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Very high muzzle velocity meant excellent range, but reduced impact angles (no deck penetrations), massively reduced barrel life and worsened dispersion. It also negatively affected the calibration of the fire control system. Italian shells were of horribly inconsistent quality and crews were given only the good shells to practice with, not the shells they were likely to fire in combat. Very slow reload. APC had a measly 10kg bursting charge, Bismarck's 38 has almost double that. Richelieu has even more, but it lost too much performance elsewhere, and the shell's engineering contained grave mechanical flaws. Naval historians such as Campbell contend on several occasions that reducing the muzzle velocity would have improved the gun's performance, and this is supported by most armor penetration simulations that consider an aggregate of belt and deck armor plotted over all plausible combat ranges. The Italian 38cm was engineered to high performance targets in the hope that it would roughly equate to a 41cm gun, but in my opinion the Italian engineers shot themselves in the foot.

I said "for their caliber". Sure, 406mm would have been nice. But Richelieu's 38cm guns had long-standing problems with their shells, Vittorio Veneto's 38cm guns were paper tigers and King George V only mounted 14", a step back to World War I. Personally I would probably prefer Bismarck's guns over SoDaks 45cals, mainly because of dispersion and firing rate, but SoDak did have one barrel more, so it's kinda even for me. Iowa had clearly better guns, as did Yamato. Regardless of whether you like Bismarck's more than SoDak's or not, they're next, and below them are a fair number of battleships with worse guns. You can toss Nagato into the fray if you wish, but her guns are usually regarded as rather mediocre. So yes, I think she had good guns.

Also, if this is really going to turn into a battleship comparison (which is inevitable anyway in this game) then Bismarck really wasn't a very amazing design. Decent, yes, with clear strengths, but also clear weaknesses. Her armor is usually singled out as sturdy, but the fact of the matter is that her underwater protection was poor and she was vulnerable at long range. The armored deck was also mounted too low and the belt was not angled. Fire control was certainly better than French, Italian or Japanese sets, but even if Bismarck had survived, the lack of production line centimeter-wavelength radar would have rendered her ineligible for blindfire FC. On the plus side are a lot of soft things, like being a very stable gun platform, quite fast, gentle motion in heavy seas... Guns were also quite good for their calibre. You can find faults with every battleship, but even accounting for that the Bismarck-class was thoroughly mediocre from a design perspective.

Looks obviously like a Bismarck-class battleship to me. It has the very distinctive lines of Bismarck and Hipper, and if it's listed as BB, it is a Bismarck.

As others have said, the Cleveland is not a good comparison. As for the general issues of BBs and cruisers: Decent battleships will always win against cruisers at ranges around 6-8km, because that's when battleships reliably start hitting the citadel, and I've one-shot cruisers several times from that range. And even if it's not a one-shot, well, you just have to wait 30s before you can kill the cruiser. In that time you'll take some notable damage, but you can just repair it. There is no way a cruiser will kill you in 30s, not even the Cleveland. Battleships kind of stink at a range of 12ish kilometers, because a cruiser can hit you with its high rate of fire, but you can't really hit cruisers with any reliability. Don't bother trying; just turn towards the cruiser and close the range, then kill the cruiser once you're closer. I could see a bumrush from an IJN CA working sometimes and getting killed by torpedoes, but even that seems kind of unlikely to me.

As far as I know the upgraded turrets count as dual purpose guns and add "significant" AA fire.

The only IJN cruiser which can be argued to have better guns than the USA cruisers is Mogami, but, and this is important— all Japanese cruisers are made of paper, and have gigantic citadel hit zones. An American cruiser will almost always win a direct battle against a Japanese cruiser if you're any decent at aiming your shots. Japanese cruisers have torpedoes, okay. Have you seen the firing angles? You can almost never use them sensibly without making half you turrets useless.

I've had it multiple times now that the battle starts and I sail around and shoot stuff and suddenly there's a "setting on fire" popup... because I forgot to switch to AP. It would be nice if forgetful people like me could set default ammunition as AP.

If this question nags at you that much, you could have clicked on my nickname to find out that I have more battles than you. Yeah, the destroyer example doesn't work for a lot of reasons, but it was meant to exaggerate the point I was making, and DoT is fine against battleships.

I think generated maps can be made to work very well for islands and coastlines. A lot of research has gone into how coastlines are basically fractals and the validity of fractal models for macroscape generation can be seen in games like Dwarf Fortress. Generated maps with some oversight by developers are a fantastic idea. edit: They're not really procedurally generated in our case, though.

I definitely do not agree fire is too weak. You can dodge torpedoes and avoid both their damage and flooding DoT, but you cannot avoid HE shells for any meaningful amount of time, and if the chance to get set afire increases, people will just spam HE at battleships and then hide behind islands once the damage control is wasted. Hell, all you would need to kill a battleship is a couple of American destroyers spamming shells from outside the battleships secondary range and then waiting until the ship dies. Consider this: the current fire system deals, as you state, 11.5% for 46s = 15%/m. A battleship landing one citadel hit with every second salvo (which corresponds to very strong shooting skills) would deal about 20% (~11k damage on a 55k ship) every 60s for 20%/m. Firing HE without any shooting skills would be almost the equivalent of very strong AP aiming.

Range is inconsequential for battleships. Bismarck's turrets could only elevate to 30° and no attempt was made to engineer a turret with better elevation because even at 30° the gun's range exceeded meaningful fire control. British, American and Japanese guns could often elevate to 45°, but they never fired at these elevations during battle. Perhaps Iowa class ships were able to utilize their maximum elevation with cold war fire control, but certainly not World War 2 ships. Even most cruisers have longer range than the best war era fire control allows. The Hippers could fire out to 30km, which is way more than they could meaningfully hit. The Hippers admittedly had a very long range because of the 60 cals on the barrel length, but the point stands. As for armor, I beg you to consider the actual armor scheme instead of relying on whatever is listed as the maximum armor value somewhere. The first is taken from wikipedia, the second from navweaps. Reasonably reliable sources. As can be seen from comparing these illustrations, Hood's armor scheme tapers out at unfortunate angles and allows penetration of the boiler rooms and the magazines at somewhat ordinary combat ranges, and Hood's decks are significantly weaker than Nagato's. Both ships have nominally the same belt armor, but Nagato only presents weak armor angles at absurd combat ranges, and even there her deck armor is more than twice that of Hood. Of course, Hood's angled armor means that at short ranges under 14-15km the angle works in her favor and increases effective armor thickness. It is likely that the ship's designers accepted a range of 15-20km as risky to increase protection in the 10-15km window. It is ironic to note that Jutland showed effective gunfire at ranges of 15km, so British designers should have been able to predict a further lengthening of effective firing ranges. I agree that the upgunning from 38cm to 41cm is not very important. When one reads about the naval arms race of the early century, one always feels like the size of the guns was paramount, but that is hardly the case across the board. Guns have more complex characteristics than caliber.

It does. Fires on battleships and carriers are very serious, and are almost as bad as flooding. If you wasted your damage control ability and get flooded and set afire, you will most likely die before the cooldown runs out. Especially if your rate of fire is quick and penetration low, using HE can do very respectable damage against big ships.

Are you sure a "not firm decision" would be on the front page?

I didn't necessarily mean this in the sense that AP is always superior to HE and HE has no reason to exist or be used. On my BBs I just prefer to use AP exclusively and it would be comfortable to change the priority shell type.

Yeah, it's been discussed a bunch of times already that the balancing between the different carriers is really wonky. Saipan is probably the worst offender, as you've identified yourself. I guess the developers wanted to reflect the jump from biplanes to monoplanes somehow. All the CV tiers have weird jumps and power differences between them. The difference between Ranger and Lexington is also pretty stark because of the absurd AA, the excellent TBF Avenger, and the more useful squadron configuration.

Yes, the collision avoidance system is a bit eccentric.

Normally, when I play my Saipan, I do a fake approach with torpedo bombers to see which BBs pay attention to the minimap and turn away/into my planes. Then I beeline for the dimwits who wait for the real attack and nuke those out of the water. Engaging in a cat-and-mouse game with BBs will only lead to horrendous plane losses. In the end, the only people you can sink in CVs are the really terrible players. Anybody worth their salt will dodge your planes, shoot half of the down and then lumber towards your CV while you're helpless.

I'd probably get a package for myself, but I'm a fag for aesthetics and visual presentation, so I wouldn't buy one if I don't like the ships visually.

Yeah, that's actually true. You're pretty useful for capping, but otherwise... We shall see :-)

The idea behind dodging torpedoes should be reading the battlefield and knowing when enemy destroyers launched their torpedoes. This is not the case in higher tiers. Torpedo visibility from planes is stupidly high, and even the slowest of battleships, even carriers, can easily dodge torpedo spreads purely based on visual acquisition. That should not be how the game works, because it makes destroyers completely and utterly useless. In lower tiers you can put the fear of God into people with your destroyer, but in higher tiers you're basically useless. The only reason for you to exist is putting smoke everywhere and annoying the enemy with it.

There is very little doubt that WoT has plenty of bots, and it isn't helped by the sheer ease with which you can bot Wargaming's games. But I have to agree with others in this thread that what you describe is not 100% proof that he was a bot.

You can turn away too if it means the planes will have to fly over friendly AA. Sometimes turning into your formation can lure them over friendly cruisers, and don't forget that air-launched torpedoes are only 33kn fast. You can more or less outrun them in a Kongo or Amagi. Turning into torpedo bombers is often a great idea, but it's not a hard-and-fast rule. Which way to evade depends on more than that. Turning into destroyers can work out as well if you're sure they launched their spread already. It leads just as much to a miss as turning away and you can nuke the DD from short range. The only BBs who get owned by DDs and CVs are the one crewed by terrible players, which is why all these torpedo balancing topics are moot. Torpedoes are mostly UP. DDs are mostly UP. CVs are all UP except Langley and maybe Independence. Cruisers are a mixed bag.

They can make the model really pretty and customized and use some interesting refit, idk. I think there are ways of making those premiums appealing. Let's criticize them once they're out.

There are too many of these threads to downvote individually, so please consider this post a spiritual downvote.