I thought this was mismodelling; a honest mistake they were unaware of. It turns out not to be the case.
This game was built on the premise of faithfully modelling vehicles- yet we’ve come to a point now where the developers artificially alter and manipulate vehicle capabilities for “gameplay reasons”…?
Ship shell rooms were designed in certain ways considering their real life behaviour. Many ships right now are borderline USELESS because the shell rooms that were not an issue in real life are crippling weaknesses.
If they really consider that shell rooms must sustain damage in some way, at least they could make it so that a percentage of shells is lost every time they are hit; but, as of now, not only you lose all of your storage’s capacity, but the explosion is more often than not fatal or catastrophic.
This nerf makes American Battleships, for example, unplayable. All it takes is ONE hit to the barbettes and they explode in a nuclear-sized explosion. Peak gameplay, apparently.
Ships can already be killed via:
1- Loss of buoyancy via hull breaches (particularly unrepairable ones and destruction of hull sections).
2- Magazine detonations.
3- Crew anihilation.
Do we really need yet another insta-kill manner of killing ships?
At a certain point you have to question if one or more of the devs just has it out for the standards in particular. Release Arizona was I think the worst battleship that has ever been in game. Shell room detonations at times take the magazine with it. They’re modeled with the lowest waterlines they can possibly have. Despite records to the contrary and even an accepted report the reload remains at a glacial 1.5rpm, while records exist of Tennessee for example hitting 2.46 during exercises. Meanwhile ships in other trees with larger guns and heavier shells are allowed 2.3-2.5rpms with no issue.
I think it’s quite clear that it’s all about “balance”.
What game limitation could possibly prevent them from reducing chances of detonation to 0?
If they want the shells to be lost, they could make it so that they are lost without destroying the entire ship in a nuclear explosion in the process; just like it happens with inert shells (and sometimes regular shells even) in Ground vehicles.
They simply appear to believe that a Battleship not always insta-dying after 1 hit in the barbette isn’t balanced or something.
May i also add that this is complete nonsense gameplay wise? US battleships can have their primary method of firepower instantly maimed for the whole match with an easy barbette hit. Meanwhile everyone else never has to worry about being permanently down a turret because they can magically fix it in 20 or so seconds.
Shell rooms in its current state in battleship tier has made USA the most useless and unfun ships to play. Doesnt matter how close to death your opponent is, just one good hit to the barbette and boom, dead.
And i just got done with a match where four scharnhorst walts into my teams spawn and proceeded to kill everyone. Classic Gaijin incompetence.
The US is the posterchild when it comes to shell room detonations but I see your point.
Anyways, why cant Gaijin just make shell rooms hit a guarantee fire instead of a boom? It would make them a valuable target to hit but not so devestating to be basically the next best thing to a magazine hit.
I love seeing American battleships and battle cruisers in a match, because it means I will be gettIng easy kills. I don’t want it to be this way, as the American tree is the first one I completed,and I’ve kept grinding it as new ships are added.
The destroyers and cruisers are exceptionally good and fun to play. The battleships are boring and frustrating. The Alaska is fun but is either constantly exploding or having its front two turrets disabled by a shell room explosion.
At least if they could get proper (documented and sourced) drafts, they’d be able to survive. They’d still be boring to use since the fire rates are garbage and ahistorical, but at least you could use your secondaries to kill destroyers and cruisers.
I really don’t know why they constantly reject sources for American standards, but if someone finds a cocktail napkin with a sketch of some never built Russian monster, they’ll take whatever is written on it as gospel. They have players willing to put in a LOT of work tracking things down for them, and then piss them off by blatantly ignoring them.
Just look at how many players couldn’t even distinguish shell room and magazine in the other thread, devs are not wrong tbh. Ammo should explode when getting hit by something, that’s by people’s intuition. And this has been manipulated by all the entertainment industry nowadays, films, games like Battlefield, Call of Duty, Sniper Elite etc.
I have done internal suggestion of changing shell room behaviours such as making them to catch fire instead of explode and can be repaired etc. so there’s always a chance
Why not model it similar to blow out panels in tanks? you lose all the ready shells quite some crew and would have to reapair but shells would after that still be able to be transported through the repaired ammo elevator back into the repaired shell room and then to load the gun. So at first really slow reload (aka depleted ready rack) or if your not instantly using the shells that come up from the magazines you are refilling the “ready rack” aka shell room again. this mechanic or mechanism is already in game in tanks and shouldnt be too hard to implement or am i wrong?
they could even make it so the shell room explosion also damages the turret leading to longer repair time and further crew loss to not make it so you could just get hit in the barbettes infinitely
(looking at you khronstadt, multiple explosions just underneath turret 1 and 2 but still firing back 20 seconds later as if nothing happened. somehow expecially this ship doesnt give a single f about stuff exploding right underneath its armament and above all its ammo)
They always seem to go from one extreme to the other, I used to remember being shown the amazing survivability of Arizona, but now they seem to be trucks full of gas.
The key issue is TTL on battleships being too long unless they deliberately break the realism to permit instakills. This has always been the issue. It’s because it’s breaking realism that it seems to be getting applied inequitably.
The only way this will ever likely be fixed within the current game is if another mechanic gets introduced first that reduces the life-in-game of battleships to compensate, so they can regularly die in about five minutes of fighting each other. Not sure what that could be, tbh.
Loss of buoyancy is a serious matter now; I die ‘Drowned’ very often after some shelling, since now whole ship sections get flooded and can’t be pumped out and there are unrepairable breaches as well.
Sometimes, I’ve been drowned even with 60+% of the crew still alive.
This new way of killing ships via loss of buoyancy, plus magazine detonations and loss of crew, coupled with armor plates being destroyed after a few hits… I think there are enough ways to kill battleships now to allow us to get rid of unrealistic shell rooms.
I agree that BB survivability was TOO much a few years ago, when there weren’t loss of buoyancy mechanics and when armor was indestructible; but I think that has long been solved.
I agree with Spanish Avenger on this one. I thought the “unrepairable breech” mechanic was introduced precisely to counter battleship survivability.
I don’t have a problem with magazine detonations as long as, as you’ve said, they are applied equitably. I think proper drafts would be one way to address that.
