RamirezKurita

To be honest, the ARP ships are mostly there as a little marketing thing, they don't have that much work put into them as they are only there to cash in on a marketing deal in Japan. The only thing that I could see them changing that wouldn't take too much work would be to change the AA graphics, as they are already purely a visual thing and so graphically they don't need to correspond to the normal graphics.

The simplest thing would be to do what Star Conflict does for missions that require you to kill, and that is simply to change "sink" into "sink or assist in the sinking of", and say anyone who deals more than 10% of the targets health in damage is liable for an assist.

I'd rather see the Alaskas as a T10 cruiser, as they were basically just massive Baltimores in terms of design (which would also give US cruiser players something to work towards, considering all the complaints I've heard about the Des Moines, alternatively they could make the Des Moines the T10 ship on the CL line, as despite not being a CL their guns' designs were derived from the Worcester class's guns and would have a relatively similar spammy gameplay style, but that would create the odd situation where the CL line ends on a CA while the CA line ends on a CB). They really aren't large enough to be true battlecruisers, considering how average capital ships of the period were 40,000 tonnes or so and the standard USN capital ship guns were 16", which is significantly larger than the Alaskas both in displacement and caliber. I don't even think they would be able to match the Lexingtons, which were a much older design, but at least the Lexingtons had the advantage of being true battlecruisers. The only way they would be balanced as battleships is if they put them into the lower tiers, in which case you have the issue of a 1940s ship facing off against WW1 era battleships most of the time, probably also with the next ship in the line being significantly older, and we know all the problems the Clevelands cause due to being far more modern than anything else for several tiers. Putting it as a high tier cruiser would at very least let them face off against contemporary ships rather than being a temporal fish out of water. It's similar to how I think the later Panzerschiffe designs belong with the cruisers, as do the Japanese B65 designs. On a slightly related note, I'd quite like to see a US carrier line purely formed of conversions, considering how at some point or other they made designs converting almost every single major ship built from the late 30s onwards, including the Alaskas. It could be either a fully independent line, or simply single dead ends for each conversion branching off the cruiser and battleship lines. They could easily make this from T6, beginning with the Independences, ending up at T10 with the planned Iowa conversion. I also don't think the US would be able to have a full CC line, as the only battlecruisers they laid down, and ever planned to lay down were the Lexingtons, so it would end up being a line of basically the Lexingtons and a huge amount of design preliminaries for the Lexingtons. Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure even the old Tennessees would be T7-8 material at most, their old 10" guns were pretty outdated, being low velocity and firing relatively light projectiles for a 10" gun, and they had far more modifications planned than the Pennsylvanias. Even with the planned engine replacement to bring them up to speed though, they would still be pretty bad. There's a good reason why the US decided to scrap them to build more heavy cruisers. Would be nice to see in the game though, if only as a premium. Would be funny to see a heavily modernised turn of the century armoured cruiser steaming around and brawling with ships 40 or so years newer. Alternatively they could be T2 battleships, considering how the old armoured cruisers were basically just battlecruisers from the pre-dreadnought era, and even their sizes were comparable to the old pre-dreadnoughts

The KGV should be fine at T8, even if its guns are relatively poor for its tier. Remember that it has better armour than the T9s, historically they had some very strong AA towards the end of the war and were slightly faster than the NCs. Their relatively low penetration would be the only thing stopping them from being a T9, and even with poor penetration they would still make excellent cruiser hunters and escorts (and if they have good trajectories on their mains guns and a torpedo belt as good as the historical one, good destroyer hunters too). If they also give it 6+km ranges on the secondaries, it should help it become a nice brawler too, which would go well with its high speed and thick armour, but unfortunately it does suffer from having fewer secondaries than most equivalent ships.

While I do agree that carrier gameplay requires some tweaks, the proposed changes I feel would simply add a large amount of complexity for very little actual depth. Complex but shallow things are very hard to learn, but easy to master, while good game design is about trying to achieve the opposite with having lots of depth with relatively little complexity; depth is the goal, complexity is the price the designers pay. Carrier gameplay is fundamentally about strategy, not APM and precision clicking, and that's what we need to figure out how to encourage and reward. For example, the current fighter combat is pretty simple at a fundamental level, but that's because the difficulty in using fighters is not about micromanaging them in a fight but instead making sure that they are in the right place at the right time, it's about whether you can fight and whether you should fight, not how you fight. The other thing that people forget is that countering carriers is also almost as much about strategy as playing as them is, which leads to players making whole strings of terrible decisions and yet still claiming something is uncounterable, without ever actually thinking about what they could have done. There are a few suggestions that have been made before that I would agree with though, such as fighters strafing AA guns. It would give fighter setups something to do if the enemy are being overly cautious with their bombers or if the enemy carriers are already dead. It would also not really add any more complexity as it would be much like using dive bombers, but it would add a significant choice to the game, giving a good amount of depth at the cost of very little complexity (do I use my fighters to sweep enemy AA so I can follow with my bombers or do I save them for intercepting enemy bombers?). Removing the RNG aspects of AA would also help no end, as fighter combat can get extremely snowbally as planes don't have actual health, as well as ships trying to defend themselves are entirely at the mercy of the RNG. It's frustrating as a carrier player to lose two entire squadrons to a lone enemy ship before they even drop their payloads, but it is equally frustrating to shoot down a single plane in the same scenario and take loads of damage, when on average several planes should be shot down. Such a change wouldn't really change the way people play, but would help with the enjoyment of the game as the game would become more consistent. It also doesn't help that the RNG centric nature of aircraft is not well documented in the game, most of the in-game tooltips imply actual health mechanics and many players might not be aware of it, which simply leads to frustration as the game is behaving very inconsistently for little apparent reason. Another idea (although not mentioned in this specific thread yet) is to actually give AA guns their own fire arcs, rather than them simply being a bubble of damage around the ship. This would both give players more tools to deal with aircraft, as they can angle their ships to maximise their AA firepower, but would also function as a nerf for TBs because ships tend to have most of their AA firepower on the broadside while DBs would approach from angles with less AA. This would obviously require the buffing of individual AA guns to maintain the same overall level of effectiveness, as ships wouldn't be able to bring all their AA firepower to bear unless they were getting surrounded by aircraft. Other small changes could be to give some kind of bonuses for massed AA fire, such as making the damage received by aircraft non-linear based on the DPS they are receiving (so a squadron taking a combined DPS of 100 might actually take 100 DPS, but one taking 150 DPS might actually take 160 DPS), which would further reinforce the idea that grouping up is a useful concept against carriers. I also agree that more things in the game need to be rewarded, spotting rewards is a good start as well as there should be greater rewards for shooting down aircraft. Currently it is something like 40 aircraft equals one kill, which is almost unobtainable in most games and is only even remotely balanced in T10 games, a much better system would be for aircraft kills to be proportional to the carriers maximum capacity, so that the carriers capacity equals one kill (they could even make it so that damaging the carrier gives XP proportionate to their remaining aircraft, so a carrier that is running low is less of a target than a full one). Having a few more skills and upgrades for carriers would also help, as currently the choice to pick up aircraft related upgrades and skills isn't really a choice because carriers benefit so little from the other options. A "choice" where one option is clearly better than all of the others is not a choice, it is simply a puzzle, and an easy one at that. Giving each module at least two aircraft related upgrades would be a good start, or maybe even merging the aircraft modules with the regular ones (so basically giving almost all of the modules an aircraft related bonus in addition to their normal ones), as well as probably adding another line of aircraft captain skills so carrier captains actually have some proper choices rather than filling out their skill points on auto pilot.

As far as I am aware, it is because carriers benefit far more from communication than other ship types. With voice chat, it suddenly becomes far more possible to coordinate bomb drops between both carriers strike groups, keep scouts around in all relevant areas and to systematically destroy enemy aircraft with their fighters rather than both carriers off doing their own thing, which makes carriers far more dangerous than other classes if they have access to improved communication. Every class benefits from improved communication and coordination, but one of the major limits on carrier gameplay is player awareness, which voice chat reduces significantly.

Only the Langley and Bogues are actually slow, even the IJN Hosho and Zuihous can actually get a move on when they need to. Once you reach T6, carriers begin to have 30+ knot speeds. I find that if I want to remain with the fleet in my Hiryuu I actually have to spend half my time at 3/4 throttle otherwise I run the risk of overtaking them. A handy little trick to moving even faster as a carrier is to not always rely on autopilot, as it has a habit of zig-zagging towards waypoints and carriers lose a lot of speed when turning, so don't be afraid to use manual control every now and then (or if you are really good you could try manual control all the time, but I'm not good enough for that while also trying to control my planes).

Did you not notice that I specifically mentioned battleships? Indeed, for cruisers it seems like T5 is the point where immediate post war designs are, with the Omahas and Furutakas, however T5 battleships and battlecruisers are far older, with the Kongos entering service way back in 1913 as the IJNs oldest ships. I think the lowest tier ship that saw service in WWII were the Wyomings, partially as the US very much struggled to make up their allocated capital ship tonnage from the treaties. However, it doesn't change the fact that the era they are from was WWI, so from a battleship's point of view the game is mostly about the first world war. The T5 cruisers are really more in line with the T7 and T8 battleships in terms of age (did you know that the Omahas were designed alongside the Lexingtons? Just to show the age/tier differences). Come to think of it, the fact that cruisers advance very rapidly to interwar era ships in the middle tiers with the upper tiers being WWII designs, giving quite a smooth progression, while battleships stick around in the WWI era for so long before suddenly going through 20 years of development and a near doubling in size in a couple of tiers is probably one of the reasons why cruisers are so strong in the middle tiers while the game is often dominated by battleships in the last few tiers. Maybe I should make a new thread about that, rather than risk clogging up this one?

The Dunkerques would make nice T7s, having significantly higher speeds than other T7s but sacrificing firepower. Most predictions also put the German Scharnhorsts at T7, so it makes sense for them to be paired off against each other. The main guns had nice penetration and flat arcs, but the smaller shell sizes compared to other T7s would result in relatively poor damage (getting citadels isn't everything if the guns don't have enough maximum damage to make good use of them), plus the guns suffered from high dispersion and had poor rates of fire. It has the advantages of a newer design, but is significantly smaller than other battleships of the period (similar to the NC vs Amagi matchup, one is small but mordern, the other is outdated but much larger). I could see the ships still functioning as excellent cruiser hunters due to their speed with enough penetration to support against enemy battleships though (they would probably struggle to take down battleships themselves due to low DPM), they just won't be proper front-line battleships. I don't think the Richeleius will work at anything higher than T8, they were still ultimately treaty battleships in a similar vein to the North Carolinas and they don't even have the incredibly efficient ammunition hoists of the Bismarcks. They also don't really belong with the pre-treaty battleships at T7 either, so T8 is really the only option for them. They generally compare well against the Bismarcks by most metrics, being better in some regards but worse in others. The differences between the Jean Bart and the Richeleiu would be easy enough to implement as hull upgrades. The smaller Alsace designs (such as the 3x3 380mm gun designs) would also work at T8, as their capabilities weren't really any better than their predecessors. The Alsaces would be a nice ship at T9, substituting high caliber guns for having more guns than the other T9s with her 3x4 turrets in one of the designs. I'd imagine they would probably also have improved ammunition hoists, giving them a solid rate of fire. This is assuming they don't just take the boring route and use the 3x3 406mm gun design, which would basically just be another Iowa. No idea what would fit at T10, unless there an Alsace successor that I'm not aware of that has something like 3x4 406mm guns or something similar. Even the biggest of the Alsace designs I am aware of are still no larger or more powerful than the existing T9s and nowhere near enough to match up to the T10s. The earlier tiers have so many WWI designs that they are pretty trivial to fill out, with the unfinished Normandies and Lyons fitting well into the fifth and sixth tiers with their large batteries of 340mm guns. Most of the designs will need some kind of AA refit though for the later hull upgrades, although most of the refits will have to be fictional as France never really did much refitting during WWII for obvious reasons (the ones that did get refitted historically were refitted in other countries).

The trouble with combining non-linear tech trees and no paper ships is that there simply isn't enough historical ships to produce meaningful trees, people are already struggling to figure out how to get both a CL and a CA line with the split occurring around T6, and even for that they had to have a couple of paper designs. I agree on the issues regarding ships performing far too similarly to other ships in the same class, something that I have suggested on another thread is to add subclasses to ships which would then behave quite differently. For example, there wouldn't just be "battleships", the game would make meaningful distinctions between battleships and battlecruisers, and each of them would come with its own selection of abilities (for example, battleships might have damage repair, while battlecruisers might have engine overdrive as an optional consumable) and some of the captain skills would affect them differently (such as the concealment one giving battleships and battlecruisers different bonuses). Likewise, there would be actual differences between CLs, CAs, CBs, CLAAs rather than just different stat lines. This would allow for significant variety within each of the main classes of ship, while also keeping things highly visible for the players. Players could still see a Pensacola on the horizon and know roughly what it is capable of rather than it being effectively an unknown variable, because they would know the rough limitations of heavy cruisers. For extra ammunition, I wouldn't mind seeing SAP ammunition for some of the larger ships, which would help larger ships deal with smaller ones without resorting to trying to knock out modules with HE shells due to the regular AP overpenning all the time. High caliber anti-air shells were only really used by the IJN, and they were notoriously ineffective against aircraft, but they did serve quite well at bombarding land targets due to the area saturation. I'm not aware of them being ever used against enemy ships and I don't know if they would achieve much against ships, except possibly setting them on fire and destroying exposed stuff on the deck (anti DD shotgun for IJN that can also be used to destroy AA guns?)

I find it a bit odd that people always go on about WWII navies, when tiers 2-6 for battleships all served in WWI, with half of them being scrapped long before WWII. Indeed, for the RN, the QE class were the oldest ships still in service in the RN, and the Warspite is T6, so literally half the tiers of battleships in the game had nothing to do with WWII.

They have long range to give them the option of shooting at long range, not because they are meant to be effective at long range. They are brawlers with the range to give them the option of shooting at enemies far away if there are no better targets, not heavily armoured artillery. The long range is so that they can gamble on lucky hits while closing or while backing off to repair, not so that they can snipe all game. You need to play to both their strengths of armour and range, using the armour while you have health, and using the range while your health is low. It's also worth noting that US battleships have very poor performance at long ranges compared to the IJN ones, the IJN battleships and battlecruisers (and Tirpitz) perform much better at long ranges.

I'd agree with the port suggestions, there's so much hidden information at the moment that is only available through datamining the game that really should be accessible to the players. Likewise, the crew aspect of the game does need some significant expansion, although I don't think your suggestion would really help actually give the players more decisions compared to simply increasing the amount of available skills that can be learnt. Ultimately, your suggestion I feel would boil down to the simple choice of which crew to have, which would likely end up with ships only having 2 or so crew that are worth having and so get taken as an automatic choice, while even the flexible ships will still end up choosing two out of three valid options, which isn't much better. I'd rather if they simply looked at all of your suggestions for extra crew abilties and simply added them as regular commander abilities, which would keep the current system while giving the players the enhanced depth. Alternatively, they could take the WoT approach and give each ship a set of officers depending on its type (not every ship would have every officer, as only carriers would have flight officers for example) and have each officer have their own unique skill tree, which would allow for a large variety in skills without having a huge, daunting skill tree that encompasses everything. The later suggestions I feel are too complex for the extra depth they provide. They are very much brute-force methods of adding variety into the game that, rather than producing engaging and thoughtful gameplay, simply serve as barriers to newer players. Gameplay mechanics should work with the players to provide options, rather than the players having to wrestle options out of the mechanics. In particular, the ship customisation really seems quite abusable, as well as completely throwing historical accuracy out of the window; it overall doesn't add anything to the game that couldn't be added already through the existing methods of ship modifications, ship modules and simply having more ships in the game (I also don't see why you are opposed to having paper ships in the game but aren't opposed to complete fantasy modifications?). There's also the issue where it's quite bad to have ships of the same class behaving radically differently to each other, as it prevents players from making informed decisions in the game and effectively reducing things to random chance as players have to resort to making uninformed decisions. You also can't underestimate the number of players that are actually interested in the historical aspect of the game. The main thing I'd like to see with tech trees (aside from more ships in general), is to have it function more like a tree and less like a series of lines, complete with dead ends and little off-shoots designs, which would help the players feel like they are actually developing and researching things and to give a better sense of progression.

The N3 would never work at T10, it is far too old and has far too low a displacement, not to mention that the 18" MkII guns it mounted had the same design flaws that the 16" MkI guns on the G3s and Nelsons had (namely, the high velocity + light shell design had terrible accuracy and poor penetration at range). Overall it would be strictly worse than the other T10s in literally every single way, with weaker guns, a worse turret layout, less speed and poorer armour. Really the N3 belongs in T9 at most. Likewise, the Nelsons really don't belong in T9, they are T7 material at most. They are from the same generation of ships as the Nagatos and Colorados. Even the G3s would probably struggle at T9, considering they are weaker than the Iowas in almost every single way, notably with the poorer turret layout and the flawed 16" MkI guns, the only ways they equal the Iowas are in speed and armour. The KGV would probably be fine at T8 though, it has less firepower than the other T8s, but has better armour than the other T8s (indeed, better than the T9s) and their late-war AA was quite heavy. They also were slightly faster than the North Carolinas. As far as I can see, the best options for T9 and T10 are some of the Lion designs, as the designs varied quite a lot in size and could easily be spread across the two tiers. Some of the mid war designs were very similar to the Iowas, which would be a good fit for T9, while the later designs were 60,000+ tonnes with autoloading 16" guns, which would compete well with existing T10s. For CAs, I know they did have some late war designs that were cancelled that would work fine at T9 and T10, including one cruiser design that had 3x3 9.2" guns. If anything, it is T8 that would be difficult, as I don't know of any designs that would fit that tier (not to say there isn't a paper design that I haven't come across). For the lower tiers it would be easy enough to have Hawkins at T5, Yorks at T6 and Countys at T7. CLs would also be relatively easy to work with, as there were numerous interwar designs that would fit across all tiers, plus a couple of paper designs that were very similar to the US Worcester class that would fit into the upper tiers.

There are quite a few hidden variables they can tweak to help with regards to fire, notably the damage they receive and the ships base anti-fire coefficient. Obviously, reducing the ships damage from fire won't help the aircraft situation, but changing it from 0.4% damage to 0.3% damage would make it a less appealing target for HE spam. However, reducing the anti-fire coefficient would allow the ship to be harder to set on fire, which would allow it to operate for longer periods while under fire before it loses its ability to launch aircraft. Even if they are on fire, the designs still have a secondary battery that is far more powerful than any cruiser in the game, so assuming they actually make their accuracy and range relevant (which they probably wouldn't, as we all know how well WG treat secondary battery dependent ships from the Mikasa), then they will still be useful for providing fire support.

I think it's fine if a small number of people get a large amount of free XP, they shouldn't be punished as it is ultimately WG's fault here. Likewise, if WG sees fit to hand it out, they shouldn't simply taking it back, otherwise it sets the precedent that they can take back anything you have in game, and that is a very dangerous and slippery slope. Even in other online games, the developers never take anything back that appears due to a bug, they just let the affected players keep their gains as the freebies already belong to the player, regardless of how they were acquired. It's similar to how after you have bought something, the original seller cannot then ask for it back because they priced it wrongly. And it's not worth a large sum of real money, it's just a lot of play time. I for one don't really fancy grinding 750 million xp (due to 5% conversion rate) on my ships to get that much free XP, which would take roughly 750,000 games, or about 20 years of playing 24/7. At that point you might as well just play to unlock everything normally rather than using free XP...

Actually, they would probably struggle to sink it, even with the earthquake bombs. Even the "little" H-44 was designed with Tallboys in mind, the entire reason why the H-class proposals became so large was because one of the design criteria was sufficient deck armour to render them practically immune to air attack (as well as torpedoes, but they didn't advance as much as aircraft did during the period). If the suggested design was proposed after grand slams had been used, it would have likely been armoured to resist them.

The reason why cruisers are meant to be good at hunting destroyers is because of the hydroacoustic search consumable (plus lots of fast firing guns), unfortunately it is pretty useless even for German cruisers so in practice 95% of cruisers simply take AA defensive fire. I'd say the hydroacoustic search would need a buff, that way cruisers can actually function as destroyer hunters if they choose to (which would involve them sacrificing their AA escort effectiveness). A buff to hydroacoustic search would also improve their ability to dodge torpedoes, so a rudder shift change won't be needed. The experience for tanking would be nice to see, something along the lines of a small amount of experience and money for the damage you take based on the number and classes of nearby allied ships (so very little for escorting fellow battleships, but quite a lot for drawing fire from carriers)

If you want to encourage teamplay and discourage people trying to complete missions at the expense of their team, would it not be a simple fix to say that you have to destroy X cruisers in games you win? That little extra clause would mean that people focusing specific targets for missions wouldn't get anywhere if it starts to cost them games. I overall find the whole "destroy ships" missions to be somewhat annoying, rather than just the ones that require specific targets, as they are more about luck and kill stealing rather than actually dealing damage. I'd prefer them if it was "deal 3000% health damage to cruiers" rather than "destroy 30 cruisers", so it would reward actually dealing damage to them rather than waiting and trying to steal kills. I've literally had battleships on my team that refuse to fire until they know they will get the kill, waiting for their allies to get the target low enough for them to steal the kill.

The later ships tend to have different gameplay styles to the earlier ones (such as battleships becoming faster and cruisers getting AA defensive fire), not to mention that the extra modules they mount can let you customise them to your own playing style better.

I was thinking the same, they have less aircraft than most carriers in the middle tiers, let alone comparing them to other high tier carriers. Not to say that they can't be balanced by making their secondary batteries and armour as good as they should be (considering how some of them should be able to win slugging matches against high tier cruisers, judging from the specs), but many carrier players would consider them to be a bit of a downgrade compared to the previous carriers due to the aircraft capacity. Maybe they would work better as a little offshoot at T9 and T10, with the regular line having a more conventional carrier designs for the upper tiers for the main line? Alternatively they might work as an actual battleship, with the aircraft side being delegated to regular abilities (such as launching automated self-defence fighters like cruisers do, except they would launch full squadrons). Unfortunately, considering how WG have shafted the Tone class of aviation cruisers by not really making their aircraft useful, I wouldn't expect them to try to do anything fancy for an aviation battleship like this so if they took this route then it would just end up being an underpowered battleship.

I'd rather have a nation vs nation mode, would have a lot more variety and strategic nuances.

What's wrong with the regular "leave game" button that takes you back to the port?

However, WoT was released at a time when the free to play model was still very much in it's infancy so it managed to gather a large amount of players quite quickly, while nowadays we are spoilt for choice with free to play games. Secondly, the rate of new content being released was significantly higher for WoT at release, players could expect multiple new tanks to be released every other patch or so, while WoWS is lucky to get a single new ship even after several patches. For WoT it seems more like they had plenty of content on the verge of release that just needed a bit of polishing before handing it over to the players (as I'm pretty sure they couldn't actually make the content that fast,particularly before the game took off properly so they would have been a small developer at the time), but WoWS seems more like they polished a small amount of content just to rush the game out of the gates as fast as possible and are now left trying to actually finish the game.

The problem that I see is that the game isn't really in a state to be officially released. Considering how so much of the fundamental content of the game (such as clans, most of the ideas for neutral objectives, AP bombs for carrier aircraft, just to name a few things off the top of my head) isn't actually in the game, it really should still be referred to as being in Alpha, rather than claiming to be a finished product. Similarly, at release they only had the barebones of two nations in the game, when really they should have some better fleshed out trees for a few different nations as otherwise they are missing gameplay styles. Overall, I'd say the game would be fit for release in a couple of years time at the current rate of development.