Panzerblitz

This isn't always about luck or aim modding. I think I'm only an average player myself, but I'm in this since the alpha weekends and can land a first salvo more often than not. With experience comes a feel for ship's size and speed and how far you have to lead to get hits in and then you will often get good results.

It's kinda adorable that due to a niche game like EVE some people are still throwing their panties in a fit whenever goons are mentioned. You realize that Something Awful is an online community of over 190k people which covers all kinds of topics from politics to sports and that the EVE gamers among the registered users are somewhere in the 0.something % range. What is less adorable is the personal vendetta some people are waging, sometimes over years, because they had their space ship blown up or were scammed (which is perfectly legal in EVE) by someone associated with Goon Swarm - aka let's get all really angry about virtual pixels and video games. The gamers among the Something Awful community are perfectly normal people, the only difference is that the whole community got a certain reputation due to the actions of the EVE clan and the Mittani's high profile propaganda campaign. The vast majority of "Goons" has not even touched EVE. Just my 2 cents...cause I see these "The Goons are coming" threads in every mmo....and there's nothing to be worried about....

This class was a late war program to deal with US planes and submarines. At 27kts they are destroyer escorts at best and far from any true fleet destroyer.

If we ever get a mixed European tree for minor navies then the Austrian-Hungarian ships would be a nice addition. But as a standalone nation there isn't enough meat here and I'm saying that as Austrian myself.

Not changing the aim mechanics in a way that such mods become impossible is kinda silly since it trivializes any long range shooting into a no skill affair. Also they are shooting themselves into their own knee with that. The mod pretty much destroys any learning curve in the game since you won't get better very soon. And without a learning curve which encourages players, there is no real reason to play the game in the long run.

The Yamato is currently badly bugged with it's broken turrets and non-existent armor. Once these issues are fixed/added then the ship will be quite good, especially because of the 18" shells which should have the best penetrating power of all nations. When it comes to broadside weight I would rate the Montana higher though.

And next we get the Fritz-X gliding bomb, right ? Anyway, the rockets on the landing ships were meant for area saturation, pretty much like the Soviet Katyusha. You can't hit a barn door with these things. But if you want to plough up a whole sector then they were very useful. In a ship to ship engagement they are ofc useless.

Advanced flanking positions - aka vulnerable positions where you get under fire early. Also any decent CV captain knows where to attack and won't rush into dense AA fire, the other option is to send in squadrons piecemeal, count to 20 for the barrage to wear off and then do the run. So you expose yourself to possibly deter an air strike which only needs to shift target a bit or wait for 20 seconds. You didn't understand my point: a Baltimore at tier 9 goes roughly 33 kts, what is the purpose of a CA at these high tiers when an Iowa can go 33 kts, or a North Carolina goes 28 kts at T8. Will these 5 kts make any appreciable difference in the game ? I don't think so. And the problem will only get worse once we have Battlecruisers. Plenty of BBs can and will go 30 kts (you're wrong about the Yamato, she should not go faster than 28 kts max and Kongo is a BC not a BB) - true 30 kts BBs include: Bismarck, Iowa, Vittoria Veneto, Vanguard, Richelieu and a whole line of blueprint designs.

Don't forget the Hood is a BC after all, unless we get her planned upgrades as possible option. In terms of guns she has roughly the same caliber and a higher shell weight than Bismarck, but also a lower rate of fire. And she has less deck armor and is also a huge target. And I think that in a long range engagement with plunging fire that deck armor will be the difference as it was in 41. The Hood is far from immune to the 14" shells of lower tier BBs, imagine what a New Mexico or Fuso can do to a large target like the Hood with their 12x14" barrels. Her speed, the only advantage over these ships, is almost a non-factor in this game with it's small maps. If the Bismarck is, let's say, a tier 8, then the Hood is definitely a tier 7, and the Repulse would be comfortable at tier 6.

The question is "What is the role of the heavy cruiser after T6". Is it AA ? Well US BBs want to have a word with you, cause they have a significantly heavier AA battery than any CA. Is it your AA Barrage ? You would be a bit of a one trick pony then if this is the only reason to have a CA on your team. Is it speed ? When the fast BBs come into play at T7-10 then this advantage also falls flat. Most high tier BBs will be somewhere between 28 and 33 kts. Is it dps ? Ok the Des Moines is a beauty, but it's T10. Otherwise the Cleveland wants to have a word with you. Also see (in future) the Brooklyn. The problem I have with CAs is that they have no clearly defined role atm. You can stick with the BBs and protect them from planes, but that also means that you will be 3-4 km out of range once the guns of the BBs open up. Do you now charge into direction of the enemy battle line and risk getting shot at or do you stick with your battle line and do no damage until later in the game when range between the teams usually decreases. The other options. Run with a cruiser wolf pack and hope for the best. If you get in a bad spot against other cruisers you get sunk fast though and if you run across a BB you are in trouble unless it's 3vs1. But once again, you bring nothing to the table that a Cleveland or an upgraded Kongo would not do better. Also there is more trouble on the horizon: where do we place future Battlecruisers ? Alaska, Guam, Scharnhost, Renown, Hood, Deutschland....all of these ships want to have a word with you. In case of the US and German BCs I don't think that they end up in tier 9 or 10 cause of their smaller guns. If such ships become tier 7-8 (see Deutschland, Graf Spee, which would be ideal there) then the role of the CA gets even more diminished because the BC is an ideal cruiser killer. Temporary solution: give the CAs more range. I'm still convinced that their job is with the main battle line and to engage other ships and especially BBs successfully they need their historical range on the 8" guns. If they can open fire earlier and be part of the capital ship group then we will get some very interesting gun duels in future.

Warspite for sure...good choice, that ship had a very exciting career during WWII. That means if you want to call "being constantly in danger" exciting....

I have an Essex and play CVs since late alpha, my 2 cent are that the flight model is so arcadey on purpose. The planes do impossible maneuvers and I would really welcome it if they actually had to obey some basic aerodynamics. I'm only a mediocre CV player and even I can get hits easily thanks to the impossible physics. In my opinion it would be great if planes move in a more realistic way, so that you have to plan strikes more careful. I'm really not sure where the CV gameplay is heading now. On the one hand you have a really hard time if you are up against a team which uses escort formations, on the other you often have games where you feel almost bad because it's so easy to earn credits and xp. A higher skill curve combined with more rewarding hits ( no more 12 torp hits to sink a Fuso) would be more than welcome.

Balancing capital ships by detection range is a bad idea anyway because of the number of planes in a full game, also it's completely unrealistic because of radar and muzzle flash. The torpedoes on cruisers did well cause of the IJN's night fighting doctrines and because the Long Lance left hardly any wake behind. I'm all for giving them their correct torpedoes as first step towards accuracy, isn't hard to understand.

Then why even have different ships and nations when everything has to be perfectly balanced ? Let's remove everything and have "Generic cruiser model #1" for every player, then you get perfect balance. If you rob the game of it's historical feel then it will lose appeal to a lot of players. The US simply had significantly better AA, better radar and (later in the war) better guns than the IJN. The IJN had far superior night fighting training, the most advanced torpedo available and the best naval aviator corps in the world. How do you plan to balance against facts ? Rip half the AA guns off US BBs ? Work with false data ? You can balance the game to some extent with the help of tiers and the match maker, but I don't want to see ship's deprived of their historical capabilities for balance's sake. Wait til the ships and stats are done and until we get some US BBs for comparison's sake and until the armor system properly works. Then we can talk about balance again.

I replied because I mostly wanted a reason to post that beautiful screenshot

7 km ? Even 9 km hits are still pretty easy when picking the right target

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/03/150309-worlds-largest-battleship-musashi-world-war-underwater-archaeology-technology/

Beaten http://forum.worldofwarships.eu/index.php?/topic/6930-musashi-wreck/

You break off the initial run and split the squadrons. Then you attack from the two opposite sides and attack over a greater area instead of overlapping the attack vector as in the gif. You should still hit with half the torps in that case. The important thing as CV player is to make decisions quickly, never hesitate or leave your planes to loiter around for too long. In the very rare case that you engage a player who is really good at turning it's often more effective to go after other players. Thing is that if a ship has to break out of the battle line then you have already achieved something, namely a delay in his effectiveness. So far I have only faced maybe 4 or 5 players who were really good at dodging and in that case I just left them to the other BBs and set my planes on easier targets. Another important thing when playing a CV is to go always for targets of opportunity. See 2 ships which have rammed each other ? Attack them ! See a long battle line going straight ahead ? Attack them ! See one guy who is holding on to dear life and turning like crazy ? Switch targets. In some cases your torpedo planes can already spook players so much that they run to the far side of the map just to escape you, where they will do no harm. Apart from thinning out the herd the psychological factor of your planes is not to be underestimated.

Actually no. If you look at the mini map you will see he is heading towards A and that he is not the first and not the last in the conga line to that cap point. He didn't make any significant mistakes when I rushed 2 squadrons at him, while he was probably zoomed out to fire at something. This is only a few minutes in the game. Had he been a bit closer to the 2 BBs behind him or the one BB before him it would also not have changed anything about the outcome. And situations like this happen a lot of times, so imagine what a coordinated CV team can do. Also, any decent CV player won't have his planes loiter around the target as advance warning. You pick a waypoint near your target from far away and then do it all in one run, which significantly reduces the escape window a ship has.

It's actually a good change. Here's why.... I had a Saipan, a Ranger and now a Lexington. The Saipan is the first ship to have torpedo bombers with relatively strong torps and 2 squadrons. It's powerful enough that early in the game you can blow a BB like a Kongo straight out of the water with a double strike from your torpedo bombers and at tier V there is zero that another player can do against that. If you are up against someone who knows how to properly use manual mode then the game ends for another player after 2 minutes with 0 xp. At tier V AA is still pretty weak and the CVs on your team usually only have one squadron of fighters, so don't count on them to protect you. Of course you can try to evade, but if you don't do this perfectly then you are instant fish food. Same counts for the barrage ability from cruisers, if you play solo there is a good chance that nobody on your team will rush to your aid once you get targeted. This is not fun. In WoT it was really rare to die that early in a game unless you made a mistake yourself. But in WoWS there are times where you can do nothing against it. And if you have a coordinated team of CVs then the problem exponentially doubles.

It's mostly a matter of practice, after a while you get "the eye" for these things. What's also important is to know the typical speed of the ship you're engaging. I usually put my crosshair on the same level with the deck of the other ship. If I'm not sure about the range then I fire a ranging shot from one turret and then follow with the rest. Also make sure to check the distance with the range button, it helps you to memorize how far you gotta lead your aim for certain ranges.

Regarding the Japanese tech tree: wouldn't it make more sense to have the Agano at tier V as a good scout CL instead of the Furutaka ? Sure the Furutaka is kinda "light" for a CA, but tier V should be CL country and the Agano might bring more variation into the CL line, instead of having 2 relatively similar ships (Furutaka to Aoba) after each other. Unless ofc the Agano will be a separate branch in future.

I think your question was already answered earlier in this thread. They have like 3 times the players in Russia than in the EU And USA together. And Russians first and foremost care about their own naval history (even if there is not much to it pre Cold War).

Well these numbers explain a lot and from a business pov it makes sense.