RamirezKurita

Unfortunately, the term "after release" means that it will occur sometime between release and the end of time. We are after release now, but technically they could unify the accounts in 150 years and they would have still fulfilled their promise.

Obviously you can't rely on getting a lucky salvo, but as I said, the Zuiho would also have an additional non-carrier ship on its team. Even if the Zuiho does literally zero damage to enemy ships (which has happened to me in that exact scenario, I was basically reduced to a floating AA platform), I know that a pair of fighter Bogues would struggle to keep up with a single decent Kongo player on damage. The situation favours the Zuiho team even more if it is a T6 or T7 game, as then cruisers with defensive fire start to appear and the Bogues will achieve even less. Air supremacy is nice and all, but sometimes it can be a struggle to take advantage of it enough for it to be worth the price.

Harsh on your little Zuiho, but good luck to the Bogues as they try to pull their weight with only 2 dive bomber squadrons between them for attacking ships meanwhile the Zuiho enjoys having an extra ship on their team and a single good torp run would probably let the Zuiho deal more damage than both Bogues together. I also originally started using fighter setups in my Ryujo so that I would stand a chance of containing multiple enemy carriers, a duty that I no longer need to do because if I ever face double carrier team I will always have my own allied carrier.

Mirroring is unnecessary, the real problem is that the biggest counter to destroyers right now are other destroyers (and I guess aircraft carriers, but they are so heavily nerfed and underplayed in most tiers that they don't really factor into balancing any more). Once they solve that issue, then massed destroyers would lose a lot of their effectiveness. Mirroring is just an incredibly lazy way of balancing games, it's basically saying that something is so unbalanced that literally the only way to balance it is to make sure both sides have the same amount of horrific unbalance. Having forced identical teams simply destroys so much of the strategy in the game, as each team would then basically have identical strengths and weaknesses and so an identical strategy, rather than players having to try to figure out each sides relative strengths and weaknesses and trying to play with them in mind.

I'd suspect that it is partially because otherwise interface mods would simply add the torpedo notifier back in, as it is all already within player knowledge. It's also because clarity is a good thing for competitive games, adding in notifiers for information the player already has but reducing the amount of busywork that simply clutters the game up without adding actual difficulty. It's the same reason why the game adds in timers for how long things take to repair or guns take to reload, sure you can learn how long each one takes and count each of them down yourself, or alternatively it could simply give you that information so that you can actually play the game rather than be busy calculating and checking your watch/phone/other timepiece. Taking the concept even further, its the same reason why each match shows the remaining time on the interface, players could calculate it but it is much healthier for the game if it simply shown from the beginning. Getting back on topic, it would be nice if we actually had a way of somewhat controlling our spotter planes rather than them just circling. It seems kind of odd that they have a habit of circling around a few kilometres behind us while we are shooting, rather than moving forward and actually spotting where our shells land. It could even be something as simple as them circling around a few kilometres in the direction our guns are currently pointing (or trying to point), that way we could at least use them to actually spot for us, while also giving battleships and later cruisers a relative blind spot, rather than having them randomly fly over important things.

I've suggested before that it should simply make the ships proximity detection range equal to the targets' standard detection range. This would mean that it would work at 6km or so for early tiers, and a bit higher at later tiers, in particular it would help hunt down destroyers that are hiding in smoke or behind islands (it annoys me how if a destroyer pops smoke, so a cruiser pops hydroacoustics, cruiser is still at a massive disadvantage currently). It could even have an enhanced detection range against destroyers that have recently launched torpedoes, similar to how shooting increases the detection range for regular sight, so that IJN destroyers can still be detected and hunted down even if they are just torp sniping in open water. It should probably also give enemies a bit of a notification that they are near cruisers with the hydroacoustics active, similar to how carriers can see when cruisers have AA fire active so they know to back off for 40 seconds, so that destroyers know when it is risky to fire torps or rely on smoke. Not sure what it should do about torpedo visibility, beyond increasing it. I wouldn't be surprised if RN destroyers eventually get hydroacoustics, as historically sub hunting was what they were good at, Soviet destroyers already have the artillery gunboat theme going on.

It would give players less choices, making gameplay overly streamlined and less strategic as suddenly cruisers would have too many answers to potential threats to ever be balanced, not to mention how cruisers already have the most consumable slots in the game. Having a one-size-fits-all escort than can fend off basically everything would run the risk of either making them too perfect as escorts for battleships (thereby forcing destroyers and carriers out of the game), or would simply leave them spread too thin to actually deal with any threat but simply mediocre against everything, either way it's pretty unhealthy for the game.

They already have the dedicated tool for DD hunting - the Hydroacoustic Search. The only problem is that it is rubbish, and far too weak to actually do its job right now. I have said many times that Hydroacoustic Search needs some massive buffs to actually make cruisers consider taking it, rather than every single cruiser at T6 or above just taking Defensive Fire on autopilot without even thinking about it. That way they wouldn't need any fancy passive buffs, they would have an effective active ability, it would also provide an indirect buff to carriers as not every single cruiser would have Defensive Fire.

Aesthetically, I would prefer to have black smoke in the game, I feel it would give a much more industrial feel to the game as well as making sense for more ships as most of them wouldn't have dedicated smoke generators, alternatively WG could look into which ships actually had the dedicated smoke generators and making the colour accurate depending on ship. Alternatively, as has been mentioned it would be nice to give players the option to choose their smoke colour, even if it costs gold to change smoke colour. More importantly, I would like for smoke to be more visible in the game, as at the moment it can be pretty hard to see, particularly when you are zoomed in or inside it. I'd also rather ships appear as wireframes when viewed through smoke rather than the smoke becoming invisible when zooming in.

However, the price you would pay for guaranteeing having a ship in your division at top tier would be to have a ship in your division at the bottom possible tier, so it pretty much balances out. If you play with your T8 ship with your T6 partner, yes you will always do well because you will never face T9/10 in your T8, but your partner will need all the help he can get because he is guaranteed to be facing off against T8s in his T6 every single game. If WG simply limited divisions to only include ships that can normally be in the same games together (normally within 2 tiers of each other, but I know it changes for some premiums and in the early tiers), then only put divisions in to games where all the division members could normally enter, then it would fix the problems related to having below minimum tier ships ruining games. Sure, you can guarantee that you have a pair of top tier ships in a game, but considering how the MM tries to balance out the tiers somewhat between teams, it is likely that your division would account for most of the top tier ships in your game, you wouldn't be able to force more high tier ships into the game than the matchmaking would normally allow.

The best thing to do would be to add them both in, giving RN carriers a much greater variety of aircraft to choose from than the other factions in the later tiers as they would have 3-4 of each type of aircraft rather than just 2. If aircraft from each nation have slightly different themes (such as USN aircraft being tougher, while RN aircraft being faster or with more damage, for example), then it would actually give RN carriers quite a bit more flexibility as to what role they wish to assume, as well as letting players use the particular aircraft they want for thematic reasons.

I was thinking that, as she was meant as a maintenance/resupply carrier rather than a standard fleet carrier, she would have fewer squadrons to manage but significantly larger reserves. Most of the figures I have seen show her has having fewer aircraft for her squadrons, but significant amounts of aircraft in storage. Would give her a different play style compared to most carriers as she wouldn't have the same initial strike power, but would be far more effective in long battles of attrition due to her reserves and thick armour.

Everyone knows the endless threads about how the Essexes and Midways are far more powerful than the lowly Taihous and Hakuryuus, there's so many of them that even players who are nowhere near T9 and T10 have no doubt read them and probably commented on them (myself included in that), so I did a bit of looking into reasons for this to be the case (beyond the whole differences in aircraft). Something that I came across is how the Japanese 10cm twin mounts are actually terrible AA guns with only 2.25 DPS per barrel against aircraft, which strikes me as odd because historically they were among the best AA artillery of the time because of a high muzzle velocity and good rate of fire. In game, they are notably worse than the US 5"/38 and the IJN 12.7 cm guns, both of which have 3 DPS per barrel with the same range. It means that the Taihou has less long-range AA DPS than the Shoukaku. This also affects the Zao to a lesser degree, but the carriers have far more 10cm guns so they suffer far more from having these weapons. The Midway's and Montana's 5"/54s are also no better than the 5"/38s, which strikes me as being a little odd. If the 10cm twin mounts were to be notably buffed in AA DPS it would help close the gap between IJN and USN carriers, as the IJN carriers carry far more artillery than the USN ones, with the Midway only carrying 18 guns compared to the 24 of the Hakuryuu. Increasing the DPS of both the IJN and USN guns would also bring them more in line with the late/post war AA artillery on the Kutuzov, which manages 7.5 DPS per barrel, if the Hakuryuu's 10cm guns managed the same DPS it would have 180 DPS within a 5km range, enough to seriously threaten even the Midway's aircraft when combined with escorts, while the Taihou would have 120 DPS, again giving it a notable advantage against the Essex, while the Midway would have 135 long range DPS (notably lower than the IJN's 180) and the Montana 150 (giving the Montana a significant AA advantage over the Yamato). It would also make the Akizuki-class destroyers actually useful if they ever plan to add them into the game, as they were dedicated AA destroyers but only having 18 long range DPS with current values would be a waste of space, but with the buffed damage they would have 60 DPS, making them actually useful AA platforms if they also have defensive fire. Alternatively, rather than giving them all the same DPS, the later guns could have different combinations of range and DPS, with the longer range ones having lower DPS and vice-versa, as long as they are overall balanced against each other. TLDR - Buffing the other late/post war AA artillery to bring them in line with the Kutuzov's AA artillery would help top tier balance by generally weakening carriers at T9/T10, buffing the IJN carriers compared to their USN counterparts at those tiers and buffing the Montana compared to the Yamato, with the minor side effect of slightly buffing the Zao's AA suite, effectively fixing the problems that are most complained about in T10 games.

I never suggested that everyone should have good AA, only the ships that are currently massively gimped compared to their historical counterparts that also happen to be underperforming in the game, so such a change would also help bring them up to standard. No destroyer would be affected by the changes I suggested, as none of the destroyers in the game currently have late war AA artillery, likewise the only cruiser that would be affected would be the Zao. Also the only tiers that would be affected would be a few T10 ships and a T9 ship, so the lower and middle tiers wouldn't be affected. I'm also fully aware that in the middle tiers carriers are struggling, particularly having recently finished with my Ryujo, but such a change wouldn't affect them at all. In fact, by buffing top tier AA, it might allow for the blanket nerfs that carriers have been hit by to be reverted, so that the middle tiers can once again actually have some fun. The other problem facing mid tier carriers is the Cleveland, but the official plan is to put it at T8 or so where it would fit in rather than negating an entire class of ship. It always annoyed me how people complained about the T9 and T10 US carriers, so WG proceeded to nerf all carriers. I'm not really sure what can be done to help T3-4 ships deal with carriers though, beyond sticking more AA guns on the later hulls (which are largely fictional anyway as most of them were scrapped long before WWII, so a bit of artistic license wouldn't cause any harm). I never had any problems in my Kongo against aircraft though, as once I got the hull upgrades I was practically glad to be attacked by aircraft as I had the speed and AA power to deal with them, unlike my lower tier allies, even my Myogi was a reasonable threat to aircraft even before all the blanket nerfs to carriers.

Not quite, as the reductions are multiplicative off each other, rather than adding their effectiveness together which is then multiplied. This means that rather than (1-0.05-0.07) = 0.88 for a total of 12% reduction, when taken together they are (0.95*0.93) = 0.8835 for a total of 11.65% reduction. Not much of a change, admittedly, but it means they aren't as effective together as some people think. It also means that for the Des Moines, the demolition skill more than counters both the damage control mod and the fire prevention skill combined, as without the base ship modifier it still results in the Des Moines having a 17.73% fire chance. That increase only gets larger as the caliber gets smaller, which is why I complained earlier in the thread how the demolition skill is one of the main problems plaguing the low caliber HE spam as its counters are unable to do their job, which is why I suggested that either demolition should be changed into a multiplicative modifier (obviously with the numerical value tweaked) or the others should be changed to also be additive, which would then allow them to actually do their job of countering HE spam rather than being most effective against capital ships which rarely use HE in the first place. It would probably also help if they actually put the base ship modifier into the survivability section of the port, as well as making it a per ship variable rather than simply giving all final hulls of a given tier identical modifiers which would give WG more balance variables to work with (as a ships fire resistance wouldn't simply depend on its tier and whether it is a carrier or not like it currently does).

I think I'd rather see it as an entirely separate ship, considering how it would end up being a quite different design to the final one because of the significant differences in weight distribution. If they trimmed the ship down slightly in other areas, the preliminary design could even have the planned 4x3 14" guns, which had to be cut down on the final model to save weight for more engines and armour.

But also in real life, the turreted secondaries were just as accurate as other ships' main guns, it's just that all guns had massive trouble hitting a moving target from a long way away. Granted, the casemated weapons did have issues though, particularly the ones closer to the waterline. For the damage from fires thing, ships already do have locational damage where each section of the ship has a certain percentage of the ship's total health as far as I know, provided they haven't removed it, with the total of all sections totalling far more than 100% (plus the citadel has an unlimited health pool, so ships cannot ever survive having their citadel destroyed). This works fine under most scenarios, as it allows smaller ships to damage the less armoured sections of the superstructure and the bow and stern regions, but only up to a certain point upon which they struggle to inflict more, letting them support effectively against larger ships but being almost unable to solo them; the real problem comes with how fire and flooding damage are not part of these damage calculations and are simply detracted directly from the ships HP. If they simply redesignated fires as causing superstructure damage (probably with an increase in superstructure health, at the moment shooting superstructure can't do much), then HE would be useful for inflicting a bit of initial damage and to damage secondary guns and AA guns, but would struggle to sink ships without either mixing up the damage sources or help from allies with better penetration. Speaking of taking out secondaries and AA guns, it would be nice if some of them were repairable rather than them being simply either completely functioning or completely FUBAR, with no middle ground. If they were easier to damage, but harder to destroy, it would give lower caliber HE shells the extra supporting ability to sweep enemy ships to temporarily disable some of the AA guns to help support their carriers, but without the issue of a single lucky salvo early on leaving a ship defenceless for the rest of the game. Something else that I have suggested before is to separate the current engine damage into "engine room damage" and something like "drive shaft damaged", having drive shaft damage would be like the current engine damage where it shuts off power entirely but is easily fixed, while having individual engine rooms damaged would just generally impact the speed of a ship and would generally be a fairly rare occurrence that results from citadel penetrations. Considering how many engine rooms even little cruisers had, the chances of having all of them knocked out would be incredibly low due to them requiring so many citadel penetrations. There could even be a medal and associated flag for surviving a match after losing more than 50% of your engine power. Similarly, most larger ships had multiple rudders, so it would be nice to see some kind of gradient damage for them, although they would probably have to remain repairable because probably more than half of the ships in the game only had single rudders.

It's quite difficult to narrow it down to a particular ship, but in the end I went for the Yamato. I quite like how it isn't quite fully sleek, yet isn't just a brutish utilitarian design, it overall have a "muscular" look that is basically as sleek as possible while still overflowing with menace. Generally speaking I went for the RN ships though, as I generally quite like the looks of battlecruisers with their long sleek lines and I've never been too keen on the IJN Pagoda masts. That being said, I am quite the fan of the Kriegsmarine's turret designs, their efficient and boxy design does sit well with me. Edit - No option for the St. Louis? I would have thought that derpy little ships like that would have a small but dedicated fanbase.

I always assumed that they put torpedoes in the secondary tree because they were a secondary weapon, not necessarily a secondary battery. I just assumed that by "secondary" they were talking about everything other than the main guns. For overall balance for DDs and CLs that rely on AFT and BFT, that's why I suggested parallel skills in a main gunnery tree. That way players would still have the option of increasing their range and RoF with captain skills if their playstyle requires it, but they would no longer be able to triple-dip with the bonuses (as CLs get bonuses to their main battery, secondary battery and AA). It would make Clevelands and Mogamis in particular actually have to choose between being better able to wither opponents down with their main batteries or being decent strong AA escort, rather than simply getting everything in a couple of skills. Separating out the main battery and secondary bonuses into different skills would also allow the numbers to be different, allowing the skills to be balanced for both secondaries and main batteries, rather than main batteries dragging the secondary bonuses down to keep things balanced.

As far as I can see it, the real problems come from a couple of things. Firstly is BFT and AFT, which only affect guns under a certain caliber. They are primarily there to buff secondary guns (hence their placement in the secondary weapons skills), however because their limitations are dependent on caliber rather than only affecting secondaries, CLs and DDs get far more benefit from them than battleships as they can use the bonuses on their primary batteries. +20% range and +10% fire rate is almost ignorable for secondaries, but is massive for a low caliber primary battery (which still provides bonuses for AA and the secondary batteries on top of the primary battery bonuses). This is why I suggested in another thread that the secondary skills should only benefit secondary batteries and AA, while a parallel set of skills would be in the main gunnery skills, ideally with the main gunnery skills having a more gradual effect rather than an absolute cut off point (so having big bonuses for <130mm, solid bonuses for <155mm, reasonable bonuses for <210mm, poor bonuses for <356mm and negligible bonuses for >356mm guns, as an example), or simply affecting all main calibers equally (percentages affect everything equally after all!). Similarly, I think they should just change the turret rotation skill to be a percentage rather than flat values for low and high caliber guns, as it would produce a less artificial cut off and a more gradual set of bonuses, while alse basically doing the same thing because high caliber turrets tend to rotate slower anyway. Secondly is how demolition expert scales additively, rather than multiplicatively. This means that it provides massive boosts for ships that are capable of laying down huge numbers of shells regardless of the shell sizes, but very little bonuses for ships that rely on small numbers of powerful shells. Because all the anti-fire options scale multiplicatively, they offer no special benefit against the HE spewing rapid fire, treating them the same as the small salvos of high caliber HE shells, effectively becoming unable to counter the very thing they are made to counter. If they fixed it so that either they are all multiplicative, or all additive, then the balance for the system would work far better.

The non-premium ships in-game don't represent single ships, they represent entire classes of ship. Many sister ships had slight differences between them,one of the biggest examples in-game currently are the Fusos, where the A hull is Fuso while the B hull is Yamashiro, complete with slightly different turret layout and armour. It's also why the AA of the different hulls jumps about, as they are not limited to a single ship's AA but instead pick and choose across the entire class's modernisations to give a smoother progression. Having Strasbourg's armour layout on a later hull upgrade wouldn't be particularly unusual because you wouldn't be playing as Dunkerque, you would be playing as a ship of the Dunkerque class. Which is also why I'm somewhat annoyed by WGs policy of T10 ships having no modernisation options, as the Yamato class would have been one of the most diverse classes of battleship ever made as the later ships were to have different secondary batteries (not to mention the modernisation plans they had and the other options that were part of the original specification), but instead we are stuck with a single specific set up. But that line of conversation is for a different thread, so I'll not elaborate further so that I don't clutter up the thread with off-topic stuff.

I think it would give a smoother progression if they instead used one of the paper designs following the Omaha, as they had planned an Omaha successor that mounted all of its guns in turrets (they had three different Omaha successor designs as far as I am aware, a CL with 6" guns, a CA with 8" guns and a BM with 14" guns), and then moved the Brooklyns up to T7 and the Clevelands up to T8. Unfortunately, I would like to see the Brooklyns at T8 so that they can face off properly with the Mogamis (they were built as a direct response to the Mogamis under the limitations of the London Naval Treaty, hence why they are so similar), but that would either involve putting their improved successors at a lower tier or trying to shoehorn the Clevelands into T9, neither of which is a particularly attractive option, but at least there isn't much difference between T7 and T8 cruisers already so even Brooklyns balanced for T7 would probably be able to match up to the T8 Mogamis. As I said, the Fargos were basically identical to the Clevelands, while the St. Louis's were basically identical to the Brooklyns, so they should really be in the same tiers as their half-sisters, they are even similar enough that it would probably be possible to put them as hull upgrades rather than full ship classes.

The Lord Nelsons are from a generation later than the Mikasa though, as the Lord Nelsons were among the semidreadnoughts which include the Japanese Satsumas and Katoris (and arguably the Kawachi, due to it mounting a mixed set of 12" guns) while the Mikasa was basically the last of the presemidreadnoughts (is that even a term?) alongside the British Formidables and Duncans. Unfortunately, the predreadnoughts only really have a single tier to work with as T1 is restricted to the little introductory gunboats and T3 is the beginning of the dreadnoughts, otherwise it would probably be quite possible to populate 3 or so tiers of them. But if they don't severely gimp the secondaries I could see the semidreadnoughts actually working at T3, 9.2" guns can't really be underestimated at low tiers. Looking into it all a bit more, another predreadnought that could work as a T2 premium would be HMS commonwealth, which underwent significant modernisations at the end of WW1 to function as a training ship. At that point she was basically a predreadnought with fire control systems on par with the Revenges, which may translate to having a very long range in game.

I'm pretty sure the Worcesters would fit better at T9, being of a similar displacement to the Baltimores, albeit slightly more modern. The biggest thing to note about the Worcesters is that they were primarily designed for anti-air combat, complete with a DP main battery; they are basically just giant Atlantas, so even if they are relatively weak in ship v ship combat then they will still be useful for AA duty. The Clevelands and Fargos both belong in T8, however I know that balancing them would be quite a challenge as the Fargos are basically slightly better in every single way, but they are nowhere near better enough to warrant being an entire tier higher. Maybe some kind of behind the scenes matchmaking mechanics would be necessary, making the Fargos count as a tier 7.5 ship for team balancing? The real problem with putting the Worcesters at T9 is that it leaves T10 open. I'm not sure if there are any designs for improved versions of them, or any preliminary designs that were considered to be too large and were downscaled for production. One crazy idea that I did have in another thread could be to put the Des Moines as the ultimate "CL", as despite them being CAs their guns owe significant parts of their design to the Worcesters and their gameplay is about high volumes of fire like the CLs rather than the precision fire of other CAs, this would leave the CAs without a T10 option but the option I did come up with is to put the Alaskas as their T10 option due to their design lineage as a big Baltimore and their gameplay being likely more like the Baltimores' than the Des Moines' are. The empty spot left by the Cleveland at T6 for the heavy cruisers could easily be replaced with one of the design intermediates between the Omaha and the Pensacola, as there were designs for a ship based off the Omaha that had 8" guns in turrets before the design was enlarged and became the Pensacola.

I'd rather see one of the old semi-dreadnoughts as a T2 premium, rather than a standard pre-dreadnought. The only problem is that I know WG wouldn't give them good enough secondary batteries to make their 9.2" guns actually useful.