Unintentional_submarine

I counter with "throw a torpedo your mug". [EDIT] Damn, ninjaed. Quite sure about it. You can hover your mouse cursor over the text and see the original. Since I don't understand Hungarian it makes no sense to me of course.

Just come back from watching iChase play this 'little' terror. In one battle he sent several battleships running by setting them all on fire at the same time. And it wasn't as if they were poor players, at least one of them is one of the better BB players on the NA server. There is no doubt that the Khabarovsk can function with it's long range, fast shell speed and high rate of fire. The stealthgunning is stronk in it. He was quite glib the entire time about the notion that it couldn't be done, and honestly, rightfully so. He also went and did it in a ranked battle just to show that it can be done there too. However, this isn't something that is either that easy, nor that fun. Well, it is fun to see battleships scramble to get out of the way or blindfire at where they think you are, but hitting enemy ships 300 times in a battle is bound to be a little boring.

That wasn't the instance where the fleet was lost. That came with the siege of Copenhagen in 1807 where the entire fleet was 'ransomed' off, and war resulted afterwards (known as The Gunboat War because of the very heavy use of gunboats). Big ships didn't really fit Denmark's needs, not even destroyers. Small, easily concealed torpedo boats were better, and such ships aren't really fitting for the game. The Huitfeldt class is the only real option, and even she is very light. If WG really want her in, then they can certainly do it, but she doesn't really provide anything special, other than being very small at a relatively high tier. And in order to fit in there, she would need massively buffed guns, and possibly even buffed torps. Personally I see no need for such a ship any time soon. Perhaps once all the interesting ships from around the world have been added, ships of this sort can be included, but until then there are plenty much better candidates among the bigger navies I would prefer to see instead.

Since I watched SideStrafe play the German ships in his stream, and heard about others playing Soviet ships or also German ships, I thought it would be nice to compile what we saw and concluded from it. Hermelin: It's a T1, it is limited how much she can achieve, however her speed and rate of fire certainly made her appear more interesting. With this in mind I think Orlan will be a beast at T1, but... it's T1. Dresden: Wow... she appeared nice. And extremely fun. In the stream she instantly got nicknames like "the Dresden firestorm" (a bit bad taste) and "the Dresden Files". But damn, she is a major firehose at T2. I didn't see her come up against any Chikumas so any comparison was a little hard, but she ate DDs like candy. But her guns are weak and the trajectory is excessive. Still, probably the most fun ship at T2, with some people commenting on her being great sealclubber. Kolberg: Essentially a Dresden 2. Not really much of a difference. However because she is T3 she appeared quite a bit less fun. Still a firehose, without the fire, but at T3 her shell trajectory sucked balls. It is interesting how fast a good ship becomes bad. But she was better than I had feared. Karlsruhe: Oh man... We have seen the stats, we have speculated that she is crap... and we were right. SideStrafe didn't get a good game both times he tried; she was massively uptiered. However that didn't change the fact that she had lousy range, poor rate of fire and bad damage. And, like the Dresden and Kolberg, she had an extremely lousy shell trajectory. Cleveland, go home. I can't see many people liking her, but I guess we already knew this. I had just hoped there was something hidden that made up for a bit of it, but I saw nothing. Königsberg: Wow... just wow. Her stats says she is good, her gameplay says it too. What we didn't know was that her rear turrets are angling monsters! The rearmost turret can almost point directly ahead on the right side, and the other turret lacks perhaps 15 degrees. It is insane! Her shot grouping is also downright insane. She is accurate like no other ship at that tier, not even Furutaka can remotely look as accurate. So these things combined makes for a powerful ship in the right hands. She does have some downsides though. Her shots are weak, really weak, and I noticed exactly 0 fires set. Her AP is also not something great. SideStrafe got off a few good broadside salvoes on a Kuma, with the flat trajectory it wasn't hard to hit the right place... despite that he only got two citadel hits. Penetration appears to be an issue. And she doesn't have a catapult fighter, and she remains rather slow for a CL. No doubt she will be a popular ship, but she probably won't be as awesome as some people thought she might be. I know, however, that I will enjoy her a lot. Nürnberg: Again matchmaking messed up a bit and SideStrafe didn't get a good match. But a few things could indeed be made out. Firstly she can't angle nearly as well as Königsberg, not even close. The clutter on her deck precludes the rear turrets from pointing forwards as much. Her shot grouping was also considerably worse, but still well within acceptable parameters (so don't worry). Durability does seem like an issue, but that's a classic CL problem (save Cleveland of course). She also appeared rather sluggish compared to the Cleveland and SideStrafe commented on it. Her rate of fire was really good of course, but again the weakness of her shells didn't let her do much damage. Undoubtedly her AP is going to be too weak for the tier unless the perfect shot is available. Just the slightest angling and she bounces. He got sunk by massive BB damage from a single salvo (though technically he got sunk by a torp, it was only for a few HP). We thought she would be the best thing since sliced bread, but she didn't seem better than just good enough. Yorck: Yeah... aside from Karlsruhe, the most disliked ship by both audience and Sidestrafe. Interestingly it wasn't the slow turrets, though they did make maneuvers a little hard. No, it was the weak shells and utterly terrible shell trajectory. Since she has a very good 900m/s MV, she has to have a very significant dragcoefficient, as her shots at more than 10km took a long time and could clear even high mountains. In return she was weaksauce to incoming fire. Thus she sits at a bad position, forced to play the long range game, but without the tools for it. Another T7 slump ship. Admiral Hipper: Well, she is better than Yorck. Still she isn't nearly as good as many hoped, and not as good as she looked initially. SideStrafe isn't great, and probably plays like the average joe, but with better accuracy. He sat at long range (supposedly the advantage), and didn't really do much. He did hit, nothing really wrong with his aim, but the damage was just very poor. Eventually the inevitable happened and he got citadeled a few times. It was from battleships, so the damage soaking potential wasn't really showcased, however it was practically the first time he really got hit in the battle. Just like the other ships. That indicates that the German cruisers have really really big citadels, and battleships hit them almost every time. Admiral Hipper is probably going to be a reasonably good cruiser, but not anywhere near as good as was expected, and certainly not as good as her fans hoped. I estimate that she is no better than New Orleans, but with a bigger citadel in return for her more offensive capabilities. Roon: Meh... nothing to make her stand out, however compared to the Ibuki and Baltimore, even 'meh' is fairly good. Hindenburg: Unfortnately I had to leave by then, but other commented that she is in fact pretty good, but not as good as Zao.

Nope, in fact I wasn't even convinced that the German cruisers would be that good from what we knew before. But still, Nürnberg and Admiral Hipper both sort of underperformed compared to what was expected from their port stats. The rest sort of conformed (and in the case of Karlsruhe I'm sort of sad it did conform) with Dresden and Königsberg both overperforming, and Yorck... yeah she was hard to determine from the stats, but I had hoped that she would be able to compete, if only with Pensacola. In general I found the German ships to be slightly worse than the Japanese for the entire tree, and about par with the Americans. However, very few people actually have experience with them, and many of those that do are perhaps not people that can push the ship to their limits. Hence, we don't really know what they can fully do, we can only extrapolate. It wouldn't be the first time in gaming history that a 'unit' is bad in the hands of a less expert player, and perhaps even OP in the hands of an expert. I don't expect that, but until a really great cruiser captain has some time in them (which is probably around the time we all get access to them), this is the best we will get. Overall my impression was that there was one great ship (Königsberg), two good ships (Dresden and Hindenburg), two above average (Roon and Nürnberg), one average (Admiral Hipper), two poor (Kolberg and Yorck) and one crap (Karlsruhe). That is actually not that bad, especially if you consider the fact that the majority of the bad ships are early on. There they have the least impact and player skill can overcome their faults to a greater degree. And if it comes to the worst, they are quickly ground out compared to stinkers like Izumo or Colorado (which is admittedly a lot better now). Also the German line doesn't have the same stop to progression like the USN line has from Pensacola to Baltimore (and the Japanese only really avoid it at Mogami because of the 155mm guns), where the ships don't really change all that much. The German ships change regularly, and that can certainly help with fighting grind-fatigue.

Yeah, didn't see Hipper AP unfortunately, aside from a single instance against a Pensacola that angled away again.

Yeah, it is indeed rather odd. Most other paper ships get a description that clearly says it. Roon and Hindenburg are hardly much better in this department, but I guess when it is complete fiction there isn't much to reference. And the AA appears even stranger. For instance the Flak 28 goes from 3.5km at Yorck to 4.5km at Hindenburg. The same gun. The Gerät 58 guns also increase in range at it goes up the tiers... That's new isn't it?

So was mine, but holy hell. Divisions really do appear to be a problem... Wavecave, MM can't really do anything about stupid players. It can only make the teams even based on their tiers, and it also gets broken when people division up with stupid spreads (also known as faildivisions). None of those were MM related.

You know, I have wondered at this too. I thought that it simply didn't count or something. 'Works' for all classes, but obviously DDs profit the most. Arguably they also suffered the most from this. Half their stealth was taken away by this. It was little more than a see through smoke screen covering the cap, you just knew a DD was there. Sometimes the DD wasn't even trying to cap but had to navigate through the cap to get a proper solution for the torps. Naturally most of us have learned to avoid hte cap for that very reason... now at least you can 'safely' enter a cap with an enemy in it. The more I think about it, the more I'm liking it. And in the end, it doesn't really change the flow all that much. As soon as the other side's ship(s) leave or die it's back to normal. And if they just left, they could head back to deal with it.

Detonations are pure randomness. I have been detonated in my Arkansas Beta by the very first shell that hit me, a South Carolina HE shell hitting the flagpole it looked like. I mean, if Detonations had anything to do with hitting something, other than the ship, I wouldn't have expected the flagpole to count. But it did. 1 HE shell, 1 Detonation.

Bombers killing fighters obviously don't count towards the achievement, and fighters intercepted by other fighters will kill some enemies (and seemingly at a worse rate than when manually targeting enemy fighters) and not count either. And CVs being popular targets for air strikes also get a fair few AA kills. Those need to be targeted too. Overall though, CVs have a much easier time getting the achievement as the vast majority of plane kills comes from active targeting, compared to AA. However, I haven't had issues in my Cleveland, and have only missed one Clear Skies (I was occupied with avoiding various enemy ordnance.

Well, thankfully it was only that one battle. Mostly I think the MM is pretty good. I mean most battles there are one or two guys who can be considered unfortunate, but overall I don't find the MM terrible. Crap will happen, and in this case I took it in good grace (in fact everyone who spoke up did so with jokes and great laughs, good atmosphere in that battle) and even survived without running off into the corner. In fact I was in the process of a deathride towards two Yamatos and the Mogami. I actually had fun, but I suppose it was fun exactly because it is a rare thing, and so I would prefer to not have this crap again. I doubt there would have been many laughs had it been the fifth time that day.

Actually I was wrong as well. Both had 8 150mm guns. But it is of little difference. Yeah, she wouldn't be a Kuma. But Kuma is already the best T4 cruiser. She would be a reasonably good match for the Phoenix however. But the point is that while she would be the weakest of the T4s, it wouldn't be an utterly craptastic comparison like the Karlsruhe is. And premium? Maybe, I just don't see the appeal. She looks good, and that's about it. There is nothing special about Emden, most people don't even know her, she did nothing worth talking about and she carried nothing special to mark her. As such the only thing that makes her Premium material is the fact that she was a one off ship. Not that it won't happen, WG has done a lot of thing I wonder at, but it would still surprise me a bit as she simply doesn't have much money potential. She could of course be one of the 'event' premiums that never gets sold, and for that she is actually fairly good. Though most of them are just lesser known sisters of famous ships, or ships with impressive achievements but are otherwise unknown and of good class (the Omaha and Aurora variants comes to mind). But I would see that as a waste, since the German cruiser line is pretty slim as it is.

One less gun, but one more gun per broadside. They have the same frontal capabilities of four guns with Emden having better arcs for her wing guns (hence greater tolerance in approach). How is she quite crap? She is bigger than Karlsruhe (again, it is a Königsberg (1915) class), so more HP, she is faster, she has better armour (belt is slightly thinner, but instead she has that internal armour Karlsruhe doens't) and she has more torps (only outfitted with four, but designed for 8). She even has her main rangefinder at the top of her mast (very similar to the T5 Königsberg actually), one of the requirements for longer range according to WG, compared to Karlsruhe's main rangefinder being not only smaller but placed on the lower superstructure right in front of the bridge. She might not exactly be a Kuma, but she is a definite upgrade from Karlsruhe, to the point that she can actually compete and not be a total walkover. And she avoids that silly naming problem that Karlsruhe has run into (can't have two classes of Königsberg).

Emden? A bit faster, a better armour layout, better gun layout, should have more HP, more torps. And better looking. In fact I'm rather surprised that she isn't in as it is, T4 being ships right on the heels of WWI, while Karlsruhe (a Königsberg class cruiser) is from 1915.

Hey guys... try to beat this. Even if we discount the fail division with the Ranger, this has to be the most idiotic setup I have seen. It was so bad I couldn't do anything but laugh and enjoy the absurdity.

That's not going to happen as it would be a historical regression. It's a bit like the Mutsuki or various IJN DDs after her that sacrificed turrets for more AA as well. It was a simple feature of the war. Yes, I know that historical accuracy isn't something WG are big on, but they appear to stick to it in this department.

Not a bad idea honestly. We have to wait for the game to load anyway, and with the present issues of loading times, it is wasted time. I don't like the way WG play the vampire here, but honestly, it isn't hard to play the game without paying a cent. So free, if you want it to be. Yes the grind is rough, but for most of that time you will be enjoying yourself right? RIGHT? Well, maybe I misunderstand things and people actually do grind entire lines they don't enjoy... I don't know.

Considering the Admiral Hipper Blücher did practically nothing, and that SMS Blücher was both active and quite a special ship for her age, I can't see him not meaning SMS Blücher. Unknown if it will be in...

Yes, dual purpose guns are just that. It is slightly silly that they can work in both capacities at te same time, but that's just a limitation with the engine I suppose. The fact remains that they do work as AA at all times (as long as not knocked out or set to not fire).

Fire always does 0.3% HP per second, and can stack four times (if hit in the right places of course). 4 fires kill utterly rapidly, it is downright scary to consider (had the luck to watch that in a stream). Carriers takes 0.4% HP per second. Flooding goes from 0.5% at T1 down to 0.125% at T10. And it can't stack. Thus arguably somewhere around T6 fires should have overtaken flooding in damage per second. However flooding lasts a long time and slow the ship. Which means it can still be an annoyance at high tiers.

Yes, pretty stupid, but that is exactly how it is. One should always compare the comparable weapons when looking at upgrades. Right now we have to do this on our own.

Oh I didn't mean to say Hiryu was awesome or sometihng like that. In fact in CBT she used to be considered the IJN slump carrier. But it is more the fact that the Ranger is often considered the second worse carrier after the Bogue. And both of them utterly knocks their IJN counterparts out of the boxing ring. A point I forgot to mention in my list, is that I think the listing might be slightly skewed. Most of the best CV players started on the IJN. Thus it wouldn't surprise me if the Top 10 of either line has more raw talent on the USN line this time around. Also, IJN CVs suffered a much heavier loss of players, and even if it was mainly among the average joes, I wouldn't be surprised if the total loss was still bigger among the best players of the line, diluting the skill pool a bit more.

I'm not sure I agree. If we look at the top 10 players for Hosho/Zuiho and Langley/Bogue the USN ships do a lot better. They are obviously harder ships to play with, but when you are good, they are also better. The IJN ships on the other hand lend themselves much better to the average joe. They are stealthier and faster, so you have some leeway in making plotting mistakes, they have more TB squadrons with a wider spread so they are more likely to give you some hits, even when you mess up. But they simply can't compare to a perfect USN TB strike with even a single TB squadron. What is really interesting is how the IJN dips for the top players, while the USN steadily increases, despite not really getting a lot more firepower. But overall the USN outmatches the IJN in damage for the Top 10 players. Which sort of surprised me outside of the top tiers. Bogue, often claimed to be the worst CV ingame, utterly trumps the previous CV king Zuiho, and Ranger, often considered another T7 slump ship, is better than Hiryu at nearly 100k average (Hiryu is around 65k). Admittedly Ranger dips marginally from Independence. So why is this? I think it is not a single reason. USN TBs do have more 'perfect strike' potential, so a better player is more likely to cause heavy damage. USN DBs are more likely to cause a lot of fires, so even a single squadron can be a danger. And their bombs hurt more. IJN top 10 players face off against a lot of less skilled USN CVs who play more with fighters, curbing their damage potential more. USN top players also face them but are better equipped to hold them back. IJN TBs are more sensitive to losses. 1 plane lost can mean a strike goes from 2 to 1 hit (on approach, if before the player can just readjust), reducing the overall potential more than a single USN TB lost. Does this make the USN CVs better? I don't think so. The vast majority can't make them work nearly as well, and will bet blocked more easily in their strikes. But it does mean that I don't think you can say that the IJN CVs are OP because the USN CVs are bad. Obviously they aren't bad if the best of either side has the USN ships come out on top.

I'm a little surprised you have that experience. Of course, if you come from Fuso, sitting at long range, with incoming fire inaccurate and quite random, then I suppose it can seem that way. But then I wonder if it might not be more down to how well you angle. mid to short range broadsiding is naturally a perfect way to get sent back to port. And with proper angling I find that Nagato is vastly stronger than Fuso. Not only is she not as tall, but her armour is also stronger and she has more HP with a much better heal. She really can take a beating very well, and I don't like to say this, but if you find that she is more fragile, then you are not doing it right. If you do present your broadside, unintentionally or not, then usually the hits will be much worse as she faces a lot more 16 inch enemies. Protection of your weakspots is more important than in Fuso. [EDIT] You have more survivability, more damage and more accuracy in Nagato on average than in Fuso. So you are on the right path, though it is a somewhat long one.