Verblonde

That's pretty much me the entire time...!

Well, so far the weekend has been pretty much 50:50 for me - some truly special people in Ops yesterday royally bollixed several of my games, whilst earlier today I came top in a victory - not because I'm any less worserer than usual but because an opposition Montana was kind enough to keep going in a straight line at a constant speed despite having to know my Chung Mu was in torp range...!

Quite - the discerning gentleman tends to favour 'get away from me, you ghastly paupers!'...

I think the main problem with the Kami sisters is that the bulk of players who have them and still play them tend to be very experienced and probably have a very good captain to put in them. There is also a major dearth of their main threat at the moment i.e. CVs. Several of the equivalent tier silver DDs can be pretty horrifying opponents with a similar level captain and player (not me) though...

Good idea, but: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_cruiser_Blücher Also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMS_Blücher

Others have covered off the 'how to BB' thing; my additional suggestion would be to play other classes too, if you haven't already - that'll give you a sense of their strengths/weaknesses, and what they're trying to do to you. For example, playing torpedo-heavy DDs will rapidly demonstrate how easy it is a lot of the time for an awake BB to evade torps; playing cruisers illustrates that they tend to explode if a BB gets sight of their citadel; apply those learnings to your BB play, and so on.

This. Was home for me for about 18 months...

I suspect, for true authenticity, a modern London would require quite complex programing to capture the full experience of the place e.g. the odd rogue northerner being lynched for making eye-contact with a local and saying 'hello' or similar...

Don't mind which, so long as the ship's horn sound is a judicious clip from this:

I have quite high hopes for a PE tree, assuming WG can be bothered - with all the various odds and ends from the 'minor' naval nations, it could end up being very interesting and varied, not to mention quite large. The Russian BBs are in for commercial reasons - the Russian player base is very large and has crippling 'short man anxiety' i.e. struggles to accept that historically there is an area of martial endeavour that they suck at...

That would be two trees, and entirely unwieldy, unless you mean Axis/Allies from only the smaller nations. From a practical standpoint, what WG are already doing is eminently sensible and practical; it's also in the players' interests - single ships with specific captains are a menace to get to a reasonable standard (unless you already have multiple thousands of games and, as a result, lots of 19-point captains) without spending money - as @Cagliostro_chan points out, a Pan European nation (or whatever, PA, South America etc.) allows you to move captains between ships, speeding up the acquisition of captain points, provided there are enough available ships. This is just a game, and one should resist political paranoia; it's only an entirely made-up flag/logo, and you can put the 'real' nation flag on the relevant ship(s) if you want. Also, yes, I thought the same thing when Chinese nationalists (small 'n' deliberately) got their knickers in a twist over the flags on the PA ships too.

The more Ops the better; Dynamo in particular can't return soon enough - it used to be great fun.

Ah, a xenophobe? No further explanation necessary then.

If Connery ish too exshpenshive, what about Jürgen Prochnow? I imagine he's reasonably inexpensive...

Click the cogwheels bottom right of your main port screen: Each of the sub-menus has a sub-section: Anything where the eyeball logo is visible is enabled, and things with a crossed out eyeball are hidden. I can't remember which one covers off the French cammo ('Decorative' maybe?), but if you make sure nothing is filtered out you should enable it, then try disabling things in turn to hide anything you want to avoid seeing.

Of course, because DDs are splendid! However, the sensible answer is to play all the classes (perhaps not CVs if you aren't keen) as that will teach you what they all can/can't do; the better your understanding of all that stuff, the better you'll do with whichever class ends up being your favourite.

As @Klopirat says, first check your filters are off for the relevant cammo, then go to the exterior tab->camouflage; you should see something like this: Clicking on the cammo in question and selecting 'mount' should do the trick. You also want 'auto-resupply' selected.

Seriously? Who cares that much? It's just a 'catch all' nation category - somewhere to put ships from any sufficiently small naval nations that don't get a tree of their own.

This. If you have a 'top x%' requirement it's doubly pernicious: regardless of how much everyone plays, only that x% can possibly earn the reward by definition. 'Achieve y' where y is a definite and fixed goal is much fairer, as everyone (who is prepared to put in the effort) can earn the reward.

It sounds a bit like an enormously fat and bad-tempered dakka DD, with a citadel - I'm starting to feel the urge; just need several thousand more coal first...

Make sure your first ten points on your captain looks like this (or close): 1) PT tells you how many people have main guns pointed at you, which is very helpful to know (some take PM instead, but these days I tend to think info trumps damage resistance in this case). 2) LS is completely essential, as you've discovered - this'll save your donkey all kinds of often. 3) SE gives you extra hp per level; again, this will probably save you quite frequently. 4) CE is obvious on almost all DDs (exceptions might include some gunboats where you rarely remove your extremities from the fire button). There are some variants on this, but you'll struggle to go too far wrong with this set-up.

+1 for more damage; my feeling is that the extra damage will probably matter more frequently than the difference in reload time will...

Has anyone done the maths to work out if the new skill makes enough of a difference to things like IJN torp boats to make a useful difference, or are they still boned against a CV? I'm assuming the latter, but haven't looked at the new mechanics in detail yet (a job for the first few battles after the patch)...

My feeling is that it's somewhere in the middle: at T9, the reliance on torps, relatively weak guns, and okay concealment make for a nice change from the usual high tier US gameplay (epitomised by Fletcher). I made quite a lot of use of her in Ranked on my alt account, and she worked pretty well for that (and that was with only around 13-15 points on the captain); I do think she is rather different to an up-tiered Farragut, if only because of the substantial stealth torp window (and the guns are weaker, tier for tier). Equally, I don't feel she's OP: she's heavily reliant on torps (no sh*t, Sherlock!), so a reasonably competent target can dodge a lot of your attacks - makes her a bit of a 'potato masher' I suppose. The guns are quite weak for the tier, so you're largely limited to finishing off maimed targets. The weak AA doesn't do Benham any favours; although that didn't matter for Ranked, it's a limiting factor any time there are CVs in play. She's stealthy 'enough', but gets out-spotted (or close) by a lot of the classic DD hunters. I can imagine better players being a bit sniffy about Benham: she's quite easy to play, but perhaps isn't the best choice for the uber high-skill plays that better players seem capable of (so, not me then!)...

The impression I got from much that was written about Benham was that she was a bit meh (I must say, I've been pleasantly surprised since I got mine) - perhaps I wasn't the only one, and people didn't make much effort/unchain their wallets? That goes double when one recalls that you were effectively forced to play the special mode to get the ship for free.