The New Damage Control Mechanic for Naval

Official News, Development Blogs and Updates
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A few notes on my experience of Modern damage control…

In reality ships work on Fight-Float-Move principles . If anything this is more akin to the current individual repair selection than the upcoming system where everything gets started regardless even if priority is variable.

In FFM you are willing to sacrifice entire compartments and equipment (and even crew) if necessary. You don’t assign anything but the minimal to contain an issue, usually those who are already on scene. You certainly don’t send deck crews out to certain death if you don’t need them, which seems to be the crux of the argument.

Fight - Weapons and sensors are #1. A Warship isn’t a Warship if it can’t… ‘War’. Fires and floods can be contained and dealt with later, you can’t ask incoming enemy fire to pause.

Float - A ship isn’t a ship if its not floating. If you aren’t at risk in any way then be an island. #1 in Peacetime.

Move - Probably the least used but if you are in restricted waters or lose fighting ability in a war zone then best to haul ass. Also applies to Search and Rescue ops where getting on scene is key, you can fix the hurricane driven sea damage later.

I would also add that depite the notion that maintainers get free reign to fix equipment as they see fit it’s simply not true. If I wanted to reload the Command System Software to wipe faulty data I had to clear it with the ORS, who in operations cleared it with the Warfare Officer, who in a war zone would clear it with the Bridge Command. You also don’t play about with a radar without permission, or IFF, or any of the other myriad things I had on my PLR (equally applied to weapons, although I spent less time on these). It’s no lie to say I had 7 minutes a day allocated to routine maintenance during Defence Watches. I spent days doing minor tweaks, completing paperwork, drinking tea, all because anything disruptive or non emergency was a headache and I often returned to normal routines with lists of faults and repairs to complete.

Imo the current system is definitely the nearest reality considering game restraints. You only have 3 things to choose so it’s hardly the complex world some try to make it. I find the idea that delaying repair is somehow an “Exploit” is insulting and shows that those who make the rules don’t play the naval game.

Will anything change due to the overwhelming Negative feedback? …probably not. I’ll likely join the ranks of speedy reload HE slingers if slow SAP/AP pounders get thrown to the wolves even more than they have already. Another nail in the coffin.

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258

This will have no meaningful change to them.
If anything, HE spam will make my Ikoma more resilient cause getting penned by advanced guns is the biggest issue I have with it.

I implore you to find out for yourself why APHE rounds will still remain king against everything with armor.
I personally doubt Gaijin will nerf crew amounts on open turret positions.

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The Damage Control Officer would explode in a Emergency Stations situation if you did that.
Nevermind the entirety of the Bridge/Warfare team would do so in State 3 running.

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AP will remain king against heavy Armour largely due to Gaijin very low bar regarding one shot magazine explosions. But that’s a different disaster zone. Also you won’t need to outright kill a ship anymore as just keep it on an eternal state of repair so they can’t shoot back.

I can already HE spam kill many larger ships with DDs, especially using the very underrated Japanese 4.3-5.0 range, but this threatens to multiply the effect. Basically any ship that traditionally relied on brute force attacks on armoured Behomoths will get a substantial boost by the back door by forcing them in to a pause loop.

This could be up there with the Fragmentation changes that made HE nukes for several weeks. The methodology may be different but the result will be the same as BRs will be chaos. It took an age for those issues to be ironed out, and that was far less of a fundamental gameplay change than a new DC model.

Maybe there r are tweaks to the system they have yet to announce, as often happens with updates. Not counting in it though.

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Battle of Jutland, HMS Lion had Q turret’s magazine flooded to save the ship.

Battle of Dogger Bank (1915), SMS Seydlitz flooded magazines and saved the ship.

Edit

USS Texas (BB-35) intentionally flooded part of the ship to artificially increase its range in 1944.

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Hey everyone. We’d like to thank you for leaving your feedback on this new mechanic. We have read and passed everything and discussed it together as a team and would like to tell you about the changes we’ll be making.

Based on your feedback, we’ll be making the new Damage Control mechanic optional. You’ll now have the option to toggle between the old and new system in the hangar.

The new Damage Control mechanic will be on by default, and any player who wishes to use the old mechanic will be able to use it through a toggle under Menu > Options > Naval Battle Settings.

We’re readying the major update for release now, and we’re working to implement this as an option ready for the update. We aim to implement this change either with the Spearhead major update or shortly after.

Once again, thank you for leaving your feedback on this new mechanic, we always appreciate your responses. See you soon!

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Thank you for this. Raises a few questions of course:

  1. Will the new coefficients described in OP for generation of ship, etc. apply to both old and new systems?
  2. Will the “old system” still have the ability to cancel repair? What will the cancel button do if you press it when you’re set to the new system?
  3. Will using the “old system” still be considered an “exploit” by Gaijin? Will you explain it and the new system in a proper tutorial soon?
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Would be great if physics-breaking perfectly spherical APHE was optional.

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great news! thx for the re-consideration !

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This caused quite a lot of stir among the naval veterans, thank you for listening to us and addressing this issue in the best way possible.

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Thank you so much for reconsidering on how to introduce this mechanic. Now that it is optional people that at first were against its introduction as it was on the dev server can keep playing with the old mechanic that people are used to (and that gives experienced players more control on how to deal with damage) but might still test out your new implementation (i know i will) and then give feedback on how to refine it, so in the end it might be possible to get to a solution that is very good for experienced players but still makes it possible for newcomers to be able to handle damage adequately (and automated) while focussing on movement and shooting.

IMO this is the way to go to get actual feedback of players while not offending players that just want to keep playing with the current system as is (because it is not bad, it just needs explanation on how it works for players that are not used to it). And then even experienced players can try out the new system on how it works and come to an understanding of what the devs intention is with it so in the end, players can give feedback on what could be refined and that can be worked on in the new system.

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I understand what you’re trying to do, and I suppose it is nice for us regular players to be able to use the old system, but this has a massive problem.
You’re hiding the ability to stay alive for longer under an option menu. This is going to increase the power disparity between players even more. Of course, everyone that sees this message and that are part of naval communities will learn of the option and will switch to the old system. New players won’t know about this, same for players who might come back after not having played in a long time and haven’t kept up with the patch notes.

This is somewhat similar to when airfield spawns were set as default for matches in bad weather, only for it to be an opt out option weeks later (and one that you cannot see during a match).

There are still people who do not know that you can set distance correction using the mouse wheel and so they drag they screen when they want to lead, all that because distance correction isn’t set as a default, and it has never been explained. This will be yet another case of bad defaults and unexplained systems giving a disadvantage.

At least with the old repair system, a player could still come to the conclusion not to always repair even without talking to the rest of the naval community. Having it implemented like this adds yet another barrier.

This is not leveling the playing field, it is making it even more lopsided against new players.

Seriously, delay this mechanic and rework it (possibly while consulting naval players).
At the very least, make it opt in, not opt out, so off by default.

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Immediate problems with changing course on this issue:

  1. New players will be at an inherent disadvantage due to forced auto-repair, just like they are with scroll wheel ranging in RB. If you want to see the effect of this, observe how much quicker AI ships sink on the live server because they have always had automatic repairs turned on.

  2. The “survival leadership” crew skill appears to no longer apply with the new system on dev. So that would have to be reworked if you plan to keep both systems, or it will only apply to one of them.

  3. Are the repair multipliers still going to be calculated on a per-ship basis? (tonnage, crew, modernity of the damacon system) This is a big change to the old system in and of itself.

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  1. The new coefficients described are only for the new mechanic.
  2. Nothing changes in the old system, you can cancel or leave it as normal.
  3. It is not considered an exploit. It’s more of a gameplay tactic, and a consequence of the old system like we spoke about in the original post, which is one of the main reasons we implemented the new mechanic.
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Rare, but big, gaijin naval W.

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Thank you 😁👍

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Very rare. I doubt most of the devs care to grind naval esp when 80% of the playerbase is “NAVAL DOVBLEG? BORING!!”

We, who actually have to slog through naval research, even with premium, understand how atrocious it would be to have your crew bled out from you as you get sniped by bots and HE spammed by wallet warriors.

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W Devblog, now we need to reduce the accuracy of bots since theyre able to laserfocus 20km away and the reduction of bot stealing kills.

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Thank you for collecting the feedback, passing it on to the devs, and responding with a change/option that we can all agree with.

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This is a reasonable decision, thank you.

1 Like