tocqueville8

How would you say they differ? This is what I run on the Venezia: other than maybe taking the secondary module in slot #3, it seems alright for a Napoli as well, doesn't it?

Monthly? - Shiki, Yammy, Kaga, Hayate, Azuma, Kitakaze, Fuso - Salem, Georgia, Gearing, Wooster, Iowa, Baltimore, Monaghan - Bismarck, GK in the future for sure - Minotaur, Plymouth, QE - Jean Bart, République, Marceau, Colbert, Mogador - Halland, Smaland - Chung Mu I never almost never sell tech tree ships anymore, unless I really can't stand them (*cough* Seattle *cough*), so I have most T6s and above.

Salem is strong, and I imagine perhaps better than DM in competitive, as good DD captains will avoid your radar anyway. The superheal is only super against fires, and it feels like an improved heal against regular AP or HE damage. The last couple of charges are going to be like regular heals, as there won't be much damage in the queue, especially if you took a torp or a citadel. Still, imagine a DM with 6-7 heals (and able to use 2-3 at once) and worse utility. Great ship for carrying, at least in Randoms. Yoshino is just one of many long-range HE spammers (Azuma, Roon, Hindenburg, Ibuki, Zao, Saint-Louis, Henri IV...). The 20 km torps reload slowly and are spotted from the Moon, giving opponents 14-15 seconds to react, as opposed to 7-8 seconds for most DD torps (non deep-water). The 12 km ones are much deadlier, and you can barely launch them while unspotted. Of course, the torps give her more carrying potential than the Azuma, tier for tier, as you might be able to use them in a brawl or take out an unaware DD in smoke. Frankly, in terms of uniqueness, I'd go Napoli, which is a cross of Yolo Emilio and a secondary BB. Of course, the skill floor is higher than on the Yoshino, as she's all about timing. I'm on the fence myself, between Napoli, Carnot (I'd have a good captain for that), Z-44 (for the memes) and possibly Yoshino as well...

The Azuma is alright: a nice, relaxing long-range cruiser. Is she very different from, or much better than the Ibuki? Not really, but she is premium. The Agir is a good brawler if you can time your pushes appropriately. The Hayate is very expensive, but she can be built in several ways, so maybe you can use her to train different captains depending on what you feel like. She's a straightfoward DD with no gimmicks or aces up her sleeve, but a powerful armament. Friesland/Groeningen are too specialized to be reliable, imho: no torps, no heal, no speed boost, bad ballistics, bad concealment. Hard to use well, often unrewarding. Imho the best use of FXP is to skip stock modules and the occasional cursed/frustrating ship. If you're looking for Research Bureau points, apparently you can reset a line, research it up to T10 (only the hulls and ships, not the other modules like torps and fire control) using with FXP without actually buying the ships, then reset it again: every ship will accumulate another set of RB points (10k or 20k in total depending on whether you had the 2x bonus), which you'll receive when you actually regrind and play the ships like normal. Basically, you'd be spending FXP but saving a lot of credits.

I once had a 1v1 game vs a Longjiang, so it's possible *I* was that Umikaze...

Sorry, I gotta ask: were YOU one of those 4 CVs? They often come together because they're caused by the same problem: very few players in the queue. If you play at reasonable hours of the day, all games are going to be 12v12, many are going to have no CV at all, almost none are going to have 2 of them per team. Play at normal hours, get normal teams. If you can't, I suppose you might consider opening an account on a different server.

Dude, these are your most played cruisers:

1) "Free ships" are already available, for coal at least. FXP ships are just freer, in that you can speed up the process by an order of magnitude, at least for a while, using flags and camos that are available for free. The incentive to give out things for free is that players are happy and get a taste of premium ships. 2) Removing the achievement-2-signals system didn't "force" anyone to pay any amount of in-game currency. Other than some detonation flags for when I play in a division (and which I occasionally bought before the change, as well), I haven't bothered buying battle signals. Those that come from daily/weekly shipments, or SCs, are welcome, but I'm not going to pay millions of credits for what used to be free. Frankly, I can hardly tell the difference, and my div mates also told me they have simply stopped equipping combat flags most of the time.

I don't think that's it. Personally, I deliberately stayed longer in the low tiers to improve on my gameplay...and to stay away from high-tier DDs that could torp me from much further away. Or maybe my first T7, the Nagato, was just underwhelming. Either way, it was my choice, nothing to do with the game's xp or credit economy. But at the same, lots of average or below-average high-tier players have thousands of games' worth of experience. They just never learn because they're unable or unwilling to, just like I've been walking since I was little but I'll never become a racewalking athlete.

Again, I think the remedy should be twofold: 1) Spread these terrible players about evenly, so that the match would quickly become, say, a 11v11 or 10v10 thing, not 9v12. It wouldn't be (and I wouldn't want it to be) perfectly balanced, but it would be less infuriating after the first 5 minutes. 2) Give better rewards for high-tier PvE modes, so that they have somewhere to derp around. I mean, I've played some T10 Co-op games to get SCs over the past few days, if I didn't have a captain on that ship good enough for Randoms, but both the gaming experience and the rewards are crap, especially in slow ships. Why can't there be a set of weekly T8-10 Operations?

1) Some steamrolls are inevitable. One team might go down 2 DDs before the other, lose map control, lose crossfiring opportunities, etc., and things proceed from there. 2) Some steamrolls would be avoided by having the teams balanced. Some will tell you that that would cause every player's WR to collapse to 50%, but that's not necessarily the case: if the matchmaker created teams that aren't identical but, say, within 3% avg WR of one another, good players would still win more games than they lose, but a much higher proportion of those games would be close and exciting until the end. 3) If that happens, the loss in victory xp bonuses might be offset by the extra duration of games, as close games tend to end after more ships have been sunk, more caps have been capped, and generally more xp has been accrued. The victory bonus could be tweaked to accomodate any loss in xp gains. Personally, I hate steamroll losses, but I also prefer a close defeat to a steamroll win. It's particularly annoying when a game ends with lots of ships still floating: the result might've been foregone, but it's still fun to shoot up stuff whether you're obviously going to win or obviously going to lose. Unless it's a ranked mode, I say remove the zeroeing rule: let the steamroll play out in full. At least people who used nice camos and flags would get a bit more value out of them.

Is it okay if I add SCs from daily shipments or "more resources" picks, or is this just for the Anniversary Event?

I don't think we should expect people to play 1000+ games before reaching T10. I mean, I did, but I was grinding 5-6 lines at the same time and I enjoyed the mid-tiers. Still, one should be able to play the Yamato without investing 300 hours into the game, imho. It's just that by then he should have learned to play her somewhat effectively. Basically, I think WG should do a better job coaching players. After all, this game is very complicated: detection ranges, spotting mechanics, radar, hydro, smoke, torps, deep water torps, MBRB, airplanes...someone with 500 battles but who reads guides, the forum, etc., is going to do better than someone with 12000 games who never bothered learning about the game. I started with a 55% WR or so because I'd watched Jingles videos for a couple of years, so I had some sense of ammo selection, winning on points and such. EDIT: I also think the game should give better rewards to Co-op and add high tier Operations: I don't mind noobs (I often play like one...), but let's give them some rewarding modes to play in. It's true they'd get to T10 faster, but they'd keep playing Co-op, I reckon.

It's clearly time for the first free XP CV!

I think it's for Americans. Or for how Russians (Belarusians?) see Americans.

T6 Aigle, win

3 BBs brawling 3 more BBs while assorted DDs make torpedo soup isn't my idea of a convoy battle. I think it should've been something with, let's say: Convoy escort: 4 DDs 1 CA/CL 1 BB 1 CV Attackers: 4 subs 2 BBs/CAs 1 CV to spot/coordinate Frankly, I found secondary-Nagato Narai to be a lot more fun than this, and more rewarding as well. EDIT: possibly, the bot merchant ships would scatter when attacked, but the attacking force would be split, say, 5-2 (5 including the CV), so the defenders might have to switch sides, or make some decisions.

0 out of 6 crates so far (didn't buy any of them other than with anniversary tokens)

To be fair, 17 out of 28 ships survived in those 2 games, so you'd expect low hp rewards in both games. I think it's because it's fairly easy to sink all the transports and win.

The Plymouth does require some finesse, but she's really good if you're patient with your positioning. Or, if there are no radar cruisers around, if you do the exact opposite and push in behind your DD. There are only 100 meters between your best detection range and your radar range. Add RPF and you arguably become the best cruiser in the game at hunting DDs. Radar Mino has a bigger stealth radar window, but she's way more squishy. The only thing you should keep in mind are your bad turret arcs, which are going to make you show broadside while in smoke: torps are a bigger threat to you than to a Mino for that reason. Cunningham helps a lot, as you'll be wanting an extra smoke and heal during long games, maybe radar as well. The AA is meh, but not exactly trash, and you'll be in smoke most of the time you're in an offesive position. Finally, the slower rate of fire will help you maintain situational awareness and be less sloppy with your aiming. This just in today: That's 56k dmg to DDs One of them was bad, one was average, one was above average, so it's not like I got particularly lucky or anything. I *was* lucky that their team had no long-range radar, though. As for the Shikishima, I seem to be doing a lot better in her than I did in the Yamato, but then again the Yammy was my 1st T10, while I mostly played the Shiki when there was Dead Eye, so maybe that explains the difference.

Maybe your secondaries set a fifth fire on someone at exactly the same time? Either that or one of the skip bombs hit someone else, maybe an unspotted DD in front of the Arizona, or behind her...

Yes. Kleber is the better open-water gunboat due to the ballistics, and the better torpedo ambusher as well (the torps are faster and reload faster), but Marceau is the better cap contester (smaller concealment window to cross), island farmer (slower shells are easier to lob over), as well as the better carrying ship (AA is way better, Kleber might run out of MBRB by the end).

I don't see how coal is being devalued: it's pretty much a fixed income, barring some Supercontainer or rewards from brawling modes, which are under WG's control. Free XP earnings are probably inflated due to special signals being available from weekly containers, as well as some one-use camos giving massive FXP bonuses (German, Blue Gamescon, etc.), but coal is what it is. And they're adding coal ships frequently: Immelmann, Marco Polo, Napoli, Carnot...

Partial haul (I'll be inputting the final results on the dedicated thread): 50 + 25 + 25 special signals 50 + 50 + 50 + 50 camos 50k + 50k free xp 1k + 1k dubs 1.5k steel 15k + 15k + 15k coal 30 + 14 + 7 + 7 days of premium 100 + 100 + 100 regular signals (speed, cpt xp, ship xp) 1 ship (T6 West Virginia) with 10-point captain I guess I've been lucky, but they seem alright to me. On the other hand, I didn't get any permacamo from the Distant Voyages ones.

I don't get it. I means at some point you had at least a year's worth of premium time, but you still took the offer and bought another year when it was on discount on New Year's? Or was there an offer for more than a year?