I dream of a day in game where crossing the opponent's T is actually a desirable tactic as opposed to the paddling you would be receiving now

iChase, you could have saved yourself a lot of mental math by pulling up the Immunity Zones for the Iowa... (Hint: 23600-27400 yards against the Mark 8 2700lb shell, 18000-30000 yards against the 2250lb Mark 5 AP shell). Also, per WarGaming the citadel hits for Magazines is for 6.1" guns or higher. 6" guns and 5" gun magazines do NOT count as citadels for ANY ship in the game (aside from Iowa/Montana/Missouri/Alabama, but not explicitly because of the 5" gun mounts but because of arbitrary labeling for citadels). The problem is that WG's own definition for citadel hitboxes is not in conjunction with the way the Iowa, Missouri, Montana, Alabama, Yamato(???) has their citadel hitboxes laid out. According to WG, the citadel is the machinery spaces (engine rooms, steering gears) and magazines (larger than 6" guns). There is nothing in the deck between the boilers and the main armor deck that would fit that definition, hence the gripe. Now there is a legitimate claim that any shell that makes it through the armor on Iowa and into that space is going to cause damage to the machinery spaces below since the deck below is 0.65" thick, but then why do no other ships also suffer from this problem aside from the above mentioned ships? No matter how you boil it all down, WG is NOT being consistent with the implementation of citadel hitboxes and it unnecessarily punishes USN BB's more than other ships. Also, as a final aside, the first thing an AP shell sees when it hits the side of a SoDak or Iowa class BB is that 1.25" or 1.5" (SoDak and Iowa respectively) STS outer hull plating which was designed to yaw and decap some AP Projectiles. That is also not represented in this game.

I play German BBs, and this totally sounds like a great idea, proper engagement ranges would make the BBs much more fun to play, admittedly it would also make it so the better players would have the advantage of using their ship like it was designed to but that tends to happen anyway, plus it would give me a good reason to close distance with my Gneisenau.

So, as a former boiler tech in the USN and having spent a little time on the Iowa, I would like to point out a couple of things all wargaming issues aside. First, the upper parts of the boiler room you mention are what is known as the uptakes and while it would not be any fun to take a shell there, it is not the same as the boiler proper, which if hit, would in fact be catastrophic . Second the 5" powder magazines are very well protected and are located down in the bowels of the ship, safe from incoming fire. The main machinery spaces and the magazines on the Iowa's were very well protected.

ok, these are good points, but WG would never change a core mechanic like this... :/ It's mostly just tweaking numbers tbh. I hope that they see this, because I think that this is really well put, and as per usual, very well backed up.

WG dont care about historically correct WG dont care about balanced game between ships WG dont care about lamer game-mode (like shot staying in smoke) WG has only a pourpose: MAKE MONEY

I like your historical argument and I agree with it as it pertains to battleship gameplay in WoWS. But how do you balance the other 2 classes with your new historical armor setup? The way I see it, a more fundamental problem of the game is wargaming's premise that BB, DD and CA/CL should be equally powerful on the battlefield and were design in such a way to "counter" each other in a way that didn't occur in real life. As such, capabilities of BBs had to be neutered compare to real life to make playing DD or CA viable. I think that is the reason why many BB players complain about DD torps or HE spam, because the power of BB is much weaker in game than their expectation based on real life capabilities. If BB armor now actually functions closer to real life, cruiser and DD shells will have much harder time damaging BBs. This will undermine the premise of the game, and will be too drastic a change for wargaming to even contemplate. Even so, I admire your thoughts and work you put in in making the video.

it's amazing how much science went into designing the Iowa class battleships way back in the late 30s

those magazines were protected and lower then the water line, I have walked inside them, trust me they are below the water line. if we are talking about "real life" ships did not fight strange static bow on lane based game. if you want an non-static game, keep heavy damage, hell keep detonations, remove citadel play. This with allow players to be more aggressive without the fear of one single volly insta deleting them. Think of this compared to world of tanks for an example, being one shotted in tanks is a very rare issue, only the biggest guns hitting medium or light tanks result in this, or the odd lucky hit. In world of warships if you turn sideways above tier 6 in anything other then a BB, you are very likely to be deleted. if you do it above tier 8 in a battleship, you will be deleted. These massive one shot kill chances make people play VERY protected stagnant games.

Yeah, seriously, scaling the penetration down to the engagement ranges of the game is the best and obvious answer, why it hasnt been done yet is beyond me. Pretty much every game ever has done it...

Would be really awesome to see super realistic battles in the future; no compressed range, no scaled speed, proper spotting and team lineups (like maybe a reenactment of an actual battle). If the team wins when his team historically lost, they earn increased exp. If the team loses but historically won, severely decreased exp. If the team won/lost both historically and in the game, no exp boost or penalty

And you have to add the fact that a kilometer in WoWS is much shorter then it should be (for example a 100m ship will only fit 2-3 times into a "1km" range when it should fit 10 times)

Wargaming endlessly craps on about how realistic their games are then somehow always ends up with games that have cartoon vehicles with cartoon tactics. I mean seriously -what ship would EVER stop or let alone REVERSE in combat ? seriously ? Even better is the old idea of "crossing the T" - perhaps the most sought after situation in surface naval combat until the end of WWII. Try that in WOW and you will find your broadside battleship being annihilated by the stationary nose-on enemy counterparts. So much for the Battles of Tsushima and the Surigao Straight.

This makes an immense amount of sense. Well reasoned, explained clearly, probably the best WoWs video I have seen. This would fix or at least improve SO many of the issues the game currently has. WG, do this please.

The thing that is REALLY wrong with the Iowa class has to do with maneuverability - their specific design SHOULD allow them to dodge and turn like nothing else. There was NEVER another battleship built with the combination of twin huge rudders placed directly between each pair of 4 propeller shafts. With the concentrated water flow directed over the rudders, it's very close to having impellers that can turn the ship on a dime. It was specifically why they were the most maneuverable battleships ever built - AND the fastest. Only the Bismarck class had twin rudders and they only had 3 propellers so they couldn't direct the flow over their rudders as well.

I really like the idea of the of scaling down the round ballistics to percentages of the ranges instead of using the realistic ballistics with scaled down ranges. I believe that this would essentially normalize all the future armor schemes while still maintaining a historically accurate ship modeling.

With that compression we might finally see the Yamato get balanced because at longer ranges the USN 16" shells actually had better penetration.

Well done. I think implementing a change like this would save them a lot of work in the future. Just look at WOT and we can see how often they "tweak" numbers for balance purposes. They could also implement a dynamic table that shows players the ship's immunity zone depending on range and shell size. The more information/training they give players the more control players will have.

What they can do is to raise the citadel only at the 5' powder mags, so like the Minotaur which has the higher citadel in the middle, the Iowa can have two "jutted up" citadel bits at those places and nothing else. so you'd have to shoot just a bit behind the B turret or just a bit forward of the Y turret to get that above-waterline citadel - you can't just shoot the centre of mass and get devastating strikes.

Chase, a couple points: 1. The 5"/38 magazines are well below the waterline. The Iowas have no effective vital systems above the waterline. You could slow one down by smashing up the uptakes or disable main and secondary batteries, but that's about it. Boilers, turbines, magazines, plot, etc., are all well below the waterline. This is true for all of their contemporaries within the US Navy and other Navies as well. 2. What you're describing with distance and impact angles is what defines a ship's zone of immunity. Specifically, nearly every warship from the modern era (1930-1940s) which is represented in-game had a citadel which was below the waterline and was protected from equivalent-armed opponents. i.e.: Iowa was protected against 16" shell impacts within her zone of immunity (very roughly 25-30km). Because normalization in real life works in _reverse_ of the way it does in-game (a shell impacting at very acute angles will, by virtue of momentum, slam bodily into a vertical armored surface or flip end-for-end and thus "bounce" off a horizontal armored surface), because modern warships used angled belts for precisely this reason, and because the successful target profile (the armored deck) is absurdly narrow in that 25-30km, the ship is effectively immune to incoming fire. I do mean immune. They were specifically designed this way and would be really boring and/or frustrating to fight if they worked that way in-game. 4. The Bismarcks were designed to fight in the North Atlantic where short ranges were known to be the rule (0.5-3km engagements weren't unheard of), not the exception. Naval conservatism was definitely a factor, but the Germans were well aware of the likely conditions in which their ships would be engaging and built accordingly. The Royal Navy liked its all-or-nothing schemes and long-ranged zones of immunity because it was a two-ocean navy which also had to worry about Japan. Japan was just special because of the Washington Naval Treaty 5-5-3 squeeze; they built for individual superiority and long ranges. In-game, you could probably get away with lowering the citadel of most tier 8 to tier 10 ships to a point below the waterline. WG is conservative so I wouldn't expect that any time soon, if at all, since half the existing features would need to be adjusted to accommodate the new-found durability of all high tier ships. Lowering the citadel as planned, assuming the above-waterline signature gets reduced by half, essentially makes the Iowas and Montana less vulnerable to long range shots and thus gives them some freedom of maneuver. You'll still be eating citadel hits, and players will still obviously (and rightly) target a broadside Iowa or Montana, those players simply won't be deleting them or taking 2/3rds of their HP as is almost guaranteed under current modeling. TL/DR: Lowering the citadels of high tier ships is a pretty good compromise and would enhance survivability at range. This will inject a measure of the mobility you seek.

If ranges were longer, screens like cruisers and destroyers could get between the fleets and slug it out with less fear of being vaporized. Right now any DD that gets spotted between fleets is simply wiped out. So they gave every DD a ton of smoke. And some cruisers. Smoke puts a Pause on the action, and it doesn't solve the issue.

At 40,000 yards, even if the target was stationary, dispersion would be huge. Note that dispersion depends on the error of the fire-control system giving the actual position of the target relative to your ship; then the error of the computation system in calculating the aim point of the guns and changing this into a bearing and elevation number pair; then the delay between the computations and the actual shooting of the gun (somewhat fixed by adding a tiny offset to get some average delay effect compensation in the calculators); then the fact that the ship is not actually motionless, but pitching and rolling and yawing (even in a calm sea this happens a little bit) so the delay between calculation and firing gives an unknown error from this motion (can only be partially compensated by the future offset mentioned above, being somewhat random); then the mechanical error in the motion of the turret and gun due to tolerances; then the error in muzzle velocity from round to round, even if the average muzzle velocity adjustment is correct (due to barrel wear, temperature, and small errors in projectile weight and powder weight and powder age). And this assumes that the target and own ship are not moving, adding in their motions and, of course, the fact that the enemy ship would probably be changing course to keep from being hit (straight-line lead computations are the only ones possible). Also, as range increases the gun has to fire in a steeper and steeper elevation and the trajectory is more and more curved, so its length is going up much faster than the range is. This last means that the random turbulence effects on the projectile as it flies through the air have more and more time to wobble the shell and make each shell move slightly differently, spreading the shells apart both in range and bearing, which adds up faster and faster as the time-of-flight increases due to this elongating trajectory -- the distance and time that the projectile is moving through the air is much more than twice as long when going from, say, 20,000 yards to 40,000 yards, causing much more dispersion at the longer range than just doubling it. Also, the curvature of the earth means that only a very tall superstructure of the enemy ship would even be visible at this huge range -- so most targets would not be visible (radar can fix this up to a point, but radar back then gave very crude ranges and even worse bearing values). Yes, at 40,000 yards trying to even find the enemy ship, to say nothing of putting a shell anywhere near it if you did see it and got any kind of good target position and motion data (not likely at 40,000 yards), was of low probability indeed.

This was brilliant, iChase. I hope WG sees this. It's a fundamental change to game mechanics, but you're totally right about about this actually making gameplay far more interesting and distinct on a per ship basis.

I think the 5 inch guns used brass cases, so those weren't powder magazines, but they were ammo storage. The cases would be less dangerous if damaged than a "powder magazine". USS Shaw was a destroyer, and it had no armor so the destruction was worse that it would have been on a BB.

So lets look at Historical Engagement ranges... Hood vs Bismarck....First shots at 22Km...Hood blown up at 15Km..Prince of Wales engages at ranges down to 13Km. Battle of the North Cape...Duke of York engages Scharnhorst at 10Km range. Battle of Surigao Strait ...max range of engagement 20Km So really Wargaming is right in it's nerfing of the ranges as historically that is what engagements occurred at.

This may work but we need to remember that changing the ranges at which armour is effective and shell trajectories remain flat means that torpedo ranges will need to be scaled to reflect the new scaled engagement ranges.

And you think WG will actually take a logical approach to this problem?? They reduced the range the guns, but did not reduce the penetration values by the same amount or take into account the way armour was designed to work at the vastly longer ranges IRL. These are fundamental problems designed in the game from day one, so if they either didn't see the problems or ignored them.....does not inspire confidence. How can any form of balance be achieved when the game design itself skews what is a really simple thing to implement, they changed the range dynamics of the guns, so they have the knowledge to do the same with armour. If WG was to change this design flaw within the game, it would be admitting they made a monumental fuck up at the design stage.....and we all know WG do not like admitting they get it wrong. As always iChase, excellent video, keep em coming fella.

Actually, the battleship engagement ranges are pretty okay compared to their real life counterparts. Prince of Wales and Bismarck exchanged shells from 24-13km, with the fateful salvo that sank the HMS Hood being fired from 14 km. The last ever Battleship v Battleship salvo was fired at roughly 20-21km at the battle of Leyte by the USS Missisippi. So yes, while "condensed" and in real life these guns could reach much farther, typically captains seemed to engage other ships between 25-15km and the maximum range was only really used during shore bombardments. Makes sense when you consider accuracy.

The USS Shaw's magazine didn't blow up, it was in drydock, and had no ammo on board. The USS Downes magaine exploded because of the Shaw explosion, but the Shaw explosion was of the boiler type, not magazine detonation.

"Time of flight for AP Shell with MV = 2,500 fps (762 mps) 10,000 yards (9,140 m): 13.2 seconds 20,000 yards (18,290 m): 29.6 seconds 30,000 yards (27,430 m): 50.3 seconds 36,000 yards (32,920 m): 66.1 seconds 40,000 yards (36,580 m): 80.0 seconds" quote from Navweaps for 16"/50 USN gun Food for thought.... and a 20 degree turn for Hood at 28kts is only about 20 seconds.......

The armor penetration example at 10:20 is wrong. The chart at 7:50 already shows penetration corrected for the angle of impact, hence the fact it shows both belt AND deck penetration. What that means is that the shell can penetrate 169mm of deck armor at 27.5km, it will easily go through 152mm even if it shows 324mm of effective armor through the armor viewer, because again, the chart already has it corrected for angle of impact. That shell would be able to penetrate 360mm of armor from a 90 degree angle at that distance.

And what is much more important, from same root grows other problem, problem of overpenetrations: you will just delete cruiser who sails at 20km range (if you hit it), or who trying to protect himself by pointing bow at you and foolishly increasing effective armor values, but suddenly newb CA becobes invincible at 8km by showing you broadside. Thin armor, hight penetration and yep, overpen of citadel, and 406mm (even more if we add impact force in equation) hole in boilers, worth nothing more then ~1k damage.

you see the note '40mm walling' on the submagazine (where the boom shit is) and around the actual magazine itself. After travelling through mechanical storage, think large lumps of metal, a void and the ballast. Its as if you think a warship is a softeg with a hardshell, the entire body of the ship is taken into consideration for your 'critical location'

Wow, Chase! I'm impressed. As a long time "paper and Cardboard" war gamer, seeing someone looking at WoW with the same eye gives me some hope to see real changes to this game. I love this concept. I do not envy WG in trying to find a balance between playability, value, and historical accuracy. Lots of discussion lately between the "Jutland" camp and the "Midway" camps. This helps clarify some of that. This game as it is now, is more like "Jutland",,or as I think, "Case Orange" (USN vs IJN BB vs BB duel scenarios from the 1930's where DDs and CVs were the eyes of the fleet, CA swatted these annoyances away so the BBs slug it out for supremacy) with the CVs added in as an afterthought. So many players of this game have no clue of the historicity, just want to point and shoot something for free and get rewarded for it. I hope WG listens to your suggestions and asks other who have a clue about this time in Naval Warfare for input to really make this game shine so everyone can benefit.

God WG really need to put that in asap. That would mean most BBs at 14km could really act like shell magnets and tank like they are supposed to. I had a game in my Bismarck today, and I was fighting 3 BBs with my a Kurfurst backing me... The moment we spotted an Iowa completely flank-openned. I did 30k damage with 2 citadels, and the Kurfusrt finished her off. It took a grand total of maybe 20 sec and the poor guy was dead. The game NEEDS this change to survive long-term. Secondary range needs to be fixed on everything non-German as well. Then the game will be at a VERY nice place.

iChase hits the nail on the head once again. I've thought for a long time that WG has the setup all wrong: all warships were built with "immunity zones" against fire, usually calibrated against their own weaponry. scaling the fire range would bring these back into play, and as Chase points out turn the game into a real naval warfare game...because let me tell you, you didn't stop moving in naval warfare unless you had a deathwish.

USN's stated preferred engagement ranges for Battleships in WW2 was between 20,000 and 25,000 yards (3.29-4.12 nm). This was stated in the West Virginia's AAR for the Leyte Gulf engagement.

This is an exceptional eye opener on why belt armor on bb doesn't mean squat. If they were to implement this, by scaling the penetration based on in-game gun range, it would make bb engagement more fun & tactical. The question is how would this penetration-distance scaling affect how cruisers and dd interact with each other and with bbs in terms of guns? It would be great if u could do a video explaining whether there would be any great impact on how the balance is currently with bbs, cas and dds if this were to be implemented. After all WG is very afraid to make major changes if it affects their game "balance" and perhaps with a bit more explanation, it would open their eyes as well on why it could work.

IChase, you are VERY GOOD here. Note that torpedoes also have the problem that they are actually going hundreds of knots in speed and their ranges also have to be scaled down, as with the guns. No destroyer has EVER sunk a cruiser in real life, to say nothing of a battleship, with its guns -- they cannot penetrate anything important and thus cannot cause any flooding. No flooding and the ship WILL NOT SINK, EVER!!! Small guns can really mess up fire-control, secondary guns, AA guns, torpedo launchers, cause fires, and so forth, which is too downplayed in this game. Ships have limited real-estate on each deck and even small guns can blow up with a lot of "splash damage", as WofT calls it. The game should realign its damage model to make small ship guns and secondary guns of large ships and aircraft HE bombs cause damage that can do all sorts of things to the target's ability to fight -- the most important being that loss of fire-control directors/range-finders making shell dispersion REALLY, REALLY bad (effective range under 10,000 meters, if even that far, even with the biggest guns)!! Your YAMATO is now a MIKASA as far as its main guns' hitting ability is concerned. This makes small ships' guns even more dangerous, since even one hit from one of them has a chance to do such damage, at least temporarily, if it hits the main gun director at the top of the ship.

The game does have compressed ranges, yes, but it's not actually that bad. The longest BB hit recorded (that people tend to agree on anyway) was Warspite vs Giulio Cesare at about 24 km. I routinely score hits (sometimes even citadels) at ranges that long or even longer in top tier battleships.

iChase, I love your explanation of this. I like the solution you present too. Alternatively, instead of scaling down the pen values to match the range, they could scale up the range to match the pen values. Either way, this deserves to have a lot of attention drawn to it, and to Wargaming in general. Spot on man. Great work.

Thanks for the eval, iChase! That's really interesting stuff, and I had no idea about it myself. Some of the comments talk about this, but my biggest concern with a change to this would be, if pen values get scaled, do the arcs scale as well? I figure hang-time wouldn't, and somebody mentioned below that the current arcs are realistically scaled already, so hopefully they wouldn't - I think that would be too much to adjust to in comparison. When I think about it, it actually doesn't sound like it's THAT hard to do - mathematically, it should be very simple in comparison to the physics that they've already got. I'd be really excited to see WG give this a shot!

Anyone else remember Iowa's 3 in "de-capping" plate in her armor scheme? No? Ok I'll let myself out.

Ok, well then. What you said about the tops of the boilers and 5in powder storage being classified as citadel is wrong. Ok so the "tops" of the boilers is just uptakes. They're also in the center of the ship, so you'd have to get the through the entire ship to get to those, and while getting a hit there wouldn't be fun, it wouldn't endanger the ship in anyway. Now the 5in powder mags. 1. Those are also in the center of the ship and very heavily armored. 2. That's where everyone put their secondary powder mags, so you'd have to raise EVERY ships citadel to conform to that standard. But other than that a pretty good vid.

Wargaming really needs to listen to this and strongly consider it. This isn't just a thing that would help Battleships. This would also help the cruisers in the game as well. Right now almost every cruiser in game if not every single one is harshly punished for showing even the slightest glimpse of their sides to an enemy. This would allow cruisers as well as the battleships to have more breathing room in widening their angles of engagement enough to actually make use of the super firing turret designs they have.

6:30 good points, but you should point out that 15k in game is nothing like 15k in reality. I would like to know the compression ratio, but my guess is 15k is something like 3-5k in reality. The BL 15 inch - the guns of HMS Warspite - had a range of about 30k. And it used about 65 seconds to get there. It used about 30 seconds to reach to 18k (near the current max range in game). It's not that the shell speed has been boosted, if anything it has been slowed down, but the distance is way off what it is supposed to be.

What so funny about this game is that, when sailing a battleships and cruisers, never ever try to catch the T position, just the opposite to the real combat.

another problem with IOWA and MONTANA is their rudder shift time. HUGE CITADEL+SLOW RUDDER SHIFT is painful and very punishing. i read in the forum iowa supposed to turn faster because she has dual rudder system.

The problem with those range tables is that they extend way beyond visual range. The absolute longest range hit ever achieved by a battleship is about 26000 yards, beyond that effective gunnery is basically impossible.

Still no STS backplate for side and deck armour on the Iowa, Montana and North Carolina class battleships like they historically had. Having that would help a bunch too. Kind of like the USN version of turtle-back armour. The German BB and to some extent even their higher tier cruisers sort of broke the game in the way they don't punished as bad for showing broadside as compared to other nations ships. If you recall Fight Night, it was a GK-fest. There was even a team that fielded all GKs and shot HE and did win a number of matches that way. I would like to see these changes brought into game though for all ship types to help balance the nature of the game out.

Sadly you forgot that the armor has special property's too. The armor is build to be effectivly twice as thick (same as when you take a 2 meter paper against a 2 meter steel plate.). The KM/Krupp armor is even more powerfull. The test of the 16 inch guns that are made is against 305mm armor from 5km range and even point blank. The armor can repell it there as well (and we all saw the penetration power), it is build for this. Best prove is and remains bismarck and her invunerability against 16 inch shells from rodney. She lost her structures on top yet most shells did simply not penetrate her armor, and they where REALY CLOSE.

I agree with your proposition IChase. But in order to make the angle of fall correct with the scaling you have to also scale gravitation constant and air resistance. I you don't your shell arc won't give you the correct angle of fall. This gives way higher arcs and shell flight time if you don't adjust the muzzle velocity of the ships. If you would want to get the correct angle of fall without affecting muzzle velocity or shell travel time too much you would have to tinker with the following 3 things: gravitational constant, air resistance and muzzle velocity. To get both the angles correct and keep the shell travel time the same you would basically get too low a gravitational constant, too high a air resistance and a slight increase of muzzle velocity. Just a technical footnote. Loved this insightful video.

I really enjoy watching your videos, Chase! Keep up the good work! :) From what I gathered, you proposed that the penetration values should be scaled to the distance-% instead of the absolute distances, which I wholeheartedly agree with. The two main points that caught my attention: 1. That would make justice to the armor designs of certain ships. 2. That would give different ships different optimal combat ranges, which would make individual ship roles more pronounced. When I saw the range-penetration table (8:22) I instantly had the same idea of scaling the penetration to the distances used in-game. What do you do, I really like numbers in games (and outside of games, too), heh. :p What I especially liked: when you started talking about immunity zones at 15:47 onwards, it really inspired me (basically point 2). I'd LOVE to see that in the game! Also, that was a really foresighted comment of the future of WoWS at 18:08. If anyone wants to share his/her thoughts, feel free to do so. Here are a few questions to get the little grey cells running (in case they're not already): Would you like to see these changes implemented to the game? Why/why not? What do you think of the idea of immunity zones being more ship specific?

WG should now reduce the effective penetration to match compressed engagement ranges.

This does make a lot sense. It always bothered me that the ranges of engagement were so unrealistic, especially for battleships and carriers. I do have questions tho, 1. would this change the shell arcs and flight times 2. would this improve general battleship immunity to cruisers and destroyers

Ok here is one thing WG can do. Boom up all the maps to there actual size. Get all ships into there actual firing range. And improve the armor quality. like some BB aren't suppose to get that heavily damaged. The problem is there is no that powerful game engine for PC

[Math and engineering moment] The "red box" at 8:50 already takes the angle of the shell into account. And it is therefore wrong to later say that due to the slopping a 150mm deck would be effective. Juste look at the evolution of Side Armor relative to Deck armor values as the range (and the angle of fall) increase. My guess is that at 30k yeards, meaning with a velocity of1567 fps, a shell would penetrate ~400mm of armor, with would result in ~380mm of vertical side armor, with the benefit of cos(28°) or to ~170mm of horizontal deck armor with the benefit of cos(90°-28°) = cos(62°). Still the slopping of the Side armor is not considered, but the slopping of the deck is already taken into account. Therefore a 150mm deck would only be good enough at ~28k yards and not 40k like your argument suggest

The table of armor penetration for deck and side already takes angle into account, so no need to divide 152mm by sin(angle)

This is a great video, Chase! I agree that the engagement ranges in WoWs are way too short for the "historically accurate" armor configurations and shell penetrations Wargaming seems to prefer. In reality, most battleships were designed around the idea of "immunity zones," or ranges in which ships would be able to resist shellfire from expected (usually same-caliber gunned) opponents. Within an "immunity zone," the idea was that the shell would come in at a steep enough slope to not penetrate the side/belt armor, but a shallow enough slope to bounce off deck armor. If you got too close, the shells would strike the sides at closer to 90' angle of incidence, increasing the chance that they would penetrate side armor. If you got too far away, the shells would begin to strike the deck armor at angles closer to 90', so shells would penetrate the deck. As I said, most battleship design leading up to WWII centered on making this "immunity zone" as large as possible, along with associated trade-offs. For example, designers may strip a few thousand tons of belt armor off (at the expense of narrowing the immunity zone) in order to achieve desired speed or endurance figures. I would love to see true historical "immunity zones" come in to play in WoWs, where captains are incentivized to fight their ships within the ranges that those ships were designed to fight. Right now the only ships that really reflect that in WoWs are the German battleships, which were clearly intended to be brawlers with a relatively close desired engagement range. Unfortunately, until Wargaming extends the range and accuracy of the guns to historical norms, this is unlikely to happen.

And in Pearl Harbor the Arizona showed what happens when the main magazine is hit and that severed it front bow completely.

Ichase, you definitely should lead the balance team of the devs.

Are you sure this really makes sense, Chase? Historically, the longest shot ever achieved by a battleship against another moving target was at 24km. Yet that is shorter than your example. And that's the longest shot ever, not even average engagement distances. And just for example Hood was destroyed at a distance of about 14km. And in ww1 where half the game's BBs come from, the distances would be even shorter on average, right? eta: Or is the real problem that in WOWS the numbers listed as 15km for example are actually much shorter visually and the game is treating the penetration as if the visual distance is the correct one while ignoring what numbers it displays to the player as the distance?

I kind of agree with you in regard to the base idea that the way ranges and gun performance were scaled causes certain problems. I do think, however; that changing the mechanic that drastically this late in the development cycle would cause one heck of a problem for everybody. The funny thing is that Iowa isn't really correctly armored according to the standards of battleship armor. A battleship is supposed to be armored against it's own guns until a certain range, Iowa technically isn't due to sacrificing some armor for speed but more importantly, the ability to use the Panama Canal without forcing a widening of the locks. That's part of why the Montana's were ordered so hesitantly (more CVs were the major reason). I think that as long as WG stays fairly consistent with making adjustments to maintain balance, the game will survive and be playable. Another thing I've noticed playing a lot of tiers 4 thru 6, is that some of those ships are fighting at the correct ranges for their armor to start working as designed. The trouble is, it's hard for some of those ships to make hits at that range in game and some of the ships at those tiers can't fire that far. The problems tend to happen from what I see, where WG artificially limits the range, which happens most at tiers 2-4 and 7-10. I have to apologize for how long this mess is, but I figure it is worth sharing my thoughts on this issue.

they should really look into flooding from ap shells and listing of the ship due to flooding also there should be a flooding dmg reduction due to pumps in the ship.

This is a really great vid. I really appreciate the in depth analysis of the game mechanics and how players interact it. I like constructive conversation and that you also bring a suggestion that allows WG to maintain some historical accuracy yet fit within the constraints of the 10 minute gameplay. Thanks for making this.

Condensing the ballistics similar to engagement range really make sense, like the way you put it. However there is one more issue I can foresee, right now even slightly angled BBs (and cruisers like Zao with troll armour) at close range are a bit of an issue for Iowa and Montana to penetrate with the realistic model (well at least penetrations are not very reliable like Yamato/GK). Now when you scale back the ballistics etc, close range penetration also gets scaled back, exaggerating this destroyed/bouncing shells even more. That sort of also negates the advantage of having super heavy shells these ships used to fire. Maybe with you proposal we should also look in this direction

"IChaiseGaming" Premium *995* days :O

May I add that the longest Battleship to Battleship shot was 24 kilometres or 26000 yd. made by the HMS Warspite hitting the Giulio Cesare. The Scharnhorst also shares this record. However, it hit the HMS Glorious an Aircraft carrier so it's not as relevant. This means that the ranges described in the video are on the very outskirts of the battleships true effective range. Now ships like the Iowa were more advanced than the HMS Worspite or the Scharnhorst to theoretically there engagement distances could be at longer ranges though that's only in theory.

There is only one problem with that ship diagram: The waterline in the real ship is actually in the EXACT CENTER VERTICALLY of that pink area!!!! The ship only has a 10-foot-high 19-degree-tilted-outward Class "A" armor belt, with only 5' above the waterline, behind a 1.5" vertical STS outer hull. It also has a tapered 12"-at-the-top lower, anti-diving-shell STS belt. The 6" armored STS deck is at the top of the Class "A" belt with a 1.5" anti-bomb STS weather deck. IOWA and ALABAMA are almost identical. You are completely right about the compressed ranges screwing things up. US Navy penetration charts have 10,000 yards (9144 meters) as the MINIMUM RANGE!!!!!! The game is really screwed up. TORPEDOES are messed up too. It should take about 5 minutes for even a high-speed torpedo to go 10,000 meters. BISMARCK and SCHARNHORST Classes have that sloped deck behind the belt, which will stop almost anything that can punch through the belt itself. These ships are all not really modeled as to armor in any realistic way. This is my area of expertise -- 50 years of evaluation.

I found You channel after watching The Mighty Jingles playlist. He had a lot of Praise for You. I can see that He was under spoken about Your capabilities. You seem to have a next gen. thought process. & You should definitely contact WarGaming with Your Idea. This would take the game to the next level of Realistic gameplay & a dynamic tactics to gameplay. You have a winner here

I agree with the a lot it will also help German DD's who have higher caliber guns that have larger pen at ranges giver reason to use the 150mm guns over the 128mm guns it would also make it so that cruisers don't have to worry about getting killed by AP DD rounds from stealth fire.

Very good review. Yes, this is also why the whole scenario in the game where battleships and even cruisers are frequently successfully deploying torpedoes is ridiculous. In real life the engagement ranges were so far the torpedoes were useless.

Don't see anything in the mechanics about AP shells being "de-capped" by exterior hull & deck plates either, which was a factor with naval AP as it uses a capped penetrator design. In fact US BB design's made use of a specific type of steel as added hull plating or interior partition/splinter protection layers. On the outer hull, the express intent was to de-capping incoming AP rounds & greatly reduce their armor piercing capability. Of course that won't be modeled either.

What about just artificially increasing the gravitational acceleration? I'd be interested to see how that would work. It would simulate the longer distance through much faster drop on the shells, forcing higher ballistic arcs. It would be very interesting to see how obvious and jarring fighting in high gravity environment would be.

Using the Iowa class is a bad example for what you are talking about. The Iowa's weren't actually armoured against their own guns as their armour layout was designed before the introduction of the Mark 8 Super Heavy Shell and adding the additional armour needed would have drastically slowed them down to where they could no longer keep up with the fast aircraft carriers. Because of this the decision was made to leave their armour layout as it was designed

I like the Proposal, I felt the WG lacked proper Immunity zones at certain ranges. Not only this benefits battleships and make battleship feel more tanky battleships, it would also benefit cruiser vs cruiser engagements making previous paper ships a lot less paper at specific ranges. This would allow each ship to have their own learning curve on and force the player to play their ships on how they were designed rather than the "cookie cutter" cruiser play style.

Maybe they should reduce repair costs so people won't be afraid to lose their ship or make bigger maps and give ships their realistic range. Remember that many battles during IIWW were very close range (like 6 km) or give realistic spread to all ships

How about implementing a similar change with the existing spotting aircraft range extension, but allowing the spotter aircraft to fly the duration of the game unless it's shot down. Such a mechanic would have an additional degree of realism as well since battleships needed this fire direction for such long, over-the-horizon, engagements.

RE: the KGV class, if memory serves their 14in guns were designed for long range plunging fire, so a close range immunity zone would be...less than ideal, if we're honest.

it would certainly make this and other WG games much more unique as it would truly require skill and knowledge in every match versus simply learning to keep your bow one way or another in relation to others. I could see this fixing many current and future balance issues... pretty much an all-in-one fix. Thank you for the content... I love learning new things and you always provide that opportuniy, iChase. Thanks again! -Cullingsun

I hope you take the time to present this to them. :)

"Most battleship battles are happen within the 15 km range.." Actually that is what is realistic and that's why the Iowa and US BB armor design is flawed. It is designed for a long range battle scenario sure, but in reality those long range engagements never happened in ww1 or ww2. The designers thought that it will be possible to hit targets beyond 20km with spotting plane assisting the aim but it never worked Don't blame WG for that. Blame the British and the US for coming up this doctrine.

well, unfortunately for a lot of player they are unable to hit enemy ships until they bow in and sit there. I personally think that iowa, missouri, and montana should all have a very dynamic style while they have 33 knots and 30 knots, which means they are able to move relatively fast to support allies on the map. The only thing made some players don't know anything other than bow in is only because they have no idea about how to leave a fight while you should. Leaving a fight doesn't mean that you can only turn away and show broadside to enemies and get citadaled. Turn away with mountains, smoke, concealment. Always turn away while you are not being focus on. If you find you are always being focused fire on, there should be only two reasons: you are the only few left, you are not in the right place where you should be. Missouri, Iowa and Montana are all very interesting ships i believe, even without the buff.

Interesting. If they scale the shells to the ingame range as you explained, i think it will encourage people to get a steath build for the late tier german battleships. Especially in high tier with the tendency for more distance passive gameplay and in the later stages of the battle if a team destroyers has been wiped out. It will force us battleships to either confront the german battleship at close range or rely on someone else to light the german bb for them in order to get those deck penetrations. (Just my theory)

In game with main guns range module the Iowa and Missouri can shoot up to 27 kms. Iowa can also use the spotter plane to increase this range by additional 20%. So, there are some questions: 1. Should the "compressed penetration" you've been talking about be "uncompressed" for this new range? Or should these values be compressed with maximum possible range in mind? Which is, in case of Yamato, will be very close to that of real life 42km, by the way. 2. The shell flight time will be increased as well to accomodate the new "compressed" values due to flight time beign the function of shell speed. It will decrease the chances to hit at max ranges even more as targets will have more time to avoid incoming salvo. Is it OK? 3. Now that you actually do have the ranges you were talking about in game - do you really want to play from 27kms+?

Like I have said on the forums before... WoW's is a combat SIM.. I would leave this the way it is TBH.. and maybe roll ocean into map rotation with an enlarged map size so that people have a means of comparison. All these ships were designed for much longer ranged combat but the sad reality is that almost all of the actual battles in WW2 involving non aviation surface units were fought at claustrophobic ranges.

iChase, I enjoyed your video, I like your suggestion of recalculating penetration values to match the scaled down ranges in game. Additionally your suggestion would provide a buff to cruisers by allowing their armor to better defeat the smaller caliber rounds from other cruisers and destroyers.

iChase! If they did make those changes, battleship gameplay would change likely for the better- but remember, you're altering angle of attack. Which means more loft at shorter range. Think of the implication for ships like the Cleveland that already have astronomically high angles. This would also drastically change time of flight, as you're essentially stretching the flightpath a good 40%. Destroyers would be nearly unkillable as the amount of lead necessary would put their ship completely off-reticle even for ships that currently have a low gun arc. And don't even get me started on the disparity between muzzle velocity and ship speed. In order to keep travel time cross-map from taking hours, speed and distance are scaled weird, but shell velocity isn't altered by the same magnitude. Meaning the distance covered by ships while shells are in flight is much much higher than it actually should be. In short, it seems like some quick number-tweaking to just *fix* the problems with armor ingame, but doing so would open up so many cans of worms it'd actually break the game entirely. Changes should be made, but it might take a lot more work than you'd think.

Where did you find the top and side views for the Iowa? That was pretty cool for reference.

My biggest thing here is the fact that STS plate is not taken into account.. STS plate was used extensively by the USN as the outer hull of all capital ships. And also decks. Very light but very strong steel. Plus the missing decapping plates that would make the iowa for example virtually immune to 8 inch guns. But in general i completely agree with Ichase here. Game mechanics make many real world values here useless. compress the armor penetration values as well as everything else.

Yeah, 307+25mm STS, 152mm+STS, yeah, the ships given their STS and all armor in all capacities would be MUCH tougher... Id love to see pen compressed in this game.

3 years after, nothing changed at all. Bow in is still the best for most cases.

I'm sure if WG ever decides to "fix" it, they will make some bandaid fix like make the citadels take 75% damage, instead of actually fixing mechanics.

Good job on digging up the historical schems iCheese :)

Scales the engagement ranges sounds like a lot of work. How about scale the map to a 25km radius. And to compensate for the greater distance to cover, start the ships at half speed, and loaded. Seriously, who gets to a combat zone and parks their ships, THEN says , "the enemy is here somewhere, load the guns, and let's get moving."??? NO ONE!!! That's who. Ships start at zero speed when caught in port, that is IT!!! If you park your ships in open water, you deserve what's coming your way; be it enemy fire, or friendly court martial.

Very well thought out and informative. Thanks for the effort that went into this.

This is also why most nations stopped using the "turtleback" armor scheme. The Germans didn't, but their ship design was kinda out dated by WW2.

The simple fact that they decided to design their ship game while ignoring basic tactics (Broadsides are what you should hope to have your ship be position wise, to an enemy who is nose on. "Crossing the T") and instead goes for Tank style combat tactics: Nose to the enemy and angle slightly lowered my opinion back in CBT. How they've continued to treat their ship game like Tanks on the water astounds me.

so what youre saying is to rescale the penetrations value to match the current ranges used in game? although i do like that plan alot, rly mean alot, but wouldnt that gut the CAs that use AP skillfully in mid range? wont it become an HE gallore once more?

Which biases against armor schemes for ships in real life like the Bismarck which is designed for close quarter engagement in the Atlantic; she 17" belt armor placed 90deg vertical. Great for brawling at close range & given how WoWs plays, no wonder she's so strong.