Possible reasons BCs aren’t their own class in-game?

[gebert906]

From a practical standpoint, just wondering what the answers could be. Are there too many variations in BC designs between nations like main armament, armor, tonnage, etc. that wouldn’t make them a cohesive in-game class from a competitive standpoint tier-to-tier or something? Not that WG is afraid of paper in the least, but are there possibly not enough BC designs across the board to warrant it? Maybe it would make it harder to fill future tech tree lines, or for ships already released, possible headaches of “X ship should be BC, but Y ship shouldn’t”?

I’d love BCs to be their own class but I am guessing there are reasons why they aren’t/won’t be. Just curious to hear from those more knowledgeable than myself. 

[Reymu]

WG is too lazy, arguably, but they announced the KMS BC line just this week, so maybe they've just changed their minds.

[gebert906]

2 minutes ago, Reymu said:

they announced the KMS BC line just this week

yep, that's what prompted the question. 

[PotatoMD]

MM restrictions, having to move already existing battleships to a battlecruiser line which would leave the BB lines incomplete, etc. 

Honestly, separating heavy cruisers from light cruisers is a bigger possibility and much more needed than a separate battlecruiser class right now. 

[kgh52]

3 minutes ago, gebert906 said:

From a practical standpoint, just wondering what the answers could be. Are there too many variations in BC designs between nations like main armament, armor, tonnage, etc. that wouldn’t make them a cohesive in-game class from a competitive standpoint tier-to-tier or something? Not that WG is afraid of paper in the least, but are there possibly not enough BC designs across the board to warrant it? Maybe it would make it harder to fill future tech tree lines, or for ships already released, possible headaches of “X ship should be BC, but Y ship shouldn’t”?

I’d love BCs to be their own class but I am guessing there are reasons why they aren’t/won’t be. Just curious to hear from those more knowledgeable than myself. 

I see nothing WG has to gain by separating battlecruisers from the BB class.

Historically battlecruisers were a poor concept. The battle of Jutland exposed their flaws. Naval technology advanced so quickly fast battleships were a reality before WW2, negating the need for battlecruisers.  The Hood was redesigned & built as a battleship.

 

[Jaybirdslayergaming]

Seems to me that there just aren't enough battlecruisers to make matchmaking work.

X: Stalingrad, Yoshino, Puerto Rico, Napoli (?).

XI: Azuma, Siegfried, Agir, Alaska, Carnot (?).

VIII: Borodino (?) Constellation (?).

VII: Hood (?), Scharnhorst (?).

VI: Repulse, Prinz Eitel Friedrich

IMHO, it appears that if BCs were separated off of BBs, people who choose to play BCs might have much longer queue times. At low tiers, there are barely any battlecruisers that aren't already part of a battleship branch (WG probably won't be willing to rip ships like Gneisenau out of the main tech tree). At high tiers, most of the BCs are available for 1m FXP or a huge chunk of coal/steel.

Just my 2 cents.

[MrDeaf]

I have no idea

WG already does this sort "segregation" in WoT, where there are medium and light tanks that should be in a different class.

I don't see why WG doesn't already separate CL and CA into their own categories, rather than have them in the same category.

I also have no idea why WG doesn't separate super heavy cruisers into its own category, and I also don't see why WG doesn't separate battleships from battlecruisers.

 

Instead we get this mess, especially in cruisers.

[warheart1992]

Can you tell me in absolutely certain terms what  constitutes a battlecruiser without any room for disagreement?

[gebert906]

11 minutes ago, PotatoMD said:

having to move already existing battleships to a battlecruiser line which would leave the BB lines incomplete, etc.

Yeah I’d considered this as well, meant to put that in my OP

[mofton]

Pros: None

Cons: Additional matchmaker complexity on an already buckling system.

[MrDeaf]

9 minutes ago, warheart1992 said:

Can you tell me in absolutely certain terms what  constitutes a battlecruiser without any room for disagreement?

"We wanted to make a really fast battleship, but due to money, technology and displacement constraints, we weren't able to, so we traded off some armor and a gun or two, to meet the demands of the customer."

[Torenico]

Is Kongo a battleship or a battlecruiser? Because it was called by both names by the Japanese...

Battlecruisers are a subclass of battleships in WoWs, much like the "Heaviums" in World of Tanks, Heavy tanks that behave more like mediums due to armor, gun and gun handling but occupy the HT slot regardless.

[MrDeaf]

5 minutes ago, Torenico said:

Is Kongo a battleship or a battlecruiser? Because it was called by both names by the Japanese...

Battlecruisers are a subclass of battleships in WoWs, much like the "Heaviums" in World of Tanks, Heavy tanks that behave more like mediums due to armor, gun and gun handling but occupy the HT slot regardless.

Kongo-class was built as battlecruisers, but after their first modernization package, which included more armor and bigger bulges, they lost speed and bacame battleships.

After another modernization package, primarily in the engines, they became "fast battleships"

[cheekywarship2018]

22 minutes ago, MrDeaf said:

Kongo-class was built as battlecruisers, but after their first modernization package, which included more armor and bigger bulges, they lost speed and bacame battleships.

After another modernization package, primarily in the engines, they became "fast battleships"

I would hesitate to use the classification of fast battleship for the Kongos as even after their extensive refits. They still had worse belt armor than HMS Tiger (9 in. vs 8 in.) and for this reason think that they should still be classified as battlecruisers despite the Imperial Japanese Navy officially classifying them as fast battleships.  

45 minutes ago, kgh52 said:

Historically battlecruisers were a poor concept. The battle of Jutland exposed their flaws. 

I wholeheartedly disagree with this. The concept of the battlecruiser was that they were meant to hunt down and destroy enemy cruisers which they excelled in that role as demonstrated in the Battle of the Falkland Islands. They were not meant to stand in the line of battle against enemy capital ships. That is the equivalent to saying aircraft carriers are bad because they are useless in a surface engagement. 

[warheart1992]

32 minutes ago, MrDeaf said:

"We wanted to make a really fast battleship, but due to money, technology and displacement constraints, we weren't able to, so we traded off some armor and a gun or two, to meet the demands of the customer."

My issue with this definition is that you get up to Hood and then that's it. After tier VIII you mostly get "fast battleships", unless you want to consider large cruisers being a form of battlecruiser.

As someone said above a separation of CAs and CLs would be possibly better.

[tfcas119]

Mostly because after 1920, the line between proper battleship and battlecruiser becomes very blurry. If we define a battlecruiser as battleship guns, but armor and speed more in line with a cruiser, British battlecruisers up to Repulse would definitely fit that definition, as they had piss poor armor but battleship guns and top out between 26-30knts in a world where a BB doing 23knts was a speed demon. 
German BCs however, were also faster than their BBs, but had almost the same armor, so they could take an absolute pasting and keep going (see Derfflinger, Seyiditz, and Lutzow) so they almost blur the line

What does blur the line are Hood, and modernized Kongos and Repulses. Hood was designed from the lessons of Jutland, and had her belt armor strengthened to the point it wasn’t much worse than a QE or R class BB, and could go 30knts. The British still called her a battle cruiser though, mostly because the RN considered any BB capable of speeds north of 25knts that regardless of armor. Plus the refits of the Kongos and Repulses gave them more armor (still nowhere near enough to ward off most WW2 era shells as Kirishima would find out the hard way) but enough to give older WW1 era BBs trouble

the line disappears with Scharnhorst, Alaska, and proper Fast Battleships like NC and Iowa. 
 

In truth, by the definition of a BC being “BB guns with cruiser-esque speed and armor” the only proper BCs in game are: Constellation, Siegfried, and Peter The Great

[AVR_Project]

1 hour ago, Torenico said:

Is Kongo a battleship or a battlecruiser? Because it was called by both names by the Japanese...

Battlecruisers are a subclass of battleships in WoWs, much like the "Heaviums" in World of Tanks, Heavy tanks that behave more like mediums due to armor, gun and gun handling but occupy the HT slot regardless.

Kongo class is a Battlecruiser, but called 'Battleship' by the US for propaganda purposes.

On the tech tree, there are also Ishizuchi and Myogi battlecruisers.  Amagi was also a battlecruiser design for tier 8

[Vaidency]

I don't see any advantage for the players in separating them.  There would be only a very small number of BC's at most tiers (significantly fewer even than there are CV's), leading to potentially very long queue times. 

For example, tier 8 would have what?  Just Amagi and the new German BC?  So you'd have to wait in queue until one of two other specific ships show up to balance the team?  How is that desirable for players?

And how does a BC actually play differently from BB anyway to justify separating them, especially above tier 6 where most BB's are decently fast?  Why would they need different captain skills or different designations?

[New_Horizontal]

15 hours ago, gebert906 said:

From a practical standpoint, just wondering what the answers could be. Are there too many variations in BC designs between nations like main armament, armor, tonnage, etc. that wouldn’t make them a cohesive in-game class from a competitive standpoint tier-to-tier or something? Not that WG is afraid of paper in the least, but are there possibly not enough BC designs across the board to warrant it? Maybe it would make it harder to fill future tech tree lines, or for ships already released, possible headaches of “X ship should be BC, but Y ship shouldn’t”?

I’d love BCs to be their own class but I am guessing there are reasons why they aren’t/won’t be. Just curious to hear from those more knowledgeable than myself. 

Answer is simple: BCs have same functions as BBs do so why create new ship type that operate in the same way BB already done. BC is basically a BB that trade off some strengths for another which in the end it just end up become fast battleships anyways.  

[CaliburxZero]

Because WG most likely doesn't want to further create more complication/write more code for the MM.  The matches do consider class amounts, so BCs counted separately i'm sure would make them have to work harder.  

[Helstrem]

16 hours ago, gebert906 said:

From a practical standpoint, just wondering what the answers could be. Are there too many variations in BC designs between nations like main armament, armor, tonnage, etc. that wouldn’t make them a cohesive in-game class from a competitive standpoint tier-to-tier or something? Not that WG is afraid of paper in the least, but are there possibly not enough BC designs across the board to warrant it? Maybe it would make it harder to fill future tech tree lines, or for ships already released, possible headaches of “X ship should be BC, but Y ship shouldn’t”?

I’d love BCs to be their own class but I am guessing there are reasons why they aren’t/won’t be. Just curious to hear from those more knowledgeable than myself. 

Hood feels much more like Iowa than she does Yoshino.  In fact, Hood feels very, very much like Iowa.

So yes.

[Swervenkill]

Battlecruisers were the follow-on for Armored Cruisers, a class that did not survive the Dreadnought era. As mentioned, they weren't intended to survive in a battleship battle (in Jutland the battlecruisers on both sides ran away when they ran into battleships). They don't have a line in WOWs because the type died out at the end of WW1, so tier 5 or 6 is it for most of them. Just not enough high-tier ships to make WG money. I'm surprised WG went with a German line and not British, but they're going to have to go pretty far afield to fill out BC lines for most countries.

[Blorgh2017]

As we can see from this very thread, there seems to be no cohesive consensus on what the battlecruisers really are. Imagine something similar happening with the dev team, during a discussion or something, lol. 

So can we really expect WG to be able to even separate them from the battleships, into their own category? 

The battlecruisers are doing just fine in this game, being part of the battleship ship-type.