Verblonde

Labelling Expert AA Marksman as OP is slightly mischievous...!

Not really. I'm amongst the first to break out the tar and feathers when WG pull their usual misleading advertising cr4p; this isn't one of those occasions - these are reasonably clearly different things (besides having different names, they're also different colours, and have different ornamentation). (It wouldn't actually surprise me if someone got fired for *not* producing misleading materials in this case...)

Just saw @ObiWankov performing majestically in his Groz - very well played, sir! (Needless to say, I was rubbish and blew up embarrassingly early in the battle. <hangs head in shame>)

Good lad - this game especially needs manliness in these dark 'Deadeye' times...!

Although RL can be very powerful (when used correctly), this is why I don't usually take it on my DDs; it's vaguely like when a DD triggers planes' detected warning - it doesn't telegraph exactly where you are, but it does indicate the general vicinity you're in, which is often enough. My approach might well be different if radar and CVs weren't so prevalent though.

FWIW my feeling depends a bit on what other captains you have available to you, and what you'd use the ship for. Personally, I tend to go ships first, then captains, on the basis that - for me - the difference between a ship and no ship is more dramatic than between a magic captain and a regular one. In this particular case, I rather like Pommern, and find her to be very useful for the bulk of 'Battleship' missions WG usually go in for (tank, citadel, secondaries, fires etc.); that said, I'm not a good BB player, so she doesn't usually get used for PvP. With regard to the captain, it may come down to whether or not you can boost him up to a respectable level with ecxp/free xp; if you can, that argues a bit more towards getting the captain. My impression is that a 19+ point regular captain is *probably* going to be of more value than a 10 point magic one; I don't have a good idea where the two 'lines' would intersect though (magic captain at 15 points or so, maybe?). If you have the time/resources to get both then that's probably the ideal (I'm waiting to see what the next tranche of coal ships will be; if none is of interest, then Lutjens will be next on my list, although I do have a 21 point captain available to generate the ecxp needed to get him to a reasonable points total)...

Hypersonic kinetic weapons? Think KM AP rockets, only they vapourise their targets rather than merely doing decadent capitalist citadels...

Vampire II looks vaguely promising...? (Assuming it doesn't get hammered prior to release, due to insufficient Revolutionary Zeal.)

It certainly makes intuitive sense; it wouldn't be the first time that belief in some aspect or other of the game altered how people played the game. I suspect that an awful lot of players over-estimate how important some captain skills are on their results; it reminds me a bit of mountain biking: a lot of folk in that community obsess over shaving every last gram off their bikes (and spend a lot of money doing so), whereas they could reduce the weight of the bike/rider overall package a lot more dramatically by just eating fewer pies. In the specific case of Deadeye, I (DD main) don't really worry about it - a BB that's actively supporting from around its detection distance is far more of a threat to me than one firing from extreme range, Deadeye or not.

FWIW My general approach with the Ikeas was to use ship upgrades to boost torps, and captain skills to boost dakka; I was after a balanced approach with them, rather than a ferocious concentration on one aspect only. I'm still doing something similar with the rework, although it's still a bit 'work in progress'; that said, this is where I am at the moment (mediocre player): Halland upgrades: Smaland upgrades: (Smaland leans more into guns with the final upgrade slot; I kept torps in slot three as most gun engagements tend to be so close that the gains from improved dispersion in practice feel negligible to me.) So, in that context, my captain for both looks like this at the moment (like I said, work in progress though): 'Standard' DD 10 points, of course. SI because of the heal (and radar, in Smaland's case). Currently running AR because it's a boosted skill, and I'm pretty sure that we can't rely on the 'BFT bug' not being fixed; besides that, it boosts both dakka and torps (this assumes you will get shot; if you play more passively, BFT is still worth considering). Liquidator because (in Smaland) you will have to make use of your torps, and much of their effectiveness comes from flooding (very anaemic alpha); I find that you frequently need to go dark, and un-buffed Smaland torps are really rather unfortunate. Although you won't do much direct damage with Smaland's torps, many players still panic about flooding, so some relatively low cost buffs (Liquidator, and the slot 3 mod on the ship) can be worthwhile IMO. Consumables Enhancement is mostly about Smaland (both radar and the short engine boost), although extended engine boost doesn't do any harm for Halland. Last two points will end up being PT, I think, as I do miss having it. I don't worry about RL, as my situational awareness (if you'll forgive some slight arrogance) is good enough to manage without it, especially given the high-radar/CV/hydro meta we have, *and* given Smaland having radar herself; I get more benefit from those four points elsewhere. My opinion on this might well be different if the opposition didn't get alerted when they're tagged with RL. This lot all assumes I'm playing a mixture of Randoms and lower level competitive (this captain also works with Orkan, if/when I can get back to Bronze Ranked, assuming the rewards stay as they are), and also that the bulk of my games are using Smaland over Halland. Just to be clear, I'm not saying this is all 'right', but rather that this is where I am at the moment, in case the information is of use.

Thanks, guys - I feel a slight tweak to my Perth build coming on... (Edit: done. That puts the hydro run-time better in sync with the smoke again - nice.)

For actual 'how to' tips, you want someone far more competent than I am, but - in case it's useful - this is the build I'm currently running on Perth: It might be wiser to run Engine Room Protection (as you are) in slot two; the reason I don't is that I usually run a captain with LS on Perth. I haven't worked out if this is foolish with the rework yet though. The coal smoke mod gives you a run time just shy of 2 minutes (117 secs), before captain skills, if applicable. FWIW I show 128.7 secs run time with a Consumables Enhancements captain on top. I won't comment on captain skills in general though as a) I'm still experimenting with CL builds, and b) the captain I'm using in this case needs to be a 'good enough' build for both Perth and Mysore, so probably won't be optimal for either.

I'm not. Suggest reading what I actually wrote, rather than what you think I wrote. Anyway, you're starting to bore me now, so I'm out.

Right back at you: who were the most powerful nations on earth from, say, the 19th century onwards? You need power to commit the largest-scale atrocities, and (thanks to the industrial revolution happening in Europe first) the most powerful nations on earth were mostly white, so it's inevitable that the bulk of the awful things that we're concerned with here were committed by white people (or on their orders). It doesn't make white people any more or less evil than anyone else; it's just a function of historical chance.

<sigh> I'm aware that this is probably a waste of my time, but here goes: making people aware of bad things that happened is not the same thing as telling them that these things makes an entire race evil; I suggest you really would benefit from understanding the concept of nuance. The reason for making people aware of this stuff is that it may help avoid repeats. We don't memorialise the holocaust to make people think that white people are evil, for instance, we do it to make sure that we don't forget what our species is capable of, and so - hopefully - reduce the chances of repeats. The only reason that so much recent(ish) history involves white people doing dreadful things is that - in general - white people had the most ability to do these dreadful things; if I recall the genocide in Rwanda, or the things that the Japanese did in Manchuria, am I trying to suggest that Black and Asian people are universally evil too? Spoiler: nope. The other reason that history is very much worth recalling is that - in some places - people are still emphatically living with the consequences now and you have no chance of fixing those consequences if you don't understand the origins. If one has the slightest knowledge of human genetics, it is abundantly obvious that racism is stupidity of the highest order, regardless of which particular race that prejudice is directed at.

Besides what @SV_Kompresor said, you may find this page of the wiki helpful: https://wiki.wargaming.net/en/Ship:Commander Bear in mind that - as it says - the page is being redone to encompass the recent captain rework. Precisely how you approach commanders will vary a bit, depending on how much (if any) money you spend on the game; this is a key area for monetisation in the game, although it's more than possible to do okay with f2p (it just takes a lot longer): There is a lot to be said for keeping all your silver ships from T5 and up; not necessarily because you'll play them regularly, but because you occasionally get ship-specific missions (one of the campaigns for example), and 'snowflakes' (a general term referring to occasional events that give rewards for the first win in that ship during the event; for instance, we had actual snowflakes over Xmas, and I netted north of 85K coal from my lower tier ships). However, anything that you're only keeping for snowflakes doesn't need a good captain on it, as most people get these rewards in Coop. Most players will move their captains up the tiers as they go, perhaps leaving a decent one on any actual 'keepers' (that is, ships you actively want to play again, regardless of snowflakes etc. e.g. Leander is on many people's keeper list as she's fun, and also very good for Ops); if you spend money, this isn't too painful - you can either retrain captains for new silver ships with gold, or just buy a new 10 pointer. If you are f2p, you'll have to spend time and/or ecxp retraining your captains for silver ships. This is one of the plus points of premium ships, incidentally; you can use them to retrain a silver ship captain without losing any of that captain's effectiveness (partly trained captains on silver ships don't operate at 100%). Your ultimate goal is to get a 21 point captain, as such captains generate elite captain xp (ecxp), but this is a horribly long-term project after the rework: to get you to 19 points (the old max) required something of the order of 1.7 million xp, whilst to get the last two points needs another 1.2 million xp on top. Short-to-medium-term, to generate ecxp (which can be used on any captain), you're reliant on the small % that you earn on all captains, but when you eventually get your first 21 pointer, the generation rate snowballs. The short version is that you want the best available captain on whatever ship(s) you're actively playing, and that need tends to increase with higher tiers (and competitive modes).

Many thanks, sir!

Absolutely - some days, a bit of S&M Tirpitz is what the situation calls for though!

I'll be quite surprised if there isn't some way of getting her eventually, probably for money/doubloons (or whatever Satan Crates end up being next Christmas, perhaps?). I imagine there will - quite deliberately - be a bit of a delay though; if people knew they could just open their wallet soon after a dockyard event, they might be less inclined to grind (so keeping WG's server numbers up)? I quite like Odin, but she's not worth losing sleep over; mine gets used more or less exclusively for doing missions in Coop. Odin is fun, but if I want to play against real people, I'll take Tirpitz...

@DFens_666 has already explained that these are both already present in the game. If you want to read more (regarding the tier disparity thing): https://wiki.wargaming.net/en/Ship:Base_Earnings And regarding the economy in general: https://wiki.wargaming.net/en/Ship:Economy (It really is beneficial to learn about the fundamental mechanics, even though it can take a bit of time; you'll find that you do a lot better if you have a bit of a sense of what the better players are doing to get the better of you. Full disclosure: 'better players' doesn't mean me.)

This doesn't surprise me; whilst the shift to green energy is entirely necessary, the current aversion to nukes is unwise - you need something to fill in the gap if/when nature (so, wind/sun etc.) doesn't cooperate, whilst still not chucking greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. This is *really* OT though, so apologies to all.

The pragmatic answer (in this case) is 'when there isn't profit in it'; in a parallel case, Nike didn't do that Colin Kaepernick advert to pi$$ off the racists - they did it because it made them a sack-load of cash. The world changes and companies go where the money is. This is actually quite an interesting question from a biological standpoint, although some aspects of it are quite difficult for most people to get their heads round; this isn't because people are thick, but rather because of the way we're wired - as a survival mechanism, we're set up to think in terms of yes/no binaries i.e. to categorise things quickly in terms of things we should fight, shag, eat, run away from etc. We're not wired to be good at dealing with gradients, and have a 'plumbed in' need to assign things to simple binary categories. In the case of things like gender (with an acknowledgement that the term means different things to different people), I suspect that humans exist over a continuous range in this respect - most living things are walking/crawling/swimming bell-curves - with the vast majority of us sitting on one of two peaks (the conventional 'male' and 'female'). For a functioning society we do need labels and cut-off points (when do you stop being a child, for instance? It's not like some sort of instant switch gets flipped.), but we also need to be mindful - as decent people - that, with so many billions of people, there are going to a minority that don't fit these neat categories. Such people have the same right to be treated decently as the rest of us.

Because the means to do so are either a mod (many people prefer to not run non-official content like this), or 'non-formal' (for want of a better expression) i.e. Dasha, or anime girls et cetera. I believe what is being asked for is essentially the same as is included in many existing games (the old Fallout 3 is my current escape from the rework, and I can do this there) i.e. when you recruit a captain, you have the option for that captain to be female, complete with the same basic uniform that the existing captains get, and a suitable voiceover. This is just about providing options; it doesn't 'force' anything on anyone. If you don't like women, don't select 'em as captains - simple. Sensible female captains in the game isn't really a hill I'd die on (sorry!), but I absolutely care about the health and viability of the game, and if having more captain options increases the appeal of the game to new players (gods help us, we need all the help we can get here!) then I'm all for it.

Don't those happen in the voice of whatever captain (and options) you have selected yourself? I imagine it's unlikely that *everyone* on my team will be running a Japanese anime captain at the same time as I might be, for instance. Mind you, it could be some sort of option that I missed...

I can't imagine that many people call themselves SJWs; the term (much like 'snowflake') seems to be largely used by people who object to having their racism/sexism/whateverism pointed out to them as a convenient shorthand for 'people who care about equality and decency, but whose arguments I am unable to refute rationally at this time'. I'm too old to get into too much of a lather over this, frankly, but trying to use 'SJW' as some sort of imagined all-conquering 'I win the argument!' is beneath anyone with a functioning brain. Object to people's viewpoints, sure, but please do so rationally and with meaningful arguments. In the case of this thread: we're talking about the possible addition of 'formal' female captains; if you object to that, give us a rational reason why, not something that looks remarkably like "waaah - the bogeyman is trying to oppress me with his egalitarian ways!". For instance, you might suggest that the work involved (creative, voiceovers etc.) would be excessive, in relation to the gain; as a commercial enterprise, that's the sort of thing that *really* impacts the viability of something like this.