fnord_disc

I've been told that the current armor/damage mechanic is just a placeholder, and it better well be.

In my opinion it makes no sense to spread your forces thin, and most CV players just camp at the back and behind islands. To provide additional air cover for those would require to keep ships back with them, meaning they can't add their guns to the battleships if they guard the battleships. If the CVs accompany the main force, they can profit from the combined AA, they have shorter rearming distances, and they can provide a better fighter screen for the others as well.

That's true, the stealth rating of the early IJN DDs is very good. It's still not always possible to see American DDs coming if the battlefield contains a lot of smoke and obstacles.

Ironically, American DDs are the ideal counter to Japanese DDs. They can dodge all your torpedoes and need only 3-4 salvos to kill you.

CVs are not really the primary damage dealers of the team, so I don't see why the cruisers should stay back and protect you. They have to guard the battleships, not you.

I never have much trouble with this in my Saipan. If you follow the bulk of your team, especially the battleships, at a reasonable distance from the battle line, they basically protect you whether they want to or not. Just look at the map and give move orders a couple of hundred meters behind all the battleships.

Yes, it's this poetry genre. Very similar to haiku, mostly just a different syllable count. "The sun in the clouds | My bygone friends | between the waves | Why do I grieve | for victory?" Something like that ;-)

Firing at anything with naval guns at ranges exceeding 30 kms in WW2 is fantasy, whatever the fire control. The gun itself is way too inaccurate to permit hits at that range. And yes, Washington had to close in on the target. Your point being? Kirishima needed Atago's searchlights to hit SoDak and still hit her less often. The Japanese even tried to range in on muzzle flashes, but all they hit was the South Pacific. I'm not saying the early-war radar FC is some kind of godly technology, but arguing it's a gimmick and inferior to more traditional Japanese systems is simply incorrect. Also, I think we are confusing two things here — fire control computers and fully integrated radar FC. That the Japanese had entirely adequate fire control computers is nothing I am disputing, but their fire control computers did not receive information directly from the radars, only information yelled down from the visual rangefinders, and their turrets were not slaved directly to the fire directors using RPC either, making the entire system extremely unreliable. Whatever the exact inadequacies of the Japanese system, Kurita's battleships had absolutely abysmal hit rates off Samar against an utterly helpless enemy simply because everyone was distracted by air attack and some bad weather fronts. You can't argue that the system was theoretically capable of good performance if that "theory" means the sun is shining down on 1/2-meter waves, everyone is steaming straight ahead at half engine power and all the crews just had a good night's sleep and a meal.

No. The longest-range gunfire hit in history is only around 25km. I have no idea how you can say that. The opposite is true. USS Washington's battle report for Guadalcanal clearly states the superiority of even 1942 American radar FC, and Washington scored vastly more hits on Kirishima than Kirishima did on SoDak. Let's also not forget that the Japanese never implemented satisfactory RPC. Surigao, too, shows that night-fighting optics and searchlights are nigh-useless. Yamashiro didn't score a single decent hit on anything the entire night, and she was riddled with blindfire shells herself. No. Just no. Even the most advanced Japanese fire control systems, most of which never went beyond the drawing board, would have had great trouble maintaining firing solutions the way that American radars could. The Japanese had excellent night-fighting training, not just on their destroyer crews, but arguing that Japanese technology other than their optics wasn't greatly inferior is historical revisionism.

Squadrons already take heave losses from higher battleship tiers, so if the AA becomes even better, we might as well play without carriers entirely.

Clevelands also simply put too much lead into the air for tier 6, and with the current armor/damage mechanic, it's almost universally better to have higher ROF and more guns. Cleveland vs. Aoba is not even a contest.

I should have added that I meant T6+ (Mutsuki and higher). The lower tiers are too strong, the higher tiers too weak.

The balancing right now is under the assumption that the torpedoes on Japanese cruisers are incredibly strong and often used, but they're not. You have a chance to use them only fairly rarely, whereas you shoot with your guns all the time, you use your AA all the time, speed, HP... Right now the torpedoes on Japanese cruisers are nice to have, but they don't nearly make up for what you lose compared to American CAs. If the range was longer, they'd be a lot more useful, but even with Long Lances the Japanese cruisers would be inferior to American ones. They are just inferior in too many different stats that permanently affect your performance.

Which is sad considering Senjo is a beautiful model.

They did. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Japanese_World_War_II_radars Doesn't mean it was good radar.

IJN DDs need a buff, not a nerf.

This is a gross oversimplification. Torpedoes caused all kinds of subtle damage to the interior of the ship and not just flooding and buoyancy damage. The Japanese lost several carriers to torpedoes that ruptured fuel tanks and turned the ship into a floating powder keg, lots of ships had their boilers knocked out and steering damaged by torpedoes. HMS Barham even suffered a catastrophic magazine detonation following torpedo hits. Also, the armor belt doesn't protect against torpedoes and it isn't designed to either. Protection from torpedoes is handled either by torpedo bulges or simply by internal subdivisions and bulkheads. Reducing torpedo damage to buoyancy damage only works if the damage model includes all those other effects as well, because they aren't rare occurences.

Carriers are quite fast. You should have no trouble outrunning most threats and/or sticking to your team. Carriers should definitely not be made more resilient.

I've never really liked the big masts on the early BBs to be honest. SoDak is very beautiful, though. The compact lines from above are very aesthetic.

I've gotten one-shot by battleships several times... You're sure those were hits and not near-misses? My destroyers have died from HE misses even, not to mention hits.

I must be blind as a bat. Can anyone tell me what I need to look for? Do I somehow need to lock on the target? If you lock onto a target you get a gray deflection marker that overlaps your torpedo aiming sight. I wouldn't rely on it too much though.

You're not the center of the team in a battleship. We don't populate the map to escort you and watch in awe as you win the game for the team. You have to look at the map yourself and talk to your team to see where you can go without leaving their cover and dying meaninglessly.

Yeah, I understand that's a problem. It would definitely lead to some bizarre TA cases, but I think that's part of the responsibility of the player to judge. Not having the choice at all is just... idk, I'd really like to blast those guns into the air sometimes. It should be for me to judge whether I will hit team mates with a desperation salvo.

No, not "this". Yes, that's possible, but it only works for each gun individually because they all aim in subtly different directions after a course change. Really, have you tried to fire with a Japanese destroyer during evasive maneuvers? You can't even move the mouse fast enough to catch up with the aiming circle once the hull moves. I just want to shoot those guns in the general direction of the enemy: it's better than nothing. Now, those guns are crap anyway, so it doesn't change the game whether they can be fired or not. But I don't see why someone who wants to fire them into the fields isn't allowed to do that using some special button that doesn't interfere with the normal gun controls.

I'll tell you this as primarily a destroyer captain. You should never be the first ship to round islands or go into unexplored areas of the map. I specifically look at the minimap in my destroyer trying to cut off battleships and catch them when they're trying to move around islands or straits. Either you have to go around those islands at 5km+ so you can get the best of your spotting distance and evade most torpedoes, or you have to ask a cruiser to test the waters for you. The worst thing that happens to me in a destroyer is battleships with an intact cruiser screen or battleships that pay attention to their distance from obstacles and cover.