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Jub wrote:

Elheru Aran wrote:Mm, yeah. Just feels like six guns isn't very much after 14, lol.

Yeah, but it's six guns on a much nimbler ship and if somebody does come in close you have a surprise that the St. Louis wishes it had.

True. Guess I just need to stay on that, er, horse and practice. Thanks for the encouragement.

If you're in torpedo range with the Phoenix or Omaha, shit's gone wrong somewhere. Stay as close to your max gun range as possible and use that sweet rate of fire to practice your long range gunnery skills.

A good rule of thumb is to shoot AP at enemy cruisers and HE at everything else. At that tier you will ruin enemy cruisers with AP, outdamaging them three to one is not uncommon.

Not sure if it's NA only, but if you type in the code ALBANY in the gift shop you get a terrible tier 2 cruiser and a free garage slot.

EDIT: If you don't want to keep it she also sells for 375,000 credits, so that could help boost you along your way.

Well I don't particularly need a new slot right now, and the Murmansk/Aurora are perfectly sufficient for my prem ship needs.

But free silver? Can't really say no to that.

Skywalker_T-65 wrote:Well I don't particularly need a new slot right now, and the Murmansk/Aurora are perfectly sufficient for my prem ship needs.

But free silver? Can't really say no to that.

Plus it's a limited time offer with no downside.

Elheru Aran wrote:Mm, yeah. Just feels like six guns isn't very much after 14, lol.

When you upgrade it you get a couple more guns and then basically have equal firepower forward, aft and to each side because of the casemates. The guns train quick too.

So that plus the high speed and good turning means you can spin in circles if you like and basically have a constant rain of shellfire to shoot at the enemy independent of your actual angle, which greatly increases your effective volume of shots actually fired assuming aggressive handling of the ship. Which I strongly recommend, the thing is faster then many of the destroyers you'll encounter using it. But like others said, keep the range long. You can dodge fire very effectively at that point.

On the other hand, make sure that 35 knot speed doesn't mean you end up in the middle of an enemy group without support, the map flanks are your place to be trying to get ahead of enemy ships and rake them, or prevent the same happening to your side. I see people use them and the Omaha to race into the center of the map trying to get flags and it seldom goes well for them. A destroyer can try that because its hard to see and has smoke, its a horrible plan with these cruisers.

The AA battery also isn't completely impotent either so if another ship needs AA support you can try it, way better then the useless St Louis for that.

I'll say this for the Wyoming...you get a full broadside on someone with AP ammo, and they're very dead if they're not higher tier BBs. One-shot a Phoenix in my last match with a single salvo, and it was at (nearly) full-health.

That being said, dear lord do I loathe the Furutaka. Maybe I just miss the Kuma, but this thing just isn't doing it for me. Sucks that it takes such an ungodly amount of XP to get to the next tier (compared to the previous ones).

Ok, WG really needs to bring spotting XP to WoWS.

First match in the Isokaze, and I get the Ocean map. I'm not a big fan of this map on general principle, but in a destroyer, it's horrible. I know I'm going to have a crappy game, but I realize I can at least help my team by getting spots on the enemy. And I do. I spend quite a few minutes spotting the enemy team before an enemy destroyer pops up near by spotting me for the enemy team. I tried getting off a few torp runs against the enemy, but I miss them all before dying. My team manages to eke out a victory.

Now, I knew it was going to happen, but it was still incredibly frustrating, after being responsible for quite a bit of enemy damage through my spotting, to be rewarded 74 experience.

On a victory.

Yay.

That seems especially unfair, since spotting was actually a much larger part of real world naval gunnery tactics than of land-based tank gunnery. Artillery used spotters, but tanks and tank destroyers didn't, by and large.

Of course, the technology of the time didn't really make it practical for one ship to spot targets for another. But that lack of communications capability isn't modeled in World of Tanks either, where you can get that same kind of hive-mind sharing of any information one tank knows among all tanks within radio range. If you're going to operate that way, then you really need to recognize that the part of the 'hive' which goes out and makes it possible to engage a target is playing a part as important as that played by the parts which do the engaging.

Warships didn't spot the fall of shot for each other, tanks actually did in some cases, but they certainly did communicate target course and speed, before radio was refined enough to do this quickly using signal flags or for a period in WW1 actual range clocks were mounted on masts and deflection scales painted on turrets. And then we had the whole air spotting thing which the game is asstarded about. Why does a cruiser have a catapult fighter, which always seems to lag far behind the ship or to the upper right, but not a spotting plane to actually find the damn enemy?

Meanwhile I'm about done playing the game because the higher the levels go the more and more broken matchmaking becomes, to a degree that often makes rounds unplayable from any standpoint of fun. Made worse by the fact that you can end up with the game thinking a carrier will counteract the other side having multiple higher level battleships... and then that carrier turns out to be all fighters or only have one dive bomber group. Letting people choose the carrier groups is a pretty horrible mechanic. The higher level maps seem to get worse and worse too. If gunnery ranges were not so arbitrarily limited and secondary batteries so useless it'd be much less of a problem.

I am suddenly reminded of why I stopped WoT and prefer Coop matches. I'm getting really tired of braindead teams.

OK, so I downloaded and installed the US version per mistake. I'd like to deinstall it. and then reinstall the EU version.

Turns out this piece of shit software will not let you deinstall it.

Whenever I want to deinstall it I am directed to a webpage where I have to enter why I wanted to deinstall it. I do so. Then it just says:

404

Commander, your ship is off course.
The webpage is not available or the address is incorrect.

Go to the main page
or download the game.

Meanwhile, the deinstall process goes inactive. Well, fuck this.

Anybody know how to remove this malware?


EDIT: No need for anybody to try, apparently the deinstall process works even though the main process is shown as inactive. Huh. First game where I had this.

Yeah... so that Albany goes out with a resounding 'meh'. One game to give it a go, and no thanks. I'll keep the extra slot but otherwise? NOPE.

Same as WoT. If it's tier 2 and free, it's a bag of nails.

Zigged when I should have zagged in my South Carolina and wound up eating 6 torpedoes. While waiting for the battle to finish, I bought my own destroyer to see what it's all about. Surprisingly fun. I like going 30+ knots, the smokescreen is nice, and my first time running a torp run I sank a battleship. I don't like only having 9k HP, but that's why they call them tin cans afterall.

I just had a match where it came down to just my Arkansas beta vs a kuma. Failed to citadel him with my last volley, ate two torpedoes and burnt to death. So much for that.

I also managed in another game to straddle at 10km a Cleveland broadside to me 4 out of 5 broadsides from a Wyoming...lucky bastard. The lead was perfect, the shells just all somehow landed right next to him on both sides.

There's a reason naval gunnery buffs like to claim a straddle as being the moral equivalent of a hit when it's a ship they like doing the straddles...

Jub wrote:Not sure if it's NA only, but if you type in the code ALBANY in the gift shop you get a terrible tier 2 cruiser and a free garage slot.

EDIT: If you don't want to keep it she also sells for 375,000 credits, so that could help boost you along your way.

Neat!

I'll keep the Albany, saves me from purchasing a Tier II ship herself.

It's funny. Up until a couple of weeks ago, I just didn't find battleships to be that fun. The low traverse rate of their turrets, the high reload time of their guns, and their terrible accuracy just wasn't fun for me. I'd fire at a cruiser, have almost all my shots miss, and then have to wait another 30 seconds to be able to fire at him again. Or maybe I would actually hit him, and just do pathetic damage.

But just recently, battleships finally clicked for me. Mainly when I started using ripple fire. I found my accuracy to be much better. With that, I've been able to aim my shots with a little more care, and rarely does a game go by where I don't get at least a couple of citadel hits. I'm having a blast.

The other night, I had a game where it was just me in my Myogi, versus two South Carolinas and the tier 4 Japanese carrier. I managed to engage the battleships one at a time, and I managed to take out each of them with citadel hits that took off nearly half their health. I sadly lost that game to the carrier, however.

Starting to warm up to the Phoenix.

It helped that I upgraded the hull and that gave me eight guns, too... so that's much better, plus increased survivability.

Chikuma sucks ass, though. Even with an upgraded hull, it still doesn't have torpedoes, so it doesn't have much punch to it. Think I'll try and hurry that one up to a Tenryu.

Meanwhile, my St Louis is at something like ~5.5K XP... and no way to convert that into free XP without spending money. Shit. Or can you just go down the module tree from the St Louis and pay direct for the Wyoming? Do you have to do that via the South Carolina?

Just got into the Wyoming last night. Need to upgrade the speed, but having an extra 20k HP on top of the South Carolina and an extra two turrets are very very useful.

Soon I will be able to research carriers. Anybody using one? I know the playstyle is vastly different than a gunship.

Elheru Aran wrote:Starting to warm up to the Phoenix.

It helped that I upgraded the hull and that gave me eight guns, too... so that's much better, plus increased survivability.

Chikuma sucks ass, though. Even with an upgraded hull, it still doesn't have torpedoes, so it doesn't have much punch to it. Think I'll try and hurry that one up to a Tenryu.

Meanwhile, my St Louis is at something like ~5.5K XP... and no way to convert that into free XP without spending money. Shit. Or can you just go down the module tree from the St Louis and pay direct for the Wyoming? Do you have to do that via the South Carolina?

Unfortunately once you've researched all the modules on a ship you have to pay to use any further experience elsewhere.

Jub wrote:

Elheru Aran wrote:Starting to warm up to the Phoenix.

It helped that I upgraded the hull and that gave me eight guns, too... so that's much better, plus increased survivability.

Chikuma sucks ass, though. Even with an upgraded hull, it still doesn't have torpedoes, so it doesn't have much punch to it. Think I'll try and hurry that one up to a Tenryu.

Meanwhile, my St Louis is at something like ~5.5K XP... and no way to convert that into free XP without spending money. Shit. Or can you just go down the module tree from the St Louis and pay direct for the Wyoming? Do you have to do that via the South Carolina?

Unfortunately once you've researched all the modules on a ship you have to pay to use any further experience elsewhere.

Well, apart from playing (and I have to admit it's a lot of fun with the St Lo), what's the point then? It's basically a waste of game time that could be used to build up experience elsewhere, although I'm getting my captain some serious experience on that ship...