jss78

Ah yes the age-old "is it a cruiser, battleship or a battlecruiser". I've always favoured the "official" stance where we had "battlecruisers" as built during the WW1 era or so, but that the Alaskas are "large cruisers". The reason why I favour the distinction is there's really a series of discontinuities between those ships both chronologically and in terms of capabilities. Virtually all ships unambiguously referred to as "battlecruisers" are WW1 era or built (Hood) or left unfinished (Mackensens) immediately thereafter. They were essentially down-armoured, lengthened and faster compared to BB's of their day. Their guns were often just as big as those of same-era BB's (compare below). The "large cruisers" started to come 20 years later. They were really enlarged cruisers in basic design (e.g. Alaska basically an upscaled Baltimore). Their guns were unusually big for a cruiser, but they were NOT any longer BB grade. Alaska's 12-inchers would've been BB-grade weapons in WW1, but no longer in 1940's (USA was moving beyond 12 inches in BB's 20 years earlier). So quite different beasts.

I wouldn't treat them as snipers really. I wouldn't treat ANY BB in the game as a sniper. Some BB's are fairly strong in brawls, and those might want to get in the face of enemy (though it's a risky business), otherwise you should play a little bit further back. But backline sniping is really the business of cruisers (who don't have armour unlike you). I tend to play my Japanese BB's tightly in the mid-range bracket, near my concealment range but just allowing me to disengage when needed (after building for full concealment, which I always do). They're basically your vanilla BB's in the game. No meme secondaries, no HE gimmicks, but also not super slow like some of the Americans. Just standard mid-good speed BB's with reliable AP and citadel layouts that require some forethought. I have favourable impression of them, but then the only one I've played 100+ games in is the Musashi which is straight OP...

I'd argue the game would be even stranger without CV's. Notice those AA guns on your ship? The ones which especially in high tiers cover every available square metre of deck space? The ones which are an inherent part of the balancing equation between the ships? You can't do a reasonable WW2 era warship game without an aerial threat as part of the equation. I'd welcome more realistic and constructive suggestions than "please remove CV's", which of course won't happen. What IS a problem is the anti-CV play still isn't very engaging. At macro level you can work in groups (which I'd argue is good for the game -- I'd rather have the game focus on fleet maneuvers instead of e.g. DD's soloing around map edges). But at micro level, when the planes are coming at you, it just isn't much fun. A second and almost crippling problem are the T4 CV's. They're completely anachronistic going against those WW1 era ships without appreciable AA. What I'd like to see WG consider is removing the T4 CV's only. Alternatively, rebalance them so that the current T4 CV's go at T6, and the current T6 CV's to T7. That way you could enter game with a T4 ship and be guaranteed a WW1/early-interbelllum game with T3-T5 ships and no CV's.

As far as purely speculative ships go, the first idea is actually a legitimately cool one. Say an export version of the Taiho class with navalized Me-262's and a stupid number of German flak guns. Let's name her KMS GROßDEUTSCHLAND and all the wehraboos would wet themselves. It'd be completely silly -- and I'd totally play that stuff. I'd take a historical what-if scenario over a pure fantasy ship.

I agree a French line could be added. Though I'd suggest Bearn could be used at T4 and Joffre class at T6 -- I'm a little dubious about both a seaplane carrier at T4 and the Bearn at T6 respectively. The T8 and T10 offer no self evident options, but you could maybe put one of the Jean Bart conversions at T8 and the Arromanches (with very modern planes) at T10. Or possibly reversing the order of Jean Bart CV and Arromanches. Germany's biggest problem is the T10. They had a bunch of CV plans (Jade, Weser, De Grasse conversion) but they all cluster at T4 and T6 in terms of capability. Actually that includes Graf Zeppelin, but I guess we can be pragmatic and keep her at T8. But what on Earth do you put on T10? The removed "odd tier" CV's have already been stated as being planned to return at some point as side T6-T8-T10 side trees: Independence-Yorktown-Essex for USN, Zuiho-Hiryu-Taiho for IJN. So keep in mind it's entirely possible that the new "Axis CV tree" is going to be the Japanese parallel tree. Those still leave untouched stuff like Unryu, Akagi, Wasp, all the numerous CVE classes. With a bit of paper ships thrown in, both USN and IJN could easily support three parallel CV trees each. And the UK could easily have a parallel tree (including at least Illustrious and Malta). And ... that's about it. Yeah, no Soviet CV's please.

I have spent games imploring in chat in FIVE LANGUAGES for people to go for exit (starting at 10 minute mark). I have clicked in vain on the map for minutes, and used universally understandable instructions like "5 min, exit", "4 min, exit", etc. With respect, WG, this operation is badly designed. It is not acceptable that one person playing poorly can ruin a 20 minute effort for the rest of the team. The purpose of a video game is to be fun and engaging, and the only thing this operation engages is my adrenal [edited] as it produces stress hormones. Note that many of your other operations are not like this. In Newport Defence 4-5 good players can mount a successful deep defence even if 2 players do something dumb. Same in Aegis and Narai -- a win (at least a sub-five-star one) is not compromised by one or two players doing something dumb I'd like to propose a simple, scientific, and useful design maxim for you. Let's call this the "three monkeys rule". In short, when play testing each operation, make the test group composed of 4 good-average human players and 3 monkeys. And follow this rule: in order for the operation to go on live server, this test team must be able to win the operation. Figure 1. Test group composition.

Musashi is "just a worse Yamato" but at T9 simply OP and for a good reason not sold any more. She's mildly frustrating in T10 games because you could just have a Yamato instead, but ultimately with those guns she'll always uptier well. But then, going against Colorados and Nagatos in T9 games ... hoooly sh*t. Mutsu and Ashitaka are both really fun in operations, if that''s something something you enjoy in general. Mutsu is the king of T6 ops because the big guns reliably deal with BB's, and you have the torps and high secondary volume out to 6 km that do lots of damage in brawls. Ashitaka likewise has wonderful guns combined with speed and strong 7.6 km secondaries. NEITHER of them I really play in randoms, they just don't fit that particular meta -- but still they're some of my all-time favourite purchases.

I'm going to play Switzerland in this debate, and say CV's are kind of crap, but less crap than before rework. The skill gap in them is still astonishingly big -- considering how ostensibly simple they are to play -- but it's smaller than before rework, so in that sense mission accomplished for WG. I've always liked the CV's as a macro scale element in the game, in reinforcing team play. Liked them before rework and still like them in this sense. In the micro scale they kind of suck -- in that they're not exactly fun and engaging to play against. This was an issue before rework and remains unsolved. Like our moderator @Excavatus alluded above, some people make easier CV targets than others. I think it's helpful to play them yourself. As an occasional CV player, when I play the other classes, I find I don't die to CV's very much, because I'm always cognizant of what the enemy CV looks for in a target.This was true before rework and remains so. It's almost always some other guy on my team who makes himself an easier target. The most outrageous problem is T4 where we have mid-1930s (or so) CV's pounding WW1 era ships without appreciable AA. What I would do here is make CV's start at T6, so you only face them once you enter the +2/-2 MM environment with T5 ships. You could take the current trees of 4 CV's each, rebalance them at Tiers 6, 7, 8 and 10, and throw in some of the missing ones at T9 -- the dearly-missed Essex and Taiho for example.

Mutsu has always been pretty boss in T6 ops. Not only the torps, but with a BFT+AFT captain the secondary volume within 6 km is impressive. In ops you can simply ignore low-health nearby ships (barring their torpedoes) and focus elsewhere. It's pretty optimal for holding the line against an onslaught of bots. One of those ships I highly recommend to any PvE player, but wouldn't necessarily take out to Randoms.

Been playing it as a CV with random teams for about ten times the past few days. It's a well balanced operation as far as I'm concerned. I think I've had 3 fails, 2 five-star wins, and about 5 wins with 2-4 stars. Sounds about right, no? I "like" those guaranteed five-star operations for grinding ludicrous XP, but this is probably better as gameplay content. I've had some absolutely epic games where my CV is at the last surviving heal zone, doing actual secondary kills, and barely enough HP to launch another wave of bombers. 20th minute rolling and absolutely no idea whether it's going to be a win or a loss. And that's some GOOD SH*T right there.

The FreeXP economy went all funky when the operations came and they also started the full range of special signals (instead of just dragon flags). A couple years back I got my 40x of each special signal for what I think was WG's birthday? Or the game's? Putting a full set of those on the Sims in Operation Dynamo netted me a reliable 15-20 thousand FreeXP per game. In four or five evenings I had myself a Kronshtadt. It felt completely stupid. I had earlier grinded my Musashi for a year or something. Then Kronshtadt in a week. I don't want to get WG any ideas, but to get effective cost of FreeXP ships back to what 750k was back then, they'd have to cost MORE than 2 million.

I like the operation in general but it's hard to five-star. It's usually blown by some individual players venturing way too far out. It's completely unnecessary, and then they get isolated, focused, unable to shifts sides quickly enough, and unable to reach the healing zones when necessary. All you need to do is make a well formed defensive line slightly inside the station perimeter, and rotate ships back to healing zones as necessary. Even if the line is breached you can sometimes do a sub-five-star deep defence from the healing zones for a long time, and it can be quite fun.

I don't think as much as 50% is necessarily needed, or that a buff should be applied as a fixed percentage when the base health pools vary so much. But leaving aside exact numbers, I do think in general survivability has been somewhat power-crept by increasing firepower. And I'm not sure this is a desirable or even intended outcome.

We have actually done this one quite a lot too. If you work a little a little on your coordination, you can pull off some hilarious ambushes. Below is an example of some HIGHLY ADVANCED TACTICAL MANEUVERS (for experts only) we've done. There's an overall a high risk of eating some friendly torpedoes, but it's quite fun and I can highly recommend it.

This is a big part of why the triple-Nelson still seems to work quite reliably. Just play central, and most of the time the DD's will be spotted by others. At which point you can send the 27x 406 mm HE greeting. It's really worked remarkably well for us, considering the ostensible limitations.

We used to run this quite a lot. Though I'm honestly not sure how well it has endured the introduction of (a) British BB's and (b) the now common multi-CV games at T4. Back then it certainly did perform quite well. In the interest of science we ran the division for well over 100 games to test what kind of stats are possible. (Right around the time we were collecting this dataset WG announced they're pulling the ship from sale, because the potential for seal clubbing. )

Personally I don't see an issue with adding a German CV tree. I think this game is fundamentally more interesting when it explores not only the actual WW1/WW2 history, but also possible could-have-been histories. "Paper ship", i.e. something that was actually planned, is fine. Having some actually built ships as the heart of a tree would be desirable. The Russian/Soviet BB's are completely fine -- some actually built imperial-era ships in the early tiers, then Izmael was started in T6 and also the Sovetsky Soyuz at T9, though never finished. I'd also definitely add German and French CV trees because they actually built CV each (let's regard the Graf Zeppelin as "built"), and there are some further designs to work with. Since CV's are one of the four major ship classes in the game, I think it should be a high priority to get some ship diversity for this class. And Germany and France are the most feasible ways to bring in fourth and fifth national CV trees. My biggest question with German CV's is -- what on Earth is going to be the T10? I look at the list of CV's Germany actually built or designed and what I see is a list of designs that obviously cluster at tiers 4 and 6. That actually includes the Graf Zeppelin which is a complete joke at T8, and compares more with Ryujo and Furious at T6 in all respects apart from raw tonnage (which she wasted a lot of, just like Germany's equally overrated BB's). But let's be generous and use the Graf Zeppelin's sister ship at T8. You can then put either the Seydlitz or De Grasse conversion at T6 as Germany's Independence equivalent. I guess Jade at T4. But what's at T10?

Let's just say this man was profoundly unhappy and was not talking about ice cream.

We have tried this and it feels surprisingly not good. The Mikasa is just so bad. Triple König Albert BEFORE CV rework was near-unbeatable. We haven't actually tried it post-rework, but I imagine it's just torp fodder now. Triple-Nelson is surprisingly solid regardless of the obvious limitations. It's a little bit dependent on your team playing smart on the flanks of the "iron fist" you have in the centre. As far as "annoying" it certainly gets its own share of hate.

With the caveat that Tanks is the WG title I've played the least (Warships most, then Warplanes, then Tanks), IMO Warships is clearly the best game as far as the BIG picture of interesting tactics, interplay between classes, and fair economy. If you take a step back, the stuff people complain about in Warships is small -- CV's don't fit the game in specific tiers, some events are unfair, etc. Generally I regard this game as an overarching success and to generally to be in the best shape ever now. Bubbling under is Warplanes which I regard today as a fine game, but unfortunately it never really took off. Fun, casual action, and an INCREDIBLY relaxed F2P economy -- x3 first win every weekend, and x5 if it's the dev's cat's birthday or something, and you get free premium planes from daily missions etc. very easily.

Forgoing the memes, I would actually be genuinely interested in what kind of a tree you could REALLY do. I realize the paper the paper-to-steel ratio would approach ERROR: DIVISION BY ZERO. Anyone have some legitimate info about any conversion/purpose-built carrier plans the Soviets actually had?

Probably Finnish. Seriously, I just found designs for this thing in the Finnish Naval Archives. WG plz add.

You guys need to work on your insults. Be more creative. I've been a d*ck and an equal-opportunity misanthrope in chat since day one, and never received a chat ban. FYI I'll report anyone for using "poi".

CV lines that could be added: German and French (Bearn-->Joffre-->Jean Bart conversion/Arromanches/???) lines with slightly dubious paper-to-steel ratios, but not worse than Soviet BB's. IMO worth adding to get variety for CV's. USN split tree (Independence-->Yorktown-->Essex) and IJN split tree (Zuiho-->Hiryu-->Taiho) are probably coming at some point. You could do THIRD lines for USN and IJN fairly easily with some paper designs added, with Wasp/Hiyo/Unryu + all the CVE classes still untouched (I'm assuming Shinano is coming as a premium at some point). UK split tree easily (something for T6-->Illustrious-->Malta).

This is such a stupid hill to die on. Undeniably LOTS of Russians play the game. Also the devs are Russians, and could have understandable sentimental reasons to explore Russian naval history. Speaking for myself I, a bona-fide, freedom-loving, western-European capitalist, do not give a sh*t how many Russian ships they add. If they can find, at the dusty end of some naval archive, plans for four Soviet CV's, add a whole f*cking tree of them for all I care. If you can only find plans for three, make one up. Demanding good balance for all the ships in game would be the right hill to die on.