barbeerian

I really struggled with it at the start. I had around 35k average damage after my first 10 games and I hated playing it. The two butt turrets kinda don't suit my playstyle. I eventually turned it around and got that up to 65k average around the 25 games mark. For me it helped to put the range mod on and start games off getting a decent position and pre-kiting, then focusing on throttle juking while staying angled. If I needed to start pushing I'd try to just angle to minimize my exposure and do my best to get the butt turrets into the action when possible. Once I got the hang of it I was able to get most of my guns firing a fair amount of the time. For obvious reasons you want to avoid situations where you need to go bow in since you'll just lose that trade. If you do get stuck like that you just try to use an island or something to shield you so you can turn out without getting blown up. Thankfully it's pretty tanky for a cruiser which helps not get blapped in those situations.

A nice acquisition for sure, congrats. I highly recommend Le Terrible and Bayard for ops. You've grabbed the Bayard so I won't talk too much about it, I'm sure you noticed it's squishy as hell but packs as much punch as the Mainz (even more when the reload booster is on). Le Terrible has some railguns on it with solid dpm and it's super fast. It's great for ops where you need to reposition a lot, and it can help your team tank quite a bit if you can draw some BB fire and throttle juke. The torps work pretty well for ops since you've got 3 racks (one on each side, plus one that can do both) so you can hit multiple targets to soften them up. Flandres is kind of meh, I like it for PVP but it's just okay for ops. The main guns are fine, secondaries are unremarkable, and it's fairly tanky. Kinda just standard battleship play, as in you can do fine but you'll basically always do better in a high dpm cruiser except for the rare game where rngesus blesses you with godlike dispersion rolls constantly.

Pretty solid Raptor Rescue in the Wichita, my highest base xp in an op.

If they can be done in coop that's generally the easiest way to farm. Defended ribbon farming is easy enough if your teammates cooperate. Ask the dudes who spawn on your flank not to go into the cap so you can farm defended ribbons. Stay out of the cap so the bots can build capture progress, shoot the bots inside the cap to reset the progress and get ribbons. It's pretty fast. A ship with a decent rate of fire is ideal. For spotting CV is probably easier but a fast DD works well too. Just spot ships and don't shoot so your teammates can maximize their damage output. The higher the tier the better since those BB's have a lot more hp for your teammates to farm so you can do it in fewer battles.

I'm sure you're aware some people are just d-bags lol. I lost karma for this battle today because I was "being too passive and not supporting a BB in his suicide rush (not the NCal FYI). Even though I spotted their Kagero at the cap and tore him to shreds so he had to withdraw. Went on to do 150k damage by pushing the enemy as they retreated from the cap. I just didn't suicide rush as soon as I flipped it. We lost but clearly I was not the problem. I find the weekends the absolute worst for this crap. Whiners complaining you aren't playing their way. Had another one where I got 'Why aren't you capping?' Umm maybe because their Moskva and Des Moines know how to use radar and shoot at a DD and it didn't go well for me. Of course if you did try to continue capping the same people would hit you with the 'Our DD effing sucks, off yourself' for not running away.

Well Flamu did a test on them. These torps do ridiculous things when fired at DD's. They don't stop homing until 70m away from the target so they'll do some insanely sharp turns trying to follow the DD around. Skip to the end of the video you'll see the sub cross drop torps like the old RTS CV's.

I usually get my best games when my team either gets unlucky or just sucks and hang on for the win like that. Oddly enough today I got my highest damage total in ops and my team was really solid for the most part: communicated, split up for objectives, went in front of the transports (Narai as well) to fight in the harbour.

I took a 5 year break and recently returned. Didn't leave because of the game, bought a fixer upper and spent 1-1/2 years renovating every night and just didn't have time to play and it fell off my radar until I stumbled onto a jingles video. Dunno if that counts.

There's a google doc with a lot of ship / captain builds that's pretty good. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1XfsIIbyORQAxgOE-ao_nVSP8_fpa1igg0t48pXZFIu0/edit#heading=h.ncmcgaiz3n71 Generally for Des Moines you want the radar mod if you can spare the coal, prop mod is better than rudder, and the only real dilemma is slot 6. The reload mod is amazing if you can get close to your enemies, but if you get a fairly open water snipy map/battle and a CV spotting you it feels so bad not being able to participate due to the short'ish range of the guns. I prefer how the reload mod feels but I just run the range mod because so many battles have a decent period of trying to wait out the camping before anyone wants to push.

Even the bots like to grief CVs it seems!

The last one I snagged was in my Gearing. It's definitely doable in a non-CV match.

50 +200% Commander XP boosters

I hate this op with a passion. All the other ones are fun in their own way, some are more or less fun in certain ship classes but they're enjoyable. Killer Whale is just so boring to play in every class IMHO. All the mini-battles in the mission are pretty lame and they don't really build up to anything like in the other ops. It's just a bunch of random small fights that barely feel connected. Then there's the teamwork aspect of KW that was mentioned. People trolling the exit or not understanding. People making a beeline for the exit when we're all high health and not even bothering with killing the two BB's because they just don't know any better. The arbitrary 'don't let them in the bay' objective is kinda boring and dumb. If we blew up the bay and we're leaving who the hell cares if they send ships there when were gone.

For me it's just the lack of meaningful interaction, it's just boring. No matter how hard you outplay the CV dodging strikes you don't get any way to fight them or punish the mistake unless they 1) Sail directly into the front line of a losing flank because they have no minimap awareness, or 2) the match is basically already over and they have nowhere else to run at which point killing them barely matters. The surface ships have constant interactions that make the gameplay exciting. A BB counters a cruiser pretty hard and can obviously clap one if it shows broadside, but if you can find good cover or wiggle and dodge a salvo you have a window of opportunity where you can take advantage of the BB lighting fires and dpm'ing them down, or maybe getting some torps off into them. A DD can be really annoying in a BB, but you can angle against where you expect torps to come from, and if they happen to get spotted you can of course fire your guns at them. You can also play aggressively and surprise them from time to time. Say they're sitting in their smoke and you know their torps are down you and you go unspotted. You can charge the smoke cloud with HE loaded and slam them for big damage if you proximity spot them or the cloud dissipates, then watch your secondaries blast them and hope your teammates will fire at them as well. I think rewarding players for out thinking and outplaying an enemy is important, and CV's just don't have that interaction. With CV's a big outplay where you dodge both of their torp drops for example just means you don't take any damage from them and get to continue playing the game until the next squadron comes your way.

Ya at least with a Kearsarge you get a 12 gun broadside to play with. I prefer to be aggressive so the Nebraska just doesn't mesh with me, the planes are just a waste of space where a good turret could go.