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I'd say it's still better to run with 1/1/1. It's ludicrously easy to hold air control over a strike Lexington in a Shokaku.

At the risk of being mod hammered, I'm quite fond of Ajin myself. The original that is, not that hideous CG abomination they call a TV show. Satou best villain 2017. If only I could look that badass every time I beat a damage record in warships. If they'd at least made it so that most torpedoes were pretty bad, then I'd get annoyed at the class in general instead. As things are right now, I just can't see why the torpedo focused line has fundamentally the worst torpedoes in the game. The Harakaze will be pretty annoying as well. The Shiratsuyu's torpedoes are quite terrible frankly, with the pure volume of fire and inexperienced players somewhat redeeming her. Having that setup on a Kagero would be questionable at best in my opinion. She might have those double tubes, but the Harakaze is pretty fundamentally a gunboat.

Not technically on topic, but I do wish that the Shima would get the option of the 100mm guns. It would go some way to redeem her from her current utter trash status right now I think. The placement of better guns on IJN destroyers would certainly make the destroyers more enjoyable. It might lead to War Gaming refusing to do anything about the awful torpedo detection ranges on the IJN torpedoes though, so my feelings are a bit mixed. This ship is nice though, I hope an equivalent sub branch is introduced for the Japanese in conjunction with moving the Shiratsuyu to the main branch where she belongs.

I do wonder how the American guns would perform. They would have to be absurdly good to manage to beat the 100mm guns quite frankly.

I rather like London actually. I just have an issue with the people who live there.

I would have been more interested if the IJN torpedoes were in fact the best torpedoes in game instead of one of the worst. As they are right now, they're an interesting novelty I might purchase to entertain myself, but not much more.

Ah, more disgusting weeb degeneracy I see On a more serious note, I might take a look at the Harakaze if she's a good performer. She doesn't look like any ship I recognize at least from her gun system. The Graf spee though? I have a Graf. I like the Scharnhorst better.

I'm baaaaack~ This is NOT a guide! DO NOT move it. (Unless you count guides to game design as a guide as well which you don't, so stop complaining). Oh, and just post something at the bottom. I'm far too lazy won't be awake to bump the thread myself. Artist page: http://www.pixiv.net/member.php?id=5192176 Extra battleship camping =P In most of the games in my Zao where I don't get instantly wiped because I managed to get my ship stuck in the middle of the ocean, I land somewhere around 150-250 shell hits. Mostly on battleships of course, but also on some cruisers and destroyers. The Zao, bar none (currently), is the cruiser with the highest fire chance on burst. A chance that is tied to RNGsus's will, a malevolent dark god who rules above all others of Chaos and will one day cast judgement upon the impudent imperial scum. Zao, being the cruiser with the highest fire chance, can be extremely dangerous to large targets with the way her guns work. I have often managed to land salvoes with two or three fires. Conversely however, I have managed to also sustain fire upon a single enemy ship for excessive periods of time with little to no result in terms of fire. Issues with fire and flooding Damage over time is a very large part of the game, and many have come to depend on it in order to keep benefiting their team and bringing their allies victory. As things are however, the ability to effectively utilize these systems makes it difficult to build tactics around them. It's often impossible to know if a salvo or three would be necessary to set a target on fire or if the use of damecon right this moment would mean that your ship would need to burn for half your health from a fire you can't stop. Sometimes this makes me laugh in the way that makes my division members want to call the psychiatric care service on me, other times this makes me spasm out in a way that has often caused quite serious bodily harm to myself. I still need to buy some cleaning alcohol now that I think about it, the blood on my mouse seems oddly impervious to my efforts to use water to clean it. A mechanic that players depend on to this extend should not be left up to the roll of the dice. It would benefit everyone if ticking damage was managed in a way that doesn't depart too much from our current system, but still has the depth that players in the know can exploit in order to perform better in their games. The concept The Implementation The Implications I believe that the current system is frustrating. Randomness benefits no one, and being able to reduce it for such a large segment of the gameplay would, in the end, benefit everyone. At least in my opinion.

Seeing as how you two are probably the main proponents of the concept of these serial cartoons, I'll need a title for the series. These are the names I thought of so far: The Atlantic (af)Front Warships Collection Bottleship Report The Tomato Port If you could some up with more names, I'd love to hear them as well.

Just of the top of my head, some combinations that could serve as national flavors for just the cruisers alone: Small cruiser with signal jammer. Can help protect friendly destroyers from threats of radar, and can use the jammer to help dispose of enemy destroyers. Torpedo focused cruiser. Cruisers can be larger than destroyers, and so can carry a larger torpedo payload and could usually launch torpedoes from both broadsides. They can probably also reload those torpedoes faster as they have more space for optimization mechanisms. Far faster and stealthier than equivalent cruisers, but without the artillery power. Destroyer escort. The Russian destroyers, but in cruiser form basically. More firepower, but less maneuverable. Battlecruiser. Slow firing battleship-esque guns for a cruiser, but very well armored. Unmanuverable and hard to conceal, but hits hard without the dispersion issues associated with battleships. Long range engagement. Balanced by atrocious turret rotation. Excellent shell ballistics and good DPM for long ranged engagements, far weaker at close ranged engagements. Protected cruisers. Far less damage output than other cruisers and slower, but armored almost entirely against overmatch and penetration from low to mid caliber HE shells by strong outer plating. Retains cruiser utility. Troll AP. AP that can overmatch 32 mm of armor despite shell calibre. Balanced by poor DPM. Troll HE. Naturally high HE penetration, like the KM battleships, on a cruiser. Flamethrower. Very little HE alpha, but incredible fire chance. Rapid fire. Excellent rate of fire reminiscent of the British and incredible arcs like those of the high tiered IJN and KM cruisers through the line. Poor penetration and alpha to balance. Glass cannon. The penetration of a battleship's guns with far better gun arcs, accuracy, and rate of fire. Dies to just about anything that shoots at them. What the Henri should have been quite frankly. That's just what I came up with in a few minutes. War Gaming, with a staff their size, quite frankly has no excuse.

I need a subtitle for these long articles, so I would appreciate it if everyone thought of one for me. Like the skybuck's x-files, but without the persistent stench of failure. Speed boost is actually a terrible consumable, something that not many people appreciate. I'd need to justify that, but I would like to mention the inherent issues with cruisers first. Long ago, I had created an article on French cruisers and the potential gimmicks that they would receive. Cruisers need their gimmicks Henri IV, which I shall henceforth refer to as Henrietta, pretty much unanimously sucks in everyone's opinion. Except Ichase, but he thought RL was a good idea. She is big, but doesn't have the armor to compensate for it. She is very fast, but she handles like crap and can't maneuver anywhere near enough to dodge incoming fire. She has a strong health pool, but she can't hold on to any of her health even against enemies that don't know about her magazine weakness yet. Ships are strongest when they are new and people don't know how to deal with them. The fact that Henrietta performs so badly even now does not bode well for her future. Speed doesn't suit Henrietta All of this is of course just background issues. The primary issue, the one that sits like an unexploded barrel of chlorine trifluoride in the middle of a bumper car ring, is that speed boost is a bad consumable. Any line that is built around it would inevitably be bad. That is not to say that speed is a bad gimmick for a line. Just that speed boost. The distinction may seem small, but the fundamental issue is that speed boost is a bad consumable. Given the option, basically everyone chooses another consumable over speed boost. Even a consumable that gets to be used maybe one every 10 games gets chosen over the speed boost. I routinely encounter destroyers with the defensive fire cooldown despite the fact that they could go for dozens of games without ever having run across a carrier, never mind one that chose them as a target. Speed boost is just a poor choice for a consumable to base a ship line around. Speed boost sucks I am not saying that speed boost is entire useless, simply that it is an extremely weak consumable that would be far better if it was improved to a point where it rivaled the likes of hydroacoustics or healing in terms of utility. I have devised some concepts that I would suggest that War Gaming considers. I am not sure why I'm doing the game designer's job for them. I would like this game to stop itself from growing stagnant, and that goes beyond one mediocre new line and a pathetic tier 10. Here are some things that could be added or changed about speed boost to make it actually a good addition to a ship. Speed boost improvements The French cruisers could be improved, they could be buffed, and they could be changed. That however does not change the fact that they fundamental foundation of the French cruiser line is flawed to a fault. Speed boost COULD theoretically work as a cruiser consumable, for a line of extremely small and agile cruisers that basically serves as over-sized destroyers in the same vein as the SN DDs. A line of fast and big ships with poor armor is the melding of traits that have little to do with each other. Separately, the traits of the French cruisers adds up to a series of highly valued traits. Combined as they are now, it creates a irritatingly mediocre line without an identity and speak of. Speed boost might work with another line, but it has no place with the French. I'll, as always, will await your indignant protests down below. Best regards.

National flavors in my opinion could be magnified to such a large extent if War Gaming would just stop being lazy and focusing on things no one really cares about. Take the last patch for example, the changes to rigging. That's nice and all, and it's a technological achievement, but how many customers really cares about that? How many players would prefer it if they invested more time into experimenting with even the current game mechanics rather than just screwing around with things that players just really don't care about.

I met Corvi in his Minotaur when I was in my Hindenburg, the best tier 10 ship (f*ck you, fight me!). I thought it was fate, but we didn't get to square off against each other. We spawned on opposite ends of the map and I had to hold the flank against the Gearing, a Kurfurst, and a Bismark. Though 'hold' might not be the best word for it. More like 'sit back, spam HE, and farm potential damage off battleships camping the spawn'.

I'm pretty sure you would also hear the engine roar and the thunderous boom of ship based artillery if it went off 3-4 kilometers away. If the ship isn't spotted, you won't.

It might be accurate for him. He seems like the kind of guy who would sail a ship broadside at max range with the range mod and the spotter plane up

Well, it is now.

Might be interesting in a competitive environment. In Randoms though, a bit too chancy.

It's technically a buff, but it's not the buff where it was needed. The fact is that the IJN are currently competing on most tiers as the worst torpedo boats in the game with the Russians. This buff does nothing to address that.

As can the Edinburgh and Minotaur.

Well this and the thread about the Henri, but I guess the forum has more than enough French bashing already

One quick note. The ships that are generally considered good so far from the French lines are the tiers 3-6. The 7 appears to be another York with fewer torpedoes, and the 8 and 10 are basically unmentionables. The tier 9 is basically a Baltimore without radar but with somewhat better arcs. As it is in the game right now, the ships considered to be the best ships in the game are mostly either ships that don't benefit whatsoever from the speed boost or is a ship that is pretty slow even with speed boost on.

Actually now that you mentioned it. Any news on what those changes could be?

A lot of the criticism of the French line, mine included, comes from the fact that they have the makings of a line with crippling specialization but without that specialization. Being big isn't going to make a ship inherently awful. Being squishy doesn't make a ship inherently awful. Having poor AA, bad gun arcs, unexceptional turret mechanization. Mediocre alpha damage, low torpedo payload, poor concealment, mediocre gun handling, and a unexceptional consumable won't inherently make a ship bad. It's the combination of all those traits that makes the Henrietta as unremarkable and disappointing as she is. As the Henrietta is right now, she would likely have to be buffed to being overpowered considering how average every last aspect of her is before she is interesting to anyone. Specialization works well for new ship lines in my opinion because it both provides something that players are interested in acquiring whilst preventing power creep. It might not be the best way of doing it, but it's probably still better than releasing an utterly mediocre line which we are looking at right now.

My point still stands. The good gun range is nearly irrelevant for a cruiser unless their shell performance supports it. It's why no one mods the Des Moines for range. They also aren't good speeds. With the speed boost on, they're decent speeds. They're still poor in the larger context of the game.

I've said it before and I'll say it again. Tiers 3-6 are inferior copies of their Russian counterparts. Tiers 7-9 are dull and uninteresting. Tier 10 is poor and ill conceived. Being difficult but unique is one thing. Being a ship uniquely good at one thing and poor at all others could be interesting. Being nerfed versions of existing ships is just bad. I am willing to work with difficult ships. I am NOT willing to work with mediocre ships. Guns with poor AP if the performance I've seen so far are anything to go by. They also don't have speed. Even with the speed boost on, they struggle to the top of the speed charts on most tiers.