About ammo types

Hi folks!

If you've been playing "World of Warships" for a while, you will have noticed that there are two different types of ammunition for your ship's guns: armour-piercing (AP) and high explosive (HE) shells. Today, we'll have a closer look at these, and what the impact of using the correct ammo for the situation on the game is (spoiler: it's huge).

High explosive

These shells carry a large amount of explosive in a solid casing, and some form of fuse. The effect is done by detonating the shell, which has a hot explosive blast, and a wave of very fast shrapnel. These things are very good at causing damage to lightly-armoured ships - imagine a heavy naval shell going through a thin armour plating, and then blowing up. Carnage. Due to the large amount of explosive, they've also got the tendency to easily set fire to flammable things, which is a nice side-effect for some additional damage over time.

But then, consider a more heavily-armoured ship, like a heavy cruiser or a battleship. HE shells will be much less likely to make it through the thick steel plates, and will detonate on the surface. So while it will cause damage (there are lots of useful, and vulnerable, things on the outside of a ship), it won't cause the same devastating damage it does to ships with less or lighter armour plating.

Armour piercing

That's where AP shells come in. They have a much smaller explosive payload, but in return, are designed to get through pretty much all armour plates. That means they can penetrate deep into the innards of the enemy ship, and explode there, causing damage to critical parts, by help of e.g. a timed fuse, giving the shell a moment to get through the armour before blowing it up.

But what happens if you fire an AP shell against a lightly-armoured target (or something like a ship's superstructure)? Depending on the weight and power of the shell, you might end up going clean through it, and not actually causing much damage at all.

Why can't I sink that destroyer?

Consider a common situation. You're in a battleship, a slow, heavily-armoured, can with huge 350 or 400mm main guns. Your destroyer or cruiser screen, as usual, is pretty useless - they've all gone off by themselves hunting, leaving you exposed. You see an enemy destroyer steaming through their lines at full speed, coming towards you. You know what's coming - they're looking to get close to you, and then fire a full load of torpedoes into your side.

You bring your main battery to bear, and unload at him at a good range. You've got AP shells loaded by default, and they do somewhere beyond 1200 damage - per shell. Your guns fire away, and you get some good hits - but they only do about 200 damage each, barely scratching the destroyer. Now, you have to wait 20s for the reload, and your secondaries don't have the range. Even if you could get a second salvo in, you'd only manage to take away about half of that destroyer's health before they unload their torpedoes on you.

I've been in that situation before. It's utterly frustrating, and I believe one of the reasons so many people play destroyer - they really don't have to worry much about battleship guns. So what's going on here? Some weird kind of rock-paper-scissors?

No, you're simply using the wrong ammo type. Your big, powerful AP shells are great at dealing damage to cruisers and other battleships, but they'll punch pretty much right through a destroyer. So next time you're in this situation, switch to HE, and the destroyer will be having a bad time indeed.

When to use which

A lot of this comes down to experience. Some rules of thumb:

•  Destroyers - they'll mostly have relatively small calibres, around 120mm. You can use AP shells against other destroyers, or maybe light cruisers, but anything else, use HE rounds. The guns fire quickly, so you've got some chance of causing fires, in addition to the flooding from your torpedoes.
• Light cruisers - they've got guns between 150 and 180mm. AP rounds are murderous against destroyers, and will get through most cruiser protection, but mostly bounce right off battleship armour, doing no damage at all. Use HE rounds for these - a light cruiser at range is hard to hit, and can fire a constant barrage of HE shells, causing fires and slow, but steady, damage.
• Heavy cruisers - bigger guns at 200mm. If your cruiser has good HE damage, you might consider using these against destroyers, as APs have a tendency to sometimes overpenetrate. Against anything else, AP is the way to go.
• Battleships - as discussed, the 350/400mm main guns are useless against destroyers with AP - they actually do much less damage than the secondaries. HE, on the other hand, can burn these pesky little ships with surprising effectiveness.
• Carriers - I normally load AP, since I often have to deal with destroyers as a last-ditch defence. Doesn't really matter all that much, though.

Don't forget to fire your loaded shells before switching ammo types, otherwise you're just wasting them.

All in all, using the right ammo type is one of the most important skills in the game, together with dodging torpedoes.