VC381

Well, I actually have a Saipan and I realised when I logged back in I was just 1k XP away from Essex so now I have that too. While retraining the captain I played a dozen Saipan games at the weekend and never got a mirror match, so that's kind of promising for Hiryu. With CVs, I'm trying to find a balance between history and gameplay. Yes, laugh at me for hunting realism in WoWs, but I want to play a ship that was historically interesting and with a realistic air group if possible. Essex fits that (mostly), I'll have to see how I cope with T9 CV play but given how often Lexington ended up in T10 games Essex can only be better. Ranger is a bit ugly and an oddball so I'm not interested in her. Shokaku is great but has the same MM problems as Lex, and Taiho scares me because 7 air groups to manage. But unlike USN, IJN actually has a cool and important fleet carrier at T7 (well 2 actually but I'm not spending money on this game right now).

OK, sounds not bad. For Saipan, is it just the exit strafe without losing a fighter that makes it annoying? Does dogfighting expert still make you win straight up fights? To be honest I'm not sure most Saipans out there exploit their ride to the full. What about Kaga, how much of a threat is that?

Hello fellow CV captains So I'm dipping back in and out of the game and for all its warts I do enjoy CV play. I've got Shokaku but not much interest in grinding up, feeling like re-buying Hiryu just to have a mid-tier CV with OK MM that I can take out for fun. How is Hiryu these days? Competitive, strong, useless? Any other recommendations?

Although Tier 8 has a good selection of very strong premium ships with good earning potential, I see two problems. 1) even though you say you'll wait to play it until you're experienced, which is fine, there's no guarantee you'll actually like high tier play. Some people never do. 2) the premiums BBs at T8 are all very similar to their tech tree counterparts, in other words a bit stale from a gameplay point of view. I would suggest going for a T7 as the matchmaking and overall game enjoyment peaks at that tier in my opinion. You'll get to play your premium ship sooner and in my opinion enjoy it more. Also you get a selection of much more unique BBs that are significantly different to what you can research in the tech tree, which is a bonus. Earning potential remains decent. If your target is the German BB line, get the Scharnhorst over the Tirpitz. EDIT: the whole experience thing is overrated BTW and the people who smack you down for buying high tier premiums are just being elitist IMO. I bought Atago after playing for just 1 week and only having T5 Furutaka. It was a learning curve but I didn't have any problems and was soon doing very well. The gameplay high up is not really harder, it's just different and as I said often not in a good way. Whatever you buy, don't be scared to try it out when you feel ready. Just don't look at the chat...

Couldn't help notice the WG birthday banner has some rather bizarre fighter planes on it. RAF roundels, but not looking like anything well known. Bit of digging brings up this though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin-Baker_MB_3 An almost perfect match, actually for the MB 4 version when you consider the bubble canopy: So, why on earth would WG have a 3D model of such an obscure project fighter? Unless...

This. You're a battlecruiser and your job is to fold a flank by getting rid of enemy cruisers. You've got the speed to do it. Then your cruisers will eat their DDs and it's GG before their slow BBs are properly in position to do the same to you. I would actually say the 14" on Kongo are better against higher tier cruisers because they have the size and armour to actually take consistent damage while lower tier ones just frustrate you with miss+overpen.

Kongo hands down. I actually prefer playing it uptiered because T4/T5 maps feel too small for it and the speed is wasted. Kongo could easily be a T6 ship with small soft stat tweaks.

I can see your point and ultimately it comes down to personal preference, but I feel "shells in the air" is too late for me to be getting that information. As rvfharrier said, it's nice to have an idea of how much threat you are under and plan accordingly long before anyone is pulling triggers. If I'm heading towards danger and my PT jumps up, I have time to turn around or plan an island hop. Similarly, if my PT is zero I know I don't need to waste speed turning randomly and can expose broadside to maximise firepower. IFA could technically do that too, but with much less warning when your temporary safety ends.

Yup, +1 That build. Always CE before AFT though if you're not at 19 points yet. I dunno, I like PT. Gives you more warning than "incoming!" because people might have you locked while turning turrets and DDs can have you locked with torps. Also gives you a better picture of when you're clear.

So... what? There are BBs spread through most of that list and some cruisers quite high. Cluster of T8 cruisers near the bottom only shows majority of people don't know how to survive in them. If anything the list shows that concealment is A bigger factor in survival rate, since the sneaky BBs are at the top and some tanky ones quite low down. But really it's all pretty inconclusive. You can wave statistics around as much as you want but global stats like that don't really mean much given how many variables are involved. They certainly don't lend credibility to opinion pushed as "fact".

Not really, cruisers can dodge and disengage and generally play around at medium range while doing quite well at avoiding damage. It's great to abuse the greed you mention to get enemies to waste time turning turrets on you just to make them miss and then fade away. You can seriously mess with the effective RoF and damage potential of an enemy by doing this, as well as forcing tunnel vision and other mistakes. Does it work every time? Of course not. Does it work well enough to be effective? I would say yes. Honestly, people spouting such extreme negative views of cruiser survivability as gospel aren't much better than the so-called BBabies. As I said before, tone down the exaggeration and black-and-white thinking, then this might become a good discussion.

Yes, if you compare direct impact, of course. And it should be like that, it's what BBs were designed for. But if you consider over a period of time, including proportion of actual time spent being targetted and what other things you can do to avoid damage other than just "tanking" it, the gap is much narrower. The classes have different styles and are vulnerable to different things.

False assumption that they will be in the same situation. A BB is more likely to be in a situation where it is targeted and has far fewer tools to get out of those situations. Of course it's a skill to manage how long you spend in those situations and the incoming damage. But the point is cruisers and destroyers survive by better being able to avoid those situations in the first place, so it's not logical or fair to compare what happens when they get in the "same situation" without considering what circumstances put them there. "Everything hurts other classes more" is also not true. A BB could eat a salvo of normal penetrations that could be 4 misses and 2 overpens on a cruiser. Again, you cant compare direct result without factoring circumstance and probability.

And this is where you are so very, very wrong... To be honest, saying stuff like that about cruisers is no better than people complaining BBs are vulnerable. Just different people taking sides to ridiculous extremes to suit their own opinions. Cut the exaggeration then maybe we can have a discussion about this.

Well, if the top picture is off I blame the thread I got it from And yes, I know a lot of things aren't to scale, ships are about twice as big as they should be, houses are tiny, speeds are compressed. But that's not my main point. Say our Lexington is the correct length, it's still not the right width and height. That's why in the last two pictures I took Essex out of the comparison and enlarged the drawing to match the 3D model. That to me shows the length/width and length/height ratios are off. So it's not so much about absolute scale, but about proportions. That's what doesn't look right and can't be explained by the game compressing distances. All the ships in game still look like they did IRL even if they're huge compared to the houses. Lexington just looks a bit chibi.

Before I start, yes I know the 3D model that in game is called Lexington is actually based on USS Saratoga with the top hull being the 1945 appearance. Anyway, something has always bothered me playing this ship, it just didn't look right, and I went and did some comparisons. For reference, I'm using the shots from this thread: https://forum.worldofwarships.eu/topic/59891-ship-size-comparisons/ Right, so: Lexington class: Length - 277m (Saratoga wartime refit) Flight deck width - 32m (note flight deck does not overhang hull sides like later carriers) Essex class: Length - 266m (overall length of "short-bow" ships like the one we have in game) Flight deck width - 45m (maximum at midships overhang, not including elevator) Now, spot the problem from the top-view comparison: Lexington is WAY longer than Essex, much more than the 11m difference in the numbers. It is also visibly much wider, when in reality it should be about 25% NARROWER!!! To really see what I mean, I've inserted a drawing of USS Saratoga, scaled by length approximately based on the size of Essex in game: So our Lex is way too big, BUT that's not it. Even if we scale the Saratoga drawing to the same length that Lexington is in game, the width still doesn't match up: And in fact you can do the same thing with the height: Basically, our Lexington (Saratoga) in game is comically, hilariously distorted. It's way too big, and even if it was the right size it's proportionally far too wide and too tall for her length. I could feel it while playing, it just looks so chubby, which is a shame since it's such a graceful ship IRL. What's up with this? WG have done a fantastic job modelling a lot of ships but it seems they screwed up really badly here.

It's really not that bad. I mean, I wouldn't mind a re-work but it's a bit naive to assume anything they do will be better than what we have now.

Possibly, honestly wasn't paying attention in the few times I played that mission. Still, makes very little sense to pick such a random failed prototype instead of you know... something that actually might have served at Dunkirk and that they could just steal a model from WoWp (Spitfires too boring these days?). Only makes sense to model something crazy like that if it's part of their plan of high tier "what-if" planes for a CV line. Or so I'm telling myself. Who knows, RN CVs will probably have some outlandish gimmick which will make half the community complain that WG hates British while the other half are crying "OP" for no real reason.

In some ways this would not be unrealistic, armour penetration is so much more complex than "bigger angle = worse". Never mind that deck armour, belt armour and unarmoured steel have completely different resistance properties depending on angle. In some cases armour penetration gets worse as angle increases, then gets better again as the shell can flip and penetrate sideways or backwards instead of ricochet, all depending on shape of shell and type of steel on the armour. I'm not saying we should have all these mechanics, but it should not be difficult to implement some less simplistic algorithms. Many penetration calculation formulas are 100 years old and solved instantly by modern computers even for quite complex cases. I would settle for additional 50% ballistics compression so we have some realistic immunity zones inside the game.

I agree with this but WGs choices about ballistics and "effective" range mean that autobounce is the only possible protection. At the ranges battles take place in game, no BB is safe from another, the armour wasn't designed for that. I want them to remove autobounce. It's a bad mechanic to fix another bad mechanic. But for that to work they also have to massively increase the distance compression so that at least for ballistics the ranges are realistic and immunity zones actually work how they are supposed to. They don't have to change the game engine, just write 24km instead of 12km and make the shells behave right.

In that picture, you can clearly see the shells are coming from the left. You misunderstand "vertical" dispersion. As was explained in another thread, it means literally vertical: at 90 degrees to the sea surface. So WG ellipse where horizontal dispersion is much bigger than vertical should not be applied to the sea surface, but to an imaginary vertical surface through the target. After the shells pass through this imaginary vertical ellipse, they hit the sea in a fairly realistic pattern. So to say it another way, what WG call vertical dispersion is literally how the shells spread on your target high to low, NOT how long or short your shells will fall on the sea around your target. I completely agree though that autobounce is a bad mechanic that is too simple and unrealistic.

Come on guys, I was trying to make a tongue in cheek conspiracy joke while pointing out a rather bizarre plane that WG have no real reason to have modelled. And all I got was generic whine. Nobody going to actually pick up on what I posted about?

That really shouldn't happen. The turrets automatically adjust to converge aim at where you point the cursor. The length of the ship and how far apart the turrets are should make no difference to pattern size, except maybe as an optical illusion since your PoV is above one of the turrets groups so the shots from the other look like they come in from the side.

Ha ha ha ha... what?! Pretty much best concealment, or at least close second, at the tiers you are discussing. You said it yourself, they're hard to play, but that statement about concealment is factually incorrect. If you feel the ships don't have enough range, you're plain and simple not using them how they are supposed to be used. T9 and 10 use range module if you really want, even more than that I can't possibly understand why you would need. US cruisers have plenty of strengths, not every ship line needs to be easy-mode.

IMO, bread and butter to 10 points: PT EM or AR SI or DE CE Then to 15 points, the other ones on rows 2 and 3. Last 4... no idea, would be tempted by RDF if you don't care about AA.