ollonborre

Yes and no I guess. A Smolensk without smoke and that 30 mm armored belt is more lined towards an open water boat and the Colbert is more of an island hugger.

You are asking to many questions comrade, off to Gulag! IMO what would have made the Smolensk a bit less toxic and perhaps even fun to play is this: give it slightly better concealment, maybe sub 10 km comparable to a Mino and then rip the smoke from it.

I think what he meant is which is more fun or better at its job, Kurrywurst or Ohio as both can be played as secondary brawlers.

Drop SI and pick up SE and BFT instead. With premium consumables you get enough smokes and hydro to last the game unless you use them every single time they come of cooldown. The heal is nice but the flat HP bonus of SE combined with 2 heals is more worth it than the extra heal from SE and no additional flat HP. BFT is self explanatory. You are mainly a gunboat, so boosting gunpower is what you want.

I run PT, AR, EM, DE, SI, CE and RPF. This used to primarily be my clan wars setup but I have stuck with it in randoms aswell as it works just fine. RPF is sometimes of meh value as you are not exactly a DD hunter early on but it does help vs cruisers with slightly worse concealment or when a hungry BB lurks around the corner. The rest is just a standard heavy cruiser build.

BB's have always searched for excuses to not push or stay in agressive locations. First it was torps, then it was CV's, now it is dakka cruisers or all the above. You can play around it, you might die a couple of times and some times it will be unfun. But it is not the end of the world, it takes minutes for a single HE spammer to burn down a BB. Back on topic, Smolensk is a very powerful random battle clubber (even though I consider the Mino to be more influential) and I'm not sure it should have been for coal making it such a common ship. Rarity is not an excuse for an OP ship but it is more manageble.

Fun to play, unfun to play against. Melts against any form of 203 mm or 150+mm IFHE/HE, is very easy to blap or burst from longer range. Is good for farming BB's but if you want a ship that will carry a game through utility then the Wooster or Mino will bring enough dakka and other bonuses to succed.

Alright after several attempts I decided to try and help instead of ridicule. You have abysmal stats overall, kills per game, survival ratio, damage etc. When you say that the team is crap what you sadly mean indirectly is that you are crap. No shame in this as long as you realise it. Often you are a liability, you play higher tiers than your skill level is capable of. Stick to lower tiers, learn the mechanics above all, learn how different classes work and move up the tiers when you feel comfortable in the game overall.

Would not mind a Duca or Molotov.

XP is not perfect but it is currently one of the clearer ways of telling who did "best". A borderhumping damage farmer can get the highest XP, but only if the rest of the team barely did anything. % of damage dealt, caps or defense points, tanking and kills will push the XP score higher than just raw damage farming. And that is often what decides games.

Bourgogne is one of the most fun BB's I have played so I know what I would recommend.

Still the tankiest tier 6 cruiser by sheer HP pool and heal, great hydro, fighter plane, AP is good and 283 mm guns give you some overmatch potential. It is slow though and the HE is very lacluster. Also the low DPM means you need time to cause lots of damage especially in a high tier game. In a tier 6 and possibly 7 you can still be very influential by blapping cruisers and some decent damage on broadside BB's. So basically you have really punchy guns, but the lack of shells and reload means a few bad volleys will set you back further than even the other heavy cruisers. Still an alright ship imo that can save a lot of face thanks to its sheer durability.

Z-46 gets 5 km hydro, which is good but you can feel the difference from the Z-52. The Brits are overall great though. They mainly suffer from beeing captain point heavy but have decent enough torps, short fuse AP, 360 degree turrets, long duration hydro, smokes on demand (low duration though) and are still fairly stealthy.

Branch out a bit more. Playing just one class in the beginning can lead to frustration as you might not understand how the other classes work and thus how to counter them. With some experience in other ships you get a firmer grasp on roles, map awarness, positioning and what ships are dangerous and needs to be focused first. Also I would recommend to either shelv your Tirpitz for a bit and stick with your Ashitaka. The Tirpitz gets thrown into high tier games that I sadly don't think you can quite handle just yet. In general I would not recommend playing a premium that is a higher tier than what you currently have. This game has a long learning curve, and there is no shame taking it a bit slow.

And if we bring in the rest of the Axis Hakuryu, Zao, Yamato, Furutaka, Ruyjo, Fuso, Kitakaze etc... Still I think a game mode like this would be a bit boring. Mirrored or mixed games are more interesting in my humble oppinion than restricting nation vs nation.

As long as you play tier 5+ the game often showers you in missions. If you don't count clan brawl and legendary upgrades I still had 10 something missions avaliable last weekend, and when you bring in directives and other events you almost have to work hard to complete them all without no lifing. Pre 2016 the best we had was a system that could only reward you credits for prettt mundane tasks 3 times a day. So in terms of free stuff we are getting more and more spoiled really. And as for campaigns, the first campaign you gain acess to is full of nice rewards for a newer account and can keep you occupied for some time.

The tier 3 Soviet BB has 36 sec reload, clearly the rest of the tree is fine then On topic, french DD's also have pretty nice arcs in my experience. The velocity is a bit slower (I think don't have access to the game to check atm) but the shells seem pretty heavy and don't have that much drag so hitting things far away is easy enough.

My answer is broadly the same, the Wickes is a better boat, more fun imo and is free. Lower tier premiums are not very good crew trainers as the XP potential is really low so I would recommend not buying any premium below tier 4-5 for money currently. Coal is another question. And again fun factor is subjective. If you want to train a crew grinding a regular tech tree or getting a tier 5+ premium is the way to go.

And as soon as you end up in a Domination type battle you have lost the entire map while chasing down their CV. Blob up by all means, but don't chase the CV from the start, it's a waste of resources and ships. CV hunting is only viable if it gets caught out of position or is the only one left, other than that all you should do is just brace for air attacks.

Ranked out in 23 games (I messed up in some of them), and I only really played 1 premium, the Cossack. Still I found it to be much easier to just carry in radar cruisers and DD's than CV's. Also my Richeliu did not fail me which was nice.

With equal skill behind the wheel the Belfast is vastly superiour to the Flint, and much scarier.

I did, and nothing has changed. It has always had that HP. This is from when the Vlad still were in testing, and as you can see. fully upgraded 73 600 HP:

There has been no HP buff. Just your normal potato picking Survivability Expert on a BB.

The highest damage is 550k in a Hakuryu on the NA server during the release of the rework. On the other servers there is a similar story of 500k+ games all in Hakus (most likely rework release). The highest non CV game is on the EU server with a Harugumo scoring 495k damage. So if you think the pre nerf flooding CV's don't "count" then the 495k is the highest damage done so far.