[2022] Designer Corner | Naval Rebalance

A lil somethin somethin: You can find the details for this event on the announcement page here.

Hello there, C0RAX here. Welcome aboard to my dev corner, in this thread I'll be going over the core introduction of the planned changes to naval gameplay.
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Why? The Live System:

• Good ship design is unintuitive.
  
• Combat revolves around exploiting oversights
  
• Ahistorical meta

Goals

• Clearer design process
  
• Meta based upon good structure and multiple key values
  
• Making historic choices in naval design and composition work well in game

Rebalance Overview

• Tech Tree
  
• Ship Designer
  
• Hit profiles
  
• Spotting
  
• Fleet composition

Tech tree
The most obvious change is our first port of call today, this is the tech tree. There are a number of changes here that will be explained in further detail further to the aft of the dev corner.



So firstly the naval tech tree has been split into 2, the naval tab contains hulls and tech directly linked to hulls. Let's take a look at what that looks like.




As you can see it's much more concise than before, armor techs have been combined so each level will unlock both heavy and cruiser armours and are not linked to any specific hulls. SH armor still remains part of the super heavy battleship.

Moving on to the new “Naval Support” tab.




Here you will see quite a difference from the old tech tree. Gone are the secondary battery techs as they are now research via the medium gun techs



Additionally the naval shell upgrades are now part of the gun lines acting as an intermediary tech between new modules. But don't worry about having to research more techs, XP reductions are gone but base research times are down.



Dual Purpose Guns

And let's finally address that big elephant in the room… Dual purpose guns now branch off the light gun line. They are a 1939 onward tech, with the UK,USA,Japan & France starting with the Basic dual purpose Battery Researched and historic ships starting equipped with dual purpose Batteries and dual purpose Secondaries. Dual purpose guns lack the piercing of regular guns but make up for it by also providing AA.




The current values for the dual purpose batteries are not final and are currently aligned with their non AA equivalents.



Finally we have the 1944 Advanced medium dual purpose battery which packs a punch both to ships and planes, which should you reach it could wreak havoc for enemy aircraft and destroyers alike.



Hit profiles & damage ("well the front fell off")

Quick primer on hit profile in case you don't know what they are. A Hit profile is the calculation used to determine how easy it is to hit a ship. This hit profile is then divided by the accuracy of the weapon type a ship is firing (10 * (Hitprofile/weaponaccuracy)^2).

Any other effects that affect hit chances such as weather/time of day are applied to the final value. Currently the live game calculation for a hit profile is the ( (visibility * 100) / speed) .

So a ship with a high hit profile will be easier to hit than one with a small hit profile.

A change to the hit profile calculation is aimed to reduce the impact of speed on hit chance and should flatten the effect of speed for much slower ships. The current but not final working formula is:

( (visibility * 100) / ( (speed/2) + 15) )

In addition to this there have been some other changes for hit chance

New hit chance modifiers that affect hit chance in the same way that weather affects hit chance. The new modifiers replace existing stat modifiers for modules/tech.

• Radar and fire control increase light and heavy guns hit chance
  
• homing torpedoes now increase torpedo hit chance
  
• Base critical chance is reduced

Spotting

• Spotting is now min capped at 0.01% progress per hour, so you will always spot a task force after 10,000 hours (417 days)
  
• Random chance to instantly spot (encounter) equal to your hourly progress, so if you have a 4% hourly progress you also have a 4% chance to “encounter” a task force.
  
• Sub and surface detections for a task force are now listed in the task force information tooltip.

Fleet Composition

First joining an ongoing battle was very painful and making strike forces much less useful this should be much less of an issue with much lower and shorter lived penalties for positioning.



Additionally SUPREMACY_PER_SHIP_BASE has been reduced from 100>75 so that IC and manpower have a greater impact on naval supremacy.

Ship Designer
The ship designer has some of the most major changes to existing ships and modules. Let's go through them by groupings..

Firstly I want to say that you can no longer have both medium cruiser and light cruiser guns on the same design, fitting both will invalidate the design. This will eliminate one of the largest exploits in current ship design and should prevent ships being unintentionally protected by screening.

Now we will get into some gritty details of the current value changes for the rebalance.

(RED=changed values, BLUE=New values and BLACK=unchanged)

Changes to speed,reliability and Production cost.







Changes to speed for hulls




On speed it should be much harder to get 40kt ships now - faster ships hover around ~35kt with slower ships being in the 30kt range. Some older ships and submarines remain well below 30kt and will need upgrading if you want their speed to match modern ships.

Submarine Visibility



Now these are the normal changes to modules and ships, but that's not all we have some new modifiers that are replacing or adding to existing modules too.

Fire control/Radar





Torpedoes



Armor

In addition to the new modifiers below for armor a review of armor values and piercing is planned, but I don’t have a completed set of changes for that yet so you will have to wait for future announcements on how that looks.




As always If you have any questions feel free to ask here.

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