HaachamaShipping

That's true for like every BB ever from Mikasa to Yamato. Just not all ships fare well at staying alive at mid and close ranges compared to adversaries. Warspite mainly excels at mid-range, as it has a limited range and it has good accuracy, while the armour is pretty underwhelming. If you take Warspite close up against ships like the Bayern, you pretty much are throwing away the accuracy advantage.

No, it pretty much is suicide. That's like saying playing the Shchors needs no skill, because if an enemy cruiser comes and shows broadside, it's dead after the second AP salvo. DDs running into a cap with a radar cruiser not accounted for, no contingency plan to bail and then smoking up to deny themselves vision is about the dumbest things a DD can do and at that point you're just asking to get killed.

Hood is an entirely different ship and if it carried the Warspite guns, I'd call it borderline OP. Both ships are imo solid premiums. Warspite is for T6 not too slow, but certainly not fast, which won't matter if pitted vs T5, but certainly does matter vs T8. The ship has excellent turning rates and radius. That's pretty much where the good qualities of the hull end. 25 mm plating all over is a pain to deal with even on her own tier, the firing arcs are decent, the AA is not very good, the secondaries are ok if you get close, but typically don't matter. The guns are excellent in regards to accuracy and penetration and only lack range (which combined with the speed means you should not chase stuff too far, because you need to stay close to the action). Warspite basically is a set of sniper rifles on a mediocre hull that is not bad, but also not good. Hood is almost the opposite. For its tier, that hull is just incredible. Best hp on its tier, an armour scheme that allows for incredible tanking if you angle (bow and stern get overmatched and superstructure is vulnerable, but the rest of the hull is highly resistant to HE and AP shells at an angle, with 51 mm deck armour that even a Roon cannot penetrate without IFHE), speed is excellent, turning radius is ok, but helped by the speed to complete the turn fast, AA is above average (rockets scare planes off) and the firing arcs are incredible, to allow angling without loss of firepower. Turret traverse also is fast and needs no EM to be comfortable. The guns meanwhile are decidedly mediocre to almost worst at the tier. But that doesn't mean they are complete trash. Their accuracy is not Warspite level, but acceptable for BBs (try Gneisenau or Lyon), the penetration doesn't work well against BB citadel, but on broadsides you still get penetrations and 38 cm guns overmatch bows of T7 and below still, so these guns are still serviceable. If fired at cruisers, these guns get far less overpens and still hit citadels nicely. Not to mention AP penetrations on DDs. Against cruisers, hood is just brutal, thanks to the combination of anti-cruiser guns and the sheer survivability and resistance against HE damage. So, these are guns that are very mediocre (apart from penetration they are still more reliable than the Gneisenau) on arguably the best T7 hull (it's flat out better than the Nagato, Scharnhorst/Gneisenau have better armour, but given ships can still citadel a Gneisenau through the bow with overmatch...).

What's Hood's doubloon value? Frankly, I think I'll just buy that bundle and use the doubloons from already having Hood to buy a Scharnhorst. Better than a package of flags. Also, they should have changed the specialisations to the respective ships. Would hardly make a difference for retraining, except Hipper and Cleveland.

Unless you plan to have some whacky non-standard build on Conqueror, Warspite works as a crew trainer. Ship is not too similar, but uses standard BB skills on captains and performs decently well. Purely for captain training, I'd call Hood the better trainer, because T7 MM and as the ship has fast turret traverse and is a BB, you can even train British CL captains with the ship (not needing EM skill and having SI anyway). For historical value, Warspite is worth it though and if not up vs T8, performs quite well. Against T8... well, just don't rush in (as if you could at that speed.

7.6 million. Saving up for Izumo, but bought a Gneisenau a short while ago that put me back below 10 million. Likely might also buy Charles Martel first, once I have the credits.

It's not that I don't play cruisers. It's that I play the three cruiser lines that are not applicable here and French, because it was required for Hermes. It's one thing asking people to branch out. It's another to make narrow requirements that kind of require you to grind every line, because god knows what ship and tier they want next for operations. Not to mention, until a short while ago, I would have had to keep Algerie upon moving on to Charles Martel, if I wanted to play Hermes again, which only is now not the case, because bought an Atlanta. But if operations get overly restrictive, it means either one has to own half the ships in the game at some point to play them all, or the amount of people actually playing operations will drop, because they just can't be bothered. Neither can be a reasonable objective. So? Cherry Blossom is not any one event, it's a generalised night battle in the Pacific. And for all that the New Orleans-class and the Atlanta-class are way more relevant than Charles Martel, which never actually made it off the drawing board. WG might have "their own reasons" to restrict it to T8 allied cruisers, but neither is that much of an argument nor does it mean people can't call this a tendency towards overly restrictive requirements that could be loosened to make people more willing to still put up with operations and not make this some niche game mode that eventually people don't care about, because half the time they don't own an applicable ship or they don't want to play it.

If your shell hits the turret and disables it, you either are so far away that this would likely not have been the one shot that will kill the enemy ship, or you are so close that aiming elsewhere is possible, unless the enemy is angled enough that you'd not get much done if not aiming for turrets and superstructure. In which case, getting a turret disabled is a greater pain than losing maybe 3-4k hp to a pen.

Afaik, they have 1/4 pen, same as the 12.8 cm guns. Only the 105s have 1/6 pen. It's why Bismarck actually gets away without IFHE, because the 15 cm guns can hurt, while the 10.5 cm guns don't do anything except start fires every now and then. The 15 cm guns have not that great rate of fire though, so typically the damage stays within limits.

Because of the fun there is in grinding a line to get a ship solely so you can get time-limited missions done connected to these operations? If you never grinded a line past T3 and now can go and try to go to T7 or T8, just because of a mission, it kind of sucks. And it isn't exactly that hard to widen the criteria and for example approve allied BBs or DDs (if they'd include things that DDs actually are good for and not just where their dpm disadvantage compared to cruisers shows), given it increases the number of eligible ships from a mere 10 for Hermes by 2 if DDs are allowed, 5 if allied T7 BBs are allowed, another 3 if T8 BBs are also allowed, while for Cherry Blossom the number would increase from 4 by 2 with DDs added and by 5 with BBs added. If tier restrictions were widened to include T7 for Cherry Blossom, this would increase even further. And would it be doable gameplay-wise? Well, early operations had T5/6 restrictions. Hermes has T7 cruisers alongside T8 BBs. It's not that hard to make an operation that could be doable in any of the allied T7 cruisers too, given the increase in difficulty isn't that much. T7 allied premiums even bring the useful radar, when the whole thing is a night battle with likely vision impairment. Adding DDs only makes it a bit hard if they don't add something useful for DDs to do. Would it break immersion? Immersion-wise, even a Perth has more of a place in Cherry Blossom than a Charles Martel. Ships like the New Orleans-class, the Atlanta-class and such were quite active in the night actions of the Pacific and a good few got sunk.

I know IFHE GK is a thing, but I would say that performance is hardly indicative of that. The damage you did to the two BBs with secondaries adds up to about 22k (not counting fire damage that wouldn't have been lower without IFHE) of which part is from 15 cm guns that don't even need IFHE. The Hindenburg meanwhile, the main secondary target of your game does not have 32 mm plating, so if it gets hit by 12.8 cm guns in its squishier parts it gets penetrated anyway, while in the less squishy parts it shatters anyway. For 4 skill points, in that match, you got hardly anything out of it.

Well, there's only so many things you can do to optimise damage in Tachibana/Smith guns: BFT (if you have a high-level DD captain, they'll likely have that skill anyway, IJN might have it for Akizuki) DE (this is the one most questionable to be on any high tier DD captain, as most spec other skills, like SE, SI for USN, TAE for IJN and skills like AFT/IFHE taking up even more points) IFHE (USN usually not, Akizuki very likely to carry it already) AR (one of the best skills to have on any ship, so, likely to be present) learning how to aim (pretty good thing to learn in general) Due to point restrictions, you won't cover them all, but by the point someone has a Benson/Fletcher or an Akizuki, they could cover most of these already and you can't optimise past that. Well, ok, you could put Yamamoto/Halsey on the ship (and Yamamoto on Akizuki is not exactly an uncommon use of Yamamoto), but then you really just want to bully the lower tier. But yeah, as long as you cam sufdficiently far up the respective DD lines, having a captain with the necessary skills (especially for IJN with Akizuki) is almost a given and the effort to optimise is near nil. Which kind of is one of the points I wanted to raise in the opening post - for minimal effort, you get a pretty solid sealclubber out of this thing. Compared to other ships like silver ships or Vampire, that need special captains and at least need retraining.

I'd say, two tier spread at most. If you need a Kuma alongside Mogami, get in some bot Kuma. But the performance differences between Kuma and Mogami make it a bit hard to throw in bots that both ships will find challenging while neither will get outright slaughtered. For example a bot Dallas would be not too hard to deal with for a Mogami, but that Kuma can just hope it can hit with torps, because no way it is going to gun that one down. And I'm skeptical about how well torpedoes work against these bots, especially after AI upgrades. I do agree though that softening the tier requirement would help a great deal, instead of making operations that get ever more restricted in what you can bring. For example, for the upcoming operation, I'll likely will have to buy a Charles Martel, because it's the only allied T8 cruiser I actually have researched. I never bought it, because I wasn't too interested in the line. I even got Algerie only because it was the quickest way to get into Hermes. I'm at this point grinding French cruisers because I need ships that can be used for these operations (and likely missions that require you play them), not because I find them terribly interesting. Hermes was already restricted to a grand total of 10 ships (Algerie, Fiji, Belfast, Pensacola, Atlanta, Flint, Indianapolis, Lyon, Richelieu, Gascogne), half of which were premiums, most of which were not obtainable at the time. The new operation will be restricted to 4 ships. It was reasonable to assume people can obtain any T6 ship in due time to play operations that had no special missions associated with them, but can we really assume everyone plays at least one allied cruiser line up to T8? At this rate I don't even want to know what they'll have in store for the Soviet BB release, but I guess I should get that Chapayev...

Yes, you're buying a WG-made mini mod. You're basically spending a bit of money to not get some voice mod. And 10 skill points on the captain. Apart from trying to get a bit more cash out of this, likely one reason why they get bundled with stuff that by itself is worth the money, so they can make sales and if someone claims they are overcharging for the mini mod, they can refer to everything else being worth more than you actually pay for this.

Good catch: Smith: 75,416 It's the only rival to the Tachibana, though it has the same crappy gun caliber.

Indeed. But sadly, it'll almost certainly will be bundled. I don't know what kind of unnecessary stuff they'll throw in there, but I hope it won't be premium time, because the last thing I currently need is to pay for a ton of premium time when in the upcoming weeks I don't even know if I can play much. Likely there'll again be some large 40 Euro bundle or something containing all captains, a metric shitton of signals, 25 container missions, a few k doubloons, the commemorative flag and maybe a bunch of those "fancy" camos, which noone knows if they even look halfway decent.

Well, I typically drop down there only at the end of an evening session, when I had enough of higher tiers and just want to play some silly boat. Then it's this or the Varyag. Mostly noticed Tachibana's characteristics and IFHE benefits, because the Harekaze/Akizuki captain is the highest level captain I have for IJN DDs and so I looked into what 76 mm guns could gain from IFHE. It certainly seems to be more than my Varyag gains from IFHE on Shchors captain.

I mean, it's a premium IJN boat. I own a Harekaze that needs IFHE, others own Akizukis. Transferring the captain comes at no cost whatsoever but the three or so clicks. No grind required (except for getting the Akizuki captain to high enough level, but that's absolutely worth it for a good T8 DD). Yes, I'm serious.

Only that they actually have the armour penetration, because at T2, hardly anyone has armour. This isn't T8 where every DD is coated in 19 mm hull armour. And if you really have issues, as said, IFHE. Also allows to hit BB superstructure for damage. Not to mention, HE only can pen for 1/3, citadel for full or shatter for no damage. There is no "HE shell fails to pen and does small damage". This isn't WoT.

The HE maximum per shell is 1,300, which is lower than most of the other T2 DDs, which typically sit around 1,500. Unless the shell shatters, they all will do pen damage for 1/3 for all DDs. 76 mm HE will pen the one-digit armour values of all T2 DDs and some cruisers and with IFHE pens any 13 mm armour plating. So, penetration from shell caliber is a non-issue too. RoF of a Tachibana is 12 shots per minute per gun, with 4 guns effective in a broadside, with the only DDs that beat the reload only having 3 guns and the rest having longer reload. If we count effective guns, RoF and HE shell damage, we get the following DPM values: Sampson: 51,420 Umikaze: 30,600 V-25/Longjiang: 54,000 Storozhevoi: 54,000 Tachibana: 62,400 The shell ballistics are also very manageable. So, care to explain where you see the loss of effective damage to make this only "on paper"?

It's workable, in my experience. The guns are tiny, but who cares? Even without BFT you out-dpm all other DDs at T2. The only restrictions are 8 km range (non-issue vs DDs) and the bad penetration value. But if you put an Akizuki captain on it, you have enough penetration to never be hopeless. Umikaze is easier for torp runs and has more hp, but can't compete as a gunboat/hybrid. Lastly, Umikaze requires effort to get a captain. Tachibana can just work with whatever high-tier IJN DD captain you have (preferably Akizuki).

I guess Bayern can enjoy being the last German to not have to fear the oneshot.

I'm surprised Bayern isn't on the list? Unreliable target or just not enough data? Also, are French BBs unreliable targets too?

I don't mind nation restriction for immersion, as long as it is kept reasonable. The greatest issue I had with Hermes is that there were missions attached to it and I had to grind to Algerie to get there (I hate La Gal). If it's your typical op with only daily missions, it should be fine. Also, you know what's the really awesome part about Hermes' limitations? Noone can bring their T7 DDs. You know how fun it is in Operations like Killer Whale or Aegis when someone brings their Hatsuharu or Fubuki?

Depends not only on ship, but also on build you aim for. Typically, it'd be a second 4th pt skill, if one is included in the build, because it's easier to leave points unspent between 10 and 14 points than between, say, 12 and 16 points or 15 and 19 points. Also, some ships really need their second fourth pointer to make the build work (Akizuki guns and secondary specs for example), in which case it's a no brainer. So, personally, for example: Bismarck: Secondary spec, so after AFT, Manual Secondaries as 5th skill. AFT is worth more, so it went first. Here it is absolutely necessary to get to 14 pts to make secondaries worth a damn beyond just intimidation. Amagi: Fire Prevention, after 4th was CE. Just because it is so expensive. Kongo: AR, after 4th was FP. Yes, no CE. This ship is seen from across the map and even with CE, it still is too visible for low tier maps to be that important to me. I'll get it at 16 pts, but FP and AR seemed more important. At 19 pt, this build would be same as Amagi though, as a typical tank build. Harekaze: Needs IFHE bad, so that went as 4th, 5th is CE for obvious reasons. Could be done the other way round, but I decided 6km detection range is still good enough. Kagero: SE. First three pointer was TAE. The only 4 pointer worth taking on that ship is RPF and apart from not being entirely sold on the skill for randoms, SE and AR would take priority.