Hello fellow naval addicts and else-minded forum users! The most recent devblog season, along with long-standing concerns about modern ships have prompted me to make a short post regarding the potentially highly flawed implementation of more modern anti-ship-missile-capable vessels into the current naval modes and tech trees. This thread should serve as a starting point for genuine discussion on how to fix the issues I will try to bring into the spotlight.
With the release of the Richelieu-class Jean Bart battleship devblog, discourse has started up again over what will follow the last of the battleships, as this is the very last battleship France ever commissioned. With Smin also alluding to these additions making their appearance in the ‘near’ future,
one has to ask how well these ships would actually fit into the current balance, maps, and gameplay. Simply put… they don’t, not without major changes in each of these areas.
Balance
Gaijin has so far largely avoided adding missile-capable ships, and the ones that have been added either rely ‘only’ on repurposed SAM systems and low-yield SACLOS AShMs, or were implemented without access to their real-life arsenal. And for good reason. As seen with ground and aerial vehicles, the capability to use fire-and-forget weaponry comes with a BR tax, even if sometimes an unjustified one.
Following the logic Gaijin has applied to tanks, aircraft, and helicopters, AShM ships would sit well above the Lütjens, Bravy, or USS Charles F. Adams, and would therefore fall within the range of light/heavy/battle cruisers and battleships — if not even at the currently highest echelon of BR 8.7+.
But do anti-ship missiles justify such a rating? No.
With how current armor and damage mechanics work in naval, anti-ship missiles will be next to useless against vessels with a substantial amount of armor. If we compare the closest currently in-game contemporary to missiles like the Exocet — the MBDA Sea Eagle — against battleships of the top ranks, we can see that they only deal superficial damage at best, unable to penetrate the heavy armor to reach the weak spots that matter.
They simply were not made for these kind of threats.
One option is to give them a low enough BR to put them in the range of lighter targets like late-WW2 destroyers and early light cruisers, but this is far from optimal either, as it would put these older ships in a dire situation themselves. The aforementioned ships (Lütjens, Bravy, USS Charles F. Adams) already put this disparity in balance on full display, with players simply sitting back in spawn and hurling missiles across the map, one-shotting destroyers with a well-placed hit to the ammo rack.
Gaijin will have to separate missile-capable ships from older vessels due to the range and capability gap, and avoid pitting them against any of the Dreadnoughts or Battleships, so the modern fleet isn’t relegated to a gimmick.
A new modern-vessel specific matchmaker is needed.
Gameplay
The second concern I want to address is the kind of gameplay such ships would actually offer.
Gaijin, in their attempt to replicate reality as closely as possible, would probably give these ships the heavy-fleet spawn point, or possibly one even further out. Players would spawn into combat, be met with a radar screen full of enemy contacts, fire off their missiles, and… immediately run out of ammo. Two minutes after spawning in, the player would be faced with the reality of having to traverse tens of kilometers to reach the nearest capture point in order to rearm, falling back on smaller-caliber autocannons in the meantime and likely meeting their end at the hands of an enemy AShM. That’s assuming rearming is even an option to begin with (big circle maps).
Closer-in spawns, for fast attack craft like the Albatros-class, would likely not fare much better. Non-vertically-launched missiles would need to initiate hard turns after firing in order to avoid crashing into friendly vessels and surrounding terrain on their way to the target — if the control surfaces even allow for this in the first place.
There is no other way to put it: Gaijin will have to give AShM ships unrealistic capabilities in order to make this mode playable and profitable, possibly taking a lot of inspiration from how they’ve been implemented in the much more arcadey War Thunder Mobile.
All in all, Gaijin has a very difficult task ahead of them if their aim is to provide players with an enjoyable modern naval combat experience that goes beyond the “oh look, cool bote” hangar-preview aspect. These ships will be harder to balance than the long-awaited submarines, which already seem stuck in development hell.
If these flaws aren’t worked out, I personally don’t see modern vessels coming to the game.