RamirezKurita

It wouldn't encourage sniping, it would encourage winning at all costs. If they lose they would effectively count as "sunk", so it would encourage them to place themselves in greater danger to try to win. There would be no cost difference between being sunk and losing the game. At the moment, everyone snipes because it is the best way to avoid repair bills, but my suggestion would mean that they get hit with heavy repair bills for losing as well. If you have to pay maximum repair costs for losing even with 100% hull, then you might as well try to win even if it results in you being sunk, and even if you can't win you might as well deal as much damage as possible (which would involve closing to short range) before the end of the game. Which would then be combined with some reduced repair costs overall, as the whole point of this thread is about repair costs being too high so we don't want to increase the average repair bill.

However, the Yamato is basically designed from the ground up to deal with other battleships, which is why it makes so many sacrifices in other areas. The Yamato might have an advantage against the Montana, but the Montana performs better against every other ship type because of it's better traverse times, more guns and better AA. If the Yamato vs Montana matchup was balanced between them, then the Montana would be strictly better than the Yamato because it performs better against non-battleship opponents.

From reading these threads (I can't speak personally about higher tiers as my highest ships are T6), I'd recommend my solution that I have posted before: Significantly reduce repair costs, but make the entire losing team count as sunk for purposes of repair bills That way, players that win often will be able to cope with repairs as they won't always have to repair their entire ships. Meanwhile, players won't spend their time sniping because if they lose then they will be hit with a massive repair bill anyway, so they might as well go out guns blazing to either get some more score (and therefore money to offset repair costs) or possibly claw back the game so that they aren't burdened with a full repair. There would be no point in staying out of combat to avoid repairs unless you know your team has already won.

I'd like to see all the historical and planned stuff for the Yamatos in the game eventually; there were a lot of planned and potential modifications to the class, only some of which were implemented historically, but nearly all of them would offer some good gameplay variation (except Musashi's final historical loadout, which was like the Yamato's final historical loadout except without as much AA). Historically, in addition to the replacement of the wing turrets with more AA, there were also plans to replace the 12.7cm DP guns with 10cm DP guns, the option to replace the 155mm triple mounts with 203mm twin mounts and the planned replacement of the 46cm triple mounts with 51cm twin mounts. Really, the Yamatos probably should have more customisation options than nearly every other other battleship in the game considering the plans the Japanese had for them, although at the moment we are stuck with a single loadout for them. For the debatable effectiveness of the extra 155mm guns vs the extra 127mm guns and AA, that could easily be fixed by changing the gun ranges. At the moment all secondary battery guns on a ship are locked into being the same range, which both makes no sense as well as making more high caliber secondaries pointless as only one is needed to increase the range of the rest of the secondary guns, not to mention the fact that balance requires the higher calibers' range to be dragged down to prevent the entire secondary battery becoming overwhelming at long ranges. If the 127mm guns were kept at 5km range similar to the other battleships that mount them while the 155mm guns are given 8+km range, then the overall balance of the current late-war setup could be maintained (albeit with a slightly smoothed out secondary battery effectiveness over a variety of ranges) while also giving the wing turret design it's own niche (as it would be far more effective at longer ranges, as well as being a greater threat to enemy cruisers). Accuracy of the higher caliber secondary battery guns could also be tweaked at long ranges to keep them relevant, leaving the short range anti-DD "shotgun" effect to the DP battery guns with their greater numbers and higher fire rates. If people don't want to have to pay or grind on T10s to make them effective, then couldn't they just make them start out elited with everything available? It would give players both the satisfaction of customisability and their fully fledged T10 ship right out of the gate.

The simplest way of actually getting players to do their job properly rather than hide away to avoid repair bills would be to simply say that the entire losing team counts as destroyed for purposes of repair bills. That way it would encourage players to attempt to win even at the cost of their ship, as losing would cost them the ship anyway; the current repair bill model simply encourages players to play overly carefully and abandon their allies at the first signs of danger.

I wasn't really talking about simply splitting them into different tech lines, I know they have mentioned that eventually they plan to having multiple lines for each tree once they get around to implementing enough ships (with the common statement of the Cleveland belonging in T8, considering it's age and displacement). I'm not too bothered about having the different tech lines, but more about making the different subtypes actually different. Even if they split CLs and CAs into two different lines, I want them to actually be different rather than the only difference being that one line has 6" or less guns and the other has 8" or greater guns.

I'd like to see them split off the ship classes a bit more, as trying to shoehorn everything into just four narrowly-defined classes really doesn't work. A simple solution would be to keep the main 4 classes, but add a type-subtype system so that players can immediately know what a ship is all about. For example, simply recategorising battleships into the umbrella of "capital ships", which would then allow for more differentiation between battleships and battlecruisers rather than battlecruisers simply being faster, less armoured battleships (that some people don't even realise are actually an entirely different category of ship, as the game mostly just calls them all "battleships" and they have to go into the detailed description to find it out). Under this scheme, battlecruisers might not have access to the battleships' repair party consumable, but would have an entirely different set of abilities to choose from. Destroyers would become "escorts" and would basically include anything with less than 3000 tonnes or so displacement, which could then include things like the sloops, corvettes and frigates at appropriate tiers for balancing, each of which would have their own nuances, abilities and advantages/disadvantages. Carriers could easily be split into a few different subtypes (fleet, escort, light, armoured, just to name a few potential subtypes), but at the moment they don't have any consumables or anything like that so it wouldn't make any difference at the moment. It might in the future though I guess if WG decide to have things interact with subtypes such as commander skills or module upgrades, similar to how the current concealment skill gives difference concealment bonuses for different classes of ship. If they want to get fancy they could also add in seaplane tenders in the early tiers as a distinct subtype of carrier. Not sure what cruisers would be called under this scheme, as they range from heavy escorts to destroyer flotilla leaders to near-capital ships that commanded entire formations. Within the current 3000-20000ish ton displacement range there are already the light, heavy and AA cruisers, but widening the class to include ships of similar displacements would also allow for things like coastal defence ships, panzerschiffe and monitors to be included, each with their own unique gameplay style and abilities, plus the extra clarity from having a listed subtype would help prevent players from raging (I could imagine the threads of people complaining about the RN monitors being the slowest cruisers ever, despite not being cruisers). This would probably also tie-in well to some of the planned objective games, as some of the specialised ships would be quite useful for special objectives.

It's for the rare times when there are multiple carriers on each team of different tiers. So if you are in a T9 CV with a T10 on your team against enemy T9 and T10 carriers then you will get bonuses against the enemy T10. To be honest though it's more of a relic of the times before the forced carrier matchmaking, to lessen the difference that having different tiers of carrier makes for air superiority.

I was thinking more about staying within the 5+km range of the 4.5 inch DP guns on the majority of the RN carriers, rather than trying to stay within the short range self-defence AA bubble, particularly as defensive AA fire provides massive buffs to DP artillery. Staying several km behind the backline battleships would likely make sure that most enemy ships will be out of range, and most of the ones that get close would struggle to penetrate properly unless a brawling battleship charges straight at you (as even the old Illustrious class had notably better belt and deck armour than the New Orleans class cruisers, and their decks weren't far off unmodernised WWI era battleships, which isn't bad for a carrier that likely belongs in T7-8. I know that the original armoured designs for the Malta-class were notably heavier, overall the armoured RN carriers are probably going to be about 2 tiers ahead in terms of armour). The idea would be so that carriers wouldn't need a cruiser escort themselves, they would instead be able to effectively function as the cruiser escort for other ships, particularly as they tended to have similar AA batteries to late-war cruisers. Rather than having a cruiser come from the mid lines to protect the carrier, allied battleships would instead fall back to the carrier for AA support in the event of air attack.

How about we simply wait until the RN armoured carriers get added into the game, and give them the AA defensive fire as a special? That would go well with their concept of escorting the fleet and would help balance out their relatively small amounts of aircraft. Having a much smaller airwing wouldn't be so much of an issue if you effectively have a free Atlanta on the team.

Hood is pretty much a perfect fit in a battlecruiser line for T7, you can't put her in T6 because then the QE-class would be pointless when you could play as a practically identical ship that happens to be several knots faster in the same tier. The Admiral-class had very similar armour to the QE-class and her belt could easily withstand 15-inch shell hits, it's just that Hood was in dire need of modernisations when she faced Bismarck (which included some hefty slabs of deck armour, as she had very thin deck armour just like all pre-jutland designs). With a C hull upgrade to reflect the planned modernisation that she was due to receive, she would be fine in T7, slightly less firepower and armour than the other T7s but quite a lot faster.

I just find it odd that people are complaining about a system designed to create balanced games that ideally will be close and challenging for everyone rather than a one-sided stomp. Nearly every online game has some kind of matchmaking system that tries to actually balance games rather than simply throwing a random load of players against each other. Granted, said system isn't perfect and sometimes it will fail, assuming it even actually exists in the first place, but it's unreasonable to expect that the system is perfect and to always give close games.

I think that really the panzerschiffe belong as a special cruiser line, rather than being a battleship line. The Deutschland-class really belongs around T7 in terms of age and displacement, with the D and P designs easily slotting into higher tiers as they aren't significantly higher displacement than the Des Moines, they could probably also dredge up some preliminary design to fill the last gap. The line could even end with a shift into the O-class battlecruiser (which would be classed as a battleship, likely T8, much like the current CCs in the game). I do quite like the idea of fleshing out the earlier parts of the tree with a couple of the old armoured cruisers, particularly considering how panzerschiffe was actually the term the German navy used for armoured cruisers, but they would have to be chosen carefully as armoured cruisers were basically capital ships at the time; it would be quite difficult to balance a T4 ship with as much firepower as a T6 and SMS blucher actually had almost as much displacement as a South Carolina-class battleship. Maybe some of the protected cruisers would be a better fit? I'd also disagree with them being intermediate between cruisers and battleships, as their displacements are far more in line with cruisers. The Deutschland-class were only 10,000 tons displacement, which is actually the same as the treaty cruisers and even the mighty P-class design was only slightly larger than the Des Moines at 23,700 tons design displacement on the P-class compared to 17,255-20,934 tons depending on loading on the Des Moines, with the difference in displacement being made up by the difference in ages of the design (similar to how the Amagi is much larger than the North Carolina, as the difference in technology makes up for the difference in displacement).

Firstly, AP shells from battleships and battlecruisers do very little damage to destroyers as they overpenetrate so much, so rather than exploding inside the hull they just leave 12-14 inch holes in the hull. HE shells work much better against destroyers as they damage subsystems and don't have the overpenetrating issues. I generally keep HE shells loaded unless I know that I will be shooting at cruisers, battlecruisers or light battleships (some of the heavier battleships such as the New-Mexico are almost immune to 14-inch AP shells), destroyers tend to have to be dealt with quickly while against cruisers and battleships you often have time to fire off your HE and load AP. Secondly, getting the secondary battery modifications can help, as they increase the range and accuracy on them, which combines very well with the commander skill if you have it. It was as I was almost to the Fuso that I unlocked the commander skill, so there's a good chance you won't have it yet, but I suggest you get it at first opportunity. Thirdly, range. Your guns are much longer range than destroyers' torpedoes so you shouldn't be too afraid of staying 10+km away from them and shelling them. Fourthly, at long ranges don't double-click to fire off all of your guns at once, spread your fire out to make it more likely that a single shell hits, if you are using HE shells a single hit will likely damage his engine and/or rudder. At shorter ranges however a proper salvo can basically take out a destroyer immediately, so don't be afraid to double-click if he is 5km or less from you. Fifthly, if the destroyer gets too close, turn your tail to him and run away. Not only does this expose a very narrow targeting profile to the enemy, it also means that the relative movement between you and his torps is much slower, both giving you much more time to react as well as forcing him much closer to you which puts him in range of your secondaries. This is particularly useful in battlecruisers such as the Kongo they are a fair bit faster than regular battleships, as most destroyers will only have a 5-8 knot speed advantage over you which gives you plenty of time before he catches up. Sixthly, never go around a blind corner if there's a chance that a destroyer will be waiting there, as by the time you notice a destroyer camping there it will likely be too late. Seventhly, getting the hull upgrades are pretty important on the Kongo, as they add torpedo bulges to reduce the damage torps do as well as reduce the rudder shift time to make it easier to react. The extra secondaries are aso quite nice to have.

Those were the earlier subclasses of the Town-class. The Edinborough subclass (HMS Edinborough and HMS Belfast) was quite a lot larger than the earlier ones as they were originally designed to have quadruple turrets so they had the deck space and spare displacement to mount additonal AA without removing a turret.

I'd be happy enough if they simply added a function in-game where you can hold down a key and it highlights the locations of citadels on enemy ships like some kind of x-ray view. A player's performance at the game should come from being good at the game, not trawling through 3rd party websites for important in-game information that is currently withheld from us. It's kind of stupid to have an all-important weak spot on a ship that is hidden from players. Not that it would make much difference for me as I have the desync issue so the citadels are usually 50+m in front of the enemy's bow for me...

The problem with putting the QE-class in T7 is that then it is going head to head against the Nagatos and the Colorados, both of which have significantly more firepower and armour than the QEs. In terms of age and displacement, the QE-class is solidly in T6, being constructed around the same time as the Fusos and being of very similar displacement. It makes no sense to artificially raise the tier of a ship beyond what it's power should be, as then you start to have to try to fiddle with all the statistics and figures to try to get it to work. As you mentioned, this also puts the NelRods at T7, which is exactly where they belong considering their age and displacement. The NelRods really can't compare to the North Carolinas, as the NCs have better turret arcs, more powerful guns (the British 16 inch MkI was generally considered to be quite poor) and is a few knots faster, the only slight advantage the NelRods have is their slightly thicker armour. The N3 designs are likely to be quite powerful, but they really aren't T10 material. They have similar firepower to the Yamato, but they are worse in literally every other respect. They are slower, less armoured, and have a much smaller secondary battery, plus they don't have superfiring turrets. Overall, they are more likely to be T9 material, having good firepower but worse in most other respects. Some of the original preliminary designs or the L designs could possibly work at T10 though. Vanguard should probably be a premium T8, it really doesn't have the specs to even go against T9s, let alone T10s. She has very good armour and speed, with armour between the T9s and the T10s and her speed basically matches the Iowas, but she is still limited by the old 15 inch guns. Those 15 inch guns are pretty solid at T6 and can do well into T7, but they aren't really going to do much to a T10 ship. This is why the Lion-class would be much better in T9 as they have basically the armour and speed of Vanguard but with 3x3 16 inch guns, which the design at the time was likely to be slightly weaker than the 16/50 guns on the Iowas and the Montanas, so overall sacrificing a small amount of firepower for other things, while the later Lion designs actually had the displacement and brute power to compete with the other T10s.

The Tosa-class would be T8 at most, considering how it is basically from the same generation of ships as the Amagi, only exchanging speed for additional armour. At T9 it's more likely you would see the Kii-class, which was basically the speed of the Amagi with the armour of the Tosa with an identical weapons load, but even then I'm not sure how well it would compare to the Iowas.

Like most people, I'd be expecting the RN to have a battleship line and a battlecruiser line, as they are probably the only nation that actually had enough battlecruisers across enough varying levels of power to actually fit out such a tree. For battleships, the only real answer for T3 would be Dreadnought, as she is about the right age and displacement to fit in here as well as the current T3 battleships were each nation's first dreadnought battleships. T4 and T5 have a large variety of options, there's about half a dozen different potential classes for each one. T6 should be the QE-class, as we already have Warspite as a T6. The only potential T7s are the Nelson-class, as they were built at a similar time and with a similar displacement to the Colorado-class and Nagato-class. T8 has KGV, as it is very much equivalent to the North Carolina-class, but with weaker guns but significantly better armour and slightly improved speed. T9 and T10 should probably be filled out with the Lion-class designs, as the design for the Lion-class basically evolved from an up-gunned KGV into effectively a British Iowa-class (which would make a fine T9) before eventually becoming a 60,000+ ton armoured leviathan with autoloading 16-inch guns (obviously T10 material) before the design was eventually scrapped several years after WWII.

It's not so much about the playable ships for players, those are easy enough to balance around the existing tiers and having some flexibility on the player's part makes the game a bit more fun as they can choose rather than being shoehorned into a particular ship. For example, against a late WWI fleet it would be easy enough to restrict players to ships between T3 and T6, possibly having fixed amounts of each tier to prevent players from always simply taking the highest possible tier to make the mission easy (for example, forcing the players to have 3 T3 ships, 3 T4 ships, 3 T5 ships and 3 T6 ships on their team). The problem is for the enemy fleets if you are using historical squadrons, as not all historical ship types are in the game. For example, having any significant fleet actions against WWII-era US fleets would be heavily limited as some common ship types such as the Brookyln-class cruisers or the South Dakota-class battleships aren't in the game. Likewise, the IJN are missing a couple of key cruiser classes and a few destroyer types for most of their historical squadrons. I had imagined that you would queue up for the PvE game in whatever ship you chose and then would be thrown in with your team against a historical formation, such as facing off against the 1915 planned 8-4 Japanese fleet consisting of 4 Fuso-class (technically 2 of them were the Ise-class, which were half-sisters to the Fusos), 4 Kongo-class, 2 Nagato-class and 2 Tosa-class (and if the servers and peoples' computers can handle 16 enemy ships, the 4 Amagi-class can be added to make the complete 8-8 fleet that was planned a few years later). Difficulty can also be altered by changing the age of the fleet of the fleet you face, both in terms of upgrades and modernisations as well as the actual ships used, so easy mode could be the Japanese 4-4 fleet (just the Kongos and Fusos) with stock equipment, medium the 8-4 fleet with some upgrades while the full 8-8 fleet with maximum upgrades would be the hard difficulty option. A few other unrelated cool things that a full PvE mode would allow for are things like attacking airfields and coastal batteries, or facing off against ship designs that are too powerful to be included in the game properly as raid bosses (such as the later German designs, the Tillman battleship designs or some of the more powerful A-150 proposals, but that would be much later as I'm pretty sure most players would prefer to get more playable ships in the game first!). They could even be made into multiple stage mini campaigns (similar to the ones in Star Conflict, for those that have played that), featuring a 3 or so missions in a row with a percentage of your consumables, aircraft and damage being recovered between missions, this way large enemy fleets can be faced in multiple waves without the associated performance issues; for example, there could be a multiple stage mission against the US TF 38.2, with the first couple of missions involving dealing with the escort screens of destroyers with a few cruisers with extra off-map air support while the final mission would involve finally facing down the carriers themselves backed by the battleships and heavier escorts; most of the TF 38.X fleets had about 30-36 ships in them of varying sizes and ages, which is ideal for a three stage mission.

Yeah, I think it would be interesting to face off against some historical fleets with your ramshackle player fleets, the main difficulty would be finding historical squadrons of the appropriate size for the game and making sure all of the appropriate ship types are in the game.

Rather than simply dedicating a gametype to carrier task force encounters, I'd be happy enough if they simply added a playlist for larger games on larger maps so that we can also include the larger battleship engagements in a Jutlandesque manner too (although probably nowhere near as large as actual Jutland, as the British fleet at Jutland included 45 major ships alone, plus escorts, I don't imagine most people's computers or internet connections would be happy with a battle that size). I'd imagine that similarly to the current ship distribution across tiers, it would function as battleship clashes at early tiers before slowly sliding into carrier engagements as you get higher, with T9 and T10 being quite carrier dominated.

The problem with putting the G3 in T9 is that then it is being placed up against the Iowa-class, and the Iowas have better guns, similar speed, more armour and better turret arcs. The Iowas have basically the same displacement on a design that's almost 20 years newer, with all the improvements to the machinery and weaponry that entails. Comparing the G3s to the Amagi-class has the Amagi-class with a clear lead in firepower, due to number of guns, better turret arcs and the extra reliability from having more turrets. However the Amagi-class has thinner armour and slightly lower speed (assuming they don't limit the G3s to 30 knots like the Iowas though, which would equalise the speed). Edit: The G3s could however work at T9 if they include the option to upgrade to the 16.5 inch guns from the original design plan of the G3 (including the slightly larger and armoured hull to take the additional weight), which would actually give it an advantage over the Iowa-class, and as the 16.5 inch guns are entirely a paper design that never even reached the actual design phase it would give WG a lot of freedom to tweak their specifications to balance them against the Iowas being better in literally every other regard.

The Nelsons really don't fit in T8, practically everything about them is equivalent to a T7 ship. They have basically the same displacement as the Nagato-class and the Colorado-class and very similar performing main guns, while also being built only shortly after, before any significant advances in technology had occured. They have a 3x3 main battery, which was generally considered to be similar in performance to 4x2, but they also suffer from bad turret placement. Their armour and speed is also directly in-between the existing T7s in the game while being inferior to the T8s in almost every regard. The Nelsons were basically just combining the worst aspects of the G3 and the N3 classes to try to save weight to stay under 35,000 tons. For a T7 battlecruiser, the Admiral-class is really the only contender, having the right age and displacement to fit right into T7. The KGV-class however do make a fine example for a T8 battleship, having slightly less firepower than the NCs with most figures showing them penetrating a couple of inches less at shorter ranges on their guns with longer ranges widening the gap, but they do have a slightly greater number of guns for consistency and against smaller ships in addition to better armour and speed. I'd also say the G3-class would make a solid T8, considering how they were like the Amagi in most respects. Vanguard would fit as a premium here, as her speed and armour are equivalent to the T9s but she has the guns of a T6. For T9, the only real historical contender is the 1942 Lion design, which was very similar to the Iowa-class in most regards. It was slightly worse in a few points, but that would be easy enough to shore up by tweaking other aspects of the ship to give it advantages in other areas. They could also drag out some of the inter war designs for this slot, as the N3 class would work well here considering it's displacement and overall specs compared to the current T9s and there are a couple of battlecruiser designs that would fit from the period too. The only real T10 contenders are the K3/K2 battlecruisers (I'd prefer to see the K2 design at T10, as we already have the Yamato at T10 with 3x3 guns, so having 4x2 adds a bit of extra variety) and the later Lion designs. Both designs had high enough displacements and firepower to be in the same league as the the existing T10s. They would also be quite different, with the K3 being basically an up-gunned Iowa in terms of specs due to it's high speed and relatively thin armour, while the later Lion designs favoured armour to an incredible degree to the point that they were sacrificing firepower to layer on more armour (particularly deck and torpedo belt, they basically ran into the same philosophy that lead to the German H-44 design). I'd quite like to see the Incomparable-class battlecruisers somewhere, but I'd imagine it would be a nightmare to balance due to it's 35 knot top speed, six 20 inch guns but terrible armour that barely even protect it from 6 inch guns. The design's age and displacement would put it somewhere around T7 or T8, being similar in age to the existing T7s but with 10,000 tons more displacement, but I have no idea how well it would function there. I'm also not sure what to do with the Revenge-class, as the QE-class is already T6 as Warspite has shown, but nobody would want a Revenge-class if they could get a QE-class at the same tier, but meanwhile I suspect that they would be too strong to put at T5. The Renown-class however would make for splendid T6 battlecruisers.

As long as they include the regular admiral-class as a non-premium, sounds good.