Aotearas

Hava, the cowboy coffee recipe needs a horse shoe, not the whole horse ...

What she said.

I'd say that depends on the line you're grinding. Some lines have a good deal fun to play ships at the high tiers or as a tier X. Gems like the Yamato (the mighty king of lolpen) and the Khabarovsk (this thing is simply ludicrously fun to play, just pure aggression and nonstop firing at stuff) are ships that I have and can heartily recommend. As for the static/passive hightier meta ... yeah, that sucks. But I found it bearable with divisionmates that I can count on and simply be proactive myself. And I can tell you the results of an aggressive gameplay move in the hightier meta can be downright hilarious. I've seen Yamato's turn out in a panic from my charging Izumo (thus giving me their broadside ), they simply couldn't handle that unfamiliar aggression. Playing the hightiers solo is not something I recommend though. If you got no one to back you up, you're forced to stick with the team or else you get focused quickly and that's the end of it. DDs and CVs can be played solo since they work very well playing on their own, but BBs and cruisers ... that's mostly just painful. Playing with friends is more or less the answer to your question. And at that point you might aswell grind all the way to tier X so you can play those tiers together

Herp-a-derp, completely forgot the fastest tier VII or below BB at the time when I grinded the Colorado was the Nagato ... yeah, a Scharnhorst or Gneisenau will effortlessly run down a Colorado. I do disagree on the taking pens from every angle though. Even in my Colorado grind, every tier VII BB (and the Warspite with her 381mm rifles) could overmatch each others' bow and aft armour sections. What you have to do is give them the cheek. Show them just a bit of side to entice them shooting there rather than aiming at your bow and your belt armour will either bounce or shatter their AP. Smart BB players who know about the overmatch mechanic will still aim for your bow, but angled slightly away also means the citadel armour they'd hit after penetrating your bow will also be angled and thus more likely to resist penetration, thus at least sparing you from getting citadeled through the bow/aft most of the time. But thankfully not many BB players at those tiers are smart enough for that so you can bait them into wasting their salvoes more often than not. This is also a crucial skill to use in a fight against the Yamato (because 460mm lolpen AP just laughs at bowtanking BBs) aswell for any cruiser whose nose can be overmatched by every BB caliber AP, but their armour belt is typically more than sufficient to bounce them at a steep angle, so baiting a shot at your side and manouvering to catch the shells on an angled belt can yield to incredibly trollish results ... nothing like charging up to an Amagi in an Atago, keeping a mental countdown on his reload and then turning as he fires to catch and bounce all his shells on the chin for zero damage, then use the next 30 seconds to yolotorp his arse as he rants in chat about godmode cheats Colorado superstructure is an easy target for HE (and RN AP) but tends to saturate easily and the Colorado's heal is the best of its tier and can heal back most of that damage. Once the superstructure is saturated, the Colorado is a veritable fortress. That's all the advice I can give for what it's worth.

Odd, since Colorado is a pretty solid ship for her tier. Slow as a glacier yeah, but otherwise a good allrounder (especially after the range buff). The slow speed makes it a chore to play when uptiered against fast battleships, but at tier VII that's thankfully not that common. Pick a course at the start and stick to it, get right into the action and enjoy the surprisingly accurate guns at midrange shooting, the very tough beltarmour and the superiour heal. Or your Colorado is simply cursed with terribly bad luck as I had it with the Amagi and the New Orleans ...

No and lolno. As someone who plays a good chunk of BBs I can tell you firsthand that BBs deal with overpenetrations on a frustratingly frequent basis. And no, you don't overpen Pensacola's, etc. with HE in your Emerald, firstly because that ship like all regular RN cruisers doesn't have HE shells as primary weapon ammunition to begin with and secondly because the AP ammunition has such a short fuze that in order to get an overpenetration with those shells you quite literally have to near miss a narrow part of the hitbox because everything else would almost assuredly result in a normal penetration. That said, Emerald has a large citadel and is easy to hit, so yes, you are most likely suffering a good deal of citadel hits, but that's not an inherent quality of BB gunnery, just the Emerald being a notoriously squishy ship.

not yap wa' Hol

I just like teamplay ... and since I don't really get that by playing solo with randoms, I stick to my pals. Only classes I can play solo are those that will do well regardless of teamplay or not, so that's mostly CVs (but my interest in playing those has plummeted lately) and DDs.

To be honest, I have no idea why. Only thing that changes is that mistakes can be punished harder the more powerful your enemies' ships are but apparently people by far and large completely draw a blank when faced with that and rather than playing smart and making as few mistakes as possible, they hide and camp and maxrange snipe in an effort to minimize the chance of actually getting in a tough situation ... it's sad, but equally hilarious to see when you force their hands.

Whilst retraining my Mogami captain for the newly unlocked Ibuki, this match brought me the last couple captain XP needed to complete the retraining. Lots of shiny medals Would've probably had a very fun game in the next round in a triple Khaba division, but one of my divisionmates had a brainfart of epic proportions and dumped his torpedoes right into my side and TKed me right at the beginning stage of the game ...

Amazing, I just crashed three times just sitting in port waiting for a mate to join!

RN CLs are all about being in the right place at the right time. Being at the right place: Look at the map and see where good places for pillaring are. You optimally want to go wherever you can get close to the enemy without being seen (or if seen, without giving them a good shot, such as behind islands) and only stop and smoke up in places where you have an easy and secure exit for when the smoke runs out, you get detected by radar or someone with hydro is charging you. Near big islands that you can duck behind is typically optimal. The next step is the right time: The best pillaring spot on the map is uselly if no enemy is nearby to unload on, so you have to make sure you go where the enemy goes or has to pass through as they want to go someplace else. On domination games that is relatively easy as you need only stick close to cap zones the enemy wants to fight over. In standard battles, you want to be somewhere central so that wherever the enemy goes, he has to pass near you. Also, DDs are your best friends and best enemies. Scavange friendly (or unfriendly) smokes if possible. DDs can also spot targets for you and give opportune early warnings if they spot torpedoes ahead. Also, DDs is what you're great at fighting. Few things can be as fatal to an adventurous DD than running into a RN CL, just a couple wellplaced salvoes can cripple, if not sink an unfortunate DD. Also, dealing with enemy DDs improves the longevity of allied DDs (that can provide smokes and spots) aswell as decrease the amount of torpedo walls the enemy can throw into your smokes to try and rout you out of them. DDs and RN CLs enjoy a fantastic synergy and are incredibly effective when coordinated. The long and short of it: Teamplay. I know, I know ... might aswell tell you to find a invisible pink unirhino, but if at all possible, that's the stuff that turns a RN CL's game into gold. Division up with buddies and go chainsmoking like Winston Churchill!

That would be oddly construed to the point of being deliberately inaccurate. I don't think that's the case or has this been confirmed/tested? What I have noticed is the stats take a while to actually get the right ones. Whenever I play CV I check the opponent CV stats and after waiting a couple seconds the game will suddenly tell entire different stats from the initial ones. Probably takes the game a while to synchronize everyone.

Hmm, you could try and contact support with your intent of getting the Admiral's bundle and see if they would reimburse you for the previous purchase of the ship (presuming you bought just the ship not a smaller bundle with signal flags, etc.), but to be honest I think that's unlikely so don't get your hopes up to high.

Erm ... I'll grant you the concealment argument, but you're severely understating the scale of the range difference. Tier IX and X cruisers can use the range mod to increase their firing range by 16% and from what I can see ingame many people do just that. As for hardly tougher ... sure, if you only look at armour thickness (but even then the infamous Zao troll armour or the Moskva in general would like to have a couple words) but the simple fact that tier IX and X cruisers get access to the damage repair party increases their effective maximum HP drastically compared to tier VIII or lower cruisers. Add in that higher tier cruisers typically also enjoy higher effective damage (either by way of faster rate of fire, more guns, more damage and/or better ballistics) means that in any form of engagement of a tier VIII or lower cruiser vs a tier IX or higher cruiser, the latter will always come out on top in a simple damage trade (assuming equal skill and no one is potatoeing and gleefully showing broadside to get wrecked by a single AP volley).

They just kept giving me broadside ...

Met a lot of people today. MasaruKondura, daki ... even had the (mis-)fortune of running into _FTD_ and [OMNI] friends in a game that was so hilariously lopsided I could naught believe it. Our own division also chanced across a [TTT] division in a game that was conversely so ludicrously lopsided I didn't even break 20k damage because the enemy was constantly running away (I swear, as soon as the Ocean map loads, 90% of the playerbase completely draws a blank and they just run the whole time). edit:// Oh, and 159Hunter ... gee, I saw so many familair faces today I can't even keep a proper headcount.

That doesn't make much sense ... if you'd rather be bottom tier in a tier VII than bottom tier in a tier VIII, that means that being bottom tier in tier VIII is less preferable, i.e.: worse. Sure you didn't mean that the other way round? Anyhoot, sure you can rack up neat numbers, but the power gap between tier VIII and tier X ships is quite significant and even then that isn't as much the issue as it's that I'm constantly being bottom tier and it starts to annoy me. If MM wants to make me work for pretty numbers, okay. But not bottom tier ALL THE TIME plz. Midtier and toptier games should be equally common, but alas they currently aren't and that's not how it should be!

Ac-tu-ally ... With IFHE the HIV 240mm guns have an HE pen of 52mm, meaning they can penetrate any armour of 51mm or less, which in fact means the deck armour of many tier X BBs that would otherwise be shattering your shells are now getting penetrated. Also, the infamously trollish Khabarovsk 50mm armour plating can be penetrated by your HE, which would make the HIV quite a threat to Khabarovsks whereas it can more or less shrug off hits from things like Zaos and Moskvas all day long due to the troll armour (and bounce AP with angling). At least that's the theory crafting aspect of it. HIV ballistics aren't that impressive so actually hitting a Khabarovsk would be much harder than with a Zao or Moskva so the effective damage could be more or less the same if not worse if the Khabarovsk can successfully dodge most of your shells, but the BB deckarmour penetration is a neat bonus on its own. Armour plating on BBs you could penetrate with IFH on HIV (which you can't penetrate without IFHE): German BBs from tier VIII onwards have 50mm maximum deckarmour (FdG is an exception as the armour deck around the turrets is actually 80mm, but the central deck around the superstructure is 50mm) Deck armour on the bow and aft section of the Yamato has a maximum of 50mm thickness (central armour deck starting and ending with the turrets is 57mm and can't be penetrated). You can also penetrate the Moskva's 50mm armoured deck. This is something only the 240mm guns on the HIV can do (with IFHE naturally) and I think that might be worth speccing into. It's certainly something I'd do just for shits'n'giggles alone though for the foreseeable future I'm not looking to grind the frenchies as I still have other lines to grind. Just putting this out here for people to test if they want to.

Well, we were being bottom tier the entire time beforehand (slight exaggeration, we were middle tier once!) except when playing tier X (duh). Then we invited Reaper and suddenly toptier all the damn time. So, if not better than Kostis MM then at least equal. And no, you can't have him. I will not allow lil' Reapy to talk to people who want them to lick their ponies. No responsible parent would do that!

A little update: still CTDing like mad everytime I play. Counted five CTDs today, including a nasty little one right at the beginning of a match (can consider myself fortunate that my ship didn't steam headlong into detection range before I reconnected!). Typically I don't crash when in a match so that's definately NOT appreciated. Also a new thing, since apparently I don't even have to do anything to CTD now. I had readied up for my division and was waiting when suddenly, without any input whatsoever the game CTD'ed ... on the plus side, another novelty was that I actually got a proper error message aside from "World of Warships has stopped working": The odd thing is that error code typically denotes a memory issue, but I've tested my memory and there were no problems with it, neither have I ever had that same error beforehand. New issue? I hope not ...

Limited DCPs is a bit hardhanded and probably incredibly hard to balance, especially against ships that have different flavours like say low caliber flamethrowers vs direct damage dealers in the midtiers. What I wouldn't mind would be a flat increase of the DCP cooldown for cruisers, battleships and possibly aircraft carriers. I'd also introduce the damage repair party (the heal) to cruisers earlier at tier VIII the latest. Maybe scaling the efficacy of that to the tier. I would also apply the same damage repair party scaling to BBs so people have to learn how to manage their HP rather than instantly put out the first fire with the damage control party only to get set on fire a couple times right after that.

Truth be told, I've already done that a couple times by putting my KM BB captain in it. More guns won't make it any less unservicable since the big manual secondary skill drop-off is at tier VI so your secondary gunners will be just insignificantly less drunk that before. You'll wreck anything close enough for secondaries with your torpedoes anyway.

I'll just make this public, I've adopted Reaper. His preferential MM is mine, mine alone!