Italy has good cruisers and Dreadnoughts that can be angled effectively to tank similar size shells.
With the decompression next patch they’re getting a breath of fresh air in that area as super dreadnoughts and such will be moved away from them.
Explosive mass of the projectiles is bad, so you’ll have to aim carefully, but, as every italian gun, the AP pen is guaranteed.
The problem is the DD area, they’re not fitted for the heavy DPM meta except for the only 2 post war DDs (one of which is premium).
France has really good DDs with their 138mm SAP and some nice cruisers ( problem is that they have no armor so use them as second line or be prepared to sink quickly), but they have awful dreadnoughs and Dunkuerque really likes to pop her front turret at the start of the match due to low armor in the front.
The problem with France is that, while italian DDs are really cheap to research and skip, BBs cost a ton of RP and you have to research all of them to move up due to the TT still being young and not fleshed out.
It depends what you like the most.
If you like fast, hard hitting DD games go for France, if you like the big ships and slow but accurate gameplay go for Italy.
Jsut don’t play Yamato, its armor is totally nightmare. I really think gaijin make it just a bigger Hyuga. But for other countries, only soviet both have fire power and armor protection with suitable magazine place. Haha Russian game.
Well it is real Japanese navy who designed Yamato as an giant standard battleship only to aim ‘ideal’ kantai-kessen that never occurs, so not to blame Gaijin.
Even WOWs has to balance Yamato’s weakness with distorted overmatch system that among tech tree ships only Yamato can penetrate other ships bow easily. That’s Yamato’s limit and Gaijin just put that distortion out to show real face of her. Actually not all real face as her shell is too powerful on penetration still than what it should be.
For armor protection and magazine place… I would choose Iowa better as spaced armor and shell room and magazine that can be emptied(which Soyuz can’t). But well, for armor distribution the real soviet engineer’s goal was to show angular protection on complicated, short range baltic sea so it is just that ship’s characteristic well matches the game.
I am currently working my way through France, almost done researching Colbert, before La Galisionnere as far as cruisers go.
I was really positively surprised how fun France is ( so far)!
I spaded Jeanne D’Arc in no time, she hits hard and has no trouble dealing with Murmansk, Krasnys and Detroits which seems to be in abundance at that BR, besides all the destroyers.
Just stay back from start to avoid much focus, find some cover and its golden. Working my way to spade Primauguet at the moment and using same tactics. Works wonders, and both 4.7 and 5.0 seems a good BR now.
Mogador is also a damn good destroyer to use in the same lineup.
These French cruisers maybe fit my playstyle, cause I also have good battles with Dupleix, at 5.7.
Uptiers ruins everything and everyone ofc, so no reason to speak about.
As Taffu states, new BRs will hopefully and probably help their early battleships a lot! Cant really comment on those, since I am not there yet! Haven’t used Strasbourg yet.
I did not expect for Yamato corner plates to be at such a bad angle. I thought we’ll be able to angle her at least a little bit… and for ammo to be so high.
My Yamato gameplay will consist “return to the battle” red sign in every match
That, but only if you’ll manage to turn her around without getting blown up as the spawn protection time for naval is extremely short.
A tip for those who’ll want to use her as fisrt spawn in naval AB and RB:
Select a spawn point
Wait untill the automatic spawn timer runs out and kicks you in the battle ( the one that start if you stay idle in the spawn screen too long)
Turn her around and start kiting or reverse kiting as the battle progress
Never show your bow to anything
This way you’ll avoid the most of the initial traffic jam at the start ( I wonder what mess it’ll be with these giants) and both bots and trigger happy players won’t bother aiming at you as they’ll be fully focused on their target.
If you see one Soyuz in the enemy team try to cap the ponts with your seaplanes
If you see more than one Soyuz in the enemy team GG, you’ve lost, just enjoy the game and try to rack some points before it ends.
P.S.
Don’t use backups on Yamato, you’ll just spawn isolated and everybody and their grandmas will immediately focus you for easy points as you won’t be able to do the steps above in time.
Soyuz’s ammo placement is identical to Kronshtadt but not Sevastopol. Sevastopol’s magazine is over shell rooms thanks to the brilliant German engineering and this is why I rated Sevastopol’s ammo placement as terrible but not the Soyuz. In fact the shell rooms being placed over waterline sometimes can be a wicked advantage as detonation of shell room would empty the associated magazine at the same time due to game code limitations, which means that this area becomes completely inert following detonation.
Some update after playing a few battles since the major:
I would give the crown of worst ship in this major to Sevastopol - terrible armour coupled with magazine over waterline, she’s essentially free XP for everyone:
Immediate observations upon opening the game (not playing any new ships yet). Vanguard is going to suck simply because gaijin have deliberately screwed us again. Like all British ships she is sitting at or even above her light displacement (no stores aka not combat ready) being 6ft higher than her average combat loading and 7ft above deep load (just leaving harbour at 36ft).
This means the majority of her belt is above the water and leaves the citadel defenceless against diving shells.
Meanwhile Soyuz appears to be sitting at deep load (as she was never built we don’t know how deep she should be sitting) based on the anti-fouling and belt height. This basically makes her immune to diving shells. Add to this the ahistorical armour the soviets weren’t even capable of making…
Funnily enough it is only the Vanguard that has this problem, all the other new battleships are sitting where they should. Very curious
Pro tip, there’s no timer and forced spawn into match on the lobby screen which shows all the players in the match and is one click away
Its useful both to let the bots go first and see if the match is gonna end in 5 minutes because of a PT boat
Very thick =/= good.
Historically a lack of special elements for steel alloys meant Japan had to improvise, iirc with copper. The resulting steel was weaker and had subpar characteristics compared with contemporary armour and was made thicker to compensate.
