HaachamaShipping

Iron Duke AP is situational. Against cruisers, it's very solid. Against BBs, T5s you can straight up overmatch, at short to mid range the pen is sufficient to do work, at long range, HE is better. QE is literally the crappiest non-prem British BB to fire HE in and the best non-prem to fire AP, due to 381 mm guns. You don't need broadside, unless it's a T8, just shoot parts that aren't incredibly well armoured.

Musashi is not the biggest threat. The 406s matter little when you don't have 32 mm plating. An Izumo/Baijie or Georgia has similar pen, but better accuracy.

Don't underestimate WG and their ability to hand Z-35 6 km torps.

Nothing announced, so rumours are baseless. Thunderer if your concern is performance, Georgia if your main concern is economy. Georgia has an easier time getting out, Thunderer has less reason to be there in the first place. Thunderer more often is the source of "balanced" HE shells than the victim, honestly.

Indeed. Smolensk basically is 4 Thunderer HE cits away from death.

Stalingrad is more Moskva than Kronshtadt though.

In fairness, not everyone has an Enterprise though, so you may be faced with the option to either play a different CV or play a different ship out of concern playing not-Enterprise might harm your team that could've gotten an Enterprise. Frankly though, I'd still rather play Shokek or Lex over trusting random team mates.

You highlighted a section that stated the ship was not nerfed but moved into a more competitive direction. Then you state it got nerfed thrice, ignoring that the statement you quote referred to the buff to main battery that came with nerfing down the secondaries. So, if someone's not following, it's you when responding with "ehh, it got so many nerfs in short succession" that makes no sense as a response.

And that matters how now?

Compare the accuracy of Khaba, Chapa, Petro, Stalingrad and Kremlin and you'll see, yes, even on Russians smaller gun hits more consistently. Bigger gun punches harder.

And the range nerf was reversed when they nerfed the secondaries...

The smaller the gun, the more reliable it is. The bigger the gun, the more punishing it is. DD will hit very accurately, but if a DD gun hits you at 12 km, it's not going to matter too much, only when shots start adding up, you ought to worry. BB hits at 12 km devastate ships and at higher tiers may very well sink or cripple ships outright reliably. Thus, what needs to be understood with BBs is, they do not play like smaller ships, they are inherently designed to be less reliable, but not unreliable to the point of being unworkable, instead they need planning ahead and contingency plans. Never make plans that rely on your guns to do their job in one salvo. Because they might do that or they might not. On the other side, no other ship type is as survivable as BBs.

Usually, that'd depend on the circumstances though. If it was something like night battle in Ironbottom Sound, sure, you'd use whatever, given engagement ranges and direction are chaos and killing a bunch of smaller ships close by is important. In a battleship on battleship battle Jutland-style (the kind that most navies envisioned when building the ships), you would not. Turret rangefinders are inferior to the main one. The pagoda mast was raised that high for a reason and turrets don't reach that. And focusing ships to knock them out of action first was very much a thing, because while one can say you can pressure multiple targets, in a battleship vs battleship battle, battleships rely more on enemy just missing instead of the incredible dodging skills of an actual battleship. So even if shot at, battleships can't wouldn't just break formation, unless they take heavy enough damage to fall out of line.

Positioning and aim. Both come with experience. If your BB only does 21-25 knots, yes, you basically have to adapt very much to what the team is doing and have to follow them around. Then it is more important to focus on doing the best damage you can do to avoid your flank from grinding to a complete halt. As to eating torps or getting rushed, keep an eye on where the hell enemy DDs are, where they could be and where friendlies are. Is there any DD that has not been spotted in a while and any gap where it could approach you from (you played DDs, try to consider where they could realistically go)? Well, be careful around that area and be prepared to potentially turn and kite. Worth noting, even a 21 knot BB that isn't silly is hard to torp while chasing, because if something like New York decides to just not push into you, most DDs don't have the torp range at those tiers and a BB that moves away has an easy time dodging most torps. Moving closer gets you spotted and you may eat heavy damage from its guns. A DD chasing a BB is pretty futile, because the DD wastes their time, the BB, even if the DD is unspotted can just wreck other ships elsewhere on the battlefield while moving away. Main point of BBs is two things: Damage. Killing ships wins games. Area control. As long as you are in an area and don't make it easy to get removed, enemies have to keep you in mind, because even a ship with as unreliable main battery as Gneisenau can potentially oneshot a cruiser if RNG aligns and no smart cruiser player will want to chance it.

Pretty sure that Fuso's pagoda mast wasn't that large because it needed seperate rangefinding and fire control for 6 turrets, but just because the centralised system for all of them was this large. While spreading out guns over turrets to minimise losses in case of a turret getting knocked out was a valid concern, usually a battleship did try to focus on one target at a time, at least once people used centralised range finders, not ranging each gun or turret individually (which they still could, but was reserved in case it was necessary due to battle damage to the rangefinder). Twin turrets were originally favoured, because they spread out the amount of guns and early on turrets often were twin turrets, so navies had experience with those. Quad turrets allow for more guns on a compact hull, which is what was used on ships like Richelieu to reduce length of citadel by keeping the magazines close together. Note that the all-forward scheme serves the same purpose and is the same as to why Nelson had an all-forward scheme, as IRL, bow-tanking wasn't exactly a thing. Triple turrets were a compromise in compactness and turrets being spread out, as well as on cruisers it was kind of prohibitive to mount a broad turret with 4 guns on a slim enough hull (Smolensk achieves that by using DD guns with two rows of two guns stacked above each other). Worth noting that it was often down to circumstances though, like if you take designs like IJN CAs, which have their peculiar 5x2 layout, this is a combination of having an existing twin turret design and not wanting to ever reduce number of guns, thus 3x3 was unacceptable and 4x3 was way beyond the weight limitations. 5x2 was what they opted for, as the existing cruisers somehow still managed to float with that setup and even if it meant turrets had only minimal armour at times, it stuck around. Was it optimal? Likely not. But it was opted for due to the requirements they set out.

If someone asks me for novice lines, I usually would say German cruisers. Not insanely powerful, they are somewhat consistent, they work decently well, they are core cruiser gameplay, have some incentives to use both ammo types and Hindenburg is a decent enough T10. These days I'd also take Hindenburg over Zao, because of the influx of heavy plating and the increased HE pen at mid tiers makes it easier for new players to get through Königsberg and Nürnberg with lower point captains. Later lines might get captains boosted with elite commander exp.

Enterprise. No Enterprise in port? Shokaku. No Shokaku either? Massachusetts. No Massachusetts? I guess NC will always be an option. But at that point you can play pretty much anything.

A normal non-autoloading gun takes up similar levels of space, given the ammunition too is stored underneath the turret and has to be transported up. The modern autoloading guns are pretty compact actually and save some space by not accommodating personel. In general, storing a lot of ammo in the turret is not practical and the need for bursts could be satisfied by an autoloader, no revolver. Next, technical capabilities to make such a thing work came at best to be in the 1940s. By then, it was mostly used on guns up to 203 mm, given BBs that don't need to just fling around ammo and where the mechanism would need to be massive, its impractical. Also keep in mind that ranging by shots was still a thing and only slowly got replaced by radar and that early autoloading designs weren't known for great reliability and you'd not want the guns to just fail mid fight. Lastly, noone then constructed battleships anymore that would need any such advancements. In general, the high reload rate on modern naval guns has two major uses, which is unnecessary for BBs: Kill enemy ships fast in burst to minimise the possibility of return fire. BBs would not rely on that anyway, as they have armour. dual purpose guns also need to do AA and anti-missile, where BB guns are naturally not useful.

Not surprised at all. Given their high-profile nature, there's quite some pressure to "get them right". Like, people may be still ok if Nagato is a loli or such, but messing up Yamato would royally piss off people and thus unless one has to, better to just delay the matter. All the while the pool of artists grows, as does the feedback to other designs, showing what is well-received and what is not.

30 knots. Average.

First off, keep in mind, Yoshino came out after Kronshtadt, Stalingrad and Alaska. Three supercruisers that had either insane penetration allowing citadelling BBs at considerable range, improved AP ricochet angles, allowing wrecking cruisers even when somewhat angled, or both. In contrast to these, a Yoshino obviously has poor AP performance. Especially when you get HE that absolutely can wreck enemies. Now, your claim was that Ägirdoes not rely on HE and is more AP focused, which is straight up nonsense. Both have the same standard ricochet angles. Both have similar penetration, with Ägir being better at close range (better Krupp value indeed), Yoshino at long range (better shell weight and energy retention). In effect, both have enough to screw over cruisers at any range, while neither is able to pen BB belt at anything but close range. Yoshino has better accuracy, making it less derpy at any range. Ägir has better alpha by a couple thousand or so (on a whole salvo), while the Yoshino beats it in dpm. So, if you just want to spam out AP, because HE is not your thing, then Yoshino basically does the same job better, Azuma does it better as long as you don't want to torp rush things. If you realistically want to get the best out of Ägir and Yoshino though, you will fire also a good bit of HE, where Ägir is just poor. If you look at the cit, it has very small sections that are weird breaks, which can be seen as weak points. But not just are they small and at range an absolute non-issue (unlike something like massive Yamato cheeks), but also they are rearward. In a torp push, they do not matter. Obviously, given the size of the citadel, Azuma and Yoshino eat cits for breakfast if one ever neglects angling. But you aren't surviving for long in Ägir either when doing that. Also, as stated before, Ägir has the same AP issues.

The citadel of the Yoshino is pretty normal actually, hardly the weird octagon of the Yamato. The difference in taking cit hits thus is minimal. Similarly, if you fail to be at autobounce angle you are pretty toast in either and shouldn't have tried to begin with. If there is a real difference for a brawl with brain, then it's that the Ägir is slightly better due to taking less damage against certain ships (namely anything with less than 90 mm of HE/SAP pen, where the Ägir is fully immune on the side, while Yoshino only has its spaced armour on half of it. Anything with more pen, like Impero/Littorio or Thunderer will just laugh at it though) and has slightly better torp angles. As to why we are comparing it, it's basically down to the claim Ägir is in any way more novel than Yoshino or Azuma. It frankly is not. Ägir can brawl lategame when the enemy lines have thinned out. So can a Yoshino. An Azuma will not, because it has no torps. Ägir has the crappiest AP performance of any supercruiser though and if you think that the Azuma is more HE reliant than the Ägir, then that's just a misconception. Azuma and Yoshino have similar penetration, with better accuracy, neither of them have improved bounce angles and the only difference is, Azuma and Yoshino have good HE to use when AP doesn't work, Ägir has pretty poor HE it has to fall back on. So, frankly, while Azuma is unattractive due to Yoshino existing, so is Ägir really, except Ägir is German, so if you are a KM fan, you might want it for the flag. Otherwise, Yoshino offers most of the same performance in a brawl one tier higher while offering a far better value outside a brawl in every other way. Be it HE or AP, as well as the 20 km torps.

Ägir has literally worse AP dpm in every aspect other than alpha. Ägir can be citpenned through the bow as well, while angled Yoshino will bounce shells off its side. For close-quarters engagements, both have torps. Yoshino being worse than Ägir in that regard is a lie.

I mean, if you think Yoshino has nothing different from tech tree cruisers, that's your opinion, but 12 inch gun is 12 inch gun.

With that logic, you could as well say that the Ägir and Siegfried are not worth a damn, because they aren't the best their respective currencies can buy and stuff like Salem is not worth it either. Regardless of whether ships are balanced. Disregarding that people exist who might already have the better ships or who don't want to play something OP. Azuma and Yoshino are pretty balanced ships. Given what is available for free exp and coal, Azuma can make a case for fourth purchase after Alaska, Nelson and Smaland, Yoshino as third purchase after Thunderer and Georgia, considering power level. Which isn't really that bad.