_Teob_

I loved the Nurnberg. Not only that but I have pretty good stats in it as well. I think it's a good ship - you just can't yolo in. And I am willing to bet you can delete most other cruisers the second they give you broadside. Fast firing, accurate, long range guns with great AP dmg - what's not to love.

Cheers! That list is quite small. Wish I had a permanent camo for my Hindenburg...

What ships actually have premium camo atm?

The Hindenburg is my overall favourite ship bar none. Whenever I play it I feel like a hunter-killer. It's just everything I would expect a tier X cruiser to be. It's sneaky enough to not get spotted by everything, it has torpedoes so if anything tries to charge you, you can defend yourself, it does great damage. I love it to bits. I also really like the Kutuzov - probably my second favourite ship. Atago is a close third. Biggest disappointments for me were the Zao and Moskva. I just didn't "click" with either of them. With the Zao I didn't enjoy the long range HE spam and the Moskva is just too big of a target.

The stealth firing aspect comes from the fact that at higher tiers getting close to BBs can be hazardous to CA health. So yeah you stay well back and shoot at everything from a range that allows you do dodge return fire if you're detected or invisifire if not. Think of it this way, the Moskva is performing well for similar reasons (but a different approach) - i.e. staying back enough so you don't get blown out of the water. At high tiers you simply cannot deal with the potential to get citadelled for almost 15k dmg once every 30 seconds (from a single ship) so you do have to hang back. If you watch replays from people that that know what they're doing you'll notice that they all seem to have 1 thing in common - they stay hidden/at range from BBs. In Des Moines they use islands and fire over them In the Zao they invisifire In the Moskva they stay at high range In the Hindenburg it's a combination of all of the above That's the life of a high tier CA and Zao just happens to be able to live that life most comfortably.

Yeah, I noticed that especially on North Carolinas and Iowas. Izumo seems to be made of stronger stuff. I did get 2 citadels in a single salvo on an Amagi though. It is unreliable though. I find that spamming HE on BBs always seems to yield better results. Does that mean that ze Germans have better penetration or just better penetration angles? I am going to crunch some numbers in the formula that his Lordship, the Count of Tuscany has kindly provided and see what numbers I come up with.

Thanks for that - very informative indeed. Someone in that reddit thread shared a formula (they do mention that the game probably uses a variation of the formula): mm penetrated = (0.30386)D0.25[(W/D3)(V/C)2]0.625Krupp is CDiameter is DWeight is WVelocity/angle is V I am not sure that's 100% accurate but it would explain why calibre doesn't affect penetration that much. Not to mention that maths isn't my strong suite. I tried doing that formula with the Exustio sheet kindly shared by Panocek but all I got was gobbledygook We still have no clue how Krupp affects HE shells apart from anecdotal evidence.

Haha! It is indeed (or at least it was at some point). But it's also a value that WG have attributed to shells. I am trying to ascertain if it figures in the penetration formula or not. You can't change your shell loadout but you have several choices. Like for example I want to know if when sailing a ship I should go for AP or HE on an enemy ship. The penetration values play an important part in that choice. For example in my Moskva, I was making choices similarly to how I make that choice on my Zao but I realized that for some reason, the Moskva seems to pen better on angled targets (or because of the much higher RoF I get to take more shots and land more citadels). Secondly, it impacts my choice of ship. Specifically, I like to grind my way up the cruiser lines - that's how I play the game. So I want to know what ships are capable of before I commit to a line. Thirdly, pure curiosity. I want to know stuff like this. Like why are people reporting 10k AP salvoes on BBs with the Hindenburg? Why can't you do hte same in the Zao? The dmg difference in AP on paper at least is quite small (Zao has 5400, Moskva has 5800 and Hindenburg has 5900) so it can't be just that. Don't you want to know why things are the way they are? Edit: I found an interesting Reddit thread: Lots and lots of info!

Less thread derailing and more on topic, please. We got the idea with the whole Murmansk argument. Is Krupp a dmg potential modifier or what is it exactly?

That spreadsheet is pretty cool although there seem to be some slight mistakes. Like the Hindenburg's reload time is stated as being 12 seconds but I think it's actually 10. The rate of fire is correct though so it might just be me nitpicking Force is obviously mass * acceleration which we do have. Krupp might be a normalizer or something. The reason I say that is that with the Moskva, my HE dmg falls off dramatically once the enemy has been hit a few times but the Zao's HE dmg falloff is nowhere near as dramatic. In the spreadsheet, HE Krupp for the Moskva is 1 and for the Zao it's 560. And I've noticed that the Des Moines also does quite a lot of HE dmg even on charred targets. Does that mean that Krupp is linked to dmg potential rather than penetration?

Now we're getting somewhere! Where did you get those values from? And how does that Krupp thing figure in?

This is why I am asking - everyone seems to have different information. About the calibre thing, I doubt it as the Moskva has 220mm guns but its penetration doesn't seem any different. If anything, like I said, it seems to have worse pen than the Roon (and I imagine the Hipper and Hindenburg).

The problem with that is that Moskva has the fastest shells of any cruiser but its penetration power seems to be less than my Roon's. This is obviously anecdotal evidence as it's based on only my own experience. I would imagine that penetration is a formula of speed and shell weight - of which there were some tables that people were sharing a while back. However there's another variable that was mentioned (krupp?) and I am not sure how that plays into all of this.

Even without the 5th tier captain skill you are still MUCH more stealthy than the other cruisers. I mean stock Hindenburg has 16km detection range... so 20+ km detection range when firing. To be fair though, It's probably the sum of all the Zao's characteristics that make it a good ship.

So I've been playing a lot of tier VIII+ games lately and thinking a lot about my gameplay. I've come to the conclusion that high tiers are an absolute joke for cruisers. Now don't get me wrong, I think you can have good games but most of the time it feels like you're just trying to hide from horrendous BB alphas. And on the flip side you can't see DDs most of the time so hunting them down is out of the question as well unless a friendly DD happens to stumble on an enemy DD. But the main issue is how fragile you feel compared to the other ship classes. Like even when/if you spot an enemy DD the chances of you killing it in one shot are almost nonexistent. They will usually pop smoke and, in a lot of situations, escape. On the other hand as a cruiser, once a BB spots you (or has someone else spot for him) you will take salvo after salvo which can citadel you even at extreme angles and if they don't citadel you, they still do around 7-15k dmg a pop. That's if you're lucky, if you're not lucky you can and will either get one-shot or eat 2 citadels which leaves you on 10-15k health essentially leaving you crippled. I won't mention BBs as it's obvious how tough they are. After 1000+ matches in cruisers and getting to rank 1 this season, I can't for the life of me figure out what cruisers are meant to do. And datamined info would suggest that they are planning on nerfing the Zao's survivability which will obviously only make the issues I am perceiving even worse. This is not a whine post - I really just want to get other people's experience and opinion on this.

I think that the main reason Zao outperforms other cruisers is stealth. BBs can't kill what they can't see. And the Zao can get quite close to DDs before they see you. I mean the high HE dmg also helps but the other two cruisers' rate of fire is so much better that in a straight up dps race, they should both out dps the Zao.

I know. But what I find is that, while I do more average dmg to the Hindenburg, it seems to be harder to citadel. Again maybe it's just my experience.

My answers in bold.

I think we all are very interested and for me at least the discussion has been one of the most constructive I've ever had on the matter. You can find decent replays but I am not sure how much that would help. I mean It's quite difficult to emulate what some of the people in this thread are capable of. I am more interested in the mindset. More like what should we be doing rather than how some very good player does it. Also people have very different ways of going about things. Like someone mentioned, it also depends a lot on the line of cruisers you play. Again, I just keep reminding myself this, key points are: - Cruisers do not have an an actual counter to DDs and we get blown up really fast by BBs which causes most of the issues.

I get that but yeah, focusing down cruisers is what I think BBs should be doing. And Cruisers fire on BBs because they have no real way of countering DDs. There's actually a pretty long thread about this in the cruiser sub-forum. Cruisers fire on whatever targets of opportunity they see. About fires, while I do take your point, I will say that it takes a long time for a BB to die from fires though, while in a BB you can silence a CAs guns win a single salvo. Even if you don't kill him, I can tell you from experience that if I lose 30% of my HP I will tend to play more conservatively. Even the mighty Zao can lose 15k with no citadels in a single BB shot. Playing a cruiser is very dangerous now that there are no CVs around to force BBs to turn more often. The most powerful formations in my experience are BBs with Russian or USN DDs screening for them and IJN DDs torp-walling the enemy BBs forcing them to show broadsides. CAs are not really needed in this equation because BBs damage them so easily. And while fires are problematic, if as a BB you get flooded from a torp and your repair if on cooldown you are out of the fight if not dead. Back to the Op - BBs are not underpowered and the OP doesn't have enough experience to make the call at any rate.

I tested shell flight times for some cruisers. Zao and Hipper and Roon have 8.5s shell flight time at 15km. All other 203mm IJN ships have around 10s shell flight time at 15km. Not sure what the US numbers are like as I gave up on that line after I reached Cleveland and I hated the shell flight time and arc. My numbers do have a bit of approximation to them as you can't get the exact same distance when aiming. Penetration wise, I got mixed results and I know there is a table with datamined data somewhere but it's not terribly user friendly. However, I will say this, of the 3 tier X cruisers, the Des Moines seemed to be easiest to citadel. This is based on just my own experience though.

Wait, are people seriously saying that they are losing to CAs 1v1 in a BB? Not because they got ambushed but in a straight up fire-fight? People who regularly lose in 1v1 fights against CAs when playing BBs need to brush up on their captain skills.

Answers in bold. Seriously bud, your posts reek of bias and misinformation. You really need to do some more research and maybe even play the other classes and you will get a different perspective.

How dare you bring logic into this?! How very dare you take the proverbial wind out of OPs sails? He came here to whine based on biassed and somewhat uninformed experience and you start giving arguments and explaining things. Shameful.

Nothing has really changed. While I would say that you do make some liberal use of hyperbole in your post describing the current situation, the situation has not changed since a week ago.