With all 5 other nations having access to their tier 5 premium after “kings of battle” patch I thought we go over the options Italy has for tier 5 premium, and there aren’t many of them.
All 5 premium ships for other nations have been battleships from ww1 to ww2. so it is important to go over battleships italy have that remain unadded as most certainly the rank 5 premium will be one of the following:
Leonardo Da Vinci, Conte Di Cavour class battleship. similar layout of main armament to in game Andrea Doria. it was sunk in 1916 so it didn’t get any refits later on. (the image is of conte di cavour before refit)
Giulio Cesare, Conte Di Cavour class battleship. this ship can be added in both its WW1 lay out similar to Andrea Doria in game or a ww2 refit lay out similar to Duilio in game. This BB was given to USSR after ww2 as war reparations and I highly suspect that Gaijin wants to hijack this battleship in it’s refit configuration for USSR in game meaning we won’t get it in italian tree in any configuration. i hope i’m wrong on that but they have done it already with Duca d’Aosta cruiser in game as Kerch.
for the other battleships of italy, conte di cavour will be added the next update in ww2 configuration, andrea doria ww1 configuration, dante alighieri and duilio ww2 configuration are all present, and gaijin is not interested in having the same ship in game in 2 different configuration as 2 separate ships and i agree with that decision.
Given the newly-added subtree, there is also the option of the Tegetthoff-class dreadnought battleships for the premium position, and perhaps as freely researchable lineup filler for the domestic ships - the class is numerous enough to perform both duties:
Both nations also have a number of pre-dreadnought( yet still post-ironclad ) battleships available, but I’ll be waiting on the addition of the leaked Danton-classe to France before having a real idea of what Rank those kinds of ships might be located in the research trees.
interesting take, it could be done with the tegetthoff specifically as it was handed over to italy. battleships take a long time to model so if they are going ahead with this plan then we won’t see it soon unless they have been thinking about it for a long time which i doubt because italian naval trees are already behind schedule compared to the other 5. also true that hungary is with italy now but austria has much closer tie to germany, considering military culture and history of austro-hungary, its ships belong with germany but regarding war thunder it might have a chance to be with italy for a bunch of reasons, again specially tegetthoff itself.
They probably chose what the prem battleships would be long ago, maybe even before battleships were implemented - the visual models for SMS Nassau and IJN Yamashiro were discovered in the files during mid-2021:
So they were already starting development around eight months prior, if not earlier. And those ships were not added together, either - whatever rollout cycle GJN has for prem BB 's seems not to have them in every TT all at once after the addition of the new top one, as happened for Rank 6 prems in Air.
W/ the low amount of options the ITA tt has for battleships in general, there 's not a huge amount of ships they would’ve needed to decide between.
I don’t think that 's true in regards to WT, the DE techtree has no shortage of battleship classes for various BR 's and uses in comparison to Italy or Hungary, and is further improved regarding options due to the " laid-down counts as prototype " implementation rule.
Whereas the whole of the Tegetthoff classe could only support a narrow range of implementations, those being far more acute in the ITA tt. Resultingly, it appears more likely that they would all appear in Italy as complementary, allowing the domestic Italian battleships to all stay in the freely researchable tree while still being available to shore up their gaps regarding lineup depth.
