invicta2012

Probably cruiser dispersion, with that and MBRB should be quite strong. 28 sec looks like a good starting point but given that Scharnhorst has 25 second reload it should probably be a bit faster when testing is complete.

Looks nice. Quite enthusiastic about this line! From a PvE perspective the combination of speed and heavy guns should be profitable. Nothing beats a fast-firing light cruiser in Narai (i'll be levelling the Chumphon that way) but this should work nicely, as Strasbourg does.

Ardent, Acasta, Glowworm, Onslow, Savage, Scorpion, Saumerez, Stord, Piorun, Johnston, Samuel B Roberts, etc would like a word. :) It's quite true that the first three were probably destroyed by radar guided secondary gunfire, but only when they closed to point blank range. (Glowworm vs Hipper is probably the prototype for most WoWs DD encounters.). In other cases the destroyers were able to get within firing distance with some considerable comfort. Anyway. Schleiffen seems a bit too strong, in the sense of having few evident weaknesses against Destroyers (that's different to having anti-DD tools which can be effective if used with skill). If bad players are using it as a YOLO ship in order to get better outcomes then that almost certainly shows how the ship *is* overpowered in that particular context. And, like being targeted by a CV, this is gameplay which makes people angry when they're on the receiving end.

Well, Ok then. HMS Curacoa. She was escorting the RMS Queen Mary (1000 ft long, made Yamato look small) when QM was ferrying troops. Queen Mary was faster than Curacoa and was zigzagging. Curacoa assumed QM would stop zigzagging. QM was sure that their escort was not going to get in the way of something that bloody big. Curacoa did not get out of the way. 4000 ton light cruiser met 70000 ton liner and the big girl just ran straight over Curacoa like a truck hitting a satsuma. (not the Satsuma, although the result would probably have been the same). The Admiralty sued Cunard White Star late in WW2 (the event had been hushed up at the time)... and lost.

Olympia is a splendid ship. Many of the early US designs are. I'm very fond of the Virginia class with their twin primary/secondary turret designs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia-class_battleship I know (from reading the US forum) that the '44 version of Nevada has been requested as a secondary bruiser for years, but WG will never get around to it, the same way they've never got around to making West Virginia '44. Definitely a +1 for Blucher and Northampton. Maybe we'll get the former when they split the German cruisers into heavy and lights?

Muavenet wasn't an Allen M Sumner (although cool ship, that's Yue Yang), she was a Robert H Smith class. Good gun boat - Tier IX without a doubt - but no torps. She was a minelayer. So why not a test bed for mines? I seem to recall the Turkish Navy was quite handy with those.

Wrong CV, old man. You want one of the new ones where you can line up attacks from the edge of the AA zone with your skip bombers and 6k torps.

It does, (I looked). Any CV with AP bombers (which are virtually useless against ships without armored decks, you'll just get over pens) will do this, and they will focus German BBs because their armour scheme makes any AP hit a citadel. So it's not just Hornet, you can do this with a Ryujo or a Weser or any number of other CVS. And then you can come back and keep on doing it. WG has balanced up high tier CVs in the way that they've balanced BBs, so that three good strikes will do catastrophic damage, but have forgotten that there are fewer ways of mitigating CV attacks. Hornet should be a model for better CVs - fewer, hard hitting attacks, which take skill to land and which give their targets a chance to defend and recover. Not just the spam spam spam they currently have.

Ah. Presumably Hornet has AP Bombers? Without wanting to be too concilatory, whacking BBs - especially German ones - is what they are for.... aren't they supposed to be balanced by being difficult to land or some such?

I played it a lot yesterday but haven't had any issues like that. I guess the usual advice applies - restrart in safe mode, check and repair your installation, then contact Tech support.

Catastrophe Flotilla. It would include the whole Russian Baltic Squadron but there are plenty of other candidates. HMS Trinidad, for example (torpedoed itself).

The idea is to try out the new line and how it plays, surely?

Well, it used to have more range pre-Captain Skills rework. With the Pan-Asians, WG is just concerned about HE spam from smoke, as that has always been the source of their greatest mistakes (Belfast, Kutuzov, Smolensk). But I think they've been too cautious here, particularly with the choice of Tier VII - they're always going to get comparisons to Atlanta and Flint if they put the same design at Tier VII. They should probably have made Chumphon the Tier VIII, paving the way for a US Juneau, and put the Harbin at VII, that way they could have comfortably given Chumphon a much greater range (like the old Atlanta with AFT) and the gun calibre would have limited the risk of it being OP. Harbin at VII would bring something new and powerful with that Soviet DD gunnery and would have been easier to balance.

I wouldn't play it if the crews were shown, and I'm sure many others wouldn't as well.

Oh, of course. But that's reality vs game mechanics. In reality there were many occasions when AA guns were used as anti-ship/submarine weapons in close range engagements but WG doesn't want those to count.

It wouldn't pen much, either. 40mm/6 = 6.67mm.

It was removed three Dev Blogs ago. They gave her better range, speed and highly improved AP pen instead, and then they nerfed it down twice just before release. If you imagine a cross between Leander and Gorizia, that's what this is.

Here we are... Hot take: Canarias is the sneaky, cap-bothering DD/CL killer you thought Dido should be, but isn't. Quick, nimble, nasty to anything lightly armoured and hopelessly impotent against anything with a decent armour belt.

Definitely. I used to do this in Randoms when I played them, but it's not that much fun in PvE mode. The problem is that with 175+ ships I keep going into battle not quite being able to remember what the ship does. I'm sure we've all had those "this ship used to have torpedoes... ah, it's Bismarck, not Tirpitz" moments.

I'm sure you already have. But being the type of divvy who plays ships in random order from left to right in port depending on what day it is I do find it comes as a shock sometimes when you get some extreme ballistics to deal with. And these *are* quite extreme, it's the gentle rain of vertical dropping HE shells at anything over 10km, let alone 14km - a bit like firing on a Mogador with speed boost on, I find I need to aim on another monitor. :)

Graf is my favourite, both for her secondaries and for her fast planes which get to the target fast and zoom through flak zones. Make sure you drop off at least one squad from each flight (make an attack run as soon as you can after they launch) and you've got enough planes to keep attacking at speed through out a game.

The clue is that you can't fit Propulsion Mod 1 in slot 4. It's baked in to the RN CLs, so Dido will always be more nimble than Rahmat. These are slow, floaty DD type guns. You get the hang of it after a while, and they are brilliant for firing over things that ships with flatter firing arcs can't.

Well, sort of. WG have been very lazy in the their creation of Rahmat so it's no surprise to find they've just recycled the Dido hull. Although this does mean that the ship has much more dakka than it should (any actual Dido with 4.5 inch guns, like the ones on Rahmat's A Hull, would have had four twin turrets rather than Rahmat's five). The main differences between Dido and Rahmat are range and, crucially, acceleration. Dido has a 14.1km gun range, which is better than any other Tier VI Royal Navy cruiser - this makes the whole smoke/island cover HE spam thing much more comfortable, certainly much more comfortable than Rahmat's 12.5km. She also has the built in British CL acceleration and deceleration, which is very handy for repositioning from cover to cover and also for stopping in those tiny smoke screens. The cons are obvious: she is very fragile, she has a small health pool and doesn't have hydro, which probably doesn't make her the DD swatting support cruiser people might like. But I think she's a very decent addition to the RN line up - with a high skill Captain and decent positioning she's a pretty powerful ship capable of annoying the crud out of opponents in a retro HE spammer kind of way.

I think this is just one of those situations where they've had to re-write the code because there was no documentation for the original and they didn't really know how to fix/amend it. Hopefully it will mean that (in time) they can be more flexible with Operations and bring back some of the old ones that were broken by the CV rework. But it's not an overnight fix for daft bot AI.

That's a shame, but I suppose it isn't year of the HE spammer yet. I've had an Atlanta for years and have always found it difficult to play (outside of Narai, anyway) so something which is a bit worse and harder to use than that doesn't sound much fun. Anyone played the Tier VIII?