invicta2012

Thought I might contribute to this... I've been playing (badly) since Open Beta. Played very badly to begin with, got to Tier VI, hit the skill wall hard (which was much bigger in those days), left. Came back a year or two later and got a bit of a clue, so here I still am. The game appeal is obvious - I have a lifelong interest in naval history (my Grandfather served in the RN during WW1, on big ships such as the New Zealand and Resolution, as well as a few smaller ones, he was also a Coastguard and a Lifeboatman, I have other inlaws who served in the Falklands War). Pet Obsessions: Royal Navy Destroyers, Corvettes, Sloops, Frigates... people being sent to war in the harshest conditions, often in underpowered, undergunned tin cans and essentially carrying the nation through the war. So if WG is looking for Premium Ship inspiration, I can think of a few... I enjoy the game but it is changing. I can see that WG is intent on attracting new players and that needs things like submarines and aircraft carriers. But they seem intent on reducing the number of game modes (inexplicably, given that the servers can clearly support things like event battles and an entirely separate sub testing mode in the live environment) and cramming more and more ideas into the same ten Tier random mode. How do I see the game's future? Ideally, I would like it to offer more variety of game play. I got fed up with the stress and angst of Randoms and Ranked. I'm bored of Co-op gameplay and its broken AI, Operations are fun but limited (and I know there won't be more). Historic/scenario game modes across more eras and Tiers is more attractive, mostly to try and steer people away from rushing to Tier X, but also to allow long-term players to stay and enjoy the game they've invested in.

Spee is quite weak at the moment. Not only is she no better armoured than a Devonshire she has an absolutely massive citadel and takes hits all over the place. If they can't buff her armour then perhaps going down the RN route and increasing the ability of her heal to repair citadel damage might be some compensation for the recent power creep.

Always pleased to get these, I keep them for new lines or to re-buy old silver ships, very useful since so many of them have been heavily changed since the last time I played them (and many are now much more enjoyable). So I think this is a good reward (sorry, OP).

This is what I hear. However I am always concerned by US cruisers and their lack of torpedoes (which is why the upcoming Anchorage is interesting, if ahistoric). Agir's armament - Scharnhorst guns, Hipper torps - is familar and comfortable (and perfectly capable of doing nasty things to Tier IX and X ships) but I wonder whether the hull is up to snuff?

Raptor has no reverse gear.

I agree. Encouraged by the wheeze of gaining Elite Captain XP I've given this a few goes. I don't like submerged warfare at all. I am still at the "getting the hang of it" phase, and I don't really like 3-D combat games (WG, you really should take note of this. I think it's quite fundamental as to why people like your most successful titles), but changing from surfaced to submerged mode was tedious and confusing. You lose all reference to what's going on above. The game interface changes, the ship properties change, the captions are meaningless (er, "Escape the ASW Zone"...?), generally it's like trying to steer a cow while being shouted at through a megaphone. In the end I gave up and treated it like a rubbish destroyer - focused on capping, spotting and sinking destroyers while on the surface. I agree about the torpedo indicator, by the way. I would want both interfaces, regular and sonar. I found that the lack of regular interface made it very difficult to attack targets of Opportunity as the game developed. It would also put the torpedo button back on key 3, rather than 2, which I found to be irritating.

What were you expecting from Games Workshop? I'm surprised it's not a blank camo you have to paint yourself (£5 a colour, please).

They're a bit too good at creating "punching down" situations, rather than game balance.

I love Krasny Krim. She is brilliantly fun, if you like melting Battleships. Mikoyan and Kotovsky are fun but a bit too fragile. Like Molotov. And Shchors. Kirov is a bit better but still only OK. Murmansk is very good, though. In the "Which is best" competition, I prefer Kirov. Don't need Molotov now I have Makarov, which is much more comfortable to play.

Keep your smoke for later in the game, it's no use while all the radar cruisers are alive. Back into caps and plan your exit so that you can exit quickly and safely if spotted/radared. Bait radar cruisers by playing tap-and-go with objectives, radar is a consumable, make them waste it and reveal their location. Radar cruisers are generally hiding behind something and their mates are normally behind something else to make a crossfire. That means they're static and predictable. You can use that information, if you have team mates who are awake. (that's what I was told, anyway).

Made for consoles. Contains small images/ pictures, not text, which I don't like and makes reading the information slower. The " reverse N" shape design of each individual item makes reading it uncomfortable. I definitely preferred the depiction of the Event Directives when they were separate and used different design, as that made them feel more special to each event and considerably less generic than this display. I'll get used to it, but if it's an indication of a new overall UI design style then it's not great.

That's the level of frustration I can accept in this game.

It's not so much fun, though. Something has been altered in the operation timings - I'm seeing a lot of runs failing because Raptor has been heavily damaged immediately after leaving the spawn... normally bad teams fail when the DDs attack, but this has been happening much earlier. Time to adapt, I suppose. I had a lot of fun in my Icarus during this game using defensive smoke and hydro to keep Raptor alive, and the returns were OK (no flags here, but I do have a permacamo for one of my favourite DDs).

Mikoyan, like Genova, is a quirky glass cannon boat. Capable of dealing loads of damage and completely incapable of taking any. That's something worth having in port, I'll take it out from time to time.

Dunkerque is also lots of fun and a good source of experience for the French BB line, if you choose to play those later on.

I have 149 ships in my port, and I have officially reached "Peak Ship". I know that I am not valuing the ships I get from the events, not getting into my purchases the the way I used to and enjoying playing five or ten games on the bounce in a single boat. I want new game modes, new operations, new maps, rather than new ships, really. If they have to monetise that to make it happen, that's OK, I buy DLC expansions for other games. But the ship thing is getting out of hand.

They may well have altered the distribution of the credit rewards to be closer to Randoms, so that you have to sink/damage more high tier ships to get the maximum credits. So that would mean sinking the Missouri would be the most valuable, then the Lexington, then Colorado/Shchors/Atlanta. Not the Tier V/VIs, or the transport ships - the sort of ship you'll melt in a Fiji or Atlanta. If that is the case, then I approve.

This isn't true. (Sorry). Andrew Cunningham (that one), when First Sea Lord, refused to countenance further small cruisers of the Dido class because they did sink after one torpedo hit. Not because of the torpedo damage, but because of the effects of flooding and the subdivision of compartments in the ship. Almost all British cruiser designs post 1920 were designed to withstand more than one torpedo hit without losing power or the ability to fight. This tallies with accounts of the loss of HMS Perth, where the Captain didn't order Abandon Ship until it had been hit by three torpedoes. They could in reality. Check out HMS Javelin. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Javelin_(F61) Lost her stern and her bow to torpedo damage - only 47m of the ship's 103m length remained afloat. Or HMS Eskimo. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Eskimo_(F75) Or HMS Kelly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Kelly_(F01) They could actually survive hits from guided missiles, too... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Glamorgan_(D19) (I would criticise WoWs for many things, but the survivability of destroyers has always seemed to me to be one of the more realistic elements of the game).

It's the RNG, old chap. There's no such thing as a truly random number. It's all generated from a seed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random_seed I suspect that reloading the game may also refresh the seed being used for RNG generation. Over a substantial period of time, of course, the distribution of numbers produced by each seed will match the relevant probability distribution, but in the short term it might give you an change in the order of generation which might be to your advantage. Or make things worse. It is, after all, random (ish).

Indeed. Why not the Royal Navy Tier XI, the County class destroyer? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/County-class_destroyer 2 x Daring 4.5 inch turrets, triple torpedo tubes, Sea Cat and Sea Slug missiles (nuclear tipped, to make up for the fact they were hopelessly inaccurate), a Helicopter and a B Hull which trades one gun turret for a quad Exocet missile launcher. This might be getting just a *little* out of hand.

The issue with modern naval warfare is defence. The last major naval engagement was the Falklands War and it proved that surface ships are extremely vulnerable to threats in the air and below the water. Protecting a modern surface fleet requires nested layers of defence, of a kind and complexity that can't be put into WoWs. However the fact that there was still a WW2 cruiser floating around in the South Atlantic as a valid part of a naval defence strategy (and the Belgrano was by no means the only ship of her type in a South American navy) shows that you could edge towards more modern warfare if you didn't focus on the part of the world with nuclear weapons and guided missile cruisers....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cod_Wars Britain deployed a total of 22 frigates and ordered the reactivation from reserve of the Type 41 frigate HMS Jaguar and Type 61 HMS Lincoln, refitting them as specialist ramming craft with reinforced wooden bows. In addition to the frigates, the British also deployed a total of seven supply ships, nine tugboats and three support ships to protect its fishing trawlers, but only six to nine of the vessels were on deployment at any one time.The Royal Navy was prepared to accept serious damage to its Cold War frigate fleet, costing millions and disabling part of its North Atlantic capacity for more than a year. HMS Yarmouth had its bow torn off, HMS Diomede had a 40 ft gash ripped through its hull and HMS Eastbourne suffered such structural damage from ramming by Icelandic gunboats that it had to be reduced to a moored operational training frigate. Iceland deployed four patrol vessels (V/s Óðinn, V/s Þór, V/s Týr, and V/s Ægir) and two armed trawlers (V/s Baldur and V/s Ver). The Icelandic government tried to acquire US Asheville-class gunboats and when it was denied by Henry Kissinger, it tried to acquire Soviet Mirka-class frigates instead. ... On the evening of 6 May 1976, after the outcome of the Third Cod War had already been decided, V/s Týr was trying to cut the nets of the trawler Carlisle when Captain Gerald Plumer of HMS Falmouth ordered it rammed. Falmouth at the speed of more than 22 knots (41 km/h; 25 mph) rammed Týr, almost capsizing her. Týr did not sink and managed to cut the nets of Carlisle, and Falmouth rammed it again. Týr was heavily damaged and found herself propelled by only a single screw and pursued by the tugboat Statesman. In the dire situation, Captain Guðmundur Kjærnested gave orders to man the guns, in spite of the overwhelming superiority of firepower HMS Falmouth enjoyed, to deter any further ramming. In return, Falmouth suffered heavy bow damage. The Third Cod War saw 55 ramming incidents altogether.

Lovely torp angles on that ship, though. I *do* love the design of the thing.

It's also a good mode for playing Random type games without Random/Ranked stress. No-one is worrying about their PR, or fuming about progressing to the next level / saving a star, maybe they're playing a bit more against type and meta tactics. It's been quite enjoyable. More of that sort of thing, please.

RN Cruisers. Got the Albemarle as early access. And the permacamo. I like the Permacamo. Got London from the Directives. Don't like it as much as Devonshire, but it's a good knife-fighter for ops. More Permacamos. Yes. I wish Cheshire had been better and less "will this do?". Albemarle with slightly bigger guns. Nope. I wish the Surrey model was less "will this do"? Oversized superstructure, Director tower, Hawkins hull. Masts which appear to be 200ft high. Nope, nope, nope. Andrew Cunningham - yes, but I'm not sure why a man who captained destroyers and BBs is best suited to a CV. Arpeggio of Blue Steel: Shouty Teddy Captain is hilarious! I don't really want 4 x Kongo but a neon pink Myoko is good fun. It now has a very serious IJN Captain who looks displeased with his frivolous ship and this makes me happy. Euro DDs: Visby + Permacamo was good fun, but I didn't get anywhere else with the event. Didn't like the random boxes. Didn't like the Campaign. Don't really like the ship line. Onwards! Soviet Cruisers: Seems fair. Got the Mikoyan. Inferior to Kirov in every way, but has character. Used it to get the Tallinn - good ship, and fabulous permacamo. My favourite camouflage in the game. Best thing from the last few months: Cap