I’m going to continue my short ship reviews as I finish the last 7 ships of all the blue water trees, revisiting older ones and talking about newer ones.
Dunkerque French 7.0.
Pros: good guns with a good amount of explosive filler and excellent penetration for the BR.
Incredible arcs for the forward-only batteries mean quick target acquisition times and the ability to stern or bow tank. Secondaries are strong and can make quick work of destroyers and light cruisers.
Decent armor but water is your number one enemy. More on that in the cons section.
Slightly higher than average crew size gives you some survivability.
Good top speed and above average maneuverability help you dodge shots, cap, and angle to your advantage,
Cons:
You will always be flooding. Research unwatering as soon as you can. With the way the forward compartments are constructed, you will be doing breach repairs all match. With the unfortunate bug that you can’t stop automatically repairing your breaches to focus on fires, you will die to fires more than other ships.
With only 2 forward turrets, it’s easy to have half your firepower removed with a lucky hit, and with constant flooding, your repairs will take longer. Split turrets are not implemented so you will always lose four guns if a turret is knocked out.
Anti-air is quite lacking with only a handful of 37mm guns and the rest being heavy machine guns, leaving you quite vulnerable to air attacks.
Overall a fun ship with a unique play style. Its sister ship, the event vehicle Strasbourg at 7.3 is also fun. It features slightly better armor, but plays almost identically.