BruceRKF

Pretty simple. They had no idea what to do, but wanted to cater to the Latin American markets. So they decided to go with some ship models that can reuse assets from existing ships, to safe on modelling costs. Game balance and plausability of the ships be damned. Now, they will try anything to make them somewhat playable, even if it means overthrowing the concept of the whole line several times.

Pretty simple for me: Grey in coop. Green in random, ranked and ops. Blue when grinding something, e.g. when (re-)grinding a line or needing a specific thing for missions. Haven't used red so far. As for signals, none in coop and depending on ship and tier for ranked, random and ops.

Bots getting smarter by the day. Flint stuck on the island for the whole game and the Cavour didn't even show up at all. Not only does that drag out the game time, it also yields fewer xp which are already meager in coop anyway. 20221220_153814_PASC206-Dallas_17_NA_fault_line.wowsreplay

Ah, I see. Thanks for clearing things up. As was worried for a second that my understanding of the idiom has been wrong for years XD

Isn't that the opposite though? Damned praise is if you praise something insincerely, but you actually criticise it? That's what I thought, at least. English is not my first language though, so I might have my idioms wrong.

I have both ships. Both are rather unremarkable (i.e. comparatively weak). Z-44 is as pure a torpedo boat as you are going to find. Her torpedoes have good range and reload very quickly and 10 is a decent number in a salvo as well. However, the torpedoes do very little damage (third worst at tier 9), so her torpedo DPM is only in the middle of tier 9 DDs. Gun DPM is nothing to write home about either (identical to the tier 7 Maass) and the turrets are slow. She is also relatively big and sluggish and her concealment is not quite good enough to make up for that (identical to Benham which is smaller, more nimble and has better guns and way better torpedoes). Z-44 is in a way a poor man's Benham. Not a ship you can expect to carry a game in. Marco Polo has SAP and has to pay dearly for that with an abysmal 36s reload. The guns are also still very inaccurate, despite the higher sigma value. Concealment is nothing to write home about either. There are two upsides: She is very tanky as long as you can remain angled and her gun handling is very comfortable with fast turrets and fast shells. She also looks quite good, imo. Lepanto is overall actually the better ship because she has better DPM, better concealment and smoke. Unfortunately, Marco Polo's doubloon/real money sister Guiseppe Verdi is also a better ship. She has HE , smoke and a shorter reload, with the only downside being worse sigma and the rest identical. This may all read quite negatively, but for some reason I still like both of them. It's a challenge to play them well, but there rarely are any expectations resting on you if you go into a battle with either. As for which to get: If there really is nothing else for coal that you want, then take the one of the ship type that you play more often.

I agree you on the "looks good", but not on the "in this deopartment", i.e. starting fires ;) As for the main topic: I got the first three and I like that they all have a historical basis (one real ship, one planned ship, one half-real ship) while the high tiers are made up. I also like their looks (again in contrast to the catastrophically ugly high tiers). That, combined with the fact that they are rather bad ships has let me come to the decision not to grind the line beyond tier 7. I just can't be bothered. And I am a cruiser main!

How you can consider Omono a good firestarter is beyond me. Amongst all tier 7 cruisers, she is the sixth worst at it, even behind the notoriously bad firesterter Abruzzi or heavy cruisers like New Orleans, Algerie and her tech tree CA counterpart Myoko. She has 26 mm base pen thanks to the 155 mm calibre and good (HE) alpha damage, but that is about it.

Here as well. Game froze, then nothing. When trying to reconnect it says "technical issues" or something like that.

Not surpising, since they are the same guns as on the Kaiser, König and Derfflinger classes (WW1 vintage), while Ägir, Odin, Brandenburg and Mecklenburg use more modern 305 mm guns designed in 1939. Kaiser's B hull and König got hypothetical modern shells though. Derfflinger and Schröder did not, which is why their penetration is so awful. A small difference: Kaiser and Derfflinger have shorter fuses than Schröder with the same guns and shells.

First outing with the new lady. Verdict: She is doing just fine.

Yes and no. It's always hard to find consistency with ships from different nations, but I think they managed reasonably well in this case. Certainly better than with the two Pan-Asian tech trees. Based on if the guns behave like their already existing counterparts in the game: The guns get progressively more powerful and get flatter arcs. First the rather high shell arc British 120 mm guns. Second, the more flat trajectory of the 120 mm Bofors on Grom. Then the only new guns, in the 140 mm Skoda guns on Split (and possibly the Lambros Katsonis as well). And last, the French 138 mm guns on Gdansk, like on the French t8-10 DDs. I would assume that they will make the Skoda 140 mm guns somwhere in between the tier 7 and tier 8/9 guns in performance (possibly similar to the Soviet 130 mm guns). Of course, they can always play around with air drag as well, to give the same guns/shells different ballistics (like Haida and Huron, for example). Edit: Here an example with the guns (and the Soviet 130 mm as a placeholder for the 140 mm).

Yep, but as far as I know that is what the I-class was (?). New bridge and quintuple torpedo tubes. However, if you built new ships for another nation, you might as well use your current design instead of going back to the older one )probably cheaper that way). You can always downgrade the foreign ship other ways (e.g. giving them fewer torpedo tubes). That's how I can imagine the Turkish I-class ships coming about, at least

Well, it says on Wikipedia as well as Nvypedia that HMS Inconstant/Muavenet had only a single quad launcher, so that seems to be correct. And the stock torpedoes of Icarus in game are also 2x4 (same as Acasta).

That's what you get with opening a topic before the dev blog is out XD. Thanks!

Interesting that you consider Poland a North European country, for me it seems pretty Middle European, maybe Eastern European if you want. Turkey is not that far North either (and I don't care about the Turkey - Europe/Asia discussion). The new tech tree has six new ships. Tier 5 Turkish, tier 6 Norwegian, tier 7 Polish, tier 8 Yugoslavian, tier 9 Greek and tier 10 Polish. That's five different countries for six ships. I think that is a pretty good mix. As for the ships themselves: Tier 10 is questionable for me and we don't know enough about the tier 9 for now, but I quite like the rest of them (t5-8 are all historical ships as well!). I also approve of the decision to create Split in her originally planned configuration and not as she was actually finished. Far more interesting, imo.

What the actual f*** is wrong with WG? I mean, WHY? Even when the community does basically all the research for them, based on historical ships and designs, with line consistency, they still end up with fictional or nonsensical boats. Is it narrowminded arrogance that would not let them use community proposals? Or just plain stupidity? @Aragathoralready posted the links, so I'm not gonna reiterate why this tech tree from WG is garbage and there are far more reasonable proposals available.

Kamikazes are not slow though. They are the (tied) fifth fastest tier 5 destroyers (out of 17), same speed as Hill actually. Only Maestrale (by 0.5 kn), Minekaze, Visby, and Podvoisky are faster (base speed that is). And even in their whole MM spread (tiers 4-7), they are placed 19 out of 65. Maybe the believe comes from the fact that she is slower than Minekaze? In the old days Minekaze was the better ship precisely because of that. She had the same HE damage and torpedoes as the Kamikazes, but was faster. Since the nerfs, speed is the only real advantage remaining to Minekaze. A gunboat DD that knows where a Kamikaze is and doesn't run into a random torpedo can indeed make short work of it, but a well played Kami is still a pain to deal with.

Ouch. The 1936As already had bad seakeeping, so Z-42 in that configuration would probably just capsize and sink.

Dupleix: Essentially an Algerie without armour, as in reality (Yay, a real ship!). I like that addition. Yes, it's gimmicks galore again, but that's a given these days and actually ties in with the rest of the French cruisers. Z-42: One of the cancelled 1936B destroyers, which is of course the reason why it was chosen by WG, so they can put whatever they want in terms of armament on it. Those twin 105s look hella weird on there. I also have to question the functionality of those twin guns when the class purposefully went back to lighter armament compared to the previous class. Four or five 150 mm guns were considered too heavy and I doubt ten 105 mm guns are much lighter (probably even heavier), which is why the 1936Bs had single 105 mm guns again (see Z-35 and Z-44 of the same class). Although I guess with all the submarines coming into the game, a destroyer that wet fits right in. Not my cup of tea at all.

"The Kai-agano (also nown as C-44) Class Light Cruisers: This class of light cruisers was designed in may 1941 for the Dai-Go-Ji Kaigun Gunbi Hojū Keikaku or Fifth Naval Armaments Supplement Program (also known as Maru 5 Keikaku or Circle Five Program) was an improved version of the agano-class, the hull was lenghtened by over 12 meters to a total lenght of 186,5 in order to fit a fourth 150mm (6-inch) twin turret aft of the mainmast, heavy anti-aicraft armament was to be composed of eight 80mm type 98 guns in four twin mounts fitted abaft the funnel; part of the hull lenghtening was also used to fit more powerful engines in order to mantain a top speed of 35 knots despite the increase of displacement, thus the funnel was also larger than the one of the standard Agano class. Five ships (with hulls numbered from 810 to 814) where ordered in 1941, with other two (numbered 5037 and 5038) added in september 1942 under the Wartime Warship Construction Replenishment Program (Kai-Maru 5 Keikaku or Modified Circle Five Program) but eventually none of them was ever laid down neither recieved a name." As for the Omono: Look at the (historical) cruiser Oyodo and then just imagine the floatplane hangars and the catapults at the back replaced by guns and you get Omono. Not saying that it's a historical ship, but WG took about 3/4 of a historical ship as a basis, at least. Helpfully, someone made an overlay picture of Oyodo and Omono:

Excellent, since those are the only intersting ones to me. The high tier ones are ugly and made up, as well as possibly bad as well. On the other hand, the mid tiers CLs are somewhat historical, with Agano being a real ship, Gokase a planned improvement on Agano and Omono basically an Oyodo with guns and torpedoes instead of hangars and floatplanes at the rear. And if they are bad, so what.

It's getting more hilarious every time. Just look a their surface and submerged speeds: S-1 real: 19.5 kn/9 kn, in game: 31 kn/15 kn -> 159%/166% of the actual speed L-20 real: 18 kn/10 kn, in game: 28 kn/14 kn -> 156%/140% of the actual speed K-1 real: 22.5 kn/10 kn, in game: 37 kn/18 kn -> 164%/180% of the actual speed and that is without any bonuses/skills! They really must have developed their nuclear power plants early... Every single surface ship in the game has a base speed that is at least close to the historical speed. Subs though, nowhere near. WG simply cannot bear to admit that submarines have no place in this game, as the gameplay does not suit them in the slighest. Nothing good ever comes out of following through on sunk cost. Just stop it, WG.

Where does this believe that Kii has better secondaries than Amagi come from? Kii lost half of her 140 mm guns with WG's fantasy refit , and those have improved dispersion. The 100 mm guns do not. Kii has better raw dpm on her secondaries, but Amagi's hit more. They come out roughly even. https://shiptool.st/selected?s=JB013JB508&c=top&p=sec&rs=6&os=sec&op=Hitting_DPM&o=desc The one thing Kii has going for her is the 30 mm pen which is still not enough against high tier BBs. And cruisers you can delete with your main guns anyway. Plus, Amagi has a turtleback and is therefore better for brawling. Kii has torpedoes instead, but to use them in a brawl she has to expose quite a bit of side. Kii has way better AA, of course. All in all, the two ships are not quite as similar as they would at first appear. Mutsu is pretty much the old Nagato stock hull, but with added torpedoes. She also retains the old shells which have very poor AP penetration. Don't have her, so I can comment only from my experience with the stock Nagato back in the day. She was quite painful to play at tier 7, but Mutsu should be fine at tier 6. AA is not really to be found on her. In the same way, Ashitaka is essentially the old Amagi stock hull, but she actually gets the modern shells with better penetration. A surprisingly good ship, imo, just don't show your side and hope there are no aircraft around. Avoid Ise.

I rather enjoy playing mid tiers, so it's a welcome change of pace to have ranked not exclusively at t10. No subs or CVs is a very nice bonus on top. One problem I see for t5 is that cruisers have by far the hardest time with 3 BBs per game pretty much a given. I think limiting BBs to 2 or one more ship in general could help out there. In addition, the Kamikaze sisters, Giulio Cesares and Gremys are a bane for game balance. Not saying there aren't ships that are too strong at other tiers, but those t5 are really a lot better than their tech tree counterparts or even other premiums. Overall, enjoyable, but still with some problems.