World of Warships

MoonDragon wrote:

Most of my ships are now at tier 8 (IGN BB at 7, and USN BB at 6), but I decided I don't like carrier game play so I gave up on them for now.

My main problem at this point is that my premium time expired, and many of the games I do now actually lose money. Every once in a while I'll have a great game that makes up the losses, but that means that overall I'm not really making much extra cash. This means that I won't be able to afford tier 10 ships. I think I have like 13mil saved up on the bank, but that'll melt away easily once I get into tier 9s. And I'm guessing tier 9s will be even more expensive to run than tier 8s. I really don't understand why the slot allocation is so stingy.

Soooooo, just like World of Tanks? I've pretty much stopped at tier 7 in WoT for that very reason - I might get 1 or 2 tier 8s and see how it goes, but I can still lose silver at tier 7.

Wink_and_the_Gun wrote:

Soooooo, just like World of Tanks? I've pretty much stopped at tier 7 in WoT for that very reason - I might get 1 or 2 tier 8s and see how it goes, but I can still lose silver at tier 7.

Yeah. I guess this F2P model works for them. Although WoT used to be much worse at this. I do not yet have a sense of how good/bad WoWS is. The money you get is over much greater range so it's hard to get a sense if I'm cash positive or negative.

Nevin73 wrote:

I'm loving the BBs though. I find that you need to plan out an autopilot route for your BB so that you can bring your broadsides to bear and focus on gunnery. BBs aren't for capping, they are for raining down hell on anyone who is foolish enough to get in range.

For me there is nothing more satisfying than executing a perfect ambush with my DD. Putting 8 torps into the side of a high tier BB and sinking him in a single pass is immensely satisfying. The tears of BB drivers sustain me and nourish me. Cruisers, on the other hand, can burn in hell (unless I'm driving them).

Is it really that hard to make money in high tiers? Even when flying tier 5 jets in Warthunder I never fail to make a profit if I at least shoot down 1 other plane.

I know everyone hates stats, but when I hear about folks having issues consistently making credits without paying at tier 8-10, I always wonder what kind of WN8 they're getting in the tanks they have issues with. As long as you're consistently middle of the road give or take, you should at least be breaking even.

MoonDragon wrote:

For me there is nothing more satisfying than executing a perfect ambush with my DD. Putting 8 torps into the side of a high tier BB and sinking him in a single pass is immensely satisfying. The tears of BB drivers sustain me and nourish me. :)

Amen!

Better yet, I saw him at 10km range and said to myself, "oh he's dead." Just something about the alignment of islands and his facing let me know the second I saw him that I was going to sink him.

Most nervous point was at 6km as we both cleared the last island... I zoomed in and his primary batteries were facing the other way, so then I knew I just had to survive the secondary batteries. I tried to keep pointing right at him to the last second, but he still got two big hits right on my nose - my secondaries are never that accurate - but then I heaved over and got him.

I'm still not sure why I want to run the US DDs. The gun range and especially traverse speed is nice, but the guns are so small that being able to point them the right way more quickly isn't necessarily worth too much. I spend most of the time with my AA off, so that's not a bonus either. Then the torps have range that's well inside your concealment distance, so everyone knows you're coming.

I really like the glass cannon feel of the various DD, but still favour the Minekaze and Umikaze.

The Witcher 3 screwed up my WoWS plans, plus my prem also expired and I don't really feel like grinding out higher tiers without prem. As a result, I play a fight or two here and there but generally feel like I am losing interest a bit.

Another reason is probably the fact that I am not sure if I am looking forward to any higher tier ships. For example, I love Minekaze, I've elited it over a month ago but I still play it and it doesn't really look like higher tier JPN DDs will provide something more interesting.

There are lots of high tier tanks that look like a great goal to be looking forward to. Ships, for some reason, look like very incremental improvements and those improvements pretty much get negated because, well, everyone gets them.

Hedinn wrote:

There are lots of high tier tanks that look like a great goal to be looking forward to. Ships, for some reason, look like very incremental improvements and those improvements pretty much get negated because, well, everyone gets them.

I would say that the carriers are an exception to this. I like how you can configure your airpower differently. It means that you never really know what to expect from the enemy carriers until you see their birds in the air.

AnimeJ wrote:

I know everyone hates stats, but when I hear about folks having issues consistently making credits without paying at tier 8-10, I always wonder what kind of WN8 they're getting in the tanks they have issues with. As long as you're consistently middle of the road give or take, you should at least be breaking even.

Probably better served in the WoT thread...

Mr Bismarck wrote:

...I'm still not sure why I want to run the US DDs. [stuff]

I was skeptical at first as well. There is a low point to the US DDs. When Farragut (T6) "upgrades" its torps to 4.5km, that's painful (but you don't have to do it). But even with that, Farragut did not feel useless. It required a rethink and playing it differently than IJN DDs. But it was by no means useless. Mahan (T7) picked up some of Farragut's bad habits, but it felt like an upgrade. Benson (T8) is a significant upgrade. Stock Benson has 5 turrets that reload so quickly that you can just hold down your mouse button and shoot a continuous stream of shells, like a machine gun. No BB likes being continuously rained HE shells on. It's unnerving even if it's not very damaging. Benson also has 2x bi-directional 5 torp launcher. That means that if you can get a good positioning on an enemy BB, your broadside is absolutely devastating. I had a run on an almost full HP Iowa last night. I was watching him be distracted from about 10k away. Smoke + beeline straight for him. He was in some smoke himself and didn't see me coming until too late. I drove past him at about 2k. Other than a few secondaries firing at me, he had nothing to stop me. 8 torps smashed into his side. I feasted on his tears.

As a counter-point, I had a game in my upgraded (15km torps) Fubuki (T8 IJN DD) last night, where I scored 96 shell hits and zero torp hits by the time I died. I had 2 kills to my name by that time, along with 6 fires and 6 equipment destroyed. I was dueling a T6 BB at the time of death. After he killed me he ate one of my torps and died. This was my first torp hit of the match. About a minute later two more torps hit a T8 BB that I shot at some time ago from 14km away. Anyways, I inflicted something like 40k damage with my 100 HE shells. And burned about 15k damage with all the fires I set. Do not discount DD gun damage potential. I kept firing torps as a simple proposition to the enemy. Keep aiming and shooting at me, and eat my torps, or stop shooting at me to dodge. Except, while you dodge, I will continue raining down HE shells on you.

You have good games and bad games and games where you just own and where you get owned and you just couldn't have known what was gonna happen.

Even with premium, cash earning in a T10 Shimakaze destroyer is very slow overall. A bad match will see me losing one to two hundred thousand silver. A great match will see me earning two hundred thousand or double that if i take no damage (rare at that level).

T9 isn't hard as a premium, T10 can be if yer not a good player going well above 1:1 on kills.

That said i can get grouped up to T10 ships when i'm in a T7, i think i even saw one or two when i was in T6. Interestingly i had no trouble killing them as a DD, but the story can be more lopsided as a CA or BB.

That said, they're still tuning, and you can make enough credits in some T5 matches to fund a lot...

IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/DDw50Cx.jpg)

Yes, that was shameless....:P I was down to my minkazee which i've kept yesterday and got that.

I imagine if you do get a T10, you'l only be playing it every 4 matches or so and having to do mid tier matches in the between. Repair cost on a destroyed T10 shimakazee DD is about 250,000 silver.

World of Warships Now in Open Beta

http://worldofwarships.com/en/news/c...

I'll have to check this out tonight. Been trying to get my hands on a beta key for a while, never had any luck with it.

Why is WoW here and WoT is in MMORPG section (which I could never figure out seeing there is NO GWJ clan etc.)

PurEvil wrote:

I'll have to check this out tonight. Been trying to get my hands on a beta key for a while, never had any luck with it.

Yeah, I wasn't able to get a beta key either. I downloaded it last night and got a couple of hours in.

How big is the WoWS install? I might need to make room, I only have 15 gigs left on my game drive and that's pushing it as far as leaving some overhead room for defragging efficiency. At a glance I could delete my SC2 install and free up 10 gigs.

Random side note. Elite Dangerous folder = 4 gigs 6558 files. SC2 folder = 10 gigs 128 files.

Besides manuevering, how best to avoid torps (and where is the indicator of their approach direction?)?

thx

If you can turn into the torps its easier to weave through them. Changing speed and zig zagging also helps to make torps miss.

Tamren wrote:

How big is the WoWS install? I might need to make room, I only have 15 gigs left on my game drive and that's pushing it as far as leaving some overhead room for defragging efficiency. At a glance I could delete my SC2 install and free up 10 gigs.

Random side note. Elite Dangerous folder = 4 gigs 6558 files. SC2 folder = 10 gigs 128 files.

Looked to be about 4-5 gigs when I set it to install this morning.

4.4 gig download for me. That's probably the un-extracted file size.

Is anyone else getting activex errors when starting the game launcher? I did some googling and the problem seems to be IE11, namely the fact that the launcher uses it. I use firefox for everything browser related so I turned up the IE security settings to maximum and haven't touched it since. How awfully backwards.

Donan wrote:

Besides manuevering, how best to avoid torps (and where is the indicator of their approach direction?)?

Maneuvering is the key to avoiding torps. Anything you do to change your direction or speed will throw off the firing solution the DD used to launch the torps.

As soon as you hear the sonar pings, you need to unzoom from your guns and look around for the incoming (or outgoing) torps. Sometimes you'll be able to avoid them by simply hitting full reverse. Sometimes you'll need to turn like crazy. Sometime you'll just have to take some hits.

I've found that playing a bit as a DD on the maps gives you some good perspective on how to avoid torps when you're playing other ships. You'll learn to be careful coming into the blind spot behind an island because there just might be a salvo headed your way.

I got the game installed and unpacked. Just FYI that 4.4 gig download expands into a 18.9 gig installation once you extract it and patch it up to spec. I went around deleting some old games I finished playing and I'm back up to 15 gigs free.

The open beta seems to have flooded the game with the next batch of Admiral Nelsons. Started one round in my St. Louis and the chat was filled with some guy telling people what to do "Destroyers zerg the point and make smoke... three Cruisers stay back... Battleships swing around c7... " and so on and so on. It got so fast I couldn't read one of his instructions before it disappeared off the top of the chat screen.

Then he charged the cap in his Chester and was immediately sunk. He scored 86 points.

Thankfully, after being sunk he stuck around to tell everyone else what to do or we might not have won the round.

Thank Crom for that guy, eh?

Not a huge fan of how WoWS does tiering. Warthunder has 22 different battle ratings to separate the spectrum all the way from cloth biplanes to jet fighters. WoWS only has 10 tiers and for the most part each successive ships is more powerful than the one before it, sometimes a LOT more powerful. This makes the 2 tier spread very painful, I've had games where my tier 2 cruiser was instantly killed by tier 4 cruisers and battleships.

Does anyone know how the income compares between Coop and PvP?

PvP is better by far.

AP vs HE? It's the eternal question.

I played some rounds last night and tonight and wrote down how much damage I did after each round with my fully upgraded St. Louis.

I hit with 672 rounds of AP during those games and they each did an average of 356 damage. They also critical damaged 2 components.

I hit with 532 rounds of HE and they each did an average of 380 damage. Those HE rounds caused 31 fires that did an average of 1,016 damage. They also critical damaged 25 components.

In the games where I only used AP rounds I found that I got more (way more) non-damaging bounces the greater the impact angle. Those rounds seem best used for long distance plunging fire against the big boys or when you're squaring off against a cruiser. Then you stand a chance at hitting a citadel and wrecking the target. AP rounds slice right through DDs and do minimal damage (if you miss a citadel) and have the tendency to bounce regardless of the angle if you find yourself going toe-to-toe with a BB.

It seems like HE rounds give you an edge in doing damage and generally wrecking stuff.

Also, ALT+Numpad Enter displays the player's names, ship type, and exact health.

Tamren wrote:

I got the game installed and unpacked. Just FYI that 4.4 gig download expands into a 18.9 gig installation once you extract it and patch it up to spec. I went around deleting some old games I finished playing and I'm back up to 15 gigs free.

That would explain coming home to an error saying update cancelled. Started unpacking it again, read your comment, and dumped a few games on that particular drive. Should go through now.

OG_slinger wrote:

It seems like HE rounds give you an edge in doing damage and generally wrecking stuff.

There's a catch though, Armour blocks HE rounds too. If the round does no damage it will show up in the after action report as a bounced shell. I got into a slugging match with another St Louis at pretty short range, we were broadsiding each other at flat angles. I started out firing HE shells and I was lucky if I managed 300-400 damage for 6 hits. So I switched to AP and started doing 1200-1500 damage a salvo.

The damage model isn't all that complicated, so even if AP shells that pass through an entire ship should cause flooding AP shells just do less to no damage than HE if:

a. If the armour is too thin to set off the explosive fuse in the AP shell
b. There is too much armour to punch through to begin with.

What's really frustrating about the system is that the game gives you no idea of how much armour each ship has or how much penetration power your shells have. So it's really a best guess situation, if it doesn't work switch ammo types.

Also I tried out destroyer gameplay for the first time. I'm really struggling with the T2 american destroyer. The primary reason it sucks is that the torpedoes have such short range you can only fire them after the enemy spots you. And I absolutely DESPISE the torpedo aiming camera because it shifts the camera just slightly enough that I can no longer see my own ship and what it is doing. Terrible UI design.

What I would really like is for torpedoes to work like any other turret and just have a separate firing button. Having to double click to fire a full salvo is also irritating.

Keyboard customization is also lacking. A lot of commands can't be bound and aren't explained at all outside of loading tooltips. Rebinding keys can be pretty buggy and it doesn't help that some keys like RMB are double-bound to existing commands, some of which you can't change. I tried moving the arty camera to RMB but what ended up happening is the first time I zoomed it the camera got stuck, the only way to unzoom was to press RMB-the zoom key. It was a mess.

Tamren wrote:

There's a catch though, Armour blocks HE rounds too. If the round does no damage it will show up in the after action report as a bounced shell. I got into a slugging match with another St Louis at pretty short range, we were broadsiding each other at flat angles. I started out firing HE shells and I was lucky if I managed 300-400 damage for 6 hits. So I switched to AP and started doing 1200-1500 damage a salvo.

There's another catch, not all armor is the same. I've scored citadel hits with HE...but only against DDs. The armor of cruisers requires AP to pen.

Generally, I've just started to use HE exclusively on DDs. For cruisers I use HE when aiming for the relatively unarmored superstructure or use AP and go for body shots. For BBs, it's AP when I'm far enough for plunging fire and HE at the superstructure.

Tamren wrote:

What's really frustrating about the system is that the game gives you no idea of how much armour each ship has or how much penetration power your shells have. So it's really a best guess situation, if it doesn't work switch ammo types.

I agree. I really wish Gaijin would get their sh*t together and get their ship stuff out.

Tamren wrote:

Also I tried out destroyer gameplay for the first time. I'm really struggling with the T2 american destroyer. The primary reason it sucks is that the torpedoes have such short range you can only fire them after the enemy spots you.

Yeah, with the T2 American destroyers I find myself doing one of two things: staying back a bit and relying on my ship's pretty decent guns to do damage (who's got time to shoot at a DD from a distance when there's a cruiser around?) or taking it slower and working my way around the edge of a battle in the hopes of catching someone who is too distracted in a gun battle to notice me getting close.

It also depends on where the armour is. Most early WW1 ships had armour placed haphazardly around the ship based on the most likely location of incoming fire. Later on some designers moved to the "all or nothing" scheme where an inner citadel is heavily armoured and contains all important equipment. The parts of the ship outside of the citadel other than the propeller shafts were somewhat superficial. As long as the ship didn't capsize from flooding it would be impossible to "kill" without breaching the citadel.

So basically we have armoured citadels, no armour at all and everything in between. WoWS offers none of this information, the nearest thing they have in a Wargaming game is a third party program for WoT that loads up 3d models of the tanks as an armour heat map. Warthunder's x-ray feature really sets it apart in this regard, it shows you the thickness of all armour plates (including angling) and the location of all internal modules. It even does this for the aircraft, while aiming at the specific spot on a plane is very hard, it can be useful to know that your pilot's seat is made out of half inch steel plate.