New Years Update

So 2015 has ended and here we are on the cusp of an exciting new year ahead, especially for Navyfield 2. On the 31st December the dev team at SDEnternet posted the following announcements of upcoming plans for 2016 here.

For the abbreviated details if you simply can't wait look below:

• Tier 12 Battleships will be introduced during January or February.
• Significant balance patch  will be made affecting BB's reload time, gun turn speed and defense power, CL's speed reduction, DD's torp damage increased. During January.
• Certain ships' credit gain increased.
• Planes now becoming permanent. The 7 day timer will be removed.
• Fleet Battles will be introduced. During March.
• Harbour Assault will be patched. Sometime during April or May.

This is great news as almost every month should include some form of major alterations to hold us out until the big game modes are available. So many of the long term veterans are looking forward to fleet battles, and the high level of strategy in the upcoming harbor assaults.

These features are exactly what the game is about, getting lots of fleets together in big battles with an end goal in sight: being the top of the leader boards or holding down a harbor for the longest.  

But the strategies involved and the tactics employed will show who has their wits about them and which fleets truly are up for the challenge.

For more details on the updates to come your in 2016 check out here. 

Daily Mission Update

As of right now the current server update has been completed and will introduce some moderate changes, two of which include:

• Daily Quest Missions (see details below)
• Majority of ships are receiving revisions (see details below)

Daily Missions

The daily mission are pretty much like you would expect to see in most games, complete a mission and receive/claim the reward.

The majority of missions will reward credits, but complete all the mission for day and you will earn some gold. This will be very useful for everyone looking to save up gold over a longer time.

But the incentive is for players to get onto the game server everyday, and get something back for doing that.

Among the ship adjustments are: 

• all battleships receive a universal 1 knot speed reduction
• all light cruiser plane capacity reduced from 5 down to 3
• the battleship New Mexico (USN) receives a 15% reduction in accuracy
• all high angle battleships accuracy increased by 5%.  (high angle = above 41 deg)
• all carriers receive a large DP increase (between 20-30k) somewhere between CL/CA's

*The full update from the developers can be seen here if you're interested in the exact figures.

For their size cv's are quite squishy, hence the dp increase. I'm all for that, as it seems strange that such large ships can be sunk so easily, making any small aggressor a serious problem. Small maps are  notorious for a quick cv rush.

The New Mexico has caused a lot of discussion and debate on the forum months ago and again recently because it is clearly out-classing ships of  higher tiers due a combination of great angles, shell spread, reload time, shell damage, and ship size. We will see after the update how much the accuracy change affects it.

Battleships are being slowed down slightly to help submarines, but also to encourage battleships to use gold boiler items. [yes devs we saw what you did there] Speed is key for battleships. 

High angle guns are slightly more difficult to use, and in line with the NM getting nerfed, the opposite end of the scale those high anglers are getting a 5% increase in accuracy to assist (albeit very slightly) with high angle hang time.

Lastly the light cruiser's plane capacity being reduced. Many would not agree with this. But a ship that has very accurate guns is very quick and highly maneuverable and being pretty small. To have all that AND 5 planes is a bit excessive. And it practically makes light cruisers very (if not too) similar to heavy cruisers.

Light cruisers are in a strange multi-purpose support ship role, being weak compared to DD/CA/BB who can dish out the damage. This makes their role not as well defined as it was previously in nf 1 where they were very potent at AA and/or ASW. Truly a support ship to BB & CV

6 Months of 2015 - Looking Back

Staring August in the face let's look back and review what's happened over the last few month to refresh our memories of some significant changes that have taken place,

So let's have a look:

Increased XP and credit earning - Ranking system

Feb/March 2015 -
The first big changes in-game were the inclusion of increased credits and experience. Firstly credits seemed to be very scarce to come by in the earlier tiers (where you earn less). The devs did an overhaul that included adding a ranking system based on factors such as how much damage you dealt, how long the match lasted and what ship tier you are in.

The F-S rank was included to make players aware of how well they performed whilst giving a sense of their earnings related to that performance.

Major Ship Adjustments

April/May 2015 -
This involved all ships receiving game-changing nerfs/ buffs depending on its current performance.

Changes from damage, speed, defence level, turning rate, dive time, plane speed, you name it it was all there and almost every ship got changed. Let's put it this way, things felt different.

Major Ship Update

May/June 2015 -

This included a large patch where all the 'blank' spaces in the ship tree were filled in. For example tier 10 and tier 6 battleships were added, among others for all classes. Around 50 ships were added in total.

This facilitated an easier and more enjoyable experience to players going up the ship tree. It also gave plenty of players their first tier 11 ship for free. (almost)

New game Modes

June/July 2015 -

Two new game modes were added: Flagship and Occupation. Along with the standard Annihilation mode this gave players a total of three modes to try.

Although still requiring adjustments to improve them both modes tend to finish quickly with little rewards because earnings are still based off damage dealt, not the actual success of the game type.

Website & Forum Updates

July 2015 - 

Changes to improve the fluidity of the website and forum were added. Things like removing captcha (a pain), longer Auto-Log off time (another pain), word wrap (get the gist?) and latest posts-by have now been implemented.

Making for a more relaxed experience when it comes to commenting about things navyfield related.

Future Updates

Latter 2015- 

The biggest focus of attention for everyone now is on the end-game content: harbour assaults. The development team are surely feeling the breath of the community down their neck.

The good news is that development has now begun. The bad news is that it will likely take some months to get to a point where testing will take place, before it gets onto a live launch.

Many aspects need to be addressed like; the world map, the shipyard blimp interface, battle rooms to set up the matches, then the actual game mode itself ( a derivative of annihilation ), along with fleet banks, challenge times and not to forget the benefits of owning a harbour; access to unique ships and production levels for defence. And ultimate bragging rights.

We want the whole package, but we also want it to be done well in the first instance.