Search the Community

Like and Subscribe is optional Comment below if you have feedback or want to see a particular ship Take care captains Apologize for my stuttering, I can assure you that the later reviews will be more through and more clear.

Premium Ship PREVIEW: West Virginia '44 The following is a preview of USS West Virginia '44, specifically a look at the Work-in-Progress stats from the DevBlog here! I have not played this ship; this analysis is based solely upon interpreting the stats as published within that one article. Please keep in mind this ship will change during the course of testing. It's been over four years. Four long years, we've been waiting for this promised ship. Wargaming forgot about their promise at one point. It took a foofaraw from the then soon-to-be ex-Community Contributors back in the Summer of 2021 to get them honour it. But here it is! So while it may have taken nearly five years to get the ship that was promised, their turn around time was technically less than two when they finally got off their butts and committed to it, which isn't completely terrible in my opinion. Good job, team. I'm really looking forward to seeing this ship in game as I have a BIG soft spot for WWI era battleships and the modernized American Standard Types in particular. WeeVee 44 rose as a phoenix from the ashes of WWII and is such an amazing success story of the American Naval Yards and Navy personnel, it's downright inspiring. Here's hoping her release can be similarly poetic for World of Warships, though I think that's just my love of the dramatic speaking. Anyway, seeing as there are now going to be TWO West Virginia premiums and I will be mentioning both in this, it's time for some nomenclature clarity. In this article, if I mention "West Virginia", I'm talking about the tier VI premium that was released way back in 2018. If I'm talking about this new tier VII version, I'll use the term WeeVee 44 to help keep things clear. Quick Summary: A slow brawling standard-type battleship with powerful 406mm artillery backed by quick-firing and accurate (gasp!) 127mm/38 secondaries. WeeVee 44 PROS Good anti-torpedo protection Strong 406mm artillery with good penetration and overmatch potential at her tier Long ranged when properly upgraded. Improved secondaries Her Repair Party heals more per charge than standard consumables Thicc! WeeVee 44 CONS Short base range for a tier VII battleship Below average main battery dispersion Bad main battery firing arcs and gun handling Slow as butts AA isn't as good as it looks. Thicc? Options Consumables We don't know the specifics of a lot of these consumables but a lot of these are fairly standard. Assuming these are standard unless otherwise indicated by the article, then we get the following: Her Damage Control Party will PROBABLY be standard for an American Battleship. These have unlimited charges with a 20 second active period (instead of the normal 15 seconds) with an 80 second reset timer. We know that her Repair Party is special. From the stats quoted, it appears to mirror that of Colorado. This queues up 10% of citadel damage, 50% of penetration damage and 100% of everything else. This will heal up to 18.48% of her health per charge over 28 seconds with four charges base. She has an 80 second reset timer. Again, we can assume her Spotter Aircraft will be standard for a tier VII battleship, increasing her main battery range by 20% for 100 seconds with a 240 second reset timer. This should come with four charges. If she swaps this out for a Catapult Fighter, this launch aircraft that will orbit on station for 60 seconds (again, assuming this is standardized). We should expect to see three charges and a 90 second reset timer. Camouflage We've only seen the 'standard' type 10 camouflage from the preview image, but I think it's a pretty safe bet that given the time frame of her announcement that WeeVee 44 will be released for the week of July 4th, 2023. To this end, you can expect a gruesomely patriotic camo to accompany her release for those who want to splurge on a bigger bundle. I doubt we'll see any tagged on economy bonus over the usual premium for either camo, though. Firepower Main Battery: Eight 406mm/45 guns in 4x2 turrets in an A-B-X-Y superfiring layout. Secondary Battery: Sixteen 127mm/38 guns in 8x2 turrets laid out in superfiring-pairs on each side with two sets firing forward and two aft. West Virginia (Tier VI)'s 1.8 dispersion. This is 180 AP shells fired at 15km at a stationary Fuso bot. Shells are coming in from right to left (Fuso is bow tanking). On Main Battery Performance I don't think we're going to see anything unexpected with WeeVee 44's gunnery. Colorado's gun performance is a known entity. There's even a closer analogue to what we're getting with this new ship in the form of the tier VI version of the premium which has shorter range and reduced sigma over Colorado's own. The drop down to 1.7 sigma will feel noticeably different to Colorado's but almost identical to the tier VI West Virginia premium's, so anyone that's put the original premium through the paces will feel right at home. A difference of only 0.1 sigma between the two premiums will be imperceptible in regular gameplay (it's only something you'd see in accuracy stats over the course of dozens and dozens of matches). I am honestly surprised to see her presented with a 30 second reload, however. If I was going to point to one aspect I think might change with WeeVee 44, it's here. With improved secondaries and improved heals, I'm fully expecting her to get the Yukon treatment and her reload will bump up and up and up if she proves to be too efficient during testing. We'll see. The big thing to talk about is her range, or rather her advertised lack of it. On paper, WeeVee 44's range does look pretty mediocre. Though, I admit, when I first read the "short range" thing, I thought she might get the Yukon treatment and end up with a sub-16km base reach. As a base stat, 17.5km IS really short for a tier VII battleship, putting her just behind Caracciolo and barely ahead of Prinz Heinrich. Only Sinop, Renown '44 and Yukon have less. This looks doubly painful given her advertised concealment woes along with her slow top speed. She's not like the Italian battleship with her speed or Yukon's sneakiness to help close the distance. However, there's one caveat to all of this: she's an American Battleship. She gets access to Artillery Plotting Room Modification 1 (APRM1). Equip her with this upgrade and suddenly her reach jumps to 20.3km. With this, she jumps from 18th of 23 ships to 6th for her tier, behind Hyuga, Nagato and the three other American battleships when they equip APRM1. So yeah, that's not terrible. It's not going to be a crippling flaw the way it is for Yukon as you have an easy out if you don't fancy brawling. But that begs the question: is it worth taking APRM1 over buffing her secondaries? Gun damage output. From left to right: AP DPM, HE & SAP DPM and Fires per Minute. I've also included things like overmatch potential (for AP) and base penetration (HE & SAP). Colorado's guns have always been solid. A sixteen-inch gun at tier VII is hella punchy and it allows her to bully even heavy cruisers with 27mm structural plating. To this end, at least from a hits-landed perspective, WeeVee 44's guns should perform comfortably. Approximate AP penetration values for Colorado's 406mm AP shells. These are good (not amazing, but good). It's likely WeeVee 44 will duplicate these barring any Krupp tomfoolery. Secondary Guns Though WG didn't say specifically, I'm just going to assume WeeVee 44 's secondaries will have the same accuracy parameters as other American premium battleships with souped-up secondaries like Massachusetts, Oklahoma and Georgia. This ticks one of the requirement boxes I have on whether or not secondaries are considered "good" for their tier and worth specializing into. The other aspects are range, penetration and volume of fire. So let's look at those. We know her initial range value for her secondariees. It's 6.3km. With a deep build, you can get that up to 9,526m which is ... well, it's not great. It's okay. It's the same other tier VII secondary specialist ships are stuck with (Scharnhorst, Gneisenau, etc). But it's far worse than those I'm more used to seeing at tier VIII which often exceeds 7.5km base. So WeeVee 44's good company, I suppose. A little extra reach would have been more comfortable, especially given her lack of speed. It would certainly be something I'd keep an eye on during testing. As for rate of fire, there's some uncertainty The article mentions that they have a "fast reload". Like with her accuracy, I'm just going to assume they have the same reload as Massachusetts' secondaries which is 4 seconds instead of the usual 6 seconds for mounts of this type on most other American battleships. The good news is that the layout of the guns will allow all of them to be easily brought to bear, and it should be easy to get all of the secondary gun mounts off one side firing at 30º off the bow. This will help prompt some auto-ricochets from AP rounds in brawling situations, so long as her opponent can't overmatch her (or doesn't just blast her gun turrets / superstructure -- brawling isn't as strong as it used to be). It's important to remember that WeeVee 44 has only eight turrets instead of the ten found on higher tiered ships with the same mounts. So she's only putting out 80% of the potential damage of Massachusetts. It's overall bad news for penetration, but that's nothing new with the 127mm/38s. They have 21mm of HE pen which can be buffed to 26mm with the Inertial Fuse for HE Shells (IFHE) commander skill. In Random Battles, I'd be loathe to take the skill, simply because Matchmaking is unkind to tier VII vessels and she'll end up facing a lot of opponents with 32mm and 27mm plating. The skill points could be better spent elsewhere. However, if you can guarantee she'll be top tier, such as a Ranked Battle season, then IFHE's value increases dramatically. Given what I'm seeing, I think kitting out WeeVee 44 for a brawl in top-tier situations will go well. Otherwise, you'd be better optimizing her for main battery firepower range. We'll see what WG thinks after the testers have got a hold of her. Firepower Feels I think WeeVee 44 has potential here. I think she'll mostly spend her time pew-pewing with her main battery guns. As a long-range (when upgraded) sniper, I think she'll do okay, but only okay. Colorado's not exactly topping the lists as the most efficient of tier VII battleships and WeeVee 44 entering the races with a dispersion nerf certainly isn't going to turn any heads. I fear for her secondaries, though. Brawls are a rarity outside of Co-Op anyway and they're certainly going to be harder to justify with such a slow ship. I REALLY hope that her secondary performance doesn't become a casualty because of the difficulty of getting her into secondary range. If anything, I hope to see secondary range buffed a bit to Massachusetts' 7.5km base (giving her a max reach of 11.34km) to facilitate this if it becomes an issue. The elephant in the room, at least for my biases, is the firing angle on her guns. West Virginia at tier VI has pretty bad firing angles. The refit is going to make it worse. Pair this with her slow 4º/s turret traverse and I can already feel my eye twitch. Bad gun handling is a personal pet-peeve of mine so this may end up a deal-breaker for me, but it won't sink the ship as it were. If I can make Yukon work (she has West Virginia gun arcs / turret traverse rates) I can probably stomach this. These are the gun fire angles on the tier VI premium West Virginia. These are already bad. WeeVee 44's refit is probably going to make them even worse with all of the AA guns and superstructure changes in the way. These are California's gun angles. They're probably the closest proxy to what we're going to see on WeeVee 44. VERDICT: Looks a-okay to me, though I'd like to see more range on the secondaries. I won't be surprised if Wargaming (a) nerfs her main battery reload because they like doing that, or (b) axes her good secondaries because testers couldn't make them work. Durability Hit Points: 59,100 Bow & stern / Superstructure / upper-hull / amidships-deck: : I'm guessing 26mm / 16mm / 26mm / 26mm? Maximum Citadel Protection: I'm guessing 35mm Anti-torpedo bulge + 343mm belt + 45mm citadel wall? Torpedo Damage Reduction: 37% Health We'll start with what we know for certain: WeeVee 44 has a good chunk of hit points. Her 59,100 initial hit point pool is nice and respectable, but on top of this they appear to have given her an identical Repair Party consumable to her sister-ship, Colorado. This is an improved version of the consumable, recovering more health per charge than a standard version of the consumable (up to 18.48% per charge instead of the normal 14%). In theory, this gives her the potential to have one of the largest effective health pools at her tier, outshone only by her sister ship and those two weirdos that carry portable dry-docks. If this survives testing, it will be to a player's advantage to spend at least some commander skill points to pick up the Emergency Repair Expert commander skill and use an India Delta signal to take full advantage of this consumable. Again, forgive the lack of a graph. You'll have to squint at numbers. Armour & Citadel Protection This is a big ol' question mark. It's likely that WeeVee 44's armour scheme will largely carry over from her tier VI equivalent, but with an extended superstructure, deck surface and massive anti-torpedo bulges. We're likely going to see the ship almost entirely covered with 26mm plating on her bow, stern, upper hull and amidships deck area, with no stand-out areas of thicker armour as appeared on California's 37mm rear deck plating, for example. It's likely her belt will be the same 343mm thickness for most of it, tapering to a thinner 203mm belt well below the waterline. We don't know how thick they will make the plating of her anti-torpedo bulges. It would be wonderful if they ended up the same 35mm thickness as California as these can cause all sorts of fun ricochet mechanics and absorb stray shells. The article describes them as "thick" but that doesn't necessarily refer to the armour value and may instead simply describe the width of spacing provided. Functionally, aside from whatever shenanigans to bulges present to incoming rounds, WeeVee '44 will be an XP pinata for cruiser-calibre HE and SAP spam, with large, easy-to-shoot areas to farm damage. You can expect a lot of harassment from destroyer gunships too. Against battleship calibre AP shells, it's bit more of question. While the anti-torpedo bulge thickness is one unknown variable, so too is citadel placement. The tier VI West Virginia has a citadel that sits right at the waterline as does Colorado. I can't see it being submerged and will likely mirror their placement. The good news is that the citadel is rather narrow. It doesn't abut against the exterior of the hull the way a lot of British battleships do, which should downgrade potential citadel hits to merely penetrating ones. So she won't be citadel proof, but she's not going to be handing them out for free the way some recent battleship premiums have. Still, I think it likely that WeeVee 44 will give away more penetration damage to incoming AP rounds than players might be used to. I predict she'll have a lot of areas easily overmatched by 380mm+ guns, on top of poor geometry and gun firing angles which will make easy vectors for return fire to take bites out of her health pool. Once again, California is standing in to give an example of how WeeVee 44's layout may appear. In this case, we're looking at her armour. Odds are, WeeVee 44 will have 26mm of structural plate across most of the ship with a massive anti-torpedo bulge. Hopefully this bulge will be up-armoured, providing some overmatch and HE protection for the ship, but we won't know until we see the ship in question. Note that California and West Virginia have similar belt thicknesses. So some of these values may carry over. California again, this time showing her belt layout and giving an indication of the size of her anti-torpedo bulges. I'm very curious to see if this will be a hit-gobbling void on WeeVee 44 or if it will count as penetrating hits if it's punctured. Anti-Torpedo Protection This is worth commenting on, if only for the absurdity of it. WeeVee 44 has 37% torpedo damage reduction from her anti-torpedo bulges. This is an improvement over the original West Virginia's 22% torpedo damage reduction and better than California's 35%. But this is identical to Colorado's and Arizona's (37%) but worse than New Mexico's (40%). I guess I should be happy that it's at least on par with Colorado's but given the geometry and specific reinforcements made to the ship historically, this still makes me raise an eyebrow. Alright, enough grumping about 'muh history'. VERDICT: WeeVee 44 looks like a damage sponge to me. I've got pretty strong hopes that she won't give away citadel hits left, right and centre, but I don't think she'll be functionally immune except at very close ranges. Cruiser-spam will be a pain in the butt for her to handle, but that's not a problem unique to her. We'll see if her awesome heal survives testing. Agility Top Speed: 21 knots Turning Radius: 670 meters Rudder Shift Time: 14.8 seconds 4/4 Engine Speed Rate of Turn: 3.6º/s at 15.8 knots (estimated) Main Battery Traverse Rate: 4º/s There's not a lot of good news here, but I don't think any of us were expecting there to be. With the stats as listed, WeeVee is going to feel slow as dirt and handle like a wheel of cheese under a blowtorch (on fire, gooey and painful to handle). It's likely Wargaming is going to clone West Virginia's performance at tier VI over, though they did change out their rudder shift time, so we'll see. Still, those are some crummy stats. In terms of agility (and as written in the article) WeeVee 44 is definitely a contender for the worst ship at her tier, though California and Nelson provide a bit of challenge to that title. At least her rudder shift time looks somewhat passable. It's not quick, but it's not irredeemable. At least she can't out turn her turrets. I think it's a bit of a pipe dream to hope that they might give her some improved energy retention the way the standards of old once had. At least then she'd be able to keep her top speed up. I'm not holding my breath, though. I've co-opted this graphic from my Hyuga review from back in 2021 to save on time. This doesn't include ships that have been added since then, but I think this gives a pretty good idea of where WeeVee 44 sits. I've added WeeVee 44's curve in yellow. She's third from the top. Her turning circle radius is small but her rate of turn is awful. VERDICT: As bad as you imagined. Anti-Aircraft Defence Flak Bursts: 5? (probably 4+1) explosions for 1,400 damage per blast at 3.5km to 5.8km. Long Ranged (up to 5.8 km): 140 dps at 75% accuracy (105 dps) Medium Ranged (up to 3.5 km): 263 dps at 75% accuracy (197.3 dps) Short Ranged (up to 2 km): 445 dps at 70% accuracy (311.5 dps) I hate that as much time as I've spent looking at AA firepower last year, I look at these numbers and I can't tell if it's supposed to be "good" or not. Time to break out a calculator. After some quick thumbnail math, WeeVee 44's sustained AA DPS is decent for her tier, but a significant step down from California who leads the pack. Against a simulated UFO with unlimited health, heading directly towards the ship at 186.2 knots (500m/s once you factor in distance compression in World of Warships) and disappearing once they get within 0.1km of the vessel, here's how much damage the top five battleships at tier VII do: California: ~4400 damage Duke of York: ~3900 damage WeeVee 44: ~3800 damage Florida: ~3600 damage Lyon: ~3300 damage AA sustained DPS drops significantly after that with Colorado putting out ~2800 damage and it continues to drop like a stone the further down the list you go. So what's that tell us? Well, it's nothing new, for one. We've already seen this level of AA power before and Duke of York and Florida provide good analogues for how well this ship can defend itself -- which is to say that it's okayish against a tier VI carrier but little more than ceremonial fireworks welcoming in higher tiered attackers. You're hoping that the enemy CV player will oblige you by running into flak; For what it's worth, her flak is strong for her tier, with higher damage and generating more of them than a lot of other battleships. But they're not insurmountable or even a significant challenge to avoid. Early on, while all of your small and medium calibre AA is intact, WeeVee 44 might not have to suffer repeated runs from the same squadron and you may even thin out a Soviet CV strike by a couple of planes. Later on in the match, though, after she's taken some HE damage, her AA is going to be significantly weaker.Just Dodging™ is out of the question with her awful handling. Her AA will undoubtedly be used as an advertisement feature on WG's promotional material. Be warned that without further boosts or gimmicks, it's not worth getting excited over. This is how WeeVee 44's AA would have looked like back in 2018 under the old AA system. This is awesome. California's would have still been better, don't get me wrong, but WeeVee '44 would have been a welcome addition to the fleet. Gone are the days of AA standardization, sadly. There's no reason to ever improve a battleship's AA firepower under the game's current design. VERDICT: Disappointing, but through no fault of her own. She could have been awesome, but the game isn't designed like that. Refrigerator Base/Minimum Surface Detection: 15.2 km / 13.68 km Base/Minimum Air Detection Range: 9.5 km / 8.55 km Detection Range When Firing in Smoke: 15.1km Maximum Firing Range: from 17.5km to 20.3km (GFCSM1) all the way up to 24.36km (GFCSM1 + Spotter Aircraft) WeeVee 44's surface detection is on the bad side of average at her tier (which sits closer to 14.8km) though she's right on the mean. The glut of new British ships over the last couple of years have driven the average down with Yukon, Renown '44 and Rooke all having a sub 13km base surface detection range which is skewing the numbers a bit. WeeVee 44's surface concealment is all but identical to the Scharnhorst sisters and is better than Colorado's by 600m, so that looks okay to me. That said, there's nearly a 4km gap between the max theoretical range of WeeVee 44's upgraded secondaries and her surface detection range, so they're only going off if someone makes a mistake. That's probably going to frustrate a few during her trials. I suspect that with a main battery artillery build, her lack of concealment will be a non-issue. I don't expect to see these values changed at all unless they really try and prop up her brawling design or if her survivability REALLY sucks. VERDICT: Not good, but not a serious flaw by any means. Anti-Submarine Warfare ASW Armament Type: Airstrike from 0.5km to 8km (plus about 200m for part of the bomb drop column which can extend past 8km) Number of Salvos: Two Reload Time: 30 seconds Aircraft: One PBY Catalina with 2,000hp Drop Pattern: 1 bomb Maximum Bomb Damage: 3,400 Fire Chance: 19% Bomb Blast Radius: 300m ASW has been standardized so there's nothing really to write about here with all tier VII battleships spitting out the same drop pattern of a single bomb. WeeVee 44's awful handling will make dodging fish a bit of a pain, but at least she's got good (but not great) anti-torpedo bulgest to help mitigate side-on hits. Mouse's Guesswork On the surface, we have a worse-Colorado. WeeVee 44's gunnery just isn't as strong as the lead of her class, having a deficit in both accuracy and range. In exchange she gets good (?) secondaries, better (but not good) surface detection and better (but not good) AA. Though determining balance is always guesswork until the raw numbers are in, she LOOKS okay? To me she looks like a solid contender when she's top tier and arguably better than Colorado. Like, in Ranked Battles she might even be a bit overtuned as range doesn't matter nearly as much and brawling is much (MUCH) easier to instigate. But when facing higher tiered opponents, Colorado is the better boat. There's still a couple of important questions to be answered about the ship. The armour value of those anti-torpedo bulges and where her citadel is placed are the biggest X-factors to me right now. 26mm anti-torpedo bulges with a waterline citadel and the ship will feel a LOT squishier than California. 35mm anti-torpedo bulges and a citadel dropped below the surface like California will make WeeVee 44 feel a lot more tanky than Colorado. Heck, even a thinning of the citadel wall from the estimated 45mm down to something that can be overmatched by battleship calibre rounds would be enough of a significant difference in her survivability. Without knowing these things, it's really hard to guess at her performance. I'm guessing we'll see at least a few changes over the course of testing. At the top of my list, I'm expecting her reload to be tweaked or she might lose her improved Repair Party. I'm dreading what might happen if they can't get her secondaries to work. We shall see! Thank you all for reading! ♥

My Review for the new French Premium Cruiser the Toulon is out! While it is currently only available in random bundles, I suspect we will see it in the armory soon! Don't forget to like and subscribe! Link for those who can't use embed.

Clear some things up (other than the disclaimer in the Sig.) Subs do belong in the game Just not like this... The current Development of subs is going backwards IMO.. Love the Sub Scenario when it premiered... My views are based on independent observation... The only caveat expressed is the "Fair play" doctrine... When play is no longer fair... Then the communities argument of WOWS, being a casino rather then a chess game of sea and digital boats... Well become more and more prevalent... Yes, I did watched the Sub myth busted twitch episode... Just because I know, doesn't mean I love the interaction presented... In a previous thread... https://forum.worldofwarships.com/topic/254753-subs/?tab=comments#comment-5748366 I posted this pic.. In that thread I called attention to how this 4km no mans land can be exploited by Sub players.. This exploit can be a match breaking... Mainly, BB drivers do not have a counter for these situations. As other noted in that thread... All you can do is turn tail and WASD to glory... Now here's a replay of the problem faced by BB drivers with this issue... In the Replay (20220507_210616_PASB518-Massachusetts_22_tierra_del_fuego.wowsreplay)... I knew where the SUB was Based on PING and last location on the Mini map... At close range, he was undetectable for A LOT of time... My options were Secondaries (they suck against subs) Guns (unable because the sub exploited the detection mechanic). RAM (unfortunate but yeah)... ASW planes (were moot/useless) Even though the SUB was the closer target... There was nothing I can do other then shot at a BB and cruiser... The replay starts and the end point is at the 13 min mark... The match itself was a lost cause... That's a minuscule detail considering the context.. If anything, a solution that is fair for both the SUB and the BB drivers must be devised... The current in game experience on the topic, is neither...

Premium British Cruiser Dido Review Pile of garbage historically like Cruisers sacrifice armor for high-speed durability and very quick reloading guns historically all British light Cruisers have traded armor protection or armor thickness for no armor and it's change for maneuverability and high rates of Fire and also low reload time the issue is the pan-Asian version of a Dido is better in terms of dispersion DPM and also rate of fire and also reload time Dido by itself could be a better ship but it's not improvements that would make the Dido a better ship and more desirable improvements that would make the ship better is to increase the maneuverability so the ship could essentially throttle better so more responsive tomorrow that responds better on top of also changing the rudder ship time to increase the DPM and also to decrease the reload time would also benefit the ship also to basically improve the reload time which gives you a century of fighting chance against Cruisers that have no armor and also destroyers by lowering the reload time from 8.5 seconds to 6.7 seconds also to lower the dispersion of the guns from 130 essentially 120 on paper the British Dido and the pan-Asian version Look equal but in reality they're just not they're totally different and how they perform as a fair comparison I'm going to list the stats of the Dido and the Pan Asian version pan-Asian version of Dido main battery stats reload time of 7.5 seconds dispersion of 111m British premium Cruiser Dido main battery stats reload time of 8.5 seconds dispersion of 130 m pan-Asian version of Dido maneuverability stats maximum top speed of 32.3 knots maximum Rudder shift time of 9.1 British premium Cruiser Dido maneuverability stats maneuverability stats maximum top speed 32.3 knots maximum Rudder shift time 6.5 Dido seems to show a stream Vulnerability to Destoryers Destroy torpedoes aircraft torpedoes huge points for wargaming though and implementing a real steel ship if any ship is bad I will happily tell you that it's bad without any hesitation or second-guessing it might be a little good for Co-Op but anything else like competitive PVP random ranks brawls or Clan battles ship is useless with this ship the taste of getting sunk repeatedly is something that your end up going to have to be used to considering it's going to happen so often that it becomes tiresome

In March of 2021, more or less on a whim, I wrote a proposal for HMS Sirius to be added to the game. As I did my research and created the proposal, I discovered what I thought was a veritable goldmine of ships. The Dido class of light cruisers had a wide range of variations under it, from the 5 turret ships that we think of first when we think of the class, the improved 4 turret ships such as Black Prince and Bellona, the 4.5 inch toothless terrors Scylla and Charybdis, and even some wilder things such as HMNZS Royalist and the proposed 1951 emergency cruiser, there was a wide berth of potential within these ships. And the most surprising part of this was that of the 16 ships built, the largest class of cruisers that the Royal Navy had in the war, none were featured in the game. But after 6 years, we now have a member of the class ingame, the lead ship no less, HMS Dido. I haven’t bought a premium ship in ages. The last one was HMS London and that was early 2020. But with HMS Dido in the game that has changed. Should it have? Was HMS Dido a ship worthy of being a premium? Is Dido a good ship? Is Dido a fun ship? Does Dido like headpats?And did WG relent and change the camouflage? In this, hopefully the most comprehensive review (sit this one out @LittleWhiteMouse, I got it) we will cover all of this. The history of the ship, the strengths and weaknesses of her in game, and finally, if this boat is worth your hard earned currency. HMS Dido, a brief history Dido commissioned in September of 1940, one main gun turret short of the 5 she was supposed to have. 1941, Dido would get her combat introduction in the costliest engagement the Royal Navy had in the entire war. At the battle of Crete she was part of a force that destroyed a Italian invasion force, and during the evacuation she was hit with a 1000 KG bomb that destroyed B turret and almost caused a magazine detonation. She was refit in New York with two new turrets and returned to the Mediterranean. From here she was in the Second Battle of Sirte, where she and 3 of her sisters faced down an Italian fleet featuring the modern battleship Littorio, and while no Italian ships were sunk, neither were the British, and the convoy that Dido was escorting was not attacked by the Regia Marina. The Regia Aeronautica had a hell of a time with it though. She served in the Mediterranean until in September of 1943, she sailed into the harbor at Taranto along with Sirius and the fast mine-layer Abdiel and deposited the British first airborne, seizing the harbor. Through the middle of 1944 she provided shore bombardments up and down the Italian and French coasts. In the winter of 1944, she joined the arctic convoys and acted against German convoys off Norway. And finally, at the end of the war she sailed to Copenhagen to accept the surrender of the Kriegsmarine, firing the last naval round of the war in Europe at a Luftwaffe plane on the way. Days later, the Kriegsmarine surrendered on her deck. Dido is very worthy of having a premium in game. HMS Dido in game. HMS Dido is a tier 6 Royal Navy premium light cruiser, using small caliber guns for her tier and relying on her excellent stealth, maneuverability, and DPM to overcome her armor and hit point deficiencies. As with my premium ship proposals, I will be discussing all these characteristics in the order they appear in port, which means that we will be talking about armor first. Armor. Didos armor, as visualized by a her Anime doppleganger Dido’s anime doppleganger likes headpats. Dido in WOWS does not. Dido in WOWS has armor that can be best described as objectively terrible, and a HP pool that does no favors for that terrible armor. So, what makes this armor so bad? 1.The plating is 13mm. the good news is that this is capable of bow tanking 152mm AP shells and below. That is all the good news. 8 inch shells will autopen the armor, meaning that bow tanking gives them guaranteed pens… at a minimum. HE will always pen the armor, and apart from the armor belt, there is essentially no area of armor that will bounce HE, so you will take tons of damage from HE spam. 2. Unlike ships like Emile Bertin that have such little armor that AP often overpens, Dido’s 89mm belt armor is enough to arm AP fuses and guarantee full pens from the side. The only plus is that if you angle against cruisers and destroyers trying to citadel you, you can bounce AP with this belt, and you will shatter HE that hits the side of the ship here. 3. Dido has a above water citadel, modeled with a 13mm roof over the machinery spaces that means that shells dropping down will overmatch and penetrate. The rest of the roof is a measly 25mm. Between these three things, Dido takes damage, and quickly. Which would be fine if she had a large healthpool, or a way to regenerate health. But she doesn’t, and she doesn’t. With a health pool of a miserable 23600 HP she is last in tier, and she has no repair party like all the other Royal Navy cruisers to keep her in the game. In essence, every ship that shoots at Dido is going to be getting their moneys worth out of their shells. Module health is pretty pathetic too. With a whopping 13mm of armor on the turrets, you will lose these if you come under fire. With this miserable survivability, Survivability Expert becomes a must. The 2700 HP you gain from it amounts to a 10% HP buff, and you need it. Even still, Dido will have the lowest HP for her tier. With this kind of protection, how does Dido make up for it? Armament. Well, don’t look to her guns to really make up for her armor, because they aren’t great. They aren’t horrible either, but they are lacking in one very important field, and that’s DPM. As we can see from the DPM chart, Dido sits in the middle of the pack as far as HE DPM goes. Most of the other light cruisers beat her, with only La Galissonniere, stock Rahmat that no one should use, and Huang He being lower in HE DPM. And La Galissonniere has main battery reload booster to up its DPM on occasion, so really Dido has the second lowest HE DPM of the tier 6 light cruisers. Its guns fire at a rate of 7 rounds per minute, or one salvo every 8.5 seconds, and as a historical footnote this is the absolute lowest that Dido’s could fire in combat without the gun crews getting court martialed. As a personal footnote, I'm of the belief that the Didos could maintain 10 RPM indefinitely, but that's for another topic. AP DPM is similarly low, with Dido only outperforming Huang He, Mysore, and the 113mm Rahmat as far as light cruisers go. And things get worse… and maybe a bit better when we consider the gun angles that Dido can shoot at. Her over the shoulder arcs are pretty bad, no one is excited about angling 37 degrees when the armor is as bad as it is. The fourth turret has really good arcs though, needing only 20 degrees off the bow before it can start shooting. But the final turret, oh goodness. It requires a crushing 47 degrees of traverse before you can get it into action. The only good thing about this atrocious angle is that Didos armor is horrid to begin with, so all you will really lose with getting this last turret into action is a smaller profile to hit, and 152mm autobounce. In some situations, the benefits of getting all guns into action outweigh the armor advantage. With miserable DPM for a light cruiser, concerns that the shells won’t perform and will reduce DPM even further are not unwarranted. The concerns are as follows. 1. Her shells may be too small, unable to do direct damage and unable to meet the theoretical DPM. 2. Her fire chance may suck, meaning that she doesn't do damage over time as often as the others. Well, she doesn’t have to worry too much about her shells. Dido’s HE penetrates 22mm of armor natively. Now that may not seem like much and is out-penetrated by the 25mm of armor penetration that the 152mm gun cruisers have, but with IFHE we see the difference. Dido with IFHE penetrates 27mm of armor. A 6-inch cruiser with IFHE penetrates 31mm of armor. What 27mm of armor penetration means for Dido is that it can penetrate every heavy cruisers plating in the bracket, and the plating of tier 6 and 7 battleships. What 31mm of armor penetration means for the 6-inch cruisers is that it can penetrate every heavy cruiser’s plating in its bracket, and the plating of tier 6 and 7 battleships, but not 8. Dido is on a level playing field with the 6 inch cruisers in terms of actually penetrating with her shots. And with a skill that can best be applied to Dido, her per shell damage is not too far off. The Heavy HE shell skill allows cruiser HE to do 10% more damage per shot, and for ships with less that 149mm main caliber weapons (like Dido) there is no downside to taking this. With this skill, Dido goes from doing 300 less damage per shell than a 152mm cruiser to 110. Not bad. And the AP… it really isn’t bad either. It has no special gimmicks like improved penetration angles or improved fuses, but the 5.25 inch cannons were actually pretty capable weapons, able to penetrate 76mm of armor at 13 KM and 100mm at 10, Dido can reliably do AP damage and score citadels to cruisers that give her a broadside, same as any other light cruiser at her tier and differentiating herself from the Atlantas. So, with her guns being not at too big a disadvantage in damage on a per shell basis, perhaps the great difference is in her chance to cause fires. There’s a lot of data on here, but this chart basically shows a tier 6 ships fire per minute chances against another tier 6 ship if it lands all of its shots. The blue line is for base fire chance, red with Demo expert and all flags, yellow for IFHE, and Green for IFHE, flags, and Demo expert. And Dido does not do well here. With a decent 8% fire chance per shell, it’s the reload that cuts into her ability to start fires, with only Duca d’Aousta performing worse as far as the in tier light cruisers go. Even some of the heavy cruisers will start more fires per minute stock, and if Dido takes IFHE she becomes almost the worst fire starter in tier. As one last thing, the guns feel comfortable enough once you get past the gun angles. The turrets rotate at 10 degrees per second, so she wont outturn them. The rear turrets can rotate 360 degrees, which for some reason the front turrets cant do. Further, the shell arcs are very comfortable. They have a arc but not near as bad as something like Atlanta, allowing you to fire over islands without such a issue with leading targets. In all, apart from their DPM, these guns are potent for their size. Only their reload holds them back. Torpedoes: Dido’s torpedoes, they're pretty good too. Familiar as well, because they are just Fiji’s torpedoes. Put simply, they have average speed (61 knots) average damage (15833 per torp) and a pretty good range of 8 km. They are helped by pretty darn good torpedo angles, able to be fired from only 33 degrees off the bow and 25 degrees off the stern. Add in the single torps, and the fact that the tubes reload in 72 seconds, and you have a versatile tool. Don’t expect to get too many devastating strikes on full health battleships, but as a finishing blow, a harassment tool, and a damage enhancer these are pretty great. In situations where you have to retreat from a flank, these torps should be your go to before your guns. Man, getting all three torps is glorious... he lived though. Depth Charges: This is a new one, and as a testament to the ASW mechanics current, this is a afterthought. When you hit G, 5 charges roll off of a rack on the back of the ship, there is no fancy pattern, just a simple line of charges that you put on the sub. If you manage this, you will most likely kill it. This is only valuable late game, and if the sub is too far away to call his friends. Otherwise, going sub hunting will get you sent back to port. The only thing that makes sub hunting not totally suicidal is the smoke generator which you can activate once you sunk the sub to try and avoid extra damage from the ships which will doubtless be shooting at you. AA: Get ready for a shock, but Dido… does not have good AA. In fact, I’d say that its AA is bad. Now you may be thinking “what, a AA cruiser with bad AA?” and I don’t blame you, as the description of the boat calls it a anti-aircraft cruiser, but its aa is bad. And that’s because Dido isn’t a AA cruiser. Dido was designed as a trade protection cruiser, with the guns main goal being to destroy auxiliary cruisers and merchant raiders, and destroyers. Now, the guns did have a aa capability, but if these were truly supposed to be AA cruisers, they would have been designed to use the 4.5 inch cannons that you can see on Rahmat. These would have a faster fire rate while still maintaining more than enough payload to take care of aircraft. The 5.25 was designed to shoot at ships first , and planes second. But even with a historical precedent for the AA being not great… its worse than it should be. So what are the problems with the AA? 1. It's too short ranged. the one thing that the 5.25 could proudly be best in class at as far as naval AA guns go was its range, outdoing the american 5"/38 and numerous other guns. in game it gets outranged by these and frustratingly even the 4 inch guns found on Leander, London, and Devonshire. With only 5.2 km in range to their 5.8, it has less influence and allows enemys to get through quicker when attacking. Being too short ranged is also a issue with the intermediate armament. the pom-poms only reach out to 2.5 km tops. 2. The flak bursts are underwhelming. For a start, they perform worse than the 5”/38 of the Americans with only 1323 damage as opposed to 1330. Even wors, there’s only 2 bursts per cycle, which happens every 2 seconds. And finally, they stop at 3.5 kilometers, leaving a kilometer dead zone between the bursts and the pom poms where enemy planes won’t be taking much damage. When you rate Dido by raw dps she’s in the bottom half of her tier, and when you adjust for range she’s almost in the bottom quarter. But Dido does have a button you can push to make all that better, Defensive AA. But even with this skill, which adds 50 percent to your continuous damage and quadruples your flak power, Dallas, Pensacola, Rahmat and Huang He still put out more effective AA fire WITHOUT Defensive AA, and Devonshire and La Gal are not far off. And Dallas, Pensacola, Rahmat and Devonshire can all take Defensive AA as well. Really, with Defensive AA, you are hoping that the flak bursts spawn in the right place, and with only 2 (max 3), the odds aren’t great. I would have loved to see Dido with the same stats but with the 5.25’s range and flak bursts buffed. With a 6.2 km umbrella and 3 bursts (4 upgraded) with something like 1400 damage, Dido could have been a good AA ship. As it is, if you are looking to get a AA cruiser that punishes aircraft carriers, this ain’t it chief. Against a Kaga, with Def AA, I shot down 1 plane in this attack. Yay. Oh well, maybe someday we’ll get Scylla. Maneuverability: Dido is not a particularly fast ship, topping out at 32.25 knots. But Dido’s great strength is not speed, but agility. Dido has a lot of things going for her with regards to her ability to turn. First, she has the second tightest turning radius in her tier at 580 meters. Second, she has the RN CL acceleration, meaning that she can go from a standstill real fast. And third is that because she cant take propulsion mod 1, she will by definition take steering gears mod 1 giving her a rudder shift time of 5.2 seconds. She is only beaten by Huang He in terms of turning radius and turning rate, and can pretty comfortably maneuver around. With this, it is somewhat possible to dodge shells at range. Use this to your advantage. Summed up, Dido doesn’t go fast, but she can dance. Concealment: Dido’s concealment is pretty good. With 10.54 km base detection she can get that number down to 9.2 km. While not enough to outspot any destroyer, she will either outspot or spot enemy cruisers at about the same time, with only the other British light cruisers beating her. Only Huang He has such a advantage that she can use her concealment to dictate the engagement against Dido, as opposed to the ships just blundering into each other. But Dido does not only have pretty good base detection to help her concealment, for she gets smoke as well. With a 15 second action time, 35 second dispersion time, and 80 second reload between 5 charges… this smoke isn’t great. For starters, this smoke has the shortest usage time in the whole game. From the second you hit the key to when the smoke dissipates you have 45 seconds. This is only enough for 5 salvos. If you were moving when you popped the smoke and want to hold fire until you stop , this is reduced to 4. Also not great is the total amount of time the ship can spend in smoke in a match. With 225 seconds of total time, its second lowest in its MM spread, only just beating the German tier 5 destroyer T22. Even the time you spend between smoke is not great. With 45 seconds between charges, you do beat the Germans, Japanese, Soviets, and British cruisers but are left out longer than the Americans, British destroyers, and Pan-Asians. By raw numbers, this is one of the worst smoke consumables in the game. Dido being sneaky. I'm sure shes in there somewhere Even still, smoke is such a powerful consumable that there is a silver lining. Burning a charge just to break line of sight and reposition does not leave you waiting minutes for your next smoke, and this allows for probably the most flexibility with regards to smoke usage in game outside of the RN DD’s. Under air attack? Pop smoke and Def AA and angrily shoot out. Caught out of position? pop smoke and plan your getaway. See a enemy ship and have no cover nearby? Pop smoke and blast them. The short duration even helps alleviate one of the main concerns that I had with Dido, that being that without hydro, she’d be torpedoed in her smoke often. But with the short duration, usually you are already gone by the time torps get to you. You do have to think a bit more using this smoke, but despite its shortcomings it can still be potent. So now, with all the stats covered, the big question. Should you get Dido? PROBABLY NOT This is not the conclusion that I wanted to reach. I mean, I’ve centered my whole WOWS identity around this class of ships. But I cannot really recommend anyone get Dido for any reason. And this is because of one fact. We already got one. And it’s a bit better. Rahmat is just Dido. Not simply a Dido class, but Dido herself. As a bit of Dido lore, there were precisely 2 distinguishing features between Dido and the rest of her class. One of them is the degaussing wire. On Dido, it is external. On the others it is internal. The other factor is that Dido had a cross bracing on her forward tripod. Guess what Rahmat has? Now you may say that Rahmat doesn’t have the degaussing wire, and also has different AA. The problem with this is that 1. Dido doesn’t have the right AA either (she’s been robbed 2 20mms on the bridge wings) and 2. Dido was scheduled for a refit in 1945. With the tiniest bit of imagination, we can say the refit moved the degaussing wire internal like her sisters, and upgraded the AA. And boom, Rahmat is just Dido in 1946. And Rahmat is better than Dido. Let’s go through the list. The guns on Rahmat top the HE DPM of the tier. Dido has better ballistics and better range (guess the Malaysians thought ballistic caps weren’t worth it) and can citadel destroyers a bit better and hit far off targets a bit easier so it isn’t all one sided, but in most situations DPM is King. The torpedoes on Rahmat are longer ranged, and sneaker. Yes the torpedoes on Dido can be single dropped for more accuracy and can hit destroyers, but in general Rahmat’s are a better pick. For ASW work Rahmat gets 9 depth charges a drop to Dido’s 5. Rahmat’s AA is so much better than Dido’s that she does more damage without Def AA than Dido does with Def AA. Rahmat has better concealment Rahmat has a better smoke in most every circumstance. Rahmat has the same armor and HP. And Dido finally scores a win with better acceleration and rudder shift. A few of these things Rahmat is indisputably better than Dido. AA, Concealment, ASW, its no contest. Survivability is literally the same. Dido wins in Agility. But in 3 fields Dido is ‘situationally’ better. There are times in Rahmat where I miss the ballistics of Dido or the range of Dido. There is never a time in Dido where I don’t want better DPM. There are instances where the single launched torps are better. Usually, they aren’t. And you can use Dido’s smoke in situations where you just wouldn’t use Rahmat’s. but playing Dido, I feel like I am having to work harder to get the same results. Rahmat is better in coop and operations, better in randoms, I can’t imagine getting Dido into Ranked or competitive. Now, this isn't say that Dido is necessarily bad. I have pretty much enjoyed my time playing her on the live server. I just think I may have enjoyed that time a little bit more in Rahmat, and I am sure that it would have been easier Even getting Dido for historical reasons has some issues. For a start she’s missing some of her AA (as mentioned above) and… I'm going to talk about the camo for a moment. The Camo Didos camo as announced and as it is in game. From day one, the first day that this ship was announced, I was very publicly banging on about how Dido’s camo was not right. This went through the NA Forum guys, and through reddit, all the way up to Sub_Octavian. He talked with the history guys, and they said it was good to go. I implored them to dig a bit deeper, and be sure. They replied with a public post, where I learned that the source that they were using was Malcolm Wrights “British and Commonwealth Warship Camouflage volume 3.” This is not a good source for ship camouflage, as the author didn’t record where he got his information from and in many cases was recalling details he had heard 25 years prior to writing the book. So again, I pressed Wargaming and they resolved to look into it further. In the end the changes that we have gotten were a change of the hull color to be accurate and a removal of the rust. On my scale of happiness with changes, that’s a 2/5. But, this isn’t over. I’ve been in contact with Wargaming since then and they are very aware of the camouflage issues with the ship. Perhaps they will update the camo. Perhaps they will add a new one. Perhaps nothing will happen. In all, WG has been remarkably receptive to hearing feedback, and have been nothing but incredibly cordial in all communications, even when I got a little salty. Which is good. Hopefully they will throw Malcolm Wrights book in the trash as a bad source that can be easily proven wrong. I just wish that their turnaround time was a bit better. But if you want the Historical Camoflauges, and are OK with not being able to see the anime skins and king kongs, id recommend downloading this mod by Albrecht_Brandi, which gives you the Camo Dido wore in late 1943 during the landings at Taranto and Salerno. So when you get enough of these Mediterranean tokens to get a ship, get Canarias, or at least get Canarias first. I don’t know if Canarias is better because I haven’t played her but I know that she is unique and Dido is a ship with the same playstyle as a ship that is 99% the same but a little better. Equipment But, if you are crazy, and are just hell bent on getting Dido for whatever reason, this is how you should set her up. Being tier 6, Dido has only 4 equipment slots. And good news is that there is only really one way to load these out. Slot one is going to be main armaments modification 1. The turrets are weak enough to need this. Don’t take auxiliary armaments because you don’t have any. the odds of detonation are very low as the magazines are underwater. And for the love of god don’t spend coal on damage control party 1. Slot two is a toss-up between engine room protection and defensive AA mod 1. Engine room protection will help if you’re getting shot, but Dido has such crappy armor and so few hit points that the odds of you benefiting from this skill is low. Defensive AA 1 fire 1 requires you to shell out 17,000 coal, and is only decent when there is another carrier, but having longer lasting Def AA that reloads quicker is nice when there’s another carrier. Slot three is just aiming systems modification 1. Improving dispersion and torpedo train rate is better than all the other options here. And for slot four , steering gears modification 1 should be your pick. Captain skills. Going to say this one last time, there really isn’t a good reason to get this ship because she is also a horrible captain trainer, using wildly different skills than every other ship in the Royal Navy. Like her Azur Lane counterpart, she really needs a dedicated commander. You still getting Dido? OK. for your one point skill, either grease the gears to give yourself more comfortable gunnery, especially when turning, or incoming fire alert to give you time to dodge long range fire. For your two point skill, either demo expert, or focus fire training to try and redeem the AA. I’d take demo expert. For your first skill 3, take heavy HE and SAP shells, adrenaline rush, or survivability expert. For your first skill 4, take IFHE or concealment expert Your next skill 4 should be the one you missed last time, Finally, get the skill 3’s that you missed first time around, and cap it off with the missing 1 pointer. This is my recommended build. Conclusions I hope I helped people determine where to put their hard-earned tokens, or even hard earned doubloons, and hope that anyone who is getting Dido at least knows what they are getting into. I will not make this a habit, holy ship, reviews require a lot of work, and my graphics are comparatively terrible next to what LittleWhiteMouse does. But, if WG ever puts out a Scylla, or a Bellona or Babur, or a Royalist or emergency cruiser, you can bet I’ll come running.

Hello! This is my new comedy guide/review series to ships in World of Warships, made in the style of Rhiload's EVE Online videos aiming to provide a balance of jokes, actual useful advice, and ship reviews. The first video I uploaded was Paolo Emilio, one of my favourite ships in the game. Hopefully this guide will entertain you and help you get the best out of her/decide whether to get her! As always, please let me know in the comments or reply to this post with your thoughts and suggestions, and let me know which ships you'd like to see next. Cheers all!

Hey! I'm Razorwave, welcome to my forum post for my videos. I aim to upload a couple of times per week with World of Warships content, mainly the "WOWSnumbers guide" series, where I take a comedic look at a ship in WoWS, but also try to provide some real useful information too! These are made in the style of Rhiload's EVE Online videos, so if you are familiar with those you should know what to expect. With the Dockyard ending in around a week, I thought I'd make a video on Repulse, the best ship from this event (don't come at me) to give you guys a quick and comedic rundown on whether this ship is worth grinding if you haven't done so already! As always, thoughts and feedback are super appreciated, and let me know any ships you'd like to see Cheers!

Hello! This is my new comedy guide/review series to ships in World of Warships, made in the style of Rhiload's EVE Online videos aiming to provide a balance of jokes, actual useful advice, and ship reviews. This video almost made me go insane trying to get good background footage for it, so I really hope it was worth it! As always, thoughts and feedback are super appreciated, and let me know any ships you'd like to see Cheers!

I noticed an increasing number of newer players in the game (or so it appears). That's great to see! I also found a lot of players that are not too familiar with the higher level gameplay or standard tactics in random battles...so I decided to start making and sharing videos with commentary of decent games, my thought process and positioning, etc. I'll preface it all by saying I'm only a semi-competitive player (typically Storm league in CBs), and the target audience for these is newer players. The games themselves are good and entertaining, but nothing insane. Each one will feature the game, comments, and a quick review of the ship and captain used. Hope it helps! And let me know if you have suggestions or requests for future videos/games. Here's the first one, U.S. BBs (Montana game) Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DAQY22u3qqY&t=2s

HMS LONDON REVIEW HMS London is finally here! I've been waiting for this ship since it was announced and I am now happy to present you with my take on whether this ship is worth the money or if you should only get her for free so without further ado, let's get into the review. Overview HMS London is a VI heavy cruiser of the royal navy, armed with 4 duel turrets mounting 203 (8") guns. Firepower for her tier is exceptional if a bit underwhelming at times, she carries 8 torpedo's housed in 2 quadruple launchers on either side. She's got a slow top speed and a lot of hull above the waterline for easy pickings but that is at least slightly compensated for with a smoke generator and a heal. When playing her she felt a bit sluggish, slow to accelerate without the acceleration mod and while her rudder shift is exceptional it can feel slow because of how close you'll be to your enemies. Unlike the British light cruisers which take off like a bat out of hell, the London is like me in the mornings, slow to get going and once you get going it's probably too late anyway. London has a very short main battery firing range of only 13.4Km, by comparison, the Exeter has 14.3Km of range and it's T5 heavy cruiser. It can feel as though the range is not enough with all the radars, DD's, and plane spotting going on in warships often forcing you to be seen way earlier than you were hoping for and limiting the number of targets you can fire at with your main guns. This cruiser is DEFINATELY not tanky, unlike the Exeter which can be extremely trolly with its light armour or the late British CA's with their thick main armour belt the London eats a lot of penetration damage and getting spotted in your smoke will often result in a trip back to the port sooner than expected. With that said it's nice to be able to tank a 203mm shell fired at the bow of my ship, and the citadel is still pretty small so unlike the Emerald giving broadside is not a guaranteed death sentence but instead is often a hell of a spanking and makes you do a double-take of your HP before spamming the 'T' button. AA defence is poor, I find them to be very underwhelming and often I don't shoot down a single aircraft, the old adage holds true if the carrier wants to sink you then he's going to sink you. London does have a few things that I find really attractive, for starters she has 203mm guns and a smokescreen while also having a really low detection range. However, she also gets the British destroyer hydro which means that it lasts for 180s and will detect both ships and torpedoes at 3km. All of this is tailored to a very specific playstyle of getting in close, put up a smokescreen, pop hydro, daka, retreat and recover HP, repeat... profit. Survivability Hit Points: 34,600 (12,450 using all heals, healing flag and superintendent are included) Max Hit Points: 47,050 Bow Plating: 16mm (bounces 8"/203mm shells) Stern Plating: 16mm (bounces 8"/203mm shells) Side and Deck Plating: 19mm Citadel Plating: 114mm (Fig above: Bow plating) (Fig below: Citadel plating) The Survivability of London is decent, while the armour is nothing special at least it isn't British light cruiser 13mm of armour that the Leander has. With that said going toe to toe against a Battleship will result in your death and the mockery of your death. This is not an open water boat, you will not juke shots from battleships unless you pre-predict the shots and avoid them ahead of the battleship firing. Rather this vessel is a window of opportunity kind of ship, by that I mean you wait for the enemy to be distracted by someone else or fire just before vanishing behind an island. Potshots when no one is looking for you and when the enemy is distracted will allow you to sat alive longer in battle. Armour angling is effective against other cruisers and destroyers with 16mm you can rush some island hugging CA's. However, her greatest tools are her smokescreen and heal so use them wisely. Artillery Main armament: 4x2 203mm guns (reload time 15s) Max Firing range: 13.4km Max AP Damage: 4550 (Muzzle velocity 855m/s) Max HE Damage: 2850 (Muzzle velocity 855m/s) Fire chance: 17% with the demolition expert skill Secondary Armament: 4x2 102mm guns Max Secondary range: 5.3km London's main selling point is her firepower, 8 203mm guns that hit for exceptional damage. The reload does feel a bit too long but when fighting at or down tiers these guns are perfectly acceptable, it's only when fighting against T8 cruisers and battleships does the firepower start to feel underwhelming. The fire chance is decent, the AP feels usable at all ranges and honestly, I'm just really pleased with the guns. If there are any down points to her guns it's the fact that they fire only 13.4KM, have a smoke-firing penalty of 6.8km and that they reload in 15s when other ships of the same tier reload closer to 10. Torpedoes 2x4 533mm Torpedoes Max Damage: 15733 Range: 7km Speed: 59kts Reload: 106s As with all British Torpedoes, you can fire these torpedoes either individually or on a narrow spread. However, unlike the Exeter which has extremely useful and deadly torpedoes for its tier the London gets slow, short-ranged torpedoes which are only useful in a defensive situation or if you're rushing a BB hiding behind an island. I have never hit anything with them and I've only used the lead indicator to get a better idea of how fast my target is moving I my shot is more accurate. However, the firing angles of the London's torpedoes are very good so you won't have to turn the ship too much in order to bring them to bear. AA Defence Range: 5.8KM Continuous Damage per Second: 124 Damage by shell Explosions: 1120 The AA defence of London in my experience is poor, even against same tier aircraft I struggled to shoot them down with my priority sector enabled. This is only compounded by the fact that you have no access to the fighter or defensive fire consumables. This can be enhanced by selecting AA mod 1 and mounting the November Echo Setteseven signal but I would recommend against AA mod 1 since there are better options to choose from. Maneuverability Top Speed: 32.3kts Turning circle: 710m Rudder shift: 7.8s I covered the maneuverability of London in the overview but I'll restate what I thought, London feels sluggish, not just because of the mediocre top speed of 32.3kts but also because of the slow acceleration and the large turning circle. Unlike the British CL's you don't get the acceleration baked into the London, pressing the W key will only result in your standard acceleration which can leave you in the position of eating many torpedoes. She also has a larger turning circle at T6, 710m is bigger than the Pensacola and ties the Aoba and Devonshire, so often you'll make a turn that you think is possible to make until you run into the island because London turns like a double-decker bus. London is a very sluggish ship, which is unusual for the Brits and it can get annoying when she doesn't react the way you'd expect a British cruiser to react. Concealment Surface Detect: 10.5KM (Camo+Concealment Expert) Air Detect: 5.9KM Smoke Firing: 6.8KM London has a decent detection range worse than the Leander and Devonshire but tied with Aoba and far better than the Pepsi can and Bodyonny. Her decent stealth helps to play this ship more aggressively, pushing in smoking up firing at the enemy before beating a hasty retreat to recover health. While not spectacular by any means the London is capable of going undetected when needing to. Consumables Slot 1: Damage Control 1/2 Slot 2: Repair Party 1/2 (you only get 1 use stock so definitely get the premium version of this consumable) Slot 3: Hydroacoustic Search 1/2 (British DD hydro) Slot 4: Smoke Generator 1/2 (typical British CL smoke) Captain Skills I run a 15 point captain on my British heavy cruisers 1: Priority Target 2: Adrenaline rush (faster reload), Last Stand 3: Superintendent (extra heals/smoke), Demolition Expert 4: Concealment Expert Upgrades Slot 1: Main Armaments Mod 1 Slot 2: Engine Room Mod 1 Slot 3: Aiming System/Torpedo reload Mod 1 Slot 4: Propulsion Mod 1 I found these upgrades to work the best, Main Armaments Mod 1 because of the lower crit chance on guns and torpedoes, engine room because I like having propulsion and steering when I'm playing a cruiser, I prefer aiming system for the tighter dispersion since the torpedoes aren't very useful anyways and I would highly recommend propulsion mod 1 over steering gears because of the before mentioned sluggish acceleration. Of course, these are just the upgrades I run with, this doesn't mean that they'll fit everyone's playstyle perfectly. Final Thoughts I have been waiting for this ship ever since I read the very first post of it back in November of last year, and while I don't regret the money I've spent I can certainly see why others might. This ship is tricky and unlike Exeter where if you mess up the worst thing that happens is some BB over pens your bow, in London, any mistake will be quickly and severely punished. With that said this is a heavy cruiser with a smokescreen and High explosive, so she has a huge advantage against her peers at the same tier. Should you buy it or earn it? I'd say earn it, you have the chance to get the ship for free take it. The ship is good and can be very strong if you know what you're doing but one mistake and you'll find yourself getting early access to submarines! However, if you're afraid you're not going to get the ship in time and you still want London then go buy the cheapest bundle. Right now you can get London for $29.23 CDN and at that price, I feel as though you get what you paid for a decent ship with high potential, some massive strengths and some big weaknesses. Final Verdict on this Ship? Hello, I appreciate if you read my review do let me know if you run a different captain build or upgrades. Are you going to earn her or have you already bought her and if so what do you think of London?

As I've stated before the post was taken over by people trying to drive the conversation any where else but on the post's actual topic, and were trying to make sure no one would talk about the issue. So I'm reposting it here, and letting the anti-cv crew go nuts in the other topic, which if the mods could please delete that one instead of this one I would be grateful. testing on the PTS with the new rocket planes. This was done by a different tester, I didn't assist in this test by any stretch of the imagination. CV Prep Time Attack Delay Lexinton HVAR 3.0s 4.0s Lexington TinyTims 3.0s 6.0s Midway HVAR 3.0s 4.0s Midway TinyTims 3.0s 6.0s Shokaku 2.0s 4.0s Hakuryu 2.0s 4.0s Implacable 3.0s 3.0s Audacious 3.0s 3.0s Parseval 2.5s 2.0s Richthofen 2.5s 1.5s As you can see from this list, this shows that rocket attacks that are being tested on the PTS are increasing the attack setup time needed for CV rocket planes from 1.5 to 6 sec on top of the 2.5-3sec that is currently there for no other reason then apparently we hurt DD's. That ship class would be the only ship class that would benefit from this as it's the hardest ship class to maintain sight and contact with while setting up a attack run. As it stands now with the 3 second setup we typically will lose contact with our targeted DD and have to guess how he's reacted to being spotted, usually we are able to get a strike or two off. depending on surrounding AAA fire. Now with this setup our attack runs will have to look something like this with the added timer. find target. Click to start the setup for attack 3 sec prep starts after that 4.5 sec attack window ( better have guessed and aimed right while keeping the tightest reticle as you can as to where that DD went in that time period.) then you have to wait ANOTHER 1.5 sec (for KM) to 6 sec (for US CV's) before your rockets leave the rails. You have to do this while maneuvering, the planes flying ahead avoiding AAA, because they don't just stop to keep your target in the reticle. All the while depending on the AAA environment your having planes fall out of the sky. All the while some charming folks here with "but muh unicum stats" will be saying it's fine etc, etc. This is not equivalent to turret rotation this is attack. Turret rotation would be the planes getting to the target. This would be like a Atlanta having a firing chain like this. click to fire. 3 sec prep, you now have 4.5 sec to aim and fire, if you do not fire in that time you have to wait 5 seconds before you can fire again. once you've clicked to fire you now have to wait a additional 4 seconds before your guns will shoot. reload time, rinse repeat. Now if you think this is fine applied to your favorite ships on top of what you have to do now to fire. Then please support this addition to cv's and Your ships as well. Everyone deserves this kind of special attention. I mean it's only fair right?

Hello everyone! Shield here, with my first written review of a ship in World of Warships. I am better at writing than I am at video editing, so I am gonna leave the video reviews to the people who actually know what they are doing. This is meant to be more casual, statistics used to explain the ship and not just thrown at you. This is meant to be a review you can read while at an airport, sitting in traffic, or just generally bored. I will try and keep it entertaining and yet still helpful/informational. It will be split up into 7 sections: History, Ships in Class, In-Game Statistics, Results, Personal Overview, and Overall Thoughts. I will add in tactical opinion as well as how the ship feels to play, so I hope you enjoy! So sit back, make sure your boss isn’t looking, your coffee is warm (or your beverage is cold), and enjoy this written review on the Cleveland class Cruiser! History: The Cleveland class of cruiser was a group of light cruisers built for the U.S. Navy during World War II. At the end of the war, they were the most numerous class of light cruisers to be ever built. The ships were designed with the goal of increased cruising range in terms of nautical miles per tank of fuel, increased anti-aircraft armament, and better torpedo protection as compared with earlier U.S. cruisers. Fifty-two ships of this class were originally planned, however, nine of them were completed as the light aircraft carriers of the Independence class (I have no idea how they thought of this but hey, if it works it works), and two of them were completed to a somewhat different design, with more compact superstructures and just a single stack (funnel for exhaust for non-boat people). These two were called Fargo class cruisers. Of the 27 Cleveland-class cruisers that were commissioned, one by the name of the USS Galveston (CL-93), was completed as a guided missile cruiser. Five were later modified as Galveston and Providence class guided missile cruisers. These ships were all named, as per usual at the time, after US cities and towns. The Cleveland-class cruisers served mainly in the Pacific Fleet during World War II (seeing as they were not built for anti-submarine or convoy-protection as the Atlantic Fleet would have been), especially in the Fast Carrier Task Force, but some of them served off the coasts of Europe and Africa in the U.S. Atlantic Fleet. All of these warships, no matter how heavily worked and damaged they might have been, survived the war. All of this class were initially decommissioned by 1950, except for Manchester, which remained in service until 1956. Six were later finished or converted to guided missile cruisers, and these served into the 1970s. The Clevelands suffered from increasing stability problems as anti-aircraft armament and additional radar was added during the war. They kept piling on more AA mounts and radar modifications and the ship was notoriously top-heavy. None were recommissioned for the Korean War, as they required a crew almost as large as the Baltimore class ships, and those ships were reactivated instead as they were the superior vessel at the time. All non-converted ships were sold off from the reserve fleet for scrapping beginning in 1959. The six that were completed as guided missile cruisers, or converted to be so, were reactivated during the 1950s and then served into the 1970s. All, particularly the Talos-armed ships (Talos being a long range surface-to-air missile), suffered from greater stability problems than the original design due to the extra radar equipment and top weight. This problem was particularly severe in Galveston, leading to its premature decommissioning in 1970. Multiple ships had to have large amounts of ballast and internal rearrangement to allow for their continued service into the 1970s. The last of these missile ships in service, Oklahoma City, was decommissioned in December 1979. Only one Cleveland-class ship remains in the world. She is the guided missile cruiser Little Rock, now a museum ship along the Niagara River in Buffalo, New York. USS Cleveland (CL-55) Talos Missile USS Galveston (CL-93) All Ships of the Cleveland Class: USS Cleveland CL-55 USS Newhaven CL-76USS Columbia CL-56 USS HuntingtonCL-77USS Montpelier CL-57 USS Dayton CL-78USS Denver CL-58 USS Wilmington CL-79USS Amsterdam CL-59 USS BiloxiCL-80USS Santa Fe CL-60 USS Houston CL-81USS Tallahassee CL-61 USS Providence CL-82 (later CLG-6)USS Birmingham CL-62 USS Manchester CL-83USS Mobile CL-63 USS Buffalo CL-84USS Vincennes CL-64 USS Fargo CL-85USS Pasadena CL-65 USS Vicksburg CL-86USS Springfield CL-66 (later CLG-7) USS Duluth CL-87USS Topeka CL-67 (later CLG-8) USS Newark CL-88 USS Miami CL-89 USS Newark CL-100USS Astoria CL-90 USS Amsterdam CL-101USS Oklahoma City CL-91 (later CLG-5) USS Portsmouth CL-102USS Little Rock CL-92 (later CLG-4) USS Wilkes-Barre CL-103USS Galveston CL-93 (later CLG-3) USS Atlanta CL-104USS Youngstown CL-94 USS Dayton CL-105USS Buffalo CL-99 (no, this is not a mistake, there were two USS Buffalos) Okay, now that all of the history portion is done, I will now move on to the stats of the Cleveland in the game. Cleveland Statistics (from Wargaming Wiki): Stock: Top: I decided to hop in and play three random battles just right off the bat, to give you a realistic idea of what can be expected from this ship. These are older battles, as you can tell by the halloween missions (lol), but this goes to show that the Cleveland is still a good ship even in the older versions of the game. Battle 1: Battle 2: Battle 3: So as you can see, the Cleveland is quite the ship to have fun in. Survivability kinda sucks but it helps you to learn how to save your HP more effectively. A plus to these photos is also kinda proof that I don’t suck, well, at least not too badly. Personal Overview So my thoughts on this boat. First off, she is a looker. Well, that is my opinion but that does not matter. Some screenshots to make you happy: Whenever you are playing the Cleveland, you have to make sure you are extremely aware of your surroundings. The armor is non-existent, so you have to make the initial approach up to the enemy team under the cover of smoke, behind an island, or behind a meaty wall of friendly BBs and other, more heavily armored, CLs. Her guns don't pack the 203mm punch of the Pepsicola (Pensacola for those less informed), but they can make the life of any enemy ship living hell if played correctly. I would recommend firing your turrets as two "teams". The front two and rear two always shoot together, but never all four at once. This will allow you to designate multiple targets and be able to lay down more constant fire upon your enemies. The Cleveland has 4 turrets of 3x152mm guns, and the HE is very fun to play with. The American Gun Arc that this ship so proudly boasts is both a blessing and a curse. You can lob shells over islands you are using for cover, as well as those that the enemy (mistakenly) thinks can provide them cover. The HE fire chance is 12%, but can be further upgraded if you like with flags or commander skills. The penetration of the HE is decent (formula being Gun Caliber / 6 = Penetration) so the Cleveland gets roughly 25mm of HE penetration. "Well Shield, that is abysmal! You can't pen anything with that kind of value!" Don't get your knickers in a twist, I hadn't finished yet. HE shells do not lose their penetration values over distance like AP does, so these shells have 25mm of pen at ALL ranges. This meaning they can penetrate the bow armor of most Tier 4-7 BBs (with exceptions, I know) and do damage unless your shell is shattered by sheer armor value (angling) in what I call "anti-overmatch", where your shells just won't penetrate at any value at all due to the sheer effective armor of that ship. Anyways, I digress. So, the HE is brilliant but what about the AP? Well, honestly, it isn't too shabby. Sure it isn't great but you can deal some serious damage as shown in Battle 3 above this section. I got 8 citadels against the enemy team, and that was all fine and dandy in my book. I would recommend a range of 5-8km when firing AP so your shells have a better chance of penetrating, but any closer and you will basically be in suicide range because most ships Tier 5-Up can citadel you for days within 1-4km. The Cleveland has some grunt getting off the line, but it still isn't quite as much as the British CLs with their Bugatti-Veyron off the line speed. She is nimble and quick and can usually hide from St. Nick, but you have to make sure you are alternating both speed and course when trying to evade shells. You have two "Hello!" turrets and two "F*** This S*** I'm Out" turrets. Their names should be self-explanatory, but if you do not quite get what I mean let me spell it out for you. The front of your ship should be pointed towards the enemy 90% of the time, using your two forward turrets to send gloriously dispersed HE at your opponents. The other two turrets are great for either A) pissing off attacking BBs who see you running away or B) broadsiding the occasional DD. Your broadside is a delicious target for all of the enemy team and should not be shown to them, so please, be modest. Furthermore, you are a DD assassin of glorious proportions. Your 152mm HE can shred enemy DDs within 3 full salvos and the splash damage is great for absolutely wrecking the occasional cocky DD who wants to "sneak up" on you. Hey DD drivers, here is a video of How Not To Be Seen: Hope that helps. Imagine the Cleveland as the narrator and the poor chaps being exploded as you, the DDs. I personally love to play the Cleveland, and it is a fun ship all around to play. You just have to stay cautious of your surroundings, work with your team, and sacrifice the occasional mature goat to the MM Overlords. Overall Thoughts: The Cleveland is a solid ship in general. I hate to quote QuickyBaby and say it is "generic" because it really isn't, but on the surface there is nothing special about it. I love to play her often, and divisioning up with a buddy in these you can have a blast. I was solo fr the above-mentioned games but if I was partnered up with someone we could have both easily done the same amount (or more) of damage by calling our targets and focusing our fire. She is quick and nimble but needs to be cared for. Stay away from the direct fire of enemy ships and be the assassin of the team, never fully up front but always ready to dart in, do 10k dmg to a poor and unsuspecting peasent, and dart back into the cover of an island or friendly smoke. I truly hope you guys enjoyed this and I would love to hear back from you about how this was! This is not meant to be an inch-by-inch review of the ship, check out some of the Youtubers for that style of content, but instead a casual overview of the ship and her history to read while waiting for an airplane, a red light, or trying to procrastinate at work (not recommended). Feel free to leave your constructive critism below as well as your thoughts and how you liked it! Remember to vote above for what ship you would like to see next! Thanks, - Shield

The following is a review of Giulio Cesare, a ship kindly provided to me by Wargaming. This is the release version of the vessel and these stats are current as of October 20th, 2017. This was a triumph. (I'm making a note here: "Huge success".) It's hard to overstate my satisfaction. Quick Summary: Giulio Cesare feels like a traditional battlecruiser -- fast, hard hitting but with a poor protection scheme. She's incredibly agile for a ship of her size. Cost: $24.99 USD with a port slot. Patch and Date Written: 0.6.11.1 to 0.6.12.0, October 12th to October 19th, 2017 Closest in-Game Contemporary Kongo, tier V Japanese Battleship Degree of Similarity: Clone / Sister-Ship / Related Class / Similar Role / Unique Kongo is about as close as you'll get to a ship with similar game play style to Giulio Cesare, but this is still a rather far cry from the Italian Battleship. Cesare is stealthy while Kongo is not. Cesare is agile while Kongo is not. Both ships excel at engaging enemy ships at medium distances, using their speed to dictate the range. Cesare exerts far more control than Kongo between her superior firepower, gun handling, agility and stealth. PROs Extended waterline belt armour helps bounce shells when properly angled. The inside of the prow has an 85mm armoured "beak" which makes citadel penetrations through the bow more difficult. Guns feel very accurate with a combination of a 1.9 sigma value and the turrets being mounted close together. HE shells have an excellent base fire chance of 35% and a rather large splash radius of 28m for damaging modules. Fast gun traverse of 5.0º/s Small, 640m turning circle, good rudder shift time of 13.0s and a fast top speed of 27.0kts, making her one of the most agile battleships currently in the game (yes, even more agile than Warspite). She's a small target, smaller than many light cruisers with an excellent surface detection range of 13.7km. CONs Exceedingly fragile with poor torpedo defense, low hit point total, a large exposed citadel and poor armour values overall. Secondaries are lackluster with a modest rate of fire and a combination of HE and AP shell fire. Poor anti-aircraft firepower and range. Feels blind without any form of spotter aircraft, float plane fighter or similar vision-assisting consumable. The Italian Battleships are here! Well, kinda. Giulio Cesare is an Italian battleship but for those who were hoping to be able to pin point what sort of flavour or gimmick they would have to differentiate themselves from the Germans, British, American and Japanese, you're going to be a bit disappointed. Giulio Cesare got the Dunkerque treatment in that there's nothing about her that points to some special flavour of the Regia Marina dreadnoughts. We shouldn't be too surprised given what's come before like with Hood and Tirpitz which were each poor indicators for the ship lines that came after. This doesn't preclude Giulio Cesare from being an interesting ship in its own right as you will see. I have to admit, even as a die-hard Royal Navy fangirl -- the Italian ships are simply gorgeous. Options Pretty run of the mill stuff here. Giulio Cesare has a standard battleship Damage Control Party with a 15s active period and a 120s / 80s reset timer depending on whether or not you go for a premium version. Her Repair Party is also standard for a battleship. Consumables: Damage Control Party Repair Party Premium Camouflage: Type 9/10. As of patch 0.6.12.0, type 9 and 10 camouflage patterns are identical. This provides 50% bonus experience gains, 3% reduction in surface detection and 4% reduction in enemy accuracy. Module Upgrades: Three slots, standard non-American battleship options. In your first slot, take Main Armaments Modification 1. In your second slot, take Aiming System Modification 1. If you really hate aircraft, you can take AA Guns Modification 2 instead. While this will help dissuade tier IV and V carriers, be advised this will not save you against tier VI+ carriers, even with a full anti-aircraft build. In your third slot, take Damage Control Systems Modification 1. Firepower Primary Battery: Ten 320mm rifles in an A-B-X-Y superfiring configuration. Secondary Battery: Twelve 120mm guns in 6x2 turrets and eight 100mm guns in 4x2 turrets I got so terribly excited when I saw the load-out of Giulio Cesare's secondaries on paper: a ten gun broadsides? That's almost German-good! Sure, this would be hamstrung somewhat by the 4.0km range, but I was gonna be happy and I was going to pew pew stuff in the face and be all, "Veni, vidi, vici!" on all of those gunship destroyers that think they're so great at tiers IV and V. Yeah, no. There are two little issues with my dreams of close-quarter conquests with a phalanx of secondary fire. Giulio Cesare's secondaries don't have quite the rate of fire I was hoping. Each gun fires 10rpm -- a whisker shy of the 12rpm I hope to see on secondaries at a minimum -- especially for low caliber weapons like 100mm guns. I mean, 10rpm isn't terrible but it's not ideal. Anyway, I could over look this in of itself... ...except that point number two is that her 120mm guns (which form the backbone of her secondary armament) fire AP shells. Blech. Now, don't get me wrong. In of itself, AP shells from secondaries can be good if they've got a lot of hitting power. But these ones don't. They have a maximum alpha strike of 2,000 damage per if they citadel and they're not going to do that often. It's like asking a cross-eyed Farragut to save your life from a rampaging Podvoisky and the fool loads AP instead of HE. As it turned out, getting that close with Giulio Cesare is generally a loser move anyway (see her protection scheme below), so having mediocre secondaries isn't that much of a loss. Still, it's a shame. I do love my low tier brawls. As it would fall out, I did find an elegant solution to that charging gunship-destroyer problem. Meet the problem solver. Giulio Cesare is one of the most comfortable gunnery experiences I've enjoyed in a battleship. It's kind of hard for me to believe she's stricken with German dispersion values. These are the worst in the game. Her guns feel far more accurate than what her dispersion value would suggest. This comes down to three factors: Her sigma value, the size of the ship and the number of guns she wields. Giulio Cesare boasts a sigma value of 1.9 which is a marginal improvement over the usual 1.8 value found on tier V battleships. The higher the sigma value, the more likely shells will land towards the center of the dispersion field. In practice this means there are fewer 'wonky' shots where shells fly every which way. They still occur, but more rarely than on other battleships like König or Iron Duke. The second factor is the proximity of Cesare's guns to one another. Cesare isn't a very large vessel -- she's shorter in length than many of the cruisers within her matchmaking spread. As a result, her guns are crammed closer together. This has the effect of reducing dispersion further This is part of why a ship like New Mexico feels more accurate than Fuso even though the latter has better dispersion values. Finally, Cesare has a ten-gun broadside. Had she only eight like Kongo, her dispersion wouldn't feel as generous. The sheer volume of fire does much to diffuse any perceptions of occasional inaccuracy grace that if you throw enough shells at a target, something's likely to hit. So despite the flaw of a large base dispersion value, you're seldom going to feel it. .Giulio Cesare's guns should be considered "good enough" in all other respects. She doesn't win out on DPM, alpha strike, penetration, or even fire chance (she's bested by Iron Duke, Oktyabrskaya Revolutsiya, New York, and Iron Duke again, respectively). However, she's a contender in each category without any serious weak spots. She has the second highest DPM for a battleship at her tier. Cesare's HE penetration value is artificially high. For a 320mm gun, we should expect her to be able to penetrate 52mm of armor. She can instead penetrate 55mm. This isn't an enormous difference, but it is a bonus. Cesare has a very high fire chance at 35% per hit. This contrasts with a more modest HE shell damage of 4,800 which is respectable but not great. Cesare's module blast radius is respectable for her tier at 28.35m even with her smaller caliber guns. Cesare is great at causing critical damage to enemy ships, including setting off magazines of light cruisers and destroyers. This just leaves Cesare's AP penetration to talk about. It's not terrible, but it's not great. Her shells have comparable penetration performance to Royal Navy 381mm guns found on Hood and Queen Elizabeth. This is perfectly serviceable at tier V and VI though it starts feeling a bit lackluster against some of the more heavily armoured American and German belt armour, especially at close to maximum range. Image courtesy of Wargaming's Armada video on Giulio Cesare. Cesare's penetration values lack the raw potential up close, though they preserve their power well over distance. Giulio Cesare is a battleship where you could be forgiven for spamming a single ammunition type and either one would yield good results. To be clear: Her AP shells are better than her HE shells, but the latter are no slouches. A player who elects to use just a single shell type won't perform as optimally as someone that's more dynamic with their ammunition choices. However, they will still do reasonably well. The only real weakness of Cesare's main battery armament (and I am really stretching things to call it a weakness) are her gun fire angles. They're not bad but they're not excellent. Her forward guns have a 288º fire angle. Her rear have a 290º fire angle. This means that to bring all eight guns on a target ahead, she needs to angle out to 35º -- this isn't auto-bounce territory (30º) so she needs to be careful lest she eat unwanted citadel hits. Towards the rear this is slightly worse at a 36º fire angle. Overall, Cesare has an excellent main battery armament that's not only easy to use but quite powerful. Summary: Good traverse rates and decent accuracy makes her guns very comfortable to use. Her per-shell damage may not be phenomenal, but the number of hits she can land more than makes up for this. Dynamic ammunition choice will yield the best results, but homogeneous fire of AP or HE can still score some impressive damage totals. Her secondaries are unfortunately lackluster despite the impressive number of weapon mounts. Giulio Cesare has got it where it counts. Manoeuvrability Top Speed: 27.0knotsTurning Radius: 640mRudder Shift: 13.0s Maximum Turn Rate: 4.9º/s Cesare is fast and Cesare is agile. Her twenty-seven knot top speed at tier V is excellent. She's not the fastest ship in her tier -- that honour goes to Kongo -- but she is much faster than all of her other contemporaries. What's more, she doesn't pay for this speed with horrible handling. In fact, Cesare is one of the most agile battleships in the game. While Warspite may boast a smaller turning circle, Cesare preserves more speed with her rudder hard over, allowing the ship to rotate faster and change direction more suddenly than every other battleship she faces. This gives her a maximum rate of turn of 4.9º/s compared to 4.7º/s of Warspite. As you can imagine, this makes Cesare great at dodging incoming shells and other forms of attack. Speed is life for Giulio Cesare. The value of being able to control engagement distances must not be underestimated. Cesare's speed wanes as you face higher tiered ships, however. While her twenty-seven knots feels blinding fast in the small, claustrophobic maps of tiers IV and V, when you're up-tiered, it doesn't quite measure up. The maps get significantly larger and you begin to face opposition that is as fleet footed (or faster) than you are. Still, like with Nagato, Cesare's 27 knot top speed is sufficient at tier VII though not especially quick. It pays to be a little more cautious because of it. One of the most satisfying elements of Cesare's speed and agility is that she is all but immune to torpedo attack form tier IV and V aircraft carriers, provided you keep your wits about you. Turning radius difference between Giulio Cesare (left) and Kongo (middle), and Warspite (right) using navigational buoys on the Ocean map as markers. One frame = approximately 3.0s. DurabilityHit Points: 45,500Maximum Citadel Protection: 250mm +24mm turtleback + 40mm Min Bow & Deck Armour: 19mm Torpedo Damage Reduction: 19% All of Cesare's speed comes at a price. She doesn't have a lot of hit points, for one. This in turn means that her Repair Party consumable isn't terribly impressive, healing back a maximum of 6,370hp per charge. For another, she's almost sufficiently protected, but there are significant problems with her armor scheme. First and foremost, there is no avoiding Cesare's most crippling flaw: Her citadel sits high over the waterline, stretching from in front of B turret to all of the way back behind X turret. Her citadel continues, submerged, beneath A and Y turrets. She doesn't have good armour protection around her citadel either -- not with how high it stands. The maximum citadel protection she receives is a bit of an illusion as her citadel sits so high that her turtleback will not always come into play -- nor will her thickest belt armour which is also submerged. Often, Cesare is forced to try and protect her machine spaces with as little as a 130mm upper belt armor and a 40mm citadel wall which doesn't stand up to punishment, even at very long ranges. If you give up this ship's side, you can expect to take citadel damage as a matter of course. Bow on, the story changes. While she has an extended belt armour which helps her face tank some shells, there's still a large section of 19mm worth of armor that can be overmatched directly head on. However, she is unlikely to take citadel hits from this angle as there's an interior 85mm armoured "beak" inside the bow to help deflect shells away from her magazines and barbettes. This wedge is a mixed blessing. While it does largely prevent citadel hits, it also upgrades many hits that would simply be overpenetrations into penetrating hits instead. So while it's unlikely for Cesare to take catastrophic hits when sailing directly bow onto an enemy, she'll still take large damaging hits as a matter of course. Cesare's extended belt armour covers her entire waterline to the rear, however, making her surprisingly tanky on the retreat. Just make sure you're aware of her worse gun fire angles when shooting over the shoulder so as to avoid giving up too much side when firing A and B turrets. Given these deficiencies in her armour scheme, it's best to take on a 15º to 20º angle towards enemies either on the attack or retreat to maximize the protection provided by your belt. Use her excellent agility to bait and dodge shells while unmasking your guns to return fire. Her agility should not be underestimated. Speed and camouflage will be your best defense in gunnery duels. Oh, and you can forget about Cesare having good protection against torpedoes. They hurt more than being stabbed twenty-three times. Concealment & Camouflage Base Surface Detection Range: 13.68km Air Detection Range: 9.42km Minimum Surface Detection Range: 11.41km Detection Range When Firing in Smoke: 10.86km Main Battery Firing Range: 16.37km Surface Detection Rank within Tier: Tied for first with Oktyabrskaya Revolutsiya Surface Detection Rank within Matchmaking: Tied for fourth with Oktyabrskaya Revolutsiya Giulio Cesare is incredibly stealthy for a battleship. When she's top tier, the only ships that have better potential concealment are rare premiums, Nikolai I and Arkansas Beta. When she's bottom tier, the closest tier VI ships are New Mexico and Warspite with Cesare enjoying a 400m advantage. The closest tier VII is King George V with Cesare enjoying a 700m advantage. Combining her great handling and top speed, Cesare can dictate engagement ranges when fighting other battleships, which is a good thing. She will be uptiered often and this measure of control makes such matches far more comfortable than they would be otherwise. Silencing her guns and turning tail will allow you to disengage from unfavourable encounters. This goes a long way towards increasing her survivability. This is especially important given how blind she is. Cesare suffers like many battleships do that lack float plane fighters or some gimmicky consumable like Hydroacoustic Search. When forced to do her own spotting, she's groping in the dark which makes spits of land all the more dangerous and dealing with enemy destroyers far more challenging. It's worth noting just how small Giulio Cesare is. Even Duca d'Aosta, a light cruiser, is longer than the new battleship. She has a comparable length to the short and squat (and very cute) USS Texas but with even better concealment values. Anti-Aircraft Defense AA Battery Calibers: 100mm / 37mm / 20mmAA Umbrella Ranges: 4.0km / 3.5km / 2.0kmAA DPS per Aura: 26 / 70 / 27 Planes are a problem for Giulio Cesare. For one thing, they have a nasty habit of negating Cesare's impressive surface detection range. For another, they like to drop explody things that make me have a sad. As mentioned previously, Cesare's agility will largely keep you safe from munitions from tier IV and V carriers so long as you keep a wary eye out. Cross drops from an expertly played Zuiho can still cause issues. Her anti-aircraft armament isn't terrible, but it's not good. At best you could say that she doesn't have the worst AA power among battleships of her tier. Her large caliber guns are hamstrung by a 4.0km aura. For much of the playtesting period, I used AA Guns Modification 2 to help compensate for this (mostly because Aiming Systems Mod 1 was not available to testers) and this provided her with enough teeth to shoot down two or three aircraft from same or lower tier carriers per attack run. When facing higher tiered planes, killing one plane was a victory. Killing two was a triumph. So keep an eye on the skies. You'll need to manoeuvre to avoid attack and that can leave you open to incoming fire. Be sure to evaluate threats appropriately. How to Train your Publius Crassus Your first ten skill points in Giulio Cesare are rather standard for a stealthy battleship. Start with Priority Target. For those players comfortable with their situational awareness, this can be swapped for Preventative Maintenance or Expert Loader. At the next tier, take Expert Marksman. You're going to be throwing Cesare about often in heavy manoeuvres. Her turrets can barely keep up with her maximum rotation rate and this will help get your guns back on target. Superintendent is your best purchase next to give you an extra charge of your Repair Party. And finally, take Concealment Expert at top tier to drop your surface detection range down to 11.4km. This will help you control fights, especially when you're bottom tier in the Matchmaker. The current meta will reward you best for taking survivability based skills after this. Fire Prevention (4) and Basics of Survivability (3), should all be considered high value skills. Fire damage is especially prevalent at lower tiers. For the remaining two points, Adrenaline Rush (2) is your best investment. If you're especially salty about aircraft and want to feel like a big fish in a small pond, you can build for AA-power with Advanced Fire Training (4) and Basic Fire Training (3) instead. Combined with AA Guns Modification 2, this will give you a rather healthy flak umbrella that will make tier IV and V carriers rather salty when they engage you. However, be advised this build is not only sub-optimal, it's all but useless when facing tier VI and VII carriers. Cool battleships don't look at exploding aircraft. Overall Impressions Skill Floor: Simple / Casual / Challenging / Difficult Giulio Cesare has one lesson to teach novice players -- don't show your sides. Beyond that, she's not a terribly complicated ships, with very forgiving attributes. She's agile enough to respond to belatedly addressed threats. Her AP and HE shells are both competitive even when the wrong ammunition choice for a task is selected. She's not so fast that you will easily outstrip your support. Skill Ceiling: Low / Moderate / High / Extreme Veterans will love her concealment value, agility and speed while celebrating the punishing hitting power of her guns. If she wasn't blind, she would be the perfect mid-tier battleship. She presents an interesting challenge on how best to maximize her armour and what few hit points she has. Mouse's Summary: 1.9 sigma, good muzzle velocity and her gun layout makes her feel more accurate than her dispersion stats would otherwise indicate. She does not stand up well to abuse. She's got enough armour to shrug off a few hits but under concerted fire, she's not going to last very long. Make sure the things that are shooting at you die painful deaths. Fast, agile, stealthy. She hates planes. She also hates torpedoes. Giulio Cesare had an interesting development cycle. Her first iteration was disgustingly overpowered with the ship enjoying the same horizontal dispersion value as Japanese Heavy Cruisers (!) with a 1.5 sigma value. The second iteration was the ship we see now but without the Aiming System Modification 1 upgrade which is what this review is based upon. As I write this, I haven't had a chance to play her with the accuracy increase and I'm very much looking forward to that. It's only going to make playing her more fun. Giulio Cesare is a battleship that rewards good gunnery and awareness skills -- so much so that I honestly believe she might be just a little overpowered but I'm on the fence. This ship is going to spit so much damage so regularly, that I anticipate she's going to end up near the top of the pile on the damage meters. The only thing that will hold her back is her survivability and that's not nearly as bad as some may be dreading. Overall, she's a very powerful ship in the right hands. What I found worked best was keeping engagement distances out to about 10km to 12km and holding it there. This let Cesare's guns land hits regularly while still giving her enough time to angle or avoid incoming fire. Against more serious threats like the Scharnhorst-class battleships, extending this range to 14km helped, as well as switching ammunition based on the opportunities provided. Cesare feels a bit idiot proof in that you can spam HE and get good numbers. I found myself leaning upon this ammunition a little more than perhaps I should have. As a consequence, this lead to more than a few detonations of enemy vessels -- a total of five out of forty-six games played. This number shouldn't be considered anomalous -- any battleship that spams HE at soft targets like cruisers and destroyers could get similar results provided they can land the hits in the vicinity of the ammunition lockers. Cesare was uniquely suited to this with not only her improved accuracy but also her speed which let me get her into positions to hammer these softer targets early on in a match. Much will be made of Cesare being a tier V battleship and suffering the ills of the current Matchmaking. This is a battleship that up-tiers very well -- at least provided there are no aircraft carriers present. In pure gunship fights, she has all of the tools necessary to contend with these larger vessels. I did not feel horribly disadvantaged facing a Colorado, Nagato or King George V. It was a challenge facing these ships, to be sure, but it wasn't a forgone conclusion like it might be had I been sailing a New York or König. When Cesare is top tier, it's really not very fair. There are only a few ships to give me pause in such match-ups. A well played Hosho, Kamikaze or Oktyabrskaya Revolutsiya might make me play a little more cautiously, but Cesare provides so many advantages it's hard not to feel confident when Matchmaker spat me out into such a game. Like the French cruiser, De Grasse, Giulio Cesare surprised me with how much fun she was to play. This is a ship I will be happily revisiting in my spare time when I can get her on my personal account. Would I Recommend? Well, I want her... PVE Battles How well does the ship maintain profitability in Co-Op modes and how does she fare against bots? Giulio Cesare is a real bully in PVE battles. Her operational costs are 11,500 to repair and typical ammunition costs amounting to this value again. This is an easy sum to recover in Co-Op. I highly recommend her for players that enjoy battering bots. Random Battle Grinding:This includes training captains, collecting free experience, earning credits and collecting signal flags from achievements. Giulio Cesare is a monster in Random Battles. She's got all of the tools needed to carry the day here. She's an easy recommendation for battleship lovers. For Competitive Gaming:Competitive Gaming includes Ranked Battles and other skill-based tournaments. This also includes stat-padding. I'm torn here and I think I would give her a pass. Giulio Cesare thrives in the chaos of a disorganized melee of Random or Co-Op battles. In the more structured (and often static) environment of a competitive arena, she may not fare as well where fire is often quite focused and manoeuvre plays second fiddle to hugging islands and concealment. For Collectors:If you enjoy ship history or possessing rare ships, this section is for you. Giulio Cesare is one of the few battleships in WWII to have engaged in surface action against other battleships -- namely, HMS Warspite. For that reason alone (and her association with my favourite bae-bote), she gets a nod here, especially for those that like to recreate historical engagements in training rooms. For Fun Factor: Bottom line: Is the ship fun to play? Very yes. I had a lot of fun playing this ship. It reminded me of the good ol' days of playing Kongo back in Beta. What's the Final Verdict?How would the ship rate on an Angry YouTuber scale of Garbage - Meh - Gud - Overpowered? GARBAGE - Grossly uncompetitive and badly in need of buffs.Mehbote - Average ship. Has strengths and weaknesses. Doesn't need buffs to be viable, but certainly not advantageous.Gudbote - A strong ship that has obvious competitive strengths and unique features that make it very appealing.OVERPOWERED - A ship with very clear advantages over all of its competitors and unbalancing the game with its inclusion.

I recently hit over 100 hours and thought it might be useful to share some insight from a 100% new player. I have never played a WG game before so Warships is my introduction to tactical military play (unless you count various FPS). I know all of this has probably been put out before and I'm only up to Tier 6 on one nation's tech tree but that is kind of the point. The game is pretty easy to get into. There is depth for sure that you need to do some research on like angle and armor thickness etc but you can just pick it up and run with it. I brought my wife and my brother into the game and they have done next to no reading on mechanics and picked it up fast. There are WAY too many currencies. I know, it is free to play and your income is generated by using currencies to obfuscate how much money people are spending but man, it is crazy! XP, Free XP, commander XP, elite commander XP, coal, steel, credits, doubloons, event currencies, etc etc etc. And then there are conversions from one to another! I'm sure there are currencies I haven't even gotten yet. A bit overwhelming in the beginning to be sure. I binged CoOp the first week I downloaded it. At lower tiers, it is so good. Ships feel awesome, guns hit great, wins feel rewarding. You can fight from a bit of distance or right up in their face. Even when I lost I felt I learned something. Bots still blew me up from time to time but the difficulty seemed to scale pretty well into tier VI. Then I tried random battles. Wow, this is a totally different game, and to be frank, it isn't much fun. All anyone does is hide and snipe. Games are slow and tedious. I liked brawling in CoOp but there is next to no chance of that happening in Random. And then when you get carriers, it gets worse. I main a battleship so I can't dodge hits and my AA does basically nothing. Carriers have unlimited ammo, unlimited range, and risk nothing by attacking me. My wife in her second game with a carrier asked me what she could do against the planes and after thinking about it, my answer was "Nothing".There is no skill-based mechanic as a slow ship that you can use, no distance or cover that will provide support. Overall, I really enjoy the CoOp game. I'll probably grind to tier X and buy a couple of ships. I will try ranked at some point and the Big Hunt/other events in the future. I will for sure suggest this game to friends. I have gotten 100 hours of free fun and entertainment. I'll throw a couple of bucks WG's way. Disclaimer: These are my opinions based on my experience. I realize that I have played a fraction of the game. I also realize that people like different play styles. I'm not disparaging sniping or carrier play in general, I just feel there is a lack of balance for the game overall. Thanks for reading.

Tech Tree Ship Review Tier I UK Cruiser Black Swan "Wargaming, why you take my AP away" "Lifeboats, your gonna need em." Where shall we start, where shall we start, you may be wondering, why am I writing a review about a tin can at Tier I. I am doing this because I find low tiers fascinating. The pew pews that pass for guns, and the AA that has no use. I could go on and on and on. So, where was I, ah yes. The Black Swan, the ship that suffered from the loss of AP, the bote at Tier I that has flak guns. The Black swan is peculiar because it used to shoot AP and has six rapid firing 102 mm pew pews. ARMOR NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE I WILL SAY ONE MORE TIME NOPE FIREPOWER Mount:102 mm/45 QF Mark XIX Alpha Strike: 750 Hitpoints Initial Velocity: 850 m/ Sec Rate of Fire: 10 Shots a min Max Range: 8.7 km 180° Turn Time: 18 sec Max Dispersion: 80 m Chance of Fire: 6% Traverse Speed: 10° Sec Sigma: 2.00 Shell: HE 35lb Practice There is something interesting about the Black Swan's firepower. The ship used to shoot AP but WG brought down the nerf hammer on them. The 3x2 mounts are the most firepower a ship has at Tier I. It always for funsies when you machine gun a bot or baby seal. Fire chance, meh. But the reload speed of 6 sec is nice. Especially yolo bots at lower tiers. Maneuverability Horsepower:4,300 Max Speed: 19 knots Fast, but not. The Black Swan is not a zoom zoom. You can get where you are going with some ease. Islands is small though. Summary Overpowered

This index is meant to serve as a quick summary of the Premium Warships, both currently and previously available. This will be faster and easier for me to update when something new comes out than the time it takes to write a longer article. This guide is not meant to be comprehensive, but to give players a glance over of what each ship entails while providing easy to navigate links to more thorough reviews. Click the name of a ship in posts #2 and #3, you can find full reviews of any of the ships in question. Recent Changes (Last Updated March 8th, 2019) Last five reviews: Irian, Wichita, Charleston, Alaska, Exeter Catching up on a month's worth of work. Lots of cleaning house. Limited Release Warnings: Exeter is available from now until the end of March. For individual ship availability and reviews of all ships, please see posts #2 and #3. Post #2 contains all destroyers and cruisers, post #3 includes all battleships and aircraft carriers. Ships are listed by tier in ascending order. Legend & Notes Ship availability will be described with one of these colour-coded descriptions. Here's what they mean: Online Store - These are ships that you need to spend real-world money (or premium currency) to acquire. In the case of limited release ships, players can only buy this ship directly through the online store. Some of the more common premium ships may also be available for purchase through the in game tech tree for doubloons, but only if specifically listed. Reward Ship - Players can currently acquire this ship as a reward -- no money is needed to acquire this vessel. Details will always describe the source through which this ship may be obtained. This can be from bonus codes, contests, achievements, events and (in at least one case), through spending free experience. Ships from previous events that are no longer available will not have this designation. Not available - Ships is temporarily unavailable. It may become available again sometime in the future. Rare Collector's Item - Wargaming has removed the ship from sale and has released information detailing that this ship is unlikely to ever be available again in the future. Unless specifically stated otherwise otherwise, these ships are unavailable. Work in Progress - Ship is still under development by Wargaming and has not been released to the public. This includes ships that have been pulled from circulation for to re-balance them (only one example so far).LIMITED TIME! - Attached to Online Store, Reward Ship or Rare Collector's Item ships that will only be accessible for a limited window of opportunity. Where possible, the final day the ship will be available will be documented. If you want this ship, do not wait until the last minute and then blame it on me if there's a misunderstanding on the specifics on when a promotion ends. When the ship's name is a link, it will lead you to the full review of the given vessel. Pay close attention to the date of the review. Older reviews may contain information no longer relevant to the current meta Angry YouTuber Review This is a shorthand evaluation of how advantageous a given ship is within the meta. It's meant to be a little tongue-in-cheek and a gross oversimplification of the overall power level of a ship. This won't explain why or how a ship is evaluated as such -- merely that it is. A player can own an overpowered ship and still suck with it, or excel with what amounts to a garbage boat. Here's the breakdown: GARBAGE– I hate it! Mehbote – An average ship. Probably forgettable. Gudbote – The best thing ever. Totally not overpowered because I like padding my stats in it. OVERPOWERED – I hate playing against it!

The following is a review of Pyotr Bagration, the tier VIII Soviet light cruiser. This ship was kindly provided to me by Wargaming for review purposes. To the best of my knowledge, the performance and statistics discussed in this review are current as of patch 0.9.4. Please be aware that the ship may change in the future. Quick Summary: A long-range Soviet cruiser with excellent ballistics. Ostensibly, she trades access to Surveillance Radar and some firepower for a Repair Party. In reality, she's just losing out on radar -- her firepower is alarmingly on par with her contemporaries. PROS Large hit point pool plus access to a Repair Party. Well protected citadel that's entirely internal -- it does not abut against the ship's hull. Excellent 18.5km range on her main battery guns with the ballistics to take advantage of it. Very good penetration on her 180mm AP shells. Improved auto-ricochet angles on her AP rounds. Excellent AA firepower. CONS Her Repair Party only queues up 10% of citadel damage instead of 33% like most other cruisers. Low theoretical DPM and poor fire setting characteristics. Horrible fire angles, especially rearward. Very slow gun traverse at 6º/s. Her flat ballistic trajectory makes using island cover more of a challenge. Her torpedoes are slow, modestly ranged and don't hit particularly hard. Awful butt wiggle and cottage cheese thighs. Her turning radius is large and her rate of turn isn't good. (Temporary) Bugged Hydroacoustic Search consumable providing the incorrect (and shorter) ranges for torpedo and ship detection. Overview Skill Floor: SIMPLE / Casual / Challenging / Difficult Skill Ceiling: Low / Moderate / HIGH / Extreme Pyotr Bargation is an incredibly forgiving cruiser to play. Her guns are easy to use, facilitating firing from the back line. Her protection scheme is more than decent. She also gets a heal to help band-aid misplays. Furthermore (and perhaps most importantly) she lacks any serious weaknesses. Thus, she isn't severely penalized in any way that would jeopardize a novice player. She's about as basic as you can get for a high-tier cruiser. Veterans will like her simply for all of the aforementioned plus they get to use and abuse some of their skills they've acquired, including when to push, what islands to use, concealment mechanics and all of the kiting they could possibly want. Her lack of team-based utility hurts her somewhat but her staying power more than makes up for it. Options Consumables Upon release, there was a bug with Pyotr Bagration's Hydroacoustic Search. She is intended to have a 3.5km torpedo detection range and a 5km ship detection range. This will be corrected upon a later patch. Her Damage Control Party is standard for a cruiser with a 5s active period, a 60s reset timer and unlimited charges. In slot two, you have the choice between two consumables. Her Defensive AA Fire consumable provides the usual bonuses of 50% extra sustained DPS and 300% extra flak damage over 40s. It comes with three charges and has an 80s reset timer. Her Hydroacoustic Search was released with a 3km torpedo and 4km ship detection range for 100s. It has a 120s reset timer and also has three charges. Finally (and perhaps most importantly) Pyotr Bagration has a Repair Party in her third slot. This heals back up to 14% of her health over 28 seconds. This queues up 50% of penetration damage, 10% of citadel damage (unlike most other cruisers) and 100% of everything else. It has an 80s reset timer and three charges base. Upgrades Pyotr Bagration deviates from other high-tier Soviet cruiser upgrades because of her lack of a Surveillance Radar. Start with Main Armaments Modification 1. Surprisingly, I prefer using Engine Room Protection over Hydroacoustic Search Modification 1 in slot two. The latter may be purchased from the Armory for 17,000. My reason for this is pretty simple -- I'm not always taking Hydroacoustic Search in this ship so I get less use from it. Still, your choice here depends on your consumable preference. I don't think Defensive AA Fire is good (especially not good enough to be worth spending coal on a questionable upgrade) even if you're using that consumable instead. Aiming System Modification 1 is still optimal in slot three. I prefer Steering Gears Modification 1 in slot four. There is a case for Propulsion System Modification 1, particularly if you make regular use of island cover (which is more of a challenge in Pyotr Bagration than other ships) or if you have a buddy providing smoke at the ranges where her gunnery is more comfortable. Concealment System Modification 1 is still optimal in slot five, but for those with a bit of dare, Steering Gears Modification 2 isn't a poor choice for helping her toss her mayonnaise-butt around. Captain Skills The big question here is whether to specialize for Inertial Fuse for HE Shells or not. Start with your tier 1 skill of choice. I prefer Priority Target, but skills like Incoming Fire Alert, Preventative Maintenance and Expert Loader (more on this later) are acceptable choices. Next up take Adrenaline Rush. At tier three, Superintendent is best to add an extra charge to your Repair Party. And you have a choice at tier 4. Here's where you need decide if you're going to take Inertial Fuse for HE Shells or specialize for fires instead. It should be your first choice if you want to go for direct damage. Whether you take it as your first pick or not, make sure to take up Concealment Expert. Those should be your first 10 to 14 skill points. After this, pick and choose skills to your preference. Some good ones include: Demolition Expert - increase her fire setting chance. Only do this if you haven't taken IFHE. Expert Marksman - Pyotr Bagration's turret traverse is hella slow. If you've got the points to spare, this is a nice one to take. Expert Loader - If you didn't take this skill on your first pass, it's not a bad skill to have. Pyotr Bagration's gunnery rewards being dynamic with ammo choices as opportunities present themselves. From there, skills get pretty situational -- pick and choose to suit your preferences. Camouflage Pyotr Bagration has two different camos. She comes with Type 10 camouflage by default and provided you've completed the right collections, you can also use the alternative colour palette. In some of the higher tier bundles, you get access to Soviet - Pyotr Bagration. These two camouflage patterns have the same bonuses and are merely cosmetic options. -3% surface detection +4% increased dispersion of enemy shells. -10% to post-battle service costs. +50% experience earned. I have to say, I really like the green, black and grey alternative palette. The original one is super bland. I'm usually a fan of over-the-top camouflage patterns. And while I admire the design for this one, it's simply not for me. Firepower Main Battery: Nine 180mm/57 guns in 3x3 turrets in an A-B-X superfiring configuration. Secondaries: Sixteen 100mm/70 guns in 8x2 turrets with a pair straddling the bridge, four straddling the rear funnel on a raised deck and the last pair mounted on the stern deck before X-turret. Torpedoes: Ten tubes in 2x5 launchers mounted between the funnels. There's a lot to go over here. Let's start with her least effective weapon systems and work our way up. Surprisingly Plentiful It should be no surprise that I'm ragging on her secondaries. Thus far, Wargaming hasn't produced a finalized cruiser with secondaries worth getting excited about. This is a shame. Pyotr Bagration has a lot of secondaries -- eight guns per side, but they're functionally useless. They're held back by not only a 5km range, but also with having only 17mm worth of HE penetration. At best they might start a fire or two in the rare situations where you're bringing said guns into a fight but Pyotr Bagration is a cruiser that belongs at a distance -- not knife fighting. Maybe in co-op battles you might start a fire or two with these weapons but given the nature the jousts in that combat mode, that's only going to last as long as it takes you to blow out their citadel with your main battery guns or slam fish down their throats. Speaking of... A weapon of desperation or Co-Op. You know, now that I think about it, these are kind of the same thing. Torpeedus "Almost functional" is how I would best describe Pyotr Bagration's torpedoes. They're weapons of desperation rather than utility. Her quintuple launchers are a credible threat to anyone coming close, but I see them more as a deterrent than anything else outside of co-op battles. Use these to force enemies to respect your zone of control around your ship. They should prevent (or punish) anyone from contesting whatever island cover you elect to use. Ambushes are possible, if largely limited to rare opportunities later on in a match given her poor concealment. The fish themselves are slow at 55kts and not particularly hard hitting either. It's necessary to land multiple hits to guarantee the destruction of a target -- even against destroyers, though even a single hit may be enough to clinch the outcome of a brawl if you've got Pyotr Bagration's guns facing the right direction. Overall, her fish are meh. 8km is too short a range to be useful, not when this ship likes to fight in the back line. Something has to go wrong before you'll get any real use out of these outside of PVE modes. Pyotr Bagration gets poor marks when it comes to her fire angles. She has to expose way too much broadside when firing forward and it's downright appalling when firing to the rear. Make sure you keep your distance or someone will swat you for flashing your sides to the enemy. No, I'm Spartacus Soviet 180mm/57 guns are infuriating. I don't mean game-play wise. In game, they're amazing. They have ridiculous levels of AP penetration, god-tier ballistics and they hit almost as hard as 203mm rounds. I'm talking from an analysis standpoint. Between Kirov, Mikoyan, Dmitri Donskoi, Tallinn and Pyotr Bagration, there are five (yes five!) distinct 180mm/57 gunnery styles with different ballistics and resultant AP performance. And don't try and give me any of that cold-witted sass: "It's not the gun, it's different shells!" You shut your hoarfrost mouth. There are two AP shells between all five ships and none of these five ships behave the same. Not a one! The only overlap is between Molotov and Dmitri Donskoi and everything else kinda spitballs their gunnery values in the general vicinity of the awesomeness of the whole. This gets even worse when you start looking beyond just ballistics and penetration as the different guns have different damage (really), dispersion values (yes, really) and auto-ricochet mechanics (yes, really-really). I could easily stomach different ranges and reload times for the sake of balance but this is just over complicating matters. This is all just a rant to say that the only thing consistent between these guns is their inconsistency. And their awesomeness. To understand what makes Pyotr Bagration's gunnery interesting, you have to understand the alternate Soviet branch of cruisers and the general weirdness of their guns. Their primary design features are: Improved AP auto-ricochet angles (50º to 65º) Short AP fuses (0.022s) Worse dispersion values. Two of these features are designed to make their AP shells more useful instead of forcing a reliance on HE shells. They are less likely to ricochet and when they do penetrate a target, they are less likely to over-penetrate even with their higher muzzle velocity. For example, an AP shell from the new ships striking a 32mm plate at 15km will need about 10m to fuse and explode where as Dmitri Donskoi's would need about 16m. This obviously may cause issues against ships with citadels buried deeper within the vessel but I wouldn't worry too much about it. For these new Soviet ships, the trade-off comes with decreased accuracy. Their dispersion values are noticeably worse over range than previous Soviet cruisers. Thus while your AP shells are more likely to do damage compared to previous 180mm armed Soviet ships, you will see fewer hits overall. So now that you've got all of that in your head, promptly forget about it. Here's why: Pyotr Bagration's AP auto-ricochet angles are further improved over the other Soviet cruisers (55º to 65º) Pyotr Bagration has the same short AP fuse (0.022s) Pyotr Bagration uses the old (better!) dispersion values. So her AP shells are better still than those on Tallinn and she hits more often. The trade off, of course, is their rate of fire -- though this is a much closer exchange than you might otherwise guess. Tallinn has a twelve gun broadside, firing 53 rounds per minute. Pyotr Bagration, with her nine guns (but a faster reload) manages a 49 rounds per minute. So Pyotr Bagration lags a half-broadside behind Tallinn for every minute of sustained fire. That's not terrible. In fact, given the other improvements, including Pyotr Bagration's improved range over Tallinn, I'd argue the premium gets the better end of this deal. It's only in HE trades where she lags a little behind and even then, she comes out the better in fire chance. The reason is the differences in their shell performance, which (of course!) are different between the 180mm armed ships. Pyotr Bagration's HE shells have a higher fire chance per shell (13% vs 11% for Tallinn) making her the better fire-starter even with the RPM disparity between the two ships. This gap widens again when you consider Pyotr Bagration's improved accuracy and range. But there's more. Pyotr Bagration's shells have a larger blast when it comes to attacking modules (a whole half meter, but still) and her shells deal about 13% more damage per hit (there's a lot of RNG involved here, but the average works out to about 13% more over the long run). So, Pyotr Bagration has better AP shells and better HE shells to boot. Pyotr Bagration is a poor fire starter, especially if you use Inertial Fuse for HE Shells. So lets' review: Pyotr Bagration has better AP shells than Tallinn. Pyotr Bagration has better HE shells than Tallinn. Pyotr Bagration is a better fire starter than Tallinn. Pyotr Bagration has more range than Tallinn. Pyotr Bagration is more accurate than Tallinn. And before you think that Tallinn's a lemon, she's a very powerful vessel. Let's not forget, the 180mm/57 guns are awesome. The drawback for these guns are two-fold and the first one doesn't matter. On paper, these ships do not appear capable of winning DPM races. But as we've gone over, the ballistics of these guns makes landing hits a triviality. Aiming over distance is a breeze. Thus any disparity in perceived rates of fire is compensated for by their ease of use granting them a larger number of hits. This gap only really materializes in the hands of truly expert players who can land hits even when firing low-velocity trebuchets off American boats. For the average player, Pyotr Bagration will improve your gunnery because of how easy it is to hit things. The other drawback is one of HE penetration. Pyotr Bagration has 30mm of base HE penetration -- this is the same value as tier VIII 152mm guns. The jump up in caliber provides no penetration benefits (boo!). For guns with a more modest rate of fire (and barrel disparity), this puts Pyotr Bagration among the lower tier of not only HE damage output but fire setting as well. If you elect to take Inertial Fuse for HE Shells to increase her penetration up to a level where she can directly damage 32mm hull sections of tier VIII+ battleships, this greatly compromises her ability to set fires such that it will be nearly impossible to tax a battleship's Damage Control Party on her own. This isn't the ship to farm fire damage in if you're electing to use this skill. At most she'll be able to reliably set single blazes and it will be rare that you double-stack them when it counts in solo-engagements. For that reason, it's important to focus fire if you've gone with this increased penetration route. Given her good AP performance, it's possible to skip out on using this skill entirely and instead rely on her great accuracy to aim for weak spots (superstructures) with her HE shells. With some minor improvements you can turn her into a respectable fire bug on part with Mogami 203mm or Atago. All of these comparisons aside, here's the big picture: Pyotr Bagration's guns are excellent. She excels from sniping from the second line with great AP penetration, shell flight times and accuracy over distance. Her poor gun traverse, fire arcs and modest damage output precludes her from trading fire at closer ranges -- it's better to keep her at a distance where her guns perform better than her adversaries. Similarly, their super-flat trajectory will make using island cover difficult, so exercising caution with the ranges at which she engages is paramount. Players have the choice of electing for direct damage with their HE shells through IFHE or they can make her a decent fire-setter by specializing in setting blazes instead. Top marks all around. Don't let her modest damage output fool you -- these guns are easy to use. That's well worth the slight dip in theoretical damage. VERDICT: Excellent guns -- use and abuse their long range performance. Everything else is irrelevant. Defense Hit Points: 42,000 Maximum Citadel Protection: 25mm bow + 180mm transverse bulkhead or a 152mm belt + 40mm citadel wall. Structural Armour: 25mm bow & stern, 25mm upper hull, 27mm deck amidships, 13mm superstructure. Torpedo Damage Reduction: 16% Pyotr Bagration holds the reputation for being one of the toughest cruisers at tier VIII. Generally, this is earned by the trifecta of having access to a Repair Party, having good citadel protection and trollish external armour plating, though in extreme cases, just having the latter-most is sufficient. However, I'd argue that Pyotr Bagration only accomplishes two out of these three points (and missed the key one). Thusly she sits further behind everyone's favourite chubby little sister, Prinz Eugen, who ticks all three boxes. Let's start things off by looking at Pyotr Bagration's health pool and heals: Pyotr Bagration's potential health is very respectable, but mostly grace of having access to heals when most others do without. With 42,000 health, Pyotr Bagration's base hit points are decent but rather pedestrian at tier VIII. She sits behind a list of other ships including Prinz Eugen & Tallinn (45,000hp), Admiral Hipper & Albermarle (43,800hp), Amalfi (42,800hp), Mainz & Cheshire (42,500hp) and finally Baltimore (42,400hp). So the only thing that's going to make her stand out is access to her Repair Party. Now having heals at tier VIII is top shelf for a cruiser as so many have to go without. This is especially important when facing tier IX and X opponents where everyone gets a heal and those without are a full step behind. However, when you line up the quality of the Repair Party consumables, you'll discover that Pyotr Bagration ended up with the worst of the lot. I wonder what the logic was behind this exception? My first instinct when I saw this was to assume that this was a bug (akin to the one that afflicted her Hydroacoustic Search ranges upon release). However, my contacts at Wargaming confirmed for me that in this case, the values are correct. Pyotr Bagration just has a crappy Repair Party compared to other cruisers. Oh well. Gift horses and what not. I don't feel this matters a whole lot and it's not really a strike against her. There are too many tier VIII cruisers dying (literally) for access to a heal. This goes double when you take into account how good her citadel protection actually is. There are three primary strengths to Pyotr Bagration's citadel protection: The thickness of her armour. Its immunity to overmatch mechanics. It's entirely internal with none of her citadel abutting against the exterior of the hull. In terms of raw armour thickness protecting her machine spaces, Pyotr Bagration is way up there. For hits striking a cruiser's broadside, she has the thickest armour protection of the tier VIII cruisers at a combined total of 192mm (152mm belt + 40mm citadel wall) keeping shells out of her machine spaces. Her next competitors include Wichita, Albemarle and Cheshire with a flat slab of 152mm belt armour (which doubles as their citadel wall) and the layered composition of Prinz Eugen's 147mm between (27mm anti-torpedo protection, 80mm belt and 40mm turtleback). Pyotr Bagration's advantage here is that she puts a thick piece of metal on the exterior, giving her the best chance to shatter (and ricochet) smaller caliber shells before they even enter the ship -- preventing damage entirely. This keeps her safe(r) from citadel attempts from destroyer-caliber weapons and those of some light cruisers as well, but again only at a distance. At extreme ranges where Pyotr Bagration likes to fight, this can even foil some 203mm AP shells, though this is chancing matters. Even if a shell does penetrate her, the thickness of her citadel's armour prevents overmatching, even from the largest caliber AP shells out there. Her multi-layered citadel defense allows her to "double dip" with ricochet mechanics -- if not quite angled perfectly, shells that pass the first ricochet check and punch through her belt have to make another before getting a chance to hammer through her 40mm citadel wall. This alone helps reduce the number of citadel hits, greatly adding to her longevity. Similarly, shells aimed high will skip off the roof of her citadel. Having her machine spaces and magazine entirely internal prevents Pyotr Bagration from taking any citadel hits from HE bomb and shell attacks. It can even provide an internal volume in which AP shells can fuse and detonate before reaching her citadel. The image on the left shows Pyotr Bagration's citadel dimensions and armour layout. The one on the right shows how the ship's belt armour and hull encompasses the entirely internal citadel. That gap can cause all sorts of weird penetration mechanics to occur, such as internal ricochets, providing a space for short-fuse shells to explode in, etc. The effect here is to reduce the frequency of citadel hits this ship receives, especially from smaller caliber AP shells. It's Pyotr Bagration's structural armour where I find she's lacking. She's a light cruiser and conforms to light cruiser norms barring her extended waterline belt. Thus, her structural armour doesn't exceed 25mm with the exception of her amidships deck. 27mm worth of structural armour is an important threshold since the Inertial Fuse for HE Shell rework. First of all, it provides HE shell immunity from destroyers of 127mm caliber guns or smaller (barring those with weird HE penetration such as the ducky 100mm) -- even with IFHE they can't get enough penetration to directly damage those hull sections. This provides protection against secondary fire too, such as those found on Massachusetts. But most importantly, 27mm hull sections give the ship immunity from overmatch mechanics from 381mm AP shells. It's a shame she has to do without. 27mm structural plate isn't an automatic "I win" attribute. Pyotr Bagration isn't crippled without it (though you definitely feel it more in Co-Op). It simply increases the ship's survivability against particular opponents and specific situations (which are, again, prevalent in Co-Op). Her lack of this armour cements for me her role as a back-line support ship. She belongs in the rear where her guns and her armour layout maximizes her performance for little risk. Her 40mm icebreaker bow is worth mentioning. While it will soak up the occasional AP and HE shell tossed at her waterline, I find it rather troll to be honest. Relying upon it will only get your face stoved in by overmatching battleship-caliber shells as there's still lots of 25mm sections to punch through. However, there's no arguing that it will further reduce the number of citadel hits she takes. Proof positive that Wargaming considers Pyotr Bagration a light cruiser. Her protection scheme conforms to light cruiser norms. Summary: She has a heal. Most tier VIII cruisers don't. Her citadel protection is good. It won't save you if you give up your broadside though. Her structural armour is squishy. She's very vulnerable to HE shells. VERDICT: Pyotr Bagration is easily one of the best protected cruisers at tier VIII. That doesn't make her invincible or even tanky for that matter, but she can survive for quite a while provided you play to her strengths. Agility Top Speed: 34.5kts Turning Radius: 890m Rudder Shift Time: 10.6s 4/4 Engine Speed Rate of Turn: 4.8º/s There's only two good things about Pyotr Bagration's agility. Her guns have a 6º/s rotation rate. She's very long ranged. You'll note that neither of these things relate to how agile the ship is itself. That's because she isn't agile. Her handling comes from the same rancid mayonnaise jar as the other Soviet agility. Sure, it wiggles and jiggles when you shake it but it's sixteen months past the expiry date. Just trying to handle it is asking for an oily disaster as it goes everywhere but where it belongs. The best thing about her is her speed -- she goes in a straight line reasonably quick (just like that watery film on the top of your expired mayonnaise when you accidentally tip it over) but that's not remarkable. As terrible as Pyotr Bagration's rotation rate is, at least she can't out turn her turrets. It's a horrible bit of consolation but there it is. Bad handling is bad handling, but that doesn't hold Pyotr Bagration back because it doesn't matter. All she really needs from her agility is to be able to maintain distance in order to stay alive. That far out, even the lack of Soviet handling is enough to kite and dodge effectively. The ol' mayonnaise zone. VERDICT: Pretty bad, but irrelevant other than her straight-line speed. Anti-Aircraft Defense Flak Bursts: 8 explosions for 1,400 damage per blast Long Ranged (up to 5.8km): 189dps at 90% accuracy Medium Ranged (up to 3.5km): 158dps at 90% accuracy Short Ranged (up to 2.0km): 70dps at 85% accuracy Pyotr Bagration has excellent AA firepower for a tier VIII cruiser. Given the distances at which she likes to fight, it's actually reasonable to without Hydroacoustic Search and use Defensive AA Fire instead. With so much of her damage output concentrated in her long-range batteries and a heavy amount of flak, she makes an excellent AA escort cruiser -- at least in so far as this role can still be said to be viable in the current meta. I think it's safer to say that you're not hurting your team's chances by spending a consumable to help bruise attack squadrons, though I wouldn't go so far as to encourage you to spend skill points or upgrades that way. Frankly, I look at this as a happy coincidence rather than something worth getting excited over. It's nice that Pyotr Bagration's penchant for shooting from the second line will keep her reasonably close to battleships and thus allow her to passively support them with her AA power too. With a lot of her AA power concentrated in her long-range batteries, Pyotr Bagration is a very good ship for providing support AA to allies. VERDICT: Pretty darned good. I wish that meant something. Refrigerator Base/Minimum Surface Detection: 14km / 11km Base/Minimum Air Detection Range: 8.23km/6.67km Detection Range When Firing in Smoke: 7.8km Main Battery Firing Range: 18.48km Pyotr Bagration's vision control is ... well, it's not good. But, like her agility, the failures here are largely irrelevant. Bugs with her Hydroacoustic Search aside, this isn't a ship that belongs up on the front lines anyway (outside of co-op -- everything brawls in co-op). So having a less-than-stellar surface or aerial detection isn't the end of the world. Pyotr Bagration's main battery performance and her protection scheme both thrive on this ship being in the second line, sniping from the rear. This said, I don't think Pyotr Bagration should go without Concealment System Modification 1 -- the additional dispersion gained from this upgrade in combination with the gains to her stealth are too beneficial to set aside. But it might be possible to go without the Concealment Expert commander skill if points are tight. Still, there is obvious benefit to padding these flagging numbers if you can. Being able to go dark is paramount for safety in open-water kiting. What is worth discussing is how little she brings to the table in terms of vision control for her team. Pyotr Bagration lacks Surveillance Radar, a staple of high-tier Soviet cruisers. Unlike Mikhail Kutuzov who also goes without, she doesn't bring a Smoke Generator either. She cannot even be relied upon to have access to a Hydroacoustic Search (nor ever be in a position where using one is advantageous given her gunnery needs). Fighting from so far back or behind cover, she's not likely to be doing her own spotting either. This is an entirely selfish ship in terms of team play -- best designed for solo-actions or relying upon team play to facilitate her damage output. The best she can hope to provide for her team are support AA-fire, good damage output and maybe distracting enemies with her kiting antics. VERDICT: Not great but this isn't a horrible drawback thanks to her protection scheme and gunnery. She's entirely dependent on her team for spotting. Final Evaluation Pyotr Bagration is a monster. She's a boring monster, but she's a monster none the less. I consider her to easily be more powerful than Ochakov, the other tier VIII premium released at the same time. However, I found Ochakov's game play to be much more rewarding, if exceedingly volatile. Pyotr Bagration is the much safer choice, promising reliable steady damage, good survivability and ... well, not much else, if I'm terribly honest. There's nothing wrong with that per se. There is a lot of reward to be found in frustrating your opponents by staying alive, harassing them with long range fire and kiting them out of position. Pyotr Bagration has very good staying power and you can always count on her guns to hit back. While Pyotr Bagration has her flaws (poor gun handling, poor fire arcs, poor agility, no vision control) I don't see any of these as being particularly damning for this ship. On the contrary, most of these feel trivial, especially when her incredible range and ballistics band-aids over these drawbacks to the point of irrelevance. In this regard, she reminds me of Giulio Cesare -- an earlier premium that, while she had her flaws, they didn't get in the way of the ship's strengths. We all know how that ship turned out. While I'm loathe to trumpet out an 'overpowered' warning without actually seeing her performance in the hands of the masses, she's certainly piqued my interest as one to watch for the future. So yeah. Pytor Bagration. She's an incredibly safe purchase, though her game play doesn't particularly appeal for me. I think Tallinn is the more interesting ship, and she's free. So make of that what you will. Conclusion Well, this one took longer than I thought it would. There's a lot of weirdness in this ship, particularly in her armour and guns that I wanted to double and triple check to make sure I did them justice. There was also the problem of getting access to Tallinn in order to make sure my comparisons were on point and that necessitated doing some grinding to unlock her. Oh well, it's done. The next ship on the docket is Mikoyan, the tier V Soviet cruiser. I dunno how this one flew beneath my radar but I totally blanked on her coming out. I'll be doing something special for her, so stay tuned! Thanks for reading!

Yorck. It’s not that fun to play, but in the right hands, you are getting over 1.5k FXP per match! Armor protection is generally good, but the ship has a slower turret traverse that can prevent kills at close range along with a long reload and armor that is very prone to citadels and is better off giving broadside than going front-on. The armor can be penetrated by HE at ranges under 10km and if you go to full ahead you will go faster that ur team and get rekt when the BB starts shooting at you. This is my opinion, but Yorck has my rating of GARBAGE! I am glad to go to Hipper because i am a bb/dd player and do not enjoy light armor.

CHAMPAGNE REVIEW (Please check out other sources before getting this ship, everything in this review is strictly my opinion) Champagne is a T8 French battleship battlecruiser with spectacular guns, amazing maneuverability, amazing speed but armour that rivals paper mache. This ship is what the player base deserves but not what we needed. It takes the passive play that ships like Nagato, Ashitaka promote and takes it to an absolute extreme, where you are rewarded for staying as far from the action as you can and punished when you push in and help the team win. The guns are incredibly accurate with rediculous penetration and a decent reload and decent damager per shell. Overall her guns are the main selling point of the ship and they're probably the best guns at T8. Survivability Hit Points: 52,600 Torpedo Reduction: 28% Armour: 19mm - 430mm The Champagne's biggest weakest is her survivability, she has the smallest HP of all T8's with some of the worst torpedo reduction and horrible armour. In a 1-on-1 fight with almost any other BB of the same tier at close range, Champagne is dead. Despite being T8 her bow and stern are only 25mm which is even less than that of T7 BB's which now have 26mm which renders them immune to T7 152mm HE rounds that don't have IFHE meaning that in a down tier scenario where you're facing T6 cruisers their HE can still absolutely hurt you. She also only has 9.4" of armour protecting her citadel (240mm) which puts her in line with most battlecruisers, Ashitaka having a 10" armour belt, Alaska having a 9" armour belt and Hood with a 12" armour belt. "Battlecruisers" fall on a scale of more cruiser than battleship to this is a fast battleship but the Royal Navy calls it a battlecruiser therefore it's a battlecruiser. With Graf Spee basically being a cruiser with some big guns strapped to it and Hood being a battleship every way from Sunday except she's faster than 24kts therefore we'll call her a battlecruiser. Champagne feels like a battleship when you're talking strictly about her guns, their ability to pen more than Izumo at ranges of more than 3km definitely feels like battleship calibre firepower. But her armour and HP makes her feel closer to Alaska than something like Hood. Where Hood can bounce the 18.1" shells of Musashi if you're angled well enough at close range Champagne struggles to bounce anything because of how large her bow amour is. Playing Champagne in T10 Random felt like playing a pinate, any shots that hit hurt, and when you only have 52k HP a 3-5k HE volley hurts especially if it's coming from a ship like Worcester, DM with very high rates of fire. In fact, assuming you hit the Champagne for 3k damage every second that would mean Champagne can withstand 17.5 seconds of firepower before dying, now this, in reality, is longer due to things like saturation and heals but overall you could only withstand that level of fire for probably ~30-40s before you died. To add to your pathetic armour and low HP War Gaming decided that you are not worthy of getting 5 heals, instead to balance the ship you are only given 4 heals with superintendent. This further encourages players to play at the back of the map and do nothing for the team. Artillery Main Armament: 2x3 406mm guns Range: 25km Reload: 28.6s Now we get to the bread and butter of Champagne, the guns, oh the guns! There are approximately 171,000 words in the English language and yet I could not string enough of them together to adequately describe just how much I love these guns. Their pen is amazing, they have high damage, and even though there's only six of them I regularly am able to hit targets with 4-6 shell hits. Have you ever citadelled a Vladivostok at a range of 22km? Because it's a cakewalk in this thing. Want to hit that pesky Smolensk in smoke unspotted? Pop the spotter plane and watch as 4 of your shells overpen and two magically ricochet because physics! The guns are just so much fun, yes occasionally you get dispersion which would make the Großer Kurfürst blush. And when that happens you really feel it only having 6 guns but 99% of the time you could trim the beard of the enemy's captain with how accurate these guns are. Overall these guns are fantastic! And I keep coming back to it because of the guns! AA Defenses Continuous Damage: 159 Shell Damage: 1260 AA range: 5.8km Champagne's AA suit can best be described as adequate. For a ship that is designed to sit in the back and snipe the AA can feel lacking when you're all alone. I've had a few games where either by pure luck or enemy stupidity I managed to shoot down quite a few aircraft but most of the time it feels like an empty threat especially against the brand new German CVs. In one match the brand new AP rockets could do as much as 15k in two passes and the AP bombs dropped me for 30k "Just dodge" right? The AA doesn't hold up especially against T10 CVs your only option is to try and outrun them or just hope you aren't the target because your AA is about as useful as using firecrackers. Maneuverability Top speed: 34kts Turning circle radius: 850m Ruddershift: 12.4s The Champagne's only means of defence is the stereotypical runaway. With a top speed of 38.5kts using both engine boost and sierra mike signal, you can outrun almost every battleship (Georgia the exception) and run down some destroyers. In the few times that I've been able to push with my team using the engine boost to run down destroyers was really fun. However, most of the time I used engine boost strictly to run away from flanks that have been completely overrun or when I need to reposition myself. The ruddershift felt standard, not like Thunderer or Vanguard where you have an insane 8s ruddershift but still didn't feel as bad as a stock Montana with 20s ruddershift. It's good enough to mitigate damage and move out of the way. Overall the maneuverability was very good it really does feel like playing a cruiser with 16" guns. Concealment Sea detectability: 12.9km Air detectability: 8.9km Smoke firing: 15.8km The concealment of Champagne is nothing special good enough when all you're doing is moving to a middle position on the map and shooting broadsides 15+ km away. The Champagne isn't too stealthy but it doesn't really need to be when you're 15km away from the nearest enemy. Air detectability does feel a little large and I'm often randomly spotted by some fighters that the enemy CV placed nearby but again detectability isn't a big concern if you're sitting at the back of the map. Captain and Upgrades The upgrades and captain skills are your typical battleship upgrades and skills. Slot 1: Main Armaments mod 1 because when you only have two turrets having one of them broken or destroyed really hurts. Slot 2: Damage control mod 1 because there's nothing better in that slot, the engine and rudder don't break often enough for me to justify using Engine Room protection. Slot 3: Aiming Systems because when you only have 6 shells any increase to accuracy helps. Slot 4: Ruddershift mod 1 because you shouldn't be tanking in the first place so equipping modules like fire prevention are of limited use. I'd rather have the extra little maneuverability to try and dodge shells a little easier. Slot 5: Concealment mod 1 because there's nothing better. I found these upgrades to work best on Champagne, you could go for a meme secondary because why not, but you'd see very, very limited use out of that build and would probably regret not speccing into fire prevention and fire mitigation. For my captain, I only have 14 points but you can't go wrong with a tank build especially when you have so little HP and armour any damage mitigation is enormously helpful. T1: Priority Target T2: Adrenaline Rush/Expert Marksman T3: Superintendent, Basics of Survivability T4: Concealment Expert, Fire Prevention I made the recommended skills bolded, basically, if you have a 10 point captain I highly, highly recommend Priority target, then your choice between Adrenaline Rush and Expert Marksman, Superintendent and finish it off with Concealment expert. With your next points get Fire prevention, Basics of Survivability and then whichever 2 point skill you didn't pick up before. Of course, this is entirely my opinion so feel free to experiment with your own builds maybe you do really well with a different build feel free to let me know. Camouflage schemes: (Standard) (Alternative Camo) Final Thoughts: Champagne is a Good bote! Is she OP? No, she's not. Champagne has some major advantages like her main battery but with some big drawbacks like her HP and armour. The ship can absolutely decimate enemy teams if you get broadsides but struggles against bow-tanking opponents. It's very fun to play the Champagne, the guns are addictive you're constantly a threat, no matter the range no matter the opponent, these guns hurt if your enemy isn't careful. However, I'm not sure this is the kind of ship I want to more of in World of Warships, encouraging such a passive playstyle is so counter-intuitive to what we've been trying to get BB's to do for a long time which is push in, support your teammates and get objectives. This ship not only encourages you but demands you play passively because pushing in is met with a hailstorm of bullets, HE spam hurts, AP hurts the only way to not die in this ship is to be the backline, the supporting line. Taking potshots at broadsides and helping whittle down enemies.

I wanted to get this review out sooner, however, real-life stuff kept me from releasing this on time. In that time LWM published her review of the Siegfried and Agir here if you want another opinion then feel free to check out her review. Finally, I just want to shout out @LittleWhiteMouse for giving me the inspiration to start writing my own reviews of ships released, thank you! Anyways if you value my opinion then feel free to read my review and tell me how wrong I am. Without further ado: My Agir Review (The following review is entirely my opinion, please gather more information from other sources before purchasing this ship.) Agir is a T9 German battlecruiser/supercruiser with 9x305mm guns in three turrets. They have decent range, accuracy and penetration while having less armour than you’d typically expect for a German capital ship. Agir has decent HP, guns, AA, Torpedoes and maneuverability. Unfortunately, this comes at a price, Agir sits quite high above the water, with weaker armour and a surprisingly punishable citadel can result in massive damage being taken. TLDR: Agir is decent, she’s a very bland battlecruiser with nothing too special or unique about her. The guns are decent with great AP alpha but weak HE damage, she’s pretty tanky in a one on one situation with proper angling but broadsiding any battleship will see a sizable portion of your HP being removed. The ship is better than Azuma, but Alaska and Stalingrad are far better contenders for competitive play. Survivability HP: 62 850 Torpedo Reduction: 37% The German line is known for its tanky ships. Großer Kurfürst having some of the best armour and highest HP in the entire game. German cruisers get 5 heals instead of 4 like other navies, this is to encourage more aggressive play and to push the enemy. Likewise, you’d expect their battlecruisers to be somewhere in between, heavier armour than a cruiser but weaker than their contemporary battleships. Germans are also known for their turtleback armour scheme, making them almost immune to citadels except in occasional situations. Agir has a few unique traits for starters unlike the battleship or cruiser line Agir gets only 4 heals instead of 5. This doesn’t seem like much but I’ve personally been really missing that extra heal charge. Agir takes a lot of HE damage from cruisers and I’ve found myself often at the end of games with low health and wanting that extra little boost. Agir’s armour is a mixed bag. With good angling and active maneuvering, the armour can hold up quite well. Against cruisers like Hindenburg, the 190mm armour belt combined with the 80mm turtleback does an adequate job of protecting the citadel. However, ships like Des Moines with heavy AP shells improved pen angles and fast reload are capable of dealing heavy damage really quickly. And against cruisers, battlecruisers or battleships with good penetration values the turtleback does very little to protect your ship. Agir has her citadel poking above the waterline, this means that unlike in German BB’s like Tirpitz, Bismarck, Großer Kurfürst who’s citadel is completely beneath the waterline giving broadside in Agir will result in citadels. In a 1-on-1 comparison, I consider Alaska to be a tankier cruiser than Agir. While Alaska’s armour is thinner on the midships plating Alaska has quite a few advantages over her adversary. For example, Alaska’s deck is 6mm thicker at 36 compared to 30mm. Her belt armour is 229mm to Agir’s 190mm. Alaska sits much lower in the water making her freeboard rather difficult to hit. Finally and most crucially Alaska’s citadel is entirely beneath the waterline, meaning citadeling Alaska is far more difficult than citadeling Agir. Artillery Main Armament: 3x3 305mm guns Secondary Armament: 9x2 128mm guns Main Battery Reload: 20s Range: 18.5km Agir’s guns have decent penetration, they have a subpar range and an average reload. They’re not notable in any way other than the good AP shell damage of 9,100, of course, this is compensated for by the lacklustre HE rounds which have a decent fire chance of 27% but low damage 3,600. The shells are also exceptionally fast travelling at 865m/s for both the AP and HE. They’re the second-fastest 305mm in the game with only Soviet bias shells beating them at a whopping 950m/s. The guns feel comfortable to use and aiming at longer ranges is pretty easy. Out to a range of 8km Agir has the best penetration of all T9 battlecruisers with the exception of Siegfried. However, beyond that Agir penetration at long range is the lowest among her counterparts, not by much in fact there’s only 4mm of difference between Alaska and Agir at 21km but it’s still there. This can be really frustrating because of her low HE damage I felt like I was forced to play the ship in the worst way possible. Giving a ship high AP damage and low AP pen at ranges feels like locking off the only good part of the ship. Because of this, I found myself firing a lot of HE in games where the damage was consistent thanks to the ¼ pen rule applied to Germans but lower than if I was firing AP. In-game I found the most success when I loaded AP and fired at broadsides, focusing any ship that didn’t angle enough and ignoring bow-in ships. Playing like this allowed me to get decent damage against enemies and use the guns of Agir to their full potential. Could you do a meme secondary build? Sure I guess, but it’s not recommended while the secondaries are extraordinarily accurate their range and been butchered down to 8km which in a T7 game is usable, but, in a T10 game feel like digging yourself into a hole with a secondary build. Again if you wanted to do it I guess you could get away with it since Agir remains rather consistent with her shots even without aiming systems modification 1, my only problem was justifying the points in a secondary build. To me, it’s not worth it but if you want to do it for craps and giggles then go for it. Now the biggest question for here is would I rather an Alaska than an Agir? Now the stats make me want to say yes, I’d rather have an Alaska than an Agir in terms of artillery but after playing both I actually think I like Agir more. They don’t get the super heavy AP or the amazing auto bounce angles of Alaska but even still I prefer Agir’s guns. Their high shell velocity means you can hit targets at long range with ease and when the AP sticks it bloody hurts. I have regularly chunked battleships and cruisers for 20k using these guns. So, in my opinion, I like the Agir’s guns more than Alaska’s, however, I recognize that not everyone agrees with my opinion. Torpedoes Range: 6km Speed: 65kts Max Damage: 13,700 Reload: 90s Honestly, there’s not much to say about Agir’s torpedoes. They’re your standard German cruiser torpedoes used for close-in brawling as a final means of finishing off opponents. Their position results in good torpedo angles, but because they’re amidship they suffer when getting shot at, often getting disabled and knocked out. They’re certainly usable and inflict heavy damage when they connect but like the Tirpitz often the torpedo tubes are removed from the ship in a hurry thanks to the amount of HE spam in the game. And if nothing else they give you a lead indicator for your main guns. AA Defences 10x4 20mm cannons 9x2 55mm cannons 9x2 128mm dual-purpose guns AA DPS: 369 Shell explosion: 1540 Range: 6km Agir is nothing special when it comes to AA in fact I find her to be rather weak. For the photo above I took Agir T9 and put her against a bot Ryujo at T6 despite being 3 tiers higher than Ryujo took out half my health. Now of course I wasn’t at the controls since I was trying to get a decent photo of her AA in action but it still stands that a T6 got through the AA of a T9. In fact, while her in-game AA rating is 87 which is seven points higher than her sister Siegfried at 80 I’d rather be in a Siegfried to fight enemy CVs than Agir. Siegfried gets access to both the DFAA consumable and fighter consumable while Agir gets neither of those. For some reason, WG decided that Agir wasn’t worthy of the two most useless consumables in the game. If I’m being honest I haven’t found the lack of Fighter/Spotter or DFAA particularly bad (I usually run with Hydro and Spotter anyway) but it’s the fact you don’t get the choice at all that is frustrating to me. Agir’s AA is meh, just like almost everything else on this ship. Is it terrible? No. Is it going to deplane a whole aircraft carrier? Also no. Like the vast majority of ships Agir’s AA falls into the “Doesn’t do crap if the carrier knows what they’re doing” category that the rest of the German cruiser and battleship line falls into. Where does she fall on the battlecruiser list? In the middle, she’s not an Alaska but at least she’s not Azuma. Maneuverability Max speed: 33.5kts (base) Turning radius: 880m Ruddershift time: 11.2s (ruddershift mod 1) Agir feels like all the other battlecruisers, she’s fast in a straight line, clumsy for a cruiser in a turn but agile for a battleship. What I found most interesting was how many people underestimated the top speed of Agir. A few times when I’ve reached maximum speed and got spotted on my way to a key area I would watch shell come flying in and land just aft of my stern. Of course, that only works once and the second time is sure to result in a massive paddling taking place if you don’t angle or dodge. I found the Agir to be nimble (enough) to mitigate incoming fire using the upper 90mm belt to ricochet shells by sailing into the enemy at an angle. Long-range felt most comfortable especially against big-armed BB’s like Thunderer, Kremlin, Georgia, Yamato and Shikishima. Giving ample time to mitigate incoming fire and then turn out to get all guns back on target. At close range, the ruddershift felt more clumsy where I would turn out to bring all guns on target before turning back in to angle the hull. Quite a few times I’ve been on that turning back in with my finger firmly on the A/D key and by that time the enemy has fired and my rudder is only then starting to turn the ship in. Is it acceptable? Yes, absolutely I’m still getting used to her ruddershift time and her maneuverability characteristics. Overall I feel once again Agir falls somewhere in the middle of battlecruisers with Alaska feeling closer to a battleship than a cruiser with her maneuverability and Azuma being a cruiser that’s been elongated. Agir fits nicely in there as a sort of middle buffer erring on the Alaska side of the spectrum in my opinion. Concealment Sea detection: 11.9km Air detection: 8.7km Smoke firing penalty: 11.7km (nothing to do with concealment just really like some of these photos) Once again Agir sort of just sits in the middle of the pack, being slightly less detectable than Alaska and slightly more detectable than Azuma. Her concealment is acceptable allowing for positioning closer to the battle and being able to go undetected rather easily. She’s often spotted by aircraft but in this day and age, it’s to be expected. Nothing really noteworthy here other than yeah, she’s ok. Modules and Crew: With my experience in Agir, I used a different combination of crews and modules here’s what I found to work best for me. For modules: I ran with this set because I found it to work best with a longer range playstyle while not impeding on close-range brawling. It was a hard choice between range and reload but I stuck with range because of the 18.5km base range which with all the HE spam results in playing too aggressively early on in the match eating a ton of damage and dying before anything good could happen. The range mod boosts the range out to 21.5km which allows for a lot more comfortable play on maps with little to no cover. Concealment because nothing else is worth taking, ruddershift because it allows me to avoid more damage, aiming systems because there’s nothing better in that slot, damage control because fires hurt on this ship and main armaments to try and avoid losing torpedo tubes 2 minutes into the match. For my captain this is my #1 recommendation: This is my GK build, it’s your standard tank build. I find it to work better on this Agir because of the 60s burn time and little armour values on the deck/side plating. If you wanted you could drop the jack of all trades skill for expert loader and preventative maintenance but I found the reduced reload time on consumables helpful. However, I know some people don’t like to run tank builds on battlecruisers because they think then they’re playing a BB without the armour so my second recommendation is: Standard cruiser build, please note that only 15 out of the 19 points are used here. Again pretty self-explanatory speccing into the main guns and concealment. This build works ok but with all the HE spam in the game now I just feel it’s far too vulnerable to fire damage. Final Thoughts: The more I play Agir the more average bland this ship becomes, it’s very pretty and her sister Siegfried will eventually be mine! But Agir just sort of became this very bland kind of “meh” ship where there’s nothing to make it stick out from the rest. I mean high AP alpha and high penetration on HE shells is great but honestly, it just feels like a worse Alaska. If you already have Alaska and are wondering which ship you should spend 1m free XP on then the answer is not Agir or Azuma. If you’re like me though, hate DD’s and want a cruiser then which one do I recommend? Agir. Because while the ship is deeply mediocre with absolutely no unique features of its own it at least has armour and can make aggressive plays when your team is down and you need points. Azuma just can’t do that her 25mm of plating and massive citadel makes her a damage pinate that battleships love to hit. Agir is also a very pretty ship, so you know if you just want something that looks cool and you don’t care about performance than sure, Agir is fine. I just have a hard time recommending this to anyone who wants a ship that is competitive or very fun to play, because Agir’s not. Alaska will do Agir’s job better, more consistently for the same price. Basically I rank the T9 battlecruisers like this: 1. Alaska (great pick!) 2. Kronstadt (radar and good armour) 3. Agir (meh, not bad, not good) 4. Literally anything else 5. Azuma What would make her a good bote? If WG increased the range of the secondary battery back out to 11.5km at maximum and gave this ship some improved pen angles for her AP this ship would be a definite recommendation. Doing this would give players who want a good german secondary ship something they could play with without having to re-grind 3-5 lines to get Siegfried. And the improved AP pen angles would just make it more comfortable to use AP against targets.

This is not a CV whine complaint, but more of a discussion/reflection. IMO, CVs have to much disproportional influence, due to power creep of CVs. Because of this, it has changed the rules of engagement for certain ship sizes... As promised, I present a replay to one of many battles reflecting this aspect of the game.... I repeat the words of Mighty Jingles... "If a CV is caught not paying attention, sleeping or out of position... Why is it the DD driver have to be punished and not rewarded, by not being able to sink the CV or down his planes ?" Many will adapt to the change... But it doesn't mean, its fun or have justified disdain for the class. This is not only in the low and mid tiers, upper tiers its the same situation but more intensified. 20200606_233718_PJSD025-True-Kamikaze_17_NA_fault_line.wowsreplay Remember, the replay will expire when the new patch comes into affect... If you have recording software you can post it again if you like. GL/HF

I put together a ship review video for the new Anshan which contains my thoughts on the ship and some gameplay footage. I am curious to know how many people ended up buying the premium destroyer and if they enjoy it. Let me know what you all think! The Taste Channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJJaSofrJHMcK-yp5ldHT-w/featured Anshan Ship Review

I've been doing a lot of thinking about this campaign, the details of which are summarized in my how-to guide here... ...while I've been completing it. However, I felt it was better to wait until I was done before posting anything. I didn't want to be accused of sour grapes (for failing to finish) or asking for an easy way through (because I haven't got the guts for the hard slog). However, those things are off the table now; I have Jerzy and I can say what I like. The TLDR of it is this: I thought it was too much to ask for the reward it gave. But it also wasn't a terrible experience for me, so let's break this down. THE GOOD: The thing I liked about this campaign was that it had a broad range of tasks to achieve which were both economic and combat-related, and there were several that could be done in co-op. The mix of missions was good, and as someone who at the start had at least one of ALMOST every ship type at every eligible tier, I felt I was ideally set up to complete this thing. It encouraged me to get on and finish a couple of grinds I'd been dragging my feet on (Lightning to Jutland, Monarch to Lion), and as a result of it I've really started to enjoy playing in Randoms again. It also came along at exactly the right time to fill in the gap that I'd left in my life by finishing both all the permanent campaigns. Note that I did not say "all the OTHER permanent campaigns". That's because this wasn't one, but I'll get to how I really feel about that later. If you were starting this campaign with far fewer eligible ships than I started with or have now, it would have been a useful spur to getting at least one of your T8 ships to T9 (via the commander and ship XP tasks in Missions 1 and 2) and having options for later, because options were important, as we wll soon see. THE BAD: Not all of these are my complaints, but I'm going to address them nonetheless. Note that "address" does not always mean "agree with". 1) Limited time. I'm an average player, albeit experienced and with a broad-based fleet. I finished the campaign in two months, but someone coming into it late in its validity cycle (six months from the date of launch) might have bigger problems. 2) Tier 9 and 10 ships. I will agree with anyone who thought that too many of the tasks were restricted to Tiers 9 and 10. I had no problems because I had ships with permacamo, coal ships at Tier 9 and 10, etc. etc., and premium time, which made all that affordable. But some of those coal ships (Musashi, Smolensk, Jean Bart) are no longer available, and not everybody can afford to buy or gets lucky enough to win doubloons for permacamos. Tier 8 is the last at which you can play in mediocre fashion and not get hammered by service costs. Yes, the campaigns for Yamamoto and Halsey also had Tier 9 and 10-limited missions, but both those campaigns had a way through (grinding XP or credits) for a player with any Tier 8 ship at all. This campaign had a roadblock in Mission 3, in which non-Euro Tier 8 ships that were not destroyers could not progress at all. 3) Exclusion of Blyskawica from Euro DD missions. Yes, I know she's Tier 7, but being a Polish destroyer (and the oldest in the game) in an event centred around a Polish admiral, she really should have been given a free pass. 4) The "winning battles" condition; some of these tasks depended on your team not throwing the battle (and everything you had achieved) down the drain at the last minute (happens too often). While this is not an issue in the permanent campaigns, it puts the pressure on in a time-limited one (especially for those coming to the event late). Note that this criticism only applies to those tasks that had to be done in PvP; the win rate in co-op is so high that it doesn't matter. 5) Too much to ask. I agree with this completely. The requirement to use a majority of higher-tier ships in randoms to do this in a short time frame was more than we were ever asked to do to get Sansonetti or Cunningham (or arguably Kuznetsov, but I deliberately didn't go for him so I can't be the judge there). The Yamamoto and Halsey campaigns are grindier, but can be done at leisure and offer bigger rewards. 6) Euro Premium Ship Missions. Let's be fair; the event which spawned this campaign was centred around the introduction of European destroyers, and it would have been too much to expect them not to receive SOME side-benefit missions (including for the premiums). However, while these did offer something of a shortcut through the earlier phases, I felt the shortcuts got a bit illusory toward the end. Even if I'd spent my FXP on Smaland instead of Hayate, I'm not sure she would have made this campaign any easier. Given how quickly I got the first three missions done without them, I'm not sure having a Euro DD at T8 or better in my port would have benefited me much at all. So I am kind of inclined to downplay this complaint... but once more, I say that in the context of having a fleet which can tackle just about any task at any time. Well, almost. After neglecting my Implacable to Audacious grind in part because there was no use-case for a T8 CV in some of the missions, I eventually FXP'd to the Audacious and farmed spotting and torpedo ribbons with her to grab myself a few easy stars in Mission 5. I'm pretty sure we will get future campaigns that include similar tasks, so the doubloons I spent on giving Audacious her permacamo are not going to be charged against this event alone (and I like playing her, so there is that). OKAY, ENOUGH COMPLAINING, WHAT ABOUT AN ALTERNATIVE SOLUTION? If I had been in charge, I would have done one of the following: 1) Made everything harder, put on more stars per stage (maybe ten, ten, twelve, twelve, fifteen), made the campaign permanent and pushed Jerzy up to 15 stars, OR 2) Kept the time constraint and the reward the same, but made everything Tier 8+ and given Blyskawica a pass as the only T7 allowed in for the T8 Euro destroyer missions. Hell, I might even have brought the tier bar lower. Jerzy's not all THAT powerful, and if you weren't going to lock Sansonetti and Cunningham behind a time limited tier wall, you shouldn't have done it here either. I liked this campaign- sort of. It was very well suited to the ships I have accumulated while trying to get the permanent campaigns done. Yet I couldn't help but think, the whole time, that it was and is going to be a very rough trot for less experienced players with smaller fleets, limited playing time, and an inability to pay.

https://thedailybounce.net/world-of-warships/world-of-warships-tier-viii-british-aircraft-carrier-indomitable-review/ "The Indomitable is a low impact, unidimensional and boring ship to play. Pretty much any tier VIII carrier will do a better job at dealing damage and will also have a much better impact since they don’t rely heavily on fire damage. As an experienced CV player, I simply cannot recommend this ship. If the bombs had a better penetration like on the Audacious or that the strike groups would be bigger, she would be good but here… Graf Zeppelin looks good compared to her." quoted from the Daily Bounce review full article here : https://thedailybounce.net/world-of-warships/world-of-warships-tier-viii-british-aircraft-carrier-indomitable-review/