"Naval Thunder House Rules?" Topic

Hello everyone!

So I have been playing naval thunder for some time, and I have come up with some house rules between my friends and I which I think have generally made the game more enjoyable for me. Some were suggestions from the SDG forum, some where came up with on our own.

Here they are:
Smoke no longer completely blocks gun fire, instead it adds +2 to shots, still modified to only +1 for ships with spotter planes in the air. Smoke was historically very effective in some battles, but we didn't feel it was the wall the game makes it, but wanted to go with more than the +1 suggested on the forums as it would otherwise make spotter planes much less useful.

We changed it so that ships taking evasive action have their movement capped at 3".

And we changed the to hit of Destroyers (and lighter ships) to 10+ to add an element of survivability.

The last thing we did was increase the hull points of all destroyers by 5, all cruisers by 10 and all battle ships by 15. We did this mostly for the destroyers and cruisers, which felt very fragile in combat, which was sometimes not very historical. This moved destroyers from a 4-9 average hull point level to a 9-14 average hull point level which let the smaller ships actually duke it out with their 1 and 2 damage guns and score several hits on one another, where as before we sort of felt that who ever landed the first hit automatically won. There were so many destroyer / large torpedo boat (such as the Ciclone's / Spica's) that were in engagements with other small boats where they traded numerous hits and still limped away that it did not feel right with most of them sinking in 1-4 hits. Larger ships still destroy them in 1 or 2 hits, as does any hit by a torp, but when skirmishing with other destroyers or light craft it allows them to actually have a bit of a back and forth.

Anyway those were our house rules. Has anyone else made any big changes? Small changes? Do you like the rules how they are?

Naval Thunder used one set of design parameters for all ship sizes. This necessarily meant that that those ships on the small end of the spectrum would end up being too fragile. Command at Sea came to the same conclusion with its data and made a similar adjustment. This problem also plagues the GHQ naval rules where destroyers have about one or two hit points.

like those changes

There is a problem in having to deal with big ships with big guns at the same time as little ships with little guns. Another thing that needs "adjusting" is that, in these rules, if you roll a "10" on the D10 you get a critical hit, and if it doesn't penetrate (gun penetration + 1D10 is equal or less than the armor), it is a topside critical hit. First you get half damage- so a 4" might do 1 hull point and a BB main gun would do 5 points of damage. That is okay, but what is wrong is that a 4" shell and a 16" shell are the same here in terms of the critical topside damage. A 4" shell on a BB does as much topside damage as a 16" shell. Or on a DD. That has to be adjusted as well.