VC381

I just think all forward looks better. Didn't make sense to me why WG picked that design from the dozen or so A-140 concepts when other options were available with all facing forward. The rearward angle would not be affected too badly.

Ok yes, the scaling looks ok from that. The perspective is one thing, but it doesn't help that a couple of ships are hilariously mis-proportioned. Just look at how fat Lexington is...

I'm aware that some battleships, especially older ones, were quite short. Is the differential size thing a myth then? Sometimes it looks wrong in game, maybe the perspective is forced. I was looking through the ship size comparison threads but they only have same class/tier together not across classes.

In this case the cruiser is longer than the BB IRL. But I'm also pretty sure the game "scale" is distorted across ship types, with DDs and cruisers being a little bit bigger than they should be compared to BBs.

Hmm, I had a go and I think I fired 5 torpedo salvos without a single hit. I scared a Blyska out of cap and got it myself, but it just felt so anti-climatic eventually I got bored and rushed a Gneisenau when the game was already won, at least I got "It's just a flesh wound". I think I need to work on position and learning where enemies are likely to be, half the time I look at the map and think "where have my team gone?", and Akatsuki doesn't do much alone. I like playing ships where I can actively go and do something and not need too much backup, hanging back and screening potatoes is just so boring and frustrating.

Yeah... am I the only one who's experience points the other way? And no, it isn't because I don't know how to play the Belfast, but I just feel that although the combination seems powerful on the surface the ship is just something you can't afford to take risks with. It's all sneaky-campy and I don't think that impacts games, and it's also a completely yawn-inducing playstyle. Fiji can be thrown into a brawl and expect to come out the other end, and that actually forces people to react to you, allows you to draw fire and tank to an extent while dishing it out fast as well. Belfast has a situational advantage with positioning and radar but has no burst damage, and the minute you're spotted you're dead, you have nothing, no agility, no armour, no heal. Fiji is much more of a "here I am, what are you going to do about it?" ship, and that has game impact, more than being an annoying DD-repellent cloud. I find Fiji way more fun an as you can see I do far better in it.

So I got a NC recently and the captain is on 13 points. I wanted to run a stealth build so currently I have: Preventative Maintenance Expert Marksman Superintendent Concealment Expert You'll notice that means I have 3 points spare. I'm finding that between the sneaking and the generally good survivability (even stock) I'm not desperate to dump those points on tanking skills. I also don't really care about speccing into AA since the ship is scary enough as it is and CVs are either not in the battle or mostly leave you alone anyway. I'm actually looking at Adrenaline Rush to get the most out of my main guns as the battle goes on and I take inevitable damage. Has anyone tried that on this ship? How strong does it feel?

To be honest, it's all well and good us (me included) singing the ship's praises but if the OP just doesn't like slow shell speed that's fair enough. I know I strongly dislike some ships that are widely considered very strong just due to some quirk of their playstyle. My pet hate is bad rudder shift for example. So I guess repeated "but NC is really good anyway" doesn't provide a satisfactory answer to your question. Unfortunately (depending on your point of view), shell speed is one thing WG do like to keep historical and not enough people see changes in shell speed as a problem for a line or slow shells as an issue on a particular ship (especially NC) for that to change. If you just don't like it, nobody's going to hold it against you. Having said that, did it really take you 5 tiers to adapt to a way to aim? I know it's individual perception but I jump up and down tiers, between ships with vastly different shell velocities, in the same play session and my aim doesn't suffer at all. It really doesn't take that much time or practice to adapt to the aim of a ship, even one you never played before, and after that it's like riding a bike even after playing something completely different. But like I said, if that's just your "kryptonite" that's fair enough. Guess you need to grit your teeth and bear with it or Free XP if you just want Iowa.

Have you ever played Cleveland? Sorry, couldn't resist Anyway, the shell speed is a small price to pay for the combination of dispersion and sheer destructive power per shell. I pulled a quadra-citadel on another NC at 15km, and citadel plus another 15k damage in normal pens on a Yamato at 17km. If you're trying to snipe cruisers that might be the issue, but a bit of practice and these guns really sing. Plus you can build crazy stealth and get unseen into ranges where flight time hardly matters. That's why you shouldn't assess on just one trait, the whole package makes up for the weakness.

BBs get quite good rewards from potential damage, which is all the damage incoming to you even if it doesn't actually hit. Since you sank in Fuso but did a very good game anyway, I have to assume you tanked a lot. In Essex I imagine nobody fired a shot at you, so no XP for tanking.

The problem is, WG don't want to sell.a T10, and they are right. They should not create a way to go straight to the top tier of the game, that's why there is no normal premium above T8. Missouri can be bought but at least it requires you to grind 750k XP on some ship first, so you are hopefully not a total noob. If they want another T9 reward ship, the the fame of Musashi means she will make sense, and they need to make her work. For me, the game is unrealistic anyway so as long as the ship looks right the it is that ship for me, some stats can be changed. You can instead consider it that Yamato is unrealistically buffed to be T10 because WG just wanted it like that.

As I said, WG can make up the differences if they want to. Aoba and Myoko have identical turrets but different RoF and traverse speed. Amagi and Nagato have the same guns and turrets but different sigma and dispersion. I know it's nice to think that they are sister ships so they should be the same, but really that's just naive. Also it's unnecessarily limiting for the game design.

I disagree with the idea Indianapolis is a dedicated cruiser hunter and nothing else, and therefore isn't suited to the meta. You can use AP very effectively on BBs since they normally don't think to angle against you and get more DPM that way than other ships can with HE+fire, and AP damage is not as easy to repair. It's easy to cherry pick one thing in turn that another ship can do better but the strength of Indianapolis is versatility and a lack of glaring weakness. You just need to adapt on the fly rather than trying to make it conform to what the meta things is "right". And she did get a RoF buff, she's at 14s which is plenty for a stealthy ship with 9 accurate 203mm guns. Only Algerie and Yorck fire faster, both have 8 guns and other weaknesses.

Soft stats comrade by tweaking those things that are made up anyway (bow armour, turret traverse, rudder shift, dispersion, sigma, even penetration) they can balance it at T9. You would basically have a ship that can hit like a Yamato in theory but that will be horribly sluggish and/or inaccurate i.e. far less effective in practice and therefore "balanced".

I highly doubt we would have seen anything past No.13 and N3 even without the WNT. It would have taken until the late 20s probably to get even those plans operational, by which time either the respective economies would have imploded or another war started and focus shifted to emergency war construction of smaller ships. They were already pushing the limits of practical ship size, anything bigger is just daydreaming with 1920s tech. And no, the fleet carriers would not have been there to show their supremacy, even if they could have in theory. CV development in the 1920s was the direct result of BB cancellations, both actual conversions and general availability of resources. If the massive BBs went ahead they would have been escorted by little more than a couple of Langley's or Hosho's, or at most the Courageous class for the RN. And it would have been a naval war where everyone would be too scared to use the monsters they ran their economy into the ground building.

I haven't played the French cruiser line past T6 yet but I see they can be quite slippery, so I suppose there is an argument there that if you're shooting constantly at max range anyway you don't necessarily need CE. But basically every other cruiser does to some extent. Let me flip the question. You say it's 4 skill points, but what else are you going to spend those points on? AA builds are fairly pointless these days, secondaries nope, only a few ships benefit from IFHE and you aren't a BB to get big benefits from stacking low and mid tier survivability skills. Basically, there's nothing I can think of getting instead, and even if there is I would still get CE first as soon as the captain hits 10 points and whatever else at 12, 13 or 14 points. Now, if we're talking instead about the concealment module, there I can see a worthwhile trade-off to get the rudder shift instead. In fact all my T8+ non-IJN cruisers use rudder shift instead of concealment. So as an overall answer, yes, there are ships and playstyles where going for absolute max concealment isn't essential. But, for all the reasons the others mentioned that I won't repeat, all cruisers benefit from concealment to some degree. If you are even thinking about aggressive positioning, concealment becomes essential. And if you aren't getting concealment you need to be getting something else instead that's worth it. As I said, with the module that makes sense, but with the CE skill it doesn't (to me anyway) so I get it first on all cruisers.

This looks very nice, they put effort into the model rather than copy-pasting a Nagato bridge and Yamato funnel. Amagi is great and this doesn't look that different. My issue here is that it's T8, with the high purchase cost and crappy MM that comes with. Not to be a stick in the mud, but I would personally still prefer Ashitaka at T7, not so much because of the stock hull gimmick, but because it would be T7. I am unlikely to buy this, since I have Amagi and I'm not actively progressing the IJN BB line. I don't need a premium in this line for the sake of training or premium bonuses, I want either a ship that gives me something the rest of the line doesn't, or one to replace a silver ship (the kind I might like to keep but am too lazy to train a captain for) when I move on from it. This isn't really the first and I'm not planning to do the second (at T8 at least) so... Still, aside from my own preferences, nevertheless a beautiful ship and great addition to the game!

I haven't tested too extensively, but I used FP on Warspite and while it was quite nice I eventually swapped to a concealment build on her and didn't miss it. I use HA+JoaT on Amagi and I think the combo works great and is more versatile than FP, which doesn't help against flooding and module damage and IMO is too expensive a skill for what it does. Colorado is decently accurate at medium range and is a small ship with a small superstructure, so I don't think it benefits that much from getting the centre fires zones combined. Having said that, US BBs work pretty well with concealment builds too.

Oh yeah, it's great fun on the rare occasions when that happens, especially in the Fiji. Pensacola and Indianapolis love games like that too. Do you guys think this is because of the Savo Island mission? You basically need to be in a cruiser to get the last stage.

I understand how the accuracy mechanics work, I'm just saying my own experience does not bear out the fact that Mutsu is inaccurate, and neither do I feel the impact of the supposed bad penetration. There is definitely a solid range band where Mutsu is both more accurate than a good chunk of the BBs at and around her tier and where her guns have plenty of punch. And she has the speed to comfortably achieve and maintain that range band. Edit: I just checked and with Mutsu I have 35% main battery hit ratio. That's second only to ARP Kongo (38%), which is a bit of an anomaly anyway because I only played 5 games in her.

All the guys talking about accuracy... are we playing the same ship? Sure she's not Warspite pinpoint, but I've never felt it was a key issue. Do you all have unrealistic expectations based on Nagato, or have you never played any German BBs to really know what "inaccurate" means?

I voted "no" because I do agree that there is an issue with relative detectability and vision mechanics generally favouring BBs when stealth isn't meant to be their "thing". But I also think just straight up nerfing BB detection ranges is a bit too blunt a solution, especially since even the biggest high tier maps can start to feel very small with the effective ranges of some ships. I think there needs to be a better trade-off between seeing and being seen. In particular, sight range (that triangle of how far you can actually "see") is pointlessly large for most classes and I think WG are missing a trick they could use as a vision balancing tool. If everyone's sight range was shorter, a DD couldn't just sit in cap and spot everything approaching for friendly cloaked BBs to shoot like fish in a barrel. And a BB couldn't camp because it would only have basic minimap info of enemy movement (you could re-work the spotter plane to buff view range instead so BBs have windows in which they can use their full gun range but otherwise not be able to see that far). It would also create a genuine trade-off between running the concealment module and the aiming system one that's otherwise basically useless now. That would leave stealthy BB play a valid tactical choice and even allow the odd outspot/ambush of some cruisers, which can be fun and isn't a problem in itself. But it would cause a trade-off by a) not having as good overall spotting information to set up those ambushes as reliably and b) not being able to project your power at longer ranges as reliably.

As rvfharrier said, this indeed works on most BBs but Bismarck is specifically more resistant to this tactic and requires a different approach. Fortunately, she has a lot of flat sided superstructure to farm damage on. Also, as I said, vary your aim point, if nothing else to experiment and get a feel for yourself as to what works and what doesn't on a specific target.

Just out of curiosity, what do you see as the Dutch cruiser tree? The actual ships that served in WWII are T5 material, T6 at a stretch. I know there are other trees where a lot of the upper tiers are "what if" but at least e.g. the Russians have two real ships (silver and prem) at T8. I'm happy with most "what if" ships but without something real to work towards higher up it's not a line I would play. Also for the County class, yes they were tin clad as built but several got an armour upgrade in the late 1930s, with a complete 4.5" belt, which is not bad. RN CLs are already tiered a bit weird due to their special abilities (remember the fuss about how Leander should be T5?) so it's not a stretch for me to see two different (real) representatives of the County class at T7 and T8 in different fits. Surrey is an OK alternative but I always prefer keeping it real where possible.

Maybe for slower or more brawling-oriented BBs but Amagi has the speed and effective range to not be centre of attention and constantly on fire like that. At least in my experience getting double centre fires is quite rare. Also I forgot to mention I run AR in this build, so I'm happy to let several fires burn to get the reload buff then repair it all back up. Since fire damage repairs 100% that means I make full use of my 5 shorter CD repairs (SI+JoaT). There have also been several games where I damage controlled e.g. a bow and centre fire only to be snuck up on by the CV and flooded. Without HA+JoaT I would have been gone, and FP would have done squat in those situations, but instead I came back swinging because I had all my consumables up. As I said, I agree FP is a strong skill on first inspection and there are definitely ships and playstyles that benefit from it, but for me it's not a universal cornerstone as you say.