fnord_disc

While on the topic of things that WG can make money from. If they want to make mad $$ from all those Kancolle lovers, they just need to shove out Haruna as a premium battleship with those late-war dazzle camo turrets.

Mutsuki is tier 6 and needs 1:30 to reload 6 torpedoes. The early tiers, yeah, reload too fast. I entirely agree. But torpedoes are not overpowered, because dodging them is very easy. It just isn't easy to dodge them during the last 10s when the alarm sounds are blaring in your ear and 6 torpedoes are off starboard. I've gotten sunk by torpedoes only once in my battleships, and I'd say that's mainly because I played destroyers first. You're not meant to dodge torpedoes through reaction times, you're meant to dodge them by reading the battlefield. Right now it's sort of possible to dodge through reaction times, and that should be removed.

Higher DD tiers don't fire torpedoes every 30s, they fire them every 2 minutes. Those tiers are definitely underpowered.

I think we ran into the same platoon because I've seen this exact same thing happening in one of my Mogami games. A division like that is kind of [edited], but what the OP posted looks fine to me. Tiers aren't that important in WoWs. Some ships are great, some are okay, some are kind of bad, but the tier system only really shows itself with carriers. So, meh, if they want to, let them.

I've been trolled hard by Amagis and Kongos in CAs/DDs. Making a successful torpedo attack relies on the enemy doing exactly you expect him to do for about one whole minute, and if you pay attention to the angle of the enemy ships, you can tell when they launch torpedoes. Japanese cruisers have very narrow torpedo firing arcs, and if you see them trying to turn their stern towards you, it's basically a dead giveaway. Reduce speed, make a half turn, kill CA. It really isn't hard. Destroyers can fire from outside your vision range, but if you vary speed and angle a lot it's still incredibly hard to hit from 7km. If you get owned by torpedoes, you were bad, really bad. Torpedoes are really underpowered right now. Not their damage, but the acquisition range is huge and hitting anything from more than 8km is pure luck. The question of BB vs CA is primarily one of range. It's sort of true that hitting a good CA player at about 12-12km is extremely difficult in a battleship, but the CA needs an extremely long time to kill you at that range too. At 8-9km it's not even a contest, battleships eat cruisers for dinner there.

I'm afraid judging systems on the basis of theory and not experience has never really worked out for anyone.

You have 9 battles in battleships, 16 in cruisers and 3 in destroyers for a grand total of 28 whopping battles.

The smoke appears behind you, so the only way of disappearing into smoke you laid yourself is by making a 100° or more turn away from the target. Otherwise you are on the edge of the smoke and detectable.

I'm pretty sure I read somewhere that in the release there would be several officers of your crew instead of a captain and his ghost ship. Hopefully there's more variety in skills to pick from, because right now the progression is fairly obvious.

I think what a lot of people aren't respecting properly is the repair ability of battleships. Maybe that's because lots of battleship players drive into the fray and die without ever having really abused it. If you know when to disengage and repair your ship, they last incredibly long, and you can engage in several attrition battles with cruisers if you time those battles correctly and repair between them. Battleships have glaring weaknesses and some battleships are definitely too weak - specifically Nagato. But I don't think the class as a whole needs to be buffed. Sure, driving into two cruisers is going to get you killed. Maybe you manage to take one of them with you, but you would have killed both if you'd engaged them separately and you'd probably be almost full health again from repairs. All ships are situational - battleships too.

Some ships have difficult-to-hit citadels. You would do maximum damage to the St. Louis if you hit that with AP, as others have already said. It's not overpenetration, just bad hits. I'm not very familiar with the St. Louis but most/all of the American cruisers have fairly small citadels that are difficult to hit at range - certainly different from ships like the Mogami, which have a citadel half as big as the ship entire. I can't tell you exactly where to aim, but good hits would kill the St. Louis very quickly.

You, in a battleship, are not the equivalent of several destroyers that have to gang up to have any chance at beating you. That is not how the game is designed and it's not how the game should be designed. We are all equals in the team. A lone destroyer can sink you, and you can sink a lone destroyer. That's the way of the world and if you sank you made more mistakes than your opponent.

If the game is not profitable, you won't see the Royal Navy at all, not 3rd, not 5th, not 10th! Why is everyone against displaying some business sense? Sure, rewriting history for the sake of a few rubels sucks. But business decisions must play a role or the game fails.

In my opinion hitzone skins are nearly useless. Hitting the citadel is down to common sense and the size of the enemy citadel, not obscure knowledge of its hidden location. I don't see why custom skins shouldn't be allowed across the board. Custom reticules and HUDs shouldn't be a problem either unless they somehow have access to the game's data and can generate deflection aids and acceleration values, which I vehemently oppose.

Having jets makes no difference in terms of game mechanics. The really important differences are digital computers and missiles, and neither will be in the game. The last designs that the game will include are late-war/post-war designs like Des Moines, Vanguard or WW2-style paper ships like the Montana. There will be nothing cold war or we could trash the whole game design. Finding paper ships that fit this bill in the confusion of the war era is hardly difficult. And so what if Russia is next and the only reason it's next is business? The game is supposed to make money for Wargaming and if it doesn't make any money for them, we will never see the German or British line anyway! If puerile Russian patriots shell out in droves it means that the KM and RM lines are done properly after that and that the game isn't treated like an ugly, red-headed stepchild.

Yeah, you can bumrush lone BBs, but it's very situational, and in 90% of the games a Japanese cruiser contributes significantly less to the team than an American one.

With the changes already made to the game it's impossible to expect historical realism now. Yes, the ship models need to be accurate. Ripping guns off is an absolute no-no. But there are many ways to balance ships, and they have to be balanced or nobody sane will play them. There are enough soft stats and game-exclusive mechanics to make ships balanced beyond sheer historicity. And I completely agree with the general design direction. By all means, make American cruiser guns better, make the ships more resilient. That's completely fine with me. Japanese cruiser torpedoes look useful on paper, currently, but they're really not. Sure, every so often someone circles and island and drives into your spread and you're like, holy hell, am I glad I had torpedoes now. But that happens once every five games and only if the enemy is utterly incapable of looking one minute into the future. In a fair battle between cruisers, even with obstacles but with two skilled players, the Japanese cruisers will lose almost every time.

I fully agree, but much of this hinges on several aspects of the current damage model which are (hopefully) not here to stay. Clevelands are only so much stronger than Aobas because the current model massively favors rate of fire and shells in the air over anything else. Clevelands wouldn't be too strong if the system took more note of her smaller caliber. This also affects the imbalance between Cleveland and the ships that come after her. The American cruiser line only fully recovers with the DM, at which point it makes a gigantic leap forward, again because of ROF. The Brooklyns would obviously have much weaker AA, but the Brooklyns also have a triple turret more than the Cleveland. There would surely be voices calling the progression from Brooklyn to Cleveland a regression, and it would really be regression unless we see more variation in terms of soft gun stats and a less one-sided damage model. DM currently profits from the underwhelming nature of two other large T10 ships: Senjo and Yamato. Senjo suffers from various design decisions whereas Yamato suffers from the damage model, but both are underwhelming for their tier. While DM is too powerful, obviously so because of the jump in power from the previous tiers, she wouldn't stand out as much if the other Tier 10 ships were less weak. Giving DM the auto-loading guns it has should not be impossible to balance. There must be ways to preserve the balance without culling the ship. I think in historical terms the line is very weird and makes creating light cruiser lines for other nations difficult, but the balance issues that you mention are mostly a result of how the game works in general right now. These two shouldn't be confused.

After 250 CBT battles I feel confident in saying that the game will need more variation either on release or some time after release. My problems with the game, right now, are mainly with the damage and armor mechanic, but I could see WoWs getting kind of repetitive after a while. I'm willing to debate that, but primarily I'd like to gather ideas here for providing the player with a wider range of experiences during battle. The maps are lovingly designed and I enjoy the little ports and buildings that dot the various islands, and the weather on North is very beautiful. It really captures the rough beauty of the higher latitudes. But once the player has his ships more or less figured out and seen the maps, they all play similarly for any given class. Some maps favor certain approaches to certain areas of the map, but the basic concept is always the same. I'll list a couple of things I read elsewhere, in no particular order: High seas maps, without obstructions. (mainly for carriers and battleships?) Night battle maps. (mainly for destroyers and cruisers? Star shell mechanic? Maybe "persistent" (2-3s) muzzle flashes to allow ranging?) Convoy escort/interdiction maps Attacking/defending installations

Well, that is precisely the reason why Japanese destroyers get worse. Sure, you get more range, but hitting stuff at 10km and more is very rare. To use the range you'd need short reloads to spam the torpedoes everywhere and hope for hits, but you can't do that because the reload is so enormously long, and you can't get closer than 7km either or you're practically guaranteed to be dead. Even at the minimum range of ~7 kilometers, the enemy battleships can easily dodge your torpedoes if they have recon planes in the air or just habitually make slight course changes (and they should!). You can ambush, yes, but American destroyers are just as good as Japanese ones doing that. Perhaps better, because the earlier ones have more tubes and can launch a second spread after a 180° turn. I think the stealth on Japanese destroyers is actually on the upper end of what can be justified. Making them more stealthy would make it extremely hard to evict them from a cap circle. Part of the problem is the enormous acquisition distance of torpedoes even from planes. In higher tiers where half a dozen recon planes are up in addition to whatever the CV has going, it's not rare to have your torpedoes spotted from 5-6km. This is a catastrophe if you only get a spread every two minutes, because from 5km the enemy has 2m 30s to make adequate course changes before the torpedoes reach the ship. There is no ship in the game that cannot easily dodge that spread. Yes, a bigger spread helps enormously, but range higher than 10km is more gimmick than anything.

Okay, I suppose someone completely incompetent would never have had any chance of hitting in the first place. Maybe it seemed like I was saying there was no skill involved at all, in which case I admit that's not the case. But if you look at any particular hit at ranges over 20km, it is mostly down to luck that that particular shell it. Of course, putting enough shells close to the target so that eventually one of them drifts onto it requires skill and technology. My point was mostly that naval guns don't have some kind of laser-like accuracy; they don't nearly have the accuracy of modern field artillery either, which benefits from shell tracking radar, weather radar and vastly more advanced computers. Modern guns also have a muzzle velocity sensor since the muzzle velocity of the barrel degrades with every shot, and this changes the dispersion measurably with every shell. The lack of all this conspires to make WW2 naval artillery comparatively inaccurate, and I have a problem with statements to the general effect of "so those battleships were killing each other at 30ish kilometers".

Even at combat ranges of 10-15 kilometers, normal engagement distances, hit rates were never in the two-digit percentage. The Japanese battleships off Samar didn't hit their enemy from half that. You can aim as well as you like, it still requires a lot of shells. Gunnery and analogue fire control computers can maximize your chances to hit something, but they will not make you hit. Hitting Glorious from 25km with basically the first shell was pure luck. It was assisted by the English crew which made no evasive maneuvers at the time of the hit, but it was still pure luck. How many battleships tried hitting something from 25km? Twenty? Thirty? How many hit something? Two.

I'm not sure in what way WoWs is coded differently from WoT, but if their internal structure is similar, then WoWs will be so easy to mod that trying to police mods is an exercise in futility.

I'm not saying Japanese destroyers aren't stealthy enough. What I'm saying, what I meant to say, is that American destroyers enjoy a longer period of usefulness on the battlefield. An American DD can deny cap circles to Japanese destroyers in addition to performing anti-ship duty, whereas the Japanese destroyer can only perform anti-ship duty. This wouldn't be a problem if the torpedoes didn't take two minutes to reload, but they do.

Doesn't change the fact it was pure luck that shell hit. Hitting at over 20 km is a matter of luck, nothing else.