70 replies to this topic

[Skywalkre]

Thought this deserved its own thread.

 

As I've mentioned elsewhere I'm a bit concerned with where some aspects of the game are and how none of them were addressed in this first patch since CB started.  Below are the big issues for me:

 

1. Basically no ship balance at all.  Tier is largely irrelevant at this point in many lines.  There's no incentive to push up to higher tiers given how bad some lines are.  Fundamental aspects of tier progression (more hps, more dmg, come combination thereof, etc.) are completely missing from some lines.  Just what in the world is going on with current tech tree layout and progression?
2. Carrier interplay is nonexistent.  To win in the air war against another carrier all that matters now is tier difference.  You can load up all the mods and have all the captain perks and it still won't matter.  If you're a tier or more lower you will lose every... single... time.  That's not fun.  That's really bad design.
3. I know less about this area but have seen others mention it several times and sunday just commented about it in the other thread.  I'll quote him.

    

   I find the lack of implementation of an armour model at this late stage, beta, more worrisome. Yesterday was divisioning with other guys in a Myoko (Tier VIII IJN CA), and found an enemy Yamato, at close range, going out of a strait. Well, it seemed almost all the AP shells that landed in the Yamato penetrated. Range was not large, between 5 and 10km but, still...

    

4. Given current game mechanics there's a distinct disadvantage to having a ship with fewer turrets and more guns per turrets (IOW, almost all high tier BBs).  This, at least, is an easy fix.  Take sequential fire, which right now is worthless, and change it so that you fire with one gun per turret.  Thus a ship doesn't have to waste 1/3 of its firepower on a ranging shot.  The fix is easy... but will devs catch on to it?
5. The Captain skill tree is... boring.  For many ship types there's only one viable option per tier (for some, there isn't even that!).  There's no fun when there's no choice (and having real choice helps generate commentary on the game as folks look into all sorts of options, combinations, etc.).
6. We have already seen mods which take one of the very few aspects of skill in this game, gunnery, out of the equation.  The best suggestion I've seen for this is to get rid of all aspects of the game that compute lead on enemy.  Thus, torps from planes and destroyers/cruisers would all have to be manually aimed.  The hope is you could then remove whatever is in the game that's allowing these mods to get this information (also remove time of flight info from ALT if you have to).  In doing this you now also add something many players have been begging for: a way to showcase skill in a game that's much simpler than WoT.

I was also reading several threads over on the WoWs wotlabs subforum.

 

http://forum.wotlabs...-warships-wows/

 

There's one listed thread for issues but most of them have the same flow of content.  What concerns me from reading those various threads is commentary from folks who have been testing this game for a while and seen little done to address some of the issues above and moves to make the game even simpler.  What little we've seen from devs is that CB will be short with only cosmetic changes.  That's a bit worrisome if true.

 

So... everyone's thoughts, concerns, etc.?

[sunday]

I do hope developers will address these issues. Really do, as the game could be the most enjoyable one.

 

If not, well, then I will not have to fight an addiction 

Edited by sunday, 07 April 2015 - 1125 AM.

[Harold Jones]

Regarding armor, at close range it should be irrelevant.  I think the issue is that although the game is compressed in both time and range by 50% they didn't compress the ranges for armor penetration.  So while 5k is pretty reasonable for a BB to penetrate another BB's citadel or turrets for cruisers it should be 2.5k and for DDs citadel and turret face penetrations on BBs probably shouldn't be possible at all.

 

 

Edited to add, that the game lacks feedback that tells you anything about what the vast majority of your hits are doing is realistic but it does make it difficult to tell if that 215 damage hit you got was due to RNG, partial penetration or bounce makes it difficult to asses what is really going on for either the shooter or the target.

Edited by Harold Jones, 07 April 2015 - 1131 AM.

[sunday]

There is another issue, the range of secondary, medium caliber guns - I find the range of the 155mm secondaries of Yamato, of about 5km, pretty small, considering the advanced FC available, the installation height, and the stability of the firing platform. That same guns, installed on Mogami, have 10km+ range.

 

American 5-inchers could be left with that maximum range, as a means of balancing their usefulness in AA, but all the other WWII BBs that had a medium caliber battery (i.e. all not-USN ones) will be UP.

 

It's kinda what happens with some IJN DDs, that have deck space used to carry torpedo reloads, but do not have substantially smaller reload time. While on the matter of IJN DDs, Type 93 oxygen torpedoes should have their detectability reduced - it's not rare to see, already, BBs that stop engines when the torpedo detection alarm is raised.

[Skywalkre]

Edited to add, that the game lacks feedback that tells you anything about what the vast majority of your hits are doing is realistic but it does make it difficult to tell if that 215 damage hit you got was due to RNG, partial penetration or bounce makes it difficult to asses what is really going on for either the shooter or the target.

Great point.  This has always been an issue in WoT and it's still the case in WoWs.  No idea why keeping players in the dark about what's going on is a good thing.

[Skywalkre]

There is another issue, the range of secondary, medium caliber guns - I find the range of the 155mm secondaries of Yamato, of about 5km, pretty small, considering the advanced FC available, the installation height, and the stability of the firing platform. That same guns, installed on Mogami, have 10km+ range.

 

American 5-inchers could be left with that maximum range, as a means of balancing their usefulness in AA, but all the other WWII BBs that had a medium caliber battery (i.e. all not-USN ones) will be UP.

 

It's kinda what happens with some IJN DDs, that have deck space used to carry torpedo reloads, but do not have substantially smaller reload time. While on the matter of IJN DDs, Type 93 oxygen torpedoes should have their detectability reduced - it's not rare to see, already, BBs that stop engines when the torpedo detection alarm is raised.

Regarding BBs, that's an interesting point and something they could do to differentiate nations.  Playing the IJN BBs right now my main thought  has been "when I finally get US BBs with their improved AAA... what'll be the point of playing IJN ones?"  If IJN had better secondary armament that could engage at much greater ranges we'd actually have something meaningful differentiating them.

[Skywalkre]

I see this one complaint on the wotlabs forums quite a bit: capping is stupid in a naval game.

 

...

 

These are all folks that play WoT, btw, so I'm curious where the disconnect comes from.  Capping meaningless ground in a game with tanks is somehow fun whereas capping meaningless water in a naval game with ships is bad.  Wha...? 

 

Since ships is slower can you imagine a game with no cap?  You wouldn't be able to catch some ships given speeds are so similar and ranged fire above 12km or so is basically just RNG.  Caps force the opposing sides together so they actually engage and even then many games I'm in still come close to the 20m cap.

 

If there's a legit complaint I think it's that maps are too big right now and given the slow speed of ships and ranged fire is so hard to do consistently smaller maps would speed things up a bit which wouldn't be a bad thing.

[FlyingCanOpener]

Maps could be reduced by 10% and be OK... or just increase the teams to 15 and it would be OK then too. I like the room to maneuver, but keep it close enough to keep the game moving.

As it is, unless the team is retarded and lets a couple of ships through, I'm usually never spotted in my carrier, which is a good thing.

[bojan]

...As it is, unless the team is retarded and lets a couple of ships through...

So 2/3 of the games going by my limited experience playing CV.

[RETAC21]

Victory conditions could be improved... a lot. But capping does have a sense in the naval world, it's called "close blockade" - out of favor since the napoleonic times, but sail fleets needed to be tied to a geographical locations of they wanted to keep their opponents bottled up - when Nelson's fleet was blow off position outside Toulon, Napoleon scaped to invade Egypt

[Harold Jones]

There's nothing realistic about capping, all it is, is a mechanism to give both sides an incentive to attack.  In a game without cap circles every match would be campinova.  As unrealistic as it is, I can't think of any other mechanism to give a group of 12 random players an incentive to expose themselves to fire from the other team.

 

ETA

The reason cap circles seem fun or logical in WoT is that probably everyone who plays WoT has at least a vague understanding that land war involves capturing territory.  They may not realize that the circles in WoT are just random circles on the ground with no appreciable tactical value other than the artificial "Capture this and win" mechanic but having a place that needs capturing still fits their mental model of what is involved in a land battle.  Conversely people think of naval battles as basically two groups of ships sailing along side by side shooting at each other in the open ocean with maybe some planes making torpedo or bombing passes.  Having a fixed geographic point to control to win the game violates that model.

Edited by Harold Jones, 10 April 2015 - 1236 PM.

[Colin]

Seizing and control of seaways has long been a naval tactic, the caps should reflect the importance of that portion of the waterway. Historical battles abound that could be used as a guide. Also a mode of shielding a convoy would be interesting.

[Skywalkre]

I'd love to know what these folks complaining about cap circles would do to get forces to engage.  Even with the clearly marked bases, sometimes taking up large portions of the map, you'll still find players running to the corners and doing their best not to engage (which is a whole issue in and of itself... why the hell are they playing this game in the first place if they're not even going to play?!).  I finally got that open ocean map yesterday and one team just ran to the corner near their spawn and basically sat there as my side pushed in. 

[Harold Jones]

I got the ocean map for the first time, it was kind of spooky in a way.  I'm so used to having terrain around the map that I was a bit disoriented at first, then I followed Nelson's rule and set off for the cap.  Ended up losing a gun duel to another destroyer but it was not a bad battle.

[RETAC21]

I only got it once, but I feel its the one map that would reward teamplay.

[Colin]

got a few times as a DD, I steamed forward and across my batttlegroup just enough to spot, but did not fire, allowing others to 

[Skywalkre]

I only got it once, but I feel its the one map that would reward teamplay.

Eh... they all do.  What the ocean map allows is for players who can't plan around obstacles to shift fire easier.

 

I've got it a few times now, mid tiers, and it's not as bad as I thought it'd be for DDs.  I've gone back to the US DDs the last few days and have started to change my view of them.  Right now they're ok.  They fill a skirmisher role.  If you play one, though, you need to realize you could just as easily live the entire game as die in the first 2 minutes.  Just the life of being in front and trying to throw their line in disarray as well as screen your BBs from their DDs.

[RETAC21]

Remember how the battle of Jutland started, light cruisers on both sides engaged, then the battlecruisers and then destroyers triwd to throw the enemy line ib disarray, soynds familiar?

[sunday]

I'd like to share here this post on the aiming assist mod.

 

 

 

Well, if no aiming aids are permitted, then the game should be called "World of Predreadnoughts", as part of the Dreadnought revolution was the introduction of aiming aids for naval gunnery.

Main purpose of those pretty, and tall, superstructures in battleships, and cruisers was to have an idea of the whereabouts of the target in order to generate a firing solution, that is a parametrized curve representing the 2D movement of the target ship in function of time, that could be converted to obtain azimuths and elevations for the guns.

Sure, there were wizardly gunnery officers, like the one of Spanish CA Canarias, that was able to hit with the second broadside a DD at 16,000m, and left it aflame, and dead in the water, with the third at 20,000m. Ad that using a coastal defense fire computer as a substitute for the English ordered one that was not to be delivered because of the war. Those kind of gunnery officers were quite unusual, to say the least. Actually, that gunnery officer was the Professor of Naval Gunnery in the Service Academy of the Spanish Navy. For more information, see these links:

Link to the EN wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia....f_Cape_Espartel
Link to ES wikipedia (more detailed, but in Spanish): http://es.wikipedia....936)#Desarrollo

But even then, it was not the Captain who physically spotted the shots, not aimed the guns. Captain commanded to engage a target, and then the Gunnery department, or the Torps one, dealt with it.

[Stefan Fredriksson]

And people like that are trusted with dangerous things, like for instance shoes.