FixCVs_Nautical_Metaphor

This I don't really understand since it must mean that you have quite a few unfinished missions from earlier directives remaining at the weekend, and you can do many missions at the same time once the later directives are unlocked. For example, every directive of the latest batch seemed to have a mission that was about shooting down planes. Or the missions for the British premium BBs - all of those had very easy requirements. So if you plan ahead a bit and methodically select the missions to work on, it is possible to do all the plane-kill missions in two or three games and all the RN premium BB missions at once in one or at most two attempts etc. To unlock the missions, you just use a fast Tier V DD with a quick torpedo reload and play two, three short rounds of Co-Op. You can farm lots of torp hits, and as soon as you get domination mode, you can farm even more Defended ribbons, as long as none of your team mates are stupid enough to sail into the cap and keep the bots from accumulating capture points. At the same time, these Co-Op games help to quickly grind the daily coal mission chains. Or, well, there were also the Exeter marathon missions that basically called for Japanese HE spammers this week... lots of bonuses to farm simultaneously.

Well, they are not easily citadelled, but if you give a lot of broadside, you will still eat a yuge load of damage because they have rather a lot of superstructure etc, which can be chunked really hard with regular pens. So no, I don't think so.

It gets radar, which in combination with smoke is always very hard to counter. It also gets HE shells, so if you try to rush it, you get burned down. The only chance you have (besides catching it by complete surprise when out of position with the smoke on cooldown, or else focusing it with several players consistently) is if it somehow fails to notice you got in very close, because then it is very vulnerable due to the complete lack of torps. So, you need very good teamplay on your team's part or else a blatant misplay on the Belfast's part. Fiji, having only AP, does not do much damage if you bow-tank, and only has one spread of torps which you have a decent chance of evading. And of course no radar.

I'm gonna try some very broad strokes here. The best silver Tier III BB is still the Nassau, hands down. However, it is a fairly quick and easy grind to get out of the low tiers these days, and the gameplay of mid and high tier German BBs is not to everybody's liking. Few guns, poor accuracy, you need to get in fairly close, and that's where you get chewed up by HE spammers you usually can't even see, and if you can, you mostly can't hit them. The American line is terrible at Tier III, super at Tier IV, terrible at Tier V, a mixed bag at Tier VI and VII (good guns but fairly squishy armour and veeeeeeeeery slooooooooooow) and gets really good in the high tiers. The Japanese line starts out the poorest but gets better and better in a fairly linear fashion, arguably with a bit of a dip at Tier V because they threw a fast battlecruiser in there, which needs a totally different style of gameplay and which has been bitterly powercrept. Mid and high tier gameplay gets increasingly static as the ships get increasingly slow, clumsy, cumbersome, with slowly turning turrets but heavy, accurate guns with ever better penetration. You can still push, all the way up to the top tier, but you better only do it behind some support ships that better don't die on you. "Positioning is hard". The English line is fairly well rounded, also it is accompanied by a very wide and nice selection of low and mid tier premium ships. Slow turret rotation but the Dunkirk commanders from the Arsenal remedy that, so you just put one of them on your current top ship and you're fine. Tier X still stupidly broken OP and fairly idiot-proof, which unfortunately means you will be suspected to be an idiot most of the time sailing it. The French line starts terrible and gets worse until Tier VI. Normandie imho is hands down the best Tier VI BB. It has so many guns you can afford to only use two turrets, which is good because you can't ever use more than that without showing way too much broadside. Also both French Tier VI ships are tied for the fastest BBs of their tier at 29.5 kt which is always good (and third place, PEF, is a bit of a turd). I needed a fair amount of time to come to terms with that playstyle but then it was great. Lyon at Tier VII is stupidly broken OP, which is great fun if you're in it. And that's as far as I got before other priorities kicked in. However, you can confidently expect the next line to come out, the Russians, to mightily powercreep everything else again. So maybe save your free XP for that.

Before getting into Torpedobeats, let me re-iterate my frustration with Wargaming's disorganized PTS chaos. About the game mode itself, it os fast and action-packed, will not be everyone's cup of tea, super arcady but a lot of fun for skilled and quick-reacting players. Don't like the hexagon matrix on the "water" and the lack of ripples. But the very first thing that comes to mind after the first game where I did not get immediately blowed up by more experienced testers is: I can think of not one single good reason to move the smoke on Rover to the Z key. Period. Thess are even poorer ergonomics than per usual. Ceterum censeo please, for the love of goddess, finally give us consistent keyboard bindings for the consumables. Players have been asking for this for years. It can't be that hard. Edit: Also I hate epicenter mode, old or new, but it is especially terrible for this mode and I'd rather you finally abandoned this idea instead of trying to fix it. Edit 2: The "Battle on" button seems to be missing after the battle ends. So you have to go back to port. Probably a bug, I can't think of any other reason.

OK now I'm officially pissed off. As per YOUR SCHEDULE, yesterday and today we were going to be testing Binary Star and Rings of Saturn modes! Yesterday, I got into TWO Rings of Saturn battles, both of which were losses, and after that, ONLY Binary Star battles. So I was unable to complete the requirement for the reward on the live server through very little fault of my own. So I thought, well, OK, tomorrow is another day BECAUSE YOUR OWN SCHEDULE SAID SO. And went to the live server to continue the other grinds. Today, surprise surprise, it is Torpedo beats time. One day AHEAD of YOUR OWN SCHEDULE. No Flags For You! HA!

Don't forget to respond to their "Feedback Friday" tweets.

WG have gotten A LOT more than € 0,00 from these ships because they dangled them as bait in front of players when it came time to flogg the Santa lootboxes, which sold like hotcakes. By the MILLIONS. And if they did what you suggested, they could no longer do that.

This doesn't only happen when shooting DDs, and it is not confined to HE. In one of my recent Yamato battles, I had four, five full AP pens on a Montana in a row with zero damage.

... in THIS thread. IIRC, at least one other has been opened in the meanwhile, possibly more than that.

As expected, the "new" Epicenter mode is exactly as terrible as the old one, only on worse maps. I find it really astonishing how tenaciously Wargaming cling to obvious failures like aircraft carriers and epicenter, throwing ever more ressources into these gaping holes rather than admitting failure. Edit: Binary Star once again has a needlessly confusing mission description. It would be really good to adopt a consistent wording, and stick to it. If the Wiki is anything to go by, the terminology has been all over the place since forever. In http://wiki.wargaming.net/en/Ship:Game_Modes#Domination, caps are alternately referred to as "control areas", "capture points" and "control points". in Standard Battle, there is a voice command "defend the base", so that's yet another name for essentially the same thing. One of the things that makes the Binary Star mission statement confusing: Why call them "points" when they are yuge areas? In this mode, they initially are larger than normal even. From the description, I half expected small caps like the Buffs in Arms Race, and I expected them to appear after five minutes. Edit 2: Personally, I like this new mode because it is something different. However, once again, the tactical implications elude most players at least initially, which is probably only in part because of the confusing description (which I was probably overthinking again, which others won't.) You are basically sitting in the enemy cap from the start, which means that camping is actually rewarded here while sweeping flanking moves are punished. Once the five minutes are up, you need a lot of campers near the center of your cap to cap it quickly, while any flankers don't have a hope in hell of getting in there in time because it recedes from them fairly fast. Edit 3: Whether it is intentional or simply bad RNG, I get a lot more Binary Star battles now than Rings of Saturn. Which of course makes me yolo in like a complete idiot, to get it over with asap, because I want to finish that combat mission for the rewards on the live server and get it over with. It would have been better to make separate combat missions for the two different modes.

Also maybe there should be, you know, a reason why the attackers only have a limited amount of time. I realize the whole back story of these space battles is some kind of gladiatorial games and that it's basically like a game of football, which takes 90 minutes as per the rules. But wouldn't it be so much nicer if, after the time is up, there's not so much a "referee whistle" but some kind of cataclysmic event that the generators have been, like, building up to? I mean the way that it's now, the attackers could theoretically be fairly unscathed and in a very good position after the seven minutes, and basically have the defenders on their knees, but the game just says "time's up, sorry" and it is all over. Not very plausible or satisfying. No closure. Maybe the generators could just need the time to charge up so they can release some annihilating death ray... granted, that would basically be the same as in the Sun Ray of Darkness Halloween mission, and also a bit worn-out as a trope, but still... or maybe they could literally pull out the plug and all the water drains out... or whatever. Edit: Also I got into a Space Assault again this morning. According to the published schedule, it should be Binary Star and Rings of Saturn over the weekend.

I've suggested numerous times that planes should be very much affected by bad weather. In real life, they couldn't even have been launched in such a storm. If nothing else, then at least there should be a very high chance of losing the plane prematurely if it launched into a storm front or cyclone. Planes should be taking significant damage over time in inclement weather. Carrier squadrons should be able to lose their way, maybe make their minimap go all fuzzy, or shift the coordinates or something.

Mine fell out of a Satan Lootbox. Gameplay-wise, she is fine. Not much wrong. Better than, say, Gascogne. Still I did not play her a whole lot yet, for several good reasons: 1) Tier VIII - worst matchmaking in the game, period 2) I'm in the process of grinding certain Tier X ships and grinding commander XP for the next CB season. She is no help with that whatsoever. To the contrary, she uses up Elite Commander XP that I would much, much rather spend elsewhere. 3) This ties in with the problem that in contrast to other nations with silver tech trees, the Roma captain can only be used on the few other Italian premium ships, chiefly Giulio. That is very little utility. Otherwise she is a cool little ship. If you really are gonna buy a premium BB these days, which I would not advise because game development and vision are all over the place with this game, you'd be a lot better served from these standpoints with Scharnhorst, which has stood the test of time and is still great despite all the powercreep, and which gets more favourable matchmaking at Tier VII, and which has much more training utility because there exists a whole German BB line. Or any of the British Tier VIIs, for similar reasons. All three of them, in their own way, have a lot going for them. Edit: also because you can use them in the Tier VII operations, for which they all are very good for one reason or another. And if you absolutely want a Tier VIII BB, which I couldn't fully understand but OK, then you had better bought Tirpitz or Massachusetts. There are two good reasons to buy Roma that I can see: 1) If you're Italian or an Italophile and just want her because she's Italian; 2) if you're a naval history nerd and want her because Littorio-class. Edit: You can actually still buy the Kobayashi camos. They are 7,000 doubloons in-game for the Tier VIII ships and 6,000 for the Ashitaka. Which I honestly think is a bit of a rip-off, considering even a Tier X perma camo is only 5,000 doubloons while offering the exact same benefits in terms of percentages, which of course is de-facto much more beneficial in the game because the operating cost of Tier X ships are so much higher.

Ok, I got in three Space Battles in Assault mode. I was on the attacking team every time. Two times out of the three, they started to camp and pick fights with the defenders while not even spotting the generators, and consequently lost after seven minutes. The third time went better, but only in part because people on my team played more to the objective. The other part was because one of the defenders thought it prudent to sail his BB into the attackers' spawn instead of camping near his gennys. I don't stand by my earlier suspicion that this mode might be "much, much too complex for random teams of casual players". But it will be a challenge. Many casuals will struggle to understand the objective. Others, while understanding it, will have a hard time to really act accordingly. However, a small majority will probably be more or less ok after a few runs. Just as in the submarine missions really. That said, the problem is that the mode, and specifically people's inability to grasp what it is that they have to do, favours the defenders because I think most players have a tendency to camp and are not aggressive enough, and if even half your team is not aggressive enough, the attackers are in a very bad place. EDIT: And that's why I think the defenders don't need the extra buff of that insane health regeneration. (At least lower the regeneration rate...) Edit 3: At the same time, the attackers' benefit of respawning after a kill is worth a lot less because it takes so much time to respawn and get back into a good firing position. And time is the one thing the attackers don't have. I've respawned maybe half a dozen times now and only one single time did I manage to get back into action afterwards, and that was in a DD and in the one battle where my attackers did win after all, and after we already had two gennys destroyed. The majority of times, the respawn was useless. Edit 2: Also the gennys might be too well protected by the topography. Maybe I'm wrong but it seems they are all "behind" an island that shrouds them from view and protects them from fire from all directions except straight from the rear, so the attackers can't even spot them until they are basically inside the defenders' spawn. Also I think the gunfire sound sequence of the DDs was changed. I don't remember it being so drawn out, with this super annoying WHOOSH going on for several seconds. It could be a result of the general audio changes; in any event it gets on my nerves. (Though I doubt that is the reason why there are too few DDs in play - that was the same last time around.) Edit 4: There is a full minute of countdown into battle. Probably intended so players have more time to familiarize themselves with the objective. Which is good. But once people have understood it, that gets a little long. Maybe lower it to the usual 30s after half the event is over or so.

Installation finished fairly late yesterday so I only got in one Co-Op and one or two Random Battles before waiting times in the Random queue became too long for my taste - not enough to unlock Space Battles. Tried to carry on with the grind today. Waiting times in the Random queue threatened to be long yet again, with only three or four other poeople besides me after something like two minutes. So I switched to Co-Op and got into a Tier VIII-IX team that very nearly lost to the bots, scraping by on points by running down the clock. That still seemed to fail to unlock the Space Battles, only unlocked Ranked for some reason, and then I couldn't go on because all I got was transaction errors when trying to collect contgainers, mounting camosor buying upgrades and modules. After shutting down the PTS client and restarting it in the, er prescribed manner of the IT crowd however, now Space Battles ARE unlocked for some reason.

I was not able to get any space battles in yet because waiting times in the Random Battle queue to level up the PTS account sufficiently. So just a few things from reading the developer bulletin and watching today's Flamu stream: I like that you include Hindenburg as a new space ship. Space camos for all these ships in the Arsenal are a good idea, also for the Tier VI ships that aren't even in the Space Battles. However, it would be nice if you could see those camos in the PTS. That is a general gripe of mine with the presentation of perma camos in the Arsenal and the premium shop: You don't get a good enough impression of what you are actually buying. Either include a zoomable 360° view or let players buy them from the port, just as the regular perma camos. The Space Assault mode seems to be much, much too complex for random teams of casual players. Many of them will not understand the objective and therefore not play the objective, leading to frustration all around. Generally, one of the things that made the first round of space battles so appealing to new and casual players was that they made some things very simple: always the same map - no need to select upgrades - always the same spawn area - never uptiered(!) - and if I remember correctly, always Domination mode. I am not sure if it is a good idea to deviate from the formula, although other players probably felt it got a bit repetitive toward the end because of these simplifications. What I don't understand: Why are the Space Battles ships classified as Tier VII and not Tier X, same as the ships they are based on?

* Port UI – last time, at least on the PTS, the Port UI was significantly more responsive. This time – not so much, it feels just as laggy as the current version on the live server. Not good.

* The naming change from “Arsenal” to “Armory is pointless and needlessly confusing. Think of all the published materials, 3rd party Youtube videos, tutorials etc. People will continue to use those - not the least because WG still has not released a lot of material of their own - and then not find the old notion in the game any more. You can do such things but there should be a VERY good reason. This might have made sense in the original Russian – I don’t know. It does not make sense in English. And in German, the change from “Arsenal” to “Waffenkammer” actually makes things worse. At least the English words are vaguely different, making the change less confusing. The new German word is also just plain wrong. It means something different. It denotes a chamber in some sort of barracks where rifles are stacked in shelves along the walls. That's the only mental image here. If you really can’t find any decent editors / translators, in a pinch, I could free up a little capacity for you myself. There. You made me say it.

I didn't get in a whole lot of play time since the wait times grew much to fast in the evening before I was able to grind access even to space battles. So just a very quick write-up with limited scope for now. What I don't like: * New drama queen destruction sequence is back. I was so glad it didn't make it onto the live server - now it seems to be putting in another appearance. Copypasting my statement from last time: Hating the new destruction sequence more and more, the more often I see it. HATE HATE HATE it. It is even more annoying than the dog tags. Seriously. Just what is the upside of rubbing their failure into players' faces? As with the dog tags, I fail to see one. Not even increased satisfaction on the part of the players that blow me up, since they don't see any of this. What I don't understand: * It says in the Arsenal I already have the Bert Dunkirk, C-H Honoré and Reinhard v. Jütland commanders, yet they are on none of my ships and neither in the Reserve. I bought them in the last PTS and maybe the purchase just wasn’t wiped thoroughly enough. Or – I seem to remember putting them on ships I ground last time and haven’t reground yet… In any event, yet again WG fails to introduce a real Barracks like in WoT, allowing players to really manage their personnel. Which would be a good idea and has been suggested for a long, long time.

Ah so that's their dastardly plan! They want to force people to finally grind all those useless side-grade Legendary modules.

Download of the update just stops halfway through. Edit2: oh wait, I tell a lie. Turns out it wasn't half way through but only at most a fifth. Halfway through the first batch. For a second there I thought my internet connection had conked out again but no, that was not it. I had to pause and re-start the download for it to resume. Edit: Also I find it thoroughly disappointing that it is still impossible to start the live server version of the game while the public test update is downloading. It's completely silly. Come on, guys. Edit 2: Especially since the download can evidently not be left unattended but needs manual restarting every now and then.

So that's what it looks like from the other side when some morons on my team make me chase DDs again ;-)

It's called "The Rings of Saturn! Many people here on the forum will be unable to contain their excitement! "What was wrong with the old one?" he asks-

If I had a Belfast or a Kami, I sure as sh|t would rather keep them intact than swap them for any of the available steel ships, which is what this would amount to. The only one of them that holds some remote appeal to me is maybe Bourgogne but even that is in no way comparable, if for no other reason than that high tier gameplay is so unappealing.