invicta2012

That's interesting. Ops would need rebalancing if consumables were available (as the distribution of forces is generally towards bigger numbers on the bot team to make up for their lack of skill) but it might make higher tier modes more entertaining - Asymmetric Battles has been pulled because no-one wants to be cannon fodder with only bot team-mates, that could be more interesting with better skilled bots.

To the OP: if you didn't enjoy the Frankie C (and I didn't) then don't waste your time skipping Tiers, it's just a waste of resources. If you haven't enjoyed the line so far, you won't enjoy the higher Tiers. Especially is Veneto is a sub-par Roma (and Roma herself is notoriously inconsistent). The whole SAP thing might chime with you, but if it doesn't, don't waste your time, there are plenty of other BB lines which are more straightforward and fun.

That you don't get a buff for grumbling.

Ranked is not that enjoyable, tbh.

It would look odd to see this elegant modern BB design with single mounts... perhaps the twin 10.5cm guns seen on German BBs (but without the buffed HE pen).

The in-port options to turn off decorative, special ships, etc are nice but not specific enough, I think it should be a ship-by-ship, camo-by-camo, captain-by-captain choice, on both how my ships are seen and I how I see other ships. I'm not a fan of many of the decorative items in the game and in particular I don't like the collab items - I find myself getting intensely irritated when a "Ship Smasha" appears in the team line up, as I hate Warhammer and Games Workshop with a passion and would love to be able to turn that crud off completely, without the faff of installing mods.

There's no reason not to. The Littorio class are wonderful looking ships and another one (preferably without the derpy Italian dispersion) would be welcome. I think I would prefer a French style combination of 4 x 2 152mm turrets and a shedload of lighter, post-war AA guns (76/90mm?) would work well - almost Marco Polo's secondary armament a tier Down - with sound main battery performance this would make an excellent Tier VIII.

I completely agree, the RN Cruisers have some significant advantages. But 16km is a decent range for some HE spam, if the player can find decent cover. And BB drivers will wonder about pushing in with those nasty Deepwater torps likely to be on their way. The PA CL line looks technical and not for casual players... and that's OK, surely?

Yes, but bots (like Italians) do it better.

That's the most horrible thing about playing cruisers. Thinking you've got away from focused fire and then getting randomly blapped from the other side of the map. Aaagh.

They don't have hydro, as far as I can see, or radar. Or the insane acceleration of RN Cruisers, which makes exiting a smoke screen under fire vaguely possible. I think anyone who expects to sit in smoke and dakka things is going to be disappointed. It starts short, but by the time you get to the Tier IX you can get out to 16.2km, which is Smolensk range. Only 12 guns rather than 16 but there could still be quite a lot of HE spam to deal with.

No, but they can turn quite slowly, Peter. So if you have a bot Warspite you may find it switches focus and takes advantage of the fact that X and Y turrets are still mid-turn while A and B are focused on someone else. It's quite fun, and shows the bot doesn't have the delay (either in the aiming reticle or in the brian) that a human player would have. And that's the actual explanation for most of these things, btw - most players take significantly longer to react to events than the AI does, and many game factors (such as torpedo detection distance) are set up to be fair to slowcoach humans. If the AI is making course changes to a torpedo as soon as it is detected, it will do so much quicker than we can.

PA cruisers have Poor armour, massive citadels, low health, DD calibre guns, teeny-tiny Smolensk style smoke screen. They make Neptune look tanky.

The game knows where the player is and what they are doing. My suspicion with bot torpedoes is that they are not launched in a conventional manner but have a course which is set by the game only when they are detectable. They seem to arrive with remarkable accuracy even if the player has varied their course. They certainly do. Back in the days when bots were quite good you often saw human players isolated on a flank. In which case all the bots on that flank would turn and head exactly to where they were. Even if they were moving.... My absolute favourite Bot thing is that they can change targets without the delay that players suffer when switching from one target to another. Consequently you can get blapped by a bot who appears to be sailing (and aiming) in another direction completely if they happen to have a sundry turret pointing your way.

KK is a long standing favourite. Lots of guns, hard hitting torps, hydro and her total lack of concealment works in her favour in Co-op; because she's always spotted, you can always buff her reload with Top Grade Gunner. Poltava, on the other hand, is utterly infuriating. Not as fast as she should be (because she loses speed horribly when not going in a straight line), Soviet armour (which doesn't help in a brawl) and guns that do nothing but misbehave. Drives me mad, that one.

I don't think so.... I think the scenario you're outlining is unlikely, because it assumes that the player is looking to obtain both the original and duplicate ships from the lockbox, when many players will some (or all) of these ships already. That's a different matter. I'm actually pleased that WG aren't promoting these lockbox sales as a way of getting full compensation, because the appeal of that is about regaining currency you've already spent. Any mechanism which does that induces consumers to chase losses/recover previous expenditure, which is a very bad (and rather immoral) thing for a company to do, as it usually results in more expenditure and increased loss. As you say, the house always wins. It's especially bad because the pull is mostly towards those who have the heaviest investment, which often includes people with gambling issues. This way round the lockbox becomes something which is bought only to obtain the specific prize within in it, not as some corrective tool for an individual's gambling meta. I'm all in favour of that, tbh

That did make me laugh. It's Chumphon, isn't it? Chumpton made me wonder when the WG/Camberwick Green collaboration was coming out. HMS Chigley and a Windy Miller captain (drinks too much cider and falls asleep at the wheel*). *This is actually true. In 1960s kids's shows, it was perfectly acceptable for characters to get blind drunk and fall asleep in charge of dangerous machinery. Today, the children who watched those shows are WowS captains.

New Year Premium Containers are 750 doubloons in the Armory, so really that's a re-roll. And it's a fair one, btw. Otherwise collectors and whales would get much more value from the Lockboxes than the average punter. Irian is 11K doubloons, so if a collector gets a dupe and full compensation they get the equivalent of 15 lockbox doubloon wins in one hit. That's not on.

It does... it's just CVs which can launch attacks every 30 seconds for an entire game which don't make sense. You can see that WG know it from the new carriers they're making with much more occasional attacks. Of course *they* still have their own problems, being an "I Win" button in certain circumstances and ruining close game situations, but there you go.

I would suggest you probably want to play with the Silver lines rather than dropping Coal or Doubloons on a Premium. Minotaur goes up close, Des Moines or Venezia for Mid-Range, Hindenburg/Henri for the longer range HE and Riga for the Soviet experience. Drake and Goliath are quite sturdy. The Dutch ones can farm damage from cover and don't explode on being fired at. If you absolutely have to drop some currencies then I'm told Salem is reliable and will be a good Des Moines showcase.

Serious DPM in one form of armament. Durable armour or self-concealment device. Low concealment, good speed. Radar / hydro. It really depends on whether you would enjoy playing a close-in, high-risk ambush playstyle, a long Range/concealed HE spammer or something which is more like a BB. Have you considered something from mid Tiers? Something like Weimar has good Ops farming potential, Mainz is good.

People tend to betray in these circumstances, if there is any possible gain. WG has tested this in Halloween modes.

Kitakami in WoWS *is* the ship she was in WW2 - a suicide cruiser. It didn't matter whether the torpedoes were traditional or human guided, all she was ever intended to do was to sink something big which the US would take 2 years to replace. This doesn't make any sense in general WoWS randoms. In Ranked or Brawls? Possibly. But it's very niche.

Well, let's guess. WG developed the Hornet, and put the B-25s on it because of the Doolittle Raid. Cool and Historical. A+. Then they thought "We really like the B-25s and the gameplay is fun with the big occasional strike from a tactical squadron... let's put it on Super Carriers." So they go rummaging around their Big Book of Aircraft and look for 1940s/1950s British Bombers. and all they found was the Canberra. Which is true, tbh, there's nothing else to use, really (short of an Avro Vulcan strike, which *would* be cool).

The problem is that she's quite like Canarias and Devonshire without delving into the Box'O'Gimmicks, and probably better suited to the silver line. The ships were refitted with a heavy AA armament for operations in the Pacific late in WW2 so that could help - 20mm and 40mm loadout is similar to a Baltimore, would make a mess of Tier VI planes and be capable if uptiered. The La Gal class in game is a late war refit model so there's a precedent for that. WG could give her MBRB (perhaps with a long base reload, but MBRB to compensate in burst DPM?). This long ish reload, like Exeter, would also enable them to put the Tier V in (with no MBRB) without it being OP. Then something like Foch or Dupleix could go in at VII? They're mostly premiums, already. There are a few options - there are as many preliminary designs for the original De Grasse as there are for the Richelieu and they could use some of those. For the Tier VII, there's one with a quad turret in the rear, combine that with De Grasse's upgrades (Reload, Rudder Shift, Speed) and La Gal's consumables (MBRB, Engine Boost) and you'd have something worthwhile. For a Tier VIII, you take a similar sized ship and complete it as was intended for De Grasse post-war before they went down the Bayard route. That's two triples and the quad (with better firing angles than Bayard) and secondaries consisting of 100mm 1945s and 40mm Bofors. For Tier IX and X you could go down the Plymouth route, take the C5 hull (smaller Saint Louis designs) and add more quad turrets.