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The issue with the Khabarovsk is that they're nerfing her wrong. The Khabarovsk I played on the test server still performed admirably, but the rudder nerf was not what she needed. I think they should restore the rudder to the old speed and instead nerf the turret traverse and the side plating. The changes to the turret traverse will affect her close ranged knife fighting ability to the benefit of ships like the Gearing. As for the armor plating, having a destroyer be immune to the shells of other destroyers is one thing. Having a destroyer immune to the largest standard shell size of the cruisers is just ridiculous.

I did. You'd know if you just read the article instead of posting this inane stock response. They're irritating and they get in the way of my game. I get bogged down in a cap whittling down the mass of battleships instead of rushing into close ranged engagement with cruisers or sneaking around and hunting destroyers. What problem exists within a 6 destroyer game that doesn't exist in a 6 battleship game exactly? Then you'll both be focused down by the combined firepower of the enemy battleship and cruisers, resulting in the allied team losing not one but two ships. The battleship overpopulation doesn't just hurt cruisers. It slows down games because it take so incredibly long to burn through a battleship's health pool before it's even remotely possible for anyone but a destroyer to safely advance.

The problem is that no one would want to play carriers in the current games. I am a high average carrier player with a 60~ish winrate solo and I almost never encounter players of my level. Either I get extremely unlucky and run across the carrier gods of the game, or I fight players who I could literally just ignore the entire battle and whom would somehow manage to have zero appreciable effect on the direction of the game. Unfortunately, I don't know how to address the issue. I have talked at length about changes that could be made to carriers to address the thousands of tiny annoyances that makes playing carriers so irritating, but I suspect that the lack of carrier players is more fundamental than that. War Gaming are the type that would just buff carriers to try to improve them which, in my opinion, would in fact paradoxically result in more people leaving the class. I do well in carriers because I am relatively confident that the AA batteries of friendly ships would do something to hold the enemy carrier back whilst I went to addressing more important things. Carrier play is, even now, extremely stressful and taxing. If carriers were buffed to the point that they could ignore all but literally the best AA of the best AA cruisers all specced towards air defense, then I would have to spend more time not just dealing with immediate tactical concerns but also babysitting the entire team including those players who wander off to the map border to do nothing useful whatsoever. That level of stress and the focus that it demands would at least drive me personally from the class. They're really not. Battleships are the biggest danger to battleships right now, followed closely by HE spamming cruisers. The problem however is that a battleship isn't anywhere near as dangerous to another battleship as a battleship is to a cruiser or a cruiser is to another cruiser. I would like to see this changed. From what exactly? Battleship can protect themselves from just about anything these days. The collapse of the RPS model has led to any argument coming from the concept of class roles to be entirely meaningless. If anything, it's a cruiser's job to protect the destroyers. This expectation is inane. Cruiser lethality starts at around 12-8 kilometers, at which range cruisers can fight each other extremely aggressively to great effect (though also to great risk). Battleship lethality starts at anywhere from 16 km and lower depending on the battleship. This means that to effectively fight other cruisers, the cruiser would have to put themselves well within a battleship's kill zone for minutes on end to advance to effective range, fight and kill the enemy cruiser, then retreat. All well within the kill zone of most battleships. The battleship therefore forces cruisers to be static and stay out of the battleship kill zone, sending them to the back. At those ranges, cruisers can't effectively engage other cruisers because they're too agile at that range and so they focus their attention on the targets that they can hit consistently for steady damage: the battleships. This mess is caused by the way the game mechanic and battleship mechanic in particular works. Did you even read a single word of my article?

Oh yay, lots of replies. And the topic is popular I'll have to try to replicate this more often. Anyways, let's get to replying. Yes, the font is rather small. I only noticed after I uploaded the image, the text is much more legible in Clip Studios than it is when rendered. I'll just have to keep it in mind for future posts. Destroyers are only so prevalent because carriers are basically gone and battleships have chased cruisers to near-extinction. Destroyers stop me from pushing, but only indirectly. I build basically all of my ships for concealment, and I want to sneak around the battlefield to show up where the enemy really doesn't want me. The destroyers keep spotting me, and the battleships just turn their guns on me, the furthest target forwards, and shoots at me whether I'm in a cruiser or a battleship. If there were only destroyers on a flank, then I can push with something close to impunity, considering how slowly they fire their torpedoes. You keep saying that, but until you present a proper study to substantiate that claim it's nothing but speculation. I joined this games because it had ships, and I liked ships. That was all there was to it.

Is the font for the comic too small by the way? I might need to edit it if it is.

I think the primary issue is that battleship accuracy is too bad. Battleships have a very high potential at being able to hurt other battleships, but their poor dispersion means that a battleship can usually avoid dying from broadsiding another battleship. A cruiser will die from just two or three hits if they're unlucky anyways, a battleship won't. I think buffing battleship accuracy might paradoxically be what is needed to cull battleship numbers.

The Belfast problem would be significantly addressed if radar was a standard consumable on tier 7 silver cruisers, at least on the British, American, and Russian lines. Not sure if that would be healthy for the destroyer balance at that tier though.

I'm playing the battleship because I want the curry sausage.

My Zao laughs at tripple Yamato divisions. And this is where I inherently disagree. I disagree with the concept of an AA ship, there to keep a carrier in check. I will write a proper article on this eventually, with colorful images and subsections and everything. For now though, I'll explain it in as much detail as I can. As AA works in the game right now, a certain ship is basically immune to a carrier. Player skill and situation as well as map awareness plays a small factor (i.e. I have nuked a Des Moines in a Shokaku by way of a longdrop before) but in general a a ship is either entirely immune to a carrier or the carrier can bomb a ship with impunity. Ships that are somewhere in the middle ground is actually quite rare. This is where I disagree with War Gaming's decisions. The existence of AA ships terrible for the game. I think the idea of an AA ship comes from strategy games. The idea that for a tactic to be successful, you should just spawn counters. This is just not an option in a game that randomly distributes members and sets up teams by just using whatever is available. The contributing factors to this issue is twofold, ship balance and competitive in game balance. If a ship has extremely strong AA, they have to pay for it in another area. In game balance demands it. This is why a carrier hard counter, everywhere but at tier 8, will always be inherently useless. There are two options when conceiving of a unit that can entirely shut down another unit or a specialized unit that is meant to entirely counter another. Either every single unit in the game must also be able to somewhat counter the thing the specialized unit can counter, or nothing but the specialized unit can perform a task. There are issues with both methods causes their own issue. If every unit can somewhat counter the thing that the specialized unit can hard counter, then the specialized unit is at best redundant. If nothing can adequately counter the threat apart from the specialized unit, then the specialized unit would be too valuable. The speed that a spotted radar cruiser gets focused down is testament to this. As things are in game right now, most units can somewhat deal with carriers. This means that units that straight up decimates a carrier's plane is largely pointless even if most games have carriers in them. My Zao, despite being the weakest AA cruiser of her tier in game right now, can adequately deal with incoming strikes from Taihos and Hakuryus with defensive fire. The Des Moines would admittedly be untouchable by a carrier, but that also means that she has to pay for that distinction in some other area. This means that AA specialized ships would always inherently be useless, whether immediately or eventually. No carrier would wander anywhere close to a AA specialized ship if they can possibly help it, which means that AA ships aren't even directly rewarded for their status as AA specialized ships. The result of this is ships like my Scarnhorst seeing plane kills in the 20s at least with a carrier in game whilst my Atlanta only sees plane kills in the low to high 10s in a good game. If the carriers can't avoid those AA ships and they continue being unable to avoid those AA ships, then they will eventually just leave the class which would then result in AA ships being even more redundant. All ships should have adequate AA to deal with any carrier they'd face, but conversely no ship should be a no fly zone. As a carrier pays for a strike with their planes, a lone player should pay for the plane kills with their health. I shouldn't have to face against an enemy who can kill my entire strike wing in seconds, but neither should I be able to hold off an entire flank against a massed hoard of half the enemy team (and the constant attempts at snipes by a particularly stupid Lexington) singlehandedly whilst only losing about the carrier equivalent of 10% of my HP. The lack of this trade only leads to the grievance and general unpleasantness we see in the game right now. The existence of carrier immune ships is terrible for both the AA ship and the carrier and should be removed as soon as possible.

It's the persisting problem with cruisers unfortunately. They underperform and so they get buffed with consumables to try to get them to perform better despite the fact that the inherent problem with cruiser performance isn't addressed. Cruisers, previously already focused down first because they're fragile and moderately easy to remove from the game. Now ships are given even more incentive to focus down those cruisers as quickly as possible. It's why I find the Missouri so objectionable. She has the strategic value of a radar armed cruiser but can't really be focused down the same way a cruiser is.

She really doesn't. A ship with a brokenly powerful AA doesn't make a ship strong, it will eventually make a ship weak. When a ship isn't in a competitive tier i.e. 8 you can't expect the thing it is countering to be there. A ship that stops carrier from doing anything whatsoever will be ultimately detrimental to itself. If a ship can just completely shut a carrier down, then carriers would just stop playing the game. This just ends with AA specialized ship not having anything to do and being useless most of the time. The Des Moines is inherently her own worst enemy.

The AA in this game has issues, and the defensive AA is a tiny and quite frankly insignificant amount of it. I've in fact come to a point where I am beginning to believe that having AA and plane health scaling at all between tiers is bad for the strike plant to AA interaction. It'll be a while before I can quantify any of this into words though, so I'll leave it as is for now.

One tubed turret then.

No, the game model shows only one tube. Probably their idea of 'balance'.

How are they going to balance the Fletcher's gun firepower at tier 8? Add that to the fact that Fletchers can mount defensive fire without the lost of a gun, and this thing might be taken over the Benson in competitive battles. I thought War Gaming wanted to move away from nothing but premiums in competitive.

I generally shy away from ideas like that personally because it appears slightly contrived to me if it makes sense. I would prefer it if the gameplay mechanics were changed in such a way that it encompasses all ships with a certain trait instead of splitting it up by ship classes. Maybe the could increase carrier payload damage and make it so that smaller destroyers and cruisers could have more easily depleted modules that would make it so that destroyers won't get wiped might be a good change, so they take relatively manageable levels of damage from carriers. One thing that could be changed overnight to stop all of this nonsense though is to just increase the chances of fire and flooding for carrier weapons. It would certainly help make killing larger ships far more easily achieved instead of setting 3 fires with 1 dive bomber squad before sinking a full broadside of torpedoes into a battleship for a grand total of 0 floods.

The idea of a mechanic that is fun both to play with an against might be a nice ideal, but ultimately I find it to be overly idealistic and unachievable in a game with asymmetrical ship capabilities. Say you're a Pensacola running defensive fire trying to defend a flank against a Mahan and a Shiratsuyu. The Mahan sets up smoke and the Shira spots for her, raining down shells on the Pensacola. This is a mechanic that can't be played around. You have literally 0 tools that could be used to combat the situation, and you will likely die without being able to do anything. Radar is another mechanic that isn't fun to play against, nor to play as. Like hydroacoustics, it ignores line of sight and simply lights up every single ship within a certain area. You can't hide behind an island to try to dispel the radar and there is no consumable that would allow you to counter the radar. You either die, or you get out of the way. In both of the examples you can run of course, and when facing a carrier you can huddle for air cover unless you're a cruiser which is the class that (at least used to) have the least issue travelling alone. Carriers force players to huddle as groups. Radar forces players (non-high tiered battleships at least) away from the cap circles and the radar ship. Smoke forces players without the necessary equipment to deal with the threat to back away. The game is filled with asymmetrical gameplay capabilities of different units and most if not all of it produces an unpleasant experience for those who are on the wrong end of the exploited mechanics. It's the nature of any game where not every single unit is identical however. Singling out carriers as a problems because they utilize a different system to their advantage is asinine at best.

For those who do not yet know, there is a minor mission going on in the PTS right now. If you manage two victories in the ships of all the existing nations, you will be credited the Saint Louis tier 9 heavy cruiser to try out. I understand that not everyone will be interested in this, but for those that are the option to try the Saint Louis is now available.

Tl;dr for people who don't want to wade through the unformatted wall above. Sorted by paragraph. My interpretation will be in blue. OP has decided to return to the forums after his last -ahem- episode. Vaguely insults unnamed segments of the community. The OP briefly mentions his campaign against the Shogun battleship of Ra3's number of turrets (I assume that is is because the Shogun battleship in Ra3 has 4 triple turrets and OP wanted them modelled after the Yamato). Op is dissatisfied with battleships not pushing flanks. He believes that the cause of this is the armor and damage mechanics which he sees as ahistorical. To fix this, he has a few proposals. First, remodel the ranges of all ships to their actual range relative to the Yamato. Secondly, homogenize the penetration value of the Yamato for the historical ranges of 26 - 42 km or around 17 - 26 km in game (i.e. make the penetration value between these ranges static). Thirdly, OP wants the effective armor thickness of ships to be raised (according to him, the historical thickness of ship armor is thicker than regular armor. He doesn't cite sources for this statement, but I assume that this is in reference to armor angling), as this will mean that small caliber shells will be rendered ineffective and large caliber shells will only ever really perform at extremely close ranges. OP acknowledges that this will remove the ability for low caliber guns such as those on the British cruisers to sufficiently deal with armored targets which OP takes no issue with. OP would like HE shells below a certain threshold to be completely ineffective against heavily armored targets (Might be interpreting this wrong, as I don't see how that's different from what we have right now). No salient comment. OP would like carriers to be able to freely pick their loadouts. OP argues that the loadout flexibility would address issues such as the inability for the upcoming Kaga to properly handle Saipans (no argument on WHY this is is presented as far as I could see). OP would like to enforce +/-1 MM to carriers. OP expressed disagreement with WG's decision to remove manual drops at the lower tiers. OP expresses discontentment at the current damage over time system and suggests the following changes: heavy cruisers should be used as a baseline, taking 'standard' fire and flooding damage. Light cruisers and destroyers should receive increased fire damage and diminished flooding damage. Battleships and carriers should receive increased flooding damage and diminished fire damage with carriers taking more fire damage than battleships. OP wishes to introduce two health bars into the game. One which tracks shell damage. Another that tracks torpedo damage. (presumably this is to introduce increased ship survivability, notably battleships which are struck by torpedoes more often than any other class). The postscript. OP expresses displeasure at unnamed parties expressing hostility towards anime and manga (the impetus for this appears to be that the OP is often confronted when posting certain words in team chat). An example is given: "Godspeed and have Poi all! Nepu!" is said to attract hostility and "mobbing" when posted in team chat. I did try to be unbiased. I didn't say I succeeded. To the best of my abilities, this is the distillation of OP's points. Edit: oh dear, that wall of text. Is that how the forums sees my long posts? I really need to change the writing style of my longer posts if that is the case.

I'd want the Perth back in the premium store. I don't have her.

I did come top by close to 1000 points I made a misplay quite frankly. I saw too many of our allies alive and kept pushing forwards in the Yamato. If I stayed behind the rock and held the position, the enemy team would be unable to advance and we could have forced a win by points. The Shokaku really needed to be on the ball though, and he really wasn't.

Not much to say really. Pretty much wiped their Gearing as well.

Met cleverviking in his Fletcher, with me in my Yamato. I have that game posted under 'couldn't carry hard enough'.

He is on the NA server, and so he will profit from this skill more than any of us. The issue is that his video makes claims that are unsubstantiated and may well lead to those who take him as an authority to adopt a costly investment that may well be a detriment to their performance in their games. This last part is just unsubstantiated on my part, but I don't think that the viewers would have let him off as easy if Ichase or Flamu was making a claim that is so widely understood to be false. Nevertheless, I do welcome investigation into whether or not 203s have some hidden benefit from the skill. I am simply not going to hold my breath on it.

Oh are we showing off games! Let me do that too!