Formerly known as the Fletcher-class USS Charrette (DD-581) located in greece.

This is going to be an extremely nitpicky post, so feel free to ignore if you have better things to do with your life, unlike me apparently.

tl;dr: WG seems to have a pattern (that I've seen with USN cruisers) where they like to give the superfiring turrets (those are the ones that are positioned higher, so they can fire over the other turrets) more gun barrels per turret. This doesn't make sense for weight reasons, probably wouldn't have been historical, and most importantly drives me insane.

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...anyways, here's the problem: weight on a ship, like weight on many things, is bad. For one: more weight means that you need more steel to actually build the damn thing, and countries did not actually have infinite budgets (see the Mark 14 torpedo saga for an infamous example). More generally, weight issues tend to compound -- if you add, say, more armor to a ship, you'll also need more powerful engines if you want to hit the same design speed, which adds even MORE weight, etc. etc.

Furthermore, weight high up on a ship is especially bad. Ships have this requirement called "staying upright", and if you add too much weight on top then you get stuff like the Tomozuru Incident where your ships roll over when it gets breezy. This tends to interfere with another typical requirement called "floating".

Generally, having superfiring turrets is good because it means you can actually fire half (or all, e.g. Richelieu) of your guns in the same direction. This actually saves weight compared to, say, a pair of wing turrets (the turrets to either side you see on some of the lower tier battleships, e.g. Dreadnought). It comes at a cost, though: due to the taller barbette (the circular part of the turret below the guns that's heavily armored to prevent detonations), a superfiring turret will be heavier than the same turret mounted closer to the deck. Moreover, that weight will be higher up on the ship, worsening its balance.

What does this mean if you're a naval designer? It means that if you're putting superfiring turrets on your ship and you want turrets with different gun counts, you generally want the superfiring turrets to be the smallest turrets.

And overwhelmingly, that's what they did:

• Nevada has 3-2-2-3, the twin turrets superfiring
• KGV) has 4-2-4, the twin turret superfiring
• Andrea Doria has 3-2-3-2-3 (later 3-2-2-3), the twin turrets superfiring

"...but wait!" you say:

• Pensacola has 2-3-3-2, the triple turrets superfiring

It's the exception that proves the rule. This was a deeply cursed treaty cruiser design (the Washington Naval Treaty limited cruisers to 10,000 tons, which caused many nations to either cheat or make decisions they probably later regretted). Pensacola's Wikipedia page has this to say:

...unlike the very few other ships with different-sized main battery turrets (Nevada-class battleships and King George V)-class battleships) the Pensacolas had the larger turrets superfiring over the smaller turrets, whereas the others had the larger turrets on "bottom".^\8]) Placing heavier turrets above lighter ones allows for finer lines for a given length, however causing top-heaviness and reducing stability.

The [8] cite note mentions that the USN was also planning to use a 2-3-3-2 design for the original battlecruiser Lexington-class design (until it underwent several changes eventually resulting in it being finished as a carrier). Why?

An enlarged belt was required by a deeper hull, as all American battlecruiser studies required deep hulls to retain their girder strength because those hulls had to be abnormally long to attain their speed...

In their original 1916 configuration, the battlecruisers were to carry ten 14"/50 caliber guns in four turrets, with two triple superfiring over two dual because there was not enough beam to accommodate the larger barbettes of the triple turrets slight further forward and aft.

Emphasis mine. Basically, they were again trying to design a ship under weird constraints; "extreme speed" plus "1916 technology" meant the hull had to be super long and narrow (low "beam").

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Recently I've been playing a decent amount of USN cruisers. WG seems to think differently than I do, since they gave at least two of their paper ships the Pensacola-style asymmetric turret layout:

• Dallas, the Tier VI light cruiser, has 2-3-3-2 with triple turrets superfiring
• Congress, the Tier VIII large cruiser, has 2-3-2 with the triple superfiring

First, the Dallas. WG says that this is based on "Project 389", but if you look at their own table on that page it says the historical design was a symmetric 2-2-2-2 with four twin turrets! In general, repeating the Pensacola thing with a hypothetical 8000-ton USN CL doesn't make a whole lot of sense because:

1. This was a 6"-caliber light cruiser. Triple 6" turrets simply aren't as wide or heavy as triple 8" turrets, making it less likely that you'd run into spacing issues.
2. WG says that this is a 1934 design. Around this time period, the USN was also designing the Brooklyns, which managed to fit 5 triple turrets into a 10k-ton design. The treaty displacement limits clearly didn't constrain 6" lights as much as 8" heavies.

Next, the Congress. WG says that this is the "CA2F" design variant for the Alaska-class. Looking that up, I was able to find this page with a picture and... oh, what would you know, it's a 2-2-3 with the lighter twin turret superfiring.

For fun, I tried designing WG's version of the Congress in Rule the Waves 3, a game I wholeheartedly recommend if and only if Excel spreadsheets are your idea of a fun time. What I did is I tried putting in the armor scheme from the in-game model, set up the turrets as they did, and then fussed with enough of the numbers to land at exactly 24.7k tons (the weight quoted by the picture). I then swapped the positions of the rear turret and the forward superfiring turret. RTW3 says this saved 47 tons.

Admittedly, that's not a lot, and I'm not expecting WG to fuss over 0.2% of the weight of the ship. WG also doesn't claim to have a perfectly realistic naval warfare sim (and I don't expect them to). On that note, though, since we're doing this for fun: what does RTW3 say that we might be able to buy with 47 tons? We can increase the "belt extended" from 1" to 1.5", which in WoWS could potentially be analogous to increasing the bow armor from 25mm to 37mm. I think the value of this in-game would be clear.

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Why do I care so much? I'm honestly not sure myself. I think it just rubs me the wrong way because it speaks to a sort of "naval design intuition" that's opposite to mine. To me, it just feels obvious that if you want asymmetric turrets, you put the lighter ones higher. My version of the Dallas would be 3-2-2-3, and my version of the Congress would be 2-2-3 (or 3-2-2 if you insist on having 5 guns forward).

It feels wrong historically in the same way that bow-in tanking or infinity torpedoes feel wrong, and sure I can suspend my disbelief for the sake of game design but in this case it just feels unnecessary. Just swap the turret positions! For me, the result is that it also makes the ships awkward to look at in port (important because that's honestly half the reason I play this game).

...though I'm still not going to stop playing because of this. Feel free to take that how you will. If you've actually read this far, you've earned the right.

edit: formatting

I really miss my main Aircraft Carrier Taihō.. Back in the days she was the T9 CV on Japanese CV tree.. Ship was very neat and historically unique ship. Essex came back but Taihō didn't.. I hope she will return soon..

I’ve never liked Bismarck. That line is the one I grind for RB points and Bismarck is kind of the low point. That said, I have Brisbane, Grosser Kurfurst, Napoli, Pommern and a bunch of the cheaper lower tier coal ships and among the remaining coal ships I just don’t see anything that excites me. There may be ships among them that I will love to death but so much of what makes a ship fun or not are not readily apparent from looking over the stats.

Anyway so I’m sitting on almost 260k coal but not really looking forward to anything when the Holiday convoy drops. Now I don’t even look at Bis 41 because I know I don’t like Bismarck and you can’t actually look at the actual stats for the others so I keep sitting. Then during the brawl I just happen to see that my team mates ship has manual secondaries! Oh my god, I love manual secondaries and have wished most fervently for a battleship, a German battleship specifically which Lutjens may bless with his presence and here one is!

I tell myself not to impulse buy a ship. Sit on it at least a day. Always a sound policy. Anyway 2 hours later I trade in about 200k coal and she is mine!.

I don’t regret buying 41, but I am having thoughts. The first of these: the power and excellence of the new German cruiser line is not coming nearly as much from the strength of having its secondaries be manual as I thought, the secondary battery itself is always going to be a beast, automatic or remote.

My second and greatest realization: I owe the ai gunners on my beloved German and South American battleships a huge apology. Using them manually is so much less easy than I expected. I didn’t notice as much on the cruisers, probably because they just put out such a massive volume of shells it’s hard NOT to smother everything in a given direction.

The secondary shells are so floaty and so slow that it is actually difficult to notice at first just how inaccurate they are because adjusting my aim requires I first observe the fall of shot.

I suspect a lot of my difficulty comes from the disorientation of constantly switching between normal view, main battery binoculars, and secondary binoculars. When I go to secondaries and zoom in it seems to diddle the zoom when I’m not using binoculars and have the main battery selected.

I have no doubt I will get a lot better with the secondaries over time, but it has been mortifying to discover that maybe the poor computer aiming routines I have belittled for years while playing Schleiffen are a better shot than me.

Bis 41 is also making me appreciate Brandenburg more. I got it for that T10 German CV obtained from a crate which I’ll never much play during a trade in and was quite happy with it but, as I mostly play PvE modes and I prefer Pommern I usually only use Brandy when bronze ranked is tier 8. Bis 41 is making me go “Wow, Brandenburg’s main AND secondary batteries are better, on TOP of the torpedoes?”

Anyway has anyone else been mortified to discover that, at least at medium ranges, optimum gameplay means letting the computer handle their secondaries?

Also is it just me or is 41’s main battery even worse than TT Bis? I’ve never liked double turrets anyway, they look uncool, they mean fewer hits and more over-pens, and triple and quad turrets look sexy af. Doubles on a BB make me go, “Your most modern BB has Three shafts and 15’ guns in doubles? Aw poor guy, Versailles really was hard on you wasn’t it little guy?”

Edit: spent coal not “gold”

Win or loss, high or low damage. Every game I've played for days has been frustrating. Everything feels like an uphill struggle. Against horrible teammates, bad ship design, bad game design, terrible matchmaking etc.

Am I just getting unlucky or is this game genuinely just unplayable now?

I tried asking this question a little while back, but I think I phrased it poorly and I didn't get a lot of useful answers. Trying again. When you spawn into a random in a US heavy cruiser, and there's no island cover on your side of the map, what do you do? Answers like "don't open-water gunboat in a US CA" aren't really helpful in that situation because here I am, in a US CA, spawned into open water. How do you play in these circumstances?

From Yamato guns at 12km

Tried to claim my code this morning for September and got "example". Did it work for anyone else?

So I'm wondering if super heavy ap shells are worth it for incomp since her shells already do a lot of damage. I currently have IRPR on the 3rd slot considering it seems more useful than the negatives of super heavy ap.

i dont remember them being this good.

there a known reason it didn't round up to 2.079.942? How does that even happen?

big G is here ( florida ) nice joke wg

I dropped the game since the CV rework years ago, now thinking of returning to the game! What important changes to the game since then that I should know about?

There's fire extinguishing planes? When was this added? What ships do it?

i was wondering about this question. with the new pan-am DD line having damage buffing F key and libertad line having it for the secondaries, does pressing the key effects the shells that already fired or just the shells that fired after pressing the F key?

I can't remember when we found out last year. I've de-prioritised a few T8's in my spreadsheet for progress ahead of it cos they represent the ones with least XP currently gained so therefore most value to be had. Outside of the new Pan-Am DD's (where I haven't got the T8 yet) that's Shimanto, Kansas, Nebraska, Lightning, GJ Maerkler, and Ognevoi, so if their T9's turn up then that's the obvious list of candidates for me to take. Would be nice to know so I can (over) plan ahead. Would be nice to knock down the Delaware cos I haven't played the Nebraska at all so it represents the most "value", but TBF pretty much not having to grind through any of that list would be useful to me.

returning player, 55.8% lifetime, three-year break, looking for a relaxed clan with a built base that runs occasional CB if I want in

DD main, also fucks with battleships.

We have the early production Östergötland

But where is the modernised HSwMS Östergötland?

4 × 120 mm (4.7 in) guns m/44 (2×2)
7 × Bofors 40 mm AA guns m/48 (L/70) (7×1) instead of 40 mm AA guns m/36 (L/60)
6 × 533 mm (21.0 in) torpedo tubes (1×6 ) for Wire-guided Torped 61
1 Squid anti-submarine mortar

It also got 1 quadruple Seacat SAM launcher replaced 3 - 40mm guns in 1960's but since WoWs doesent have them we would not get the latest version.

Still this variant of the HSwMS Östergötland would have imroved Fire control systems, AA defence and torpedos

"Torped 613 is wire-guided and has a dual passive and active sonar seeker head that incorporates terminal homing and two-way wire guidance to send back information through the wire. The torpedo was developed during the late 1970s and early 1980s through a collaboration between the navies of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden."

As the title says: which line should I choose? Which one is easier to progress through, which offers more fun, and what are the playstyles?

Me personally, I think it's Vladivostok. The bow is pretty inconvenient in battle but it sure does look really good, I just love the elongated and sleek look. What about you guys

I stopped playing this game over a year ago, is the Kremlin line still worth it?