VC381

Which they very well could be. The RN's combat prowess came from a combination of huge tactical experience, first class training and in some cases numbers. Some of their ships were revolutionary in concept but often the ships themselves are nothing impressive when compared 1v1 to contemporaries. Also the game heavily skews what are good and bad traits for ships to have compared to what was the case IRL. Of course it all depends on what WG choose to be the flavour or "trick" for the line. Safe bet is on Warspite style, although I'm still hoping for something really unique and different like a pure BC line. Anyway I'm not really expecting anything super special, of course I will still play them. But I think a lot of people will have to quickly forget a lot of myths when RN BBs come out. With high expectation comes great disappointment...

You mean Stalingrad? WG are going to get boxed in by their own autobounce mechanics with that thing, it's a balancing nightmare. Don't get me wrong, I have a strong interest in project ships and I would rush grind a Stalingrad if one was in game, but they are not necessarily easier to implement. Also, weirdly, I would be more interested in fictional ships if the game was actually realistic, then you could get a feel for how they might have performed. As it is, the "I'm on a cool ship" factor is stronger with real ships even though some projects are pretty awesome in their own right.

So upgrades are 50% off and I though I would stock up by de-mounting upgrades on some of my ships and re-buying them cheap but it seems I can't buy more if I have some available. Is this right? Is there no way to "stock up" on cheap upgrades for future ships during this sale?

Well, I worked it out in that I can buy a module different to what I have. So I could, for example, demount a Steering Gear Mod, buy a Propulsion Mod, swap back and have the spare Propulsion Mod I want and the Steering Gear Mod back on the ship that needs it. 50 doubloons per swap, only worth it for the top few upgrade slots but I only need a few specific things. Yeah, some kind of depot would be awesome!

Yeah all my ships have them but I wanted to buy more for ships I haven't finished researching yet...

It's tricky. My stats in Myoko really annoy me, I have decent average damage and win rate which forces me to admit she is a good ship, but I didn't particularly enjoy it. The turret traverse and the gun angles constantly frustrated me and (as you found out) it just kicks you in the teeth whenever you try to pull off an aggressive play. But if you play chilled (cautious but chilled) it just racks up damage. It's just... boring... but it works! You are right, to an extent you are relying on punishing enemy mistakes but there's still an element of being in the right place to do it. I've heard her called a great support ship, in the sense that you're the DPS while someone else tanks or herds enemies at you, you just need to practice being in the right place relative to your team to be able to contribute free damage. The concealment is pretty decent, all standard T7 cruisers except Fiji have worse. And the fairly flat arcs and great dispersion make the guns very useable out to max range, so you don't have to close too far to be useful. You can easily be that guy that waits at about 13km for the enemy to engage and then open up at just the right time to turn the tide in your teams favor, but it requires patience and planning. Another thing I've seen people say is, play like a very squishy BB.

Try to stay second line so others take the heat or try to fight while kiting, not aggressive bow in. Myoko shines on DPS when not focused, unchallenged damage potential but poor in making solo plays. One trick that works well for all IJN cruisers from here up is, close under cover of concealment or islands, judge situation, turn around, reveal and fire. Then adjust as necessary, but your torps are now on target and you're ready to beat it and vanish if it's all gone wrong.

At least unlike the Germans there are plenty of real upgrade examples and they are all very similar. Stick a Warspite style bridge/superstructure on everything, merge a funnel or two, will be very believable and probably quite good looking.

Well, most IJN DDs carried torpedo reloads while most DDs of other nations didn't. Once we accept that infinite torpedo ammo is a necessary break from realism to make DDs "balanced" in WGs world where each ship type must have equal combat value, then that reload booster at least attempts to incorporate the real relative strength of IJN in this regard, at least in flavour if not actual timing.

I see Renown as T6, mainly because the closest equivalent we have is Kongo, and Renown is better in every way except number of guns. Gneisenau is balanced by RNG but if we're feeling accuracy will be a "thing" for the RN line (or at least that the 15"/42 ships will shoot like Warspite does now) then 6 x 15" is plenty. Again though the armor argument can get very weird because in game angling reduces the importance of belt thickness and although only 9" the belt (and therefore most of the citadel) on Renown is almost submerged. Could be that in game, ships like her can achieve survivability beyond initial impressions from belt thickness and battlecruiser roots. Having said that, armament would probably still cap tier at 6. Which I find annoying because a 32 knot ship with likely a huge turning circle feels very limited on mid tier maps. I always wished to be up-tiered in Kongo for example, so I could really stretch the ships legs... I think BCs would be more fun if the MM split them as a separate type and tiered them higher rather than trying to balance them as lower tier BBs, but that's not going to happen.

Exactly. I agree with your assessment there that the risk was small, you were a small target and Tirpitz has horrible dispersion. I don't agree that every time you're a bit too close to a BB it's a mistake and only RNG saves you. What really makes cruiser play is calculated risk taking. And actually, playing on the greed of enemy BBs and being bait is hugely useful. Imagine you draw fire from 2 or 3 BBs but on your terms (you're ready to dodge and kite). They're going to get angry and tunnel vision, you'll eventually take a stray citadel or two but in the meantime have saved your team the wrath of countless BB salvos and dragged them out of position. Be that thorn in their side that's too much resource commitment to chase and kill but too damaging to ignore, force that choice on them. Stat to watch out for is "potential damage" in the end game screen. This is how much damage you would have taken if every enemy shell and torpedo fired at you hit to full effect. You even get XP based on it. Aim for a million or more and think about that for a second... You just made the enemy team spend a million damage worth of firepower trying to remove something with only ~30k HP. Even if they succeed, the effort spent is so disproportionate it gives your team a big advantage.

Love it, enjoyable and pretty accurate. Every CV player should read this.

Situational awareness and good dodging are your friends. It's hard work but you need to know where every enemy BB is at all times and if heir guns are pointed at you to be angled against them (not to bounce shells but at least to be a small target) and also be ready to dodge when they fire (not before as that wastes your speed and gives them a chance to predict). Cleveland is pretty nimble despite her size, the problem is her arcs are hard to use at long range so you need to take more risks to get the DPS. Murmansk is a floating citadel coated in tin but Cleveland is very tough for a cruiser, especially at that tier. Just keep angling and dodging (and praying a little). I haven't played IJN below T7 for a long time, not sure what Furutaka and Aoba are capable of these days but generally you want to keep your range with those and favor kiting over pushing. Usually with IJN cruisers I use the stealth to get close then turn around before engaging, and always fight while moving away.

You're getting screwed by a very heavy battleship meta, partly influenced by direct and indirect buffs and partly by the earlier release of German battleships. That means BBs are hugely popular and most games have the full cap, 5 BBs on each team, all hungry for cruiser citadels. Check the teams in your games, if your cruiser count is low you need to be doubly careful, since without RN smoke the minute you reveal yourself you've got multiple BBs trying to farm your HP. This is even harder since a lot of people are playing destroyers to try to counter the BBs, so it's not uncommon for teams to be 4 DD, 3 cruiser 5 BB, which makes it very hard for cruisers to stay hidden or share the heat. There was also a change in matchmaking which resulted in T5 getting dragged into T6 and T7 games way more often than before, so ships like Omaha and her premium clones can't go around being easy-mode clubbers anymore. Having said that, if you were a cruiser main you're probably doing all the right things, you just need to do them twice as well. I'm not trying to discourage you, just fill you in on changes that might affect your experience. Cruisers are my favorite class as well and I refuse to be beaten by MM or game balance issues, I just take the challenge as it comes and do my best in the ships I enjoy playing. Any specific ships you're having trouble with?

OK here are some replays as promised. The first might not work as it was a few weeks ago, I think before the last patch. The other two are above average but not spectacular games. As I said I don't claim to be an amazing player just want to show what can be done with a bit of practice in this ship. I made a huge mistake in the second but by then it didn't matter, I made 150k silver profit without premium. Just take it as a bit of fun http://wowreplays.com/Replay/22637 http://wowreplays.com/Replay/22638 http://wowreplays.com/Replay/22639 As for hunting DDs, it's true the RoF usually won't let you kill a DD outright in a 1v1 but that isn't the point. The point is to surprise the enemy DD and force them out of cap. And if you tell people ahead of time you're using radar and have an aware team-mate then the enemy DD is much more likely to be dead. Torps should never be an issue for you in this ship, definitely not to the point you are scared to use all 9 guns. You can wiggle back and forth better than anything T7+. The aim takes some getting used to but at the end of the day it's just practice. If you play the ship enough you'll get to the point where you can hit a DD first salvo and then the accuracy is pure murder (6+ shells on target per salvo not uncommon). If the DD is still in smoke and you sneak up and hit the "surprise motherf*****" button, you can't miss. And if you pre-aim by tracking where the DD stopped and where he is firing from in smoke you get 3 salvos in one use of radar, plenty to have him running and scared for most of the rest of the game.

Weren't most of the hits on Bismarck at such short range that it's fairly meaningless to use them as a benchmark for the power of the guns? In game terms, as fnord said, most fighting is this close anyway so autobounce is more important than theoretical belt penetration.

There are two misconceptions here. First, yes CE might improve your survivability but it does so at the cost of firepower (because you need to stop shooting to vanish) and map presence. Super rudder shift is the only thing that can keep you alive while firing constantly and is a better combo because of it as you don't have to dread that exclamation mark and you will do much more damage. The combo is extra strong on NO because of the small turning circle and good speed retention in turns. You will also get tons of XP from potential damage, it's not unusual for me to have upwards of 2 million potential damage on my score sheet at the end. Distracting multiple BBs and trolling them by dodging (or even bouncing) everything they throw is a huge help to your team. Hiding in concealment is not. Secondly, random citadels happen but taking yourself out of the fight is purely psychological. I've had some of my best games where I've been smacked down to low HP early on then fought as if it didn't happen. You're relying on dodging, and yes you're at risk of sinking on any salvo but that risk is no different from the risk of taking a citadel while on full HP. For example, if you play aggressive and take minimum damage but eat two unlucky citadels at the 10 minute mark, nothing has changed, you have exactly the same chance of playing the rest of the game without taking more damage as you would if you were full HP all the way. If you take the risk you can get so much more done. I'm way too aggressive in my NO and I sink a lot but usually it's late in the game by then and I've made my impact, more than I would have if I played safe and lived. And the new rewards system from a couple of patches back makes it worth it. I've had some good NO games recently and while I don't claim to be an amazing player I hope I can at least show that you can make the ship work, so I'll try to upload those replays later.

New Orleans gets a lot of hate but it's one of my favorite ships at the moment. Stick the new rudder shift mod on the last slot, propulsion in the other, and you can go very aggressive, firing all the time, dodging incoming, it's a real thrill to play. Plus the satisfaction of popping radar on unsuspecting DDs. If you have a competent DD on your team you can back up (or better still division with a DD) you can do wonders. The AP punishes cruisers harder than the Germans, because although the Germans have technically higher damage and theoretical DPS, the AP bounces really easily while the US one has much better ricochet angles. So you can still get citadels on people that think they're safe showing their rear turret a little and generally you don't lose as much damage on angled targets. I just think if you don't like the Prinz Eugen and you want to go aggressive the NO is a better overall package. But, I haven't played T9 yet so I guess it also depends if you want to suffer for something better later on. I hear Des Moines is fantastic though...

There is absolutely no point beating each-other over the head with tables that show different data for the same gun. We've already been through this. It's weird that the calculations "of that time" credit the 14"/45 with such bad penetration while use of a modern formula does not, but I would err on the side of caution using either set of numbers. At the end of the day, even using the better numbers, it's still a mediocre gun. It's not a mediocre gun because it's 14", it's a mediocre gun for its caliber, not much better than 14" guns designed/built 20 years earlier. The only soft stat that can reasonably be tweaked to make this armament viable at T8+ is dispersion, since buffing reload or penetration are much harder to justify given none were particularly impressive to start with and would be immersion breaking. So what you would get is a de-facto cruiser murderer that still struggles to damage other BBs, especially when up-tiered.

I was thinking it could be interesting if instead of the usual mirror teams and mirror caps we could have battles that are set up asymmetrically. For example, only one cap that is owned at the start by defending team with auto-win if it's not captured, but attacking team has more ships to give them a fair chance to take the cap and win. That's just an idea, but can be anything where the objective is not the same for each team, team size and ship composition are deliberately different or map is not mirrored. I know it would be hard to balance but I think it could be fun and provide good variety.

Again, why the nastiness? People in this thread obviously have an interest in the topic and if you think we need enlightening it's not a waste of anybody's time for you to do so. I'm actually on the fence on this one. The fact remains that a 13.75" vertical belt is only marginally better protection than a Colorado (13.5" belt). While the Colorado is doubtlessly a tough ship, to me the basic vertical protection scheme of KGV seems to be throwing thickness at a problem that could have been more elegantly solved in other ways (and indeed already was, the RN used a sloped internal belt on Nelson). It's clear from history that angle of impact has a disproportionate effect on shell penetration characteristics so even with armour quality accounted for it's not a clear cut case. Nobody is absolutely right or wrong here, there are simply too many variables. Saying that either armour scheme is clearly superior in all cases is not true. My gut feeling at the start of the RN battleship discussion was that KGV should be T8 based on the fact that's where the other treaty battleship was (NC) and where the others would probably end up. It was purely a flavour and timeline choice, not a power level one. Looking at it now, the other BBs at T8, although of less modern design, are bigger ships, not treaty limited. If we're looking at displacement alone, KGV is closer to Colorado and Nagato than Bismarck and Amagi. I would say she is tier 7.5 on performance, which way she goes can be adjusted with soft stats. The biggest problem is even if on balance her protection counteracts her lack of firepower, she would scale very badly when up-tiered, while the others can at least punch above their weight.

It's difficult to make a call on the effectiveness of an angled belt as NC has and a thicker vertical belt as on KGV. The machinery spaces account for most of the citadel and here NCs scheme is probably equivalent in protection to KGV despite being thinner.

Nobody is looking for an argument, but the armor scheme itself looks very solid so it would be good if you explain how you conclude that it's "technically worse than NC". If anything that's the only thing about KGV that's better. The AA depends on choice of fit. The 5.25" are mediocre AA guns and nothing compared to the US 5"/38, so KGVs long range AA would be "meh". The short range could be as good as NC with a 1945 fit but equally it could be as bad as Warspite with a 1941 fit. That's not something that can determine tier on its own, think of what Gneisenau already does to T6 planes.

That makes sense but in this case the table in the RN 14"/45 page says it is based partly on the USN empirical formula, which is the same source quoted in the page for the US 14"/50, so it should also be an appropriate comparison. It also says "partly based on official data" which I take to mean firing trials. Also, the striking velocities for the two guns at 10ky and 20ky are very similar, slightly higher for the US weapon. The mass difference is also small so the impact energy at those ranges is essentially the same. The RN shells do have a slightly steeper angle of fall at these ranges. The rest is down to AP cap design. So Nathan Okun's formula gives a slight advantage to the 14"/45 at those ranges but I don't see anything in the impact energies to justify it, while the "official" numbers make it look like the 14"/45 is firing wet tissue paper, which also looks wrong. I would call it a draw and say the KGV guns are at best equivalent to NM guns and at worst equivalent to Arizona guns.

A while ago when I got the New Mexico I was really impressed with it and did quite well. I researched all upgrades and parked it for a bit as I was in no rush to climb the US line. I came back to it recently thinking "what can I play that's chilled out but quite strong" and had some pretty awful games. I remember it being tanky and it just didn't feel right, citadel while angled from a Bayern, lots of normal pen damage from everything, two fires lit permanently no matter how I managed the DCP. I know it's me not the ship because I don't think it was directly nerfed in the last couple of months, or maybe it's meta? I usually play T7 and T8 a lot and getting dragged onto those sh**ty small maps with islands everywhere is really hurting me in this ship. I seem to either be sailing around aimlessly with all targets obscured by rocks or going somewhere there's no way back from if things go wrong (which they inevitably do because few at those tiers understand supporting a slow BB push). So just reality check, have there been nerfs or has the meta turned against NM? Any map specific positioning tips for me? Especially "Fault Line", I never seem to know what to do with that place.