dasCKD

American ships tend to place their heaviest AA in their Bofors or medium ranged AA equivalents. Between AA range and damage, the rule of thumb is to go for range with any American ship. The exceptions to this rule are of course the Atlanta and Cleveland. It would be a waste to spec a captain for a single premium ship anyways, unless said ship is the Belfast. Go for range on this one, your ship will benefit more from it.

I recommend the following nerf to the Conqueror: remove all carrier fighters from the 4 high tiered aircraft carriers and catapult fighters from regular ships.

French battleship speedboost: regular speed boost was considered too OP by WG to add to battleships, instead they have shell speed boost. Whilst the consumable is active, French battleship shells have double their normal velocity.

Haven't reinstalled Aslain yet. Played a few CV games early in the morning. No issues so far.

It's really only useful on the Perth, or on the Benson in competitive.

You can just double tap the key bound to the ship or aircraft group to pan to the location of that group or ship from the global map.

Well that's hardly fair. EU's PR and event team are characterized by their apathy and incompetence traditionally. WG NA on the other hand is characterized by their pathological aversion to moderate behavior with a flair for escalation and all the whilst ignoring international law.

Absolutely not. That would be sensible, allowing the input of the most knowledgeable people on the subject to reach an impasse that would ultimately benefit everyone regardless of their skill level. No, instead they should listen to me. First order of business: add anti-ship missiles and shaped charge warheads to all carriers. Exchange the USN Enterprise for the Galaxy class Enterprise, and allow the Hakuryu to drop F3 torpedoes. I can say whatever I want, it's not like they'd listen to me even if my advice was serious.

Silly nub. Y WG give me 20+ km if to not snipe?

Objective advantages should be burned from the game in my opinion. Even captains like Yamamoto that can be acquired through heavy grinding should not have objective advantages over regular captains in my opinion. Even the advantages provided by some captain skills makes me bristle. If WG wants special captains, then the captains should have advantages that are immaterial to the gameplay. Advantages like "free consumable resupply" or "-50% off ship servicing fee" or even "+100% XP and credit bonus". Great advantages to be sure, but not advantages that exists only so good and established players can lord over less experienced players. Jack Dunkirk, Steven Segal, and even Yamamoto represents a very bad route for the game, almost equivalent to things like the Belfast or the Saipan, ships whose continued existence is quite frankly a disgrace to the game.

I think this is nice to share anyways. Whilst it has become evident that the narcissistic and arrogant attitude of the developers would not change anytime soon, it is at least nice to see that there is at least some good people working in customer support who at least seem somewhat sympathetic to the general sentiments of the player base.

Perfectly fine, quite frankly. Overpowered premiums are awful for the game, especially at the lower tiers where newer players haven't yet learned to play around them. Admittedly, I can't say much about that ship because my experience with lower tiered battleships is quite limited, but WG will likely buff her if she proves to be inadequate regardless.

Instead of pure ship numbers, it might be better if it was: own 30+ ships of tier 8 and beyond or something. Even if the requirement was to own 150 ships, it would be relatively simple to just rebuy every single tier 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 ships for essentially no cost to the player. Maybe a 'ship's connoisseur' club where you have to have at least one game in a certain different variety of ships to qualify, as this would mean that it won't necessitate having to crowd up the port for it.

Play to your ship's strength, exploit islands when you can to minimize the amount of ships that have a line of fire on you, do damage to destroyers whenever you can, and protect your own destroyers from enemy air strikes. Try to keep a destroyer between yourself and the location you suspect the enemy destroyer is in at all times. There's not much I can tell you without knowing which ship lines you're interested in going up.

Considering that there can only be 1 battleship, massed DMs is probably one of the most effective cheese compositions that could be used for Clan Wars. A team of nothing but Des Moines and maybe two Gearings would be brutally effective at just DPMing down the enemy team with the use of proper team positioning. A Zao heavy team would be very useful for a team that employs heavy flanking maneuvers, seeing as how there is only one battleship. The concealment, speed, and AP alpha and performance could be used to rip apart enemy cruisers at medium ranges and they can fade back into the background. I would consider Zao heavy teams to be extremely powerful, if not optimized for facing off against the best. Seconded on the Henrietta though, she survives on the Randoms meta and little else.

Let's be honest here: a clan that would fail to field even a single carrier captain would get ripped to pieces by one that can anyways. My clan for example is a non competitive clan (despite what the advertisements say) yet we can still field 3 carrier players from our main clan alone. A clan without even one would not stand a snowball's chance in hell if they can't attract as much as a single carrier player.

Did you like the clickbait title? I did. Anyways, let's get onto the topic. I want this thread to be easily accessible, so if there's good points in the thread I'll make sure to combine it in the original post so that new viewers could quickly see how and where the conversation went. This is a forum post after all, I should be able to keep up with everyone's thoughts ;) <<<<((<(>_<)>))>>>>> Dive bombers and torpedo bombers Asking all CV captains, would you be willing to trade 2 or 3 of your dive bombers for 1 extra torpedo bomber? Is there anyone who ISN'T willing to make that trade? The results of a poll on that question would undoubtedly be obvious to anyone who plays CVs. Right now, there is a massive imbalance between the field effectiveness of the two squad types are obvious. In most circumstances, only 1 or 2 squads of dive bombers are necessary to perform their job of lighting the enemy on fire. Due to this, I would like to suggest improvements to the mechanics associated with dive bombers in order to give them more utility when compared with the torpedo bombers. USN - give the USN CVs dive bombers some AP bombs. I thought of suggesting this for the IJN but 1) the IJN has bombs with less damage potential both historically and in game and 2) having AP bombs with the precision of IJN bombers will be rather overpowered. This would mean that 1) the USN strike loadouts in the Bogue and the Indy won't be entirely useless and 2) it would give USN carriers another vector of dealing high amounts of damage as deck armor tends to be quite poorly armored and therefore they could potentially even score citadels with plunging fire if they are really lucky. They might not be able to penetrate the citadels of most battleships, but they could retain utility against enemy CVs/CAs and lower tier BBs (relative to the carrier). IJN - improve the precision of the IJN dive bombers, make their circle of no return smaller, and increase the chance of them setting fires and causing module damage. You can scale back the damage output if you want for compensation, 4600 damage per bomb hit is virtually destroyer tier anyways. These changes are suggested both to be used to expand on the points below as well as to give the IJN bombers a different role in engagements. With the increased precision the bombers could target specific modules for destruction/incapacitation and therefore be used to soften up enemy ships for your allies by going after gun turrets or stop them from moving my going after the engine or steering on top of setting the ships on fire. Both nations + future nations - An increase in speed, HP, and DFC resistance. Dive bombers right now quite frankly suck at their job. They're nothing more than an extra 2000-7000 extra damage and fire damage on top of the tens of thousands that dive bombers provide. The changes I will suggest will no doubt be controversial, but we CV players have always liked that don't we ;) I suggest significantly increasing the speed and HP of all dive bombers on all tiers relative to their tiers. They don't need to be as fast as fighters, but bombers that are significantly faster than torpedo bombers would add extra depth to the game. It would mean that whilst a less skilled player would be using a dive bomber like they always have, a more skilled player that can multitask could use the dive bombers far more frequently as a separate strike squad to lethal efficiency. Their extra speed will also provide them with relative resistance to fighters and AA from the enemy team so whilst they can't compete in terms of damage with torpedo bombers they can still strike deep into the enemy fleet at strategically significant targets and therefore may hold a far more significant strategic worth in a future patch instead of being the tag-along to a CV game. This will make USN dive bombers like a single battleship salvo whilst it will make IJN dive bombers more similar to cruiser guns, which will also allow us to preserve the 'national flavor' that War Gaming seems so fond of. The last change will also mean that there are situations where dive bombers are obviously better for dealing with the situations that a torpedo bomber will suffer from. I will expand on the suggested national differences below. IJN vs USN CVs Right now, the tech trees are something of a mess. The IJN tree is advertised as the strike tree whilst the USN tree is advertised as the fighter tree but as many CV captains would attest this is utter tosh. The IJN tree has torpedoes that cause less damage than any US torpedo from t6 upwards to go with their bomb damage that is a tiny fraction of the USN damage potential and from t6 or t7 a USN fighter squad can be held up by the IJN squads as the strike aircraft runs riot around the allied fleet and so the AS loads become mostly an easy way to lose the damage game but is nevertheless something that USN carriers (up until about t8) have to put up with because almost all cruisers are loading deck fighters and they need a way to guarantee a hit. This means that t4-t5, MM decides if an IJN or a strike deck USN carrier will have fun or will have every plane they send up ripped to shreds by enemy aircraft. It's not even that fun to hunt aircraft, I'm sure most carrier players would rather be menacing the entire enemy team instead of just aggravating 1 enemy team member. tl;dr: IJN strike units can't compete with USN in terms of damage. USN is 'balanced' with this by having terrible loadouts. I have many changes that I would like to suggest in altering the current paradigm that I am certain will have an overall positive effect on the game. 1. Speed up IJN torpedoes and speed up the spread convergence. Not long ago, IJN bombers were inferior to USN bombers in every way. They had a massive spread that needed luck to even score 2 hits on even a slow battleship and they had the aforementioned inferior damage output. I welcomed the new converging spread, but the torpedoes were now just as slow as their USN counterparts and converged too slowly to be used even if you angled the drop nearly perfectly. If the torpedoes had a base faster speed(the torpedoes used to have a speed of 42 knots if I recall correctly), with the new captain skill a really skilled carrier captain could actually utilize the IJN bombers in such a way that it could be dropped from 500+ meters away and actually hit someone who isn't braindead/AFK. 2. Give the USN AP bombs and the IJN more effective fire bombs as well as torpedoes that have a higher chance of causing sinking. I suggest this due to the playstyle that is most evident on high tier ships namely the Midway and the Hakuryu. Most Midway players group their torpedo bombers in a group and strike at once to cause maximum damage whilst the Hakuryu players use the faster plane speed and smaller squads to make their enemies die of a thousand cuts. With this system, the two nations can distinguish their playstyle. A USN carrier can cause as much/more damage with their new setting whilst the IJN carrier will be able to guarantee leaking with fewer torpedo hits and fire with bombs and therefore be able to more effectively use their multiple squadrons to inflict damage over time on enemy ships that, if used correctly, could match or even exceed that of the Midway even if the damage isn't necessarily apparent when the strike is over. This would also mean that there is a national 'flavor' to both carrier lines now. 3. Widen the USN torp spread and scale up the damage as the tiers increase. I will expand more on this in the level increase subsection but for now let's deal with US torpedoes. Right now, USN CVs can start guaranteeing that every torpedo will land on target starting at tier 7 battleships and they only get better from there as opposed to the supposed strike focused carriers of the IJN. Due to this, making a full salvo strike more difficult as well as more rewarding might be optimum for US CV drivers who have unchanged potential damage output starting with t5. If we introduce the AP bombs for extra damage, I suggest compensating for the massively increased strike potential of USN carriers by raising the skill slope for USN CV players in order to allow more skilled players to excel and distinguish themselves. Tiers and levels Right now, the Langley starts out with 5900 dmg per torpedo that quickly jumps up to 8500. The Indy further increases the torpedo damage to 9867 and it stays there for the rest of the game, significantly higher than the IJN torpedo damage. Whilst this would be unhistorical, I think that this would be fine if the soft stats for IJN torpedoes were improved i.e. speed, chance of flooding, arming time(mostly for killing destroyers). I also think that the massive damage torpedoes should be reserved for higher tier USN carriers whilst the mid tier USN carriers should be buffed in other ways i.e. giving them more squads. Many will likely say that is insane, but I think that we can make this work if we make USN torpedoes do less net damage in the lower tiers. This, combined with the fact that they have slower torpedoes and are targetting smaller ships with lower speed and smaller turning circles, could be made to work. Here is a table of possible values: 35 knots Torpedoes: Damage/squads(planes)/potential Chance of flooding Speed Damage/squads(planes)/potential Chance of flooding Speed Tier IV 5900 / 1(6) / 35400 40% 35 knots 8000 / 2(8) / 64000 40% 35 knots Tier IV 6300 / 1(6) / 37800 40% 35 knots 8400 / 2(8) / 67200 43% 35 knots Tier V 6800 / 1(6) / 40800 40% 35 knots 8567 / 2(8) / 68536 45% 37 knots Tier VII 6800 / 2(12) / 81600 40% 35 knots 8567 / 2(8) / 68536 45% Tier VIII 7500 / 2(12) / 90000 40% 35 knots 8567 / 2(8) / 68536 65% 42 knots Tier IX 9867 / 2(12) / 118404 40% 35 knots 8567 / 3(12) / 102804 70% 45 knots Tier X 10500 / 2(12) / 126000 40% 35 knots 8567 / 3(12) / 102804 75% 53 knots p.s. I have no idea what the real values on flooding are. These are example values. Yellow is USN, orange is IJN.,green is for the superior stats As aforementioned, the USN carriers could receive a debuff in having more space between their torpedoes (a wider torpedo fan) and a torpedo damage debuff in lower tiers but are compensated by having more torpedo bombers to work with which will reward the better players. The IJN can make up for the difference by their better soft stats like chance of flooding or torpedo speed. Dive bombers: Damage/squads(planes)/potential Chance of fire Chance of module damage Damage/squads(planes)/potential Chance of fire Chance of module damage Tier IV - - - - - - Tier V 5500 / 1(6) / 33000 0 % 12 % 2300 / 1(4) / 9200 40% 12 % Tier VI 7500 / 1(6) / 45000 0 % 12 % 4500 / 2(8) / 36000 40% 16 % Tier VII 7500 / 2(12) / 90000 0 % 12 % 4500 / 2(8) / 36000 50% 20 % Tier VIII 7500 / 2(12) / 90000 0 % 12 % 4500 / 2(8) / 36000 60% 24 % Tier IX 8500 / 2(12) / 102000 0 % 12 % 4500 / 2(8) / 36000 70% 30 % Tier X 8500 / 2(12) / 102000 0 % 12 % 4500 / 3(12) / 54000 80% 40 % Keep in mind that these values are if every single shell fired penetrates the citadel. In most attacks, RNG will likely not give much more than 2 or 3 citadels maximum. Nevertheless, the damage from those hits aren't insignificant for even a high tier battleship or carrier. IJN bombs won't penetrate anything, but has a large chance of fire damage and module incapacitation. I'm not sure where I've heard this, but apparently as you go up the tiers, ships gain natural resistance against fire and flooding. These new values will likely allow carriers to maintain their damage over time tactics even in a high tier environment. Ships in the higher tiers have far higher health to splash around so the steadily rising damage will allow carriers to effectively deal with tougher threats as they advance up the tiers as well as continue to cause them trouble. I.E. A Hiryuu and a Ryujou in this cause cause identical potential damage. Both ships might be able to attack a New York for an average of 8000 damage but if a Ryujou attacks a New Mexico a torpedo might average 5000 damage whilst a Hiryuu, whilst having identical stats, would be able to do 8000 damage. This mechanic would help carriers deal with the often extremely tough ship torpedo bulges as well as encouraging carriers to go after the sometimes harder targets as the same damage against a higher tier ship would usually give them more rewards as well as helping their team against ships they may have problems with. That's what I have for now. Thank you for reading as far as you have. I might have to come back here later to condense this down or add onto the list. Best regards and happy sailing!

Battleships are big, they have a lot of health, but they have very inaccurate guns (generally) that turns slowly. This combination makes it so that secondaries, for dealing with targets that would be a waste of shells or are too agile for the shells to deal with, are a good thing to spec for in them. Cruisers have highly accurate and fast firing guns. A cruiser would have to have an utterly nightmarish secondary armament to make secondaries useful enough to detract points from their main armaments to buff.

Well, renting tier X isn't bad in concept. I, for a start, would very much like to take tier Xs I don't have for a spin for a few games each season to see whether or not I want them. Even so, I think we all know that the reason behind the rental system is to squeeze more money from the 1000 game crowd and to tortuously prolong the illusion that this game isn't in a mode of total collapse thanks to how WG handles interclass balance.

1 Gearing, 1 Minotaur, 2 Hindenburg, 1 Conqueror/Yamato, and 2 Moskvas would be my preliminary pick.

Not necessarily. You would if the bow has full health, but a saturated bow will take less damage. This is why you could see the first HE salvo of a cruiser do 10k+ damage to a battleship as it hits the superstructure, and then only around 4-5k for the subsequent salvos. The first salvo though, you can expect to do 1/3 damage to an undamaged battleship. If you are doing some, but not the expected, damage, then you are shooting at a saturated section. You would switch to an unsaturated segment for DPM focused ships like cruisers, but British battleships get most of their mileage out of fires as far as I know. Battleship AP is pretty good, so any range with AP can have good effect if you're confident in you aim. Against battleships though, you'll want AP in general for any engagement below 12 km unless they're perfectly bow on. At ranges above 6 km with battleships with somewhat weaker AP (which the Lion is not one of) you should aim slightly higher to miss the main belt armor and hit the softer lower superstructure armor or higher side plating to maximize damage. Against ships like the Yamato, North Carolina, Iowa, or Montana, aim for the waterline at any time when you're below 8 km or above 14. Against the Germans or the British, aim for the center of mass as citadel hits are rare and you will want to maximize the amount of shells going into the enemy ships over trying to hit the citadels with the few shells that do. It's more a matter of target than range.

I don't play much British battleships, but I can answer a fair few of your questions. First of all, you experimented with bots which I presume you had to engage them quite closely. This means that you are firing your shells at a very flat angle, which means that you are likely hitting the torpedo bulges that, despite being possible to penetrate, isn't actually possible to inflict damage to. Either that, or you are penetrating secondary or main gun batteries to the same effect. British battleship accuracy isn't cruiser level (thankfully) and so it's safer to just aim a bit higher for the ship's central deck, so you'll either hit the ship's bow or superstructure when the shots deviate. If you shells hit the main battery you'll do no damage which is the second possibility for why you're doing damage, but in general you aren't accurate enough in a battleship to aim for modules, even at 10 km. As for HE, HE does not overmatch. Overmatch is a mechanic exclusive to AP shells. HE shells have a fixed penetration value that ignores armor. With the Lion's HE, you will have around 70 mm of HE penetration whether you're firing at a flat broadside or skimming a Kurfurst's bow angled at 1 degree. I can't really comment on the 419 mm guns otherwise. Best regards.

The only thing I have found that is remotely effective against high tiered British battleships is American high tiered fleet carriers, some of the rarest ships in the game. I have no idea how anyone thought these ships were a good idea, and I look forwards to whatever stupid non-nerfs WG will devise for them.

I would have removed preventative maintenance and went for superintendent as my first choice and BFT as my second.

If the Alabama was similar to the South Carolina at tier 8, literally no one would play her.