_Flyto_

The best thing about the Warspite used to be that she could repair Major damage. Yet when I was driving her yesterday, after a couple of months off, it seemed that this is no longer true - I took torpedo hits to my bow, and found that the damage wasn't repairable. Was there a nerf to this recently? I don't recall anything in patch notes.

For me, torpedo spam is boring - but carefully aimed torpedoes, taking into account what the target might do in the next minute, are far more interesting. Up to T7 in IJN ships one doesn't really have enough torps for spam anyway, but T8+ players do seem to favour the "wall o'torps" effect rather more... That's encouraging to hear. It was a minor revelation for me when I realised that the Hatsu's guns are quite good, and actually using them (at the right time) is the key to many games[1]. I'm looking forward to having a third turret on the Fubuki.... but I've never seen a Shimakaze driver actually shoot stuff :-/ [1] Actually, the upgraded Mutsuki guns are quite good too, but in a different way.

I didn't find the Kawachi so awful, but you can't play it like other battleships. You have to charge in really close, then keep twisting and turning. Use your guns on one side, then turn to use the ones on the other side while the first lot reload (hint: You don't always have to turn all that far). If you accept that you're rarely going to come out of a fight alive, and just focus on taking as many enemies with you as you can, it can be quite a lot of fun :-)

It's not just low tiers. In a game i was in a couple of days ago, a North Carolina sailed straight forward from the spawn until it ran into an island, and stayed there, steaming into the island... one might think that the captain was afk, except that any time an enemy came into range the NC immediately started shooting at it with whatever turrets would bear.... but took no account of when it was trying to shoot through the island that it was still attached to.....

There are occasional discounts on the credit price of non-premium ships - but it's been 2-3 times in the months since I've been playing, and not predictable. But don't worry, T4 ships are relatively cheap, and you'll probably already have enough money to buy them by the time you have the XP to unlock them. It's around T6-7 that credits start to become the dominant brake on progress :-)

There's no simple method, and "learn to play IJN DDs" is certainly good advice, but there are some general things you can do. Many of these only apply if your sole objective is fighting the DD; they don't work so much if you're trying to fight others at the same time. 1. Load HE, if you can find the time to do so. The 1-point captain skill that halves the time for ammo changes makes this more feasible. If you don't have time, don't worry - 14" AP shells will overpen destroyers, but still do useful damage on the way through. 2. As others have mentioned, keep changing course and speed - but never let your speed drop much below 3/4, and don't spend much time side on to where you think the DD is. The faster you're going, the quicker you're able to respond to unexpected torps; and the closer you are to sailing towards or away from the DD, the less turning you have to do to dodge. Hint: Sailing away is usually better than sailing towards. You don't want to get too close. 3. When you do spot the destroyer, don't panic; If you're careful, and have successfully predicted the direction your guns should be facing, you have a good chance of landing shells on him at less than 7-8km range (and he's closer than that already if you can see him). Don't double-click and fire everything unless you're very sure of hitting. Instead, fire each turret at a slightly different location, to allow for different directions that he might dodge in. If he's going in a straight line across your view, fire each turret with a different amount of lead. It's more important to hit him with *something* than to worry about how many shells hit. If you're lucky, a single hit might take a third of his health or knock out his engine. If you *are* trying to do other things at the same time as avoiding being sunk by the DD, then just drive away from him, changing course occasionally. Even if you can only manage 20 knots, that halves the speed at which he can catch up with you, and substantially reduces his effective torpedo range if he tries to attack from behind (if he has 7km torps, by the time they've travelled 7km you've moved 2km, so he needs to launch them from less than 5km away to hit - at which point he's visible![1]) [1] Exact numbers made up, I didn't do the maths.

"1 - What ammo type to fire from each type of ship at each type of target? " As you noted, the table is fairly general, but it is generally a good starting point. Over time you'll come to consider armour thickness and angle more generally, rather than relying on classes. For example, some destroyers can penetrate some cruisers at some angles, making AP worthwhile; most cruisers (especially 8" cruisers) can penetrate battleships at the right angle, making AP worthwhile; some battleships will *over*penetrate some cruisers at the right angle, making HE more effective. And when you just need to get a few hundred or (very) few thousand hit points off something to kill it, sometimes the guaranteed modest damage of HE is better than the risk of an AP salvo bouncing. (also, of course, if you're driving a battleship and don't have the captain skill to make changing ammo type quicker, the shell that you have loaded now is nearly always better than the shell that you can have loaded in 30 seconds!) 2 - What torpedo spread setting is, again generally speaking, best to use? Speaking as somebody who only really drives IJN destroyers, nearly always narrow. Wide spreads, by the time they get to any distance, are only good for catching somebody who is not paying attention (which does happen a surprising amount!). If the enemy is awake, they can nearly always avoid a wide spread. The only time I use wide is in when spraying them around in a DD dual (which is hoping for a lucky hit on a distracted captain), or when firing into smoke (and even then I try to overlay more than one wide spread to increase the density). 3 - Do torpdeoes have a minimum ARMING distance? Plane-dropped torps do, and if they hit after less than this distance they do no damage. I'm not sure whether ship-launched torps have any arming distance; some very close encounters suggests not, but I've never been *quite* touching! 4 - Is the reload time for torpedoes always the same? Yes, it's always the same (except with a high-tier IJN-only consumable). Note that if you are in a ship that has tubes on either side, turning to face the other way will bring a different set of tubes to bear, allowing you to fire before the first set have reloaded. 5 - Do warships have unlimited ammo for main guns and unlimited torpedoes? Yes.

It's because I am a special snowflake, and needed to have a thread all of my own. Have a nice day

Depends on how the metagame is looking that week. I mostly do Hydroaccoustic (and will more so after the range is buffed today), but sometimes switch to AA when there's a mission that encourages the carriers to leave port.

The only time you should see ships more than two tiers above you is if you're in a division with somebody of a higher tier (because the matchmaker treats everybody in a division as being of the same tier as the top ship in the division). Don't form divisions with somebody more than 1 tier away from you, or you risk causing your team a severe disadvantage (e.g. T3 ship in a T7 battle isn't going to last long)

You'll almost certainly want to spend a modest amount of real money eventually for captain skill resets or instant captain retraining. I think that's the only thing that really demands it until the "soft wall" that others have mentioned, where playing top tiers without premium time tends to be a financial loss (but I've only reached T7, so I haven't quite experienced that yet)

On the contrary, win rate means (sort of) everything - in my view it's the only stat that's meaningful, because the objective of the game is to win matches. Of course it has to be considered over hundreds of matches, not just one, but somebody who has a 55% win rate after many games is likely to be a much better player than somebody who has a 45% win rate after as many games. Let me give a few examples of things that contribute to a win but don't yield damage, kills, or sometimes even XP: A US battleship who guards a cap and causes enemy ships to run away (but is too slow to chase them). A japanese destroyer who causes enemy ships to turn with its torpedos - it gets no hits, but it forces the enemy to show its side to the friendly BBs. A DD that concentrates on spotting, using stealth rather than exposing itself. A carrier that does the same, using its planes for spotting as a priority over damage. General situational awareness - any time that a player abandons an easy but time-consuming kill (think DD in a tail chase) to attend to something more urgent on the map that will have more influence on the match's outcome.

It needs the range upgrade, but once you have it the NY isn't a bad ship at all. Plays similarly to a New Mex, just with fewer guns (as noted by many, ignore the middle turret unless shooting destroyers)

Yeah, I do find it very strange that my ship floods down to zero hit points, minutes after combat, and then spontaneously blows up...

Ah, thanks. Although that thread seems to have quite a poor S:N ratio, sadly.

Huh, OK, good to know. (what are the "RU Q&As"?)

*really*? The entire team? Or do you just mean that people who land shots on the remaining target get xp?

If possible, avoid Wyomings and let other team members deal with them. However, if you're forced into a dual note the following: Both ships are horribly inaccurate, but the Wyoming has so many more guns that they make up for this (it's more likely to hit by chance). The Myogi has significantly *bigger* guns (14" rather than 12" if memory serves, but I may have forgotten the specifics). So the shells that the Myogi does land, as long as they penetrate, will do more damage. The Wyoming has much better side armour, but the Myogi can still take relatively little damage from the bow and stern, and has the speed to dictate how the engagement happens to some degree. So my advice is (a) Keep your distance; not so far that you miss all the time, but not so near that they hit all the time; (b) face away from the Wyoming. That way you can present the small profile of your stern and still have use of two of your turrets. Ideally, swing your bow out to use the third turret while the Wyoming is reloading, but never show your side; © If the Wyoming is turning sideways to use all its guns, then try to time your shots to hit it at these times - even if it means waiting with loaded guns for a few seconds. You will do much more damage to its side than its front. Alternatively, if the Wyoming is chasing you, stay near their maximum speed and maximum range, then they can't turn without losing distance and are reduced to using their front two turrets. The Myogi is hard to play, but consensus is that the later IJN BBs are worth it :-) And the angling techniques that you need to survive in a Myogi are important to every battleship at higher tiers.

Yeah, this isn't so much a question of "more XP for the team" as "who gets the XP". People who are near the cap point but not in range of the last ship would probably rather cap, and vice versa ;) In general, the game is set up to reward winning more than kills. So as others have noted, capping is worth quite a lot, wheras kills (as opposed to the damage prior to those kills) are not.

This - the IJN has the same light->heavy cruiser transition from Tier 4 to 5, hence all the people who "hate the Furutaka". USN (and also the Kreigsmarine) puts off the transition until T7.

I've been using Torp Acceleration on my Hatsuharu and loving it - you end up with 8km, 67 knot torps, which allows you to play more like a Minekaze: get to ~7km, aim carefully, and be fairly confident of a hit with multiple fish, rather than launching slow torps and hoping the target doesn't dodge them all.

While agreeing that there isn't a huge problem, for the sake of plausibility I would love it if overpens (at least those from high angles) caused flooding. There's a sodding great hole in the ship!

I had a couple of really good matches today... did major damage on 3-4 ships, came at or near the top of the scoreboard...but no kills. And that's fine - it's a team game, and somebody else finished them off before they had a chance to shoot back at me. That's a good thing! Or, it should be, if it weren't for all these missions that are based entirely off who gets the last shot in. Having a successful battle that makes no progress on any missions, because somebody else got the killshots, is very frustrating. Couldn't "kill n ships of type x" be changed to "do n points of damage to ships of type x"? Or "Take more than 60% of the health of n ships of type x"? That would bring the aims of the missions back in line with the aims of the battles.

Check the date on my original post - this was not about the current missions. (actually, since this moan I think things have improved a little - we haven't seen so many killshot missions lately, but more of the "come top in the xp table" ones instead, which make far more sense)

There isn't really a way around this. You have a few options: Start a new captain on the new ship (free, unless you pay for him to start with skills) Transfer a captain for free, and grind out some XP to get the skills back. While they are retraining some skills work at half their normal effectiveness, and some do not work at all. The amount of XP that you need is dramatically greater with more highly skilled captains. This is the sensible option for captains with less than 3-4 skills, as it's quick to get them back. Transfer a captain and pay 200,000 silver to halve the amount of XP needed for retraining. Often worthwhile, as the amount of silver is fixed regardless of how many XP it saves you. Transfer a captain and pay a substantial number of dubloons to have them retrained instantly. The cost of this increases with the number of points the captain has. With highly skilled captains, this becomes a moneyspinner - it's quite expensive, but the amount of XP you need any other way means that you have an ineffective captain for a long time. It's not really a "workaround", but the one exception to all this is premium ships: Any captain of the right nation can command any premium ship without retraining. This means that, (a) You don't need to train a dedicated captain for premium ships - just transfer one from another ship when you want to play the premium. (b) Since premium ships earn XP faster, you can use them to help with training or retraining captains for other ships. This can be awkward if the premium is the wrong class, though. e.g. I don't want to go into battle in my Kamikaze with a cruiser or battleship captain, as they will have the wrong skills.