Next Naval Update?

[Usable Username]

I have Posted a Suggestion thread up titled 'Navy - Efficient Balance Changes for a More Dynamic System' based on the learnings from this discussion thread.

Please head over and upvote the thread so we can get a more dynamic hoi4 Navy experience.

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An effort to implement as small a change for a large, positive impact on Hoi4 Navy as it stands.

Proposed Changes:

1. Introduce a new column in naval engagements for cruisers in-between destroyers and capitals, similar to what was done to carriers a while back.

2. Allow destroyers to screen for cruisers at a rate of 1-1 or 2-1. and apply a lesser screening bonus to accuracy in the cruiser column of ~10-20% that gives destroyers an opportunity to provide a supporting buff without making them a necessity for every fleet comp. Use cruiser column + destroyer column to provide screening to capitals.

3. Set both gun types to fire on all ranges. Weigh the gun types to each include cruisers as a high priority (column 1 and 2 high priority for lights, 2+ high priority for heavies), (optional extra) weight the gun types to bleed a small portion of shots towards their less then ideal targets, i.e. lights target capitals sometimes, Heavy guns have a small chance to target DD sometimes. Use Cruiser column + Capital Column to screen for Carriers + Transport column.

4. Upgrade light armour ratings to sit above their respectively tiered guns to reduce the effectiveness of light batteries when compared to heavy batteries at killing cruisers. Use devspective to set this number in such a way so that within reason, heavy cruisers become more efficient at killing heavily equipped cruisers, while at the very light and fast end of cruiser design, light guns can remain the most efficient. Tie a one off heavy damage accuracy buff to medium guns to balance. (Similar check to capital or not)

5. Consider proportional adjustments to destroyers and secondary batteries in line with the % armour increase.

6. Enjoy fielding a wider variety of fleet compositions that will each have advantages and disadvantages in different matchups and conditions.

Bonus: Hopefully all of these changes have been done before and dont employ anything particularly complex or new in the back end. Maby Gui exempted?? Sad to be proven wrong, but not surprised if i am.

The discussion continues....

Regards

Usable Username

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Edit: added medium gun accuracy buff for balance as required.

Edit: updated light gun targeting.

Please note i have updated my first from its orgional to summarise the first 3 pages of posts.

Origional First post below.
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Problem - navy armour is useless for heavy cruisers and not particularly useful elsewhere as the speed increase for not using it is often better then using it. Leading metta of l1 DD and light gun CA essentially capitalises on this and effectively makes any updated heavy gun redundant. bb and shbb especially.

Solution:

Can we please consider giving light cruiser batteries/light batteries in general the ability to engage the second naval row at a scaling rate to screening efficiency maxing out say 20%? Perhaps the inverse rate to heavy guns? This could also provide a buff to BB as they would have a ?realistic? effect of taking some small gun attention for the fleet.

Consider adding a 5-15% damage reduction as soon as the armour beats the piercing, then add scaling as is on top. I.e.

And importantly add a small scaled damage reduction for guns that do pierce the enemies armour. I.e. l2 guns on L1 armour still gives a 10-20% reduction reduced to 0 with l3 guns. with cmdr and doctrine buffs moving this around.

Or/and .consider adding a heavy cruiser armour set.

Essentially an armour buff that is more scaled and not as powerful as the old 90% upfront reduction. Gives value to armour over a wider variety of situations.

Simple changes should reset the arms race and make a larger variety of fleet compesitions available.

Kind Regards

UsableUsername

P.s. can we please consider giving early BB like the Kongo class a historically appropriate set of secondary batteries? 16 152mm guns are currently reflected as 3.0 light attack.... heavy secondary mod?

 

[Usable Username]

You could just remove most of their screening need (ie adding CAs wouldn't equal needing additional DDs while still providing screeing for CVs etc) and make them a bit less attractive for BBs to shoot at compared to other capitals.

I was thinking you could add it in in such a way that it's an optional extra over a mandatory cost

So say you have a fast raiding ca or 2, your happy to rely on the speed to dodge torpedoes, or maby you have some fast light cruisers mixed in with your heavier ca. You can choose to spend your resources on another ca and roll the dice on torpedoes because your hit profiles are pretty small. OR you could choose to invest in that dd screen, (in my head I'm thinking 1-1 or 2-1 ratio for Max) and get that torpedo imunity/reduction and maby a small non game breaking accuracy buff.

Option a could be more vulnerable to dessy torpedo swarms, option b to being outgunned etc. Just make different combos yield more clearly different results.

Hopefully resulting in a reinvigorated naval system.that would tie in nicely with the espionage mechanics as more clear counters emerge.

 

[Usable Username]

I thought the point of this was to try to give CA a more historical role within the fleet, and basically avoid the whole "meta cruiser" thing. Moving CA to the screen line or the CL to the capital line would only serve to remove one of the classes from the game. Buffing heavy attack accuracy will make both the CA and the BC/BB more viable, but it doesn't help give the CA the role of anti-CL/CA. Armour would have to be buffed pretty hard for it to be worthwhile on cruisers beyond the most basic models for protection against DD crit spam. Right now, the armour simply costs too much in terms of IC (refit especially), resources, and speed (and research), without offering enough of a damage reduction against light attacks that CL can be expected to encounter. Not getting hit to begin with is generally superior to being better able to handle getting hit. Any attack you do take that could have been avoided, even if it has reduced damage, is still going to be dropping your HP/org and risking crits, which is going to be dropping your accuracy and attacks. Not only evasion for the ship, but having a cheaper ship will often mean you can have more ships, and presenting more targets brings the mechanics of target saturation. A ship can avoid being hit by simply not being targeted.

Apologies Corpse, I agree with the aim and point your making, I just wanted to raise awareness that doing something like bumping heavy attack accuracy would mean we would have to consider its effects on every type of target. Where as something like sig for CL you would only expect an effect on Light gun and Heavy gun accuracy against just light cruisers.

I'm still feeling that mabe a light armour buff would be the smoothest way to go. It would only effect light attack as it applies to cruisers and if the main battery on light cruisers is what we are trying to influence then it shouldn't have any unintended consequences except for dd and secondary pen values. Secondaries should be fine as is. Dd could be bumped a little to compensate.

Then we can just influence our light guns impact by changing how the pen value sits as stock against their corresponding armour value. So as an example, if l2 light guns were 80% of the l2 armour rating, we could expect a 20 drop in light gun performance against those targets. Then we can just determine what value we would need to set it at in order to get that nice - little big bigger progression going on.

If heavy guns are underperforming, raise it etc, heavy guns will sit apart, and the better light gun and pen tech makes more of a difference.

What's more, it can be part of a player based option so there wouldn't be any unintended impacts on say unarmoured raiding cruisers.

And it shouldn't get exploited through min/maxing as heavy guns will just form a natural counter.

 

[Corpse Fool]

Where as something like sig for CL you would only expect an effect on Light gun and Heavy gun accuracy against just light cruisers.

What is sig?

I'm still feeling that mabe a light armour buff would be the smoothest way to go. It would only effect light attack as it applies to cruisers

I'm starting to lose track of what conditions we're already assuming. Is this idea going from vanilla, and the only change is to boost cruiser armour now? For what purpose?

 

[Usable Username]

What is sig?

I'm starting to lose track of what conditions we're already assuming. Is this idea going from vanilla, and the only change is to boost cruiser armour now? For what purpose?

No worries, I'll clarify what I'm trying to say. I can certainly get lost in my own little world from time to time.

So by sig I ment signature, which is the incorrect way that I was trying to refer to the surface visibility statistic.

The assumption is still just that we get a new cruiser column and I am trying to understand what leavers we could pull to give CA that nice place as cruiser killers as per our previous discussions. Ideally as simply as possible.

I tried to set out a simple summery of where I am at with all this in response to our awkward dev on page 2 that may help explain if that helps.

So on giving CA that cruiser killing spot. I am optimistic that a increase in armour could be a good way of doing it. Plus maby a 10-20% screening bonus to accuracy for the column if it has a dd escorts.

Did I explain that better?

Noting that going past this may be getting a bit to far into the developers territory but in the interest of setting some points of reference. I could pose a question like:

If say a us Brooklyn class LC was fighting a jap Tone class AC.

1. What would we want the result to be?

2. What would the likely result in the new format actually be?

3. What would the armour value of the tone have to be in order to achieve the desired result.

4. Is that reasonable and can we adjust with a screening accuracy buff or other factor etc. Rinse repeat.

5. Adjust any other aspects that may be effected, in this case destroyer piercing via same process.

After that it's just a matter for the developers to decide on what is a resonable result.

 

[blahmaster6k]

Just a question, since I don't know if it's been assumed or not, but when people are comparing the hit profile of light guns to heavy guns, are they considering the heavy guns' likely benefit from the 40% accuracy from screening? Sure if light and heavy attack both benefit from the modifier the light guns are still more accurate, but as long as they can both reliably hit the targets they need to hit it isn't that big of a deal. Then you just have the attacks/IC issue to deal with to buff heavy attack.

 

[Usable Username]

Just a question, since I don't know if it's been assumed or not, but when people are comparing the hit profile of light guns to heavy guns, are they considering the heavy guns' likely benefit from the 40% accuracy from screening? Sure if light and heavy attack both benefit from the modifier the light guns are still more accurate, but as long as they can both reliably hit the targets they need to hit it isn't that big of a deal. Then you just have the attacks/IC issue to deal with to buff heavy attack.

Spot on blahmaster.

So under the proposed new column for cruisers CA would no longer get that 40% accuracy buff which may well have been an underlying assumption for all heavy attack in the game to have to make it effective at hitting what is is supposed to.

Therefore, moving CA away from that buff is absolutely penalising their effectiveness, potentially messing everything up.

But, bb still get it, and at the moment, light attack is getting it. So the trick would be to bridge the gap somehow that effects only the comparable relationship between the main light attack user, LC and the now gimped heavy attack user, the heavy cruiser.

If we bump heavy accuracy directly, we effect BB. So I am trying to find features that would leave everything else alone, but sort out cruiser relationship.

Noting that we could just carry the 40% screening buff across to the cruiser column, but then light attack will continue to get it, and as corpse was pointing out, it appears that light attack is already to good by comparison.

As an aside, light cruiser spam has been the go to ever since BB stopped beating everything in every circumstance, what we have now is just light cruiser spam hiding behind a unbalanced mechanic. So I'm betting that taking a little off the top there would be good to mix things up again.

 

[Corpse Fool]

This is something I might have overlooked earlier. Keeping "ranges" the same, adding a cruiser layer between screens and capitals will push the capitals out of range of heavy attack, until either the screen or cruiser line is empty. This means that heavy attack can be weight-boosted against cruisers like it is for capitals, without much fear of the CA guns choosing a capital over a cruiser. This allows the CA to prefer cruisers, like we want. I was hooked up thinking that heavy attack would still reach far enough to hit the enemy battle line out the gate, even if they were screened.

This means that we don't really need the medium attack that was brought up earlier, though medium attack would give us flexibility that I would think is more immediately recognizable by players as what it is intended to do.

Just a question, since I don't know if it's been assumed or not, but when people are comparing the hit profile of light guns to heavy guns, are they considering the heavy guns' likely benefit from the 40% accuracy from screening? Sure if light and heavy attack both benefit from the modifier the light guns are still more accurate, but as long as they can both reliably hit the targets they need to hit it isn't that big of a deal. Then you just have the attacks/IC issue to deal with to buff heavy attack.

I think we are now at the point of trying to work around fleet compositions (amounts of types of ships) and what sorts of screen bonuses the cruiser/capital/carrier lines should be getting. Once we have the assumptions about the composition and screen bonuses, we can make up ship templates and tune the values of each module to form the whole.

So on giving CA that cruiser killing spot. I am optimistic that a increase in armour could be a good way of doing it.

I still can't see armour value on cruisers as being that important. Torpedoes and aircraft are still ignoring armour, all cruisers are now immune to light attack until the screen are gone because they are literally out of reach, like the "Meta" CA used to be. And the heavy attack from BC/BB should still sail straight through the cruisers armour. This only leaves CA heavy attack for the armour to compete with, and the biggest goal of this entire endeavor has been to make a CA a better cruiser killer.

If you wanted to make cruiser armour viable, we probably can't even have the armour module focus around armour stat. Perhaps give it a much larger HP boost, and perhaps boost reliability (crit resistance) as well. Other ways to make armour value itself more important would be to increase vulnerability to light attack, but you can't really do that without it seeming strange to me. You either extend their range to match heavy attack, hit 2 layers. Give light attack screen penetration like torpedoes to randomly roll into the cruiser line. Or somehow find a way to allow a fleet to be functional when it is missing its DD screen line. All of those sound like nonsense to me. Having cruiser armour compete with CA gun piercing like cruiser armour kinda does now with light attack piercing, just means the armour isn't really worth it since it slows you down and makes you more expensive for no practical benefit.

 

[Usable Username]

Fair point corpse we haven't brought range's into this yet. Although I would like to propose an alternative solution to what you have presented and get your thoughts on it. As I think it addresses a lot of the problems and complexities you raised.

1. Extend range of lights and heavy to cover every layer.

2. Weigh the use of heavy guns in a similar way to now but just as if cruisers were capitals now. Weigh lights similarly treating cruisers as screens but with a small weighting to the capital row to allow the presence of a bb to bleed some of the light attack. The inverse would hopefully apply with heavy attack bleeding a little to destroyers.

3. Use a cruiser + bb screen to calculate access to carriers and transports as the capitals are used for now. Very high rating for heavy guns, very low rating for light guns to reflect the difficulties in getting access with shorter range weapons and counter balanced by cruisers being a lot more abundant then proper capitals are at the moment.

Getting back to this idea of using combos to produce different effects/fleet buffs to encourage different combinations. I do believe that the weightings are tied to a per ship basis so that it should scale ok without any additional change there.

This way that big beautiful armour set you bought for your bb flagship has an impact on the fleet outside of direct hits. Which we should see more of if we can make CA more useful.

I.e. my 6 bb and destroyer screen are fighting a light cruiser spam. At some point, some of those cruisers are going to shoot my bb before every one of those destroyers are dead.

This also fixes the idea of capital secondaries theoretically being out of range.

Hopefully this could also help keep the back end changes relatively simple. With most if coming down to just fidling with those weighting numbers.

Keen to hear your thoughts corpse.

P.s. using cruisers to help calculate access to carriers keeps in line with base strike doctrine.

 

[sudpud]

Lot of great discussion and beneficial criticism/recommendations in this thread, keep it up everyone! I really hope the devs incorporate some of this feedback into a naval overhaul. The existing naval meta is one of the weakest points(not historical, and one dimensional) of the game at the moment.

Would be nice to see some variation in naval builds besides subspam and LA-CA.

 

[Usable Username]

Edited: I incorrectly wrote down the details for light gun targeting carriers. Should read 'light guns target all columns, low priority for column 3 and 4 and high priority for columns 1 and 2. As per the explainer above.

Attempting to write up a concise summery of where i am at with all of this to date. ill port this onto the first post to try and give any newcomers a better starting point.

An effort to implement as small a change for a large, positive impact on Hoi4 Navy as it stands.

Proposed Changes:

1. Introduce a new column in naval engagements for cruisers in-between destroyers and capitals, similar to what was done to carriers a while back.

2. Allow destroyers to screen for cruisers at a rate of 1-1 or 2-1. and apply a lesser screening bonus to accuracy in the cruiser column of ~10-20% that gives destroyers an opportunity to provide a supporting buff without making them a necessity for every fleet comp. Use cruiser column + destroyer column to provide screening to capitals.

3. Set heavy guns to fire on all ranges, set light guns to fire on first 3 non empty columns. Weigh the gun types to each include cruisers as a high priority (column 1, 2 and 4 high priority for lights, 2+ high priority for heavies), (optional extra) weight the gun types to bleed a small portion of shots towards their less then ideal targets, i.e. lights target capitals sometimes, Heavy guns have a small chance to target DD sometimes. Use Cruiser column + Capital Column to screen for Carriers + Transport column.

4. Upgrade light armour ratings to sit above their respectively tiered guns to reduce the effectiveness of light batteries when compared to heavy batteries at killing cruisers. Use devspective to set this number in such a way so that within reason, heavy cruisers become noticeably more efficient at killing heavily equipped cruisers, while at the very light and fast end of cruiser design, light guns can remain the most efficient. Tweak with aforementioned screening bonus for cruisers if it gets ridiculous.

5. Consider proportional adjustments to destroyers and secondary batteries in line with the % armour increase.

6. Enjoy fielding a wider variety of fleet compositions that will each have advantages and disadvantages in different matchups and conditions, and enjoy that sure fire promotion for which ever dev takes this on as they are congratulated on such an efficient use of developer time for such a large improvement to HOI4 Navy!

Bonus: Hopefully all of these changes have been done before and dont employ anything particularly complex or new in the back end. Maby Gui interface exempted?? Sad to be proven wrong, but not surprised if i am.

The discussion continues....

Regards

Usable Username

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Everyone else who has been following, please shout at me if i have missed something.

Devtag: @CraniumMuppet

 

[Usable Username]

Lot of great discussion and beneficial criticism/recommendations in this thread, keep it up everyone! I really hope the devs incorporate some of this feedback into a naval overhaul. The existing naval meta is one of the weakest points(not historical, and one dimensional) of the game at the moment.

Would be nice to see some variation in naval builds besides subspam and LA-CA.

Thanks Sudpud, and everyone for who has been jumping in, there are plenty of other items that im sure the community could put together, Just like to point out that i am not across Subspam enough at the moment to provide any constructive feedback, and if anyone else is reading this i would also like to keep that discussion to another thread if possible. I would like to keep this one focused on surface fleet engagements, and making whatever recommendations we spit out as easy and simple for dev's to adopt as possible.

The Wishlist for another day currently includes:
-Better balance for Subspam
-in fleet surface detection rates contributing to fleet positioning.
-a +1% speed buff per non main gun module for proper Capitals, (tie it to the capital engine modules for ease of coding?)
-appropriate secondary weapon profiles for historical BB (see Kongo reference....s). (Presumably fixable after aforementioned speed bump.)
-Balance super heavy batteries in a way so that the only ever historical examples of a super heavy battle ship can be accurately represented in the ingame ship designer... with 3 turrets....

another day.

 

[Usable Username]

Throwing up a couple more items that came to me in the shower (so you know there good!) that we haven't considered yet:

On Carriers - In tandem with armour changes to cruisers, if carriers were given access to light cruiser armour, that would actually make the deck armour mods a solid situational option, lifting the armour value further away from prospective Light gunned assailants would and maybe even low level heavy attack piercing values would making them comparatively durable under the right circumstances.

On Airforce Naval attack - probably something for the wish list, but, bumping up CAS and fighter navy damage and naval targeting while pitting them against target armour values would give an otherwise largely redundant unit a legitimate role to play targeting smaller vessels. (History win) Also doubling up on the idea of making armoured carriers a viable option (another History Win).

On Heavy attack Penetration - another stat that we could play with in tandem of scaling light guns to sit underneath armour values more. Could be to scale the Critical hit bonus upwards as the gap in Pen V Armour widens. sort of a high risk/reward damage buff for bigger guns, creating a point of difference between BB and CA heavy attack. Worth noting here that ship speed on light stuff could be the counter that stops it being OP. But it could set up situations where Yamato/Bismark get some nice flavour to them and make beating armour less of a zero sum game. Although im aware at this point we are talking about changes that would have a relatively small impact on the game, so may be best left for the Wishlist.

On Minimising the workload for devs to make these changes - I have given exactly 0 thought to how all of the proposed changes would effect the AI and single player experience and am wholly understanding that this will probably increase billable hours required to make any change. (who'da thought?, game design is hard)

Food for thought.

 

[Paul.Ketcham]

This is something I might have overlooked earlier. Keeping "ranges" the same, adding a cruiser layer between screens and capitals will push the capitals out of range of heavy attack, until either the screen or cruiser line is empty. This means that heavy attack can be weight-boosted against cruisers like it is for capitals, without much fear of the CA guns choosing a capital over a cruiser. This allows the CA to prefer cruisers, like we want. I was hooked up thinking that heavy attack would still reach far enough to hit the enemy battle line out the gate, even if they were screened.

This means that we don't really need the medium attack that was brought up earlier, though medium attack would give us flexibility that I would think is more immediately recognizable by players as what it is intended to do.


I think we are now at the point of trying to work around fleet compositions (amounts of types of ships) and what sorts of screen bonuses the cruiser/capital/carrier lines should be getting. Once we have the assumptions about the composition and screen bonuses, we can make up ship templates and tune the values of each module to form the whole.


I still can't see armour value on cruisers as being that important. Torpedoes and aircraft are still ignoring armour, all cruisers are now immune to light attack until the screen are gone because they are literally out of reach, like the "Meta" CA used to be. And the heavy attack from BC/BB should still sail straight through the cruisers armour. This only leaves CA heavy attack for the armour to compete with, and the biggest goal of this entire endeavor has been to make a CA a better cruiser killer.

If you wanted to make cruiser armour viable, we probably can't even have the armour module focus around armour stat. Perhaps give it a much larger HP boost, and perhaps boost reliability (crit resistance) as well. Other ways to make armour value itself more important would be to increase vulnerability to light attack, but you can't really do that without it seeming strange to me. You either extend their range to match heavy attack, hit 2 layers. Give light attack screen penetration like torpedoes to randomly roll into the cruiser line. Or somehow find a way to allow a fleet to be functional when it is missing its DD screen line. All of those sound like nonsense to me. Having cruiser armour compete with CA gun piercing like cruiser armour kinda does now with light attack piercing, just means the armour isn't really worth it since it slows you down and makes you more expensive for no practical benefit.

There's a lot of content, so I'm going to need to break the last few posts up into pieces.

1.) With regard to capital ships not being able to engage past cruisers, that's definitely not the outcome that I'd want; battleships can shoot long-past their effective firing ranges, which are still kilometers past cruisers and destroyers operating as a screen (cruiser/destroyer effective range is around 10km, versus 15-20km for battleships). If battleships were able to engage cruisers without battleship-retaliation, the historic outcome is that the cruisers would withdraw. Realistically, the main aim of a cruiser line is to reduce (not eliminate) torpedo vulnerability to cruisers (i.e. screen efficiency caps at 70% for cruisers), while also adding cruisers to the carrier screening line.

2.) The main aim for me with medium attack isn't just to add a different attack type, but to make it obviously and visually-distinct. Technically you can just redirect the targeting for CAs, buff the damage, and drop the piercing, and call it a day. That doesn't address their accuracy problems, though, and also leaves more ambiguity as to what the guns are supposed to do (clearly-marked "medium guns" with a tooltip describing them as cruiser-killers with an accuracy penalty vs destroyers would identify them better, and also represent in a fleet a difference between capital ship gun attack and anti-cruiser gun attack). My preferred outcome is where CAs have less of an accuracy penalty than BBs/BCs versus destroyers, but still have one (so CLs are still better against specifically DDs).

3.) I generally agree with the armor rework idea you have. I'd want a general overhaul of armor, but my simpler fix is threefold: first, add a % health increase for armor (and take it away from CA guns, replaced by a one-off buff like CLs) to increase their value, then drop piercing values in general (i.e. CL guns with 5.5-8.5 piercing, CA guns with 8.5-15 piercing) so that the armor values matter more (and buff cruiser armor to 6/9/12/15). I'd also remove cruiser armor as a tech, and just make them available by default (everyone knew how to put together 6-inch armor belts in 1896, let alone 1936).
I should also point out that ship speeds rise and fall too-sharply, although reworking engines is a whole different issue. 37 knots on a cruiser is insanely-fast.

4.) For torpedo defense for armor, I'd give it a reliability buff, but realistically I'd just have torpedoes have a piercing value (which would mean that torpedoes would always beat cruiser armor, since they're designed to attack capital ships). HP and reliability from armor would mitigate it, but not prevent critical hits. Torpedo protection on armor usually was too bulky to mount on cruisers, as they often included massive bulges out to the sides that on a cruiser would kill their speed.

The random roll idea for piercing is an interesting idea (since they might hit at angles or be defective), but that's a question of how many calculations the game has to do for it (I have no idea personally).

 

[Usable Username]

Back to heavy gun accuracy - I am increasing starting to think that I am underestimating this problem.

A also 3-1 hit rate for even slow cruisers at the moment is going to be hard to overcome. A flat knot or 2 drop of cruiser speeds does seem to look reasonable now that you point it out.

As corpse pointed out, I am coming around armour change alone will be enough to balance.

Screening buffs may help bb a little as is but we don't want to make them so powerful as to make a full dd screen an obligation for every fleet.

So if those don't work, next easiest step would probably be to apply a flat accuracy bump to heavy guns and drop the screening bumps accordingly and get some acceptable profiles.

And as per pauls post above, ideally CA would have better accuracy then BB. But it would be possible to obtain this through the screening bump if we can get those numbers low enough to keep that destroyer flexibility open.

So if messing with those figures and armour values starts to become to messy, it may well get to the point that adding in a sepperate damage point called medium attack, would be a simpler solve. Noting that it could still leave BB behind. But then anything you do to heavy attack profiles would be more isolated. Which would bring me more in line with the concerns in your point 2.

Also no more mixing medium and light guns would be nice, even just for the aesthetic. You can swap to lots if secondaries if you have your heart set on it.

3.) I generally agree with the armor rework idea you have. I'd want a general overhaul of armor, but my simpler fix is threefold: first, add a % health increase for armor (and take it away from CA guns, replaced by a one-off buff like CLs) to increase their value, then drop piercing values in general (i.e. CL guns with 5.5-8.5 piercing, CA guns with 8.5-15 piercing) so that the armor values matter more (and buff cruiser armor to 6/9/12/15). I'd also remove cruiser armor as a tech, and just make them available by default (everyone knew how to put together 6-inch armor belts in 1896, let alone 1936).
I should also point out that ship speeds rise and fall too-sharply, although reworking engines is a whole different issue. 37 knots on a cruiser is insanely-fast.

4.) For torpedo defense for armor, I'd give it a reliability buff, but realistically I'd just have torpedoes have a piercing value (which would mean that torpedoes would always beat cruiser armor, since they're designed to attack capital ships). HP and reliability from armor would mitigate it, but not prevent critical hits. Torpedo protection on armor usually was too bulky to mount on cruisers, as they often included massive bulges out to the sides that on a cruiser would kill their speed.

On 3 and 4, I get the point behind stanrdising armour. Originally I was trying to keep the number of changes to a minimum, but if recalibrating all of the figures makes life easier, I'm all for it.

From a pure game play perspective but, if all of the armour sets are available from the get go we could run the risk of homogenising a lot of the options and skewing the game to a particular meta as we could be taking some of risk/investment away from what would otherwise be a reward.

Some sort of mitigating circumstance for torpedoes sounds great, it would however be a totally new mechanic with higher risks associated with implementation worth considering. I.e. maby a flat damage reduction tied too only capital armour sets would be a simpler way of getting a similar effect?

@Paul.Ketcham , do you have any carrier armour facts you lay on me to help flesh out my idea on those?

 

[Corpse Fool]

1.) With regard to capital ships not being able to engage past cruisers, that's definitely not the outcome that I'd want

So past assuming the new cruiser-layer, and with the goal of making the CA target cruisers, and wanting to have as few deviations from current as possible. We can keep heavy guns at 2 range, which lets the CA shoot other cruisers, but stops BB from shooting other BB. We could increase range to 3 for heavy guns which lets the BB shoot other BB, but then our CA are also going to be tempted to shoot BB, or if we weight heavy attack for cruisers, the BB are going to be weighted to shoot cruisers.

Giving CA medium attack would allow the CA to shoot cruisers and we can put heavy attack at 3 range and weight the capitals, so BB shoot other BB. I don't know what the "cost" of adding another attack type is going to end up being, but this seems to be the best option.

2.) The main aim for me with medium attack isn't just to add a different attack type, but to make it obviously and visually-distinct. Technically you can just redirect the targeting for CAs, buff the damage, and drop the piercing, and call it a day.

Yes, I said as much myself. An interesting point raised here related to the first, is the idea of giving the ship itself (CA) a bonus to targeting other cruisers. This is currently not a mechanic in the game as far as I'm aware, and it could help solve our above problems, but if we're adding a mechanic either way, I think medium attack is going to be a lot cleaner and more easily understood than hiding a bunch of modifiers in a specific hull.

I'd also remove cruiser armor as a tech, and just make them available by default (everyone knew how to put together 6-inch armor belts in 1896, let alone 1936).

It isn't just thickness, it is also metallurgy and perhaps most importantly, design. All-or-nothing schemes weren't gaining widespread use until 1910's, Germany used some "turtle back" armour schemes.

4.) For torpedo defense for armor

This is also something I'd like to see, but it is further down on the list of priorities.

 

[demon72]

if there are changes made to naval warfare - shouldn't then be the biggest issue to create more historical battles?

 

[sudpud]

if there are changes made to naval warfare - shouldn't then be the biggest issue to create more historical battles?

Define historical? Don’t want to railroad player choice.

The issue as I see it right now, is that there is one specific surface naval build that is always the most effective(Light attack heavy cruisers LA-CA, and roach DDs with torpedos). There really isn’t any reason to build differently, as this is the best bang for the buck.

 

[demon72]

Define historical? Don’t want to railroad player choice.

The issue as I see it right now, is that there is one specific surface naval build that is always the most effective(Light attack heavy cruisers LA-CA, and roach DDs with torpedos). There really isn’t any reason to build differently, as this is the best bang for the buck.

Most historical battles just happened with few ships or very small fleets - right now there are almost only battles with massive fleets.

 

[Paul.Ketcham]

@Paul.Ketcham , do you have any carrier armour facts you lay on me to help flesh out my idea on those?

I'm a little wiped out right now, but just to be quick:

1.) Cruiser armor in general was pretty standard for carriers, though capital ship conversions could have up to battleship levels of armor (Shinano didn't have any stripped off, so it had 16 inches of belt armor). Letting regular carriers or cruiser conversions use cruiser armor is the basic standard, though here's where we come back to the point on cruiser armor starting researched (The BC conversions had armor stripped down, leaving the Kaga/Akagi and Lexington classes with 6-inch belts).

2.) Deck armor really needs to just be a one-off buff, or a designer attribute, because its in-game implementation makes no sense at all. Deck armor and belt armor are completely different, first off, because most gunfire at a ship is going to hit the side, where deck armor provides no defense at all (as opposed to the module just stacking more armor). Second off, its intended role of stopping bombs is useless because bombs ignore armor, and the game lacks the complexity to really distinguish between aircraft bombing attacks versus torpedo attacks. Lastly, the fact that armor replaces an entire hangar means that you can't build historic armored carriers at all, because the hangars are apparently just giant shield generators deploying armor around the ship (the historic answer is a smaller armored hangar, which carries fewer aircraft but gets bonus HP and reliability).
Anything regarding non-belt armor is best represented by HP/reliability buffs.

3.) Realistic air reworks would be hard to put into the game without a significant number of changes, since you'd need to balance the different types of bombers and their respective damage types, and either handwave a damage type for them (i.e. heavy attack, so its armor-mitigated) or add a new type of damage blockable by armor, and add piercing values. Without changes like that, you're not going to get a meaningful difference between torpedoes and bombing, and without some way of determining what a bomber is armed with (CAS and tactical bombers presumably would get better air defense, but slightly-lower attack and significantly-lower piercing than naval bombers, but I have no idea how to balance this).

Ideally, a basic overhaul of carriers would do four things:
1.) Add regular armor modules (at least cruiser armor options, plus BB/BC for carrier conversions).
2.) Add dedicated secondary and AA modules to raise defensive firepower, and increase the number of available hangar modules. (+1 hangar and +2 gun slots minimum).
3.) Swap deck armor for armored hangars (~12-15 aircraft, bonus HP and reliability).
4.) Make hangars scale cost and HP more in general (so smaller carriers are affordable, but weaker).

 

[Usable Username]

Most historical battles just happened with few ships or very small fleets - right now there are almost only battles with massive fleets.

I think a large part of this comes down to managing lots of fleets getting a little tedious, but i am hoping that if we can reduce the reliance on screening benefits for CA at least, that could help out by giving simpler options by lowering the cost to escalate surface raiders.

Otherwise you would probably see a bigger change if we can weed out sub spam, and get more surface ships into raiding convoys. then you can get those arms races going in multiple places at once where each player tries to one up.