mofton

Well, that's a thing. I last played a battle in February and I've not posted in quite a while, the forums have certainly lost a lot of their zing and attraction, just aging out in part, like the game. Still, 8 years since I joined, too many posts, a few topics, learned a lot about ships along the way which was the main thing. Made some friends. Fair seas.

Under-resourcing ASW made sense from the Japanese perspective I think. They had to win fairly quickly, or they were just going to get ground down anyway. Japan's chances of victory by 1943 were pretty much nil. Investing in better ASW to take fewer losses there would simply draw out the defeat - as noted Allied submarines were a non-issue for the first stretch of the war.

If it 'works' by which I mean actually makes AA have some little impact, then for sure WG will declare it a failed test and not implement it. This is just the spotting change that disappeared without a trace 2.0.

Using lines that have been fixed is a bad example but WG use 'consistency' as a complete fig leaf. The Buffalo (3x4) for instance was shoehorned into the CA line at a later date and made it less consistent than the original Nola-Baltimore-DM (3x3) line. For instance half the time they don't care, and then in this example they say a consistent line was important... while slapping a random Abruzzi in. WG does sometimes improve 'consistency', but to use it as an excuse for this line's composition doesn't add up.

Why none for Goliath? She's older than a lot of the ships on that list and has none. Nevermore pointed out Nevsky too. It would be good to revisit some of the older modules, a number are simply bad choices and very unbalanced. That said since the modules were put behind RB I've not bought a single one that way, missions in the ships to get the module for that ship made a lot of sense, but the RB is waay too expensive and in competition with ships that are far more interesting than a low quality tweaking-stats module (looking at you Daring's rubbish one). ]I honestly thought WG had given up on these since I can only assume the uptake since you slapped them behind a 19,200 RB wall has fallen off a cliff.

37 knot submarine...

It was pretty common - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escort_Group#1st_Escort_Group Usually Escort groups would have at least one fast ship as the Escort Commander's grouped up with a mix of other destroyers or corvettes. The fast ship would give you a lot of tactical options, while the corvettes could maintain a perimeter. Almost every escort group would comprise an old V&W Class, Interwar Standard or similar destroyer and a mix of smaller ships. Take group B7 for instance which was the defender at one of the biggest convoy battles around ONS5. The group included destroyer Duncan, a second, older destroyer the Vidette, frigate HMS Tay and 5 corvettes - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escort_Group_B7 Group B5 was the same makeup, 2 destroyers, a frigate and 5 corvettes, and B4 was 2 destroyers and 3 corvettes. That B7 group during ONS5 was reinforced by 5 destroyers from another convoy and the 3rd Support Group, and then the 1st Support Group (3 frigates, 2 sloops). Fleet destroyers with the full armament on convoy escort were a bit uncommon by 1942/1943 it's true, but some from the Home Fleet were detached out of Iceland to go to the relief of convoys. That doesn't really fit the Greyhound story.

Gamemodels3D has it as 8.5km which I think is correct. The wiki's kinda hilariously awful, they still haven't updated the AA side of stats going on what, 3 years since the carrier rework? Maybe take 3 for subs too...

So you think fleet submarines are an unnecessary and nonsensical addition to the game (I whole heartedly agree on both 'historic implementation into the arcade' and far more importantly, fun and interactive and engaging gameplay grounds) but you think I-56 is an interesting thing? You seem to alternate from your own to WG's perspective and it's a little unclear. You're right that WG is going down the mega-gimmick path as it runs out of other ideas, I'd say the super-ships with their alt-fire modes are big offenders (something I dislike) and the 'what if we gave destroyers 8in AP equivalency' for the Germans is another one. I do particularly dislike this one because it's simply so jarring to see visually a pretty archaic deck gun spitting out rounds at this rate. I'm usually not counting to see a battleship reload in 25 instead of 30s, but that one is just absurd. As for gameplay, even middling DPM is pretty silly when you shouldn't be at 'bad destroyer' you should be at 'overwhelmingly bad against destroyer' and I think it will catch and surprise people who don't expect a deck machine gun, even if the net results aren't outlandish DPM. Is 'submarine with a usable gun' even a concept worth exploring (I think not) and if I was going to explore it, why I-56 when there are far more sensible candidates out there like the French 2x 8in Surcouf or Nautilus with her 2x 1 6in guns? Those at least make some thematic sense as gun submarines over the unremarkable armament of I-56 surely.

I don't see you complaining that battleships can shrug off a torpedo catastrophically mangling their propellers and rudder by pressing 'R'. There are always gameplay requirements to make the arcade work, destroyer reloading torpedo tubes is a major one, as is the entire damage system. Those changes are necessary for the game, adding this premium sub and giving it machine-gun reload on a gun that makes no sense is entirely unnecessary. Having a submarine with single 14cm deck gun as it's main thing is just a terrible idea and a nonsensical addition.

People are pointing out that this is an arcade game and that there are already plenty of deviations - and that's true. But going from 5 to 33 RPM is a whole different kettle of fish (6.6x faster) than say reloading a battleship gun in 26s instead of 30s. The 14cm was a very basic, hand operated gun and it now outshoots post-war fully automatic systems. Over the last couple of years the game's just gotten crazier and crazier and less and less even lip service has been paid to history - which is/was the foundation.

The perfect ship for people who ran spotter plane Donskoi and thought it was rad.

The 'hybrids' are the least interesting non-carrier line to me, in that they are basically carrier gameplay. Zero interest. Hector's kinda dumb. The K25F type designs were for basically Fiji-sized and capability ships i.e. T7 The initial balance looks pretty tragic - pretty poor DPM, no pen, poor ballistics for that tier. T9 sees 12km radar all the time. Commonwealth for no real reason, annoying with captains, not particularly thematic Alliance is a much more capable submarine than the T10 Thrasher, but she's T8. Ok I guess, don't really care for subs.

Jutland does have a pretty poor rate of fire and output these days - Very much in the lower section of firepower when you balance DPM with ballistics and penetration. She's got fractionally more base DPM than Yugumo and Z-46, Mogador can double her DPM with MBRB. Jutland started life with a 3.5s reload which gave her 174k HE DPM. Ironically if you kept her original reload, but used the historic A instead of the janky B hull (5 guns) you'd be at about the same output as she has now - WG added the B hull for nothing really. I don't desperately like Jutland, she's slow at 34kt with no engine boost which is hugely limiting as ships and engine boosts have gotten more and more extreme. I think some change is warranted.