Tzarevitch

Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. You just learn from the last loss and try again. The campfests and BB herds hiding in the back are frustrating but I just keep working at trying to win.

A classic strawman argument is when you make an argument that is very similar to, but isn't the same as the original argument, but is easy to refute. Like a decoy. You then knock down the easy decoy argument rather than refute the original argument which is presumably much harder. It tricks the listener into thinking you knocked down the original argument when you really knocked down the decoy you set up.

That doesn't help DDs much though. Most don't have DF. I mainly play CVs and CAs. People are too fixated on the CV damage from rocket planes. The CV rarely destroys a DD completely with rockets. Rockets do chip damage and work best as finishers. The way CVs get DDs killed is by keeping them spotted. If the DD plays well and keeps its AA off it'll only eat a couple of rockets per pass for fairly low damage. Most rocket planes can't spot a DD outside the arming range on the rockets. The issue is more that the DD is lit up for every enemy DD, CL and CA out there for as long as the plane is in range. The DD's own AA usually makes this worse. I've said it before and I still think they should put the same spotting delay on planes as they have for radar. The spotting delay makes it a lot harder for rocket planes and TBs to keep a DD spotted for the whole team. It can still be done but it requires more skill by the CV to keep spotting up (or burning a fighter consumable) and gives the DD more leeway to maneuver to minimize visibility for the entire team. The CV meanwhile still has a chance to do damage. That can work well but most DDs will still get betrayed by their AA because most players don't know to (or how to) turn it off. Another alternative is to modify it so that a ship using its AA doesn't get lit up for the entire enemy team so that less skilled DD players aren't killed by their own AA. That may be harder to program in though. The single biggest source of DD death to CVs is the detection bloom caused by the AA firing at the planes (which then plays into the spotting issue above). Most DDs have sub 3k air detections. That's too close for rocket planes to arm and target a DD. Mid to high tier DDs tend to have AA auras that approach 6km though. That is plenty of time for the planes to turn, line the DD up and arm the rockets.

I play Wichita a lot myself and have a heavy AA build on her (mainly because I use my 19 point DM captain in her.). It isn't the best USN AA cruiser on its tier but it does ok. The problem in your build is Massive Fire. Get it out of your build ASAP. It is effectively sabotaging your AA. Basically it trades the ramp-up damage that boosting your AA sector gives you, for a smaller, but immediate, damage burst. Note the word "smaller." Its intent is to give weak AA ships a burst of AA so they can do some damage because they can't ever build enough to shoot down a plane, but this comes at cost of overall sustained AA damage for ships with good AA output. Honestly it is a terrible skill all around mostly because it costs too much. There is simply no reason for a weak AA ship to spend 4 captain points to basically be a bit less weak. If you can't get over the threshold of shooting down a plane per pass there is no point in spending on AA at all. Right now it is an expensive trap for the unwary because it isn't super clear to most people that it should not be taken on a good AA boat and honestly should not be taken with other AA skills or modules.

Yes. You can if you need to but that is all you ever do and it is about all you can do. Truthfully if you set your autopilot well you rarely ever do that. The hybrid concept would require do to perform dedicated fighting while still managing planes.

It absolutely isn't impossible. It would require some reprogramming the game engine though. How likely they will do that is another story. I doubt they ever will for one ship. If they try to start a line of battleship-carriers (and dear God I hope they don't) it may be worth their time but I really doubt they would redo the engine just to make Ise work like that. The problem is that for all the fascination with it the Ise battleship-hybrids were a terrible concept and were even worse in reality. They tried to find a use for a pair of BBs that they themselves considered to be near obsolete and basically wasted time and resources making them less useful. Every nation toyed with the concept and everyone else realized that it was lousy long before spending money on anything more than paper designs. It simply doesn't work well. Even in the game, flying your strike planes takes continuous attention as does watching for targets for the guns and properly angling your ship so you don't get killed. Toggling back ad forth won't be effective even if the game engine was rebuilt to allow it. Also, its gun firepower is poor after trading 1/3 of its firepower for hangars and a flight deck, and its plane compliment is too limited to be an effective CV. It certainly isn't impossible. They could make it work. I really just don't think they will spend resources rewriting the engine to make one bad ship concept work. I don't think we will ever see Ise in its bb/cv hybrid form because it was a waste in real life and it probably won't work well in the game either. I think we may see Tone because it wasn't a hybrid carrier. It was a cruiser with more floatplanes for better scouting.

Have they decided anything? I thought they were considering options.

CVs can toggle but the "Ship control" is limited to steering, and simple things like triggering the AA sector and shift-clicking the secondaries. You can't do much. You can't direct guns or really manage the ship's own consumables. That's why they operate automatically. I think they said it is a limit of the game engine. I got the impression from what they said that the game engine doesn't allow control over planes and the ship. Essentially you can only control one thing in a match and CVs treat the plane squadrons as a ship that you have full control over. The hull can only be steered around without any other input. They might be able to do it like GZ and let the main battery guns operate automatically like secondaries do now but I'm not sure anyone will want to play that. You end up simultaneously with a lousy carrier and a lousy BB.

I think this one is the easiest and most effective. It should work well for Tone and it still leaves her with enough firepower to be effective at T7. Ise probably won't be an effective ship at T6 but a lot of people would still get it as a low-tier premium for the historical value. It should be ok if dropped to T5. It's firepower is too low for T6 and it compounds it with horrendous firing arcs for the 2 midships turrets.

CV torps are a lot smaller than surface ship (or sub) torps and have smaller warheads and thus lower flood chances. You pretty much just have to keep hitting until RNGezus gives you a flood.

A lot of it is that the lemming behavior that is rather common plays right to their strongest point. No matter what I do in chat I can't get the BBs to split up and bring crossfire down on them. I was impressed in a game last week when I saw a NC sneak up on a Kremlin from the side and blow him apart in one salvo. It was so gratifying. I was sure he would die, but he knew his business. The thing that gets me is in addition to the thick bow armor they gave them ridiculous deck armor too so that cruisers can't reliably damage them either and unrealistic turret traverse so cruisers and DDs can't even take advantage of getting to an opposite flank.

This is what I experienced with the entire line. I ground through Chapayev but I hated the experience. I had much the same problem as you described. The guns on the ships are wonderful to fire but the hulls are so fragile and turn so miserably that if you get caught out at even modest ranges you eat massive citadels every time from just about everything even at really steep angles and even through the deck. Chapayev's agility is so bad it can't even turn out in the time it takes for a BB to reload if you risk getting close to provide better support or use your radar. I've even seen Baltimore's shells drop down through the back deck into the citadel at relatively long ranges while kiting away. With the high velocity guns it can't get close to islands near the front and shoot over them either. You are pretty much relegated to long-range shell slinging and it was hard to impact the game at those ranges. You can stack some decent damage but you end up depending on your team to perform the grunt work of spotting and capping. People seems to make these thing work. Clearly they don't suit my playstyle. I'm a cruiser main but I really loathed the Soviet cruisers. I got so frustrated that I just FXPed past Donskoi to end my misery. I haven't actually used Moskva yet but I've faced them enough to know it plays much differently than the rest of the Soviet CL line. I'll recommend against what I did unless you had the same frustrating experience. I would suggest just grinding to Moskva unless your play experience with them was as miserable as mine. I love cruisers and Soviet CLs are the only cruiser line I HATED playing. I don't necessarily love all the others but I could make them work. I could not make the Soviet CLs work in any way that felt fun and effective.

Most gratifying for me was AP bombing a Tirpitz about 6 months ago. All 6 bombs scored citadel hits. A week later I got the same thing on a Yoshino. Reminds me why I love Enterprise. It doesn't happen very often but it is great when it does.

Most of them bleed little speed in turns already and they have tiny turn radii. Between that and their short hulls I rarely get torpedoed. The bigger problem for them is just getting to a fight. New Mex is ok at T6. There are plenty of BBs which aren't much faster. Colorado at T7 is a big problem. Nelson is almost as slow but it is a premium, and every other BB is at least 5-6 knots faster. Cruisers are at least 10 knots faster. Some DDs are double her speed. Colorado can't reliably even get to the fight. Faster turret rotation certainly wouldn't hurt. More range would be better though. She could at least reach out to the fight if she can't physically get there. Also actually giving them the most upgraded versions of their hulls would help. Part of me is hoping they'll split the USN BB line so it gives them a reason to revise the line like they did with the cruisers and do proper final hulls for Colorado and New Mexico. It definitely bothers me that those two still use the worst hulls of their class as their final hulls when almost every other class out their either uses the true final hull or fantasy final hulls with better stuff than was ever planned for them. I know that people in the forum are heavy into XXX bias, but I really think that it is just due to the fact that they are holdovers from the original plan for the game when they thought those hulls were sufficiently upgraded. I think they originally thought the true final hulls (Idaho and West Virginia) were too powerful on their tiers so they went with these pre-war versions. Power creep has long since put more powerful ships into the game. There's no reason to not do their final hulls properly.

It's a big difference. Oregon was much worse. Colbert was scrapped after they couldn't get enough funds to maintain her anymore, she was in disrepair, and the public wasn't that interested in her. Oregon was well regarded and liked in Portland, but was scrapped because the Navy decided that her historical value mattered less than her scrap value. Oregon was only loaned to Portland. The Navy owned it, and took it back and started to scrap it during WW2 for its steel. They then changed their mind (indicating that it wasn't that huge a need) and then used her as a hulk, and then basically abandoned her and left her to rust in Guam for a decade before finally having her scrapped in the 50s. It is water long under the dam but as far as the Navy at the time was concerned she was a forgotten a relic from a previous war that was valuable to them for its steel, and there wasn't enough political impetus to preserve her at the time.They simply did not see Oregon as valuable anymore over a new ship, and there wasn't any political will at the time to save her. The Navy makes huge efforts to preserve historic ships now but that wasn't a common thing back then. As I mentioned before, the Navy had no problem sending Enterprise to the breakers, which is probably their most famous ship after USS Constitution herself, for nothing more than the value of her steel. This was over the objections of Halsey himself. Ships like North Carolina and Massachusetts were only saved from being scrapped because localities raised enough money to save their states' namesakes. People don't really remember it but ships like Olympia, Constitution and Constellation barely were kept. Olympia is still having severe financial problems and is suffering problems with neglect. There's nothing all that shocking about Colbert. The same thing is done everywhere when the need arises or the museum loses its allure. Here a good article on the topic. Particularly about Olympia and Oregon, and how ships like Constitution were saved: http://historicships.blogspot.com/2013/07/the-national-naval-museum-fdrs.html