I’ll start.
Definetly fixing the spawn situation, that would be at the top of my list. Not just congestion, but spreading them out a lot more and reducing the amount of spawn vs spawn combat. Almost need a WoW approach, just to give people a chance to spawn in and move a bit before fighting. (this is why Naval EC I think is so superior)
I also want to see a new way/approach to balancing different calibre sizes. 15 inch gun ships have an artificial nerf to their accuracy which is badly felt in any long range dual. It makes it so that ships like the Hood cannot fight at long range.
Radar - The sheer lack of radar implementation for many ships just suck. Britains biggest strength was their radars and it was one the leading factors why HMS Belfast was able to fight the Scharnhorst and yet in game, very few ships even have a radar, even an AA radar. Its a real shame.
The possibility to research bluewater fleet using coastal and vice versa.
It is potentially a very long list, but I’ll add just a few…
Rebalance the entire Italian trees. Many of their ships simply aren’t competing at their current BRs.
Give the French some coastals.
Break the broken Russian 4.3 lineups.
Fill the many, many gaps eg. US 3.3-4.3 has fewer crews than the Marie Cileste.
Give us proper working radars, especially for AA where targets frequently don’t lock.
Lower the ridiculous costs of higher tier coastals.
Prevent ships from launching smoke and torpedos within seconds of spawning blinding the team and causing collisions.
…and many more…
I would love that. I have some bluewater ships I want to play but I need my RP to go into coastal as that is where a boat I want is.
My list as a Tier IV (so far) naval player:
Maybe higher RP rewards or lower RP research for some of the higher tiered ships especially costal.
Bigger maps…have mini EC style maps not fully EC just some of the sizes and objectives.
To actually get into a game instead of just waiting for 10 minutes
give it the complete rewrite it needs and deserves
start testing stuff
when they change one thing they either never test it at all or never check what it changes … or both
Some sanity in the aiming system and in the autocannons mechanics. Improvements in damage modelling and fixes for the broken cases (like PG02 or K2 or M802). Sensible game modes and matchups for bluewater.
All the above. Especially ‘just test stuff.’
If I had to pick one area of the game itself it would be damage and repair. Make it so battleship duels feel like battles between leviathans gradually beating each other down, not like speedboats with huge hit point reserves: ‘oh, all my guns have been destroyed,’ press a button…3-2-1, ‘hurray, everything works again.’ So damage and repair mechanics have to go hand-in-hand.
But making damage accumulate gradually over time would only work or be believable if battleships spawned far enough apart, so that instant catastrophic broadsides were not possible. That means reworking spawn points (which we know need reworking anyway for other reasons) plus making many maps bigger to create enough space for long range battleship duels and manoeuvre.
At long range and in reduced visibility you need to rework targeting, so that spamming the lock button doesn’t acquire targets by magic through fog, mountainous islands etc - but radar might still work, given line of ‘sight’ so, radar needs work too. In turn aiming would likely need a rework if lock is removed or made more realistic.
So, wherever you start you end up with a complete rework. But there’s little chance Gaijin will start; battleships fighting extended duels over realistic time spans even as 1v1, let alone fleet actions =/= ‘game over’ in 15 minutes.
Look at Send your suggesstions for the improvements in the naval mode into the 2024 Survey
It contains a ton of wishlist items.
Regarding the maps - check out Introduce a new guiding principle for Naval map design: No spawn-to-spawn direct line of sight
Would be nice if they made the Royal Navy at least partially as good as it was IRL. Instead of Russia being dominant whilst never having a substantial naval presence IRL.
A way to kill Scharnhorst, apart from torpedoes.
Yeah we need them to fix the bug that means AP shells don’t cause flooding and also they need to implement flooding for the compartments between the outer belt and the turtleback, that way shells that don’t penetrate the TB will still cause flooding which could possibly sink the ship.
Aiming fixes. The aiming system has been full of bugs since it was added in Direct Hit:
The impact pipper is an object projected into the battlespace and will therefore jump when over the enemy ship, nullifying inaccuracy in the rangefinder.
The elevation of the target is not included when displaying the range, so you can fire at the exact range even on a stationary target and still miss.
You can easily lose lock or have issues maintaining convergence and lead on targets closing bow-in at close range.
Locking AI fleets behind islands is incredibly buggy and inconsistent. You can detect an AI target and it will display the range, but it won’t officially “track” the target with the box or display lead.
This is more of a nitpick and you can cry “skill issue” all you want, but I don’t very much like the forced manual range correction in RB. I get that there’s more skill involved in the RB system and it many ways it’s better than the AB one, but I can’t stand the fact that you HAVE to correct the distance manually, whereas in AB you can just estimate rate of close and lead, aim at a point, and the range will follow that. IRL the firing room or ballistics computer will estimate the rate of close and extrapolate a firing solution. Instead you have to do that in your head and if you don’t scroll perfectly uniform the entire time, even after you’ve done the skill check of estimating lead and rate of close, your shots will miss at range. Manual range correction is good and should be standard, but you should be able to set an applied value, such as +25m. Think of a display like the “shooting distance with correction” on pre-Direct Hit UI.
TLDR;
The aiming system has bugs and should be changed. According to datamines, Gaijin appears to be working on some sort of FCS for naval behind the scenes, but very little is known about it and it has yet to be announced.
a Swedish naval tree
Other than aim fixes, I’d like to see RP requirements reduced for coastal since a frigate does not offer the same superiority as a battleship and very few people play coastal now. Finally, not having the helm repair slowed down by other damage control would be nice. The bridge being out slowing damage control is already a pain to play against, but it also often adds another (unnecessary) timer that forces more important damage control to suffer.
Breeak the broken scharnhorst
French navy.
More work and “big boys” for the bluewater, and the start of the Coastal.
Because for now the state of the French Navy in WT is just plain sad, and nothing give hype to grind it for now…
Dunkerque class (Dunkerque and the more armored Strasbourg) should already be here, and i hope we gonna follow other next big ships with Richelieu class (Richelieu and Jean Bart with different fits).
Also lot of coastal itneresting stuff to add, hoping to get exocet first and not Germany or idk who else…