Honestly right. Naval is fine. It’s not good, not by a long shot, but it could be way worse and half the people who actually play naval know that.
We don’t need the stupid famous ships like the Iowas, Bismarcks, or Yamatos because they just don’t fit in current naval. We don’t even really need new battleships, instead the whole mode needs a rework.
Naval also doesn’t need more (any) anti-ship missiles because then you run into the issue of “how do you counter an anti-ship missile in a battleship from 1943.” Ironically this is exactly what caused battleships to no longer be prevalent in the post-war era, besides costing stupid amounts of money, and we are quite literally going to see it happen in game if AShMs are added.
As others have pointed out, the disparity between Coastal and Bluewater needs to be addressed. The two do not work in the same gamemode, outside of something like Naval EC. They can’t balance well, any half decent destroyer can murderize a coastal ship no matter the BR. So either there needs to be a gamemode split or just a revamp in general. The issue of “useless in an uptier” also has to be addressed, probably by decompression, but by other stuff as well. As an example, a destroyer is practically useless in a game where you are fighting heavy cruisers. One thing that I think that could help with this is removing the 3-spawn ship limit, and giving free “backups” to ships made in large numbers, such as destroyers or early light cruisers. In real life, any given battle will probably have 3 times the number of destroyers as capital ships, but in War Thunder, that isn’t the case, which leads to ship classes that aren’t the big powerful ones essentially becoming obsolete as soon as they are required to go up in BR. As another example, if you’ve ever played 6.0 cruisers, you constantly get uptiered to 7.0 battleships/battlecruisers, and have practically no way of harming either of the latter.
Another way to possibly reinvent naval would be to introduce modes like “convoy escort” or “fleet action” where there is a set objective for each team to accomplish one thing, such as destroying/damaging a convoy or destroying/damaging as many enemy ships as possible. I’m not really sure how respawns would work in a gamemode like this, maybe time-based reinforcement spawns that occur every 30 seconds or so. One thing that needs to happen, in my opinion, is that capture points can’t be present in these two gamemodes. Ships are, obviously, horrendously slow and cannot move fast enough to capture points in a reasonable manner. They are also (generally) made to fight at ranges that would make the capture points a deathzone for anyone that ventures towards them. Such a problem already partially exists, as in most maps (especially the ones with coastal cap points), the spawn zones are not even half of the battleship’s maximum effective range.
On the topic of the Coastal/Bluewater split, I do think it was a good idea, I just think it was executed poorly. I personally would have kept them all in one “Naval” tab, but separated the lines for the now-Coastal ships and the now-Bluewater ships. But due to engine limits, or something, the game is only capable of having 5 vertical tech tree lines (at the moment) which probably led to the split. If that could be revised, and horizontally scrolling trees similar to other games could be added, I think merging their tabs (BUT NOT THEIR LINES) would be a good idea.
Sorry for the rant, I just want naval to be better because boats are cool and the gamemode right now feels like something good that is just being held back.