RamirezKurita

There's a mechanic called damage saturation, where each section of a ship has its own little health pool that can be depleted. After being depleted, the region takes very little damage from enemy fire. Basically, after a certain region is completely chewed up and made useless, twisting the metal more or making more holes in it won't actually affect the ship at all. It's the same reason as to why shooting a battleship's superstructure with HE shells eventually stops doing any significant damage - you are just denting an already non-functioning chunk of hollow metal.

Agreed that the low numbers of CVs is a significant issue, it's already a nightmare to get even just my T8 Shoukaku into a game during an off-peak time period and I'd imagine that it would be even harder for the T9s and T10s. Trying to get more CVs into high tiers is a bit of an issue though, as there's actually quite a few in the lower tiers but somewhere up the tiers everyone just abandons them - I see carriers in more than half of my games in my T4 ships, not that often in my T6-7s and basically the only time I see carriers in T8+ is when I'm playing them. It doesn't help that every single change WG implements for carriers seems to make them even rarer and force more and more carrier players out or the game or into other classes. It also doesn't help that a good chunk of their changes for carriers over the last few years are simply making them harder to learn, but not any harder to master. Every single thing they have done to make carrier gameplay more "skilled" has actually just made carriers harder to learn, they have raised the bar for the minimum skill rather than raising the bar for how to apply maximum skill. This causes a massive gulf between good and bad carrier players, as the bad ones haven't even learnt the basics of what to do while the good ones have got the basics down. Ideally, you want the "easy to learn, hard to master" learning curve, where it's very easy to get some okay results but players who have fully mastered the carriers can get some decent results. To be honest, I feel that what carriers most (but not limited to) need to solve these problems aren't really related to overall power level, but Quality-of-Life improvements such as UI changes. Skill based MM could never use WR to decide teams - the whole point of skill based MM is to try to keep everyone at a 50% win rate. It would need to use a separate Matchmaking Rating or something like that to gauge how good each player is and then balance accordingly.

Not only that, but T10 CVs have very large plane reserves that benefit from long, passive games, while the shorter and more brutal games will not give them much of a chance. It's basically CVs and the Yamatos that are the only forces stopping campfests in the upper tiers. Grouping up doesn't mean camping, ships can more easily support each other if they are all underway. Not only that, but ships that are properly underway are much harder for carriers to attack in the first place.

If you are torping things in smoke, then they can usually torp back. This is a particularly dangerous idea as most of the things that can smoke also have very good torpedoes. You can try using a spotter plane, but not every ship has them and smart players can still shuffle around in the smoke rather than fully dropping anchor. Regular planes actually have no way of seeing things in smoke, smoke is actually a pretty hard counter to carriers. Radar exists so that ships can be forced out of smoke properly, rather than having to risk a suicide run with Hydro (as even with the enhanced detection range, getting within a few km of things with torpedoes is a really bad idea).

Considering how they can so easily model from pure imagination for some ships, I would have thought that having some numbers on hand would make it pretty easy.

To be honest, I think that's more of an issue with the HE penetration mechanics. I'm quite surprised they didn't just use the WoT style of HE damage where armour reduces non-penetrating HE impacts but struggles to completely negate the damage.

They don't gather actual reasons or get a human to look at things, it's just a matter of accruing enough chat reports to use as "evidence", regardless of why the reports were handed out.

They are not shared particularly well in that case, I've had games where I've had 150+k spotting damage done, yet my XP earned wasn't really higher than what my own damage would have suggested. We are not talking about the sharing of the "spotting damage" stat, but the actual credits and XP that result from that sharing.

Same AA guns as built, but the Yorktowns received a crazy amount of modernisation over the course of the war to the point where they were almost halfway towards being an Essex. As far as I'm aware the Wasp never even got 40mm guns during any of her refits historically (I know there were intentions to equip her with 40mm guns, but they never went through and there's even photos showing the empty sponsons where they were meant to be), while the remaining Yorktown ended up with over 50 40mm Bofors, she was never modernised to the same degree as the Yorktowns. Even the Ranger received more modernisations over the course of the war than the Wasp. Aircraft tier depends almost entirely on the tier of the ship, it has no bearing in-game on what age the ship is otherwise we should see the Lexingtons with 1920s dinosaurs and the Independence should have T8 or so fighters; yet the Lexington has T8ish aircraft while the Indy, a much more modern ship, only uses T6ish aircraft. Putting the Wasp at T7, without any kind of CVL uptiering shenanigans like the Saipan, would therefore see her equipped with T7 aircraft. Comparing the Ranger to the Wasp, they are about the same speed, displacement and armour. However, the Ranger had significantly better AA historically (after refits, that is) as she was equipped with a fair amount of 40mm guns and even the 20mm guns in-game have a surprising amount of bite, while Wasp continue to mainly use the 1.1 inch machine guns as her light/medium AA throughout the war; overall, the Wasp's short/medium range AA would basically be the same as the stock Ranger's AA. Technically, the Wasp's long range AA was better historically as she was equipped with the /38s compared to the Ranger's /25s but in-game that would only equate to a 6 DPS increase, while for some reason the /25s are significantly better in-game against surface targets in-game due to massively increased fire chance and 33% increased RoF, so overall the Ranger would be much better equipped to fend off pesky destroyers for what it's worth. As already stated, in-game the aircraft depend on the ship's tier rather than age, so they are likely to be identical between them, while little things like AA defensive fire are again tier dependent and so don't really factor in. The universal consumable, the damage control party, is again likely to be identical between them both as they are both American fleet carriers. So in the end it comes down to an extra 10 or so planes in reserve vs much improved AA and secondaries. Depending on playstyle, captain skills, upgrades and team compositions (particularly enemy carrier/carriers flight controls), it would likely be a close call between them I'd say.

CC is the USN designation for a battlecruiser (Cruiser - Capital), not often used on these forums as most people prefer the slang term BC to denote the battlecruisers.

Size might not be the only factor, but it is a major contributor to all the other factors - things require space and buoyancy to fit onto a ship after all. The Wasp class has a large hangar, not far off the T8s, but there's not much difference really in capacity between the T7s and T8s in game (in fact, the Ranger B hull has more aircraft than the Lexingtons' B hull) and the class didn't really carry much more aircraft than the Ranger historically and slightly less than the Yorktowns at T8. The biggest difference in-game between T7 and T8 carriers are the aircraft themselves and the addition of defensive fire, both traits that are generally dependent on the tier of the ships involved rather than on intrinsic qualities of the carriers themselves. So basically, we have a ship with the hangar capacity bordering a T7/8, but lacks AA guns, speed, torpedo protection and armour compared to every other T8. Combine those drawbacks with the lower tier aircraft and the lack of defensive fire and we will have a very fitting T7, as even with the extra hangar capacity compared to the Ranger the Wasp will be more vulnerable to enemy counterattack and, lets be honest, how often do T7+ ships run out of aircraft when operated by a semi-decent player? Even with the decent hangar capacity, how would a Wasp ever compete against a Yorktown which is strictly better in pretty much every single regard?

True, "well-known" is pretty relative, and while they might not be quite at the point where they have their own Wikipedia page like some of the battleships, it only takes a quick google search to come up with a full wealth of information on them. For those that don't know much about ships, including the deviating designs gives those that are interested the hooks they need to look into the ships. For the Wasp's size, because of the square-cube law a 20m difference adds up to quite a lot, particularly once you factor in things like the beam and draught differences; the size differences quickly multiply up. You can see these large differences in the full load displacements, as the Wasp didn't even top 20 thousand tonnes, meanwhile the Yorktowns topped out past 32 thousand tonnes after their modernisations. I wouldn't call being 62% of the size as being similar. That's pretty much the same size ratio as the Iowas and the Montanas, and nobody would ever consider them to be in the same league.

Well, most of the ships I mentioned, except possibly the armoured Yorktown preliminary (which is one you do need to do some digging to find), are pretty well known and documented alternatives. The armoured Essex, CV-9G, and the unarmoured Midway are well known, as were the conversion proposals for the Alaskas and the Iowas. As you said, you could easily fill half a dozen branches with paper designs for any of the major naval powers, but there has to be a point where you need to stop and realise there's no mechanical or thematic reason to include such a design in the game. There's easily enough designs for 3 or 4 regular, unarmoured carriers per tier for the USN, but if they are all basically the same then they would just be a colossal waste of effort to produce as it would just be the same ship with a different name. Giving each line (or offshoot) their own niche, such as unarmoured vs armoured or the conversions maintaining their torpedo belts like the in-game Lexington, means that we get sufficiently different gameplay out of them to justify the development resources they cost. As far as I can see, the only other carrier designs the USN has that won't just be carbon copies of ones in these lines would be the flight deck cruisers, but there are only a few designs for them and two of them were basically the same so they would have to just be a fragmented offshoot at around T6-7ish. The Wasp I see as being T7 largely by virtue of its small size, being significantly smaller and generally worse in every regard than their T8 cousins, the Yorktowns. Sure, the Wasp class had some big hangar capacities compared to the current crop of T7s, but still notably less than the T8 Yorktowns, plus downtiering the class would lower their aircraft tiers so they won't perform as well on a per-plane basis. If necessary, they could even be given the undertiered aircraft treatment, leaving them with the aircraft performance of a T6 carrier to balance out a larger than usual hangar capacity. T7 sees a big jump in carrier performance anyway as that's when they switch over from the CVLs and into the true fleet carriers.

Off the top of my head, the USN could go for an unarmoured carrier line (basically the current one but with one of the unarmoured Midway preliminaries at T10 and the Yorktowns at T8 and the Wasp class at T7); a branch of armoured carriers from about T8-10 using the historical Midway, the armoured Essex preliminary (CV-9G off the top of my head) and one of the armoured Yorktown preliminaries for T7; a conversion line going from the Independences, through the Saipan class (would likely have to be called the Wright class in-game, unless they want to risk the ire of wallet warriors by renaming the USS Saipan to USS Wright), then onto the Lexingtons and finally the proposed Alaska and Iowa conversions for the upper tiers. Lower tiers could likely have 2 lines of escort carriers up to T6 or so, topped off by the Ranger as the biggest of the slow carriers. Sure, they aren't complete homogenous lines going from T4 up to T10, but they thematically fit and it offers more variation in the middle and upper tiers where it is needed most as they go from 2 lines until about T6 or so, upon which the two lines begin to split into 3 lines. Even more thematically, the early escort carriers could be split between the conversions (which would lead nicely into the Indys at T6 while also finding a home for the Langley which was a conversion) and the purpose built ones (which would reach a dead end at the Ranger while branching out into armoured and unarmoured carriers at around the same time).

That's what I've been saying for a long time - they need to make plunging fire more effective. Currently, long range duels between battleships are pretty boring even when broadside on simply because their belts can't be penetrating but even at max range it is incredibly difficult to land citadel hits with plunging fire. Battleships should engage each other at medium ranges, not have their entire gameplay style revolve around being impervious to fire past 10km (and those with submerged citadels are also impervious below 10km...). The worst part is that there's a few premiums here and there like the Missouri so that they can't even fix the citadel issue directly, they need to find a workaround solution.

As someone who is interested in the engineering and design side of things, I have no problem with historical blueprints and proposed ships compared to restricting things to the historically completed ships; but I do have a major problem with complete fantasy designs and made-up ships when there are perfectly feasible actual ships/plans/proposals that would fit. At least the German carriers were all designed and worked out, even if serious consideration was never given to actually building most of them. As someone that generally likes to keep things thematic (and eventually hopes for a navy vs navy queue, even if it would likely never happen as it would require WG to put more effort into balancing), fleshing out the German tech tree with even just a single carrier line would add that much needed variety to the German lineup. That being said, the Royal Navy carriers would make more sense to come first, as the can easily fill out up to T9 with actually built ships, while having enough to fill out multiple lines just on actually built ships except for the very top tiers. The only nations that can really rival this variety would be the Japanese and USN trees , particularly the USN as they could easy complete three different carrier lines up to T10.

Don't try to reason with people with large sums of money and little sense. Both potential reasons for this situation don't make any sense to me. Either way, this account has no regular ships, so captain training or credits can't be the real reason they have the premiums.

My feelings exactly, but it's no less confusing than my other hypothesis. The thing with premiums is that, as they don't require any kind of progression, there's far less impact putting them into a second account. It's not like the regular lines where player might suddenly decide they want to grind back up the same lines over and over on new accounts - they can go straight for the ships they want.

She would make far more sense as a T4 premium as those 12 inch /50s were historically so very bad at actually hitting targets that the RN was put off high MV shells for the next several generations of battleship.

Sometimes when I see accounts like this, I do wonder whether they are literally players with far too much disposable income or whether they actually have 2 accounts - one for premiums and one for regular ships.

HMS Incomparable would likely fit best at T7-8 (being larger than the T8s, but a notably older design than the T7s), depending on the degree of hypothetical refits they give the class. Being at T7-8, she could be the crown jewel of the unarmoured battlecruisers (either following directly from the Renowns if T7 or from one of the unarmoured preliminaries of the Admiral class if T8), with the unarmoured battlecruisers leading to a dead end at the Incomparable while the armoured ones carry on through the Admiral class and the interwar designs (the Fs through to the monstrous Ks). Overall, T8 would probably suit the class better, as it would give a lot more headroom for AA refits and the like rather than the ships' base specs limiting what refits they are allowed at T7. At T7-8, the 20 inch guns would fulfil the all-important role of being able to pen the bow of any opposing ship, encouraging players to learn how to angle their armour properly to bounce shells off the belt rather than trying to bow tank everything. Plus, if the class is placed at T8, they could also help the Yamato class with their holy task of preventing bow tanking in T10 games.

Remember that HP in-game isn't just a measure of how actually damaged something is, it's how close it is to no longer being an effective fighting vessel. If we were actually trying to sink ships in game rather than the "sinking" just being a graphical way of representing disabled ships, then we would have ships being several times harder to sink than currently. Historically, capital ships generally only sunk once most of their modules are knocked out completely. With that in mind, the "repair" party probably isn't really physically repairing parts of the ship, it's simply moving things and activating backup systems around to keep things operational. Superstructure damaged? Start moving command crews down deeper into the ship. Crew getting depleted? Wake up the off-duty personnel, cancel break times and press the non-critical service members into positions to keep things going. Big ships have enough redundancy that it is often just a matter of switching to the redundant systems rather than actually repairing the broken ones.

It wouldn't affect them because they are already being affected, the Atago and MK are already in the game at this power level. Trying to restrict the damage further by limiting the OP things by peoples' wallets is not a good way to do things, particularly how we have already seen ranked games dominated by 3+ Atagos in almost every high ranked team. We can't undo the effects of the game of the Atago, and we can't rebalance other ship around it as otherwise the regular T8s will suffer, so therefore we need to buff the regular T8s up to the Atago then go around tweaking things. Plus there's the general issues regarding how fragile T8 cruisers are in T10 games and how there isn't much of a performance jump between T7 and T8 for most cruiser lines compared to BBs/CCs. Buffing the T8 cruisers up to a consistent level would likely be the first step to limiting the current pandemic of battleships in the upper tiers.

Roughly, but WG are more than happy to throw random numbers at it to balance (or attempt to balance) things. There isn't a hard and fast formula to directly convert displacement into HP.

The bar has already been set at the level of the Atago and the MK; giving all other T8s the heal consumable wouldn't be raising the bar, it would just be bringing other cruisers up to the bar. The only other option is to do some weird mechanic shenanigans to rebalance them, such as making captain skills that scale with the XP cost of ships or the servicing costs, but that would cause much more problems and wouldn't be sustainable in the long run if they "accidentally" release some more OP premiums.