VC381

You would be surprised. Basically in the build-up to WWI the US wanted a bigger Navy but Congress didn't want to pay for it, so every time they got money they spent it on a battleship because that's the best, right? So during WWI (when the Omaha was designed) they basically woke up and realised they have this huge battle line and the only cruisers they have to protect it and scout for it are old and obsolete (St. Louis and similar). So they quickly designed and built the Omaha class to try to catch up. Despite the fact the US Navy was indeed huge later on, at the time period we are considering they literally had nothing between rusty early century design Armored Cruisers and the new Omaha scout cruisers. The only sort-of option would be this monster: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tennessee-class_cruiser but it would be very, very hard to implement and balance her, never mind that's basically a pocket battleship. She would be like Mikasa in that you would be controlling only 4 x 10" guns while the epic 8 x 6" per broadside would end up as secondary battery, nerfed in range and controlled by incompetent AI. There were some plans to modernise/convert these ships but then you're back to paper concepts. Also she would be such a ridiculous "blip" in the line in terms of playstyle she would not be viable.

Really depends on ship. I think only Aoba, Myoko and 155mm Mogami really NEED the traverse module, all the rest are fine. But then again, their dispersion is good anyway so none really NEED the accuracy either. On my Myoko I forgot to equip this slot for ages and didn't feel anything was "wrong", for that ship I did eventually go for traverse.

Well, they had a tough job because H41 as designed is horrendously, almost criminally under-armed for her size. The H40 design did have a 3x3 arrangement so there is a precedent there for triple turrets. Also making it "different" for the sake of it doesn't make sense when BB design IRL was clearly converging to an optimum at that stage across all navies. What might have made sense is to up-gun her to 460mm but still have 8 in the traditional 4x2 arrangement, but I guess only Yamato is allowed guns that big so meh.

I don't think it's something that needs to be "fixed", there are a few other ships where the model isn't of the lead ship the class is named after, and that's fine because it represents the class as a whole. EDIT: to be honest it's probably just whichever ship WG could most easily get good plans of for their 3D modelers to work from. I was just pointing it out for general interest and educational value. But yes, people would flock to buy SF for the history even if it was just a copy-paste premium. Weirdly, because the permanent camouflage is accurate for SF, a premium SF that used the same model would very likely have fictional or wrong camouflage just so it's different!

To be really geeky about it... Although New Orleans and San Francisco were very similar both as built and as refitted during the war, there are a half dozen or so detail differences. A close look at the model we have in game proves that visually she is already San Francisco. The permanent premium camouflage available for the ship is also correct for San Francisco (Tuscaloosa also wore the same scheme but New Orleans herself never did). So basically buy that camouflage or download a mod for it and you have San Francisco without waiting for WG to stick a name on it. Which they won't anyway, because as has been said there's already a US premium CA at Tier 7. EDIT: And even if they did add this ship (or any other New Orleans class) she would be a Tier 8 premium. Unless they make a completely new model to show her as in 1942, which would make her AA useless (basically stock Pensacola AA) with other nerfs e.g. less HP, stock RoF only.

A pretty ship but it would be nice if you gave some reason or context for the wiki-dump. Is today relevant to something in its career?

Fair enough, it does sound like a problem. I don't actually have a Mogami yet but I'm sort of gathering intelligence ahead of time. Honestly the turret traverse is enough to make me want to save Free XP and skip the 155s. The 45 seconds on Myoko already makes me want to tear my hair out at times.

Can you explain a bit more why the hull affects the concealment debuff of the guns?

More BCs please, I like! And thanks for the review, great work both of you

I want to tell you a short story. The other day I was taking my Independence for a spin and as luck would have it, I ended up in a game with a Ranger, mirrored CVs and almost all the other ships being T8. I thought "damn I'm screwed" and I was mostly right. So I tried my best, made a good run on a Tirpitz, made some mistakes, in the end I was running for my life from a Fubuki with nothing more than a lonely Hellcat on my deck. Our Ranger answered my call and ended the DD, I dodged the torpedoes and sailed around aimlessly for another minute while my team finished the enemy cap. I lived, we won, but I was feeling quite down about the game, the MM, the AA, you know the deal. Then I hit the results screen. I think I was 5th on my team, just narrowly below our Ranger, higher base XP than both enemy CVs and 60k damage. Now that's not amazing performance in the grand scheme of things, but given the circumstances I started feeling better about the game. Basically, against the odds I wasn't a dead weight to the team. But it still felt awkward, that there was this disconnect between how much I enjoyed the game against the actual score. So where am I going with this? Well, recently I've seen a lot of complaining that CVs are underpowered, that AA buff made them useless, that kind of stuff. And it got me thinking, are all those people simply expecting too much? If a T6 CV can "break even" and contribute something in a T8 game, that's more than most classes can expect. Is it acceptable then for the CV "balance point" to be something closer to suicide runs? It might be frustrating to lose so many planes but maybe we shouldn't be expecting high survival rates. Maybe we should just treat the air group as an expendable resource and be happy with the contribution it makes to the battle before it runs dry. I'm rambling on a bit now but you get the idea. TLDR do people expect too much from their CV given that you can still make a decent contribution to the battle in what feels like a "bad game"? Should we be enjoying the challenge and the uphill battle instead?

The shells are listed as the same type, and the velocities are the same, so I assume there are no hidden stats there. Normally when a gun change comes with an increase in penetration/normalisation the shell name changes (this happens for Baltimore that gets slower but stronger AP shells on gun upgrade).

The increased turret traverse doesn't do anything really since it's still the best traverse for a 203mm gun armed ship either way. It's still easily fast enough to aim at full turn and that's saying something on such a nimble ship. The rate of fire also isn't hugely noticeable, but I got the upgrade anyway. It's Myoko RoF instead of Pensacola RoF, up to you if that makes enough difference. If you're dueling another cruiser for a long time it can add up.

They could get a DPS bonus to account for the fact the enemy fighters aren't fighting back. It then just becomes a race to kill the enemy fighters before they get to your bombers. Also it would make it more of a skill contest because it opens up the possibility of strafing disengaging fighters, plus the decision on the other player's side whether to go for fighters or bombers.

I think the characteristics of Kronshtadt and Stalingrad preserve the relative strengths/weaknesses we see in the Soviet cruiser line compared to the others. They could make those differences work for BBs. We have smaller caliber guns but with excellent ballistics and advantage in volume of fire, large size and sub-par armor, high speed but poor maneuverability. I prefer not to over-think how they would work within the current tier and ship type framework because I find it far too restricting; the argument that something isn't similar enough to what we already have at a certain tier and so it "doesn't fit" would leave a very stale game state. I think the variety would be very good for the game.

Sovietsky Soyuz is essentially an Iowa equivalent and should be T9. They had an even bigger design that would fit T10. The rest is actually easy. T6 Izmail as you say, ending the progression of WWI designs. T7 Kronshtadt, essentially a Scharnhorst clone, which we already know will be T7 and looks balanced there. T8 Stalingrad. There, we made a Russian/Soviet BB line. To be honest, I only want this because I want Kronshtadt and/or Stalingrad... Those are some real beauties...

This isn't a bad idea. You would lose fighters but kill some bombers in the process. It would also mean you can disengage when out of ammo instead of losing planes for free...

It was more of an anti-"that thread" to say that from my point of view it doesn't always feel as bad as some people make out. Of course there are good and bad games. I get what you mean about not losing attack capability but e.g. a Yorck doing that needs to put himself in a position where he risks suddenly losing 100% of his attack capability (by getting sunk). A CV is almost always safe from his targets, so there needs to be some risk to him attacking. Maybe the balance is too far the other way at the moment but I'll just say again, do we really want CVs having a limitless risk-free damage potential?

You've completely missed my point. I said that even flying T6 planes (my experience is Independence and Hiryu with her T6 TBs) it seems to be possible to deal OK damage to Tier 8 ships as long as I accept I'm going to lose a strike every time. But then by the time I've run out of planes I've made an OK contribution to the overall battle. So I don't understand how it can be worse for T8 CVs with more and better planes, to strike other T8 ships, if T6 can already do it, unless you have totally unrealistic expectations of what you should be able to do. T9+ I don't know.

Fixed it. Edit: and yes I realise making suggestions is mostly useless but one can dream. You mentioned realism, apart from some of the small escort carriers where it makes thematic sense, a loadout completely missing one plane type is a bit of unrealistic BS. They're trying too hard to make US CVs "unique" and throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

Does this actually affect all tiers equally though? Langley has a balanced deck, Bogue is small and it makes thematic sense for her to not carry each plane type, Independence balanced deck is very viable without losing planes in the air, and Essex and Midway gain a fighter squadron in their strike deck. So basically it's just Ranger and Lexington that have a really harsh choice. Give them both 1/1/2 instead of 0/1/3 and everything's fine. Or make their AS deck 2/1/1.

There's no additional AA I can see in those pictures that would justify a fictional 1942 refit. Even the RADAR is probably accurate, most of the battleships at Pearl had one by then. It's only the deck that's the wrong colour. Oh and No.3 turret (X turret to the Brits) should have a catapult on it, and I believe as a result did not have the red roof. Nitpicking here

Odd, I find Tirpitz to be a fairly easy bomb target in my Hiryu, and when I'm sailing my Tirpitz I'm always priority target for CVs. I think you got unlucky running into heavy AA spec ones. Nagatos and Amagis same, you will lose planes going for them but I feel you guys are exaggerating or picking and choosing bad experiences where the BB was probably running AFT + Manual control + AA module. In my Nagato I feel completely naked if there is a CV around. I did run into a Colorado like that once, if I could see him in the same screen as my planes they were dead, but that's not normal. Cruisers you always need to watch out for of course. For manual drops with lots of squadrons, I usually drop two at a time as if they were one. You need to fly them around a bit until they more or less merge then make sure not to order them separately. That way with IJN for example you have 8 torpedoes in a very tight pattern, it's practically impossible to miss.

The downside is it makes the arm distance longer as well so you can't drop torpedoes right in someone's face as easily. The AA can be frustrating but by the tiers where it is CVs have enough spare planes to lose every strike wave and still come out with decent overall damage. With my Hiryu I basically accept TB runs are suicide, if the torpedo is in the water before the plane dies it's a success.

This ability is at least as old as 5.6, but nobody noticed because that didn't mess with the upgrades and force everyone to review what they are using. Is everyone selling their stack of -70% detonation upgrades for a small profit then?

I used the weekend sale as an excuse to blow Free XP and buy the Hiryu. I'll fully admit I'm likely to be out of my depth a bit having skipped Ryujo, but I just wanted to get the basics down before I start playing her. With Zuiho I enjoyed being able to cross-drop but I also hated getting completely denied by AS setups. And from what I read Hiryu TBs are Tier VI planes with no possibility to upgrade, so I'm thinking losing a squad of them won't hurt that much if they're crap anyway. Is that sound logic to go 3/1/2 or is 2/2/2 still better even with sub-par TBs?