Capra76

The problem I have is that the "skill cap" is back to front, logically if you are going down that route the high skill ships should be at the higher tiers and the relatively easy ones should be at the lower tiers, as it is the lower tier ships are almost unplayable and the line only starts to get good at T6.

The answer to that is at about 1.04 in the link above, there was no problem with the signalling system, the problem was that Beatty didn't send any signals when he should have. Going off the link Beatty was a very poor commander who'd risen in rank essentially by luck, and most of the things that went wrong in the battle can be laid squarely at his door.

Not so much luck as poor ammunition handling resulting in otherwise survivable hits being catastrophic explosions, very interesting if long lecture posted on another thread: (skip to about 52 minutes onwards for the relevant part). Re the squadron running into the sights of the German fleet, they did AFAIK exactly what they wanted to do and it was only due to good luck and caution by the RN that the German High Seas Fleet wasn't annihilated on that day.

The thing is firing from smoke is very far from no skill and is IMO very hard to do well. First off you need to make sure that someone else is spotting for you and that you're not going to obscure their view of the target, once you've done that you must understand that every torpedo within range is going to be launched in your direction so you must consider what ships out there could target you and whether the risk is worth it, finally if the enemy decides to charge into your smoke you're in a world of hurt so you must either have sufficient support or an exit strategy. Any fool can do it badly, I've screwed it up plenty of times myself.

So, for a laugh, I tried to replicate the HE citadel penetration against Caldon with Smith in the training room and couldn't but I can confirm that 76.2mm AP will citadel it quite easily. I'm not quite sure how I got a 152mm HE citadel on one of the T3-T5 ships because the below water line paper armour seems to be immune to HE shells and there's nothing above that which ought to be penetrated by HE, perhaps there's a bug in the armour model on one of the ships that raises the un-armoured section above the waterline, if there is then 127/130mm will have the same effect.

Not sure about that, I think it's really a victim of BBabies crying about fire being OP and WG caving in to them as usual. They're quite happy with the passive/smoke play so long as they can't do any harm to their BB overlords, hence the fact that the ships still have smoke but no HE. It really does feel like a line designed to give BB players exactly what they want, harmless little bugs for them to jump up and down on without any risk of taking damage in return.

Not played it, I ground through the Caledon in 15 games and hated it, the consensus seems to be that Danae/Emerald are even worse in which case I'm having nothing more to do with the line unless/until it's fixed and the port slot now has an Ognevoi in it. One thing I forgot to mention in my earlier post, it's 5 days since the release of the line and the games featured between 2-4 RNCL, compare that with the KMBB that were so numerous they were able to break MM and force 11 BB per side games for weeks afterwards and it's clear that the line is a total disaster that almost nobody wants to play.

Broadside on, with AP, from the right range - always, but with RNCL, they can do it with HE Seriously, I took my Phoenix out for a few games and managed to score a citadel hit with an HE shell, now the mechanics are that an HE can penetrate armour 1/6 of the shells diameter, so the 152mm can penetrate up to 25 mm armour and a 127/130 mm will still go through 21mm, with RN CL above the waterline the armour is reasonable, below it it's paper thin, 10mm for Caledon rising to 13 then 16 for the next 2 in the series, so the 76mm guns on Smith/Tachibana can citadel Caledon. I could be wrong on the game mechanics, it's based on what's on the Wiki plus the armour viewer, but if I'm not can somebody explain to me how DD with comedy guns scoring citadel hits against higher tier cruisers with HE isn't so f***ing broken it's not true? Incidentally those 3 games brought home to me exactly why I hate the Caledon and I suspect if I played it the rest of the line. In the first I screwed up a bit, set a couple of fires on a BB but got involved with a Danae at very close range, killed him with 3 x citadel hits but died to his torps and ended with about 25k damage caused. In the next 2 games I survived to the end and finished with well over 40k damage in both cases, so generally the damage in this ship is a function of the time you survive, die early and do badly, live long and prosper (as a wise man once said). With the Caledon it felt completely different, it's quite possible to spend 20 minutes shooting constantly and end with single figures damage, you can get some good results but that doesn't outweigh the fact that most of the time you are screaming "this ship is absolute f***ing s*** "

And in a tight 1 v 1 game, are you happy for that to be decided by a 10% HP BB simply angling against a 100% HP CA and waiting for the inevitable citadel hits?

I disagree with this, I don't think that many Brits feel a particular attachment to the RN except those of a particular age or those who served in it, for the vast majority of game players I suspect it's just another line. What I hate about the line is that it feels like another sop to the whining BB players that the game seems to revolve around, a series of ships that are easy XP for the BBabies that are unable to inflict any kind of meaningful damage in return.

Can you explain this to me please? My tactics are to sail at an angle to get most or all guns into the game then when BB fires go stern on and hope for the best, are there better tactics?

Your point appeared to be that fire damage was meaningless, if I misunderstood I am sorry, but my point was it isn't.

Only to the extent that the BB has the heals available, and can live long enough to use it Keep him burning long enough and hard enough and he isn't getting it back, and of course he is also having to sacrifice one or more of his heals to repair the damage, meaning he can't use them to recover damage from other sources (like 50% of the damage suffered from regular AP hits). Also, XP and credits are calculated based on damage caused, do you know if the calculation weights fire damage differently to other sources.

It's a Friday afternoon ship, they spent months developing the models for the ships then did the game-play basically at the last minute, on the Friday afternoon before the ships were due to be released, didn't test it properly and screwed it up. They were going to be an absolute nightmare for BB with their sheer volume of fire and a reasonable fire chance and might have done something to control BB numbers, but the developers lost their nerve at the last minute, caved into the usual collection of whining BB players, took out HE altogether and didn't even bother to give them particularly good AP.

Give the man a Gremy, there are too many BB already.

With HE that would be what? 4,5,6 fires? Depending upon damage control that could be 50k+ damage, 13k does not look fine to me.

I think there's a fundamental problem with the game in that it's trying to place ships with completely different roles IRL into an arcade game where they all fight each other and we pretend that the world manufactured as many if not more BB than DD. In reality cruisers were scouts, AA support, maybe DD hunters and shore bombardment ships that got involved in surface combat when all else failed, discussions about how strong they were compared to each other I think largely miss the point, there are so many abstractions from reality in the game that arguing for particular ships to be squishy because they were IRL is a bit of a nonsense.

Thanks for the port slot WG.

Caledon is possibly the ship I have sworn at the most in this game, and that includes T3/4 BB (and I hate BB play generally), it's stats at the moment aren't terrible according to WT, going off the last week it's only about 12,000 damage behind the Bogatyr and a measly 4,000 or so behind St Louis, but then all the RN players are going to be complete noobs whilst everyone else at that level is going to be an expert right? Oh, hang on, I may have got that the wrong way around, in which case............ The worst thing about it isn't that the potential damage output is terrible (it is but...), it's that it's so incredibly boring to play, it's just constant max-range AP spam for maybe 290 damage per salvo if you get your aim right, to do well you need to survive to the end, find buckets of equally weak cruisers to shoot at and hope nothing bigger decides to shoot at you. WG say this is a "high skill-cap" line, it actually feels like the total opposite, a very low skill-cap one. It feels like one thing and one thing only, sitting at max range, spamming AP, hoping the opposition has more important targets to shoot at then being killed when they don't, they're barely competitive in a cruiser heavy meta, once we get back to the BB/DD meta (Monday/Tuesday I guess) they are going to be absolutely f***ing murdered.

Right, Caledon sold, captain sent to reserve, thanks for the port slot WG.

Am I right in thinking that you free XP'd your way past most of the line to Fiji?

I could live with the AP only idea if it was implemented properly, but it's not even very good AP, the German AP gets an extra 800 dmg per shot out of more guns with a better rate of fire and the option to use HE as well, the minor tweaks to bounce angles aren't really compensating.

Have to say I'm struggling to get Caledon to work, the AP is nowhere near good enough to make up for the loss of HE, she feels under-gunned and has lousy ballistics. Most serious of all, it doesn't feel like I'm actually doing anything at all in the game, just passively chipping away a few thousand damage here and there maybe finish off the odd ship that someone else has already crippled but nothing that's going to contribute to the outcome and this is with a glut of equally bad RN CL in the game, once they start coming up against ships that aren't broken god help them. I think I'm done with this line.

Fractured Space looks interesting or maybe Fallout 4, I think there's a new Doom out and another Hitman, why play a CA line that holds no interest for me?

I think MTM gave a big hint when he said a while back that the changes were being driven by (presumably BB) players on the RU server complaining about fire being the worst thing in the game ever (after CV and torpedo soup obviously). So I think what happened was the original concept was a line of USS Flint style ships with relatively weak guns but a huge ROF that could use smoke to burn BB into the ground whilst staying undetected, but also a line that was going to be fragile and not much use against anything else. The problem as I see it is that late in the development (i.e. after version 1 went out for testing) the developers lost their nerve/caved in to the BBabies and tried to turn them into AP focused ships (in the space of a few days) but they've not done a very good job of it and the AP isn't good enough to make up for the lack of HE. I'm not sure any AP only cruiser was ever going to work in a BB heavy meta, because if they're going to penetrate well angled BB armour (which they need to do) then they'll absolutely murder any other CA/CL in the game, and I don't see how you can balance that.