Xevious_Red

It's a shame you didn't try the tier X CV. Midway DB launch 6 bombs with a 15k alpha. Which means strikes of up to 30k (unless you can find something that can get citadelled by a HE bomb) plus several fires. Hakuryu squads launch 3 bombs with 9k alpha, but since they're AP you can get a strike of 27k that is a lot harder to heal.

This isn't helped by WG who keep giving out XP like candy. For example I'm semi "grinding" the French cruiser line. Since we get tons of free XP there's no reason to not get all the modules. The tier 6 is took 14 battles to complete. The tier 7 took 16. So in about 40 battles you go from being in the low tier protected MM (tier 4), to being tier 8 and therefore being thrown into tier X MM Obviously a newbie probably won't earn quite as much XP and will take a little longer but it's still very fast

Maybe don't try free xp skipping to the tier X when you have zero experience with gun boat DD?

I could open task manager. However Wows was stuck being the program at the forefront - so while I could use the windows key, press Ctr Alt Del, and use ALT+TAB to cycle through open windows as soon as I chose anything it went straight back to Wows.

Overall I really enjoyed it, more so than the current RTS version. Pro's: - Looks lovely - I personally found it more fun/exciting - While you can still easily spot, it's more limited - Focus is now more towards sinking capital ships rather than deleting destroyers - One player can't be completely locked out by one other. - Dive bombers require a degree of skill to use effectively (as judged by the fact some people can pull off hits on DD, while others can barely hit a BB with them) -I like the idea of the sector switching. -CV don't feel too OP when I'm the surface ship and they're attacking me -CV don't feel to UP when using them. -Planes being harder to control once attack has started- rewards lining up correctly rather than having to correct after the attack started -I like the plane refresh mechanic. Cons: -Can't use DCP/repair while flying. Have to abort entire wing just to turn a fire off is bad -Same as above with steering. Could just double tap 1 to return to carrier view - Planes can just fly on their last gearing would be better -Sector switching is fiddly when mapped to O. I remapped to space bar. - Planes "drift" with the mouse as you look around. -Sector switching takes too long, particularly if reallocating from one side to the other. On many ships it's simply not worth swapping. - The AA values don't seem to make any sense. According to the port UI the worcester mid range should fire 10500 rounds a minute (170 per second), doing 750 damage, with 80% accuracy. That to me says I should roughly hit with 140 per seconds, doing 750 each (which is a stupidly high value). Instead you frequently get nothing, maybe a 1050 hit, and the odd 79. At best with the worcester I've had 5-8 plane kills. - I had the opportunity to sit the worcester next to some planes circling (carrier was dead). Despite sitting in my close/mid AA, with the sector focussed and DF on, no plane kills despite being there for 2+ minutes. My AA was damaged, but still seems off. -Plane refresh is too quick. Unless you spam planes at a close target and get them all killed you generally always have a full squad ready to go. In the TST this also seemed to be bugged sometimes, as 9/10 the refreshed really quickly, but occasioanlly they barely refreshed at all. This didn't seem to be linked to anything. - Planes "dance" when going over mountain/it you try starting a torp run over land - You can't cancel an attack unless you drop. Annoying when the midway attack lasts 25 seconds. -Long range AA usually "wears down" planes, and the short range DPS gets the kills. This feels like you are contributing nothing if it's your mid/Long that they are flying through. Perhaps a counter like the spotted/potential damage might help -tier 6 rockets/DB feel rather anaemic. Neutral: Catapult fighters seem off. On the one hand I like the almost fire and forget nature of them, and that a CV player can't get totally locked down by fighters. I'm not a fan of the mechanic where they just do a straight 4 plane kills (2 at tier 6) and then leave. They seem more of a nuicance since all they really do against a full squad is remove its last drop. They do nothing against the first, second and possibly third drop. Presumably when surface ships can also take catapult fighters this will have more impact. Plane detection - I like that you can do stealth plane stuff by staying out of visibility or even ambushed using land masses. However I was using the detected symbol, the minimap, and islands to triangulate unspotted DD and hunt them that way. That seems off - a DD can turn off it's AA, but it can't turn off seeing the planes. Having the visibility shown on the minimap is fine. Having a detected symbol for something that only has a 10km detection and can travel at 270kn is too good an ability IMO Bugs: -Midway torps sometime not tightening up even if flying in perfect straight line for a long time -Had it crash completely and get frozen - couldn't exit game or anything. No error window, eventually had to reset computer.

Don't follow hockey, no idea who he is. Equally though, this has zero negative effect on me, so I don't mind it.

I find use for all the squads. Rockets are for scouting. They're the fastest, they turn the best. They're the best for getting to an allied ship to dump a fighter squad over (which is pretty much a guaranteed 4 plane kills). They're therefore the best at finding a DD. While the rockets don't do a lot of damage (ranging from virtually nothing but you get 48 HVAR to almost ok Tiny Tim's) the speed of their parent planes plus the ease of hitting at least 1 means they are great for resetting a capture. They also seem to do decent module damage which means knocking out torps. Dive bombers. Initially these were hard to use, not aided by the view as they come down. However after using them for a while you recognise the pattern - the reticle appears beneath your planes. You get a window of ajusting the reticle by turning the planes/speeding up/slowing down. Then on the way down the reticle is fairly static so you need to have lead correctly by that point. In the last phase as the planes pull up the reticle lurches forward. You either need to have dropped before this so it doesn't throw you off, or be planning on using it. I personally like using it because your bombs drop right on top of them. AP bombs give nice citadels on BB/CA/CV as long as you know where the citadel is and can aim appropriately. HE DB are usable on all targets, including DD (they're quite good against DD). These have become my favourite choice to use, simply for their versatility. TB are fairly obvious to use, and give the most leeway if you make a mistake since you can keep flying onto a different target. Their slow torps (33kn midway), deep water (IJN), quite long arm time (Hakuryu) and highly telegraphed attack run make them not a good choice against anything that's not a BB, or brain dead. They're not to be sniffed at - they can do a lot of damage - Hak's torps do 18k each and can be a source of high damage numbers. They're primarily a battleship killer though. I'm yet to experiment fully with dropping 8km torps from a plane with 7.5km detection for troll-a-lol stealth plane torping

Because of the way short range AA works (equally damaging all planes) then it seems rare for the long range to kill planes - it merely softens them up for the short range. Similarly if the planes are all equal health then the short range AA will do no kills and then suddenly get 4-6 kills all at once as the HP of the remaining planes all hits zero.

I can't speak for anyone else, but the current RTS I find dull. I can manage all the mechanics, but I just don't find it exciting. My mate tried them ONCE in CBT and basically went "well that's the biggest crock of sh*t won't be playing that again". And he hasn't. 3k games later and he's never touched CV again. He got in the rework. While he's not very good with them, he's at least played 5-6 games in the new version. While he isn't exactly going to suddenly become a CV main, he's far more interested in them now.

Option 1: The code is written to assign pink status automatically, without a manual override. They could spend time writing code to allow a manual backdoor. They then need manpower for people wanting their pink status removed. They then need to spend time arguing with people that got their pink status from doing TK that they can't undo that, no matter how much they claim it's "not their fault he drove into my torps" Fairly soon the people that go AFK if they don't like the line up will realise they can get around it by ALT F4 or by clicking disconnect and then pestering customer service into having the pink status removed Option 2: You play 2 games where your name is pink, which no-one cares about anyway.

My password has what turned out to be a capital O in it that looked like a zero 0

All 4 of the CV will have been actual players. How many of the other 20 were players, and what were they in?

Got all 4. Chose 1 in the poll because technically someone bought me one. Didn't contain a mission though. I did however purchase as many containers as possible from the arsenal with the sovereigns (and then use the sovereigns from those to buy more etc)

It's the initially off putting fact that my brain tries to move the reticle with the mouse (It's a circle, it feels like I should move the mouse), when actually I need to steer the plane. The torp bombers are actually the easiest - you can start the run early and have loads of time to adjust. Almost too much since if you mess up you can stay in attack mode and go for a different target. The rockets are trickier - although at low tier this might be just the low ish number of rockets vs a small DD. The DB are the easiest to mess up - because if their vertical nature you cannot go for a different target - as soon as you click attack you are tied to that area. They are also the least adjustable, and easily prone to overshooting/under shooting particularly if you approach too fast or too slow

Played a few games in the tier 6 ships. Initial thoughts: As a surface ship (tried DD and CA): sector swapping seems easy enough. I had to remap it to spacebar because "O" was far too awkward, but once I had done that it was easy enough. Planes either attack from far enough away to telegraph their attack and give you lots of time to react, or they snap attack you which results in a really wide drop which is easy enough to dodge. As a CV: BB are obviously the easiest to hit, and you can get 5/6 of 6 torps to connect if you don't lose planes to AA. Torps are easy enough to use against cruisers too as long as you can catch them in a turn. Rockets are obviously a bit crap against BB/CA but they weren't that great against DD - useful for resetting cap, but not really killing. Rockets have the bonus of being very fast so good for scouting/placing a fighter squad. Dive bombers seem ok - harder to hit small things but easy enough against CV/BB. Controlling the planes feels a bit clunky - using the mouse and the keyboard at the same time seems to give best result. With the rockets/DB it sometimes is a bit of a guess where the reticle is going to appear when you press attack. The trickiest part is gauging your speed correctly when attacking - as you can easily overshoot with DB if going too fast. However you kind of get used to the controls - Planes are more sluggish than I expected, but this seems like something I can get used to once I'm aware of their limitations in turning etc

I'm finding this throws me off too. It's ok ish when just flying but is clunky when trying to line up an attack - I default to trying to use the mouse and then remember I need to use A/D to aim

Had a chance to have a quick go. Some things worth noting: You start with no XP. You need to play a carrier game to get the XP. You need to play a non carrier game to get credits. You only start with 3m credits. There's a good chance the zao is totally stock. There's no AA equipment available currently. So there's no way of buffing your AA via equipment at present on the test server You have 0 captain skills, and each point costs 20m free xp. You earn 1m free xp from playing carrier. Therefore basically everyone has no captain skills either atm - so no BFT/AFT/man AA AA therefore is pretty much just the base ship. Fun additional fact: the values are wrong on the UI. The Aoba is listed as 4.5km in port. In game it says 5.2km. The guns actually start firing somewhere around 6km. Changing sectors of the guns is actually not too bad once you remap it to a button more convenient than "O". Also each ship has different swapping speed, and different benefit. Montana gets +15%. Farragut gets +50% Also AA has (at least according to port UI) different hit% with some ships very accurate (95%) others not so (50%). This can be different for short/mid/long. Similarly the long range flak bursts do different damage - farragut is 270. Aoba is 450. Ryujo is 600. Mostly been playing around with the AA side first, will try carriers later (can just jump into a game in a non carrier atm)

It is however a good test for CV attacking ships that DONT have a full 19pt max AA build. However playing stock with 0 captain is.....painful

They also want to test how carriers interact with actual players, since bots are very dumb when it comes to avoiding stuff.

This isn't the balancing test anyway -They pretty much said that the values will.all be off, and everyone behaves differently in tests anyway. So no, the AA value of the Montana will not be dictated by someone who has only ever used the Hosho and just spams his planes into the nearest worcester. Those values will be tested by ST. This is a test of the concept - do people find it enjoyable to play? Is it intuitive? Is there enough "skill" or does everyone get the same results? For this you need good players, average players, and bad players if for nothing more than comparing how well the good do vs the bad. You also need existing CV players, players that have never played CV before, ideally totally new players as well, to see how easily they pick it up, and if they find it enjoyable or frustrating, or if they just totally don't get it. The values for what HP planes have, how many in a squad, cycle times etc will be done by ST, not the general unwashed public.

It's not active CV players only. I got an email informing me about it even though I haven't played carriers for months. The actual test seems to have all sorts in it - I'm in. My mate didn't receive an email (never played CV ever) but he clicked apply when it showed up on the main page. He's in too.

We do the same. With a tirpitz and an Asashio. They have a credible chance of just being bought with zero experience. For double bonus hide stats first.

While we're on the subject of better late than never, go into settings and turn on alternative interface (set it on permantly on). Not only will this tell you what ship you are actually facing which is incredibly useful to know, it also tells you how much health they're on instead of a vague approximation of "half-ish". In addition when you use the shift key to look down sights it tells you the flight time of your shells to get to where you're aiming. This is pretty important for judging how much lead to give. While you're in settings turn on last known position for mini map so you can keep track of where the enemy are, then on ship names on mini map so you know what it is that's there. In the main game press the + key several times to make the mini map as big as possible, then use the cog symbol to the top right of the minimap to open the map menu. Turn on your concealment circle, as well as radar range if you have it. This provides very vital info. I also use secondary range if secondary spec'd and sometimes hydro range. Lastly since you will have made the mini map as big as possible and it slightly obstructs your view, use the slider to make it translucent so it doesn't get in the way when dodging torps/looking at things to your right.

Cruisers no longer get 12% as well. Which makes the worcester radar range nerf more pronounced if there's also a CE nerf

What does the "Fire air defense" symbol mean? I was trying to work out if it was your planes spotted by enemy planes (doesn't seem to be), or if you were being attacked by AA (doesn't seem to be that either)