Figment

Well it was a win at least. But what this video tells me is neither you or the enemy really knew how to play in this instance IMO. (Again, this is no defense of the current sub design, but bad play by players isn't a great indicator of bad design either). No offense, but you seem not to be very aware on how subs play at the moment, so you're not making all the right calls either and IMO act instinctively on fear of getting hit. it worked out in the end with the subs and teams doing what they did, but it's not a great example of a good nor a representative engagement of two sides who know what they're doing. We can conclude from a 6 minute engagement by two spammy subs, that homing torps aren't guaranteed to hit much of anything, even if the target isn't really trying not to get hit by running away in open waters so the enemy has more time to engage from safety with line of sight, ending up laying near still on a border so it should become hard to miss. The narrow spread is relatively easy to dodge once you deactivated the homing after all and the torp range usualy isn't too great either if a target is running away, despite its speed. That said, you contributed as much as they did in turning this combat experience into a dull repeat excercise by trying to disengage (running), without actually trying to (or knowing how to?) disengage (you didn't look to break line of sight at all). You basically kept the situation as it was from the start. If you'd run, I'd have stayed closer to the islands to the right of the screen, which would have given you more control over their positioning as you'd narrow their options to get line of sight and more importantly, even a lead on you (even ping needs that to hit). You're lucky they wern't too bright either though. The main thing those subs did wrong, was to keep pinging you, tbh. IMO the first volley is best fired without pings anyway and if that isn't a hit, possibly a good moment to disengage if it comes at you. At least one of them should have gone without pings to make it more likely you'd turn into his torps while trying to escape the others. But if neither had pinged, they'd have likely caught you in your path with at least the first volley from either of them due to the initial angles. Some tips: - Use your fighter aircraft to help spot. Especially near the end of that video. You didn't launch any, despite the enemy subs being only 5km out from you at the end. Had you engaged them, those fighter aircraft would have given you a good chance to scout them out, made your ASW more accurate and given you a chance to fire HE and force them down. - You say you didn't want to turn into them, because of the different angles. On the other hand, you'd likely have killed at least one by exposing it to your allies (who'd been able to assist) and quite possibly gotten both of them (one by air strikes, one by turret fire). Yes, you'd likely have taken some damage, but you did now as well. - Engaging one would have likely forced it to dive and disengage, leaving you with just one firing torps at you. Since they can't get away from their position easily, they'd likely have been moving at you (closing the distance faster) or go in reverse, making it hard to opt for an unpredictable escape path while diving. - Spam your ASW aircraft a bit more and with a bit more lead, you wait awfully long at times and seem to aim at where they were or behind them, rather than where they'll be at times. - Try utilising islands a bit more to disengage with one sub so you can concentrate on the other, while forcing the sub that lost line of sight to reposition, likely by getting closer to the island while moving around the island and thereby trapping itself on one side, making it more predictable. Plus once it would reengage you'd know exactly where it'd be and likely both subs would be at the same angle, possibly even blocking each other's line of sight a bit.

No. It has more to do with the will of the team on the losing side to engage subs properly. If they hang back, the sub on your team gets slaughtered without support, while the other sub gets the freedom to break through the middle of the map and get into open waters on your side.

It is more to do with the gimmicks (radar, super heal) introduced en mass at T8 that become more excessive at T9 and T10, where some ships do not have gimmicks to compensate.

It's WG's and matchmakings fault your opponents are mostly TX, because the tiering power creep stimulates people to get ever heavier ships. This power creep can only be seen through matchmaking with less powerful ships. Players don't want to be at a disadvantage (results in whining as fragile egoes are crushed), so over time players will concentrate in the highest echelons by default. Outnumbering those below you, while giving the higher tier ships just another bit of an edge over the ships below that becomes increasingly powerful as higher tier ships are balanced against the most powerful ships on that tier, not against those below them. Note that this will also cause some players to think they're of higher skill than those in tiers below them, if their equipment let's them win at an edge over those in the tiers below them. But of course, entitlement and all.

Ironically, I couldn't agree more. The level of self pity and lack of challenge acceptence and openmindedness to have a constructive argument by people afraid to adapt on these forums is excessive. The lack of these people wanting to even consider other arguments or nuance is frustrating, especially since they are so petty they'll try ostracizing and personal abuse tactics. Sound familiar? That goes for most people these days because of their biases (justified or not) to particular playstyles of old, or preference for particular ship classes and their hatred of those that hurt them (without ever checking if they hurt the gameplay of other classes in a similar way, of course). Their desire to protect it from any interference whatsoever leads to black and white thinking, especially if it's new or more different from their own playstyle. Talking to people with an absolute dislike for subs or CVs is akin to talking to abortion absolutists, where it isn't about reason, it's about emotion and a strife for a corruptly motivated, self-centered utopic ideal that is assumed to be the same ideal of everyone else. And if not they'll enforce it on everyone else... Well, if they could. They can't. Which is what makes them so toxic and unconstructive. Note that the following is not a defense of the current implementation of subs, but more of a principles of game design rant. Most of you are not at all looking at what the subs cannot do and how to value sub hp endurance for instance. A sub will usualy lose virtually all its hp in the first engagement it is in where it is spotted. If it loses all in every first engagement it engages in, there is absolutely no reason to ever have fun in the class, as this first engagement is typically out of their control. Being able to withstand two volleys of attack is not overpowered. Most other ship classes engage over many, many more engagements, while doing substantially more damage with substantially less risk to themselves. From a game perspective, a sub player should have approximately the same amount of game time, impact and fun as any other player. That goes for the CV player as well, IMO and no, I'm not saying this is where either is at the moment. Hell, I don't think that's the case for DDs and cruisers atm with respect to BBs and overall game balance, which is heavily skewed towards BB and heavy cruiser play, next to certain all-round and hunter (hydro and radar) DDs. When you look at a video like hte above, you only look at the perspective of the DD player and what the DD player notices of the sub's engagement. You don't look at how the subs are limited, generally turned out to be wholly ineffective (despite the DD player not even having realised there were two subs from the start...). You don't see how they are constrained and what their handicaps are. Why? Since most people here are too arrogant and petty to actually try them before whining about them, most people here never developed any strategy to counter them (instead assuming there's none and then proclaiming this as "The Truth"). If you don't know how a sub player plays, developing a counter strategy is simply based on bad assumptions and ignorance, so I'm not surprised so many people whine that they just can't sit in the open water next to a submarine and they don't care that it's bad, they just want to sit in open water next to a submarine because they've always sat in open water when there wern't any submarines. Sorry to say, but those people should be offered Darwin Awards, not be listened to. It's very noticable that most of the people here have absolutely no good sense of the effectiveness of either guided torpedoes (some even assuming those have a high hit rate, while it's significantly lower than that of regular torpedoes...), not to mention tracking and counterplay options against subs in general and how it feels on the receiving end of an engagement from the sub perspective. Mostly because those people want to see the sub die the moment they look at it on the player list, as they simply don't want this engagement to be there in the first place and do not acknowledge the right of that sub player to have fun. Same goes for their treatment of CV players. There are quite a few people who project their irrational fears and entitlements and are scapegoating and harassing players for poor design decisions on WG's part. IMO people frequently abusing the karma system by abusing players in certain classes of ships at a disproportionate rate, should be temp banned for being toxic until they learn to behave. Be constructive towards WG, but don't hate on players who have no control over the design. That sentiment colours all their judgments and people often settle for pretty weak argumentation as a consequence. Which actually hurts the cause of getting something changed when it is pure in emotion. We all know these devs prefer spreadsheet arguments over feelings of fairness. So if you want things changed, make a good case they can relate to. Instead, some people will bring up evidence of a sub even daring to hit something as a sign of being overpowered. Such arguments will simply be checked against a spreadsheet of relative performance and be dismissed. Are there instance where subs have too much striking power? Yes, IMO there are situational balance issues with subs as is, on both sides of the argument and on both engagement, spotting and other mechanics. Hence I'd do subs very differently, butat least there are things the devs improved on this PTS from the looks of things that were barely mentioned, or even recognised or acknowledged. This is what I would focus on if I wanted to change things further for the betterment of all. Not just whine on as people have. ------------------------------------------- A proper analysis of the PTS sub would look at the various changes and say "okay, this mechanic is an improvement" (tracking damaged subs by oil spills) and "this balancing is still bad" (torpedoing frequency). It should be noted that despite that high frequency of torpedo spam (with which I have to agree, is too high for the potential damage per torpedo) the DD survived two engagements, while under fire from a BB's secondaries and an Italian cruiser and suffered only one torp hit out of many fired at it by one sub, while the other didn't even have a chance to engage the DD chasing it before getting rammed. In fact, throughout the match, that DD was a bigger threat than either sub and probably been less visible while engaging with torps far beyond detection range. And when spotted simply put up smoke, still seeing its enemy, but the enemy not knowing where the DD is as long as no shots were fired. Somehow this is considered fair (because everyone is used to it from the beginning), but when the sub does it, it's not fair? Sorry. As a very frequent DD player who dominates in ranked battles due to its shipclass (even though I don't use a hydro or radar DD in those), I find this logic simply stunning. In fact, from the looks of it, the DD put out more torpedoes that actually hit, because the DD torps wern't guided, but aimed at a general route of multiple enemy ships with no means for those ships to steer the torps away on top of turning themselves. They could of course turn, but that Italian cruiser for instance turned into them due to not knowing torps had been fired (whereas it would be known if a sub had fired and pinged to get the guidance on). Note how the DD could abuse the guidance of the torps to make them miss because guidance means giving a modicum of control over the angle of the torpedoes to their target on top of their own dodging agility. He did that quite well and it's not that hard. Once you're close enough the torps won't guide anymore and you can just run circles around the sub, because the sub has very limited rotation rates and limited forward angles. This makes these engagement quite one sided. This approach also works with cruisers and BBs, btw. Though I would recommend using island cover to approach and dismantle torps as any ship class (if you steer towards running behind an island, the sub has no way to use guided torps on you and thus can only fire non guided torps at poor lead angles). Under the current mechanics, guided torpedoes are - despite all the whining - actually worse as long as the targeted ship has a chance to repair, and DDs have a very short repair timer. So from the perspective of the submarine, these engagements must have been terribly frustrating, terrifyingly panicky and have felt entirely one sided with little to nothing he could do to win but hope the DD would steer into a torp due to not paying attention for a second. The subs only other option was an attempt to escape before depth charges were fired and hope the DD would search in a different direction, but in this case they tried to do so after the first depth charges. With the new mechanics in place the oil spills gave away their position and effectively they were blind to any threats from the DD, while the DD had a better sense of where the sub was. That is definitely an improvement towards hunting subs that few people have acknowledged. But once the sub dives rather than try to kill the DD with torps, it also means it won't be able to get back up and safely engage any target, as long as that DD was in the vicinity. The DD will be too close to safely approach the surface and would hunt it down immediately without friendly support. With the new oil spill mechanics, the DD will home in on it even if it dived out of sight and the chances of getting away permanently are even smaller. So consider that any player hates getting instagibbed and a sense of being able to fight back is important. This goes for people playing against subs (which is why cruisers who repaired and are in the open are IMO slightly too easy targets for subs as is due to torp damage), but it also goes for sub players. Like DDs, being spotted is usualy death. So a little bit of extra endurance, especially if you need time to disengage (and subs need more time than it would appear), isn't weird. Look at who actually won the engagements and what the subs were able to do, rather than an overall biased judgment that "oh noes there were subs/CV/whateverpetpeeve involved, so bad". What you see is the DD player counting the amount of depth charge "hits", while not realising that a gently nudging near miss is portrayed the same way as a full on hit. So they'll go "but I hit it 17 times! How is it not dead!?", without realising that many of those hits will likely be similar to ricochets. So there could be a difference between depth charge hits that actually hit and those that are misses in terms of ribbons to convey this to the player that is firing blind. But you should realise that if you would do this, this would give a lot of positioning information away that narrows the targeting for the next run and the chances of escape - which are lower than most people seem to think - would become much lower. Then there's the speed. In the example above, the sub chasing the BB was spotted about 4 minutes before the DD decided to give chase. Then complained it got so far away from the moment of giving chase (while in reality it had multiple minutes to relocate and wasn't that far from the original position) and when it was spotted that it was akin to a "race car". Yet he managed to catch up for depth charges and catching up to the point of ramming it. Some race car that was to have squandered a multi-minute lead to get rammed... Only for the DD to race to another side of the map and kill a sub there as well. What he didn't notice at all, was that the sub might have seemed fast, it was not agile at all and not at all capable of dodging, whereas his DD was extremely agile and had been dodging throughout. This in practice means a lot of difference in endurance. Yet when he tests for endurance, he only looks at amount of hits required on a stationary target, not at expected hit rate and times of (dis)engagement possible. It should also be noted, that throughout the DD was engaging multiple targets, many of which at all kinds of angles with respect to the DD's own hull. This is something a sub cannot do. It can only ping on one target and keep its nose in one direction. It might have butt torps, but those are relatively hard to line up without ruining your main firepower lineup. You saw in fact one attempt at launching such torps by the first of those two subs, but the only thing it did with that was give away its approximate position to the DD with nice arrows saying "sub here". Did any of you recognise it as such? No, because you register this subsconsiously without considering its rammifications. At most you'd go (like Flambass did) "oh wow, it has more firepower!", without considering how he used the knowledge he obtained from that torp volley (or any of the other torp and ping attempts) against the sub. If you people are fair, you would look at both sides of the engagement without going into cringeworthy one sided double standard hypocrisy. There's a lot I would do to change the current design, but to cry about the current situation from a position of prejudice and ignorance like some people do here is a needless exageration.

Honestly? He's whining a lot for someone who killed two subs in one match virtually unchallenged (yes, he had to dodge torps, which is exactly how you dodge sub torps: go slightly diagonal to the ping, repair, slow down, turn other direction, keep moving in fast to close the distance so the sub can't keep its nose trained on you and is forced to dive, where you can freely drop depth charges). The first volley nearly killed it. The second run he was dead. Even gave oil spots to give an indication of where the damaged sub was heading, making leading with depth charges easy. Took nearly no damage from that ram either... Overall very short chase and engagement times before either sub died. He waited minutes before chasing after the sub that engaged the BB (which survived despite having been engaged by that sub for minutes), could eventually easily catch up with it and kill it quickly, all the while proclaiming it was all very hard. Meanwhile spamming torps at other targets himself from invisible range, accidentally hitting a BB and Napoli with one volley of poorly aimed torps and most the time firing at and hitting DDs and cruisers while in free look around mode... Because aiming is hard, apparently. Could be worse... :/

Has it ever stopped people with 10K-20K battles whining? Or do they just whine with more attitude?

Wheelies are more like French and some other DDs. Arty... Try HE (radar) cruisers located behind an island with an arc you can't return fire on. Subs are more like Obj. TDs. Hit hard if they do hit, get into a hidden position and generally have poor arcs and poor rotation. Can die very quickly if they get spotted. CVs are more like a combination of scout tanks and artillery working together. But not just any scouts, the fun ones. Like the old pre-nerf Chaffee.

You're saying there have been any amount of good players at any point in online history in any online game? This is news to me. Anyway, players in general adapt to changing circumstances. That's the way it has always been. You could postulate an improvement in stealth and dynamic gameplay will (if implemented right) create word of mouth advertising, causing old players to return and others to stay. So that's potentially a very valuable path for WG to take away from this over a supposedly ease of targeting design aimed at a portion of the playerbase who might benefit from seeing stuff to fire upon, but is too inept to deal with being seen themselves. Surely a radio range and intel sharing limitation would benefit yoloing ships and thus many casual players to stay alive longer or reach CQB ranges. I don't think radar was meant to make things easier for the low quality player though. I think they were just looking for gimmicks and creating new challenges and gameplay forms, rather than realise they made life virtually impossible for some ships. What it did do was create a less initiative incentizing environment that promoted certain camping, HE spamming and hanging back playstyles. But I think that wasn't intentional. I don't think they actually fully understood the impact it would have and that it'd be used en mass to such a degree.

True, it is such an incredibly bad argument that should never have been made in the first place as a counter argument to what I said. You’re right, how could I not say this the first time. No. Dude. You did. It does not “stop doing damage” within the range of AA… Didn’t I specifically mention the Russian CVs and TX CVs for not abiding by attrition rules? Oh wait, I did… Quite recently… Then you should argue with the guy I countered, not me. Seeing as you specifically went against MY point that it is about mitigation and not stopping damage, you went there. Is this where I have to remind you about me saying for years CVs should start at tier 5? Ah yes. Attrition. Plenty made it back and attacked again. And for the record, they flew in areas with lots of enemy fighter squadrons attacking CV which are ships with most AA… Which is actually one of the things they did do right in the latest version. Most aircraft attacking a CV die fast. Or dead horses. Especially when they’re poorly applied out of proper context and supporting the opponent more than you. You might wonder why a 40% WR player keeps doing the same things over and over too… Do I have to mention again that TX and Russian CVs are not balanced well? I mean… Again? WoWs never got CVs right, not even close afaic though some conceptual elements were okay. Unfortunately a lot of players go straight to “this version doesn’t work, it is the only way it could be done, thus it cannot be done, remove it”. Which is strange since they have had a couple versions so far, each mixing in some balance breaking elements that make those incarnations work poorly.

Wow, really, this bad argument again? You do realise that... 1. What you describe is not related to game design. 2. This is not a simulation game, so even if it had been a good example (it is not), it would have no real impact on game design for you cannot have complete immunity from another class of units in a gladiatorial rather than 100% rock-paper-scissors game setup (i.e. what we have is units designed around situational advantages that they need to exploit by proper positioning and tactics when faced with opponents with different setups. So any ships engaging a CV must try to get into a position where the CV is in a disadvantage due to not having a very fast DPS, unlike surface ships. They do however, have an indirect strike advantage if given the time and angle to use it. That said, some CVs, especially T10 and Russian CVs do not hold to that original weakness and have too small different weaknesses. That 's genuine balance issues.). 3. The bombers in your example stayed high up, but still engaged targets. "The town and the shipyard were badly damaged". It could have been worse -> MITIGATION, NOT STOPPING. In fact, the smoke factored in greatly as well. 4. Ever heard of the Battle of Midway? Or the rest of the battles in the Pacific theater? You think there was no AA involved there and no air strike ever occured against ships with far greater AA capacity than the Blyskawica? Unfortunately, no, you don't realise anecdotes make for rubbish arguments and the text actually reinforces my arguments that AA is mitigation and attrition, not stopping power. :/

Can you direct me to the workable "I don't take damage from enemy surface ships" counter batteries, please? This whole idea of stopping air strikes with AA is a nonsense concept. It's mitigation, reducing the amount of strikes, it should never provide an invulnerability and it was never meant to be that. The problem with statements like this is that by the stopping definition, there's never enough AA until you can simply cruise in a straight line without ever having to worry about air attacks. At which point CVs can't exist. What AA should do, is create attrition on dps capacity for carriers. In the current design it hardly does. The RTS version had some better concepts in place. The initial CV design included deck fires stopping aircraft even launching as a CQB counter giving an excessive edge to ships attacking CVs. However, by this time it was often already quite likely that (like with some artillery in WoT) CVs would have ran out of aircraft, removing their striking threat with tiny wings that couldn't sustain AA barrages anymore. Unfortunately, rather than tweaking damage rates on both ends and different A2A combat balancing, devs went with an overhaul and had to start all balance lessons from scratch (and then barely ever made proper balance passes or explored balancing concepts further). There are certainly balance issues, but anyone talking about stopping air strikes is disingenuine or doesn't understand game balance.

I think radio range should become much more important than it is now. I don't think aircraft spotting should be removed entirely, but I do think spotting by all ships should be restricted more. There's far too much information being shared at the moment IMO, as like with WoT, there's just too little localised fog of war that has to be overcome with actual teamwork and player interaction (which some might call "verbal or written communication"). There should IMO also be more emphasis and distinctions made in spotting information being shared on the map and spotting information by visibility range, as this would allow for more daring ship maneouvres and a much more dynamic fleet gameplay, where not all foward initiative is punished with concentrated fire. Radio chain linking now often provides full information about ships on the other end of the map, but what if your information is limited by the degrees in the radio chain? Say first ship gets info from second ship, which gets info from a third ship. Ship two sees all information for direct targeting, but ship 1 only sees map information from ship 3's scouting and ship 3 only sees map information from ship 1's scouting. Similar effect would go for aircraft. This would entice players to be aware of and reposition to close in on targets, without always directly being able to engage that target. It should lead to more aggressive offensive moves that would currently expose their broadside to the other end of the map and would make the whole game a lot more dynamic and rewarding for teams that take the initiative. The downside is that it can be a lot harder to assist far away targets and hunt down certain ships. However, this would also make it possible for last stands by outnumbered ships by controlling the enemy numbers and overall be more effective.

SOE was potentially worse. Though they didn't even assign developers to their MMO game at the time till they assigned the most hated CRM/GM who never had any game design or coding training, who didn't understood the playerbase and had a sadistic approach to players complaining to become developer of the game, so there's that.

Once made some map suggestions: This was mostly some map elements that would create tactical challenges and opportunities like wind and currents (+/-speed/drifting), fog, port captures for slight ship bonuses. But what if we add: Island captures: If your team controls a (or the most) ports of an island, certain map advantages linked to that island activate. This could be: - AI controlled anti-ship and/or anti-air batteries in bunkers and emplacements. Providing a little bit extra cover fire. (Hostile emplacements can be destroyed for minor exp gain) This could provide minor local AA umbrellas to ships without AA, or some extra secondary level and rate support fire. - hydro or radar station (intermittently scans an area around the base on the island until destroyed for 10-15sec (radar) or up to 2 mins (hydro) every 5 mins.

It would also be easy to simply add call in air support fighters, which you could deploy circling a fixed position in a sorta combination of air strike and CV fighter patrol drop to AA disadvantaged ships at tier III and IV. Limited amount like with spotter aircraft consumeables, on timer, deployment time of a five to fifteen seconds depending in distance to ship, but don’t scout and don’t follow the ship, but could be deployed to an area like over DDs to help other ships take out say a wave of T4 CV aircraft. Overall, cruisers that can have fighters circling your own ship should be more proactive and engage aircraft when they’re detected within 8km of your ship, not engage after a strike occurred. Maybe then the AA fighter captain skill upgrades would be worth it.

I would suggest next reset you do the following UI and UX upgrades to ensure your goals of easy access are reached and met, with full player approval: - Reset all captain skills for all ships and leave them to the player to assign at all times - When entering battle with a captain that has no points allocated: create a pop up which allows the player to auto-quick select “recommended captain skills” for that ship. - Auto-selected skills can be reset at no cost for one hour after the first battle, before they become permanent for that captain. - Have the order of auto-selecting skills be recommended to you by high performance players. Or datamine if you must. - Don’t just assign all points available on a captain, as sometimes you want to save up. Have the above players determine this for each nation and captain level, if per ship is too much work. Generally most of this info should already be on the Wiki anyway. And while you are at it, ensure people can select a camo before entering battle if they forgot it. Same goes for any missing or unupdated modules. In fact, players would likely appreciate a “pre-battle ship readiness check” assistant with full ship overview. That said, I’m sure a lot of people would like their battle loading screens to contain more information about the ship they currently play as well. Think which flags are mounted, how many of those are left, same for camos. This way people know beforehand they must be replenished with gold. Do warn people that they go from stockpiled flags to gold purchases and have them confirm such change! I for one made a lot of accidental microtransactions against my will due to the current flag and camo acquisition setup. And if people don’t want help? Allow them to toggle it on/off. Quite sure such quality of life changes would be welcomed by all players more than new ships.

Super CVs: spectacular Flambass videos where he shows how OP it is damagewise, while not prioritising supporting his team where it actually would have made a difference (the side that's overwhelmed), therefore losing ships disproportionally, and eventually losing flanks by concentrating on showing off how to reap damage on easy targets like ships that are already checked in place by his team, damage farming on lonely and overextended ships and getting so intoxicated by it he loses sight of his potential greater strategic impact if he had engaged further away targets and dealt less damage. Subs: a quiet and zen past time for our more introvert, patient and modest players to give the enemy an easier time by removing themselves from the battlefield almost all match, while occasionally gently reminding their enemies to contemplate the use of basic cover. Before leaving as if nothing happened, which is exactly what may have happened. But also to now and then remind our more... loud and crude extravert BB-players of the concept that with great power comes great responsibility to check for torpedoes once in a while. Among other things, of course. :)

I'm always amused by how some people react to sarcastic parody of a view or frustration they can strongly relate to, but isn't necessarily well-argued, while also not necessarily realising the point of the thinly veiled critique of OP's dime a dozen BB-mainer's rantpost. :)

Let's start by removing Battleships. The game was meant to be played as just light cruisers. Tier I at that. This is obviously true because ALL lines begin as a T1 light cruiser. No exceptions. Anything that comes after might as well be a supership and is OP because it has features the light cruiser does not have. In fact, all initial lines in beta were cruisers, so clearly they were meant to be the only ships in game, ever. Nothing more to add. There. More constructive than your post.

I don't particularly enjoy the current design either from either recipient or sub player, so we can agree to that, even if that's our subjective perspective. They aren't unethical. But not playing them does mean you have an insight gap. I disagree, it's a constructive debate to have, because if we don't come up with alternatives regardless of the chances of implementation, all you have left is either bashing in hopes it gets removed or get stuck with what we have now implemented by WG. A proper understanding, a fair evaluation and presenting a decent alternative are what's needed to convince a dev to let go of their pet-projects. What's pointless and undermining to change is going against constructive debate and going into hyperboles, because devs will look at your argument, then look at their data and denote your argument of "cheat" and "OP" isn't resembled by their statistics (and you know how statistics can be used) and subsequently they will conclude you have no idea what you're talking about and your argument is void. If you present a coherent argument that is realistic and accurately predicts how things are felt by players and also reflects their statistics, there's a bigger chance they might listen, as long as it isn't drowned out and there's popular support for it. Mind, this may take time and an effective player campaign. But those are usualy more effective than the usual player tantrums. I say that because it gets reflected in the unit statistics as it cuts sub games very short and reduces their average damage output and impact significantly. Since we have a dev team that looks at statistics constantly, you might want to be able to offer an explanation and figure out their rationale so you can argue against it. You really should play subs to understand this isn't true in Wargaming because you'll be thinking about how, where and when to next engage your enemy. Subs have a huge logistical achillesheel and their maneouvrability is extremely low. Despite the top speed some people have refered to. It greatly impacts (narrows) the likely choices for disengaging or engaging moves. If you don't understand this, then it's no wonder you don't know where to educated guess your ASW strikes. I'm not saying you're a bad player... in the previous situation. But if you don't adapt your play and refuse to increase your countermeasure knowledge, you're not a good player anymore in all new situations that can occur. As said, you're asking for it by staying in open water when a sub is near. Your stubborness to adapt is your undoing. It becomes your fault for opting to do the wrong thing in the known presence of a submarine, that the sub gets spotting damage or torpedo damage. I fully understand you think of the older situation as "intended", but the new situation is what you got and you'll have to make due with that for the time being. That means you either adapt your playstyle a little, or face extinction under survival of the fittest rules. I understand you want to cling to what you know and idealise that situation, but it's not here at present, so this is like a DD main clinging to fogged rush approaches with DDs, even after the fog no longer obscures your speedy approach post-beta. I'm sorry. But you have to move on for now. It's fine argueing that you should be able to do that, but then you need different submarine mechanics. Until you have those, you're going to have to accept you have to adapt. No, I'm not at all saying that. You don't understand sub strengths and weaknesses and you thus don't understand positioning anymore... You make assumptions and draw conclusions that aren't based on facts, but which draws on the fears and prejudices in your mind. Sorry, but this is absolute bogus. Look at the image I've posted earlier. It means you change your routes. It means you operate in the open in the proximity of islands you can use as a shield to steer torpedoes into, without actually going behind the island (!), because you manipulate the path of the homing torpedoes. Submarines have a very limited time in which they can reliable torp at you if you move between islands. You can manipulate this to such an extend they might never get a reliable shot on you during the entire match. But it does mean you take into account what they need in order to hit you. You really should, if only to understand how to counter. Besides, you currently grief your team by being a liability that needlessly opens himself to random sub attacks. Coop subs are pretty easy to track and kill. Shouldn't take too long tbh if you triangulate using "who is spotted" questions. :/ That sub is usualy on the way to some cap zone on your original side of the map and has trouble steering, so might have run into islands along the way. It's stupid and all, but that's why you need an alternative means to break homing torpedo locks or abuse their locks (islands) to get the most out of your DC. Typically you only need to during a match if the sub started on your end of the map. Otherwise it likely never gets anywhere close to you. When it does signal it is near you by getting spotted or pinging you, you adapt from that point forward. The minor change in gameplay really isn't a big deal. I'm sure you adapted to Dutch cruiser air strikes as well by making minor changes to positioning and pathing?

An on average higher cruiser to battleship ratio would probably be a good thing for gameplay (provided they're not all radar ships). One problem I see is that BBs are so popular due to their relatively imbalanced endurance + alpha damage class nature and public image that it might increase waiting times a bit and this might make devs opt for allowing the higher BB ratio they have in the past.

This seems to be very subjective, but since there are options to prevent being hit and there are options to hit, let's at the very least agree that there is in fact counterplay possible. I've never said it's properly balanced. Quite the contrary. I've also proposed to remove homing torps in my overhaul suggestions, or make them very unique nation specific, but with a different mechanic that's closer to dumbfire. Again, I'm not saying you can't disagree with the design, but if you don't know how it works and what you can do against it, it's a lot harder to make a convincing argument or find a proper fix. Hence it's important to know how to deal with it and that's best learned by playing subs tbh. Being on the receiving end only just creates an information gap that's filled with speculation and that's exactly what most people here seem to do. I'm simply not interested in people dishonestly hyperboling just because they want something that annoys them removed completely, rather than find a compromise that works for everyone. That's mainly a balance issue regarding effectiveness, but again, it's not impossible. The problem I think the devs touched on is when they get ganged up on by 6 or more ASW attacks launched at once. That's the issue with the ASW plane design as a mechanic, if you get spotted in the vicinity of a lot of BBs, you could get absolutely pummeled as everyone has them ready and they all want to throw it on you. Getting hits isn't a problem for me, I find it easier to lead than with a Yamato at 30km tbh. Some miss completely if you misjudged the path, but I've sunk quite a few in the past. Just have to aim where the sub is going to escape to rather than where it was last seen. Plus depth charges hardly work well on surfaced subs due to the distance (they're not proximity explosives, but timed after all). The recent playtest update probably makes it harder to get enough damage done. I think it's annoying they made captain skills and thus had to balance around that for ASW. Nobody is going to invest in a skill that only applies to one class which may not be present. I mean, how many people get the extra fighter or AA upgrades on random ships when they can have a skill that does more damage to all ships? This is one of the balancing issues with AA as well, since they have to balance around the best AA you can have. If there's a sub in the game, I make sure I stay within a few km of islands. Works very well for me. When I played subs for practice and experimenting, those staying in open waters were just asking for it. Getting hits on anyone near islands unless you got around them and attacked from behind or cuaght m completely by surprise with late or no pings, was very hard if not impossible at times. Sub players don't always have a choice. And that depends on how their opposition plays. I'm not sure how often you've played subs, but there's a lot of islands on any given map. Hitting ships that island hop is pretty hard from a long distance for a sub, so it would have to get closer and more vulnerable in those situations. Breaking line of sight and path regularly with a sub just renders it useless a lot of the time. Or outtiered? :p I've litterally not been hit more than once by sub torps while in a cruiser. :/ You probably give them too much time to get a renewed ping on you. For cruisers the repair button is too infrequent to get caught at the wrong time without having the option to block the torps physically with islands. You don't need to stay behind islands all the time, but if you stay around islands you have an escape option and you force the sub to get closer or in a lateral position to you, which makes it easier to engage and reduces its dps by a lot.

Err nope coz ya know grammar. Oh and irrelevance to the point made. There was a huge imbalance between tiers because of the power creep design between tiers. But even within tiers the US CVs were very much inferior to the Japanese CVs that brought more squadrons. Some of these designs made the combined imbalances even more excessive. Balancing wise, it was awful. It wasn't more skillbased than today. It had different skills applied (more timing and planning involved). There was very little skill involved when you had a higher tier CV facing a lower tier CV. For instance, the only chance a lower tier had vs fighters was luring them into AA zones of friendly ships before engaging. Otherwise the DPS guaranteed you lost more air than the other did, if it lost any at all. That design aspect was crap. Some other design elements were okay to good, like locking in flight paths for attacks 6km out, so a ship had time to react. But the balancing of hp was at the basis of the entire tiering design and it caused huge amounts of problems with AA vs aircraft balancing and inter-aircraft balancing. The squadron choice setup was also very poorly designed as you could end up with nothing to do during the match depending on what the enemy CV brought. It's not the only strategic class... Everyone is involved in RTS. What you mean is to say it's the only top down map view unit. Sure, it's the only class that can quickly reproject its power anywhere on the battlefield and has a bit better overview with the top down view. However, this didn't make them a commander or "more strategic". It makes them more versatile and ideally for the CV player, better informed. No. If someone says "the game was supposed to be this", and it's not the vision of the initial developers, who determined what the game was to be, then that person is simply wrong to say so. They can at all times say they want something else, envision something else, but they can never claim "it was supposed to be" when that isn't true. No, you're doing it to be argumentative. Yoooooo. Are you a pirate? This has nothing to do with board or chess game, it's got more to do with the assymetry of gladiatorial combat where a unit had advantages and disadvantages, some have extreme advantages and disadvantages, some have jack of all trades abilities. It's about trade-offs, but in the end, when properly used a unit should be able to compete against any other unit. The problem is that some of the jacks of all trades think extreme advantages vs extreme disadvantages (like having next to no brawling ability) is unfair because they're not always in their own optimum engagement position and can only mitigate incoming attacks at that point. They completely ignore the part where when they do get into their position, they can annihilate that extreme unit because of a lack of patience and an urge to fight against copies of themselves and slight derivatives mostly. You, like many people on these forums, conflate specific game design elements with CVs as implemented as being inherent to the class and particular balancing choices made by devs (which I don't agree with) are considered by many here as invariable. This is a distinct lack of creative thinking that permeates many development forums, because the majority of people cannot see past a status quo, past design choices and barely can imagine the impact of changing even a few game mechanics. Spotting (by aircraft, but goes for DD and subs too) is one of those things that could have easily been less impactful, if for instance sharing information automatically on the map was more limited by range (for instance, requiring a chain of units to deliver info to BBs in the rear) in this game and relied more on players literally communicating this information verbally to one another. Just imagine how that alone would change the game. Imagine if BBs couldn't sit too far back to rely on spotting information provided by ships on the other side of the map, because radio distance actually meant something.

I'm not defending the design, I'm explaining to people that there's counterplay possible when they claim there's not. If you're going to argue against something, at least understand what it is you're argueing against. And the people on these forum here act like spoiled teenagers most the time who think in absolutes and demand to get exactly what they personally want without any consideration of or tolerance for other people. Let alone understanding that which they've declared to hate and call OP before any incarnation was even known. To these people facts don't matter, nuance doesn't matter. Which tbh means their opinion doesn't really matter. One of the reasons homing torps are such a bad design is the above exploit, as it results in many sub matches ending with people having 0 damage dealt as homing torps are incredibly unreliable and the ping mechanic is ridiculous from the citadel damage to the way it is aimed. What you can't fathom is someone explaining something he doesn't particularly like, to people who pretend something is "impossible to deal with", when it's just them being crap. That doesn't mean I think it's good design at all, just that these people have no idea what they're argueing against aside that they know they fear it. It's not an OP tool. It's situational and mostly hits idiots or people who were unlucky enoug to have used their repair just a bit earlier. Beyond that the design is pretty meh and should be overhauled from the ground up IMO. But don't let that opinion of mine which has been posted over a year ago with extensive overhaul suggestions get in the way of your prejudice and jumping to conclusions.