Most newer battleships have vital parts under the waterline, so some can be unkillable.
With regular battleships from other nations, even with the APHE shells if you had a good shot you may take out multiple components at once; some compartments, boiler room, transmission etc. With Italian battleships, all of them just get yellow damage.
This forces the use of SAP shells, which are just slightly better at damaging. 305mm SAP has 31kg HE filler. If you managed to suffer through the tree and got to a 7.3 Italian battleship (Novorossiya etc), you get ‘rewarded’ with the 320mm gun with a even worse SAP shell, 23.4kg HE filler!!
This SAP shell in fact does less damage than even some APHE shells from other nations like the German 380mm gun, 25 KG of HE filler.
If you have to use the APHE, it only has 6.38kg of HE filler. Most nation APHE easily double this, or more than double this.
But there are similarly weak APHE shells from other nations!!
OK. What is their reload time?
Conclusion: Italian battleships combine the unique package of having slow fire rate and low damage, making it not able to kill ships with vital modules below waterline.
Battleships (can’t say about other nations, but Italy) are unplayable for me, because even bots have stuff like Scharnhorsts, each battle I either get assists or nothing. I’m spading Caracciolo, but slowly because it’s a pain to play in the current situation as well as other Italian BBs. Honestly I don’t have any motivation to continue playing them, especially since Gaijin refuses to unnerf Roma (and now upcoming Littorio) rate of fire. I will better have some fun in Alano while grinding Baleno or if I want to play bigger ships I will finish spading Bolzano instead.
mhh maybe dont knw how work the game and put you alws in 7.7 or 8.0 against good ship like gnesaiu amagi sevastopol ecc you should to get less ammo like on tank and you can survive better at fire and at the explosion and aim good to the enemy
and you have problem with pen with the compture calculate all? you have to try rb if have issue becouse the gun is not the problem and neither the ammo how have telled you can have some problem with armor and fire if you go full
depend alws about you i am italian main becouse i am from italy and i am spading every vecihle have for sure more hard to play respect at meta but can tell the us in battle, huge problem are the reload i am 100 with expert and reload in 47s you if are unlevelled are around 53/54 and have an a bit more spread of ammo armor is nothing special if not angled is mid but depend on you
Dunno man, I do well with italian battleships with the exception of Caracciolo(since she only gets SAP, she can only farm bots), I like the AP of the guns, excellent penetration for their caliber with a decent fuze delay so it can get inside and detonate properly, so just aim where you need to pen and you get the job done, either due to direct hit on shell room or magazine or creating a fire low on the elevator. But for the love of god, dont use SAP, it pretty much never has enough penetration to penetrate BB armour at typical combat range with the only two exceptions being the german 305mm(because it has stats in pen and tnt almost identical to the AP shell) and the russian 406mm(A SAP that penetrates more than all AP shells available before leviathans update, now thats some russian bias lmao), in all other SAP shells you would need to get into 2-3km range for it to have enough penetration to reliably penetrate the elevator armour and create a fire there or damage the magazine.
And after starting to play other nations BBs this year: Renown, Strasbourg and Marat(will probably play german 6.7-7.3 ships and Lorraine in the next few months), I ended up liking more those italian guns that I already do.
In Renown case, yeah she gets bigger boom and great pen, but british fuze delay is terrible and makes a lot of shots detonate prematurely before penetrating the turtleback or reaching deep inside to detonate the enemy magazine.
In Strasbourg case, the guns performed very similarly to the Italian ones, but with better salvo accuracy due to the superfiring quad gun turret design, with the trade off of being very easy to get your turret disabled due to how big it is.
In Marat case, she gets great fuze delay, but terrible penetration so it ends up depending on getting lucky with underwater penetration due to fuze delay or not doing damage at all unless getting very close, also the armour is not great with only good thing being low profile so it can be hard to hit a Marat in the right place, thus kind of artificially boosting her survivablity if the enemy is a poor shot
Well, its more worth than Yamato thats for sure, as my best battle in Roma being me killing 3 Yamatos(2 players with backups) while they where engaging me two at same time.
They also fixed the missing internal armour behind the belt armour on the first turret elevator sections(and almost all my deads where due to that missing armour) and removed the lifeboats blocking the maximum horizontal turret angle of the rear turret, as well as fixing the bug of secondary guns ammo detonation killing you instantly.
Havent played the ship after they fixed the bugs, will play her again once update releases to boost Littorio research and see how much Roma improved after the armour and turret firing angle fix.
Just GE the AP shell to skip having to stock grind with useless SAP(having stock SAP is like having stock HEATFS at top tier, at least stock HE can work to farm lots of damage by destroying AA guns and research the AP shell rather quickly)
Just ground out the Italian flett a couple weeks ago and the only issue I had was the terrible accuracy which was consistently inconsistent lol. They are quite playable.
Personally speaking in game if it had a 35 second reload or there abouts I’d rank it over Richelieu, Bismark, on par with vanguard but below Iowa, soyuz and yamato
Although even without bug reports imo such parameters as accuracy and rate of fire shouldn’t be directly copied from paper sources, balance component, the same for ground tech, should be presented, so we don’t have underperforming/overperforming ships in that regard, while it can also solve issues with different measurements methods, theoretical/practical RoF, conditions of tests (on ground, on water and etc) or just a lack of data.
The brightest example of this issue are 100 mm Minisini cannons which have different RoF on Italian and Soviet ship, because having different values in each nation paper sources (same cannons, same turrets).
In your list of ships, Marat has to be my favorite. The guns are good, though penetration is bad. It used to be borderline unplayable with the ammo elevator fire blowing up ammo, but it does not happen anymore or at least is significantly delayed, making the ship surprisingly survivable.
Imo its the opposite, it was hard to kill via fire, but now it can be killed via elevator fire almost as easily as a german ship, also doesnt help that unlike any other nation, also the square hole instead of cilindrical on the lower deck armoir on the elevators makes it very easy for fragmentation damage to hit the magazine despite the magazine being deep below the water, in a way that you can sometimes onetap the Sevastopol and Mariya classes with a salvo of high tnt filler guns like british 381mm, or do the same in three good salvos with low tnt filler guns like the italian 320mm, Scharnhost 280mm or japanese 356mm. As for the guns, yeah, the damage may be good IF they penetrate, which already struggle a little bit against its own BR and becomes quite hard to do proper damage in a reasonable time in an uptier
