VC381

Funny you should say that, I really enjoyed the Karlsruhe still sold it though for the Konig, which I also enjoyed. I didn't think of farming flags, but then again try not to play for the sake of farming alone. It is tricky to balance playing a ship because you enjoy it against that nagging feeling that you could be researching something rather than piling XP on an elite ship. I guess a competent carrier in a low tier game will just destroy everyone, with a cruiser there isn't much you can do since even if you're good you're liable to get focused and your impact is limited.

It sounds tempting in principle but Kastike hit the nail on the head. Think of low tier matches and how they are a brainless mess where the only thing that matters is combined volume of fire, little or no variety and no real tactics. It might work but only if you made the rooms smaller as well, most of those real life cruiser squadron battles were more like 6v6 or less, not 12v12.

Possibly a bad idea so hot on the heels of the Tirpitz sale, there are probably a lot of people that just bought Tirpitz and wouldn't be able to justify buying this as well.

I don't have her but unless the wiki is lying her range is 16.3km, yes? I play the Fuso and while it is nice to take pot-shots at people at 20km, most of my damage comes when I close to <16km anyway. Also Fuso has no hope to 1v1 a Warspite that knows what he's doing.

I did try to account for the other variables before posting, I have outrun my smokescreen before but this didn't feel like that. I know it doesn't render fully if you're inside it but you do get a haze around your screen which wasn't there either. I'll be more careful about being fully stopped and check if the "detected" alert has the little radar symbol. I could have been too quick to assume a bug and always more to learn, but it was still pretty suspicious. Thanks!

I have no problem with DDs as such, only with this quirk of the MM: If ever there is an even number of destroyers in the game and more than 4 total, it gives one team 2 more than the other instead of splitting equally. Always I see 3v1, 4v2, 5v3 etc. Why, just why?! Sometimes the other team gets an extra BB, as if that somehow compensates. Destroyers actually balance themselves out with quite a few good gunboats hunting down the torp spammers, but not if the enemy DDs can be everywhere at once while yours can't!

Collision avoidance is horrible, nothing worse than the AI taking control of your ship randomly. You can cut much closer to friendlies than that allows quite safely. The worst thing is people playing chicken and turning the same way when trying to avoid each-other. IRL it would be rare for ships on the same side to be sailing in opposite directions across the battle space but the map setups and general lack of organisation means it will happen. Also IRL there are simple collision avoidance rules (always pass other ships port side to port side, ships on your starboard bow always have priority etc.) but good luck getting the whole player base to follow them.

You should train yourself to zoom out after each shot (use right click), look around, change course if needed, zoom back in. Everyone goes tunnel vision sometimes, it's up to you to get better and not do that instead of expecting the game to do it for you. Plus the people who really tunnel vision will just ignore the warning as well.

OK, I have won 3 out of 12 games so far with this ship and I'm close to giving up. I get OK-ish damage numbers (55k average over those first 12 games) but I feel completely useless. It's frustrating as hell to play and I feel nothing I do makes a difference to the outcome of the battle. In my Kongo I was king (70% win rate despite mediocre average damage) but Fuso? I just can't make it work. The way I feel, unless cruisers present their broadside to you, you're not killing anything. The spread makes long range fire a waste of time, and the armor pen on the AP shells feels like unless you get perfect 90 degree broadside shots they just bounce. Just now I had a game where I was at 5km range (!?) to a stationary North Carolina. OK he's Tier 8, but not known for good belt armor. Salvo after salvo, 8 to 10 hits on the citadel area, 1k damage. In some games I spammed HE and actually did moderately better. The flip-side is... everything will citadel you in return, at any range, any angle, bow, stern, doesn't matter, you take tons of damage. OK this has turned into a big rant but I a have not yet been THIS disappointed by a ship in this game, especially since everyone goes on about how much of a monster it is. Maybe it doesn't suit me, but I just don't get it. Help? EDIT: forgot to say, this isn't a stock issue since I used Free XP on the B hull and propulsion module before starting to play the ship.

Fair point, they could have made it a bit easier. I was aware of the issue and used free XP to get the hull and propulsion before I even played her, so I don't know how bad it really is. Having said that I think it would be cool if the game had a WWI mode where all the mid tier BBs were limited to stock hulls and mixed in with the actual WWI cruisers (that are usually lower tier).

Cool, I'll try using it again to see if I get an advantage in aiming. Still wish it lasted longer though.

It's consistent with the stated game mechanics, that firing range is based on the height of the main rangefinder. IJN BBs get their huge range from the fact the rangefinder is at the top of the "pagoda". But Fuso stock is just a WWI BB, her rangefinder is on the armored conning tower (barely above B turret) and she's dropped into a tier where the cruisers and destroyers are all 1930s designs. Upgraded she's a brand new ship and does fine but stock she's basically time-travelled to being obsolete by 20 years. It's harsh but there's no way around it given her extensive rebuild. Also Kongo should have the same terrible range stock for the same reasons, she's the one that doesn't make sense, not Fuso.

Yeah, I know what it does but I rarely ever shoot at my maximum range, why would I want it increased? I guess I don't realise how short ranged other BBs are, but then isn't the spread really bad if you extend the range anyway? The second part can be useful but the duration is so short you don't have time to get used to it. It might be easier to see the target but aiming feels different.

Stock Fuso has terrible range, most of the additional range comes from the hull upgrade, not the GFCS. ~20km fully upgraded, I recommend spending your free XP on it or it will be painful.

I think he meant success rate on an otherwise accurate shot, but yes everything in game is far more accurate than real life. Which is fine, think of the RNG cries if it was realistic and how frustrating battleship play would be. EDIT: Also several Japanese cruisers and destroyers were lost to otherwise minor damage (fighter plane strafing in some cases) because it set off their torpedoes in the tubes and reloads, do you want the whole IJN line to be experts at farming "detonation" achievements?

This is also a good point, plus with pre-dreadnoughts battle ranges were still short enough that you might get flanked and so having guns on the other side of the ship wasn't a complete waste. But the designs evolved fairly slowly, only the US picked up on superfiring turrets immediately. Britain and Germany built several ship classes with wing turrets (later staggered so each could fire across the ship) despite having turbine propulsion. Magazines go very deep in the ship, so even without the height of triple expansion machinery it's tricky to fit everything on the centreline especially on something like a battlecruiser where most of the hull is engine. This is where oil propulsion really helped, much more power out of smaller boilers. Also if I remember correctly the British had a strong fear of having multiple turrets knocked out by a single hit and used that as an argument against superfiring arrangements for quite a while. By the time they got to the Orion/KGV/Iron Duke classes it was obvious there was no better way to fit 5 turrets on a ship, but if you look at the contemporary battlecruisers it tells a story. They didn't do the most "logical" thing (delete the middle turret and fill the space with engines) but instead got rid of the superfiring pair aft and split the engine room (Lion class) or at least spaced the turrets far apart (Tiger, Kongo class). The British had an additional quirk with superfiring in that their turrets had open sighting hoods at the front. This meant if B turret fired directly forward over A turret, the muzzle blast would go straight into A turret and completely incapacitate or even injure the crew there. So even with superfiring turrets, British battleships/battlecruisers of WWI design could only fire A turret directly ahead, or Y turret directly astern.

The best you can do is get two squadrons of torpedo bombers and attack simlutaneously from two directions at 90 degrees to each-other, that way no matter which way he turns he gets hit by something. More than that I don't know because I don't play carriers. I doubt reading up about real life tactics will help that much (other than being interesting). Plane squadron mechanics are very simplified, not much from real life to apply, more learning gameplay but you should read some dedicated CV threads for that.

Yeah, I realised afterwards I probably went a bit too basic in my explanation. I think the reason they are so big is related to the fact she is an older ship. She was designed before WWI. Cruisers need a lot of power, those three funnels mean she has a lot of boilers taking up a lot of space in the hull, so basically the machinery is inefficient and the only way to make more power is to just have lots of it. All that needs more air, and if the machinery is inefficient you can assume the ducting is as well so instead of a more refined solution you just get lots of huge intakes. Well, to start with I just want to say that I enjoy the game and the fact the ships are beautifully modelled but I started playing knowing it isn't realistic, so I just bear that in mind and ignore a lot of things and just enjoy the game. In fairness, some things do need to be different to real life, for game balance, or to give nations unique traits and make the game interesting like Panocek said. TBasic answer to your questions, torpedo bombers were dangerous if ignored, useless if swarmed by fighters. Japanese torpedo bombers had reasonable success at both Coral Sea and Midway. I feel dive bombers in game should have the option to equip AP, as at the moment it seems they drop HE. IRL dive bombers armed to take out ships used bombs designed in a similar way to AP shells and could penetrate deck armor and cause magazine explosions. AA itself was less effective in real life than in game, but not useless. It was just a big numbers game, throw enough metal in the air and something will hit, enough to cause meaningful attrition on the attacker but usually not enough to save you from a determined attack. I don't have numbers to hand plus you could write a book on the subject. Kawachi is a pre-dreadnought and from a design point of view her turret layout is terrible. Basically you're wasting the weight of two turrets that can't fire to one side. Remember the game is sped up and much more dynamic than real naval combat, where squadrons of battleships would just sail in a line and fire at each-other. Good arcs of fire across the bow and stern were less important IRL than broadside, so in that sense it matters less if you have one turret at the front and two at the back or the other way around (or in the middle of the ship for that matter). The game punishes bad arcs, but having all turrets on the centreline like Myogi is still the best arrangement. Myogi is also not a real ship, only a design study (one of many not used), so there can be any number of reasons for the layout. My own theory is that it's to do with centre of gravity: if you put the second turret above and behind the front one it's much higher in the ship (because the bow is a deck higher than the stern). Other ships did use the 1 front 2 back layout though (Konigsberg, Nurnberg, a lot of IJN DDs).

You're welcome, I've been interested in ships and naval history for a long time so I jump at the opportunity to explain things Air vents, well, all ships of that time burned something (initially coal but after WWI almost all switched to oil) to make steam for propulsion. The smoke goes up the funnel but people seem to forget that you can't burn fuel without oxygen, so you need to get air down into the boilers somehow (not to mention ship engine rooms are horrible hot and stuffy places). So all ships have intakes to draw air down into the boilers and the engine rooms in general, and the piping for these tend to run down alongside where the funnels go up (saves having to make more holes in armored decks). It just so happens that the actual intakes you can see above the deck are really big and obvious on Svetlana, but all the ships have them if you look hard enough. Curving the intake forward means the ship speed helps force the air down but isn't strictly necessary, it depends how the rest of the flow is designed. There are also generic air vents for ventilating crew spaces but these tend to be smaller and scattered around the ship. I'm pretty sure the ones you're asking about on Svetlana are the boiler and engine room intakes.

Oh course you do, the Italians helped design them (well, Kirov anyway, and the rest copy the style)!

Ferry has the right idea. The cloud appears behind your ship, so if you're moving you'll lay a long smoke "barrier", if you're standing still it just refreshes the same region around you. Also, I believe the "linger" time of the smoke depends on nation, with IJN having the shortest and USN the longest, although I don't know the numbers and it seems measuring it isn't an exact science.

I think the best point in this thread, well made by several people, is that there's no point puffing chests and arguing for prides sake what the ship was IRL, and that a ship so unique and different from all contemporary types can only be a premium in the current state of the game, or in its own tree branch in the very long term. The thing I care about the most, as I said before, is for the ship to be tiered with her historical contemporaries, not squeezed somewhere she doesn't belong. I would also like to see Project 82, B-65, O-project etc. added in the long term. But if we're going to fight this battle to have these "super-cruisers" (in my opinion the most accurate term for them) added in game, and sort out the ship type identity and balance issues that they cause with their uniqueness, it makes sense to do Alaska first since she was actually built.

Why don't we have the US Porter or Somers class destroyers in game? Would it really be that hard to balance a destroyer that is a pre-war design but with an 8x 5" gun main armament? Also, what does this say about possible future ships? Are we then unlikely to have a Tribal class for the same reason? What about German destroyers with their cruiser caliber (150mm) main guns? It just seems that WG has taken a fairly low power benchmark to balance destroyers around that makes some of the lines (US in particular) a dull progression of similar ships while locking out some interesting and unique classes (Porter and Somers as I said above).

Scharnhorst has armor to rival Bismarck, Alaska does not. Also Scharn has the option for the uncompleted upgrade to 6x 38cm guns. Not a fair comparison despite superficial similarities. Also the Alaska was more an excercise in how big can you make a cruiser before it's too expensive to be worth it. It was actually a complete waste IRL since it never did anything a Baltimore couldn't have done on a fraction of the size/cost.

Yes. They are beautiful ships, I want one and would sail it no matter where it ended up, although I prefer the idea of it being a top tier cruiser. I say that because they are late war ships and squeezing them in as lower tier BBs would be making the Cleveland mistake all over again. It would break what little historical immersion there is, they would eat every cruiser alive and have crazy OP AA for their tier. And you can argue all day about what different people call them but the official USN pennant numbers were CB-1, CB-2 etc. CC was only ever used for the Lexington class.