StarDestroyer.Net BBS

You do get a small amount of free Xp that you can use on other ships without having to pay. But I agree, racking up thousands of Xp on a ship is useless if you can't convert it.

Blargh. That's bloody annoying then because the St Louis is definitely my favorite ship to play so far in the game. At least it got 'elite' status so it helps run up the free XP but that's still annoying...

Elheru Aran wrote: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...

You're meant to keep grinding up the line and either paying to make use of older ships or moving on from them. It would be nice if they let you transfer that exp to your commander like they do with the crew in tanks, but I guess they figure that would level your commander up so fast.

You need to use lower tier ships for earning funds and the point is to play ships you like not endlessly grind

AniThyng wrote:You need to use lower tier ships for earning funds and the point is to play ships you like not endlessly grind

I have a ton of premium ships for that, but I guess if you wanted to be entirely free-to-play you'd need some tier 5 and 6 ships for credit grinding.

A note to destroyer drivers: At the beginning of the match, press the "P" button on your keyboard. That turns off your secondaries and your AA. In a destroyer, you don't really have secondaries, and your AA will get you killed far more often than it helps you.

Last night I was in a match in my Kuma. At the last bit of the game, it was the 2 battleships capping while I was hunting for the last destroyer, an Isokaze. I didn't really think I had a hope in hell of catching this guy, as I would have to come within 6 km of him just to see him. Meanwhile, he could stay out of visual range of the battleships while launching his torps. If he played smart, he could be a pain in the ass.

Out of desperation I launched my float plane. This still might not have worked as the Isokaze has an air detectability range of only 2.8 km. But seconds after, the destroyer was spotted as his AA guns automatically opened up on my plane. After that, I would detect him every so often as my plane once again got into range of his aa guns. Thanks solely to that, I was able to hunt him down and kill him without him ever doing an additional point of damage.

Ended that match with 5 kills.

A few observations on the South Carolina so far:

--It is a slow, wallowing pig of a ship. Point it and go, and don't expect to do much fancy moving around.

--Along the same lines, point your turrets in the general direction of most of the enemy ships, and don't plan on any quick 180-degree traverses, because that ain't happenin', either.

--DO NOT fire all turrets at once. BAD idea. If you miss, you end up waiting 30sec for each turret to reload, and in the meantime all you have are your secondaries. Sure, you can ctrl and click on the nearest ship... but your secondaries only have something like 3km range, and if you're in a knife-fight, that leads to point next...

--DO NOT get into a knife-fight with Japanese cruisers over tier 3, or American over tier 4, unless you enjoy torpedo-rape or can hit them fast and accurately enough with your piddling 4 shots that you'll take them down in the short time they're passing that close.

*harumph* they should really make it possible to pass on XP after you've leveled up a bit, I'm all the way up to 7 by now...

--It is a slow, wallowing pig of a ship. Point it and go, and don't expect to do much fancy moving around.

It's worse with the Wyoming. It's 1/3 again as long as the South Carolina and it shows.

--Along the same lines, point your turrets in the general direction of most of the enemy ships, and don't plan on any quick 180-degree traverses, because that ain't happenin', either.

Neat trick - when expecting to do a 180, aim your turrets to the opposite side of the ship, lock them on that bearing, then do the 180. The turrets will have almost fully traversed by the time you finish the turn.

Last night I had a battle that left me laughing out loud when it was over. It was a co-op match, and we traded ships evenly throughout the match. We lose one, they lose one, we lose one, they lose another, etc... By the end it was just me and another battleship vs 2 battleships and a cruiser. I figured we had it covered, but little did I know that the other friendly BB was hiding behind an island and didn't want to fight. So here I was charging at three enemy warships myself. Oh shit. Oh well...blaze of glory and all that. So, flank speed into the gauntlet.

Dueled with the cruiser for a few salvos and he went down. Put out a fire and engaged my last damage control, then turned towards the first enemy BB. By this time I noticed I had several spectators from my team, cheering me on and smack-talking my "teammate" who was still hiding behind a rock. So I engaged the first BB, dodged most of his incoming fire and manged to take him down. Spun my turrets and circled an island where the other BB was waiting...beached and firmly stuck. Took my time aiming and put 12 AP shells straight into his magazines.

This was the most entertaining match I had so far, because I barely escaped with my life from an ambush early in the match, managed to hang on and take on three enemy ships by myself, and provided a great deal of entertainment for my observing teammates. While sometimes the matches suck due to bad players on your side, overall I'm having a great deal of fun!

Yeah, it's really important in BBs to be thinking about where your turrets need to be pointing a minute from now, because that's how long it takes for them to get there.

Also, your rudder takes approximately forever to go from lock to lock, so get used to planning steering in advance.

And it's important to press 2.

Personally I love the Wyoming. Once fully upgraded you've got decent AA, it's actually fairly agile for her size, and those six turrets equal shotgun-esque hot death if you know what you're doing.

Just gotta be careful when showing your side is all.

Trust me, you'll stop being so enamoured once you get to play something good like the New York.

Um. So, I'm almost getting rammed by another Phoenix. Never gonna have a better moment, right? Torpedoes away at 0.1 km or maybe it was 0.0...

Er. Maybe that wasn't the greatest idea?

Elheru Aran wrote:Um. So, I'm almost getting rammed by another Phoenix. Never gonna have a better moment, right? Torpedoes away at 0.1 km or maybe it was 0.0...

Er. Maybe that wasn't the greatest idea?

They have an arming distance unfortunately.

Saw some guy cut it too close to a BB he was trying to torpedo...the torps did go off but the explosion killed them both at the same time. Gave us a good laugh.

Jub wrote:Trust me, you'll stop being so enamoured once you get to play something good like the New York.

Probably. For now though, I still enjoy it.

Omaha op pls nerf.

Jub wrote: They have an arming distance unfortunately.

I once fired my torpedoes without thinking while another friendly ship was hauling up very close alongside me, and as far as I can tell the torpedoes actually spawn in the water a short distance from your hull, which in this case was on the other side of the friendly. They then hit the enemy battleship we were both trying to get the hell away from. I dunno that any arming distance exists past this spawn issue.

I just love when people ramming each other turns into both ships exploding and sinking though. The game needs a ramming only mini map and mode.

Sea Skimmer wrote:

Jub wrote: They have an arming distance unfortunately.

I once fired my torpedoes without thinking while another friendly ship was hauling up very close alongside me, and as far as I can tell the torpedoes actually spawn in the water a short distance from your hull, which in this case was on the other side of the friendly. They then hit the enemy battleship we were both trying to get the hell away from. I dunno that any arming distance exists past this spawn issue.

I just love when people ramming each other turns into both ships exploding and sinking though. The game needs a ramming only mini map and mode.

I might be mistaken then. I know they used to back in the CBT, especially for the air dropped torpedos.

Airdropped torpedoes have an arming distance, ship launched ones don't.

I wonder how they're going to handle Bismark's archaic armor scheme. Hard to knock out subsystems, laughably easy to citadel?

I thought it was the reserve with Bismarck's scheme, in that fire control etc. could be knocked out quickly but the main citadel would be hard to hit?

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Vent: The lower tiers are populated by idiots. For example last game I was in my Albany flanked by two Eries. Said Eries then decided to not keep up and provide flanking cover (as indicated by their position) but charged down the middle. Hooray.

Also, Battleship drivers are almost universally risk-averse. Three times I have seen a South Carolina stop in our cap and just wait for the enemy to come. Great, except the enemy had some torpedoes.

IIRC, the decision on Bismarck to go with 4 twin turrets instead of 3 triple (like the Americans) or 2 quadruple (like the British) meant that the citadel was larger and couldn't have armor as heavy as other classes of ship.

Question:

How do you look into captain skills? because I got no captain showing up on any of my ships.
No ships are higher than Tier III right now, so does this have something to do with it?

Possibly, you don't get commanders until your account reaches a certain service level, IIRC 5.