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It actually is kind of discouraging when those 40 planes you struggled to shoot down happen to be less than a third or two fifths of a CV's reserves.

You get 15% faster turret rotation. That's kind of a big deal on some of the really heavy hitters like Yamato with its 72s turret rotation time.

Pensacola is a fantastic ship in its own right. New Orleans is where that line takes a slight nosedive. The biggest letdowns for me were Minekaze -> Mutsuki -> Hatsuharu and Amagi -> Izumo. Out of that bunch I hated Izumo the most just because you have to grind it for ages.

Air superiority only works at low-ish tiers. At higher tiers, CVs tend to fling too much poop at each other for your fighters to make a difference, given their very limited ammo capacity.

By all means, go ahead and play a high tier cruiser, preferrably with 203mm main batteries. From first hand experience I can tell you that I'd rather engage three enemy cruisers, one ship at a time, than one BB. It pays better and I get to deal more damage. At long distances - the distances needed to not lose >50% of your hitpoints to one BB salvo - your damage won't be consistent. Yes, there are 6k damage salvos. Yes, there's fire. No, it doesn't happen every salvo. The amount of time needed to sink an enemy BB and the resulting low efficiency means that cruisers ARE FAR better off engaging other cruisers and DDs, should they get spotted, despite "HE wrecking BBs". It is far more efficient to trade your hitpoints with other cruisers and sink one to four ships in the time it'd take you to stare down a BB with more hitpoints while risking losing a significant amount of hitpoints and/or time. As far as OP goes: These kinds of short distance engagements where the CA or CL actually exposes his broadside should end up with the CA/CL dying to three to four citadel penetrations unless the BB is a terrible shot. If the BB messes up - as OP demonstrated gloriously - he dies. He had two full salvos. He fudged them up. He lost. This doesn't mean that CLs/CAs pull this kind of stuff consistently at these distances.

Nope.

Thanks for the effort. I guess I should've been a bit more specific: I've been looking for ways to attach replay files but apparently "I'm not permitted to attach this kind of file".

The crux of this discussion is that as you progress up the tech tree, BBs generally get faster while CAs and DDs get slower. At top tiers, USN CAs - the type of cruiser you need for escorting duty - are only ~10-15% faster than BBs. Meanwhile, spotting distances for planes stay the same while their speed increases by ~50%, giving you much less time to react with your slower, less maneuverable ship. All of this boils down to escorting CAs being held on a much, MUCH tighter leash. Couple that with BBs having ranges in excess of 20km and you end up in a situation where, in order to provide effective AA support, you need to give up your main battery as a means of earning experience and cash. This is the primary reason why my own damage doesn't seem to increase from tier 6 and up, though it could also be the simple fact that New Orleans is a weaker platform than both Cleveland and Pensacola. What you're describing is obviously true for low-ish tiers. You can afford to and have to be aggressive against DDs. In the current high tier meta, however, you're pretty much forced into the AA role. The anti-DD role is very secondary. Both require vastly differing playstyles to the point at which if you devote yourself to one, you cannot really fulfill the other one effectively. A CA without sonar is relatively weak to DDs, a CA without AA barrage is worthless in the AA role. Edit: If anyone told me how to attach files to posts it'd be much appreciated.

Ahh, but here's where your idealism doesn't work most of the time: Being "selfish" and killing a bunch of enemies (aka actively engaging in combat, using both your main battery and your hitpoints as a resource) can provide your team with a way higher winchance than babysitting one particular ship for the entirety of the match. This is particularly true when it comes to CVs who camp behind islands, thinking they're clever. I always peg those to stay close to the fleet in order for me to provide AA to both BBs and the CV in question. Removing yourself from ship-to-ship combat is a massive deal when AA isn't the only duty you're supposed to have in a CL/CA.

If anyone tells me how to attach replays to this post, I'll happily provide a replay showing off how to escort and why it's not rewarding, even when you end up protecting the right target and manage to intercept and shoot down a decent amount of planes. Edit: Spoiler contains the results of said match. Consider this: Two USN CAs tried to protect the CV more or less sporadically throughout the game. Both CAs managed to shoot down a grand total of 61 planes. Midway carries 136 planes and he didn't even try to not fly over CAs with the AA ability on. Also, consider that, despite its tier, Des Moines has sh** for AA DPS. He has basically as much AA DPS as me - only with longer range - meaning that this situation would've basically been the same if I too was in a DM. Also, as a result of being tied up with AA duty, our DM did jack sh** apart from that throughout this game.

Meh. You're right, sitting at rock solid 76.9 fps with 52% utilization of the GPU, according to Afterburner.

76 fps is what the internal fps counter can display. Using external ones like Afterburner shows you the proper framerate and it does go higher than 76. I'm running it on a Xeon E3-1240v3, a GTX970 and 8GB or RAM, all at stock speeds. Edit: That's what a buddy of mine observed. I was and still am going by the internal one and, to be completely honest, cannot be bothered to use external overlays like Afterburner.

...and yet, controlling seven units simultaneously would be considered very light for any proper strategy game, especially given the pacing of this game. Very little happens over the course of split-seconds in this game. I don't think this will be too big of an issue. Players have plenty of time to get accustomed to controlling a lot of squadrons at a time and yes, there will be plenty of awful CV drivers - just like there are plenty of awful BB, CA and DD drivers.

Wouldn't mind it at all if it was just for those flags that work outside of the matches i.e. the +50% exp flag, the -5% repair cost flag or the +20% credits earned flag. Going that route would be this game's equivalent to boosters and those are fair. As is, I'm mildly annoyed by that move.

While I certainly do not disagree with you, pape's performance has nothing to do with mid tier cruisers, aka the topic of this discussion.

That's an issue with module cost in general. Only at mid tiers is it possible to make enough dough to pay for the upgraded modules you've unlocked in that time and it is true for all ships. CVs suffer from it more with them having more stuff to unlock. Talking from personal experience with the USN CA line, I can tell you that I did not make enough money in OBT to pay for the three upgrades I could unlock on the New Orleans while unlocking said upgrades.

Just treat lost planes like hitpoints and have them be the "ammo resupply" after each battle. Lower the CV's own repair cost to account for that and make "losing all planes" + "having your CV destroyed" - with it being weighted towards the loss-of-all-planes part - a tad more expensive than losing a regular ship + the associated ammo cost because CVs rarely lose all their reserves in higher tiers. Edit: This is actually one aspect I'm the least worried about. Wargaming has been pretty good about balancing credit earning potential between the classes of vehicles in World of Tanks and extracting and interpreting this data from the servers really isn't difficult.

- Change CA's AA DPS distribution to have more DPS at longer ranges while having lower overall AA DPS. Such a change would facilitate more efficient escorting duties and encourage teamplay overall. - Decrease the AA DPS bonus provided by the AA ability on CAs and CLs (currently it's a 6x multiplier as far as I know) and increase the base AA DPS. As is, without the ability I cannot hope to shoot down more than three planes out of a 24 plane zerg as a New Orleans with full-AA loadout against an equally tiered Shokaku. The situation is less dire with the ability running. This means that, as is, even AA CAs are reliant on an ability with less than 20% uptime for both AA DPS and the panic effect. Meanwhile, shot down squadrons replenish in less than a minute and high tier CVs have enough reserves to not give too many sh**s about losing a squadron or two to an angry CA trying to cover his tomato teammates that're running away from the CA in question. - Reward people properly for shooting down planes. That change is pretty much self explanatory and would incentivise even CVs to actually play the fighter-heavy loadouts. However, those loadouts have their own issues as I've seen described by Cronos, for example. Since Wargaming's design decisions are driven by statistics alone, none of these discussions matter in any way and pretty much serve only for people to vent their frustration.

That's a given. The fighter does not, however, stray farther than 4km from the ship itself as far as I have noticed, meaning that by the time the fighter does f*** all, enemy squadrons have already been panicked by the AA ability.

Wargaming can give them 0 DPS for all I care if they allow me to control them directly. I've had way too many situations where I was charged at by the inevitable CV zerg squad with my floatplane doing its best tomato impersonation on the other side of the ship.

Pensacola is by no means better armored than Cleveland and it has the downside of having a ridiculously large citadel compared to Cleveland. In other words: A poorly driven Pensacola is even squishier - both in absolute and relative terms - than a Cleveland. As far as OP is concerned: Cleveland is where you should already have developed a sense of angling and how to mitigate damage - especially if enemies try to AP your butt. Now, granted, angling between salvos doesn't really work due to the rate of fire you have, but it's an ability you should absolutely (ab-)use against CAs with 203mm guns and any and all BBs. As for the ammo: I found plunging fire to be underwhelming in just about every situation due to the low reliability at these distances. Your mileage may vary. This meant that I'd fire HE at all distances against targets I couldn't reliably penetrate UNLESS I had the side of a low health BB that needed a quick killing. In that case you can load AP and shoot the hopefully flat side. You won't penetrate. The spalling damage, however, is far greater than the direct damage you could do with HE and it's fairly consistent. AP itself is reserved for cruisers that're silly enough to present their sides. Shoot the mid section below the smoke stacks and right above the water line. I've had my citadel penetrated five times in one salvo by a Cleveland, who knew what he was doing, in my Pensacola. In terms of the playstyle: You cannot really afford to be aggressive on your own if there's a CV on the enemy team. In that scenario you need to support your team against him and intercept cruisers and destroyers without straying too far from the main force. Your BBs will have to dictate the speed of the engagement. If there is no CV, most of the time, you can be way, WAY more aggressive with your positioning and still do well. Note that Cleveland has a ridiculously high gun shell arc when firing at long distance, meaning that you can abuse terrain like few other ships. This leads to situations in which you can fire at a target over a piece of terrain while that target is unable to retaliate.

Minekaze is the best IJN DD in the game - not just tier-for-tier - despite it being the predecessor to five other ships in that line.

The best part about that is that Sharana didn't have to launch a single aircraft to force that play. The mere presence of him is enough to impose a very specific playstyle on the entirety of a team. How the f*** does that sound reasonable to you? A single player forcing an entire team to play in a very specific way is ridiculous. A single player forcing an entire team to cooperate and ball up and even then, such a play does by no means guarantee victory, as this kind of play is strictly sub par against a normal BB/CA/DD composition where you risk being torped to death by DDs due to the lowered maneuverability in such a convoy. This is too much power for one player in a 12vs12 format. Fair enough.

You also humped the island in that game, if I remember correctly, and ate at least one salvo for 15k from me. It wasn't just your team's fault. In any case, I'd like to point out a statement by Ectar that went along the lines of "If a carrier gets into the range of another ship's guns, it is dead.". I can dig out plenty of replays that show that to not really be true and plenty of replays with lone carriers being able to force a draw after the timer runs out before they're chased down. Between map border exploits and Wargaming's decision to not only make carriers' speed on par with cruisers, but also to give them the second highest amount of hitpoints in the game, they have turned out to be quite durable. This goes double for IJN ones with less than 13km detection range. In fact, I've seen some engagements against carriers take upwards of five minutes because said carrier was barely slower than the pursuer while being able to dish out maximum damage and exposing the smallest crosssection possible, only to have said engagement end in a draw because the timer ran out. No other class of ships has this big of an impact on any given match, no other singular ship is capable of making an entire team huddle up like a bunch of scared sissies. This is WoT artillery all over again: A class of vehicles that effectively denies vast parts of the map through sheer presence while not being at any risk apart from other vehicles of its kind. This is terrible design on a multitude of levels. Unfortunately, unlike artillery, I don't see a competitor coming up any time soon to "encourage" Wargaming to question some of their design decisions. The bottom line is: If they're unwilling to balance these monstrosities against other ships, they should at least force them to engage their own kind. Force them to wait for another carrier of an equal tier. The game, as is, isn't fun enough at high tiers with these kinds of teams. Time is not really going to change that because mid tiers suffer from the same issue while having enough players in them. Fortunately, at these tiers it's nigh impossible to lose money due to a fudged up matchup. Edit: Typos and grammar.

That's a problem with the Atlanta and not cruisers in general. 203mm HE is not effective against high tier BBs unless it's a DM using it.