Designer Corner | Naval Rebalance

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