I still have yet to figure out how to actually sink this ship.
Just spent several minutes pumping AP rounds from my Baden into the ammo elevators on one from like 3km out. Zero fires.
I tried hitting other areas a couple times but it did nothing.
Some other enemy battleship sailed next to him so i hit him with 6 rounds and he sunk.
Could they at least give the scharnhorst a chance to have an ammo elevator fire? I do not remember ever setting a fire for one on it. Every other battleship has like an 80% chance of it catching fire if hit.
They do, however the problem is that the chance of flooding is too low in game due to the water surface is being simplified as flat in DM. In many cases you punch several holes on Scharnhorst’s armour belt but these breaches don’t take water in as they are located above waterline. IRL the water surface isn’t a flat plane as in the DM of this game, so breaches located over waterline can still take water from bow waves
I remember first times when Scharnhost added to game, you can just press W, rush to enemy spawn and bot ships fire at you with everything included autocannons. Now at least you can kill a Scharnhost.
I suggest SAP or HE when dealing with one. Flooding is much more effective than trying to go for crew kills or magazine detonations. The vast majority of my deaths in a Scharnhorst are from flooding either from SAP/HE or torpedoes.
I’d suggest trying to aim just below the waterline before the first turret and behind the aft turret. If you can hit the very back of the ship at the prop, it also tends to flood more. It definitely isn’t easy, but it’s easier than the alternatives.
Edit: Just forward of the first turret and just behind of the aft turret will also take out the pumps.
Naval mode is currently Scharnhorst mode. Matches should not be predetermined by the team with the most broken ship in the game.
This ship requires so much additional or modified mechanics to simply stop it from being a stomping machine. Waterline needs to be dynamic so that near waterline hits can cause flooding, ricochet check needs to be removed so that shells can pierce her turtleback and large caliber guns needs their dispersion nerf rolled way the hell back so that they can hit the damn thing. This is ridiculous!
When famous ships are added Germany is going to be a wehraboos wet dream. Invincible Bismarks and Scharnhorst going to close range and magazine sniping King Georges, Iowas and Yamatos, all thanks to unrealistic mechanics that favors turtlebacks.
Didn’t HK reporter’s tests above have an order of magnitude above that and still failed to penetrate the citadel?
I think Scharnhorst’s armor layout is just inherently broken and needs an outright game mechanic change to be balanced. If 16" ammo with velocity high enough to actually escape earth’s gravity well can’t penetrate the ship, clearly the problem goes deeper than shell power.
Maybe adding armor destruction to the turtleback would help? Exclusively a mechanic for Scharnhorst. Nobody else really needs their already bad armor getting destroyed further.
Flooding changes would be more historical and realistic, but those are harder to get right. Making the turtleback become weaker after heavy shelling is a faster, simpler* fix.
We’ve literally just seen HKs post about Scharnhorsts turtleback shrugging off shells with 20,000mm of penetration. The game is not even bothering to calculate if a shell can penetrate the turtleback, it just marks the angle hit as a automatic ricochet.