Magni56

Yeah. Then again, losing one for killing a Yamato is a good tradeoff. And revenge kills from the grave are always amusing.

Make the torpedos a bit slower and give them 15-20km range and she'd be pretty beastly, but still balanced imo. Right now, it requires (as the author of the following pic described it) someone making a huge mistake for Kitakami to just pull her weight.

Nope. Carries should very much be capable of wiping out inattenttive fools and put the hurt on lone BBs.

According to whom?

It's cheating, plain and simple. Calculating lead on the fly is *the single most important skill in the game* gunnery-wise and this thing trivialises it. It's an immense advantage and destroys any semblance of fairness or balance between players using it and those not using it - to say nothing about how much it wrecks the game balance between ship classes, given how BBs profit disproportionally from it.

Well, driving my Kongo, I found out that the small channel between the islands at C on Fault Line is in fact wide enough that a Phoenix and a Kongo can pass each other without colliding. Was probably a rather traumatising experience for that enemy Phoenix, though: First the deer-in-the-headlights moment of watching an enemy BB entering from the other side of the channel, then getting four shells shoved down his bow from the frontal turrets followed by getting raked by the secondaries at point blank range while realising the hard way that there is an arming distance for torps and finally getting finished by another four shells up the stern from my rear turrets.

So if I were a spiteful individual, I could just get my clanmates to constantly report someone I don't like and have them be functionally permanently placed into your segregation pool. And with the notification, I can even laugh at his misfortune as he gets dumped in there again and again and again and again. Trusting in mob justice through an automated system like this is simply not a good idea.

Yes, yes it is. It's called game balance. Otherwise, we'll end up with World of Battleships.

AP always on the Cola. Stay at around 12km and hammer away. Aim low and get used to the faster shell travel times. You can citadel other cruisers (even Clevelands) rather regularily that way. Even got cits on BBs once a while at about 8km or less.

Magazine detonation. Always funny when someone gets Hood'd. Happened to me once so far with the Kongo; torp blew right under the second turret.

The thing with BBs (that aren't the Kongo) is that if you commit to a flank of the map, you're committed to it for good or bad. Also, shooting stuff at 20+km might be fun, but in practice doesn't do much more than harass and somewhat soften up other BBs. You want to get your firepower and survivability into the fight sooner rather than later and get close enough to go for aimed citadel shots. Seeing BB players at full health halfway through a match always makes me shake my head. You're a battleship, not WoT arty. Why are you so afraid to get your paint scratched a bit while you dish out fire at ranges where you will actually score hits on each salvo?

If it doesn't give any real, tangible in-game advantages the way the lead indicator mod does, it's okay in my book. Different reticules, skins or a permanent display of the information you gain by holding the Alt key are all matters of personal taste and confer no unfair advantage to the user.

Bad design, more like it. If one torp to the stern can completely kill your maneuverability like that, the designers fucked up. Just about any other BB would have still been capable of limited steering with the screws.

A BB player who knows what he's doing can decide matches.

Because at those ranges your chances to hit anything are so low that you generally won't achieve much of note within the 20 minutes of a match, leaving your full potential dreadfully wasted. You want to get close enough that you can consistently land big hits on enemy ships. Yes, that puts you into danger of return fire. So what? You're a bloody battleship, for god's sake! You have more armor than light cruisers have total displacement, a massive hp pool and a unique ability to regenerate part of your hp on the fly. So what if you take some hits? Better to roll in to 10km, take a few hits on the way and then blow that cruiser to the moon rather than futilely try to snipe him from 20km for 15 minutes or sit at 15km where he can hit you pretty reliably, but still has a good shot at evading your return fire. This goes even more if you're driving a fast BB like the Kongo - one of those sitting 20km away and trying to lob shells at me when I'm playing a cruiser is mildly irritating. One barreling straight at me at 31 knots? Now that's something to get really, really nervous about. Because once the range closes enough for him to land consistent hits, I'm just going to get murdered. My normal serious engagement range against other BBs is 15km - anything above is more or less just harassment. Against cruisers, I definitely want to roll in to 10km. DDs aren't worth engaging with primaries unless they're rolling in for a torp run and hence at ~7km or less. Carriers you of course want to get as close and personal with as you can.

Ships getting Hood'd is always funny. My personal is a tie between two moments: - I was driving my Kongo through the DD payground on Big Race, an Omaha tried to do a ballsy point-blank torp attack straight down my bow. He miscalculated and dropped from within arming distance. You can guess what happened next. I then pushed his wreck right into a another torp spread someone else had fired at my bow at the same time from farther off. - Around the A point of Fault line, I swerve my Aoba into an island to dodge a torp spread and get stuck. Fire torps blindly to one side into the corner there. See a Kongo coming around the corner on my other side. He nukes most of my health with a broadside and clearly intends for the secondaries to finish me while he keeps turning... and runs straight into the launcher arc on that side at about 2km distance. He eats a full spread and gets killed by my guns. Then I get sunk by a Cleveland following him. And after that, my other torp spread scores a hit that kills a Fuso through flooding. I just sat there and laughed because the best game I ever had with the Aoba was the product of crazy luck and two dumb BB drivers who managed to get themselves killed by me even after I had already made lethal mistakes.

This was by far the dumbest and most lucky thing that happened to me in the beta. Evaded a torp spread near the A capture point and ran bow-first into an island doing so. Fired one wide torp spread towards A just as a general crowd control measure, then saw a Kongo rounding the corner on the other side to eat me. He blew away ~80% of my healthbar, then kept chugging on into the launcher arc at like 2.5km distance while I was still frantically reversing. Hence he ate a full narrow spread, then got finished by my guns seconds before the secondaries could murder me. A second later, I got blown apart by a Cleveland following him. A few seconds after that, a Fuso got hit by one torp from my first spread and died through flooding. That game accounted for a full 50% of all torp hits I scored while grinding the Aoba. This should tell you something about how often you get to actually use em with that atrocious firing arc.

It's plenty rewarding already imo, especially when you get close enough to an enemy BB and the secondaries start duking it out like Age-of-Sail cannon batteries or when you leave it to the secondaries to finish off a low-health opponent while alreaady swinging the primaries around to the next target. IMO, if you're playing the Kongo at least, you should end up using the secondaries agianst a cruiser or BB at least once a match unless you roll the other team.

Fort Drum, situated in Manila Bay, Philippines. Aka the concrete battleship.

The only AP shell that (barely) breaks 15k damage max on a citadel hit is the 46cm one used by the Yamato. The only way to exceede that (or reach 15k itself with another BB) would be to nuke your magazine and make your ship go up like the Hood. Aiming pays for 8-inchers against BBs. I regularily do 2-3k per salvo into BBs with the Aoba, and that's often with just the two forward turrets firing from 12km or more.

Leave it at that and it'll be glorious. Draws all day as both teams hammer each other for 20 minutes doing next to no damage.

No, no it certainly isn't. There's an element of luck, but if you don't know where to aim, you don't even get a real chance in the first place.

Bridge and superstructure are not part of the citadel. The conning tower is. The conning tower on the Fuso is afaik is the small, rounded tower wedged between the pagoda and the second turret. It has two twin-25mm AA on its roof in 1943 refit hull at least. Should be toted that the conning tower is jsut about as heavily armored as the main turrets, though, so it's not exactly a good target between that and its small size.

I find the low tiers rather balanced overall. The St. Louis, Phoenix and Oamaha are all primarily gun cruisers. They can slug it out to some degree, have good rate of fire and are decently tough. The St. Louis takes it to a more extreme form by having a murderous amount of firepower and being really damn tough for its tier, but it pays for that with very sluggish handling and a speed worse than that of most battleships. The Tatsuta and Kuma on the other hand put a bit less firepower downrange with their guns and are a good deal more fragile, but they're also relatively small, nimble and their torpedos can often be used in a much more aggressive manner in knife fights. Both are in a sense destroyers without smoke, but enough guns to savage real DDs and finish off damaged cruisers. In the higher tiers, US CAs are just loaded down with guns galore and put ridiculous amounts of shells downrange on top of carrying a murderous AA suite and decent secondary batteries. Japanese cruisers comparatively are a bit underpowered right now imo as their torpedos (nice as they can be at times) aren't quite enough to make up for somewhat inferior gunnery, AA *and* them being more prone to citadel hits in cruiser fights - it's also notable that the CAs starting from tier 6 have really bad firing arcs for the torpedo launchers if you want to use them offensively. It's only once you go really high that they in a sense gain back a niche with the Senjo and it's ability of being one hell of a nasty long-range skirmisher due to being able to lob shells at targets from several km beyond its detection radius. Personally, I think IJN CAs would be okay if long-range torpedos got their detection range fixed (IE, have it not be dependent on torpedo range anymore) and the citadel hitboxes on them got overworked to at least make them comparably survivable to US CAs. They'd still pay for their torpedos with less gunnery and AA.

So, this just happened in a match I kept spectating after getting killed: Spooky Ghost Kongo couldn't move or fire his primaries anymore, but his AA kept firing and he kept being shown as alive for the rest of the match.