invicta2012

Shorten your squadrons (by attacking a passing island) to minimise your potential plane losses by one or more attack groups per run. Do more spotting early in the game. Wait. The longer the game goes on, the more AA your opponents will lose AA guns to HE spam and the easier they are to attack. Misuse islands in your attack run path, AA doesn't go through them.

I much prefer the Lowenhardt. She's very much like Furious - which I know won't be the most popular choice - in the sense that she has nimble planes and that all the attack groups are worthwhile in their own right. I love the Stukas and their precision HE bombing - great for finishing off damaged enemies - and the fact that you can see your attack reticle while dodging flak is much better than the Weser's high altitude bombers. I think you probably can do much more damage in the W if everything goes in your favour, but E.L is easier and more fun. And it has all the cool planes you want from a WW2 German carrier.

I have to say I really don't like the Weser. Operator Error is more than a possibility but it matches Ranger in the wonky aiming stakes - both rocket planes and bombers have horrid aiming mechanisms - and the torpedoes need to be given Ryujo lead time for trivial damage. Not a fan at all based on games played so far.

Op of the week was Aegis yesterday, now it's gone back to Raptor Rescue again. Paging @MrConway

Because the CV has to decide where it wants to be, what it wants to be looking at, and whether it can stand 1000 "I need Intelligence Data" messages every minute from paranoid BBs until it starts spotting. And then, where to spot? Any mistake will be punished hard - anyone who played Fubuki during the RTS CV era will know what you could do if the CV didn't pick you up, and it doesn't matter what sort of secondaries a BB is packing if they're constantly dodging torpedoes and healing floods. If I was playing on the high tier team I would probably want to bring something more generally reliable and durable - an Amagi, Vladivostock, Lenin - rather than a Massachusetts. I suspect resistance to HE spam will be the thing for these ships. Bring 'em if you got 'em. Radar is not so much of an advantage if you get twice the volume of fire in return, and there are plenty of hard hitting cruisers at Tier VI.

It's all about the numbers and the players. These gimmick boats like Massachusetts really aren't all that - if they burn down pretty easily against a Smolensk (and they do) then a combined force of organised 6 inch gun cruisers from Tier VI can do the same with ease. Does it matter? CVs are designed for the stale random meta, not asymmetric battles. The CV elite may be able to dominate but I suspect there will be a lot of other players fiddling about for far too long trying to sink a QE or a West Virginia, and not doing any of the necessary spotting. Meanwhile there are plenty of Tier V/VI DDs perfectly capable of knocking over a high tier battleship by themselves - there's three in that sample lineup alone. Could be a return to the golden age of Minekaze.

That and developer choices, which is what I'm complaining about. Not the right ones, at least for the purposes of immersion/versimillitude. "How many guns can we stick on this" was 1930s Royal Navy design, after 1940 it was "how do we make this more durable", which is why we ended up with Vanguard......

I think the weapons on the Albemarle are great - 203s still hold up well at high tiers, British HE sets fires like no-one's business - and that's reflected in her (really quite high) average damage - so I can see why they've made the survivability trades. But that makes for a good premium ship, edge of the seat but rewarding when played well, not a silver ship where the grind can make you really bored of being *so* vulnerable. If you look at the era of the ship - where the RN was saying "to hell with treaties, let's build something better than the Germans and Japanese" they wouldn't have come up with another glass cannon like this.

I know. Expect the usual mix of steamrolls (when one team is capable and organised) and frustration (when they mill about getting blown up individually like sheep in a minefield). If I were plotting tactics for the lower Tier team I'd have 2 sets of BBs - one fast, one slow - on either wing of the DDs and Cruisers, and a single direction push through rolling smoke. Classic Horns of the Bull stuff.

Permanent smoke. Permanent hydro (all the cruisers can slot it, as can T-22), Permanent fighter cover (Furutaka, De Grasse, Spee) and more than serviceable AA from Texas, Budyonny, De Grasse...if the low tier team's DDs and Cruisers are decisive and co-ordinated then their BBs could just sail to the corners of the map to harass with HE and waste CV travelling time, the rest of the team will have burned at least one of the red BBs down before the CV has managed to get enough squadrons away.

Low Tier team every time. If they blob up for AA/fighter mutual support and the DDs use smoke and spot intelligently, then it's a turkey shoot. The CV won't get near them. Massachusetts won't get to secondary range, it'll be blundering around trying to land a haymaker with it's main battery, while being HE spammed by Kongo, which both outranges and out runs it. Myoko and Albemarle are made of citadels and the sheer weight of fire coming from those cruisers could melt a Gneisenau in seconds. And as for the Kagero... I'd back Okhotnik to score higher.

The problem with Albemarle (and possibly with Goliath, I'm still playing Drake) is that while it can be super tanky zombie, you only get to use the heal around 50% of the time due to being dead. There are too many ships capable of Dev Striking you from all over the map in the Tier VIII-X world and everyone - even the Co-op bots - know it. The overall experience is rather like close range brawling with Nelson - fun if you like your games exciting, but frequently very short. Overall I think Albemarle would make a great premium and they should have gone for something tankier with 203s at Tier VIII. Cheshire, though, is just all wrong. I've not had any trouble with Devonshire - I think she's very powerful at her Tier - Surrey seems fine, Drake has worthwhile armour but it can't compete in the overall DPS race.

This conversation has made me feel like taking Anshan out for a spin again. She's still got it... (btw, the recent module changes have made it worthwhile reviewing your equipment choices. I don't have EM on my Anshan captain, but I do have the Main Battery Mod 2 installed, which gives a serviceable, cruiser like traverse. You may want more for knife fighting in caps during Randoms, but it does fine in Ops).

Eras of warships would be nice. I would be interested in the post-ironclad pre-dreadnought era, as those ships are - for want of a better term - utterly bonkers. But I think that the current dev team lean more towards spaceships and pew pew pew, though, so they'd probably be more interested in 1950s and 1960s warfare and the early era of missiles and jets.

I agree with the OP. I think there are plenty of "long in the tooth" ships at mid-tiers which could be put into the Arsenal for Coal and perhaps removed from the Premium Shop - and then from sale completely for a bit. Ships like Arizona, Mutsu, Indianapolis, Abruzzi, Ishizuchi, Gallant, Exeter, Mikasa, Tachibana, Texas, Huang He - none of these are going to be huge sellers and they might get a bit more interest if they were a bit more commonplace.

X will make your guns track a particular target, Shift-X and CTRL+X will lock your guns but you should get a message on screen to say this has happened. The game also has an autolock function but this is bugged (especially when you have several red ships in close proximity, it may pick the wrong one resulting in shells falling short) and occasionally they just don't turn (you have to aim at a bearing they can't reach and try to fire to get them to move). Otherwise - and this is my bad habit - holding down right mouse button while manoeuvring means your guns don't follow the aiming reticle and will still on the bearing they were before you started to move.

But I thought everyone wanted a more realistic depiction of naval warfare? Brawling went out with Nelson. :)

Won't it improve the standard of play? If snipers are gonna snipe, at least they can have the means to contribute in these ships....

Aigle is better than Anshan at Operations, and at Tier VI, what are you going to play most of....? It's not than Anshan is in any way bad, but Aigle is just has the advantage in fives: 5 guns in a salvo, 5k more damage per torpedo hit, 5k more health. Both can citadel any cruiser they will see in Ops, so be brave and break out that AP. Don't spend your resources on them, though. I know times are tough and that not everyone has cash to spend but at this Tier these ships are worth £15 of your money, in a way that many of the higher cash and novelty value ships aren't. Keep your Coal for something worthwhile but expensive, like a Jean Bart, Georgia or Thunderer.

Well, we've got Warhammer*, Transformers, Azur Lane, Arp. I've got a pink Myoko, a Mutsu captained by a Teddy Bear, a La Gallissoniere which has space ship guns and makes X-wing pew pew pew noises when it fires and an unspeakable halloween Shokaku camouflage. This may not be Serious Navy Simulator 2020 any more. But as everyone says, provided that you can turn this off and not have to see it if you don't want to, then it's all good. * The one thing that bugs me about the Warhammer collab is that I can't turn the ship names off. Ignis Purgatio, indeed. It's not a threatening name when an Ignis is the jolly Japanese hatchback sitting on your driveway.

Presumably it can do whatever Edinburgh does, with a few variations. Neither "I Win" nor "Trash".

Reticle visibility is awful. I've raised it with Mr Conway but he seemed to think it was working as intended, which probably says something about the nature of these AP rockets and how they're proposing to balance them. No-one should have to install mods or switch off graphic options to be able to see where they are aiming, ffs. Overall I've found the German CV I have (Rhein) to be really annoying to play... I hope the Weser is better!

Indeed, but they were also put to interesting uses in other navies (such as AA cruisers/destroyers in the French Navy/MN) and that might be more interesting than the current iterations.

Or Friesland. Anyway. In an epic moment of Operator Error caused by trying to get my cat off the laptop keyboard , I have converted a disagreeably large amount of doubloons into Free XP. This can't be restored by WG Support, so I guess I had better buy something with that 1,000,000 XP I now have. Super Cruisers! seems to be the order of the day. So which is best? I am told that Alaska is an excellent ship. That Azuma is not as good as Yoshino. And that Agir is very new. But what do you think?

Yes, Odin's great. Possibly the best Tier VIII PvE battleship you can buy, and for the cost of a Dreadnought, why not?. Everything works, not necessarily best in class, but never bad. For Randoms, I guess you'll have as much fun as your skill lets you have, the ship has lots of potential.