EsaTuunanen

If you think rock bottom has been reached there's always someone willing to start digging deeper. Playing with T5 Gremlin number of DDs per team varies down to two. But four seems to be absolute minimum number for BBs.

Also unlike all tech tree DDs after Ognevoi Leningrad can fully utilize Concealment Expert for gaining good early game cap contesting ability... While having also speed to easily disengage unlike Mahan. Along with good stealth firing of guns and torps. Almost as if Leningrad was made by different people than those who did tech-tree DDs. Or maybe their trying to use quite good torps to encourage players to not spend whole match spamming HE from long range? Though at least as long range "3x4 skilled" spammer good survivability should help to mitigate having one gun less than Kiev. And without EM that "front line" general purpose destroyer work probably isn't that good idea because of lower DPM compared to other gunboats and problematic firing arcs.

I think there's fitting Finnish idiom for that: Toivossa on hyvä elää, sanoi lapamato. Meaning: It's good to live in Hope, said tapeworm. (Toivo is both name and translation to English word hope) It's only that other team whose game gets ruined... Though bad player in Gremy is more likely to be "twelve minus one" player to his team than in Minekaze or Nicholas.

I think he's mixing Kiev to Mahan... Which wouldn't be wonder because gotta be semiblind to miss shell trajectory difference between Soviet 130mm gun and USN 127mm/38 anti-air mortar.

While AA-mortar of USN DDs get really major 60% increase to per shell fire chance from DE for Soviet DD AFT is primary choise. Broadside sailing bigger cruisers are valid targets up to 13km range. Besides just use AP against broadside showing 25mm plated BBs 13km away... Non-German BBs below Tier 6 burn just fine without DE anyway. Leningrad again faces 203mm gunned heavy cruisers and Soviet railgun cruisers and needs to keep more distance to them with 6km detection penalty. (smoke isn't always available and tends to attract torps) And with low alpha and not so great shell output per minute you should try to look for chances to use Leningrad's quite good per tier torps. That high speed allows easy moving to launch position and moving back farther for gunnery.

If you're shooting at 25mm plated BB just use AP always when seeing broadside. Something like Colorado is depressingly proof against small caliber HE with only soft spot superstructure "armored" with all those AA guns eating half the shells hitting it.

There's only one hp pool for superstructure... Which is the only part of higher tier BBs which can be penetrated and damaged directly by below heavy cruiser caliber HEs. Also hits to superstructure can only start fire on it. Starting fires elsewhere (bow, stern, midsection) requires putting hits to those impenetrable parts of the ship. And armor has some effect to realized fire chance. New Mexico with its up to 152mm HE proof 25mm deck and side plating requires so much more hits per fire than New York with mostly penetrable plating. Difference is way more than what could be explained by small increase in native per tier fire resistance of ships. (like from Wyoming to NY) Even destroyer is simply better at shooting AP if NM shows side at range where shells have reasonably flat trajectory! And all German BBs are even more resistant against smaller caliber shells than others. And guess why those treaties were done? Because of very high cost of building and maintaining battleships. Leaders wanted to avoid another expensive arms race. And same very few ships out of total number of sinked ships can be said about gunfire of battleships in WW2. Yes, in 1 vs 1 they were powerfull. But when looking at what could be built at cost of that single BB they weren't anymore that strong. If IJN had used resources spent on Yamato and Musashi for building couple carriers more and additional cruisers and destroyers Pacific War might have gone very differently.

One thing that can happen is that single repair can't anymore heal all repairable damage. But if you use one repair next repair can heal remaining repairable damage. Basically if BB took no direct damage but just fires it could burn down to below 50% hp and ten minutes later come back with full hp and "toothpaste smile". Cruiser can be left short if it hunts down and spots destroyers. And BB can help team also by drawing that enemy AP fire away from cruisers keeping them alive. Destroyer is really only class which needs to do lot more than its own hp worth of damage to have good carrying effect.

You're not getting decent credits because you're not doing good damage. For battleship that would be your own ship's hitpoint pool worth of damage. While in average you're doing damage barely enough for killing equal tier cruiser in your BBs... While starting from Tier 5 BBs start to have chances for nuking side showing cruiser in single salvo, especially if it has already lost part of its hp. Not that bow showing cruiser is safe from getting single salvo shot by BB at closer ranges... If you play destroyers then you should know well how starting from T6 BBs of any nation (Germans are more proof earlier) often require 20-30 hits to start single fire. With most of those hits doing zero direct damage because 25mm plating is proof against up to 152mm HE... With those non-penetrating HEs also having worser (average) fire chance. They're so proof against HE that most of the time destroyer is better at shooting AP at (non-german) BB showing it's side from flat shell trajectory range! Penetrating AP shell simply does damage than penetrating HE and way more than superstructure missing non-penetrating HE.

And RN ship detonations in Jutland happened because of gross neglect of safety and basically daring detonations by having (more volatile than that of others) propellant stored in various levels of turrets with lots of blast door/safety hatches open for explosive train to magazine. None of those happened because of getting magazined or from extensive damage with internal fires reaching magazines/capsizing throwing stuff around. Other very notable thing is very small number of destroyers with those detonations mostly caused by very heavy hit like that of torpedo or mine. While literally hundreds of them were lost in World Wars from being bombed/shelled until sinking. Vs. in game 8/10 DD detonations happening from full/high hp with single slavo or even single shell often doing it.

Still five non-BBs in match... WG must be planning further nerfs to them.

Would have to check armor layouts, but moving to sides and spamming AP might be hilarious.

While armor may have been not working basically all players at least were interested in trying to understand game and how to play. Now we have these BBs running to useless map edges and corners or hiding in rear. Yesterday in two consecutive matches had team's top tier BBs to be totally useless. Like two Colorado's sitting near base behind islands in Fault Line, while enemy cleaned up flanks... Where team's remaining BBs kept sailing broadside. (and in other flank cruisers suicide rushed) And Neighbours match... Two BBs rushed to corner away from enemy cap to get shot to side. While "defending" Colorado and New Mexico went toward rear edge finalizing enemy's map control.

Well, good thing that German BBs tend to be more spam proof than others. Even Kaiser has good part of the ship proof against smaller HEs. And non-penning HEs aren't even good at starting fires. In average Wyoming would almost half melt down from direct damage and fires of HE spam needed to do more than small damage to Kaiser. And if German BBs show side their medium armor makes them also harder to damage with smaller caliber AP spam. Their only durability weakness is torpedo protection. But IJN DD line is basically getting nerfs to decrease amount of needed WASD haxing of ships facing T4 and T5 IJN DDs. Again DD trying to rush German BBs faces strong secondaries and because they're not as slow as USN BBs rushing to sure kill distance is harder if enemy pays attention. So I would expect their overpopularity to continue.

IJN had most success with torps in earlier part of Pacific War especially during night attacks. Done by groups of destroyers and cruisers. Later USN acknowledged capability of Long Lance and anyway ship sinking was done mostly by planes or submarines. IJN had exactly failed to develop proper tactics and built fitting ships to protect cargo shipping from submarines. Their in game destroyers were mostly designed for attacking heavier surface ships using torps to even IJN's inability to match RN and USN in amount of capital ships. And convoys usually didn't use more expensive fast fleet destroyers as escorts but smaller, slower and cheaper ships like DEs. Ships optimized for slower speeds were well enough to hunt max 15 knot targets. Also guns shells could be duds just as well. After major battle it wasn't unusual to find unexploded AP (one of those few percents of shells which hit) embedded in ship's hull. I think in one case after battle some ship had crew member even finding unexploded shell in his bunk.

Only in vertical direction. Not in horizontal direction needed for different lead for different ballistics. And even that gun independent vertical aiming didn't happen with all (especially older) turret designs. And you are exactly thinking very poorly. If you can penetrate (but not overpen too often) AP does good amount of more damage than HE and hoping for fires. And instantly instead of maybe sometime in future when it might be too late to stop enemy from firing one last salvo. Again if it's impossible to pen then full HE is better. Besides AP and HE need to be most of the time aimed at different parts of the target. No sense to scratch belt armor with HE or overpen superstructure with APs. (or bounce them from the deck) Sure different caliber guns could be used to fire different ammunition, like secondary gun or two firing illumination rounds during night. But mixing different ballistics shells in main battery guns would have made already hard hitting even harder.

Just call them as super random. That's what they started to be at third and fourth season.

It's 5 seconds after popping smoke. First of all smoke machine has 2s "warm up". Then there's 3s "rendering fix".

iChase has some new Captain's Academy vids for some parts of the game. Anyway you'll first want to play bottom tiers (possibly in Co-op) for getting touch back to aiming. You need to be able to hit correct parts of the target depending on its angle and shells. And unless you're in German BB remember to keep armor angled... Especially remember that cruisers don't have real armor:

While at top tiers carrier decks bounce BB APs unless its real plunging fire...

There's still the part of those Balless&Brainless boats running away from enemy. And destroyers thinking they're some escorts for carrier. Or those AFKs and couple minutes late to match. Didn't see much of those in closed beta. Yep, logically that way. http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MathematiciansAnswer

Without limiting divisions to same tier ships that would just result lot more fail divisions. Because those people who don't understand how to play surely don't know any more about how match maker works. Nothing glorious in those useless suicide rushes.

"A-team firing" isn't their exclusive right. Gremyashchy's gunners occasionally do the same for many salvos in row... for example when shooting some stationary cruiser. Sometimes feels like gunners don't want to hit stationary target. I can get lead right from the first salvo for broadside moving cruiser 13km away, but sitting cruiser 11km away? Splitting shells evenly, falling short, going over...

Currently replay file doesn't contain any match result information. It's just record of match itself. While in game Print Screen takes screenshot of what's on the screen (match/results screen/port) saving it into screenshot folder so you have to use it to save match results.

And what about shells "drawing silhouette" all around the target?