Increase Fire Rate and Range

[Ishtar]

I realize that many aspects of realism would have to be sacrificed for the sake of gameplay, but personally I think guns should just have realistic rates of fire as a maximum with modifications (mostly negative) to the final RoF. The nature of dreadnought warfare from Jutland involved quick firing guns at long distances rather than the strange close range maneuver warfare with long reloads we currently have. In exchange, long range gunnery should receive a nerf to accuracy and all guns should have a nerf to damage. It seems rather rushed that 6 shells of 16" will sink a 30,000 ton battleship (or drop its structure to red) when even old warships like the Kirishima took 20 shells from the Washington and took a few hours to sink. This would place the emphasis on long range gunnery and strive closer to what I see as a more realistic model. Visibility range should also increase as a result

I understand that modifications like autoloaders do increase reloads to near historical values, but the prospect of an autoloader on a battleship seems far fetched. 

[ThatZenoGuy]

IMO this game should strive to be as historically accurate as possible, given specific techs and time periods, with some level of leeway for ahisotircal techs (autoloading 18 inch guns technically existed with the Yamato, but otherwise no big gun was automated)

I do not wish to see ridiculous things like 1901 cruisers instagibbing ships or going 40 knots, etc.

[goduranus]

I agree! God damn, show me one battleship that was lost because of structural damage, without flooding or ammo explosion.

[Cptbarney]

Ye, even for non-historical this would be fine and since this game is clearly going for a more realistic route it makes more sense for the devs to try and be historical as possible even with split modes.

[RedParadize]

A single shell can sink a ship... but 200 might not. It might burn for a hour... or explode and split in two. Such is life in the real world. You want more RNG?

 

[Diabolic_Wave]

More rapid, less accurate high calibre fire sounds good to me. I'd go for slightly more accurate Low Calibre guns too.

[sRuLe]

7 hours ago, Cptbarney said:

Ye, even for non-historical this would be fine and since this game is clearly going for a more realistic route it makes more sense for the devs to try and be historical as possible even with split modes.

Actually we need to split some WWl and WWII, at least not allowing throwing an pre-dreadnought against Yamato. Or might be not...

[sRuLe]

2 hours ago, Diabolic_Wave said:

More rapid, less accurate high calibre

HMS Warspite disagree with ya... ad there I see a nose of KMS Bismarck popping around the corner to get ya an chew.

Actually there is the web is some USS New Mexico and Nevada exercise schemes of a shots landing, dispersion an range to target. And these "ladies" hardly can be called - Inaccurate. If I found, I'll post em. 

Edited November 1, 2019 by sRuLe

[sRuLe]

14 hours ago, Ishtar said:

In exchange, long range gunnery should receive a nerf to accuracy and all guns

Man, can't tell HOW I Agree with ya.  What ever you have, radar, sonar, satellite dish popping out of a butt... all over 16-18 miles are just the same as shooting down the Moon with a firework.

14 hours ago, Ishtar said:

and all guns should have a nerf to damage

Depends on a shell weight. If its Heavy APC/CPC, the ballistic arc mostly land a shell into a poor armored deck... and 'ere we go.

[Diabolic_Wave]

22 minutes ago, sRuLe said:

HMS Warspite disagree with ya... ad there I see a nose of KMS Bismarck popping around the corner to get ya an chew.

Actually there is the web is some USS New Mexico and Nevada exercise schemes of a shots landing, dispersion an range to target. And these "ladies" hardly can be called - Inaccurate. If I found, I'll post em. 

I mean compared to the current state of the game, rather than anything else. Compared to the game, warspite was probably just slightly inaccurate, after all. I wouldn't want to disparage the Grand Old Lady, of course.

[Ishtar]

The accuracy issue in my opinion primarily comes from bundling it all together as one accuracy stat rather than separating it into precision and accuracy. Even radar FCS can't magically fix mechanical accuracy inherent in guns, but at 15km a high tech battleship will land the majority of its shells on a battleship. This is also evident in close range low tech battles where shells are going 10 degrees apart from each other despite being fired from parallel guns in the same turret. Mechanical precision and accuracy should be separated so we don't get those wonky close range scatters that are physically impossible.

[Mycophobia]

Responding to the OP,  how quickly a ship is sunk by gun fire can be extremely dependent on location. Furthermore, even a doomed ship can take a while to actually go below waves (seen with many ships that had to be scuttled with torpedo's after the crew abandoned ship). In game terms, I think the "sinking by structural damage" can also capture situations where crews simply abandoned ship.

Moving on to main gun RoF, I think since the game already model the "ranging" period , I support increasing ROF to more realistic levels, especially since the game is a lot slower than say, RTW. It is important to keep things happening. Accuracy are probably a tad too high in conjunction with firerate increase, but honestly again, real life naval engagement can go on for hours, and without higher speed up option(and honestly, very high speed will take away from the tactical detail of the game anyway), its probably best to speed things up a little so most larger engagement can be done in the 20-40min range kinda like comparable battles in RtW

[WafflesToo]

2 hours ago, Mycophobia said:

In game terms, I think the "sinking by structural damage" can also capture situations where crews simply abandoned ship.

I've been assuming that a structural kill is exactly this.  It seems more reasonable to me than simply taking for granted that the ship's hull breaks up into kindling when that last critical hitpoint is gone.

Edited November 1, 2019 by WafflesToo

[goduranus]

Crew wouldn't abandoned a ship that's not sinking unless the enemy has clearly won. They'd see if they drive the enemy off and then to tow the ship back. Even if the ship was irreparable, they would at least inspect it for damage analysis.

The current mechanics would result in the ship being instantly lost on the campaign layer as soon as there is too much structural damage.

[Hangar18]

18 hours ago, goduranus said:

I agree! God damn, show me one battleship that was lost because of structural damage, without flooding or ammo explosion.

Kirishima.

[goduranus]

That was flooding.

[Cairo1]

10 minutes ago, Hangar18 said:

Kirishima.

Wrong. Kirishima was lost due to flooding. Due to an extreme list the captain ordered counter flooding to balance the ship out. This had the side effect of lowering previously above the waterline damage into the sea, causing sudden massive uncontrollable flooding causer her to capsize.

 

Edited November 2, 2019 by Cairo1
Spelling

[Absolute0CA]

Since I took a 2 day break from the forum I'll be spamming replies here for a bit:

To reply to the OP Rate of fire across the board needs to be increased to realistic, and I wouldn't say that the main battery's need to do more damage... but they do need to be brought up to realistic armor penetration capabilities.

[goduranus]

Where's the source data that says rate of fire should be faster? I read that battleship guns typically manage to fire 2+ round a minute in trials(was it 3 rounds a minute for the Bismark gun in trials?), but during combat generally fired a lot slower, less than 1 round a minute.

[Absolute0CA]

15 minutes ago, goduranus said:

Where's the source data that says rate of fire should be faster? I read that battleship guns typically manage to fire 2+ round a minute in trials(was it 3 rounds a minute for the Bismark gun in trials?), but during combat generally fired a lot slower, less than 1 round a minute.

Most of us realize that it’s just combat moves at a glacial pace and we want it to go faster, that’s why there was such an uproar over time acceleration dropping when ranges close.

[Tyrendian89]

On 11/1/2019 at 2:25 AM, Ishtar said:

I realize that many aspects of realism would have to be sacrificed for the sake of gameplay, but personally I think guns should just have realistic rates of fire as a maximum with modifications (mostly negative) to the final RoF. The nature of dreadnought warfare from Jutland involved quick firing guns at long distances rather than the strange close range maneuver warfare with long reloads we currently have. In exchange, long range gunnery should receive a nerf to accuracy and all guns should have a nerf to damage. It seems rather rushed that 6 shells of 16" will sink a 30,000 ton battleship (or drop its structure to red) when even old warships like the Kirishima took 20 shells from the Washington and took a few hours to sink. This would place the emphasis on long range gunnery and strive closer to what I see as a more realistic model. Visibility range should also increase as a result

I understand that modifications like autoloaders do increase reloads to near historical values, but the prospect of an autoloader on a battleship seems far fetched. 

and what would you consider "historical" rates of fire for BB caliber guns? Please dont quote the Wikipedia 30s bollocks, that's under ideal training circumstances and not in combat...

[Mycophobia]

6 minutes ago, Tyrendian89 said:

and what would you consider "historical" rates of fire for BB caliber guns? Please dont quote the Wikipedia 30s bollocks, that's under ideal training circumstances and not in combat...

In Jutland, after finding the range the RN battlecruisers were able to come close to this RoF. In practice ofcourse most ships fired slower, especially when finding the range. 

For realism, the Historical RoF would be the average 30~ second reload speed under ideal condition, and further modified by ingame factors such as "not yet ranged in", firing at enemy at long distance, etc... The baseline is the optimal, and modifier brings it to a more reasonably realistic level given the circumstances.

However, doing so means that we can probably expect one shot per minute, or one shot per several minute even on a WW1 era ship. In games like RTW, this is 1-2 "turn" or click away. In UAD, we had to wait for the cycle with little to do in the meantime. This does not make for good gameplay. So as long as the relative RoF guns are kept proportionate(for example, predread era main gun shoot much slower, with a 60-90s reload, if not longer), I think its fine to simply use the RoF in ideal condition for the sake of preventing battles from becoming more of a slog than it already is. (Especially as very high speed might lead to crashes/make player miss details like incoming torpedo or particularly damaging hits)

[goduranus]

Maybe the game could just run in 2x speed as a baseline, and then Slow would bring it to 1x.

[Mycophobia]

28 minutes ago, goduranus said:

Maybe the game could just run in 2x speed as a baseline, and then Slow would bring it to 1x.

Looking at people's reaction with the 2x speed limit two patches ago, it becomes rather clear that things are already rather slow paced as is. 5x was fairly tolerable, and 3x is already feels very slow for me in larger battleship engagements. But slowing fire rate to more realistic level will likely mean that we have to have 10x or even more speed up to get much action happening continuously, at which point I think will cause more problem than the benefit of having realistic RoF. 

[DeiLwynnA]

the range, sea condition and hull stability should impact reload speed, then each tech level and caliber of gun has its own base reload speed that should be close to the historically equivalent gun.

for example the 460mm guns on yamato could fire up to 2 shells per gun per minute when aimed at an elevation of 3 degrees (same degree as when loading it up) and at max elevation, it was only able to fire up to around 1.5 shells per gun per minute because it had to depress the guns back down to the 3 degrees of elevation to reload. if you add a reload penalty to that due to rough seas and unstable hull, you might end up at a speed of only around 0.75 shells per gun per minute