RamirezKurita

Thinking about it a bit more, if they implemented mods directly directly into the client then it would be far easier to regulate them and keep them strictly cosmetic. That way, there would be very specific things that the mods can actually change while everything else would be banned. Rather than giving players the power to modify anything they get their hands on then trying to regulate it afterwards, it would be better to open up specific avenues of appropriate mods (such as ship retextures, custom flags and alternate ship images). They could ensure that every aspect they open up can't be abused, and would remove the grey area of which mods are cosmetic and which ones are cheats.

For coloured shells I'd rather if the game just gave us the option to change the colour of our own shells, so that each player would then have their own unique colour shells. This is basically what happened historically, as different battleships within a group would use different dye bags in their shells, so that when operating together they could identify from which battleships each splash of water was from for each missed shot. It would also be entertaining to see a destroyer being fired at from multiple ships and having a veritable rainbow of splashes and tracers all around them. It could even become something to work towards in-game, with some daily missions giving another random colour to add to your collection rather than the usual free XP and credits, it could even be a bit of a money spinner for WG if it requires doubloons to dismount colours from a ship rather than destroying them.

The only mods I don't mind are minor graphical ones, such as retexturing ships, correcting historical flags and changing background images for the loading and victory screens. These mods make basically no difference to the actual gameplay, but do add to the players enjoyment of it, while not detracting from the enjoyment of others because the gameplay itself is not changed. I don't agree with mods that give an appreciable difference to gameplay or the in-game interface though (I don't mind port interface mods as they can't give players an unfair advantage, they are simply either fancy or convenient), as then you are beginning to tread a fine line between customising your gameplay for your own enjoyment and outright cheating. I'd say that recolouring AP and HE shells, for example, would be a borderline cheating one as it gives you a slight advantage due to the significantly better clarity you enjoy (as destroyers might not bother dodging AP shells, while battleships will probably completely ignore AP shells from anything less than 8" guns). If the extra clarity and customisability is something that players want in the game, it should be officially implemented rather than giving an advantage to a select few.

The simplest solution would be to have all the flags in the game files, both historical and alternatives, then offer little localisation options that simply asks players what country they are from when they next log into the game. If the player happens to be from an Asian country that bore the brunt of the Japanese Empire's aggression, then the IJN rising sun flag gets replaced with the standard Japanese flag. If they player happens to be from a country that has banned the Swastika like Germany has, then the Kriegsmarine would use the alternative flag (as well as most of the German navies' flags would be altered, from what I can tell). If the player is from a country that suffered under Soviet occupation, then the Hammer and Sickle would be replaced with a politically correct alternative. That way, if the player's home nation doesn't care about the historical politics, they can enjoy the full historical set of flags. If a player chooses to lie about his country of origin and so gets a flag that he is offended by, then that's his own fault.

It's not meant to be a pleasant sound because something bad just happened, you are meant to associate being hit in the citadel with not being good. It's like complaining that you don't like warning sirens - they are meant to be horrible, grating sounds that immediately grab your attention so that you do something rather than ignore them.

As others have said, remember that you have allies who can have surprising amounts of AA themselves, particularly if you are lucky enough to get a Cleveland or two. Even without Clevelands though, it's surprising how much of a threat to aircraft any fully modernised battleship or cruiser can be (and cruisers often even have catapult fighters!). Trying to engage their fighters within allied AA firepower can be enough to tip the balance in your favour, making them pay dearly for their air-to-air victories against you. Speaking of allies, because of the forced MM for carriers, you will always have an allied carrier to help you if you are up against two enemy carriers, so coordinate with them. If the enemy fighters are scattered all over, coordinate your fighters to take down a lone enemy fighter squadron; if the enemy fighters are grouped, then spread your bombers all over so they have to try to defend everywhere. Nowadays the fighter strafe ability (alt+click) is quite powerful and can be used to destroy huge amounts of enemy fighters if they try to group up. Can take a bit of practice to get used to though. Even if they have quite a lot of fighters, there will always be moments when they leave gaps in their patrols, if you have bombers ready then you will often be able to dash out for a quick run against the enemy front lines, possibly damaging a destroyer or even a cruiser that is getting a little too close. Obviously you have to keep an eye out for enemy fighters, but if you are lucky you might be able to lure them onto your own fleet's AA. Lastly, remember that you aren't just your planes, you have a ship too. If you are in a situation where you absolutely cannot do anything with your aircraft, then make use of the rest of your ship. The Zuiho actually has some reasonable secondaries (unfortunately secondaries in general are pretty bad, so don't rely on them too much) and very good AA, as well as enough speed and concealment to keep up with the fleet. Sometimes your own AA can tip the air balance in your favour, but if all else fails you can help with capping and shooting down enemy bombers.

Some interesting designs in this thread, I never knew that Sweden's naval architects were so active in during that period! From the looks of things, there's probably enough destroyers to fill out a destroyer tree, with possibly enough regular cruisers to flesh out a basic cruiser line. The ships I would like to see most though would be a "cruiser" line of the defence ships, as looking at all the proposals and designs mentioned so far, there's easily enough defence ship proposals (particularly including the related categories of monitors and artillery ships) to go all the way from T2-3 up to T10. They have both the appropriate range of ages as well as the appropriate displacements to fit right in line with the existing cruisers. In-game I'd imagine they would function mostly as long-range artillery, using a combination of heavy guns, good accuracy and solid concealment to wither away the enemy, although if their torpedo protection is anything like the British RN monitors they would also be surprisingly difficult for destroyers to deal with.

As has already been pointed out, the Kriegsmarine basically didn't need aircraft carriers as they operated under the umbrella of land based aircraft 99% of the time, it's the opposite as to one of the reasons why the RN favoured armoured carrier designs (as they knew they would be operating under the umbrellas of their enemies land based aircraft most of the time). They still had the Graf Zeppelin, as well as they were in the process of converting several different civilian ships and cruisers. Overall, they probably have enough carriers to fill out tiers 5 up to 8, and there might have been other conversion proposals that I'm not aware of to fill out the rest of the tiers. The Soviets on the other hand as far as I'm aware never even considered getting any carriers in the time period, so overall it would be best if they remain without one as otherwise it would end up being pure fantasy. I'd like to eventually see a nation vs nation gametype though (who doesn't want the thematic battles?), and having nations without carriers would make that queue very difficult to balance.

We'll never see this in the game, at least not as a player ship. It's far too large to be ever balanced against even the T10 ships. The only way we will ever see it in the game is if WG decides to flesh out the PvE a bit more with a bit of extra variety, as it would probably make quite a nice boss enemy for entire teams of T8-10 ships to slug it out with.

Unfortunately it is now basically impossible to post in this thread without either being off-topic either for the specific thread or for the sub-forum it is contained within, as the two are at odds with each other. This entire thread is not about "game guides", it's not about trying to give people directions on how to use the ship, it's about balance discussion. If anything this thread should have been moved to the Gameplay/Current Update feedback forums, as this is ultimately a feedback thread about the game that is still affecting the current version, not a discussion about actually playing the game.

I'd rather if they just buffed the hydroacoustic search to actually be useful rather than it currently being useless in comparison to AA defensive fire (even though carriers are a rare sight these days!).

Most of the time I use Q and E for turning though, I only ever use A or D for turning if I need to make tiny adjustments, so I'm used to monitoring my course and the adjustments I'm making. Playing primarily battleships and aircraft carriers help with this a lot.

I wouldn't be surprised to see 5 aircraft per squadron, although they could surprise us by making them have different squadron sizes for fighters and bombers. Beyond the extra armour giving them extra survivability from the extra HP and rarer penetrations (no citadel penetrations from HE!), from looking at the historical loadouts they typically had some pretty impressive AA firepower as well as some reasonable secondary batteries, so I would expect them to function better than most carriers as an independent ship as well as a fleet escort. The whole doctrine for carriers for most of WWII in the RN was about the carrier serving to support the fleet, rather than the other way around like the USN. From looking at the historical AA guns guns on the Illustrious class, which historically were of similar age and displacement to the Shokakus so are likely to also appear at T8, Formidable ended up with an incredible 16x 4.5" guns, 48x pom poms, 21x 40mm Bofors and 45x 20mm Oerlikons, which is practically T9+ Battleship/Carrier territory with a combined total DPS in the region of 538 (assuming the pom poms have the same DPS per barrel as the ones on Warspite, despite having a much more modern fire director, and the DPS per barrel on the 20mm and 40mm guns are the same as on USN ships). This would overall mean that RN carriers would be quite difficult to use bombers against, although a good chunk of the AA DPS is quite short range so it would have to be very close to the fleet to provide AA support to other ships.

I agree that it should be tweaked to account for all forms of AA, rather than just focused fire and fighters, it doesn't make sense that it selectively chooses which planes are shot down rather than counting them all. It also causes problems for AA cruisers that are trying to take down as many aircraft as possible to help their team rather than focusing on single squadrons. I can see the reasoning that it should scale with tier, as higher tiers have far more planes to shoot down than lower tiers. I know in T4 matches it was practically impossible to reach 30 planes shot down due to the small hangar capacities of the carriers. However, the scaling has gone far too far the other way, as shooting down 50% of the entire enemy team's plane capacity is almost impossible. It also doesn't help that in dual carrier teams, not only is the enemy hangar capacity doubled, but you also have an allied carrier competing for air kills. Overall, I think it would work better if it were simply changed to 5x tier aircraft to get the achievement. That way it breaks even at 30 aircraft at T6, while making the earlier tiers a bit more bearable (20 at T4 and 25 at T5), but also makes it actually a bit of a challenge at higher tiers due to T10 needing 50 aircraft.

As the OP mentioned, the reason why the Atlanta, the dedicated AA cruiser, is underpowered is because carriers have been nerfed too much in the middle tiers. Obviously a specialised ship will be underperforming if the things it is meant to counter don't actually need countering. Once carriers get back up to there being 2 of them per team in almost every game, the Atlanta will once again become useful.

Thinking about it a bit more, I wonder if there's enough carrier conversions for the IJN carrlier line to split into a purpose-built carrier line and a carrier conversion line around T5-6? As far as I can tell, there are at least 5-6 ship classes that were converted historically (and there were probably preliminary studies for others), ranging from the little Zuihos that are already in the game at T5 all the way up to the massive Shinano which would fit well at T10.

I've only had 4 detonations in 760 games, so I wouldn't consider it to be too common.

Another thing to note is that smaller ships such as cruisers and destroyers tended to be quite long for their displacement as it produces a more hydrodynamic hull form which is better for high speeds. This combines with how the displacement is a factor of length, depth and breadth, so even ships with significant displacement differences quite often have relatively minor length differences. Even with identical ratios on the dimensions, a ship that is 25% longer would be almost double the displacement. A time when this historically became an issue was during the battle of Denmark Strait where the Admiral Hipper class cruiser, the Prinz Eugen, was mistaken for Bismarck with one of the reasons being that the Hippers had 80% of the lengths of the Bismarcks despite only 1/3rd of the displacement (also having identical turret layouts and similar superstructures helps too).

Replying to multiple posts from all over this thread, so this post will seem to jump around a bit. Firstly, battlecruisers (CCs, or "cruiser, capital" going by the USN hull codes that people love) will be classed as battleships in the game, this much is obvious as we already have 4 CCs in the Japanese battleships - Myogi, Ishizuchi, Kongo and Amagi. The only battlecruisers I would say could ever fit in with the regular cruisers would be the Courageous class, as they were only 2/3rds the size of other capital ships of the time and were often referred to as "large light cruisers", so overall they have more in common with the Alaskas than other battlecruisers, although their power compared to other cruisers would still make them difficult to place in the tree as their power would place them in the upper tiers but their ages are more in line with the middle tiers, as an aside it would also be fun to see then with Furious's 18" guns. The mixed caliber batteries would simply leave the player in control of the largest set of guns, typically the bow and stern turrets, leaving the lower calibers as secondary batteries. The armoured cruisers were basically lightly armoured, high speed pre-dreadnoughts (the dreadnought era equivalent is actually the battlecruiser), and the Mikasa leaves the player in control of the small number of main guns. This also means that the proper armoured cruisers are more likely to appear as T2 battleships, as they were considered to be capital ships of the time (indeed, the final few IJN armoured cruisers actually had 12" guns). For the upper tiers (T9 and T10), I expect that we will be seeing paper designs up there. I know there were designs for cruisers notably in excess of the 10,000 tons of the treaty that never got built, including one design that had a main battery of 9.2" guns. I wouldn't be surprised if the Town-class would be fine up to T8, considering how they were from the same generation of ships as the Mogamis. Similar to the Mogamis (and the Brooklyns and Clevelands) they were basically heavy cruisers that simply had smaller but more numerous guns (a direct result of the London Naval Treaty, which defined light/heavy cruisers by gun caliber, so navies responded by building 10,000 ton "light" cruisers). Overall, the Towns had some pretty large variations between the subclasses, particularly if we include the planned quad turrets for the Edinburghs, so it wouldn't be too bad to split them between two different ships in the trees (regular town at T7 and Edinburgh at T8).

I'd much rather see them as ships in the trees at T8, where they would appear alongside their equivalents, the Lexingtons. If you look at the carrier trees, several of them are conversions (off the top of my head, the Langley, the Zuihos, the Independences, the Lexingtons are all conversions). Overall, neither of them were particularly special though in operation, as they were fully converted, unlike the hybrid aviation battleships and aviation cruisers the IJN operated, they would play just like any other aircraft carrier. It would get confusing having both the original designs and the conversions in the game though, in the case of the IJN conversions they at least have the advantage that the two conversions were both the 2nd ships in their respective classes, so they could simply call them the Akagi class and the Kaga class as they were the ones actually converted rather than their more official designations of Amagi and Tosa.

It's possible that you suffer from the desync issue that means the enemy ship isn't where it appears to be. I also suffer from it and so I know that the citadel on a moving cruiser is actually about where the bow is, while the middle of the ship is actually where the stern is (stern hits just do the tiny overpen damage that you seem to be dealing there).

A little thing that has irked me so far in the game is how all the secondary batteries on a ship have identical ranges, despite most battleships and many cruisers (particularly Kriegsmarine cruisers) having mixed calibre secondaries, while logically the higher calibre secondaries (particularly turreted ones) should have longer ranges. This is particularly noticeable on the high tier IJN battleships, as their higher calibre secondaries load AP for cruiser hunting duty, however they have their range tied down by the the 127mm dual-purpose batteries so in effect they aren't actually useful against cruisers as cruisers don't get as close as destroyers. Meanwhile, the opposite is true for the 127mm guns, as despite being identical to the ones mounted all the way back on the Kongo they have their ranges lifted all the way up to 7 km from a mere 4 km. This method of balancing secondaries ends up with ships having a fixed circle of secondary death, rather than a gradient of lethality as more guns get in range up close, as well as the previously mentioned issue of the anti-cruiser single purpse batteries not being able to do their job properly. The issue is also apparent to a lesser degree on the German ships, as they sometimes have up to 150mm single purpose secondary batteries in addition to their heavy AA artillery batteries (which are treated as a dual-purpose battery in the game) which suffer from the same problem, as making the 150mm battery have the range to be relevant against cruisers would make the DP batteries far too effective against destroyers. Making the range per gun rather than per ship would solve these issues. It would allow each of a ship's secondary batteries do their own specific job without their performance affecting the other batteries, similar to how we already have ships with multiple AA batteries that each have their own ranges and purposes. For example, if the casemate mounted guns have ranges from 2.5 km up to about 4.5 km, the DP artillery would range from about 2.5 km (the early 76mm gun mounts) up to about 5 km (the standard mid-game 127mm DP mounts), possibly with the high-tech DP mounts being up to 6 km (such as the IJN 100mm and the US 5"/54), which would then allow the single purpose mounts such as the German 150mm and the IJN 155m guns have 7 km and above ranges. Obviously this would quite a bit of tweaking, both of the other aspects of the secondaries themselves as well as probably some balance changes to the ships most affected by the changes. What do people think? Should the current simplification of secondary batteries be kept or should a more logical, but slightly more complicated, approach be taken? Would the current model for secondaries cause problems for any potential ships that are likely to be implemented?

For me the hardest ones are the multiple ship torpedo hits in a single battle, I literally had to go out and buy myself an IJN destroyer to do those missions because I was struggling so much with my Phoenix and Furutaka to complete them. At one point literally all three of my missions require ship torpedo hits, and this was before the option to cycle them manually. The aircraft mission is easy, as I normally play fighter IJN carriers, so getting 30+ aircraft shot down in a battle is pretty routine, both through a combination of fighters being really good at shooting down enemy aircraft as well as being a carrier now guarantees an enemy carrier.

The way I see it, the current secondary battery model in the game severely gimps the high calibre secondaries in favour of the small dual purpose weapons as they are forced to share the same range. Overall, the high caliber secondaries already suffer from a relatively low rate of fire and being fewer in number, which really makes their job difficult if they are forced into the same range as the little guns. To use the Yamato as an example as it is probably the ship that would be affected most: currently the Yamato's 155mm guns are limited to 7 km because giving its 127mm guns any more range would be overpowering. A separation of the ranges, forcing the 127mm guns down to 5 km would give destroyers much more freedom to engage the Yamato as it wouldn't have a 10+ km bubble of secondary death, it would only be 7 km or so once modules and skills are involved, as destroyers don't much care about the 155mm guns as they are too few, fire overpenetrating AP and fire too slowly to be a real threat. This nerf against destroyers would free up a good chunk of the Yamato's power budget, allowing the 155mm guns to go up to perhaps 9 km or so base range, which would then be capable of brawling with cruisers on thanks to the longer ranges and the reasonable penetration of the 155mm ammunition, while possibly getting an occasional lucky hit on destroyers outside the 127mm guns' ranges. It wouldn't be about buffing or nerfing, it's about differentiating the mixed batteries and smoothing the secondary battery firepower over different ranges. It would be about giving different secondary batteries different functions rather than a simple bubble of secondary onslaught that blurs all the guns together into a hail of yellow and orange projectiles. I expect most ships that suffer a range reduction on part of their secondary battery would also get a range increase on another part of it.

As you said for the Furutaka, it basically became identical to the Aoba after they replaced the turrets. However, an upgunned Scharnhorst would not be the same as a Bismarck. There's also the point that the Furutaka simply had its gun layout changed, the actual guns themselves basically didn't change, while for the Mogamis and the Scharnhorsts the guns actually change caliber which overall changes how the ship plays. Overall, the Furutaka's rearming would take more development work than the Mogami's or the Scharnhorst's but give less actual gameplay difference, which overall makes for poor usage of the developer's resources. On a similar note, I am somewhat disappointed that they didn't include the light cruiser variant of the Admiral Hippers, as there were plans for some of them to be completed with 4x3 150mm guns rather than 4x2 203mm guns, which would offer a similar choice as the Mogamis and Scharnhorsts - trading penetration power for DPS.