The trouble with finding a middle ground with a Wargaming.net product is that they change the damn rules all the time :). But yeah, it is sort of a dance. One challenge is that to shoot accurately you need to move in a straight line, if you’re shooting at max range. To avoid being hit, you need to not move in a straight line. So you have to sort of balance that out.
Guys, you guys! 0.3.1 is gonna hit tomorrow! democracy-fueled battlewagons of immeasurable freedom! samurai flyboys! armor that actually stops a shell or two!
FREEDOMBARGES are released. This isn’t mentioned on the client, but if you jump into a game you’ll notice, because you’ll be surrounded by 15 US BB.
I still took my St. Louis out. I don’t care.
Japanese CV are also in the game now. I haven’t had a chance to try them, so I don’t yet know how wickedly OP their planes are.
The queue I just joined waiting for a game : 8DD, 4CA, 54BB.
must be fun driving a DD in there lol
I just started playing my Umikaze and trolling the tier III BBs.
Lots of fun! :)
I also wanted to try new US BBs, bought the 1st one, got into the queue… 185 BBs in the queue with me. :) Took over 3 minutes to get into a fight. OTOH, when on a DD or CA, matches start within seconds.
One of the new BBs (New York, tier 5 IIRC) is so freaking maneuverable! He was dodging my torps like no tomorrow even when I launched them from about 5 km.
To the guy who installed the game on a wrong HD. Similarly to WOT, you can just copy the entire folder to another HD, re-point your desktop shortcut and it will work. I’ve done that with tanks and I’ve done that with ships.
All of the American battleships I’ve been in turn like crazy—they’re not straight-line fast, but they have extremely narrow turning circles. Even perfect torpedo drops don’t usually get me more than once.
I quite like the American BB line, definitely more than the Japanese line (although I’m only at tier 4 in both). I love the Wyoming’s main battery, although the dispersion can be annoying. I can get a little steamed when I straddle a target dead center with all twelve shells.
In regards to BB tactics.
BBs have to be the damage sponge for their team, there is no doubt about it - they have more HPs, more armor, health regen skill, etc. BBs have range, cruisers don’t, if a BB stays at max range, cruisers have to get in closer to shoot, which makes them vulnerable to enemy fire. Furthermore, if a BB continues to stay far back, it becomes more vulnerable to planes and DDs, since cruisers can’t cover him effectively. Eventually, the enemy team will capture the point, kill all your cruisers and then kill you.
Ships should move together. BBs, CAs, DDs - they all have their job and they can only do it effectively when they work together. Lone BBs hanging back is bad, lone BB attacking the enemy line is equally bad. Watch your team, move with them - whether your teammates are pushing or hanging back you have to be with them baiting your enemies to shoot you instead of them. Well, not only you, of course - the goal is to spread enemy fire among many friendlies and focus fire enemies at the same time - but you should be receiving most fire without allowing the entire enemy line to focus fire you.
BTW, always kill cruisers and DDs first, not BBs. Doing so enables your DDs and planes. It’s like in RPGs, you want to focus fire glass cannons and softies first to prevent them from doing the same to your team and then finish off the tank.
All good advice. The trick is getting a pub match team to do any of it. Sticking around your team mates usually gets you shot or torped, or rammed, sadly enough, and no one seems to have a grasp of naval tactics. You have to think ahead a lot more than with tanks, because the inertia of your great big gray boat is, well, massive. Most folks haven’t figured this out yet, and if they play DDs mostly they never do.
Thanks, I didn’t think you could do that.
All true but, like in tanks (and RL, hehe), do what you ought to and hope for the best. :)
The trick IMO is to stop trying to get a pub match team to do what you want and, instead, to react to what they are doing.
Friendly torps are becoming less of a problem, I honestly don’t remember friendly torp fire ever since I hit tier 5 or so. Most of the time though, if you watch your teammates as well as enemies, you can minimize the chance of getting torped or rammed. Easier said than done though. :)
You may be on to something, in that I’ve noticed a decrease in same-side torping since the patch. Unfortunately, my client has been a lot less stable since the patch, too.
Some idiot in a cruiser rammed in to my side when I was in my BB. I got fined a token amount for it, more than him of course.
As usual I tried to avoid it but he never did, even after he was stuck on me.
The changes to the ammunition to make HE a bit more viable have combined with the Captain’s perk that make your rounds more likely to set the enemy on fire to make the St. Louis a fantastic troll boat. It has so many rounds in the air at once, then when the enemy uses their repair to put a fire out there’s another eight shells on their way, ready to set them back alight again.
I sank another St. Louis, a Yubari, a Kuma, a Gremyashchy and then went toe-to-toe with a Wyoming BB. I hit him 59 times played hide and seek in the islands as much as possible, while he burned down from full health to death.
The enemy had four ships left - a Kongo, Wyoming, Minekaze and Zuiho - but they managed to capture the objective before I could get to them.
Yeah, it’s pretty much out of hand; right now, no one but a few BBs shoot AP, and every fight is like going up against people chucking napalm. You sail around with three fires going at all times, and the US cruisers in particular are like flame throwers. It’s pretty stupid, and robs the game of much in the way of tactics at the moment. They supposedly fixed a problem with HE ignoring armor, but it hasn’t made that much difference it doesn’t seem.
It’s going to be very hard to balance this, because naval warfare in this era was inherently unbalanced, even more so than tank combat.
I had a spectacularly bad day on this front yesterday. At one point a Russian DD clearly thought he had guns selected instead of torps and dropped a full load about 10 feet away from a friendly Cleveland. He sank the Cleveland and the few torps that missed crippled me.
Then later…
I had dropped torps to frighten off a pair of enemy Cruisers, then circled around behind this train and came back up on the side again. I’d been loitering there for about 10 seconds, waiting for the Cruisers to engage our front two ships, so I could go in and drop torps again, without them focusing me, when that teammate on my left dropped a full stack of torps, all of which hit me.
Still really enjoying the game though. The glass cannon nature of IJN Destroyers is great fun.
I got the Ranger carrier, but the carrier HUD and interface is not very good, so the experience suffers, my IJN battleships are good fun though
I’m really looking forward to trying the Japanese destroyer line—I enjoy the torpedoes on the Omaha, and having some extra range and punch on them seems like fun.
I don’t quite see the point of the American destroyer line, though. What’s their killer feature? The Japanese have torpedoes across cruisers and destroyers, the Americans have cruisers with better AA batteries. I don’t see any particular reason why I’d want an American DD.