Playing strategically

Hi folks!

World of Warships Blitz, especially since the 1.0 release and opening up to a wider group of players, has gotten much more difficult than in the beta days. This is due to a number of factors:

• more human players means less (relatively stupid) AI players to farm on
• human players increasingly know what they're doing
• new branches on the tech tree mean more experienced players grinding at low levels
• AI got better (especially in terms of avoiding torpedoes)
• ranked battles mean you're quickly up against top players

I'm seeing signs of frustration in my fleet chat, with people "just not winning anymore".

Back in the beta days, if you had a destroyer or light cruiser, and had a halfway decent idea of how to actually play the game, you could absolutely dominate. Enemy ships would sail at constant speed, in straight lines, obliviously close to islands. Battleships would blindly attack into close quarters against destroyers. Battleships would fire HE shells at your battleship, and AP against your destroyer. Stuff like that.

I've clocked in battles where I single-handedly wiped out the complete enemy fleet in my Nürnberg class light cruiser:

Not getting these kind of results anymore - even an Iron Fortress medal, which I used to pick up in pretty much all battles, is not guaranteed. More frequently, I end up spending 3/4th of a battle duelling with a single enemy player, defending a flank or sneaking a cap to make it to - less glorious - victory.

Strategy

Since it's quite hard to carry a game on your own, working in a team is becoming more and more important. Unfortunately, unless you squad up with other players you know, you'll be on your own with a group of random players, with limited means of communication. Let's take a look at how to make the most of this situation, and keep coming out on top. I'm flying the "Battle Star" nick in-game for a reason - and modesty isn't one of them :)

This is me in my "Admiral Hipper" class tier 8 German heavy cruiser. Not one of my favourite maps, too much open space, and these icebergs are too large to use as quick cover. So, what do we have to consider at the beginning of this battle.


First, fleet composition. We've got one battleship, three cruisers, and three destroyers. The enemy fleet has one more battleship, at the cost of one cruiser. Battleships are deadly on this map if played right, due to the wide open spaces. Let's look at the map a bit closer.

This is close to a minute into the battle, and you'll notice two things: most of our fleet is heading straight south towards that narrow channel. Spawning points are cross-position, and the enemy fleet is likely do do the same thing on their side. If we were all to follow, one thing is almost a certainty on this one: A destroyer will sneak up close to or behind the icebergs, and try to win by capping. You'll almost certainly lose this way, I've seen it happening many times.

So with the lemming train heading south, if the enemy battleships have even the slightest idea of what they're doing, they'll position around their cap circle, angled forward, and welcome them with blistering fire, while the destroyers will scatter them or drive them against the icebergs with torpedoes, where they don't have space to manoeuvre.

There isn't much I can do to communicate with my team, so I'm heading straight east to defend the eastern approach. The "Hipper" has sonar, so I've got a decent chance to detect enemy destroyers or cruisers when they're inevitably heading up these lines. I'm making sure not to get too close to the icebergs, so I have range to manoeuvre against torpedoes.

The "Hipper" also has six torpedo launchers on each side, with a range of 5.4km, giving me something to deter enemy ships from going in a certain direction. Once I've intercepted whatever comes sailing up that side, I'm turning back north to defend the cap.

You'll also note one of our destroyers going straight through the centre to spot for the rest of the team. He has to be careful, since there's no concealment, and once he's spotted, he'll have the entire enemy fleet shooting at him. But at least we'll know what's coming.

In this particular game, I had a destroyer and a cruiser sailing up the western line, and another destroyer sneaking up the eastern line. I did manage to sink both destroyers, but got taken out eventually by the cruiser, but I prevented them long enough from capping that we were able to win on points (and I would almost have taken the cruiser down with me). I managed two kills, about 40000 damage caused, which didn't get me any medals, but at least our team won.

Communication

In this next scenario, I'm in my Aurora, a premium tier three Soviet cruiser. She's not particularly fast, but sturdy, and has mean, quick-firing high explosive shells, which do over 400 points of damage. Setting battleships on fire while dodging their return shots is great fun, and she can do some severe damage to destroyers at close range.


As before, let's look at our disposition of forces. We've got a carrier (I'm bottom tier in a tier four match), three battleships, two cruisers and one destroyer. The enemy fleet has two destroyers and an additional cruiser, at the cost of battleships. They have the mobility and torpedo advantage, we have more powerful guns. The map is tricky, though. 

We have three cap circles (this is a very common map in these lower tiers), and plenty of covers behind islands, especially around A and B. This map favours mobility. Again, consider that the enemy team is going to cross-spawn on the south-eastern corner.

The most important decision in this situation is made at the opening. With our fleet vulnerable to destroyers, we need to control and defend two of the cap circles, while keeping each other in supporting fire range. Our destroyer spawned on the western end of the map, and my Aurora barely does more than 20 knots. We couldn't go for caps B and C, since we didn't have the speed and mobility to hold these plus defend the battleships from being flanked by destroyers.

So what I did here was trying to "pull rank" (again, flying the "Battle Star" nick helps, especially in lower-tier games) and get the team to take A and B. This worked reasonably well. The destroyer capped A, I positioned myself near the islands north of A to cover him against enemy cruisers, and to intercept enemy destroyers, and the other cruiser capped B, with fire support from the battleships against the main enemy thrust.

Of course, things went messy quickly after that (it's a lower-tier game after all, players mostly don't have the experience for discipline), but we managed to keep their destroyers in check, and our battleships made short work of the enemy cruiser force. We ended up holding all three caps, and won by sinking the enemy fleet.

When I play lower tier games, I usually hold back and leave kills for the more junior players, if possible. Or hunt down other higher-rank players.

Summary

With the game becoming harder, you can't easily carry it by your own, you need to work as a team, and communicate. A couple of things to keep in mind:

• be aware of fleet composition, and try to plan accordingly
• be aware of your role. If you're in a Japanese destroyer, you need to torpedo-snipe from long distance, and not get into gunfights. If you're in a battleship, stay in open waters, cover your flanks, and stay in range to concentrate fire with other battleships. If you're in a light cruiser, escort battleships and knock out destroyers. If you're in a carrier, scout early, disturb enemy air attacks, and take out low-health ships.
• try to communicate with your team in the opening stage, especially on cap circles.

This way, you can still pull off a decent win rate, and keep competing. By the way, if you're wondering how top players (e.g. pretty much all of FND) are having win rates in the 70 or 80% ranges, I can almost guarantee you that it's down to using external team communication.

World of Tanks Blitz

Hi folks!

Today, I'll take a quick look at the other mobile game by wargaming, the mobile version of World of Tanks. I've enjoyed World of Warships for quite a while, so I figured I'd bite the bullet, free up 5GB of space (yep, that happened) and give it a try.

First impressions

The game does a good job of getting you started on the controls, with tutorial missions, and then throws you in for what I can only describe as "guaranteed wins" for a couple of battles, before sending you off into the terrifying world of multiplayer tactical battles.

That was the point I almost dropped the game again. You're a noob in a tier 1 tank, you have really no idea what to do or how to do it, and you're thrown in with players who have hundreds or thousands of battles under their belt. I had a basic idea of what I was supposed to do - stay in cover, concentrate fire, try not to die - but the first, I don't know, ten or twenty battles I got killed pretty much immediately, and felt like I had zero impact on the battle (or probably a negative one for my team).

Controls

My biggest issue at first was with the controls - in World of Warships, you've got your speed setting, and port / starboard rudder, and that's pretty much it. Try not to crash into islands. In World of Tanks, thinks are three-dimensional for a start: hills, slopes etc do exist that you can drive up on, valleys to go down into. 

There are eight directions: forward, forward left, forward right, reverse, reverse left, reverse right, rotate on spot left, rotate on spot right. All these are controlled with a virtual analogue stick with no haptic feedback, the size of my thumb. Effectively that meant for the most part of my first battles I was just derping around, getting stuck on rocks or buildings, and inevitably getting killed very quickly.

Matchmaking

I feel that one of the main problems in the matchmaking is that it's by vehicle tier, not by player experience. That wasn't so much a problem in World of Warships, because I started in the open beta, and we all pretty much had to figure things out as we went. World of Tanks has been out for a while, so the experienced players get frustrated with scrubs like me dragging their team down, and new players are quickly frustrated by getting shot up rapidly (and potentially shouted at).

But I decided to stick with it, for a couple of reasons:

• I wanted to see how long it would take to not completely suck
• I quite enjoy tanks, and the tech trees are huge
• battles are rather quick, and the game gives you a generous helping of vehicle slots, so I always have something to battle with

Currencies

The currency system works pretty much like World of Warships - there's "silver", which is gained from battle income, and used to buy tanks, upgrades, repairs, ammo etc. Then there's "gold", the premium currency you usually have to pay real money for to get.

The one big difference I've seen so far is that you can buy premium ammo with gold, and do more damage than with regular ammo. That feels like a stupid pay-to-win system at first, but it really isn't - yes, it might cost you the occasional battle, but on the whole, if you don't know what you're doing, no amount of premium ammo is going to turn the game for you.

You'll start with a respectable amount of gold for free (1000+ in my case), probably to get you used to spending it. Honestly, I haven't really seen a need for it yet, having sufficient fun without putting any real money into it. I will, eventually, come up with a fair price of what the game is worth to me, and spend that once, but it's really quite good in free mode.

It took me about a week to get up to tier 4, get some upgrades, and actually make a meaningful contribution to battles every now and then.

Map layout

I'd say, from my limited experience, the single most important thing to learn, besides the fiddly controls, is the map layout. Players are very, very good at exploiting your mistakes - you sit next to a rock, thinking you're in cover, but you're actually in an open vector from the rear - you're dead. Drive too far ahead, get spotted and overrun, you're dead. Get flanked in a tank destroyer - you're dead.

So for the beginning, I'd recommend sticking with the other players, observing the spots they take, and learning the map layout.

Keep practising, upgrade your tank, train your crew, and after a while, you'll get the satisfaction of doing damage, occasionally carrying a battle and getting some medals.

Ranked battle killers - Königsberg light cruiser

Hi folks!

The "ranked battle" feature has been in the game for a while now, and it's an interesting and fun addition. The basic idea is that, during currently two windows of server time a day, you play against other players, gaining (or losing) points, and thus moving up or down the ladder. Each rank class (bronze, silver etc.) gets you resources at the end of the season, and you gain currency to spend in the rank shop.

A nice twist is that ranked battles can only be played at tier five, no matter what your personal top tier is. This, of course, limits the choice of ships available. In the battleship line, there's the excellent Japanese Kongo class, which really is a fast, uparmoured battlecruiser, and you'll usually find a large number of destroyer players.

Since I'm a bit of a fan of the German cruiser line, I found that the tier five Königsberg class is really almost as good as the tier six Nürnberg.

She's got very similar guns - nine 150mm in three turrets - and torpedoes - four triple launchers, two on each side.

Armour and health are comparable, she's a light cruiser, so two good broadsides from a battleship will probably sink her. But the fast-firing main batteries (can be brought down to about 7s reload time with the reload speed equipment upgrade), using armour piercing, are an absolute destroyer-killer.

She doesn't have the Nürnberg's sonar, but does have the precise aim. Staying away from cruiser and battleship guns is a given, and she can do great with dodging distance shots while responding with rapid high-explosive fire from her two rear turrets. Alternatively, you can use her torpedoes to flank or ambush bigger ships.

As with the Nürnberg, I'd recommend using the two steering equipment upgrades, playing to her strength as a light cruiser.

Visibility

Hi folks!

Today, I'll leave some thoughts about visibility, and how it can be used in your playstyle. Visibility in World of Warships is affected by several factors:

• ship class - smaller ships like destroyers have much lower visibility than large ships.
• modifications - in higher tiers, ships can be outfitted with superstructure mods that reduce visibility (usually by 10%)
• camouflage paint - besides giving other perks, they usually reduce the visibility by a couple more %

In the game, visibility is marked by the dotted circle around your ship, with the full line being the range of your currently selected weapon. 

Firing guns

Once you fire any of your main or secondary batteries, your visibility will bloom, and it will take a while of you not firing them for it to go down again. The impact this has on your strategy depends on the ship type you're sailing, and what kind of build you're going for.

Battleships

Being the largest ships out there, battleships usually get spotted first, easily halfway across the map. Stealth isn't really something required for battleship strategies, since you'll be mostly firing from behind your destroyer / cruiser screen at range. That said, if you build for lower detection range, and manage to show up in a place where you're not expected early in the game, you can get a slight advantage out of it - but I probably would use the modification slots for more important things.

Cruisers

Smaller than battleships, they're still relying mostly on their main guns to deal damage, and once the firefight is up, they're easily spotted. That said, if your main gun range is larger than your visibility, you can get the first salvo off against an unsuspecting target, provided they're spotted and you aren't.

Destroyers

Here, visibility really comes into play. Especially Japanese destroyers with their relatively weak guns and long-range torpedoes can benefit hugely from low visibility. A common attack pattern is to sneak up just outside spotting range, fire a salvo of torpedoes at an unsuspecting target, and get out again unspotted. American and Russian / Soviet destroyers have much shorter torpedo ranges, so it's harder for them to pull of these "stealth strikes". Still, getting out of spotting range means you won't be shot at by long-range, fast-firing cruisers. Dropping smoke screens also helps quite a bit.

So after you've dropped your torpedoes, and you haven't yet been spotted, hold off on the gunfire - it might be a better choice to turn, get some distance and stay out of sight. Of course, once you're spotted, you might as well open up with the main guns. Again, US and Russian destroyers have the advantage here, they're close-range fighters.

Carriers

Having a low visibility on a carrier can help hiding it from enemy eyes, but there are two factors to consider - first, there's a good chance of an enemy carrier in the game, and planes are very good at spotting. Second, it's easy to see where you should be just by following the planes, since they're visible across the whole map.

In general, camouflage helps in the game (how I hate the games where I got hit by two loads of torpedoes in my "Admiral Hipper" without even ever seeing the enemy Kagero class once). But, as always, it depends on your ship class and playstyle. 

Update 1.2 - Russian / Soviet destroyers

Hi folks!

With the latest update, we've got some new ships in the tech tree. This time around, it's mainly Russian (and later Soviet) destroyers. I've started with some low-tier ships, and so far, it's been great fun.

Of course, we'll need to compare them with the US and Japanese destroyer lines. Overall, the Russian destroyers have great fast-firing guns, are quick, and have rather shitty torpedo range and damage.

This is the tier three destroyer of the Russian imperial navy, the Derzky.

She's got three 103mm guns, with a base reload of only 5s, as well as five (!) dual torpedo launchers, that reload in a blistering 26s. They only have a range of about three kilometres, and only do about 1900 damage each, but they reload almost as fast as a battleship's main battery.


This ship is so much fun to play, that I haven't even bothered to unlock the higher tiers yet. While it doesn't have any health whatsoever, you can two-shot a US battleship. Other destroyers are in for a nasty surprise as well, since you can fire three salvos of torpedoes at them, have them dodge, only to run into two more on the way, all while you're peppering them with the main guns.

These guns do almost 300 HE damage when fully upgraded, which is on par with other destroyers of similar tier, but reload so quickly that you can put out some serious damage while you're waiting for your torpedoes to reload, and that doesn't take long at all.

Battles with the Derzky are hectic, fierce and just plain fun. With a detection range of 5.3km, you can't get close enough to launch torpedoes without being spotted, but it's great for just running along the side of the battlefield and surprising the enemy battleship line from behind.

In higher tiers, things get mildly better in terms of torpedo range, but also with higher reload times. The Russian / Soviet ships retain their great guns, and while not as numerous as on US destroyers, they've still got great reload times.

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. 

My current ships - Admiral Hipper class cruiser

Hi folks!

After saving up for quite a while, I've finally made it - the tier 8 "Admiral Hipper" class heavy cruiser. And I have to say, I'm not disappointed, it was worth it. The tier 6 Nürnberg was already a mean weapon, but I was struggling against battleships, due to the light armour and ineffective 150mm guns.

Strengths

The "Admiral Hipper" is classified as a heavy cruiser - she's got eight 200mm main guns, set up in four twin-turrets. They reload slightly slower than the Nürnberg's, but do significantly more damage - and, most importantly, they can get through battleship armour.

As secondary, she still has the torpedo launchers - with two triple-launchers on each side, she can field more torpedos than many destroyers.

The defences are good, and with over 30000 health, she can withstand quite some punishment.

Weaknesses

Her main weakness is the slowly-responding rudder, which makes dodging torpedoes rather tricky initially, so definitely consider getting both rudder upgrades to compensate. For the third upgrade, I chose the 5% reload time again, so she's got the same equipment as the Nürnberg.

My Playstyle

If I compare her to my tier 5 "Kongo" class battleship, she's got pretty similar defence and health, but main guns firing twice as fast, doing almost the same amount of damage with AP shells. I'm playing her more aggressively than my Nürnberg, since she's got more health and better defences. The torpedo launchers have a good forward angle, so with the rudder upgrades, I can attack a battleship head-on, turn one side, launch six torpedoes, and quickly turn about, launching the other six, all while raining gunfire on the target.

She's at a slight disadvantage against destroyers, since her guns are slower than the Nürnberg's, and she's less mobile, but it's not a big difference. The sonar is improved, giving her great detection range - which is important, since many destroyers at that level have smokescreens.

All in all, I'm really happy with this ship, she's a great allrounder, suits my aggressive playstyle, and has enough endurance to get through the fight.