Would you like to see an optional Night Battles in Naval RB?
Yes
No
0voters
Do you like the searchlight mechanic?
Yes
No
0voters
With Ground RB battles recently making night battles an optional thing, I thought it might be worth suggesting the same be applied to other game modes too. For Naval RB, the gameplay differences Night Battles brings largely come down to two parts:: reduced selection range and searchlights.
The reduced selection range is fairly straightforward, with the enemies being only reliable locked on at a much closer range compared to standard and only when you are pointing your cursor directly on the vehicle (as opposed to hitting X and it just locks onto something within your field of view). Locating the enemy in the dark would often come down to finding them through muzzle flash when they fire. Ships with surface search radar would be less hampered by this limitation and can consult their search radar to know more precisely where to start looking.
To those without surface radar, an option exists in the form of searchlights. When turned on, the light beam is tied to your camera (and therefore follows your view in a free cam) until you lock onto the target, When you illuminate the target, you increase your lock on range on that particular ship for yourself and your allies to non-Night Battle conditions. As a victim, this searchlight will “blind” your gunnery crew and make you unable to target the ship that is shining on you unless you have surface search radar. The downside of the searchlight is, of course, that you also make yourself an extremely visible target in the darkness and make yourself as easily targetable as non-Night Battles until you turn the lights back off.
As with Ground Battles currently, Night Battles for Naval would also have its own special rewards for playing on it to incentivize people to play on it.
Naval queue times are already abysmal. No one is going to wait around for ten minutes to get into night battles in naval. Work on other areas of the game instead.
How it works is pretty much like how it works in ground battles, night battle is added as a part of your queue. So the waiting time would be the same as the current matchmaker, although it does mean night battle would be comparatively rarer than other game modes.
I’d definitely love to see this! I’ve had a few (too few) evening matches and they’re fantastic, especially with all the tracer fire; proper night would be neat too. This searchlight mechanic seems well thought through as well.
Night battles would be awesome and fun!!! However if they do like they did in ground where you can only get into a night battle at 10.0 which would be 6.3/7.0 for Naval no one would play it and you wouldn’t even get in a lobby. Im not a huge fan of Battleships and despise facing one in current game play and a lot of other people feel the exact same way. Thats why you have dead lobbies starting at 5.3br. The devs needs to all ahead full stop on these Battleships and start implementing other vessels that can deal with them.
Yeah, I’m hoping it’d extend to all BRs for both of my night battle suggestions (and retroactively apply that to the ground!). It’s optional anyway, so why not?
Star shells would be a decent alternative to searchlights, yeah! However, one thing I’m not entirely sure about is what nuances you can have with that mechanic. Presumably, it’d allow you to target anyone within its range of illumination as easily as daytime, which might defeat the unique quirk of night battles…
Its not like ground RB night battles at all. Star shells don’t illuminate an area.
The tactic was to fire them high and behind potential enemy locations to silhouette them to be able to conduct optical range-finding and engagements. Same thing as the searchlights. Once everyone started shooting, finding targets isn’t the problem.
Yeah. Its why a lot of the night battles in the Pacific (like the entire Guadalcanal campaign) had some part of “something shoots/drops star shells/illumination flares,” it was to provide easier spotting for one side or the other. A lot of the time they’d be planned to be dropped from planes since a plane doesn’t give away a fleets position like a barrage of gunfire does.
Another thing night battles might have to take into consideration is surface search radar. Or just radar in general, as that was used by Allied ships especially, to spot targets at night. But it also sometimes reflected radar returns from small islands, and other forces could camouflages against such landmasses to hide from the radar.
But that does make it possibly counter-intuitive to the game mode tho, with the “as long as the shell is lit up, people in X radius can be selected” vs “the shell is up, everyone ‘in front’ of the shell can be selected”… especially since you know that this would be extensively exploited in the opening minutes of the match since everyone is stuck in a spawn swarm out in the open, at which point the battle just breaks out like typical naval battles currently…
Night sighting could still work without them, maybe with some detection/target acquisition difficulties (for example, in current naval, targeting at night on a ship with no radar and on poor visibility conditions would mean an increased time before a lead indicator shows up, or its inaccurate).
This part though could be fixed with multiple spawns (like 5 or so per team), or by increasing the starting battle range. Either of those will help mitigate this.
The way I initially laid this out is that the “target lock” (aka, hitting X to select a target) wouldn’t work at night unless you are explicitly pointing at the ship you want to lock. So no hitting X and it automatically selects something in your field of view. I’m just a little worried that illumination shells will negate this debuff by just lighting up the battlefield so it just devolves into normal Day Battle Dut Dimmer. Adding this to what you mentioned about increase time/inaccuracies of the FCS is a great idea though!
As for surface radar, I will agree that it will be massively beneficial for the ships equipped with them. I hope to nerf this a little by you having to refer to radar to know where to start looking but it still won’t go around the night battle’s aforementioned feature of just spamming X to target that something. And yes, using island cover would also help avoid detection.
And of course, I agree that Naval needs more spawns!
Ngl thats how I play naval already lol. But I agree that it should be this way, with players having to use the scope and actually look around for targets even if they don’t quite know where they are.
When I was thinking of this, I was thinking somewhat in the way that currently aircraft use radar, where it tells you the general area of where something is, but not precise location (unless your radar is really good). So you have to look in the direction of the radar return to actually find your target.
+1, I’ve been waiting for night battles in the fleet for a long time. I’m especially looking forward to the spotlight mechanic so you can blind your enemies! How it was in reality. But then everyone would see you too
