How to improve naval combat?

[Saavedra]

A cost increase seems reasonable enough. what kind of synergy could you have with naval units?

I can think of these things that could balance eachother out, considering we're talking about deep water combat:

Heavy ships (weak against missile overkill and attack subs. Strong against everything else)
Attack subs (weak against helis and specialized frigates, Strong against heavy ships)
Helis and specialized frigates (weak against heavy ships, strong against subs)
Anti-ship planes (strong against most ships, weak against Aegis systems)
Anti-sub planes (strong against subs, weak against anything with AA capability)

I'm also thinking about that it might be better if it requires less missile/torpedo hits to actually sink a ship. And that more focus on Sonar/Radar mechanics to detect the enemy would add more depth to the gameplay.

We don´t have subs and will never have them, according to Eugen. Even though we literally need no models for subs. Or at most we would need a mesh that was visible under the water, requiring no detailing.


The synergy I am thinking of is in terms of roles, not just attack power. Helicopters should be scouting, big ships should be providing excellent protection with CIWS and long-ranged SAMs and low anti-ship capabilities, medium ships should provide the main anti-ship capabilities and low CIWS/SAM, and small ships should be riverines and missile spammers. And in general, small ships should also be far more vulnerable to gun attacks, CIWS should be nerfed, and the autocannons on landing craft should either be really weak, or not exist at all.

You simply need to tweak the units to more gamey standards. In real life, an M1A2 tank could take out a chopper, but that was not included for gamey reasons on the ground part of the game. I think that the same logic should be applied to the naval part. Strip ships of some capabilities so they depend on each other, and make them too expensive for all areas to be covered with the maximum power possible. You want to spam small missile spammers? You lack anti-missile defense. You spam missile defense? You lack means of attack. And in any of the possible cases, you want to take choppers to scout ahead for you.

Anyone who´s ever played a naval simulation game knows that the whole thing is a cat and mouse game, with you trying to find the enemy before he does, figuring out the appropriate method of attack, and executing it. You have to out-maneuver and out-think your opponent. This cannot happen when all we currently do is spam missile defence/spam AShM planes. Make naval players depend on scouting, force them to play with caution, and you will not see so much spam.

[wingen013]

The funny thing is pure naval maps play just like that. Its still really silly and imbalanced and putting a ASM helo up solves pretty much all your recon issues but the skeleton is there.

[Brutoni]

The funny thing is pure naval maps play just like that. Its still really silly and imbalanced and putting a ASM helo up solves pretty much all your recon issues but the skeleton is there.

The problem is partly made worse by the mechanics not being able to cover full naval combat. Also partly by terrible ship selection across the board with some exceptional choices and some units that just were never going to bring too much tbh.

[Half Life Expert]

It seems Wargame is not going to receive new stuff for a while, but since the red dragon release there has been discussion about how the new naval part was broken/etc.

The moment I start thinking about it, I get overwhelmed by the complexity of actual naval warfare in the 80s and 90s, like described in for example Red Storm Rising. The strong point of Wargame is (at least I think it is) its easy to use UI and understandable gameplay mechanics.

Just suppose for a second that we could change the game, or maybe develop a new one. How could we make the naval part better? For example with the naval only maps, what do we need to make it fun and worthwile to play?

In my opinion, the fundamental problems with Naval combat are:

1) Lack of Ship variety: No detail needed here, it is all too obvious and discussed a lot.

2) Gun accuracy is pathetic: im talking about the cannon used against other ships, It is crazy how all over the place these shells fire. These have had radar direction since late WWII!!!! NO naval gun on a major warship (Kongo, Perry, Udaloy) should be THAT far off target.

3) the most important: inability to fire volleys of Anti-Ship missiles.

At present, on average a ship can fire one or two ASM at an enemy vessel. When the target, or a nearby enemy, has CIWS (Close In Weapon System like the US Phalanx) and SAMs, the odds of one missile fired getting through are less than one percent. All modern navies know this, which is why they use volleys to overwhelm the defenses. The fact that we basically have to simultaiously fire every missile we have from all units at one strong enemy ship to kill it is ridiculous. If its a group of ships, just forget it.

Basically, at least destroyers should carry more missiles and be able to fire volleys of 4-6 in a spread

[wingen013]

[CornProducts]

-No deep sea vessels
-Increase riverine boat cost to be more in line with ground units (STRB 90H for example is a little too cheap)
-Return planes like the F-14 and F/A-18E to their rightful place

[Dimonay]

As many other have already said there are two ways of improving naval.

1: Major rework and lots of new ships. Basically making a naval game.
But it is going to take a lot of development time and it is probably not going to synergise well with the rest of the game. Basically you are creating a game inside a game.
Personally I don't think this is the right way to go. Going to cost to muchand it takes focus away from the rest of the game.

2: Focus on riverine and amfibious units. Intergrate riverine and amfibious units with the rest of the game.
The low cost version of this is to simply have a bit of rebalance and the probably through the deck system it so that you can use them withouth the bigger ships.
If you want to make it really awesome you could introduce lots of new river boats and river boats coalitional/national.
Instead of like it is now with faction based navy

[FLX]

The official line I got from FLX was this.


"Many people don't know how to play naval. It is designed to be balanced for 1v1 or 2v2 play not for larger maps. Only minor changes will happen because he has had lots of feedback that naval is now balanced."

I'm curious if anyone actually thinks that?

Reality in naval is broken, inauthentic, full of terrible abstractions and also full of magical unicorn OPVs performing better than god damned full sized Frigates and Destroyers.

To make things clear, quoting an extract of a steam chat conversation you had with me are in no case an official line.
I'm game designer, I do gameplay, and my conclusion on the naval part is that the gameplay works.

Most people don't know how to play naval simply because they didn't play it. And they didn't play it because they wanted something different. ( more realism, bigger scale, smaller scale, more ships, less ships, submarines, carriers...)

The number of unit available is a matter of time and money, we got what we got and we made a gameplay with it.
There is a reduced number of ships but with unique characteristics in terms of firepower, CIWS, sea detection, air detection, stealth, speed maneuverability, turrets angles.
This is very different from the ground battle. Less units but much more micro gestion per unit.

[Bullfrog]

I think my biggest issue with Naval is the land::water ratio or just map design. Straight to the point is the first that comes to mind. But other than that, I just feel like even though the over all size of the land in any giving map was good enough for land battles. The sea part was never big enough for naval and was heavily restricted by the land mass.

IMO it should of been the sea that dictate the size of the map and the land follow. They can always set the size of the land battles by compressing the zones on the map.

[Wookimonsta]

My two cents as someone who used to play naval combat extensively until a little after the release and then stopped completely:

What I loved to do when playing BlueFor is put those little boats with good CIWS just behind an island, lined up at the very edge. My missile ships would then fire at the enemy (obviously in the open) and my forward stationed CIWS would shoot down enemy missiles without being exposed themselves. This worked really well, so I acknowledge that there are tactics that work. The problem with this tactic is, that if the enemy has any Anti Ship planes, he can start picking off those ships with ease, since you got no big ships with proper defenses to cover em that close.
This was one of the very few really effective tactics (that isn't totally obvious) that I discovered when playing navy stuff.
The thing is, that against another navy, blobbing is still highly effective and I feel that in blobbing, RedFor gains an advantage. Two reasons for this:
First, RedFor CIWS seemed more effective. Udaloy seemed to be blessed by random number generator and I saw it take down 6 missiles fired in a single volley without taking any damage.
Secondly, SMERCH. This was a huge issue when fighting as BluFor against RedFor. If two navies are sitting and duking it out, moving gives you a distinct disadvantage as it makes both offense and defense weaker. So whenever I had my navy sitting and engaging the RedFor navy, some asshat would just smerch my entire fleet. It wouldn't sink my ships, but it would panic them and make them easy pickings for enemy anti ship missiles. You can argue that NATO has some cluster arty as well, but it doesn't have the same punch that the SMERCH does, I tried.
My summary was that you can make BluFor navy work, but it takes a lot more work than making RedFor navy work.

So, whenever I played BluFor with friends, we did the only thing that would even the odds. We didn't spawn ships, we just bought their points worth in high tier anti ship planes. Then you fly your planes in a straight line perpendicular to the enemy positions and then have them all attack at once. This would ensure that they all fired their missiles at the same times and at least some of them would hit.