jss78

I got the Piotr Velikiy aka. Big Pete, from a free container.

I thoroughly love the basic concept behind them. Everything about them encourages aggressive, in-your-face play. Yet they are not invulnerable doing so, but require actual skill.

AFAIK floatplane fighters (as opposed to spotter/recon planes) never really became a much-used in WW2, so understandably WG might have trouble here. A lot of the time they seem to be some obscure prototype of a float conversion of land-based fighter. E.g. looking at my French ships, de Grasse gets the Loire 210 fighter which actually served briefly, while Algerie and Dunkerque appear to have the Dewoitine HD.780 for which only a single prototype existed. I don't recognize the fighter on Charles Martel. On some of the planes the 3D models actually have the model number visible, e.g. the HD.780 mentioned above.

I'm just confused by all the anime stuff. But it'd be nice to have a another FreeXP ship in mid-tiers, like the Nelson.

The Köln could make a pretty unique premium, because she was modified in 1942 to experimentally carry a Flettner helicopter. One of the only ways you could bring helicopters into the game without going way out of timeline. I'm not sure how you'd balance that. Apparently the landing platform was on top of the superfiring rear turret. Maybe allow that turret to still fire and simply have a helicopter as the spotter aircraft?

I'm partial to that horn that many CV's have, at least Ryujo, Shokaku, British T6,8,10. It sounds really ominous, or alternatively kind of asthmatic.

In no particular order: Okhotnik Ryujo Nelson Scharnhorst Audacious

I liked her fine during my grind towards the Audacious (28 games, 76k dam average). I don't think there's a "main" plane to use on this one -- I used them all quite heavily depending on what I had available, and what the optimal target looked like at any given time. You rely quite a lot on stacking damage-over-time types. I'd definitely run Demolition Expert on this one, as both the rocket and bomb salvos are quite large (20 rockets, 16 bombs). I've liked all the RN carriers I've tried (from Furious up). Their agile aiming (short attack run, quickly narrowing reticle) and sturdy planes give them a distinct comfort of use that's not really visible in any of the stats.The way you can turn around almost immediately and come in for a next attack -- while surviving within the AA -- is very pleasant. I'm not sure there's any dramatic imbalance between Lexington, Shokaku and Implacable. I consider all of them "keepers" because they play quite different. (Implacable is certainly attractive to keep since we got that free permacamo for her.)

Yeah, I have about 500 of the various reward ones giving XP bonuses. I haven't run non premium consumables since 2016 or something. It loses a lot of credits in coop, but that kinda loses its meaning when you're sitting on 200 million. I also have at least 750 of each of the combat signals. I feel like I've broken the economy. It feels weird.

Premium ship choices depend massively on what you personally like. What tier do you enjoy playing? What type of gameplay do you enjoy? There are very few irredeemably bad premiums in the game. There's always someone out there who enjoys that play style, that tier, and is able to make the ship work. (All that said, I think everyone should have an Okhotnik.)

In terms of being complete outliers in AA potency for their respective tiers, the answer is probably Katori and Yubari. A quick look at wows-numbers seems to confirm this, they're way ahead of all the other ships in their tiers in terms of Avg. Plane Kills. For example in T10 Minotaur is strong, but so are half the cruisers at that tier.

I like operation Killer Whale a lot in most respects -- it has fairly varied gameplay stages -- but I agree the "exit clause" is frustrating. I've had so many games where everything goes well but the team simply fails to understand they will lose unless they move to a specific area. I've always thought that ideally the operations would be "idiot proof", in the sense that they can be won with a few bad players in the team, though not necessarily with all stars. For example, in Newport Defence, even if half your team suicides by drifting out the defence area, you can still secure a win by doing a deep defence in the heal zones with just 2-3 ships. You won't get 5 stars, but there's still a thing to be achieved all the way to the end, and it's not as frustrating. In Narai, likewise, even if only ~half the team knows what they're doing, you can still enter the harbor and get a low-star win by ignoring the departing transports and CV. In Killer Whale you're so often left watching in frustration as the guy refuses to go to the area, despite pinging the map, asking in 5 languages, etc.

Some of today's daily missions grant that 1000 XP, so I'd assume it came from there. I haven't paid attention but apparently it's not shown in that breakdown.

I'm these days leaning towards getting both 3-pointer survivability skills first. In order: Air Supremacy (1 point) Improved Engines (2) Survivability Expert (3) Aircraft Armor (3) Sight Stabilization might come next at 13 points, it's a good skill but the 5% improvement in aiming time is nowhere near as essential as having sturdier planes. For 19 points I've then gone for Torpedo Acceleration, Demolition Expert, and Improved Engine Boost, with my RN CV captains.

I believe Köln, the sister ship of our familiar Königsberg, at one stage had an experimental helicopter landing platform for the Flettner Fl 282 Kolibri. Could be a fun, unique premium ship, just put that contraption there and use it as a spotter plane. (This picture is not the Köln I think, can't find one with the helicopter platform)

I think when in random queue, largely you just have to accept that some people aren't very helpful. I don't mind the "camper" when he's something like a Charles Martel doing obscene amounts of HE damage. I'm annoyed by the low-concealment DD hiding behind me when I'm being torped in my BB. Speaking for myself, there's one thing I've always focused on learning, when playing online shooters. Used to apply in my old Mechwarrior days and now here. And that's to not get fixated on camping or pushing, but being able to play dynamic, and rapidly switch between cautious play and maximum aggression. I've lost so many games where people SHOULD have camped. We had two caps out of three, we had the numbers advantage, and we were well positioned to defend. All you had to do was hold ground and take an easy win, but then people get impatient and start to trickle out one at a time, feeding the enemy kills. In some cases I think game design is the culprit though. In WoWS I've never liked the whole design concept of a cruiser relying on island cover and relying on having BAD firing arcs. They're not terrible interesting to play -- and even less to play against -- and beyond that they just break the whole flow of the game. It's a basic design concept that doesn't improve the game and stagnates it.

For what it's worth, I did some testing with the Kaga secondaries going against 12 Yamatos in a training room, and putting in some BB captains. To me investing on the secondaries is just not worth it when their range peaks at 6.8 km. Not in a tier where BB secondaries surpass 11 km. The fire volume is quite impressive and the fire chance decent though. I'm not above running the occasional joke build, and if the Kaga secondaries reached to 10'ish km I'd totally set up a captain with AFT for some late-night derping. (Got a video of the secondary test, running everything but Manual Secondaries (BFT, AFT, module, signal). Quality is kinda poor because I've recently relocated and stuck playing on a Lenovo Thinkpad.)

Yeah, the more I look at the Kaga, the more it doesn't look worth it. That 5% is not a bad number if you anticipate lots of hits. Same logic as with surface ships -- the more HE hits you expect, the stronger reason to take DE. But Kaga only drops 4 bombs at a time (6 for Lexington, 16 for Implacable). And actually the story is the same with the rocket planes, with only 8 rockets per attack (24 for Lexington, 20 for Implacable). There's also the question of anticipated playstyle. Kaga feels like the torp plane is your #1 choice. And you have many of them, so in many games you might be able to keep spamming the TB's for the bulk of the time. So yeah, I guess the standard concealment build might do.

How are you guys setting up your captains for the Kaga? There's an obvious dilemma that it's an HE bombing CV as opposed to all the tech tree ships. I've thus far developed my IJN CV captains towards what I suspect is the "standard" stealth build: Air Supremacy (1), Improved Engines (2), Survivability Expert (3), Aircraft Armor (3), Sight Stabilization (4), Improved Engine Boost (1), Concealment Expert (4), Last Gasp (1). On USN/RN 19-pointers I've replaced CE and LG with Torp Acceleration and Demo Expert. So what to do. Initial impression is that the ship relies SO heavily on the torp planes (despite the HE bombs) that the concealment build might still be optimal. But not sure. I guess I could develop a captain using DE on the Hosho which doesn't need more concealment anyway.

I can't speak for the GZ (not terribly interesting to me with those fictitious planes and no tech tree to go with it). As far as the others, Kaga is definitely the most straight-forward one. A bit of a blunt instrument compared to the T8 sibling Shokaku, you just spam a crap ton of big attacks and don't have to deal with the intricacies of AP bombing. TL;DR with Enterprise is it's an American CV with AP bombs. I like her for a distinct gameplay flavour. I like the Saipan and get some really good games out of her, but I think she's more for experienced CV players and aficionados. You have so few planes that you need to be mathematical about where to use them. Also the Tiny Tims and the ridiculously cumbersome, long torpedo run require forethought.

I have sufficient 19 point captains that I'm legit considering getting the Kaga and retraining a ManSec+AFT CV captain... You can still get the truly essential CV skills like Survivability Expert and Aircraft Armor. Edit: to be clear that's a joke build, but IMO the joke is a good one.

Can someone who plays CV's a lot talk to me about the Kaga? I have all American T8's including Enterprise and Saipan, and also the Implacable and the Shokaku. What makes the Kaga go? I wonder especially when I have the USN/RN carriers with HE bombs already, is the Kaga superfluous? Or absolutely worth 40 EUR?

This is all true. Also, in real life circumstances, the losing team would disengage at the first signs of a fight snowballing against them. Here, we often fight to the end, no matter how pointless it is. We tend to long for that nail-biter movie finish with the last handful of survivors going mano-a-mano to the bitter end. But real life just isn't conducive to such outcomes. (Still, they happen once in a while, and you should savour these games.)

I like the rework in general, but T3 is a pretty specific problem. Most of the ships at that tier are pure WW1 and we can't really give all of them speculative AA upgrades. And then they have to play against late-1930s planes. The only real outlier is Katori which has actual WW2 AA. I think a few (Caledon, Friant at least) have something like interwar AA. (I'm salty because I was just detonated by an aircraft torpedo in my Charleston, with a glorious AA complement of 7.6 mm Hotchkiss machine guns.)

Good advice. The T6 Ryujo is IMO quite a fun carrier, so I'd highly recommend taking that 10-point captain to Hosho and then Ryujo, to learn the basics. Then use Kaga for some T8 action.