ilhilh

Tirande. You have already had several people mention specifically that you seem to have a vendetta against this ship that you haven't played and yet you still won't stop. We get that you think it is bad, There are enough people around who have bought it that you can probably leave the opinions to them. I have only had 2 games in mine but in the first game where I got 4 kills I could feel the weight of plenty of my team on my shoulders. In the second game I played badly but then our team played badly although 2 x t7 BB+ 1 x t5 BB (them) Vs 3 x t5 BB (us) certainly doesn't help matters. If you scroll up to my previous post you will see that my initial impression (as good as it can be from 2 games in it) is that good players will have little problem making it work unless facing a good opponent, which is pretty rare. If you are a bad CV player then this ship will be more of a challenge than the Hiryu/Ranger and on that basis I would recommend you stick to your guns and go nowhere near it.

Very impressive - particularly for a tier 7 ship. My Yamato begs to differ - got 3 kills in it once and 3 CQE... but with 11km range and that many of them it is perhaps less surprising

First impressions are that it is not a great CV but it is ok. I managed 4 kills in my first game but I did miss a few torps I shouldn't have. I'm not sure whether this is because I somehow can't aim with there being 3 planes or whether I just need to adjust to the plane/torp speed. My biggest fear in it is being CV sniped as I think it will be hard to defend against in 2/2/0 loadout against a decent CV captain but reading stuff on here I can see where some of the problems are. You need to be aggressive with your patrolling and pick up a snipe attempt early. Ragweek talks about tying down enemy fighters and then wrecking the Saipan with his Hiryu, but I think in the Saipan you need to force that engagement far out from your ship and even if your planes lose you get a new squad quickly. With your faster fighters you should have more control over when/where you lock horns. I think that if you have 2 good CV players facing off then in most cases the not-Saipan CV beats the Saipan CV, but in most cases CV captains are distinctly average. You guys need to remember that when talking about how easy you kill them - you are good and chances are your opponent didn't make it as difficult for you as he could/should have. I think a good Saipan captain (particularly with the tier 5 Air Supremacy skill which I don't quite have yet) will be able to deal with a lot of your average CV captains whether they are in Hiryu or Ranger. All of the above is predicated on running 2/2/0 as I have a natural aversion to AS setups but I will keep an eye on people's comments on the effectiveness of the DBs. 8(9)xDBs does have some potential but I worry that they will only be able to get decent damage vs DDs/CVs or by specifically hunting down vessels that have used their repair - running a AS Saipain with HE spamming ships in a division could prove effective. EDIT: I also have no idea why they mentioned the basic requirements (20 games and at least 1 in tier 5) and then didn't bother with it. It was a really easy requirement but it was a sensible one given the different nature of how CVs play and how influential they can be on a game's outcome. Ridiculous. Although if I had to guess the reason it would be that they hadn't implemented the rule and wanted to start selling it as soon as possible.

That sounds like a question a rebellious teenager might ask. You know full well that questioning people who say something is false is ok - the problem arises from how you go about that questioning (this you also know).

Took my Saipan out for its first ever game last night and bumped into forumite Drunken_Jedi in his. Map was ocean. He was chewing through my fighters but between the speed of the TBs and the ammo supply on the fighters meant I was at least kicking out the damage. First we were winning comfortably but then they were suddenly ahead on caps and remaining ships. I was actually certain we had lost. I had no fighters and in the end but snuck some attacks out before Jedi shut me down with his fighters sat above my CV, but by that time I was in range of a Mogami... a Mogami I had knocked down to 2k health but without any DBs for starting DoT I couldn't kill him. I died with 4 kills but we had regained all 3 flags and when our DD killed Jedi it pushed us over the finish line for a very close and hard fought win. I also realised that my fighters consistently losing to identical fighters was odd and this was down to me not putting any modules onto my Saipan so they were performing sub-optimally.

Where do you get that from? When I had XVM for WoWs about 2 months ago it displayed that they were hidden and gave no information.

I used XVM the first time it appeared but it doesn't seem to be on Aslain's currently and as such I haven't bothered installing it. I did make my stats link only though to stop people seeing me in game so easily.

He isn't exaggerating that much. I happily attacked kongo/NY in my tier 4 CV knowing that I could get enough torps onto them to ruin their day. They certainly can't do much of anything to my Hiryu or Ranger.

Saipan has no dual purpose guns and no long range AA but it does have AA armament.

Lol. This thread has actually dragged out some people who think that there are too many CVs. Ahahaha, I Love it. P.S. I bought it.

First ever Witherer depressingly far into my career:

It is very hard to dodge all torpedoes from a well setup cross torp but that is to be expected. But, it is possible to dodge them all although this is often largely down to luck and poor execution of the cross drop: It takes some time (i.e more than it should take to just get to a target and launch). and that is if the target is sailing in a straight line. All they need to do is turn a bit to throw off the positioning of both TB squads. It takes some skill to pull off a proper cross drop due to the timing needed to make sure your second lot of torps are right where the enemy turns - usually when you dodge the second lot of torps it is because there is too much space and time after the first launch. Other planes, even single fighters launched from your target can be a real problem (panic) when using an attack which is often slower than a standard attack. It requires more space to execute than a standard attack and if the ship turns the 'wrong' way it can delay the second Also, in a lot of cases I can hit more torps by not cross dropping. The main purpose of the first squad of TBs in a cross drop is to funnel a ship to into a position that is advantageous to your second TBs who maximise the hits on the target ship. Hopefully you hit one or two from the first drop but you are really setting up for the second squad. But, I can fairly reliably hit 3 out of 4 torps from a standard attack and 6 torp hits is better than 4-5. Cross dropping does have a place (particularly against DDs) but it takes a lot more faffing, doesn't work in plenty of situations and can be less effective (especially including DoT... if you take an extra 30 seconds per attack it can add up over a longer game).

First warning: this post is likely quite long - read it at your peril! Second warning: the poll is to find out how CV playing players play their CV - don't tell me that the poll is missing options because CVs are 'gay' or 'like an RTS game' or 'worse than arty' because... well because I don't care. If you really want to discuss how useless CVs are then you can make your own thread. Ok, onto the thread proper. I essentially want to discuss the different loadouts, their pros and cons whilst tying together my musing and various opinions I see. The reason I am making this thread now is that I have seen what seems to be a fairly substantial shift in the number of people playing strike CVs (particularly USN) and I want to find out why people who have moved to this setup have done so and what it means for teamplay. As you will see I will add some pros/cons that often see people using as justification for their choices and then attempt to debunk them and I'll highlight these with italics. It may also include some anecdotal evidence and I welcome people proving me wrong Disclaimer - my max tier CV is kind of 7 (bought the Lex today but not played it!) so I haven't much experience of the highest tiers except in my BBs facing them (obviously only occasionally since it is rather quiet up there!). Also, I'm a bit of a balanced loadout fanboy, but this thread should explain my reasoning. Air Superiority Pros Easiest to play Best for protecting your team Best for spotting Best for teamplay Cons You cannot do much damage You are at the mercy of your team mates utilising the benefit afforded them by your planes You don't get much XP for shooting down planes You can't have sufficient air cover everywhere all of the time All of this translates to you losing more games <---this is the anecdotal bit! I've already highlighted 2 pros as perhaps not being all that proponents of AS claim but even the top one isn't so much a reason for choosing it - you shouldn't want easy, you should want good. I think the reason people choose AS is mainly because they lose in dogfights to AS players and instead of learning to deal with them they join them... and if they kill a lot of planes they translate that to helping the team - and it isn't the same thing. Particularly if you fight another AS CV and most of your 40 plane kills are fighters then it hasn't protected your team from anything really! Then there are the cons. Your damage output is fairly woeful regardless of the enemy CV - even if the enemy is strike and cannot shoot your bombers you cannot do very damage to reduce the number of enemies you face. On top of that it is very hard to kill an entire attack wave even if they bunch up. And it is too easy for other CVs to split up and get around your defences. Killing most things is not good enough when your entire loadout is aimed at preventing damage from planes - it is your raison d'etre. If you specialise in controlling the skies then you should be able to lock it down and the reality is you can't - I certainly don't fear AS in my balanced config. As for the spotting, once you have killed an enemy attack wave you need to re-arm otherwise you will be unable to defend the next wave successfully and that is bad (see the point above). This reduces your ability to spot for your team as the reality is for most of the game you will be chasing enemy planes as opposed to spotting DDs for prolonged periods. And from tier 6+, or definitely tier 7+ the CVs have too many planes for you completely stop them from being a threat and until you do that you cannot become a dedicated spotter. You also read people saying that from a BB perspective AS is great because they keep you alive but most people posting that are probably good enough to make use of being alive. I could keep alive a platoon of battleships but if they are all 48%ers then are they going to use that gift and get us the win? Probably not... As I mention in con #5 I think this all translates into a lower win rate than other loadouts and this is mainly because you remove yourself from equation deciding who wins and given the number of bad/average players you cannot afford to be a passenger. Balanced Pros Jack of all trades* Usually an equal mix of fighters/TBs/DBs Good (strong) damage potential Ability to protect your strike force, yourself and friendly ships using your fighters Cons *Master of none! Reduced damage potential (strike squadrons) compared to strike and potentially a smaller number of squadrons As I mention above I'm a big fan of the balanced loadout. It allows you to deal out significant and game altering damage, protect yourself, protect your team (to a certain extent) and protect your strike group thus maximising the damage it can deal. You can neutralise AS - by this I mean you can engage their fighters when you want to to stop them getting your strike planes. Hell, often against bad ones you can out kill their planes and you certainly don't need to worry about being sniped. Against strike you can be a PITA whilst knowing your strike planes are safe. Against balanced if you are decent you can outperform them. The downsides are that you are weaker at both killing planes and doing damage than the specialised roles. In the USN line you operate with 1 less air group although this is either 1 less fighter or 1 less DB so the TBs remain the same. Strike Pros Massive, game winning damage potential Cons Probably the most difficult loadout to master Hard countered by AS CVs Limited AA defence for your team i.e. you either kill the enemy CV or it is free to operate how it pleases Limited self defence capability Biggest gamble I've only thought of 1 pro, but it is a biggie. You take the huge damage potential offered by strike and use that to force wins. You are basically taking a lot of responsibility onto your shoulders to carry your team and out-damage their CV. I have seen it described as almost being a game of 'chess' since you either have no fighters or a very weak fighter force. This can mean that when facing anything except another strike loadout you have to be very careful, and very sneaky, if you want to succeed. It is all about misdirection and potentially sacrifice of part of your strike force in order to get as much damage done as possible. Your ability to protect your team, and in turn yourself is quite limited. You can only stop their planes by taking out their CV... and this seems to be a very common goal of a strike CV. It makes sense, because if you are not taking losses to enemy planes it of course improves your damage output. But, on the flip side it usually takes quite a long time to get to their CV since your protection from enemy planes is nearly non-existent which forces you to take a circuitous route to avoid your planes being spotted until it is too late. You need to do this because if you do get spotted it is quite easy for any non-strike setup to ruin your attack, which wastes too much time. Over the weekend I have seen 2 occasions where the enemy planes made their attack run on my CV at around the 15 minute mark... and both failed. The first one tried a second run at the 10 minute mark and in total had 1 torp hit and maybe 4 bomb hits... not even half my HP and in neither case did I have AA protection. And again, if huge damage is your raison d'etre then spending 10 mins trying to CV snipe is not a good use of your time. Surely? Ironically the strike loadout finds CV sniping easiest when fighting another strike loadout which is when the threat to your own planes is at it lowest. And most of the problems I mention here are what I see when locking down strike loadouts in a limited fashion using my balanced loadout - a strike loadout can multiply these issues. As I say above strike is the hardest loadout since you need to be patient and good in order to succeed but perhaps in world of bananas/tomatoes that is enough. Strike loadouts work because most of the time your opposite number just isn't that great. This means that you can force wins most of the time and push your win rate and average damage up and just absorb the odd frustrating lockdown. My belief that with 2 good players the strike players loses to the balanced player most times. The teamplay issue I have mentioned it above but people often use the teamplay issue as a big argument for AS loadouts. The argument is that by killing lots of planes they are stopping their team taking damage. They also mention spotting which as I've mentioned above isn't as easy as is claimed because a lot of the time you are chasing enemy planes or rearming. Not to mention the fact that all 3 loadouts are capable of spotting. However, these people ignore the fact that balanced loadouts can kill plenty of planes and do damage and that the massive damage strike squadrons can do. Also, not only is the damage you do a huge benefit for your team (less for your team mates to do) you can also direct it to important locations relatively quickly - there are caveats to that which include enemy planes and floating AA platforms, but it doesn't stop the fact that you can open up a flank, or change a 1v2 to a 1v1 or 2v2 to a 2v1 by smashing up a ship. I have lost count of the number of times I have saved a team mate or tipped the balance of several engagements in a match. Sometimes it obvious when you save a team mate by taking out an enemy ship but often people come into contact with a half dead Tirpitz and have no idea that the reason for it being half HP instead of full is the CV who but a spread of torpedoes into its belly. That being said, CV play can be relatively selfish anyway. If anything directly affects your own survival you stop what you are doing and deal with it but that is no different to any ship - just perhaps more noticeable on a class with such force projection. If I had to list priorities for my fighters in order of importance it would probably look like: Keeping me alive Keeping my strike force alive i.e. helping it onto target Spotting enemy ships on our cap Keeping friendly ships alive (highest importance going to friendly CVs). This might include spotting Added to all of this there is the job of re-arming so that they are ready to do those jobs and what it means is there is limited help to team mates. This all means that I might leave a BB to spot a DD on his own or I might not be able to stop a CA getting nuked, but if I'm doing my job properly then in the end I should increase our team's chance of winning and as such I'm doing my job even if it requires your death. A final thought Going back to my reason for making this thread - the increase in strike CVs and then tying it to their only AA defence being CV sniping... it makes me CV snipe more. I don't usually pick it as my strategy but if the enemy CV is intent on my demise then the safest course of action for me is to stop them being able to hurt me...

You have to assume it was some kind of performance issue but as others have said, make it a graphics option, perhaps turned off by default and if you think your PC is up to it you can enable it!

This is the most recent information I have seen: Source

Assuming the 4 torp squadron being IJN, the converging torp spread mean that it is actually very rare to get all 4 torps to hit because they start too spread out. So, your choice is to drop far back (loads of time to dodge) or launch close and settle for getting 3 hits

My last tier 10 game... 10 destroyers. 6 on our team, 4 on theirs. 3 of ours died really quickly we lost. I managed to kill 3 ships in my Yamato but in the end I was the only ship contesting our cap Vs a benson in the cap and another 5 ships all pounding me.

Is this purely down to getting +2 DBs? It does seem a popular choice but the Hiryu is a bit of an animal. I didn't mean hard in terms of the ability to do damage, I meant harder in terms of your ability to defend yourself and look after your planes changes a lot i.e. you have to run for friendly ships or just drag them way out of line. Having a fighter means that you can just throw that into the mix and even if you lose the squad your strike planes can get away safely. I have only just bought the lex so still getting to grips with it and having bought the Mahan the same day I am uber poor but I might re-spec to AA once I have some credits and try the 0/1/3 a bit. Back to general thoughts - do people running strike find that they sometimes get locked down by decent players running non-strike setups or is it quite easy to deal with any opposing CV? I mention in my original post that I think strike works well because most players are... well just a bit crap but I am interested to know if this is the case.

Because after you had taken out the enemy CV, and perhaps some juicy lumbering BBs you might finally go for the DDs causing the torp walls?

My Yamato still works and is still better than my Montana.

I think with the extra squads it can be more forgiven if your TBs start getting chewed up by fighters but the Langley is brilliant and the 6 plane squadrons mean it is good for ensuring you get some hits. When you get used to them both then although the USN CVs can perform really well I think the IJN ones are just a bit more flexible. You should definitely check out this thread: http://forum.worldofwarships.eu/index.php?/topic/7608-guide-basic-cv-gameplay/ and then also for more advanced stuff check: http://forum.worldofwarships.eu/index.php?/topic/40984-advanced-carrier-guide/ - it can be a problem that these pages get a little outdated due to changes but the basic principles are right. From the basic guide (first one) one of the most important things to start getting to grips with is the arming distance on torps. Once you get used to the arming distance you can start to drop torps as close to the target as possible but still have them arm - that way they get hit by the maximum number possible.

This. The Saipan will be weak at CV sniping due to not really being able to be certain of DoT. It could technically try using 1 set of TBs to get flooding, wait for repair and then try with the second set but I think your chances of success would be slim due to a) probably going to lose a plane to AA from each attack meaning that b) your flood chance has to come from 2 torps assuming both hit. The speed of the planes will mean it will be easier for the Saipan to get past enemy fighters and onto a target but I don't think it will be great enough to casualties.

Open window. Foot-->Cat. Close window.

lol. That is proper wishful thinking.

Top damage is a fairly crap indicator. Ave damage is much better but I wonder if he has enough games in the Saipan to give a true figure.