Aotearas

Iirc MM does take ship nationalities into account since some time. Or at the very least I distinctly remember WG talking a lot about that.

Doesn't even have to be that precise. WG could simply assume that ships that typically mount radar (i.e.: tier VIII+ US and RU cruisers, plus all the premium ships with access to radar) do so. Ships like the RN CLs and the PA DDs as a rule of thumb don't run radar since they have to give up smoke for it, so WG could reasonable assume that such ships don't use radar. Then when the MM draws its ships from the pool, it attempts to distribute radar ships equally on both teams. That by itself would at least be enough to get rid of hilariously lopsided radar distributions where one team gets no radar and the other gets ALL of the radar. Anyone who wants to play a different build can do so. Someone wants to play the Memetaur with radar instead of smoke? Okay, one team gets an additional radar. Someone watched atsf and wants to play Des Memes with spotter plane instead? Still gets counted as radar ship by MM, so one less radar for that team. Technically that could still lead to MM where one team gets 2 radar and the other gets none (say Memetaur and regular radar ship on one side and the Des Memes that was drawn as radar ship for the other team goes spotter plane or whatever). Can happen, will happen, but it's still better than seeing MM like posted in the OP where one team gets 5 radar ships and the other 0. Had the same kind of BS MM myself multiple times and it's never fun to play (for both sides, even the winning team tends to get meh games since such a game tends to end very fast and very decisively with little opportunity to get big rewards). But as long as the MM has sufficient radar ships to draw from its pool, the chances for massive radar ship disparities per team are going to decrease SIGNIFICANTLY even by a flawed system. Still better than no system if you ask me.

Oh, you don't have to explain that to me. I'm just mocking the people that automatically equate physical attributes on fictional characters with pornographic content.

Guess I'll switch my daily low-tier warm-up routine to my Kamikaze then But seriously, why can't WG give out a non-BB? A Marblehead instead, or perhaps the Krasny Krim. Hell, I'd even go through the hazzle of getting a trial just to get the Krasny Krim so I can add her to my collection. But nooo, it had to be another bloody BB to fill the queue, classic WG.

Kappa?

Ishizuchi is absolutely FILTHY good if you play her like you would a heavy cruiser.

Because the game clearly needs more battleships ...

Ah but you see, if they ain't human and have animal traits, its bestiality!

And will players be able to buy those on bulk, or is going to be like camouflages/consumables only one piece at a time?

Neither am I, but apparently that is still enough for super-unicum rating. Just knowing how to do manual attacks/strafes is enough to instantly put you into unicum territory. That should be rather telling exactly how low the skill floor for CV gameplay is. When people say less skill gap, I'm fairly confident they mean that people should be encouraged to learn how to play and not be absolute shite at it as consequence. You know, the actual operating word being "skill" rather than "gap". Rather than making leftclick attacks as effective as manual ones, I'm of the opinion that automatic attacks for bombers should be outright deleted from the game. Don't even give people the lazy option, because they'll just stick to it without ever even trying to learn the manual option. Seen plenty enough tier X CVs doing nothing but automatic drops and never strafing with fighters to know that unless you force people to learn, some will simply continue in willfull ignorance and such potatoes shouldn't even be considered as a baseline to judge the skillgap in CV gameplay because quite simply, they have no skill at all.

Sweet stuff.

Actually, he's neither and both at the same time. You see, trap is like Schrödinger's equation. As such Astolfo can't in actuality be categorized either way with certainty until you flip the skirt. It's quantum mechanics!

Bruh! No no no. Your favourite anime is trash. As is your waifu. But Astolfo ain't waifu, he husbando. Which means he ain't trash! Gotta stick to the weeb rules, aniki!

On the subject of honks and why it's imperative to spread the message: Empower the little engines!

But, but ... I just want to spread the love of honks to each and everyone. Honks are good for you. They cleanse your soul and raise your spirit for the upcoming battle. Like the little engine that could *chugga chugga chugga TOOT TOOT* ... I don't understand why people would want to report me for sharing the joy!?

Ima just say it again, traps ain't gay. Someone done the math!

And that's the bloody problem. Panicking the enemy aircraft to disrupt strikes is 50% of the DFAA's purpose. So what does WG in their infinite wisdom decide? Hey, let's make a circular drop-pattern so that attack approaches are no longer a concern. Oh, and make it so that even with DFAA panicking the DBs are still hella accurate. Because teamwork between ships to cover one another with DFAA is totally not what this game should be rewarding. So it's all down to RNG, hoping you shoot down enough bombers and then hope those that got through don't pen your citadel. Much counterplay, such skill, many wow!

No I don't use the game center (anymore, after I finally got a download link for the standalone client). Mostly because I don't need it at all, since WoWs is the only WG game that I play and the game center literally adds nothing but an extra click for me to start the game. Also, I hated how it wouldn't close when exiting the game center. It would minimize itself to the system tray instead and keep running in the background, requiring me to explicitly kill the task AGAIN just to get rid of the unnecessary load.

This is largely true for most of the IJN cruisers, but I find the Zao also has a pretty trollish armour. At least from what I can tell from my (still few, only unlocked her recently) Zao games is that I take the usual lolcitpen less regularily than with other cruisers, pretty much on par with the Hindenburg which is notorious for ruggedness. And against cruisers the Zao is every bit as tanky as others when you angle (though lacks in dpm due to the longer reload and bad firing arcs on the turrets if you're forced to angle nose/aft in/out).

Just swam across @Mandalorianer and @Areoduki in their Z-46 and Chung Mu respectively on the red team as I was continuing to retrain my captain for the Yue Yang in my Lo Yang. They didn't have much luck with their team that played pretty passive and let us have the cap advantage throughout the entire match. Was a lousy game for me, only got to do 23k damage, though at least I got plenty XP from all the caps I took. Somehow got a couple reports in that game too, despite the fact that the only things I ever said in chat was my usual prefight "Press N for honks", one offhand comment about not having much support going for B (as everyone else turned to either A or C) and noting our AFK Gearing "finally woke up" after three minutes into the game. Guess that's enough to get reported these days. And met @Mandalorianer AGAIN in the next match. Again he was on the reds, blessed with a passive team. And yet again a poor game for me in my Henry ... Henry doesn't like quick games. Also met @Bellegar the following round, this time on our side and we probably needed it because our team did try really hard not to win for half the game.

I'm not even convinced most BBs need a nerf (though the RN BBs could well serve with toning down the HE damage (direct and module damage) and firechance a bit). The biggest problem is that there's so many of them, typically 5 per team. That's what creates most of the problems imho. Just capping BBs to three maximum per team would probably help a lot in normalizing the meta again to the point where cruisers can play more aggressively (which also helps reducing the number of DDs as their counter would become more common and effective again). If THEN still things look like BBs need nerfs, WG can go look into it some more. But if WG wants to deal with the BB problem, reducing the BB numbers is the only effective step I can think of.

Define "too squishy". If you're looking at cruisers, they're all squishy within the current BB heavy meta. Especially if you want to make them work around 10km which inevitably means you're going to be close enough to draw lots of fire. Even the toughest cruisers can't sustain themselves under focus, nevermind battleships taking big chunks out of your HP. If you're looking for an ambush cruiser, then the Zao (and IJN cruisers in general) are pretty damn good. Good enough concealment to get within 10km of the enemy and at that range the guns are more than accurate enough, especially the Zao which already has amazing ballistics. Plus you get the torps you can use at those distances. When it gets too hot, their concealment also allows you to try and disengage (though realistically that won't happen unless you have a DD screening ahead that keeps the enemy's DD from spotting you permanently, plus any present aircraft can throw a wrench into that plan if you're unlucky). At least that's the only cruiser I can think of that somehow matches your specified criteria. If you're willing to extend the engagement distance a good bit, then I can wholeheartedly recommend the Hindenburg. You won't really want to fight anything as close as 10km (more like 15km+), but thanks to the ballistics the gunnery is hardly an issue at the extended range. Plus you get the 6km torps for when you actually get into a brawl. The Hindenburg's armour is also trollish as hell (particularily up close due to the turtleback) and I found her to be toughest cruiser to play. Plus as a jack of all trades kind of ship she's absurdly reliable in almost every situation.

Unless WG said something different, the whole raison d'être for the Asashio was/is that her longrange deep-water torpedoes allow her to punish passive battleships in the rear, right? What WG apparently fails to understand (and which has been pointed out by every single player that tested the ship that I've seen/read so far) is that why would someone play the Asashio to hunt passive camping BBs in the back, when it's much more effective to simply go for the BBs that actually do their job and push forward. Even if the whole "punish camping BBs" thing is falsely attributed to WG (don't know but wouldn't be surprised), the matter of fact is that the Asashio is a far greater threat to BBs that play the objective than to those who don't. It's punishing good gameplay (and really, there's little even a good BB player can do against a volley of 8 DWTs, nevermind the potential 16 DWTs in conjunction with the TRB consumable) and the potatoes camping in the back are quite possibly hardly feeling the impact because games tend to end quick after the players PTFOing have been sunk. The whole concept of the Asashio is bad for the game. So yeah, I very much think the Asashio shouldn't make it into the game.

You know, I wouldn't mind if the italian cruisers turned out to be the CA version of the RN CLs. AP shells only with amazing bounce angles, good ballistics and an improved heal to add to the survivability (doesn't have to be quite as good as the RN black magic heal though). If bad HE shells is what we'd be historically looking at, why not drop them entirely?