British Cruisers

Hi folks!

With the update to version 1.4, World of Warships Blitz now has a British cruiser line in the tech tree. Time to take a look.

I spent some free XP to skip the first tiers, this is the Danae class tier four light cruiser.

She's got a good turn time, is fast, has six 152mm main guns, and four torpedo launchers with a 5.7km range. That is some serious offensive firepower for a tier 4 ship - basically, she's an oversized destroyer with bigger guns.

There's something unique about the torpedo launchers - you can either fire in the usual wide patterns, or you can switch to the narrow launch pattern and fire the torpedoes individually. Consider the implications of this - you have not one, but six torpedoes you can spread in any pattern you desire across the launcher arc. You could fire them all at on the same path, or create a broad spread at short range.

As expected, the 152mm guns do well against enemy destroyers, but they have one serious handicap - they can only fire armour piercing ammunition. And this is where it gets interesting when you go up the tech tree - even the tier 10 "Minotaur" has 152mm main batteries, and can only fire armour-piercing (albeit at a blistering reload rate of 3.5s).

This means two things. First, finally we got another light cruiser beyond tier six, aside from the Soviet line (US, Japanese and German cruisers all switch to 200mm guns). I'm often struggling in my tier eight "Hipper" when dealing with destroyers, since her 200mm guns on armour piercing are prone to overpenetration (doing only about 20% damage), and her HE shells are pretty poor.

On the other hand, though, my tier six Nürnberg is struggling to do damage with her 150mm guns against battleships when using AP, since the shells mostly bounce off the armour, especially against US battleships. If I can't get the torpedoes to bear, I can switch to high explosive, keep the distance to dodge return fire, and whittle them down with fires and constant HE barrage.

You can't do that on a British light cruiser, though, since they only fire AP. In addition, they have relatively low health and paper-thin armour. So my prediction here is that you're going to have to play her more like a destroyer - use the guns to obliterate enemy destroyers and maybe do some damage against cruisers, but rely on the torpedoes as your main weapon against bigger ships.

I understand the move - can you imagine the carnage of fires these things could unleash with their reload rate. But be aware that you can't take return fire even from heavy cruisers, and use those unique torpedo launchers to your advantage.