Spawn Point Based and BR Dependent Submarines

Suggestions Gameplay
1

Disclaimer: This is an idea on how to integrate submarines into the gameloop and not how submarines as a feature should work.

This suggestion tied to this post about the implementation of aircraft carriers, please be sure to look into it for a complete picture.

[Would you like to see this in-game?]

  • Yes

  • No

0 voters
Should submarines be mutually exclusive to their BRs?

  • Yes, submarines should be locked in BRs where there are adequate counters for them.

  • No, I want to play submarines in all BRs regardless of balance.

  • Don’t want this suggestion to be implemented at all.

0 voters
If yes to the previous poll, what BR should submarines be removed from the match?

  • 4.7

  • 5.0 (This suggestion’s recommendation!)

  • 5.3

  • Other (please comment as to which you’d prefer!)

  • Don’t want this suggestion to be implemented at all.

0 voters
How early can player spawn into submarines? (In determining the Spawn Point cost)

  • Early Game (Refer to CAS in Ground RB)

  • Mid Game

  • Late Game (Refer to Nuclear Bombers in Ground RB)

  • Don’t want this suggestion to be implemented at all.

0 voters

Premise

With the Battle of the Atlantic Event having come and gone, we can safely assume that Gaijin is deeply considering on how to add submarines to Naval. Prior to this event, I already have given my misgivings about the implementation of submarines; to those who missed it, here’s a brief rundown:

Submarines as tech tree vehicles are in a predicament where their effectiveness is exponentially greater the higher BR you go. In the lower BRs, the motor boats and destroyers are nimble and are armed with depth charges. Inversely, battleships tend to be sitting ducks in terms of mobility and they lack depth charges to counter the threat.

While the Battle of the Atlantic Event resulted in overwhelming ship victory, this cannot be interpreted as a realistic situation in a Naval match due to several reasons:

  • the submarines are the sole focus of that particular event without other surface vessels to draw fire away until eventually the destroyers are sitting on top of the submarine spawn.

  • they are facing destroyers and frigates, something I’ve already addressed as counters to submarine warfare and therefore can’t be extrapolated as submarines are inherently weak against all ship encounters.

So the implied solution for higher BR would be to deploy destroyers in higher BR to perform escort duties for the team, as was done in real life. However, this solution relies on an assumption that simply will not translate gameplay-wise to War Thunder. For one, it hinges on teamwork from the player base, which will never realistically happen consistently among strangers. And the other - the bigger - issue is that the current gameplay loop for Naval simply doesn’t permit the survivability of lighter weight classes when heavy hitters are present. Showing up as a destroyer in a match with battleships will mean instant death the moment you are seen. To experience this first hand, look into the Arcade battle at 6.0 and watch the destroyers get wiped out in a volley. Whether it’s controlled by a bot or not is beyond the point. World of Warships may have allowed this sort of gameplay loop but WoWs is much more arcadey game with visibility mechanics, something that is antithesis to War Thunder’s game style and therefore not comparable.

The Idea

As a solution to this, I propose that submarines to be match-exclusive vehicles, much like how attack drones are currently implemented in high-tier Ground RB. This means the only way to have access to them is to have enough spawn points from battle contributions to spawn in one.

For optimum gameplay balance to address the problems listed above, submarines will have mutually exclusive BR ranges; meaning that above and below this range, they wouldn’t be an option to spawn. This BR range would be determined by what can adequately counter the options. In my opinion, submarines would be spawnable at BR 2.3 (to avoid Reserves getting targeted) up until 4.7, as the cruisers in that range have depth charges.

Tradeoffs

Pro:

  • Subs are locked in BRs that they can be adequately defended against.

  • As its locked behind (presumably pretty high) spawn points, you wouldn’t have matches filled with them, especially not at the start of the game.

Cons:

  • The biggest con is probably that the choice of vehicles to play is out of your hands. The selection avaliable will probably be the kinds of vehicle that is representative of your nation; so for submarines it’d be like Type VII U-boats for Germany, Gato-class for the Americans, etc. etc.

  • As it is a spawn point based system, by the time you can spawn one, the match might have progressed to the point where you can’t make any meaningful contribution with it.

    • As submarines are naturally slow vehicles when underwater, this means getting into engagement range would take longer than the remaining amount of time, especially if you don’t want enemies to swarm your spawn as was the case for the Event. Although this is slightly countered by the fact that the lower BR maps tend to be small.
1 Like
2

Subs should be implemented in the normal system.

6 Likes
3

For any mods seeing this comment, i recently made a suggestion for a new game mode known as carrier strike group. can someone approve my suggestion pls?
Also +1 for this suggestion, we need submarines and aircraft carriers in naval

1 Like
4

Yeah I had pretty much the same idea as this for carriers (but at higher BR) but that one haven’t got approved yet. Hopefully I can get it up soon so it’s tied together nicely.

Update: Looks like I have to combine that suggestion with Bombe18’s existing carrier thread. Be sure to check it out there!

5

I think subs could be great in EC too. But not as regular battles, they are too slow for this.
And sub shouldnt have guided torpedoes

6

Yeah, I did think of that, although I figured it being on the lower BR range should help with that since the maps in that range generally are smaller.

7

Submarines should be a normal tree.

Combine boat and large ship trees, and instead of increasing the BR of destroyers, revise the BR of battleships and cruisers, and allow each ship type to be researched in parallel, like on land, light tank line, medium tank line, heavy tank line.

Currently naval battles force battleships = high BR and therefore the top of the tree, so beginners are forced to fight battleships with lower ship classes (e.g. cruisers).

With the introduction of submarines, the value of destroyers and submarine chasers will increase and the value of battleships will decrease, so the BR standard should eventually become proportional to the era.

Therefore, by integrating the boat trees, we will avoid the situation where modern frigates, which will increase in number in the future, have a lower BR than early war destroyers.

1 Like
8

While having a true combined fleet would indeed allow the viability of submarines to be a tech tree vehicle, the problem this faces is something I’ve described in length multiple times before: the thing that determines the combat encounter in Naval will always be the ship with the heaviest firepower. It doesn’t have the nuances of objectives like on air, nor can a lone destroyer capable of dealing any notable damage to the battleship like a light tank can against heavy tanks on ground. You have torpedoes to level the playing field, but unless your target is a clueless player who sails straight all match, the effective range for your torpedo spread is around a single-digit kilometres away, well within the effective range of battleship guns. So this would mean that anyone who would spawn as sub-chasers/destroyers/cruisers to go submarine hunting will ultimately be the first to die against battleship spawns on the simple reason that they are easy to kill - long before they can detect, nevermind intercept, some slow moving submarine that would become a threat from mid-game going forward. You can witness this first hand if you go to 6.0-7.0 Naval Arcade and watch all those Gaijin bots in destroyers and the like be utterly wiped by player-controlled heavy cruisers and battleships.
There’s no use in having IRL comparisons because IRL operates a limited assets and teamwork. In a given fleet, there might be three or so battleships surrounded by many escort ships. In War Thunder’s current spawn implementation? On an optimum match, you will have over a dozen battleships, and each one of those can respawn at a maximum of three times. As for teamwork…it’s an exceedingly rare thing, so I won’t even take it into the equation right now.

All in all, while your solution would work in the event that Gaijin chose to drastically restructure Naval again for parallel development, I doubt it will happen due to the above issues. With that in mind, the implementation of subs that I bring here is to seamlessly integrate it into the current layout.

9

Rewards could be reworked that the bigger the ship class, the higher the reward, so Destroyers and smaller might be ignored more often giving them a chance, while makin Scharnhorst painful to play due to being focused

10

I think the desire for points would be overcome by the sheer need to get a kill in. Like, why do people complain about kill-stealing when you net more points from landing hits over time? (I believe this is still the case? I have to test this out at some point.) Because that dopamine of getting a kill is there. So you can either spend the next ten minutes lobbing shots at Scharnhorst and risk it noticing you and slamming shells into you in turn, or spend that time getting kills in minutes from the destroyers that are nearby and would torp you if you ignore them.
If you want a true combined arms game mode, it might have to take a page from air battles and everyone gets one life per match, and there will be a fixed amount of certain vehicle classes per team. Throw in some unrealistic visibility mechanics to prevent the smaller ships from being spotted straight from the start (which is a map design problem, I won’t go into it right now) and…well, we have accidentally recreated World of Warships.

11

By using dedicated spawn locations for submarines and giving each ship type additional rewards depending on the target, we reduce the incentive for larger ships to go after smaller ships.
For example, battleships are maximized for sinking battleships, and have half or no bonus for sinking light cruisers or smaller.
Destroyers are maximized by battleships or submarines, and cruisers are maximized by destroyers and battleships.

2 Likes
12

A dedicated submarine spawn is a given, yeah, but for the other idea, yeah that’s what Admiral Pieter raised as a possible solution here. As a counter, I raised that WT players aren’t driven by scores (well, unless scores are explicitly what they seek, like in the case with events and the like), but rather by kill validation.
Additionally, if destroyers can get full points against battleships (not saying that they shouldn’t, if they managed to kill a battleship they deserve it), that would mean that battleships are incentivized to spend a little bit of time shooting at destroyers and the like out of self-defense before they get within effective torpedo range. This leaves the only way to stop people from seal clubbing the lower BRs being some kind of personal honor system. You can kind of experience a lighter version of this at BR 3.3 where you meet the transition from lighter speedboats and heavy-hitting but slow sub-chasers against (often relatively modern) frigates that would utterly slap the other two out of the water in a few volleys or secondary armament set to shoot at surface targets. I personally will tell everyone that “I won’t shoot at the smaller boats unless they shot me first”, but you can’t expect WT players to follow this mentality by default, cause they are happier the higher their kill count numbers are.

13

Do you attack only lower-ranked enemies to earn kills and get less actual score and rewards, or attack targets set for your ship type or higher-ranked enemies and get fewer kills but normal or bonus rewards?

I think this is very important.

One of the complaints I often hear from the navy is that battleships ignore battleships and only attack cruisers and destroyers, making beginners feel bad.

I think this proposal will solve that problem too.

1 Like