BrushWolf

Do a google search for "naval computer games". Also look on Steam and GOG. Naval Action is more complicated because you have to also trade to make money to run your ship. However, it is free so worth a try.

There are much better ways to make the game more "challenging"

I don't really want a hard core sim which realistic would be but I would like to see bow tanking gone as in the real world the last thing any captain or admiral wanted was to let the enemy cross their T. The simple way to accomplish this is not with realism but with a significant damage increase when taking hits through the bow or stern and a significant damage reduction when taking damage through the broadside.

I see a lot of criticism that does not get taken down but those people are stating the problem and what they think should be done while saying this in a polite manner.

It took a long time to hammer down the glitches in the original game and adding subs created them all over again.

With how many changes that have happened since then they are pretty much starting over with dealing with the issues.

The problem here is each map is different and the problems are different which is why it took a long time to hammer down the issues.

When they added the subs some old issues came back and those problems took a long time to resolve.

Not really a competence issue but that what they wanted did not happen as the bots were not as bad about getting stuck as they are now.

I have not played enough to say but my guess is they wanted this to fix the bots but it didn't. Personally I think that the land is going to have to actually repel ships to stop the bots getting stuck.

I would assume that this change will help with the bots in both co-op and in operations.

I have not been playing ops lately and the random factor is one reason because some ships are terrible in some ops plus ops that are hard for a group of top players can come up.

The complete no fly zones are gone but AA overall is better than that. What really hurt with the rework was that before you could help both AA and secondaries with the same captains skills where now it is one or the other. If you choose AA over other things the old AA ships are still monsters although taking out all of a squadron is unlikely the cost to hit those ships is such that good or better CV captains look for other targets that are easier to hit hoping that your AA is reduced from damage when they come back. AA skills should not be all or nothing and at least on US ships with 5 inch dual purpose they are AA guns too. Another thing that should be addressed is when a squadron attacked as a mass ships with weak AA or no AA could force that squadron to miss where now they will take hits from at least one pass. The fix here is to give them an AA refit so they are not defenseless.

They have been beaten down for a long time

Here we go again. There are no skill factors in the matchmaker. The only way they could be included without slowing matchmaking to a crawl for some people would be skill balancing between the teams within each type of ship after the MM has chosen the required number of players for the match using the current system.