Manual Control over secondary guns and AA

[ovejrp]

Hello everyone,

I've been playing naval war games for more than a decade now, and a few games are in the top of my list: World of Warships, Steel Ocean, and Battlestations Pacific.

By far, World of Warships is superior to all of them. The 3D models are beautiful, realistic, the physics are super-impressive, sound effects are amazing, etc. The shooting mechanics are one of the things I like best. (I play mainly Battleships, BTW, explains a bit about my perspective).

One thing where WOWS could really learn from those games in respect to gameplay, is improving the mechanics of Secondary Batteries and AA Guns.

What do I mean by this? Well, I noticed that secondary guns in WOWS don't do much, unless a ship enters it's minuscule firing range (for some ships, it's actually a good range), and do nothing at all when it comes to engaging aircraft. Battlestations Pacific accurately recreated the functionality of dual purpose guns by elevating the barrels of secondaries, very high up so they could fire at enemy aircraft.

As an example, the 4.25in guns on the Queen Elizabeth-class and the 5in guns on the Iowas, North Carolinas, South Dakotas, could elevate at very high degrees in this game and fire to incoming planes (unlike old battleships with casemate guns). Moreover, the game had the option to let the guns fire automatically while you manned the primary guns. Or, you could take control of the AA suite yourself and fire with better results. All dual purpose guns and AA guns would fire where you would point.

Same, with the secondary batteries, taking manual control of them would improve the battle efficiency. Like in Steel Ocean and Battlestations Pacific.

Just picture this, you are fighting close quarters (8-7 miles) just fired your full broadside with the main guns, but now it's 30 seconds until you could reload and fire again. But not really, because you still have your secondaries, switch to the secondary guns mode, and fire them yourself! If you decide not to do that, that's fine, just let the game fire them for you. But wouldn't it be AMAZING if you could control them yourself and be responsible for their accuracy? (Let's be honest here, the accuracy ratio of shots fired and hits scored with the secondaries it's not that great). This feature would be great against destroyers.

Believe me, it would make the game dramatically more lively, realistic, and maybe and added challenge of manning those guns yourself if you don't want the robots doing it for you.

I really hope the developers read this and consider adding it to the mechanics of the game.

Would you like to take control of the AA and secondaries?

[Ace42]

Been discussed a ton over the history of the game.

There's pros and cons.
Some pros: There's more player interaction between ships and planes; more skill indexing in the use of secondaries; and it adds more immersive content to the game.

Some cons: It doesn't solve the fundamental issue with CV-plane interactions: If the AA is good enough to negate CV strikes, the entire class becomes useless;
and that while people are off playing Beachhead minigames, they're getting dunked on by other ships.

Having manual secondaries on CVs is a concept being tested in the CV rework - TBH I think it's a bad idea as a boobie prize for getting yourself deplaned. Because again, it's not going to be balanced reasonably. Either your CV has secondaries worth using and it ruins DDs days and thus it's a straight upgrade to the most impactful class in the game; or they're an ineffectual jokey gimmick that baits bad players into wasting their time pretending to be a BB.

Manual secondaries on BBs and some cruisers isn't necessarily a terrible idea, but it would mean rethinking the game's balance from the ground up - because every single battleship would have to have its secondary battery re-evaluated for ease-of-use and damage potential when being manually controlled.
You can't just have the dire base accuracy of secondary batteries under player control, otherwise it would be such a spammy innaccurate mess that it would be a pointless frustrating disaster to even try and play.

You end up with a weird situation where you have to create fantasy secondary batteries for CVs that simply don't have them just so that they're not massively handicapped vs the ones that do; or you need to improve planes to compensate, etc, etc.

The ideas aren't terrible - IIRC Warthunder has some degree of manual control over AA, and being able to use dual-purpose main batteries for AA might be funny (especially Yamato's ill-conceived beehive shells) - but while it might not seem so, such a widespread change would be as big an upheaval as the change from RTS CVs was. Arguably even bigger because very few people played RTS CVs extensively, whereas pretty much everyone plays ships with AA and some sort of secondary guns.

[christof]

Small sidenote, but it has to be said: Your dual purpose secondaries do absolutely contribute to your AA, even though you might not see it happen visually. Same for the dual purpose main guns on some ships.

[Jaynoble55]

Originally posted by Ace42:

Been discussed a ton over the history of the game.

There's pros and cons.
Some pros: There's more player interaction between ships and planes; more skill indexing in the use of secondaries; and it adds more immersive content to the game.

Some cons: It doesn't solve the fundamental issue with CV-plane interactions: If the AA is good enough to negate CV strikes, the entire class becomes useless;
and that while people are off playing Beachhead minigames, they're getting dunked on by other ships.

Having manual secondaries on CVs is a concept being tested in the CV rework - TBH I think it's a bad idea as a boobie prize for getting yourself deplaned. Because again, it's not going to be balanced reasonably. Either your CV has secondaries worth using and it ruins DDs days and thus it's a straight upgrade to the most impactful class in the game; or they're an ineffectual jokey gimmick that baits bad players into wasting their time pretending to be a BB.

Manual secondaries on BBs and some cruisers isn't necessarily a terrible idea, but it would mean rethinking the game's balance from the ground up - because every single battleship would have to have its secondary battery re-evaluated for ease-of-use and damage potential when being manually controlled.
You can't just have the dire base accuracy of secondary batteries under player control, otherwise it would be such a spammy innaccurate mess that it would be a pointless frustrating disaster to even try and play.

You end up with a weird situation where you have to create fantasy secondary batteries for CVs that simply don't have them just so that they're not massively handicapped vs the ones that do; or you need to improve planes to compensate, etc, etc.

The ideas aren't terrible - IIRC Warthunder has some degree of manual control over AA, and being able to use dual-purpose main batteries for AA might be funny (especially Yamato's ill-conceived beehive shells) - but while it might not seem so, such a widespread change would be as big an upheaval as the change from RTS CVs was. Arguably even bigger because very few people played RTS CVs extensively, whereas pretty much everyone plays ships with AA and some sort of secondary guns.

Wow, someone who remembers Beachhead. I thought I was one of the dying few. Provided its the 1983 Beachhead and not the new versions.