HaachamaShipping

Neptune dps is pretty good and no joke, just getting the best use out of it is hard. The main reason I went radar over smoke on most RN CLs that can do so was that I started to rely mostly on terrain anyway, because smoke seemed a decent tool, but you really need a good position for that where you have enemies that cannot simply angle, where the enemy is not falling back outside your gun range or pushing to the point you have to disengage and abandon the smoke before you get overrun. That was my impression and murdering a lolibote in a few seconds seemed to me more of a useful contribution than trying to get huge damage numbers on battleships. With Neptune thus, I often don't use the dpm to get a shitton of damage in sustained engagements, but to make the life of those radared end faster. Because even if certain aspects of the ship are questionable, the dpm is certainly not and when you aren't getting shot at and can use all your guns, you can let it rain shells like few other cruisers can. And catching a DD or a smoked up cruiser offguard can let to them evaporating due to fast firing guns. Just unlike with Mino, you really need to have them trained on the enemy already, no swinging them around in mere seconds. This though. Radar Nep can work, but it might be quite hard.

When some lengthy videos with explanations founded in actual gameplay mechanics are not worth your attention, why is your rambling worthy of ours? Just some food for thought. No need to respond.

I used the Neptune with radar (before I reset the line and slacked off regrinding them) and it's best if you treat it like a Cleveland or Seattle, who also cannot radar up quite to their detection range. Try to consider the target's mentality and what they will do. Already with Edinburgh, I'd try to set up around corners where it'd basically be an ambush so the enemy is a good bit in my radar range already before they light me up and I radar. Naturally, for Neptune this'd work still. Otherwise, pushing up to smoked up threats or just treating your radar still as an area denial tool from behind obstacles works too. Lastly, enough people don't pay enough attention about radar ranges and especially with Neptune noone expects a Neptune radar. Many DDs will push up, just hoping to get a good spot to torp your eventual smoke or to deprive you with your smoke firing penalty and while being caught out is painful, often enough radaring after a short while reveals the culprit. Also, for buffing radar duration, with radar mod, the duration already is plenty long. I don't think the ship needs much more radar duration. I for my part didn't like the ship in the beginning, went through a harsh learning experience playing radar Nep in Arms Race ranked (as it was the only T9 radar ship I had) and restarted playing it just for fun when I got the AL Neptune captain to put on it and honestly, it is quite derpy, but it can be pretty fun, especially when you really start getting into the fine adjustments of maneuvering a ship as big and as gliding as this thing.

For me it's a consumable to throw out to get radar. In general, smoke or not, islands are much better tool to work with than a smokecloud imo.

I'd rather have an Essex, Taiho, Akagi, one of the Illustrous-class or something along those lines. You know, a CV that is famous and actually was useful (design-wise) as a CV.

I rather have a coal/steel CV. Clearly, we need a Stalingrad/Smolensk of the skies. A ship to surpass the Enterprise, which is not Russian after all. No, but seriously, even if it isn't more OP than other CVs, I'd like to have some CV option there.

At 20 km, every enemy with a brain will evade most of your shells though. It can be quite lulz, but frankly, you are basically a gimmicky Shchors.

That's factually incorrect and the rest of your post is just a bunch of *edit* that ignores most things I said and is basically what you accuse us of. So, well, hate it all you like, it won't make the Gneisenau less of an impactful ship that can actually carry when played properly and get the numbers. But certain people rather complain.

It depends on what your guns are, what enemy gun turrets are and what you hit. For example, in @El2aZeR's screenshots, Alaska has improved pen angles. At these ranges it has enough pen and without bouncing it easily pens. DM in a cruiser brawl can annoying for exactly the same reason. Shooting German turrets like you did is kind of weird, because the turret faces are pretty ok, the upper half is sharply angled and you don't usually disable them easily from the front, but from the side they die easily. For Germans, pointing turrets at the enemy is a good method of not risking sudden incapacitation, as I often enough had enemy BBs sweep my forward deck with AP and knock out both front turrets because they were trained elsewhere. The worst turrets on BBs, btw are British T9-10 turrets with flat turret face, which get absolutely wrecked in a brawl if you shoot it, with Lion and Conkek being prone to getting turrets knocked out, which is annoying as hell and makes them even worse at short ranges than the questionable hp pool and armour scheme would already indicate. Thunderer has a bit thicker turret faces, but otherwise same issues. In contrast, something like Yamato with its insane turret faces that also have some slope will hardly ever lose a turret from a frontal attack. It's why I question people taking PM on Yamato, because what exactly are you afraid of losing? Rudder dies at most from torp in the stern, where you might just repair it with the inevitable flooding, Engine only dies if you get citpenned, which you should try to avoid at any cost anyway. Turrets are basically some of the most survivable and Main Armaments mod preserves them. So even when people tell me "Why do you take PT? As a BB you get focused anyway!", at least you get more out of that skill (including some indication when it might be the best situation to turn around without losing large parts of your hp and potentially the engine) than PM. It's not a DD, where you get shot by one HE salvo and half your stuff is out.

I might actually for the first time take the HA skill (since the major skill rework years ago) and only because I have 2 filler points in my Thunderer build that has PT, EM, AR, JoAT, SI, BoS and CE. Went for JoAT because it's a Dunkirk captain and you wouldn't want to get HE spammed for extented periods in Thunderer anyway, so now I can consider whether to go PM + EL (the likely better choice) or HA, just so I can boast that my repair is 51s CD and my Damecon is 61s CD, approaching cruiser levels of damage control. But yeah, there's an extreme difference in how useful certain skills are compared to others, like HA vs AR and IFA vs PT. Like, PT outright does the same job, but better...

tbf, while defo not priority, skills could get a few changes. Even before CV rework, there was an issue with the way some skills were just infinitely more useful than others and now it's even worse. Like, IFA, HA, extra fighter plane skill, Vigilance, Massive AA, they imo are pretty much all skills that are just not worth it except on maybe 1-2 ships or if you have some weirdo build that needs a filler. Like, IFA and HA to me are just outclassed by way too useful other skills in the same price category (PT, PM, EL, EM, LS, AR!!! and even JoAT), fighter plane skill is worth it only for very few ships like Kuma, where it effectively doubles the amount of planes and you don't need the points for anything else anyway, while Vigilance seems overpriced by a point and MAA is just absolute garbage. Then again, I would like to see this fixed more than I would like to see stuff like subs.

Thunderer can compare, due to large cruiser accuracy and 22.9s reload. 63% fire chance, over 8k HE alpha and the ability to citpen a good few cruisers with HE. You can actually devstrike Smolensk with RN BB HE, if you hit the citadel belt with enough shells, given the HE does so much damage and does not just overpen or bounce. And even when not, losing a third or more of the hp pool to HE pens hurts.

Hood is fast as Gneisenau actually. Also, in terms of speed, the fastest BBs are: Georgia with speed boost French T8+ with speed boost Iowa, Missouri and Georgia without speed boost Gneisenau and Hood At its tier, Gneisenau is joint fastest with Hood though and that with a solid margin over most others, as only 3 other battleships go 30 knots or above (Hood, Scharnhorst and Ashitaka), so rest ranges from 4 knots slower (KGV/DoY) to a spectacular 11 knots slower (Colorado).

Gneisenau is the best German secondary platform tier for tier, imo. Mostly because at T7, it is uncontested in efficiency, it needs only two skills invested to be full-penning same and lower tier ships (IFHE is unnecessary for that, while for higher tiers it would be required to deal with BBs) and at T7, you can get away easier with sinking captain points into that, as many don't run full 19 pt captains there, compared to T10, where you'd expect them more. The guns are 3/4 of a Bismarck. Like, literally, you only have one gun turret less. Now, yes, the greater quantity one tier up helps a bit, but you gotta learn to live with that dispersion, because Bismarck, FdG and GK are just as wonky. Bismarck and FdG just shoot 8 shells and GK 12. But you'd expect such improvements over the tiers. Personally, I got into Gneisenau after I finished Bismarck and had gotten used to how they behave. Because frankly, not all is terrible with the guns, because their bigesst drawbacks are mediocre accuracy and low barrel count, but: they rotate fast, allowing the turrets to keep track of targets quite well. they reload fast, getting down to almost 20s if you lose hp with AR. half-dead Gneisenau can still be dangerous. they overmatch and penetrate well. They are T8 material after all. Gneisenau is with Nagato and Colorado here, not like Lyon that has no overmatch, Nelson that has crap pen or KGV that is terrible in both regards here. they have high shell velocity. This means less lead necessary and less reaction time for the target. Gneisenau, like Bismarck and any high shell velocity ship can snapshot quite well, unlike ships like Colorado, NC, Lion, Conqueror or Thunderer that may be accurate (Lion and Conq are not), but give quite a bit of time to just evade, so most shells plunge accurately where the target no longer is. Gneisenau gets underestimated. People consider it often the least threat and are more likely to bet on your crap accuracy, just to get absolutely devastated when the Gneisenau can properly lead and adjust for possible attempts at evasion and RNG gives a minor blessing. Similarly, people at times overestimate their ability to deal with the ship and miss the chance to disengage before it is too late and 32 knots moved you into their face.

1. Even without torping you, Gneisenau is faster and will close the distance. The Gneisenau is mostly armoured enough to not give a damn about your shells when angled properly and your ship is not. At 8 km, the secondaries open up with 31 mm base pen, so you constantly bleed hp, as both Nagato and Colorado are 25 mm all over. In the end, I do not need the torps to bully you away and get a favourable exchange. Btw, this also shows why the Scharnhorst is not necessarily the better ship, as you can neither overmatch, nor do most of your secondaries pen a thing. 2. It can bully other ships away when played properly. It's not completely braindead, but properly played, it has quite the impact. 3. And neither has the armour or speed, nor torps or good secondaries. They are basically on the other end of the design spectrum, putting emphasis on main battery over everything else. Which when properly uused is quite good, I still have both ships and like playing them from time to time, but Gneisenau is certainly competitive.

Yes. Aircraft torps were typically smaller and had less explosives, because carrier aircraft are typically not made to carry torpedoes as large as those used by ships and submarines. After all, you get way more leeway in weight when the torpedo doesn't account for like 10% or more of the max takeoff weight of the platform.

Well, lucky you to have come to Bismarck without ever having a detonation.

Hard to tell, when someone states that Daring has almost double the fire chance, where the most common interpretation would be the value "fire chance" which is per shell, with 10% for Kleber base and 8% for Daring base. Daring has better fire setting capabilities over time.

With DE and fire flags it looks different though. 6x24x0.11=15,84 10x20x0.08=16 Both ways it is very close.

Izumo, Myogi and Gneisenau are pretty decent, Bayern I'd even consider good.

Torps and secondaries don't exist, I guess. And yet these guns are the reason why, when we assume equal skill, Gneisenau beats Scharnhorst basically every time, because Gneisenau can at least overmatch part of the hull armour of Scharnhorst, Scharnhorst cannot. Scharnhorst also cannot deal as effectively even with angled T6 BBs or T8 cruisers.

Lion reloads in 27s (with reload mod), Monarch in 25s. So, what? Without reload mod, Monarch has literally more dpm than stock Lion and as much as upgraded Lion. For a tier up, the most useful things Lion gives you are a superheal and better fire chance, but I deem neither worth going up a tier. Especially with things like how the shell velocity absolutely tanks compared to Monarch and the Monarch already is survivable enough, getting an upgrade in survivability, but not in offensive armament absolutely sucks for me. Contrast with something like Izumo or Iowa, where you actually get dpm improvements and more powerful AP. For someone who plays Monarch almost exclusively with AP, better HE is just horrendous and HE-based playstyle is absolutely horrendous.

Frankly... ehhhhhhh Secondary buff, yay... Not too hard to achieve, but the buff also is pretty much the most meaningless there is. Yamamoto with harder to get achievements has better boni and Kuznetsov is easier to achieve and more meaningful. Main battery buff will be useful on Hindenburg, Nürnberg and Mainz. Rest will fire so few main battery shells as to make this not very impactful. Even on Mainz, the greatest KM shell spammer, 140 hits requires over two minutes of spamming shells non-stop with 100% hit rate. Typicall, I'd count on the skill activating at earliest by minute 5 to 6. On Hindenburg or Nürnberg after around half the match time. On Hipper, I'd count on never. Heal... Spot 3 ships, restore up to 3k hp at T10? I'd say, for the Z-52, it's nice, but by the time you need the buff, spotting ships gets progressively harder. An CV at that point makes it nigh impossible to get the ribbon. For GZ, this is absolutely meaningless. Aircraft restoration speed is the most meaningful buff and also why the only thing I see in Lütjens is a GZ buff. Whip the rockets out for 30 hit ribbons asap and get restoration time that approaches acceptable levels. Is GZ good now? Doubt it. Skills: Ah yeah, Germans always needed Expert Marksman and that sweet 2.5% more engine boost... Lütjens compared to other legendary captains is basically what the Jutland brothers are to the Does, Dunkirks and Honores. Kinda sad.

Lion has a bit more max range and at these ranges, dispersion values for British/US and German/French are pretty similar (though the German is a bit worse by a couple meters, if they had the same range). At closer ranges, the German dispersion is somewhat worse. Both disperson models are way worse at these ranges than the IJN dispersion though and the only reason the Iowa isn't this bad is because of the dispersion module.

Monarch isn't the greatest thing at T8, but I find it decent for its tier and like playing it. Lion just felt eh. Sure, if you just like spamming HE across the map, Lion basically gives you stupid fire chance back and the range, but you no longer have the dpm edge compared to others and I feel like the dpm allowed Monarch to make ok AP plays. Lion just will feel like a shitty Iowa when played with AP and with HE... ah yeah, I also like doing the job of a Saint Louis in a BB, until a Musashi/Yamato decides I don't deserve to live and overmatches straight into the cit from any range. Lion is what made me quit the line and just get Thunderer instead, because I can live without silly heal. I cannot have proper match impact without actually useful offensive tools.