Estaca_de_Bares

Same for me, except that I faced a division from OM twice. They even took turns in testing the Alaska IIRC, and I did my little part in that testing by bombing the ship. First battle a defeat (I was still unaware of what I was facing), the second one a victory. Salute.

When you've reached tier 5 you're no longer under protected matchmaking (MM) rules, so you face ships two tiers above yours when at the bottom instead of only one tier above. Yes, it's not very pleasant and some ships suffer more than others, but that's how the system works. Consider yourself lucky because you, like me, have arrived to the game when MM is more rational and sensible: from what I've seen and read, it was very common to face ships 3 tiers above yours (now it only happens in fail divisions) at the beginning, and this could happen even in the now protected lower tiers. Salute.

I also received the mail (I've just checked after reading the thread), but at least I was able to test Alaska... with bombs from my Essex. The problem was that I couldn't test too much because it belonged to an AA division (Taiho, Alaska, Fletcher) from Oden Mortis. Salute.

Cherry Blossom is pretty good at that with Hermes coming second, both due to the relatively high WR even when solo. If you're a CV player that knows how to properly do manual attacks, Newport works almost as fine with Ryujo but you depend a lot on your team not screwing up and letting the waves reach the perimeter: let your team-mates farm damage while you focus on DDs and certain ships that are normally neglected (e.g., the Furutaka from the third wave). You can do your own damage farming later against Izumo and the KM ships in the final wave, due to all lacking DefAA (Yubari, Aobas and Myokos, OTOH, have it). Salute.

I'll probably go with Aigle, as others with no other suitable ship have stated. I suppose I'll have to start deciding about wasting some elite XP and the captain skills on her. Which is why I typed in chat during the previous ranked season "Focus Kidd, no kidding." when using my Shokaku and facing one. Not having to do it in this one though: I started at rank 16 and reached rank 15 three battles later (one defeat with star kept -Bismarck- and two victories -Kagero-). But yes, that little bugger is fearsome against planes. Salute.

Then they've been infected with westernization too much. In a proper Japanese strike they should be working themselves to death. Salute. P.S.: I was thinking about Siân Phillips' character Livia in "I, Claudius" when typing the reply.

What's not to love about Hiryu? Weird battles are her forte, because she can kick and punch her way to victory. Getting rid of the Duke of York that has you spotted, then alone against the red CV and a DD while being way behind on points due to another DD staying in our base for quite a time (kudos to the Cleveland that made use of my spotting to get close and sink it with secondaries, and that absorbed an airstrike before going down): Salute.

Yesterday, I've been against @MaciejoVietnam's Taiho with my Essex and, dear Lord, I hadn't sweated that many buckets (at 4ºC for maximum density) during and after a match for a long time. Not even turning on a couple of portable fans were able to alleviate the physiological effects of knowing that you're in deep trouble. I lost both that (for obvious reasons, although the team spreading didn't help either) and the following battle with Essex. I should have switched to operations or low tiers while the adrenaline rush was kicking back. Salute. EDIT: I've taken a look at my screenshots and I actually won the following battle, with First Blood and Solo Warrior achieved. My mind is starting to mix things up and thought there was a defeat in between.

I've witnessed this pattern of SE spawn heading en masse to C (or, to be more precise, to a location south-east from C as shown in the picture) a lot during last weekend and well into yesterday. It's somewhat expected for NW spawn to more or less do it (B+C is its natural strategy), but when both teams head for such a standoff, victory usually goes to the one with less ships in that location, since the remaining vessels have almost free reign for capping elsewhere and flanking. Salute.

In the same way as Infiriel, I don't know where exactly to aim, but scored citadels on Großer Kurfürst with herself, Friedrich der Große, Missouri and Bismarck, always from distance (+15km). Haven't achieved it yet with the other ships I own within her MM spread that are theoretically able to (I hardly ever play with some of them, so there's that, or I use HE shells/bombs). What surprised me was scoring a citadel on a Conqueror while playing GK yesterday night, at about secondaries' range. It seems that the stars were aligned for it. Well, they were aligned for the whole GK streak (80% WR, some Confederates, some Fireproofs, even a Kraken). Salute.

There was also the sinking of the soviet ship Komsomol, a known blockade runner although in the action that led to its sinking things aren't clear due to not being boarded to check its cargo, which caused some international outcry. Apart from that, nothing that could be deemed unacceptable when considered from historical perspective. Salute.

There's this little thing called Spanish Civil War (it's pretty interesting that only the last one received such name) that politically triggers a lot of people, and Canarias and Baleares both served on the side that triggers people the most. Admiral_H_Nelson simply pointed out a known fact about Spanish history and its projection into politics nowadays. It shouldn't affect us naval enthusiast though. Salute.

It truly is. Although this battle is from yesterday, another fine example of random teamplay: all but one of the kills done by the four ships that entered C cap in Trap, with DDs (the top Kitakaze and Loyang) providing smoke, me providing radar and Großer Kurfürst going all-in for secondary support. The battle was soon over because the reds left A and B and sailed north, which allowed other team-mates to take them swiftly: Salute.

@Belustigungspanda's Donskoi (same team) and @Nautical_Metaphor's Friedrich der Große (opposite team) while taking Musashi for a cruise in Land of Fire. It was surprising that we won (I left the battle earlier) and the final outcome even more astonishing when I checked the scoreboard: a massive blob of ships (there were no DDs in the match, quite fortunate for all the BBs present) near D cap with no intention to either push or take it and a CV (we had a Lex, they had a Shokaku) that seemed to ignore about strafes were a bad omen, but the carrier still, well, carried and ended top of the team shooting down twice as many planes as his counterpart. Much later, in the same team as @ThinderChief's Shiratsuyu, me in Hiryu and him being our only DD. A T8 battle in Two Brothers with lots of radars so I asked at the beginning for focusing them, yet people didn't comply that much to the request (the red Atlanta, in particular, stuck himself like a wedge near D cap where ThinderChief was and became a nuisance for providing AA cover there). Their CV wasn't that much of a problem though, and I even evaded his snipe launched as a last-ditch effort to score more damage and maybe a kill. Salute.

Missouri and the T9 USN/RN CAs/CLs, 9.45km, right in the middle of T8 and T10 values. Salute.

I still provide offensive smokes for BBs and big CAs from time to time, but it's basically laying screens at pre-arranged places at the start of the game, sometimes mid-game, in order to offer them the chance of shooting first from a good position (I spot the big reds while the big greens are concealed to their DDs). Not many maps and spawns allow for it though: D cap in Two Brothers (A cap too, but I find it less effective) and A cap in Loop are the best examples I can think of ATM. I also lay them defensively, allowing a focused ship to have some breath, and communicate my intentions in chat if possible, but I normally don't arrive in time for making a difference or the other guy disregards my efforts and keeps shooting. Apart from that and providing them to radar CLs so they can get close to caps, I mainly save them for myself if I have to disengage due to heavy focus/low health, which is why I've switched to TRB in Yugumo and been thinking about discarding Superintendent in other IJN DDs as well (torp boats at least, gun boats will still need it), because there have been matches where I didn't use a single charge. Salute.

I've been playing quite a nice streak with Hiryu (75% WR before what I'm going to describe) and then a T9 battle in Tears of the Desert, domination mode, my team winning and me achieving a Liquidator against an Atlanta. Ping goes to -35ms, signal of a heavy packet loss and probable disconnection, which happens. I return to the game to see that the match is considered a draw, get disconnected again, come back and notice that the server population is around 1k, which is pretty low for this time of the day. As I write this I've been disconnected again (this time it could be due to inactivity, I'm slow at typing), entered again and now the server is at around 850 people, increasing slowly. Has anybody else had the same issue? Salute. EDIT #1: I can access inventory, campaigns, missions, news and most of the tabs. Arsenal and clans say server unavailable though. EDIT #2: Can enter to the arsenal, but discount coupons not showing up. EDIT #3: I tried to enter a random battle. Queue working and MM seems to be assigning battles. EDIT #4: Server population growing up again (1k+). I stayed in the queue with Hiryu 4 times, two of them for over 5 minutes with other CVs present, but wasn't thrown into battle. It seems that more people are needed ATM. Clans' tab up and running.

The server didn't crash for 2 hours but it certainly suffered a stroke, with some parts of it being unavailable for longer than others. I opened a thread related to the same issue describing the situation and I was back in the game immediately, although the match I was playing at that moment was considered finished and a draw (every single one of the players disconnected at the same time, I assume). Maybe your mistake was closing the client and trying to use the launcher for the re-connection: the client tries to link directly to the game section while the launcher has to go through other parts of the server that were still down, thus saying so. As for the pink status, although I'm sympathetic, it's better to just remove it by playing some operations and move on. And no, it's not that simple to write a routine that checks the server status for every single match and embed/call it at the proper place, not to mention the amount of extra computational time required (very little in itself, but it piles up). There seems to be quite another difference between both cases: while in yours the disconnections appear to happen one after another (someone was able to comment about them in open chat after all), in mine there's no hint pointing to that but to a simultaneous disconnection. Let's consider that the aforementioned routine is implemented: which situation could be considered as a server crash and which one as players having network issues on their end? As you can see, things aren't that easy to discern. Salute.

I spotted a herd... I mean, a division of Stalingrads during my first match of the day with Shimakaze. I didn't pay much attention at first because I was busy capping C in Atlantic (so to say: being radared by a Donskoi and focused by a Harugumo was a pretty nasty experience), but after heading to retake B I noticed the clan (HOME) and then the player: @GarrusBrutus. Things didn't go well for his team in spite of having won an initial advantage: mine had split in two with the main blob threatening to go north from C while some minor force tried to take A, so they had middle completely open and could have steamrolled the latter. Salute.

I can raise that bet. When both teams are so "good" that the top player on the winning team is a teamkiller: Salute.

Logged out of the game, this weirdness ruined my mood for playing. Things appear to be back to normal, so I hope you can still enjoy your gaming sessions while I wander around the forum for a while. Salute. P.S.: Note to myself: timestamps for the edits would have been nice.

Well, I've been able to enter to the port, population at 860 right now (fell from 880-ish). Maybe battles are still unavailable, haven't tried. Salute.

True, the most important change affecting general gameplay was the one to smoke mechanics. After that, to a more lesser extent, the proliferation of radar ships in T8+. As for the questions OP originally stated: The supression of manual attacks for T4-5 moved the real CV gameplay to T6 and above where AA begins to be an issue, thus many starters are discouraged to follow after hitting that wall (they can now lose all their attack planes trying to strike on certain ships or due to a strafing, a mechanic they were taught nothing about up to this point). At the same time, the inclusion of more ships able to become AA monsters in high tiers made T8+ CV play a lot less enjoyable, specially if you're not top tier (which, due to MM, is quite the norm for T8-9), so the population there dwindled. You have then 3 brackets: T4-5, quite alive (for CV population standards, which means encountering them every four matches or so) but not really a challenge; T6-7, also quite alive and where things are interesting; T8+, where only the true stubborn (in both good and bad sense) stay. Most cruisers could be one-shot before, but maybe you're seeing now quite the number of RN and/or US CLs, lines that were introduced during your absence. Those are particularily squishy, with Emerald (T5 RN CL) earning the reputation of being a floating citadel. The fact that RN CLs were given smoke adds to that because many players stay still and broadside within it, providing a perfect target, not to mention they have to slow down in order to do so. Angling against incoming shells has always been there, it's a core mechanic: AP shells bounce if their angle of incidence against armour is big enough. Current discussion about the matter comes from changes in armour profiles (thickness, disposition, geometry) and angle normalization for shells on certain ships, most of them in high tiers. Salute.

Combining ships from different European navies should provide at least a CL/CA line and a DD line with very few paper ships, and starting with Netherlands, Poland and Austria-Hungary (maybe even adding Spain as a fourth nation to the basic mix) makes sense: AH can provide low tiers, NL (and Spain) quite the bulk of mid-tier cruisers, Poland is suited for small ships in the upper tiers. Top tier DDs, though, would be mainly US material unless Sweden is incorporated, and then there are the inconsistencies and lack of progression due to heavy swings in weaponry and general performance. A BB line is a different matter: Jaime I as T3, Tegetthoff as T4; Reina Victoria Eugenia or the Dutch pre-WW1 proposals as T5; Ersatz Monarch as T6; the Dutch Scharnhorst (design 1047) as T7; Spanish variant of Littorio as T8 and... that's it. Not even complete in spite of two thirds of it being more or less paper ships and coming from 3 different design and construction philosophies. Anyway, why not? A Pan-American techtree, with one premium already introduced under such banner, faces similar problems, less exacerbated for cruisers and destroyers (many were/could be made -if paper ships- either of British design or American surplus sales) but even worse in the BB department. Salute.

If going with the originally proposed complement in planes, Shinano would be a T9 equivalent to Saipan: she wasn't meant as a fleet carrier in the same sense as Taiho or Essex were (lots of aircrafts in those, while Shinano only was intended to carry 47-53 of them for deck operations), but more like a replenishment ship with spare parts and planes for others while still capable of organising her own strikes and defense. Salute.