invicta2012

Royal Navy Destroyers - all real ships. Royal Navy CVs - all real ships. USN Destroyers - 9 real, 1 paper (Nicholas) USN BBs - 9 real, 1 paper (Montana) IJN Battleships - 9 real, 1 paper (Izumo) KM DDs - 8 real, 2 paper (laid down - Z46/Z52) Soviet lines - so paper, they should be sponsored by Kleenex.

Kotovsky - the tech tree replacement for Kirov - appears to be what the Raimondo Monteccucioli should have been. The grumbling over the Italians will increase, because unless these Soviet cruisers are armoured with cardboard, they are way over the top.

Haida with manual secondaries.....

That is a lot of premium cruisers, though. Diana, Aurora, Oleg, Varyag, Murmansk, Krasny Krym, Kirov, Mikoyan, Molotov, Lazo, Kutuzov, Ochakov, Petr Bagration, Moskva, Smolensk.

Well, that is quite a lot of cruisers, isn't it?

To restrict the availability of a valuable in game commodity for balancing purposes, as is done with Aircraft engine boost and the like. This doesn't prevent HE spamming ships from doing their thing, but it might well prevent the issues with divisions and combinations allowing for permanent smokescreens, etc, which can be vexing.

True, but... It doesn't need a genius to see that the best game balance is at the Tiers where the historical meta (international treaties) limited the size, armour and weaponry of ships. This forms a natural balance. If WG sticks to historical accuracy then we get ships to play which present players with decisions to make and qualities and limitations that we need to learn to make work. The danger with paper ships is that the designers no longer have to make compromises, which will tend to make those designs OP. Well... Go back to the history books. Small destroyers and CLs couldn't spam rapid firing weapons all day because of the need to conserve ammunition and the condition of the guns. Ammo is a factor in WoT and WOWP, it should be in this game too.

Of course, OP ships should be balanced. But the most egregious examples of balance failures - GC, Belfast, Enterprise - are from the cash shop and their OP status is made worse by being (essentially) unfixable due to community outrage at amendments to cash purchases. Steel and Coal ships can be fixed, can be withdrawn, and normally the community that has these ships understands why, because they understand the game. Limiting Tier X reward ships to Steel only is based on an inkling I have that the Dev Team are better at producing fun and balanced products if they are given a few restrictions to work with... having to say "oh, this is a Coal ship, it's a Tier IX, it needs to be good but not awesome" might well result in more Jean Bart and fewer Smolensks.

Thanks for the warning. I have a sensible Japanese captain on my ARP Myoko as I can't bear the screeching. He bears driving a neon pink cruiser with the expected dignity. (I have no idea about the pink Teddy captain, and I don't think I want to know).

It's quite easy to obtain, but not that easy - I would think that I can afford one, possibly two a year? I think Steel should be the reward for playing in higher quality game environments like CBs and full-fat ranked, and that it should be the main (only?) source of directly obtaining Tier X ships. Things like Smolensk and Thunderer should be behind that particular skill wall to keep their impact reasonable - just as already has happened with Flint and Black. Coal and Free XP can be ground without necessarily needing to get into high-skill environments so their rewards should be for Tiers III - IX.

What people fail to realise is that this is a magic T4 light cruiser whose fire chance per shell is suspiciously higher than that of a normal Phoenix. It also has the special torpedoes beloved of WGs bots which are fired without any of the course corrections that humans make during aiming and so have considerable surprise value. So what normally happens is - first salvo, the ship is on fire, player starts ignoring the Lexington, second salvo, two fires, oops, better put that out, thirty seconds later, oh no it's the torpedoes, followed by permaflood, and salvo number four, the ship is on fire (again). Add in a dozen mystery overpenetrations and you can see how it goes. They can certainly help with the CV, Missouri and generally helping mop up at the harbour. Last game I was in Gadjah Mada cleared out the transports on their own....

It's not just DDs. Occasionally WoWs kicks me into a random game. I have no idea why it does this, but every time it does I realise that Random games are completely borked. The modes seem to be full of gimmick boats, fail divisions, comedy divisions (quad Lyons or Massachusetts), and games dominated by two or more CVs. There is no proper gameplay at all. Co-op seems a wealth of sophistication in comparison.

Get the speed flag and she does 41 knots, with the Speed Boost on top of that you're hitting Russian and French speeds of around 44kts. They improved the firing angles so you can keep spitting out torpedoes while zooming away. I like the ship (bought for cash) - would probably recommend her over the Leningrad if you're prepared to put the effort in with the captain.

What are you implying? <hides Atlanta, Helena, Nuevo De Julio, Lyon, Mogami and Venezia at the back of the port under a large sign saying "nothing to see here"> Did they ever have any plans to put those Smolensk turrets on a Destroyer? That would beef up their gunnery a bit.

I suspect the game population at 3AM is largely people who should have gone to bed several hours ago. Get some sleep!

She's a strong gunboat with effective, quick reloading torpedoes. Most reviews will go on and on about smoke firing and ancient history - the correct response to this, I believe, is "OK Boomer". You will, however, need to push some resources towards training up her skipper, as her concealment is awful until you have a 10pt captain.

How about the Isle of Wight? Plenty of nautical heritage, no room for camping:

Too many ships full stop. I can't keep up with it. I just unlocked the Mogami, ffs.... there's still new content from 2017 I haven't got around to yet. What would it be, though? Destroyers?

We don't know much about this one as yet. There's plenty of HE spam about from other nations - Helena, Cleveland, Bayard, Colbert, Marceau, Atlanta, Flint - and the community threw a hissy fit when they released the Italian line without any fire capability, so I'm not surprised they've gone back to small HE cruisers. Provided they avoid the Belfast/Smolensk mistakes I'll be interested to see how it plays.

Those are twin turrets, though.

Well, the Soviets did build rather more cruisers than West Germany after WW2.... I think they built more cruisers than anyone else in the world. The existence of the ships isn't the problem, it's the balancing.

Ok, all the ones above Tier VI, as far as I know (including the sunken Hood one, which was new to me).

Well, the Soviets did like building cruisers and they did have lots of plans. If WG wants to make a consistent line of CAs and CLs then that's fine with me - I can cheerfully ignore the ones I don't like (the light cruisers, which are just too tin can for my tastes), and perhaps the CAs will be better. I hope it opens up the door for more part lines and side grades - an IJN split, with 155mm Mogami and 203mm specialist Mikuma at VIII and some IJN light cruisers at IX and X would be nice.

Almost all of the Permaflages in the game are now available for Doubloons. I suspect these ones will also be available when the event ends, or shortly afterwards.

I think they're playing Co-op, tbh. Some of these decisions do make sense through that lens.