With more and more 8.7 battleships being added to the game, the current 7.7 battleships are basically unable to compete against these new top-tier battleships at 8.7. Naval battles are different from ground and air combat, where skill can make a difference. Naval battles are purely a game of raw statistics—if your shells can’t penetrate the enemy, there’s nothing you can do about it. Additionally, due to the small player base in naval battles, 7.7 battleships almost always end up in matches against 8.7 battleships, which is unfair and irresponsible game design. I hope this feedback can be conveyed to the naval developers: you cannot keep adding top-tier battleships without adjusting their battle ratings and map balance.
Currently, on most maps, the spawn points for both teams are only 10–13 km apart. At this range, even 8.3 battleships struggle to penetrate 8.7 battleships, while the 8.7 battleships, with their high shell velocity and devastating firepower, can instantly delete 7.7 battleships as soon as they spawn. Lower-tier battleships have almost no room for maneuvering or evasion.
Therefore, I hope that in the next major update, the spawn distance for most maps in the 7.7–8.7 range will be increased to 18–25 km. This is a more realistic engagement distance for battleships, rather than the close-range brawling meant for cruisers. Such a change would somewhat improve the gameplay experience for lower-tier battleships. Additionally, I hope the battle rating balancing for naval forces arrives soon. The current 8.7 battleships, such as the Sovetsky Soyuz, absolutely dominate 7.7–8.3 battleships with an era-spanning advantage. For example, the Sovetsky Soyuz, with its best-in-class shells, shell velocity, and bow armor, performs far beyond its 8.7 battle rating—it should be at least 9.0–9.3. On smaller maps, this advantage is overwhelmingly magnified.
I genuinely hope that War Thunder’s naval battles can attract more players. It is a very captivating game mode, and I wish for its continuous improvement.
What are you talking about there is 20+km maps on 4.3+ br now, where DD and Frigates/Corvettes can’t even shoot each other for 10 minutes. Blindly enlarged maps will give you nothing but disappointment in gameplay. Besides that distancing armored ships form each other only leads to lost damage from the guns, due decreasing armor penetration with distance. Lower BR ships have chance against big boys only on close distance.
Enlarged maps made game more realistic? - No - we have no curved earth on maps for that to feel the difference.
Enlarged maps made game more interesting, entertaining? - No - it’s the same maps with the same problems, just now enemies even further from you which lead to even more passive gameplay.
There should be big maps and small maps for the BB in the rotation at the same time, to create different situations, not just long range shots over the flat ocean in the circle of death with nothing in-between all day long.
And 5 minutes into the match, we’ll be back to the situation that started this post.
A solution to the problem that is brilliant in its stupidity…
Easiest solution is to drop the spawn distance from 20km to 15km for 5.3 and below (maybe 10km for 4.3 and below?)
20km should honestly [only] be 6.3 and above.
The development team has completely failed to consider adjusting map sizes based on different battle ratings. They simply keep enlarging maps arbitrarily. Balancing map sizes according to battle ratings is an urgent issue that needs to be addressed. However, at the moment, their development focus seems to be solely on frantically adding more 8.3-8.7 battleships—similar to what happened with the air forces last year and the year before, and with the ground forces from 2018 to 2022. Map matching adjustments have always been treated as a final-step task.
This is somewhat contradictory, you say the lower rank battleships can’t compete against the higher ranked battleships because of the weaker shell performance of the lower ranked battleships, they cant pen much. Yet if you increase the distance that would even make it worse for the lower ranked battleship making their guns less effective while the top echelons will keep dominating.