FixCVs_Nautical_Metaphor

I'll say this for bots, they make the most reliable back-up for DDs. You spot an enemy, they're sure to blast him. You rush a smoke cloud for them, they will open up as soon as you spot the enemy DD, with 100% reliability. Human players in Random will let you down with about the same percentage rate.

They are the most recent ones I could find at the time when I cared to jot them down. That doesn't mean most of them are out of date, in fact most are from before the Upgrades rework. I have updated them here and there but not systematically. Mostly on a need-to-have basis. That's why I included the date of the video in question.

Flamu builds https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1UDqctb8pVpiyYBZZdgE7LzkwphdJ6hjUQpgRA_9CZpk/edit#gid=1700316440 My Carrier battle matchmaking statistics https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/11G0IGENL2SOSoJx8yP6Sz_RhVIk0hovHasSaWKiw1KM/edit#gid=1867916425 And from back in the days before the CV rework, when I still blew copious amounts of money at this game, Gold in Wows https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1GdW79l1hAu7cDeP6R-zKDkR6F6M2Jjv0YJLdUULC-hE/edit#gid=853355875

Do something about the flags. By which I mean the actual flags, the cosmetic ones, not the signals. 1a) I've got maybe 40 or 50 by now, after a few years of playing the game. Others are bound to have even more. As it stands, I am only ever gonna use the same three to five ones or so. My favourite ones are way down the tab, found by scrolling through a deep mess of other flags that I will definitely never use. It would be great if I could just pull them into a custom order so as to at least find them more easily. 1b) Remove the "structure" ordering the flags arbitrarily into Awarded, Commemorative and Special flags. Nobody asked for that and it helps nobody. It just uses up space on the monitor. It is useless. 2) All of 1) wouldn't be much of an issue if you only needed to choose a flag or several flags whenever you bought a new ship. That happens rarely enough. But WG chose to give even regular players one kind of flag every now and then which actually does have a function beyond mere cosmetics: The Ranked flags for Ranks 10 and 5, respectively, which reduce service cost. So, if you're just OCD enough, the song and dance is to hoist the Ranked flag on all your ships once you attain Rank 10 in order to not miss out on the savings. At least it is changed out for the Rank 5 flag automatically on all these ships later, but once the season is over, and the flags are once again removed from your stock, and you're OCD enough to wqant your favourite flag back up, you have to go through all your ships AGAIN. Frankly, it would be better if the Ranked reward for the service cost discount were something other than a flag, or it were hoisted automatically on all your ships, and afterwards, the original flag replaced. Or something. 3) Sell flags from past events in the shop. This is a complete no-brainer. Players will always shell out for cosmetics. Maybe even let players sell their flags to unclutter their tabs. Looking at past experience, these are going to be implemented no sooner than at least four years from now but hey. Glad I could help.

On my Misc WoWs info spreadsheet, I have a page with all the camos and what bonus percentages they yield. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ONv6CVw20qGRsGglarice7Jt9I0Rp069wRpVsmgOxHE/edit#gid=957595903 You can also use the coal to directly buy Revolutionary camos in the armory, whose 30% credit boost is among the better ones, as well as the regular Economic signals. However, Coal is much too valuable a resource to blow it on mere credits. What you should be doing is saving up the coal for a decent premium or special ship of a type you are comfortable playing, which then becomes your cash cow. My choice would be Georgia since it is so obviously better than the other Tier IX choice of Pommern, and you meet the fewest aircraft carriers on that tier which means it is the least unfun. Another idea would be to convert the coal into signals and camos that give you more Free XP, for which you then get yourself an Alaska as soon as you saved up a million of it, especially if you enjoy heavy cruisers and battleships. Alaska is absolutely outstanding, one of the best premium/special ships of all, not just among the "freemium" ones you can get without paying WG any actual real money. But the first thing you should do is try to get a lot better at the game because currently, looking at your stats, you're mostly terrible and lack the basics. You mostly play high-mid and high tier DDs and you are mostly a bad liability to your teams in those games with win rates mostly below 40. They would mostly be better off without you. I don't mean to disparage you; those are merely the straight-up facts. Most of us were at that point at some time or other. In the earlier days, I would have told you to go play low to mid tiers more, gain more playing experience and grind a few other lines but frankly, these days with all the carriers everywhere all the time except Tier IX, that would not be a lot of fun, and terrible advice. So my advice is this: play as many modes and events where there are no carriers. Farm as much Free XP, coal and maybe even steel from these as possible. Blow it on Tier IX ships, tech tree or freemium. Jutland, Yugumo, Fletcher. The British DD line is terrific as of Tier VII at the latest and you can get a perma camo for the Lightning from the Royal Navy Collection, which is another sensible thing to invest coal in. (You will find a useful page on Collections in the above Spreadsheet as well.) Watch a lot of Flamu videos and try to learn from them; he is the best I have seen in didactic terms, and though a lot of his stuff is a bit out of date, many basics still hold true. Also I seem to recall Little White Mouse once wrote a guide with a few easy pointers how to increase your win rate, that was very useful to me. Don't give WG any money. And never pass up a free premium ship, nor a free perma camo, especially not for Tier IX.

I've been doing a lot of them today. Strangely, the CVs seem to have all but disappeared from the mode. And as I predicted - it's great. The most annoying thing to happen is when you either don't have any DDs or they are only unstealthy ones or they are all too incompetent to spot targets. But hey. Preferring that to CVs any day of the week. Here I was, almost ready to free-XP the rest of the way through the Amalfi but now I'm grinding the rest in Asymmetric.

Yes. Basically the whole game is an unfun mess, has been for nigh on two years. But at least at Tier IX there are significantly fewer carrier battles, not as few as I'd like but it's just about every third game or so. Fewer for Friesland, more for Benham, strangely. And of those, they are mostly uptiered. And European DD AA is not bloody useless by any measure if you play it right. That may mean to shift your goal from winning the game to annoying the CV but even so. Also most CV players are not even halfway competent. So limiting oneself to Tier IX and Halland/Smaland is still bearable. Just about. It's a shame about muh Shima, which I used to enjoy a great deal, but hey. But in the low Tiers, there are carriers in every game, often two of them, and they don't need to be competent at all to grief and disrupt and just blap whoever they fancy with no repercussions.

The grind to Conq is worth it, and you should buy a Thunderer as soon as possible. Funny funny English HE never gets old.

Dude, the low tiers are an unfun mess because they are infested with aircraft carriers, compounded by the fact that not one of these ships has adequate AA and many of them, none at all. So you're just plane fodder, all the time, without fail. I'm occasionally taking out my fully AA-built Orion with the fully AA-built Dunkirk captain. That is the best AA ship on Tiers I-IV as far as I am aware, highest range (5.8) and highest continuous damage (89 w flag) and it does nothing. Compared to the carrier plague, nothing else even registers. Regarding that campaign, just grind it in Co-Op.

The client now flat-out refuses to save my settings for the minimap circles. Have to reset them every game anew.

Supercruisers / Battle Cruisers should very definitly be in a separate class with separate matchmaking constraints. And Asashio DW torps should be able to hit them.

Firstly, you need to be aware of their role, which is to utilize their high damage potential - about the highest in the game - to deal a lot of damage while avoiding to take damage in return, since they just can't, usually. For this reason, the Priority Target skill is absolutely mandatory in each and every cruiser captain build. You must know when somebody starts targeting you, and react. Even if it's just by stopping to shoot and going dark for a while so they hopefully lose interest. The most important factor for achieving your goal is positioning, which is very difficult. A position is good if it lets you inflict a lot of damage while not taking much in return. It will not stay good forever though, so you need to remain alert to what the enemy are doing (aka use the minimap), and have an exit plan to bail in time before things get too dicey. Besides the old "park behind and island and spam HE", a classic way to avoid damage is positioning at some lateral distance from battleships, so enemies targetting those BBs are loath to swivvel their guns by 90° or more to target you instead when you open up, goading them into keeping to shoot at those BBs instead. Tanking damage is their role. If they try to refuse, you can try forcing them into it through your own positioning. Cruisers are late-game ships. The longer they survive, the better they generally perform and the more important they become. That means you need to play it cagey, at least at the start, and generally be patient. You also need to play it safe. Faced with the choice between two moves, high win rate players will usually choose the less riskier one. At the same time though, they are support ships. Most bring more utility to the team than other classes, like with hydro or radar. So choose another ship of a different type and support that as best you can while not dying. Most of this is covered exceedingly well at a very basic level in the latest Flamu Omaha video. That ship is an extreme example since it is about the squishiest ship in the game. One thing that's not in there, at least not explicitly, is an easily remembered maxim I heard from a former clan mate: "Cruisers don't push - battleships do." If they don't, you can't force them. And if you care at all about your win rate, you then need to contain yourself and find something else useful to do instead of starting to push on your own. Like maybe kiting, which means to run away while getting the enemy to chase you. That way, you can shoot back at them and maybe drop the occasional torp spread their way, eventually burning them down or luring them into a trap. Another handy maxim is that nothing good ever comes from pushing deeper into a crossfire. You shouldn't get into one in a cruiser in the first place, which takes good situational awareness, but if you end up there, YOLOing in or turning broadside are your absolutely last options since they will most likely get you killed. All of this is really not easy, especially if you lack patience, as you can easily see from my stats - I know all this stuff and have a lot of games and still generally suck at most cruisers. My highest win rate in Randoms is still Mogami from way back, which I built completely differently from the standard (a kiting HE spammer avoiding damage by dodging) and into a dedicated DD close cap support instead. Musta been shortly after the initial CV rework.

PotatoAlert worked for a bit, but now it's broken AGAIN. Says the skript failed to execute. Probably because I am not playing with an Admin account?

Hi, I keep getting the occasional F-key quick message from an enemy player in my battle chat, like the "Well Done" message (F11?). Is that a bug or a feature? Or a mod even? And if it's a feature, how do I do that? Cause just hitting the F key in the general battle chat (=the white one where messages go to both teams) does not seem to be doing it.

I noticed it sooner but never wondered enough to bother finding out. I suppose the recent increase in chat bans spurred my curiosity. Players are obviously using the quick commands with a corresponding increase in frequency to circumvent getting chat banned while still being able to insult others through sarcastic use. Also it's more like 30k battles counting all my other accounts.

Fantastic! So WG is providing players with a great, anti-intuitive way to spread sarcasm and bile, intentionally or unintended, and I suppose it doesn't even count as chat abuse. Really a stellar achievement. Sometimes I think they should stop censoring the chat altogether, let players say whatever they want and work it out amongst themselves. Take a leaf out of Rust's book etc.

Proper teamplay is - what helps your team win - what makes your team perform better than just the mere sum of its ships. Aka help it become a system instead of remaining a jumbled mess of individual ships. Here's a depressing replay as a bonus. https://replayswows.com/replay/106468#stats

It's just carrier fodder. The end.

The only time I had that happen regularly was when I was using a very slow PC, like a seven-year-old office machine or something. And that was on a far slower internet connection. You do not need the latest maxed-out gaming rig for this game, which is one of the things I still like about it, but it should be halfway up to snuff.

Not completely on her own but you can really make CVs unhappy if you play it smart. Even the better CV players. You're not completely helpless, in contrast to every other ship. You can hurt them back. You are not just fodder.

You should keep grinding to two million and get a Smaland. Everything else is just carrier fodder, to varying degrees.

The barefaced cheek of this statement, after WG's immediate reaction to the CB boycott was to stomp it out under their heel by simply opening the sluice gates on the steel rewards. No honest discussion, no appreciation of clan players' feedback, not even a hint of negotiating or the slightest sign of good will, even though the boycott movement, from the start and very naively, took any measures right off the table that could have hurt WG's business in any way whatsoever. No, WG just squashed them like bugs, wiped them aside after maybe ten minutes of a middle management meeting. And then to top it off, this kind of smugness in the forum. A true class act.

I'm firmly opposed to the whole concept of resetting and the only reason I did two lines was because it seemed the quickest and easiest way to get my hands on a Smaland, since you can buy 250k Free XP for I think 12.5k research gimmicks. (Resetting means going through a lot of tiers below IX, depending on your Free XP, when Tier IX is the only Tier not completely overwhelmed with CVs at this time and thus the only Tier left that is worth playing at all in Randoms with any but the strongest AA ships.)

Why are you stopping already when the Anniversary even continues till the 30th and the data gathering is automated?

Why blow ridiculous amounts of Free XP at a Tier XX DD with no AA to speak of? You're grinding countless hours of game time, blowing no ends of ressources, only to make yourself carrier fodder. (Smaland is worth every cent.)