Why does aiming in naval battles suck so bad

Game Discussion Arcade Battle
22

To be fair, most ships don’t have this problem. It’s related to the ballistics, like you said, but you can figure this out pretty easily by checking the muzzle velocity of the shell (it’s not a perfectly accurate way to determine the ballistics, but it’s accurate enough).

For example, the Nurnberg light cruiser doesn’t have this problem, because its mains and secondaries fly at about the same speed, so they will hit the target area at about the same time:

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But almost identical ship, the Karlsruhe light cruiser has this problem. It uses the same main guns, but different secondaries, which has much lower shell speed:

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So it will take longer for the secondaries to reach the target area, so if you or your target moves, your mains and secondaries won’t land at the same place.

The interesting part is, on some ships you can actually affect this, by switching the ammo. Mentioned Karlsruhe can also use this shell for main guns with lower muzzle velocity:

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It’s still not ideal, because this shell is still much faster than 785 m/s, but if you use this shell, mains and secondaries will at least land much closer to each other.

Judging from your screenshot, you are using the USS Northampton, so you are dealing with the problem mentioned above:

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Unfortunately, you can do nothing about it. When I played this ship (and other similar ships), I used to correct my aim when firing with secondaries (main guns have very long reload speed, so you can do that). For example, if I was standing still and the target was moving right, after shooting mains, I just moved my mouse cursor more to the right, and just before mains reloaded I moved my mouse cursor back to the previous position. This is a bit tedious, but that’s the only way to use these secondaries effectively.

The good news is, so big main/secondary guns shells velocity difference is very rare. From what I remember, the USS Portland / USS Northampton (and a few more similar ships) are the worst case scenario in the whole game. So it’s not as big a problem as it might seem.

This is actually a feature. Apart from a few ships (that have almost instant secondaries reload time), if your main and secondary guns are not reloading, when you press left mouse button once and hold it, only the mains will fire. If you want to fire with both, you have to pretty much double-click (or just left click again, when your mains are reloading).

They designed the system like this, so you can fire only mains if you want to. It works pretty well, but there are ships with almost instant reload rate on secondary guns, and the system is bugged and doesn’t work correctly there (for example, the USS Wilkinson and the HMS Tiger are affected by this problem).

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23

Same here…

Switching to secondary will cause lead indicator to move where these shells are expected to land.
If you wonder this is tedious, you are right, but if your mains reload are very slow ( think about 40 sec of USS Mississippi for example) and your secondary are very fast, it’s an effective way to drop tons of secondary shells on the target with good precision while your mains are reloading.

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24

Yes - I’ve noticed all these things to be true. The only way I’ve found to work around it is to re-aim by eye with the secondaries while the primaries are reloading but by the time I get close to the target it’s time to fire all again and I have to aim far back the other direction and start again. And the aiming circle is of no use during the entire process. It never moves. Makes hitting the target virtually impossible for me. Strangely though - if I take the ship on a test drive I don’t have this problem. Granted the target isn’t moving but if I fire all guns simultaneously all the shells land on the target. Just game weirdness I guess 😕

25

If your target is steady still, this is correct.

The only difference is the fastest muzzle velocity shells land first, and the others land later.
But the point of impact is the same since distance and position of the target do not change.

Differences arises when target is moving.

Let’s assume your’re firing bot primary and secondary at the same time, and your shells have a different muzzle velocity.
Since your target is moving, slower shells land later, and your target has changed position in the meanwhile…

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26

This is not correct, because you are forgetting about the inertia from your movement.

When you move, the inertia pushed the shell to the direction you are moving. The longer the shell flies, the longer the inertia pushes it.

This creates a very funny effect that many people find illogical. When you are moving forward, let’s say to the left from your camera position, and you fire at the stationary target, the shell with faster speed will hit the target area first, and the shell with slower speed will hit the target area second (obviously). But because the second shell will be pushed by the inertia from your movement for longer, it will land more to the left from the first shell.

You can actually use this effect to increase the accuracy of your shells. That’s exactly why when you and your target move in the exactly same direction with similar speed, it looks like your guns (even with different shell speed) are “more accurate”. And when you move in the opposite direction, it looks like your guns (with different shell speed) are even “less accurate”. Just keep in mind that air resistance also reduces this effect as the shell travel distance increases.

At short distances it doesn’t really matter that much, as even shells with a lower speed don’t need much time to reach the target area.

You can see this effect in the test sail, but you have to choose a distant target, for example the Heavy Cruiser 9 km away or even better the Battleship 11.5 km away. Just shoot at them while moving at the full speed with a ship with different main/secondary gun shell speed, like the IJN Mikuma or the Karlsruhe. And then repeat this test, but use something with similar main/secondary guns shell speed, for example the Prinz Eugen or the USS Helena.

This is why I always liked Naval, aiming in Naval is so much about physics. If you understand the physics, aiming is really not that hard, because it’s very realistic. I absolutely loved to “calculate” such effects in my head. That’s why I didn’t like the devs added this green aiming helper to Naval. It destroyed a lot of fun in Naval for me, but I understand most players prefer to have such helper. I much preferred how Naval looked a few years ago, when aiming was actually difficult and you had to rely only on feel and quick calculations made in your head. But that’s just my opinion of course.

BTW: I’m not a native English speaker, so please forgive me if I used wrong words here. I don’t like to talk about technical things, because I don’t know and normally don’t use such words, and English translators can sometimes be very inaccurate or even misleading.

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27

I know this very well sir 😁

But in case both ships are standing still, like the example I was referring to, in response to @CaptDirtbag concerns, the inertia of the ship movement is 0.

Excellent explanation anyway, congrats👍

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28

Oh I see. I just made an assumption that he talked about the situation, where he is moving and the target is standing still. But you are correct, and he only mentioned the target standing still, he said nothing about the movement of his ship.

I probably assumed that, because if both vessels are standing still then it wouldn’t make sense for shells to land at different places. It’s so obvious they will land at the same place, I probably just refused to accept that someone can be surprised by that and even call the game “weird” ;).

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29

By contrary, I’ve assumed the simplest case possible, which is he was also standing still 😃

Anyway, thanks for the feedback, really appreciated 👍

Cheers

CV

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30

I’m not a stranger to physics, passed a year of it in high school and another year in college so I do grasp the concept. Even when both ships are travelling in a constant direction at a constant speed the aiming indicator just doesn’t seem to be very accurate. If the fire control on my ship can’t calculate lead and distance under those circumstances then I think something’s wrong.

This might be a stupid question but I’m new to naval so I’m still trying to figure stuff out. On the ships I’m using now (Pensacola & North Hampton) the secondary 5in turrets are AA guns?? I’m guessing that’s why when I target them to a ship they don’t fire. And the ammo they get is strictly for use against aircraft?? They seem to do some damage to destroyers but are pretty useless against anything bigger. I see them explode far above the target and do minimal or no damage. If they are taking out crew that would be somewhat useful but am I wasting my time firing them on ships??

31

Even the distance calculation seems to be off most of the time. I get that even if the two ships appear to be travelling parallel to each other they’re usually getting closer or farther away from each other constantly but there’s frequently times when I’m aiming a half mile short of the target and still going over. Maybe just me but the whole thing just seems a little f’d up.

32

The aiming indicator isn’t a real-time feature. It only updates from time to time. You can check this time and its accuracy in the X-ray view of the ship:

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For example, the USS Pensacola has a Fire director with 100% measure accuracy, fire solution calculation time of 15 seconds and fire solution update time of 8 seconds. This means when you select a target it will take 15 seconds to show the lead point and then its position will update every 8 seconds. Everything that happens between these 8 seconds, you have to calculate yourself.

Players rely on this lead point way too much, it’s not showing you where to aim with every salvo to hit the enemy. This info is based on the current enemy speed and course, but these values can change at any time, and you have to do the correction before the next update.

Let’s say the target is moving in circles, 10 km away from you. With how the lead point works, you will never hit the enemy if you only fire at that lead point. You shouldn’t care where the enemy is now, you have to predict where the enemy will be in ~15 seconds, when your shells will reach that distance, and fire at this area.

The lead point is also bugged when the enemy is very close to you (like less than 2-3 km). In this situation just ignore it and shoot directly at the target.

They are multi-purpose guns in the game. You can use them against vessels and planes.

They need proper angles to fire. They also won’t fire if you are trying to attack the target beyond their reach.
Also, just double click to fire main and secondary guns, if you have “Main and auxiliary caliber shooting with one button” option enabled.

Judging from this description, you use HE-TF shells. These shells have time fuze, which is set by your crew automatically. Especially if you don’t have maxed crew, they aren’t doing good job with the fuze and they usually set it too low, so these shells explode a bit too early. You can argue this makes sense against planes, as planes are moving pretty fast, but it doesn’t work very well against vessels. I don’t like HE-TF shells and I avoid using them whenever I can.

With mentioned ships you can also use HE-VT shells, and to be honest you should always use them, when you can. Instead of the time fuze, they use proximity fuze. When you fire HE-VT shells, they arm their proximity fuze after short delay and then they will explode when they detect the target within the certain distance from the shell. This method guarantees that the shell won’t explode too early or too late.

HE-TF shells usually explode too early and don’t do much against ships. HE-VT shells works fine against ships, but they do less damage than pure HE shells. There are reasons for that, but it’s a long story. You just have to remember they are not equal to pure HE shells (assuming the same explosive mass) with the damage against vessels. But they still do good damage.

I’m not sure if you are talking about this, but there is a bug with your crosshair position and the distance calculation in the game. I wrote about this bug on the old forum a long time ago:

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Aim inaccuracy with Arcade aiming (I don’t know if this bug also affects Realistic aiming, but in Realistic aiming at least you can correct the distance with your mouse wheel, in Arcade aiming you can’t!)

This is another problem that appeared after “Apex Predators” update. For some reason your crosshair position is no longer properly synchronized with the distance if you use Arcade aiming. Before mentioned update, it was all fine, so you could play by feeling. You can’t do that anymore, you have to look at numbers to figure out where your shells will land.

So for example, aiming this way before “Apex Predators” update would hit the enemy, because I’m aiming the enemy lower hull area with my crosshair.

But after the update, you can see, the guns are set at 6.12km, but the enemy is at 6.18km. This means I will shoot too short! To hit the enemy, I have to move my crosshair much higher, aiming his chimneys in this case, to hit his lower hull area:

This is very annoying bug, that affects long range aiming even more than short range one.

Another example of this problem, at long range:

To hit this enemy, I have to move my crosshair much lower than his position is. Only this way my guns are set to 10.86 km. If I moved my crosshair at him, I would shoot way too far.

Not long later, when the enemy moved a bit and I reselected him, it’s now the other way round:

I have to now aim much higher than the enemy position to hit him. As you can imagine, this is very confusing, because you never know how to aim next time you target lock the enemy (even the same one!). You have to look at numbers, crosshair position is completely useless.

In this case the enemy is barely moving, so it’s still doable. But it is much bigger problem, when the enemy is closing or extending the distance and your crosshair position means nothing.

Tell us about the problems that you had to face while playing the naval battles mode. - Page 2 - Naval Discussion - War Thunder - Official Forum

BTW: If you want to see how I play the game, I actually upload my battles on YT. Maybe it will be easier for you to understand this game mode, when you check how someone with Naval experience play? Here is the link to my Naval playlist:

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcY50kUmXMA&list=PLZSTdaNsWtv6GxAQUD9Lgn7YJe-6g39Eg

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33

I never use the aim indicator for distance. I just use the numbers. I know the distance is constantly changing but it usually doesn’t change a lot in the time it takes the shells to get there. Being off by a half a mile or more just seems kinda useless. I’ll try to get a screen shot of a ship 5.0 mi away and I’m shooting at 4.5 mi or less and going over. Just agrivating mostly. Thanks again for the tips. Much appreciated