FixCVs_Nautical_Metaphor

Well by that standard, you'd be better off in both French Tier VI BBs. And I wager you'd be able to do more worthwhile things once you got there.

Ok I finally got around to unlock it myself and I have to say, the lurid title is completely 100% justified. I thought the low tier French BBs were bad but this thing takes the cake. Once the CV rework hits and the AA becomes meaningless, the only redeeming feature will be the secondaries and I'm not even sure a full secondaries build is even worth it. So wet, so slow. Handles like a whale. Unworthy of being in the German BB line. Why would WG inflict this on us? Greed is understandable for me in a commercial enterprise but this is sadism. Edit: I take back the 'slow' since she actually is faster than all non-French Tier VI BBs. Probably the sluggish handling just gave me that whalish impression. In any event, I've compared the Scharnhorst to a brand new AMG C-Class and the Graf Spee to a pre-owned old Golf GTI. This thing is a Scirocco Diesel. ♫♪♪ 54 mpgiesel... ♫♪♪

Here's another idea: I just remembered some premium commanders are now 'for hire' in the Arsenal for doubloons. That might also be a worthwhile investment, especially if you can use them on ships you like to play a lot or on several premium ships besides their specialization. However, I'd first get all the coal ones.

Ceterum censeo these numbers are not "statistics". They are "specifications". Please try not to cement WG's translation errors.

I did the grind in the B Hull a few months back. That said, there were very few carriers back then. The fact is in the current meta, if a halfway decent CV player is going after you and you don't have defensive AA, you're dead. Seeing as there are currently a lot of carriers out there, C Hull is worth considering for the next two weeks. Of course as soon as 0.8.0 comes out, all bets are off anyway. So maybe make sure you have the Fletcher by then and can do Ranked in that, where there will be no carriers.

Also btw, I don't think spending doubloons on a few premium days at a time is a particularly good deal, and if you didn't even buy them but accumulated them over a long period of time as a F2P player, frankly it is a quite terrible idea. I added a little section to my "Gold in WoWs" spreadsheet down at the bottom of the sheet called "Gold by purchase". https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1GdW79l1hAu7cDeP6R-zKDkR6F6M2Jjv0YJLdUULC-hE/edit#gid=1719828417 These give you the converted money values in Euros if you bought the doubloons outright in a medium or large chest from the premium store. Now the individual values like 86 cents for a day don't sound like much. And it's certainly a lot less than 80.39 Euros which is the standard price of 360 days of WoWs premium in the shop. But last Christmas, they had a discount flogging the 360 days for 60 Euros. This year, it was 39,99. And in the weeks leading up to it, they had a few doubloon discount promos, and if you made use of those, and then spent those doubloons on premium time, someone calculated the price was I think less than 28 Euros for those 360 days. Those are far smaller sums and the price for one day becomes something like eight to eleven Cents. And now consider all the things you did to get those doubloons in the game, without paying money for them. The hours you put in, grinding, and possibly not enjoying yourself very much in the process. You never get those hours back. And I think it is worthwhile to ask yourself now and then if it doesn't make more sense to spend a little money, that you maybe didn't spend quite as much time earning, and possibly even enjoyed earning, in order to save yourself some grinding in the game.

You want to save it for retraining of your top commanders after re-assigning them to freshly ground ships. Specifically those of them that are maxed out. It's not a big issue in the lower ranks but once you get into those last few points... Besides the benefit of having the top commmander on the highest tier ship in the respective line, they also generate more Elite Commander XP since you're of course more inclined to put the best power camos and special signals on these ships for the new grind, especially while they are not yet fully upgraded. If you put a maxed-out commander on a new ship and use credits for retraining instead of doubloons, he doesn't generate any Elite Commander XP during retraining. So you lose 125,000 ECXP. That is almost enough to upgrade a 6-pt captain to 10 points, aka not having to play that 6-pointer's ship without concealment expert. The fewer maxed-out commanders you have, the more sorely you miss them during retraining. As an F2P player, you might also want to spend some doubloons occasionally on demounting upgrade modules in the high tiers. Three million credits for a 6th slot module still take some grinding without premium time. Also for demounting special modules bought for coal in the Arsenal, in order to move them to higher-tier ships. Another good investment imho are port slots, you don't need to be a 'collector' to want some 50 or more ships in your port. The best time for that has only just passed though, with the 75-percent discount over the Holidays you could have gotten four times as many slots for the money. If you missed it, definitely wait for the next discount which is sure to come sooner or later. You should definitely not use them to buy Free XP and level commanders because that is much too expensive and you get very little bang for the buck. Regarding Yubari, I'm repeating myself here but it's a waste to blow coal on such a ship when you can get it for less than a fiver in the shop while the coal buys you things you can not get for money, like the 'performance' signal flags, which you definitely want in Clan Battles and Ranked, just to avoid letting your side down. It's a nice little ship and all, but do better buy it for money, it's less than a pack of fags these days. The only reason to use coal would be maybe if you live in Turkey or some other country where that actually is a lot of money. Very few premium ships you could conceivable get for that small amount of doubloons are worth it imho. Okhotnik perhaps, borderline. But since you already have the Leningrad, that's half of the utility gone, so it would be a blatant and foolish waste in your situation. They might put T-61 into the Tech Tree for purchase one of these days but she'll probably be around 4,500 gold even if they do that. (Or they might pull her completely.)

Regarding Operation Dynamo, at the risk of being the umptienth nerd to point this out, but there have not been any colonels in Her Most Britannic Majesty's Royal Air Force since since 1 August 1919. The equivalent rank has been "Group Captain" ever since.

The German DDs are a bit unique in that there are at least two massive breaks in the line. The first four ones can reward hyper aggressive play with their front torps. You can not just get away with recklessness more easily on the low tiers; it's almost a requirement for playing these ships successfully because they only gain stealth torp ability with a 10-pt captain. Through the mid tiers, they slowly develop into somewhat gimmicky 'hybrid' DDs (that supposedly do equally well with guns and torps) but arguably, this side of the premium T-61, the concept doesn't really come into its own until Tier VIII, and that's of course the Tier with the worst general matchmaking. Also the smoke is neither here nor there with its medium-short duration and limited number and longish cooldown, so you can't really practice the 'offensive smoke' tactic for extended periods (where you just smoke up in a good position and keep shooting at the enemy from within the cloud.) Though that may be a blessing in disguise... In any event, there is a very good Flamu video on youtube covering most of the German line. Upshot though, German DDs can be very enjoyable but arguably are not the best place to start. Better to start with the purest incarnations of the two classic polar opposite archetypes, the US gunboats or the Japanese torpedo boats. Since it really does not take long to unlock ships on the low tiers, and WG is smothering players in power camos and special signals these days, and hopefully you've been stocking up on port slots during the recent massive 75% discount phase, my suggestion is to unlock the Tier IV and V US and IJN DDs as quickly as possible (Minekaze rather than Mutsuki) and then stick with those for a while but start to grind commander XP instead until you have concealment expert on all of them. Also note the basic DD captain build is PM-LS-SE-CE (or PT instead of PM on gunboats). Any other skills are for later, even though Radio Location is massively useful on basically any DD once you understand how to use it. All of that said, my current personal favourite on the low tiers is Derzki the Tier III Russian DD. It's only got three small pop guns and the torps only have 4km range and hardly do any damage, but it has TEN of the little buggers it can shoot to either side, and they also reload very quickly. It really teaches you to use the terrain for concealment because you just crave the giggle factor of sneaking up on people to flood them with all these torps. I have had a hard time with mid tier Russian DDs though. They retain these super short range 'YOLO' torps, and while they do get very good, hard hitting guns with laser flat shell trajectories, these are mounted in very slow turrets, and the ships themselves also get clumsy, with big turning circles and rudder shifts as well as bad concealment. It takes yet another a different play style which is not everybody's cup of tea. The key advantage of the line though is that they not only get two worthwhile premium DDs (Okhotnik and Leningrad) but you can also easily use a DD commander on the Krasny Krym premium cruiser, which lots of people hate but also lots of people have gotten out of a Santa loot box, and I think it can be good fun.

This could only work if a major revision of the complete ramming mechanic and the team killing sanctioning mechanic was implemented at the same time. But even then, it is highly doubtful that WG would even consider that. Jingles makes a good point in the latest Mingles video: Most players just don't care and don't take the game sufficiently serious to make an effort at getting better. And there is very little that can be done about that. So it would make the game less fun for both the skilled/serious players (more damage incurred from rams by potatoes) and for the potatoes (because more damage and more harrassment from more annoyed skilled/serious players).

Port keeps switching to Twitch port at each new start of the game client. Please, this has been reported again and again over months and months. Maybe even make it so players can uninstall ports they don't want.

This is supposed to be more of a fun series than a grinding series, as evidenced by the news bulletins and the meagre rewards. Up to now it actually has been a lot of fun for me personally, not the least because I encountered hardly any carriers. However, with a view to this concept, it doesn't seem to make sense to make players who reached rank 1 the last time then start at rank 10 already in the second round. It's actually more of a penalty because it cuts the fun even shorter. Especially since there is no League of Sea Wolves at the end.

Well, with shira we are talking more than "a few" torps though.

It also depends (a little) if you use the Preventive Maintenance captain skill. Not having a Gearing per se, I couldn't say how much it depends, but it is en vogue these days to prefer Priority Target, and it does make a fairly big difference on some ships I play and used to play. Main Armaments mod 1 as the first slot upgrade made an even bigger difference.

So is Cossack, possibly the most OP ship on the Tier at that, and it is admitted to Dynamo. Which I'm not entirely sure I approve of, but there you go.

Truth be told I rarely get as much fun out of high tier games as low and mid tiers, with sucky MM Tier VIII being the cut-off. The exception would be clan wars, because of the group experience and of course the absence of carriers. But I'd be more than OK with Tier VI clan battles, or Tier V even, now that I have my own Giulio. Possibly even Tier VII, that would be a nice opportunity to test if Shiratsuyu is really such a good counter to Belfast as some people say.

Hi, rumors have been put forward that WG has a firm cap on the total number of ship drops or something, so best get in early while the cap has not yet been reached. While statistically irrelevant, it at least coincides with my anecdotal personal experience. I bought four discrete batches of 20 mega boxes in the first few weeks, and in the first three batches, I got several of these conversions where a Supercontainer with a ship I didn't already have dropped instead of a Santa box. In all, I got nine ships, the last one was a Giulio Cesare, and in between the second and third batch, I used some of the gold from the boxes to buy the Blyska and further increase my chances of a "rare ship" drop. So not at bad haul, but the fourth batch didn't have a single ship drop, which was something of a letdown. Should I put it down as a fluke, and let WG milk me some more? I do want that Kamikaze, and a Belfast wouldn't go amiss either, even though at least one of my Clan mates would then probably refuse to speak to me any more...

Fight a couple hundred more random battles and you will probably be recruited by some clan looking for members. Chances are it'll initially be a solo player clan that mainly looks for your contribution of daily oil to expand their base. If you want a clan that regularly plays clan battles, it's probably easiest to use the respective forum section but you needn't really bother until you have unlocked at least one Tier VIII ship from the tech tree, rule of thumb.

There is always the possibility they are just using the messed-up balance on the PTS as a marketing tool. I mean what they have achieved is that everyone is shooting their mouths off and at the same time everyone is craning their necks already for the supposedly upcoming dumpster fire. A lot of attention, which is what you want in marketing. Now what if they're really smart and the balance of 0.8.0. is completely not what it is now on the PTS? I mean I know... but...

Jean Bart is in the Arsenal and can be bought for coal, I just did after the Snowflakes thing.

You are of course just uselessly damage-whoring while neglecting your spotting, scouting and capping duties, as can easily be seen from the complete lack of the respective ribbons in your screenshot. It's not so much an Asashio curse but rather an Asashio player disease.

Carriers keep switching out of top-down view into live view on their own after setting a route point (without me hitting the respective key).

Please, for the luv of god, stop flirting. I'm sorry but I just don't think of you that way.

Better than Monaghan, not as good as Kidd.

That's still true if the opposing CV player is just bad enough. I think people have just forgotten about it now and again because there were long stretches with few carrier players in Randoms. Just from the gut, without having kept actual statistics, I'd say in the past six or eight months, carrier participation only flared up twice for two or more weeks in a row. The first time was when WG announced the death of RTS for the first time, the second period is currently ongoing. Besides these major flare-ups, there were only a few isolated days with increased carrier populations, which had to do with certain daily missions / RN directives etc that were more easily farmed in CVs.