Magni56

And then your cruisers meet a bunch of enemy cruisers with some decent BB players mixed in and get minced. Hell, even against a lone BB driven by a good player, a cruiser wolfpack is going to suffer before dragging it down.

Why not both? Some BBs are better long-range ombatants, other good at brawling. Many can do both. Knowing when and where to go in and start throwing your weight around in earnest is a big facet of how to play battleships properly. You can hurt other BBs at long range and harass cruisers, but it's in close that the real killing tends to happen. *cough*Nagato*cough Meh. Turn towards the torps and either sidestep the spread or drive in-between 'em. I've learned all of that back in the early CBT already with the Kongo because of all the cruiser captains who would launch panic torps to try and shake off the 30knot BB racing after them with a gleefully cackling madman at the helm.

Kongo is the most fun ship in the game and I will not hear any slander against that beauty.

Not really? A different skill floor and different specific requirements are perfectly fine as long as the classes are balanced against each other when in the hand of competent players. Because you can try and shoot a marginally aware cruiser from beyond his range all match long without achieving anything helpful. Your "advantage" truly is priceless in that case - for the other team because it means you've functionally removed yourself from the match already. If you want to actually kill a cruiser in a timely manner, get stuck in and learn to dole out those citadels from medium-close range that will actually wipe him out in short orders. That's a whole lot of nice theorycrafting. Too bad it's all founded on a meaningless red herring. Hit rate is ultimately of minor relevance. It's damage that's important. And in terms of average damage, a decently-used BB will be right on par with, if not better than a cuiser. Again, I've managed roughly equal average damage per match in the Kawachi and the freakin' St. Louis despite the lower hit rates. Woops. Also funny how you talk about "everyone" knowing the effects of fires. Well, I do. And when I'm in a BB, I certainly don't fear them at all. Because some minimal thought into managing the damage control and recovery consumables render them a minor nuisance. Leaving a cruiser with the unenviable task to land dozens of salvoes on me to actually kill me while *one* good salvo from me will do the same to him. That you think citadels are pure RNG doesn't make them pure RNG, it only shows your laziness and unwillingness to actually seriously learn about how to get them. Positioning, timing, proper lead, proper distance ec. All of these influence your chances of scoring a citadel. You can stack those dice in your favour or against you by your own actions - but I guess it's jsut far easier to simply do nothing and then blame it all on RNG insead. And that you consider long-range torpedo attacks reliable damage really does make me laugh what with those only really being reliable against the absolute worst players.

And yet I somehow do just fine with my BBs. Hell, even with the dreaded Kawachi I had average damage slightly higher than I had on the St. Louis. Anedotal evidence like you are trying to push ain't worth anything. Averages are what's important.

Edit: Sorry, put this in the wrong section. I'd be grateful if a mod were so friendly as to move this over to the bug reports. Thanks. So, I just had a bit of a strange episode in the Wickes. Namely, all of my guns except the forward one jsut spontaneously decided to stop working. No, they weren't destroyed. They showed up laoded and ready and intact on all status displays, but wouldn't turn or even fire when the whole ship was turned to swing them on target. When tried switching shells, the reload bar simply remained empty on those three. Damage Control didn't help (wouldn't trigger and no repairable crit was displayed) and neither did using other consumbales, switching to torps and back, turning AA off and on etc. Nothing. Made two pics in the midst of battle to record it. Empty reload bars: Intact, but completely non-responding gun mounts:

The joke is of couse that a good battleship driver will do average damage right up there on par with cuisers anyway. It just happens that doing so requires skills other than just good aim. Bad players bith about the RNG, good players move and fire in ways that minimise its effects and are content with what they get from doing so.

LOL. BBs are plenty fun. If you know how to play them well. Unfortunately, that requires a level of situational awareness and ability to think ahead that is sadly beyond the capabilities of many a newbie. A well-handled BB will eat a cruiser alive and ask for more and even the low-level ones are potentially quite beastly if used well. You'll easily do damage averages on par or exceeding that of cruisers once you got a feeling for driving BBs - it's jsut that people far too easily give up before that or jsut plain ignore that little detail because hei big damage numbers come from single devastating hits instead of the constant nibbling you do with cruiser guns. If you manage to be bad in the New Mexico, just stop playing battleships. Just stop. That thing is marvelous except fo its poor speed.

It happened to me once during beta without mods. Only ones I'm using are different ship icons and crosshair anyway. And his isn't about blae. It's about a bug in the game that needs fixing. You know, what a beta is supposed to be for.

Um, no? Cruisers are also limited to their like 3 planes. And right now, the spotter plane is already pretty cool with it's ability to allow you to look over islands and pull off trickshots that way.

St. Louis seems to have an abnormally low and small citadel from the side perspective, which makes her very hard to citadel pen through the belt. However, she's considerably more vulnerable to plunging BB-calibre AP shells going through her upper decks and into the citadel. I've scored citadel pens quite regularily on the St. Louis during my Kawachi grind by shooting her from ~8-9km, where the trajectory of the Kawachis guns cause plunging fire. In fact, the Kawachis broadsides weirdly enough felt *more accurate* at that range in general than they felt at 5km or below. This. Also, you need to learn ot think ahead. For a good battleship driver, it's important to act pre-emptively to adress upcoming situations. Being able to estimate how the situation will be in half a minute and acting on it immediately is more important than twitch reflexes to truly use BBs to their full potential. Situational awareness remains as OP as ever in that regard.

I think it's less the floatplane and mroe that attacking it is quite often going to cause the fighter squadron to fly into the AA umbrella of the floatplanes mothership. Good luck fishing them out of the water mid-battle.

You, sir, need to find the shift key and punctuation keys on your keyboard before tellign someone else that they're making "an sbsolute arse" of themselves. Fire was considered a primary threat for warships functionally ever since there weas such a things as warships and continues to be exactly that right up to the present day. Every warship *ever* has been built around the premise of trying to withstand missile (and/or ramming depending on era) attacks, flooding and fire - to the best efforts of it's respective builders. It did not make any of them invulnerable to these things any more than a bulletproof vest makes you immune to getting shot. Anecdotes like that are the worst reasoning ever. I've once been magazine-detonated two games in a row by Kawachis. Nerf Kawachi primaries!

Yes, there's nothing to burn in ships stuffed full with all kinds of ammo for all kinds of wepaonry every, electrical systems that can create full-scale fires by themselves, wooden decking etc. etc. et. Ships of the time were in fact utterly fireporoof and nobody at alla ever feared that they could actually burn. Which is of course exactly why damage control techniques all but uniformingly considered fire the literally biggest threat to deal with, right? This grasping at straws of yours is even more pathetic than the whining about "every shell" setting fires. Because clearly when playing a CL game and firing HE only, I earn as many fre ribbons as shell hit ribbons... Of couse what's evne more pathetic is that it's all but exclusively BB fanboys that engage in it despite the fact that BBs are the the class that is the *least* endangered by fires already thanks to massive hp pols and damage recovery.

...you do know that 203mm shells are *higher* velocity than 155s, yes?

So instead you get the "you're dead" message and your burning wreck coasting around as a decoration/navigation hazard once they implement different death animations. What a great difference. And with out of control fires on a grand scale, whatever crew's still on board will be busy getting out. The armored hull would in fact NOT provide prolonged protection with the whole upper ship burning intensely. Temperature transfer alone would start to cook the poor buggers and start fires inside. At the scale we're talking, there is no getting the fires under control anymore. You're lucky to slow it down if you go all the way to flooding compartments entirely and even then it's only a question of time until the ship dies. And it sure as hell ain't fighting anything else while dying like that. Truly catastrophic fires consuming a ship is what's perfectly consistent with existing game mechanics. In fact, it's part of them.

Three so far today with the Kongo. Two ended with the Atlanta dying, third with it beating a hasty retreat after getting kicked in the citadel just once. Atlanta blows up embarassingly quick when you know where to put those AP shells. Nothing funnier than one of them setting you on fire only to lose 80%+ of his healthbar on your return salvo and then deciding that he really wants to be somewhere else right now. Oh, and I take atual care about managing my damage control, which kinda makes a difference. Protip: Hitting the R button for a single fire icon is a waste and not worth the cooldown. A few thousand damage ain't **** when you're driving a BB, even moreso when it's fire damage that can be mostly regenerated back. Why would a ship need to sink to lose all combat capability to the point of being a useless wreck? Hell, a ship dying by out of control fires? Sooner or later it's gonna reach the magazines and blow the whole thing to the moon anyway.

With the slow reload on the Furutaka turrets, you can change your angle during reload and then swing back once the guns are about to be ready again. And no, her job ain't hunting DDs. You're better off going after other cruisers and BBs.

If you get burned down by a single cruiser, you're doing it wrong. A bit of good management of repair and damage control and it'll take even machinegun cruiser like the St. Louis a long, long time to actually sink you. Meanwhile, BB-calibre AP can still make cruisers go pop like balloons if you're good at aiming.Only time you really do get burned down "rapidly" is if you've blown your repair and several cruisers are peppering you with so much HE that you quickly get multiple fires going again. Which begs the question of how you got into a situation that allowed multiple cruisers to gang up upon you. Fire right now is the ne thing that gives CLs a chance to actually somewhat hurt BBs. Not nearly as much as a BB can hurt them, though.

That's great. It also only happens if you're either ganged up upon by multiple cruisers without having any teammates nearby helping you or when you do it wrong and try to engage the cruiser in a long-range duel instead of trying to close the distance to your preferred range. The secret is that at the low tiers, you should be aggressive at the start and move in range to trade fire with the enemy team, then fall back behind your own teammates to recover hp before coming back again and repeating that. I don't even care about fires unless it's at least two burn symbols while doing that because I expect to repair a large portion of that damage anyway and I'm quite certainly not afraid to get my ship banged up a bit - with the biggest hp pool in the game and the ability to heal parts of it back up there's absolutely no reason to fear getting stuck into a slugfest. As for my actual experience in burning down BBs, a good example would be a nice St. Louis T3 game I spent lately firing mostly at Kawachis and South Carolinas. 133 HE shell hits created a grand total of 8 fires. Hardly the fiery armageddon that HE spam is hyped up to be. Meanwhile, I very much tread lightly around any BB that's displaying some actual competence at this. Because even just one citadel hit with AP from a Kawachi or South Carolina will instantly nuke something like 40% of the healthbar of a St. Louis - to say nothing about the tendency of later ruiser to pop like balloons if they catch a BB salvo of AP shells to the waterline. And that citadel hit is more likely than you think even agianst the notoriously tough St. Louis if the Kawachi/SC player is smart and fires from around 8-9km to get plunging shots. There are only two kinds of cruisers I'm afraid of when driving a BB: - The Phoenix/Omaha/Murmansk/IJN ruiser that managed to get right up in my grill and is about to try and ram a bunch of torpedos down my throat. - The one who brought two or more friends and managed to catch up to me while there's nobody there to support me. And this is from someone who considers BBs his favourite class and whose highest-tier ship right now is the 30-knot nightmare of any cruiser captain known as Kongo. Edit: Calling BB AP situational like Liare up there makes me laugh. The only situation in which you should ever fire HE out of a BB primary is if you target is a destroyer or the matchmaker had a brainfart and you're now in a Kawachi or South Carolina gunning it out against a New Mexico or Warspite. Against BBs of remotely the same tier and cruisers of all sorts, AP is flat-out the better choice in such a large majority of situations that loading HE becomes counterproductive thanks to the long reload cycles on BB primaries. If that enemy BB is angled, you don't switch to HE. You wait until he's showing more of his broadside or you fire the salvo a bit higher to send it penetrating into his lower superstruture and perhaps kick his turrets about a bit. You don't waste half a minute switching to HE during which he might as well turn back and give you his side again.

I'd say it's marginally useful for BBs because they'll be firing almost exclusively AP against anything but destroyers and shaving off 30% from a 30 second switch is a lot more telling than shaving 30% off of a 10 second or 5 second reload cycle. It's basically a skill you grab for your BB captain if you've maxed him out have a point left.

HE is the ammo of chice for 5in and 6in guns against anything better armored than a japanese light cruiser. 8in AP does better against cruisers than HE and battleship guns do better with AP against everything but DDs if you know how to score those citadels. Even without a citadel hit, BB-calibre AP can do some serious damage with mundane penetrations. I had salvoes with the Myogi and Kongo scoring in excess of 10k damage without citadel penetrations. Burning down BBs with HE is an exceedingly inefficient and time-intensive tactic against anyone good at managing his damage control and repair ability. A HUGE portion of fire damage is regenerable with the BB repair skill, so leaving the big boy any breathing space means he'll come back for round 2 with much of your damage undone - and can meanwhile still erase your ruiser with one good salvo.

I can be useful in some cases, most so for BBs when a destroyer pops up close enough to become your priority and you need to switch to HE quick. Having those ready ten seconds faster can be worth more than overpenning the tincan with a shell or two. Still not really worth it unless you have a point spare and don't know what to do with it.

With the amount of time Hosho or Langley squadrons have against T4 ships, it is only a question of patience to get a drop with multiple hits on a Myogi even with one squad alone no matter how much it tries to wiggle. And patience the carrier driver can afford with his planes being in virtually no danger at all unless there's a fighter squadron bearing down on 'em. Even "fast" rudder BBs cannot compensate fast enough to dodge that. As it is, AA at low tiers might as well not exist at all for all the good it actually does.

I'll be waiting in a fully upgraded Kongo. Sooooo many cruisers to kill... Also gonna keep the St. Louis in port.