invicta2012

I like the sound of that. What is also quite fun about ships of this design is that you've always got guns pointing in the required direction, even if they don't train very fast, so rudder shift becomes more important than speed of traverse - so a Warspite like nimbleness would be essential. And as for AA, she certainly wouldn't be helpless. Lots of 3 inch AA guns of various ages, and a WW2 upgrade with close range 20mm guns. Nice package with two camos (historic and museum ship), A and B hull options to allow some variations in play (more secondaries, less AA and vice versa)... I'd have that.

It's a very old fashioned armoured cruiser, the type of ship which was made obsolete by the development of the battlecruiser. Lots of navies had them and there were several ships of that type in action during WW1 (the German Blucher, the British Good Hope, Defence, Warrior, etc, and often ending up with much less successful outcomes than Averof). The only ones that WG has introduced (like the St Louis/Charleston) have a uniform main battery.... but to be honest I think they should just get over it, it's going to be Tier III/IV, make all the large calibre guns directable and let the players work out if it's fun.

They have. It's an option on all of them. Blyska Viribus Romulus

Oh, completely. I have a Duca and she is still an effective ship and fun to play. It's not that I don't like the SAP cruisers they put in, but I think the Italian cruiser line would have been very different if it had been done after the IFHE changes and accompanying armour normalisation, which has done wonders for weak armoured ships like Pensacola. An Abruzzi released now would be much better. I'm not sure what they are up to with Paolo Emilio. I like the idea of a gunboat with ludicrously powerful short range torps - a mini Soviet cruiser, almost - but I think they'd have been better trying that concept out on anything other than a Tier X. As it stands I think it will be the next Le Terrible and people won't want to pay lots of money or resources for that.

We certainly mentioned the Greek Navy when were discussing an alternative Pan-Euro tree for the DDs line a while back; the Destroyers Vasilissa Olga and Vasilefs Georgios - G/H class RN DD hulls with German weaponry - should certainly be in there, especially now as WG have released Z-35. Averof is such a splendid ship but WG are going to have finally make some decision on ships with mixed batteries or significant secondaries before it can appear in the game.

The problem is that the AA now attacks a single plane from the attacking squadron, and then moves on to another when that plane is destroyed, rather than distributing damage amongst the entire squad. So hit chance is crucial...

Gosh. Well, the Italians are suffering from being late to the party, and from WG having to think up new gameplay gimmicks rather than just giving us solid designs which are fun to play and which let the elegance of the designs come through. I'm not sure about your criticism of the US ships - Georgia is a real design, Monaghan reflects the fact that US DDs had the heaviest torp load of any nation's DDs, and those US secondaries are all 5" DD guns, they will make a mess of things. And as for US and USSR Ships with radar... that's their thing. Other lines have to have other things.

£50 worth of ship for nowt. Fair play if you can make it happen.

I have those! They look a bit weird in high summer. Still, give it a few months....

Did you know that HMS Belfast (C35) will be renamed as HMS Belfast (1938) when the Royal Navy launches the new HMS Belfast (2022) "to prevent confusion"? I think this is very dull of them, and the idea of confused tourists attempting to board HMS Belfast (2022) rather than HMS Belfast (1938), perhaps thinking that this is their tour booking time, is rather amusing.

They have already gone this way. Attack preparation time was lengthened for several CVs and the planned change to DD detection distances will also have an effect. Reducing the number of possible attack runs may also make a difference but overall the problem for a DD is that once it's spotted the CV has a pretty good idea of where it is and also where it will be, even if the CV player has to take the time to fly off another squadron of attack planes. Example: Raptor Rescue is Op of the week. The first ship you see in that Op is a Minekaze. In a CV I will always over fly it, but that isn't a problem, as I can just pull a 180 and come back, knowing where it will be. Even with improved DD detection I will still be able to find it and attack it, simply by launching my attack run early so I don't have to set up the run, just react when the DD is spotted. DDs may be able to manouevre out of the way - bots don't, of course - but that often leads to the DD getting stuck in an unfavourable location, either in badly positioned smoke or with smoke on cooldown.

If Belfast is Belfast '43, can Oklahoma have an exclamation mark?

I have a Baltimore, and a Wichita, both of which I like very much. I can see why WG might want to put a downgraded version of an unpopular ship in the game as a prize, it might work a bit better. Seattle's Tier VIII sister when?

Well, that's OK, as I'm not really going to get a Buffalo by other means. And if anyone hasn't learned from London and the Italian cruisers than smoke is often a noob trap, then I guess they never will...

Hmm. Belfast '43 is nice, but no Southampton, Sheffield, Gloucester? They look so much nicer than Edin or Belfast. Well, that's quite nice as Anchorage looked quite fun, even with those utterly ahistoric torpedoes.

Ah, I didn't know that. Is that ship fun?

Thank you for the code! Nice little piece on FAA Aviation... no Sea Hornet, though (unless I missed it). Would love one of those in the game.

The Halland is a design from the 1950s, using the best technology of the era from Bofors, a company whose anti-aircraft weapons were a global standard for 50 years. This is a destroyer with weapons meant to be capable of despatching jet aircraft, it will do terrible things to WW2 era planes. It's the same with many Tier X DDs such as Daring - these are late war designs with DP guns using all the know-how derived from WW2. Battleship design - which pretty much stopped around 1942 - involved a lot of small calibre AA guns and slow firing DP secondaries which have nowhere near the capabilities of a late war DD, often designed from the outset as an AA picket for a carrier group.

They are difficult to avoid. The Tier IV torp planes are very fast and so are the torpedoes, I think this will be something WG will come to regret. The safety mechanism for DDs - that the planes have a Ryujo style aiming window - is only really a defence against unskilled players or those with low point captains. Lightning and Cossack have plenty of dakka and those nasty single fire torpedoes, which offer lots of Dirty Harry scenarios for opponents who can't quite remember whether you've still got one or more torpedoes left. (I was going to say "fish left" but Clint Eastwood was never about the fishes). Hsein Yang really needs concealment to rival Cossack and faster loading torpedoes - as it stands it has 600m better concealment than Le Fanta, ffs, which is faster, has more health, more guns, better torpedoes and is immune to yours. How are you supposed to deal with something like that in a souped up Mahan/Sims?

Did I say HYang was the first Tier VIII ship I ground out in Co-op? It makes a lot more sense there, you do get the benefit of those DWTs and the guns are perfectly adequate for setting fires on BBs and defending against planes. But I get the sense it wouldn't do well, being a particularly vanilla DD, against the monsters in the Tier IX and X bracket with loadsa radar, CVs, etc, and probably deserves to be a Tier VII these days.

The new German CVs are brilliant for this. Those torpedoes are not kind to DDs.

They're not as good as WV'41, as the previous posters' charts show. And neither should they be - Mutsu has torpedoes and better secondaries, WV is just a slow and rather vulnerable vehicle for those lovely guns.

Like most Japanese battleships, it's a bit inaccurate, so if I feel it's more difficult to do damage in it than all the other Tier VI BBs I have, that is down to the ship.

Yup, that plus sign clearly implies that the value of the bonus is additional to the value of the original transaction (i.e. when you buy 100 doubloons you receive an additional 200), so it's misleading. If it just said 200%, that would be clearer, as it would mean that that the coupon increased the value of the overall transaction to 200% of the original (which seems to be what WG customer support are saying).

In Mutsu's case, provide a gentle breeze and some water spray as they fall all around the Bayern and completely fail to do any damage.