In the upcoming major update, we’re going to be introducing a new rank for Bluewater ships: rank VI!
We’ve got some exciting news for you: rank VI Bluewater ships will come to the game in the next major update! The addition of this new rank will open the door to more powerful ships that you have been asking for. The addition of rank VI means that rank V can be decompressed — which will help you speed up the research towards rank VI!
For this momentous occasion, we’re also announcing the pre-order of rank V premium battleships, which will help you to significantly speed up the research progress of any ship in Bluewater research trees that have them. These almighty ships will become available with the release of the next major update, and pre-order packs will also come with special bonuses for their owners!
Pre-order — Arkansas Pack
The Kit Includes:
Wyoming-class, USS Arkansas (BB-33), 1942 (Rank V, USA);
We’d also like to mention a new feature coming alongside the pre-order bonuses for premium battleships. This is the ability to change the flags on your ships in the hangar! Pre-ordering these packs will mean that you will receive the flags of the state of Arkansas, and also the city of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky — both cities that these battleships are named after.
Battleship USS Arkansas
USS Arkansas was ordered for construction as the second of two Wyoming-class battleships, developed prior to WWI. After the U.S. entered WWI in 1917, USS Arkansas sailed for Europe to support the Allied forces as part of a detachment operating with the British Grand Fleet. After the outbreak of WWII, USS Arkansas initially took part in convoy escort duties in the Atlantic before shipping out to England in preparation for the D-Day invasion in June 1944. As part of Operation Overlord, USS Arkansas bombarded German shoreline positions and supported advancing Allied troops. Subsequently, USS Arkansas sailed for the Mediterranean where the warship also conducted shoreline bombardments as part of Operation Dragoon. In 1945, USS Arkansas saw its last major operations, taking part in the Battle of Iwo Jima and Okinawa and on both occasions supporting troops with artillery fire.
Unlike its sistership, USS Wyoming, the USS Arkansas features modernization that started at the beginning of World War II. During these modernization changes, the anti-mine caliber weapons were converted into anti-aircraft guns, as well as the armor being strengthened.
In total, USS Arkansas received 8 single mounted 76mm guns, 6 quadruple 28mm machine guns (known as the “Chicago piano”!) as well as 26 20mm Oerlikon machine guns. These additions meant that the USS Arkansas’ ability against enemy ships was reduced, but capability against enemy aircraft was increased: something the USS Wyoming lacked.
Battleship Marat
“Marat” (before being renamed to “Petropavlovsk”), like the other 3 ships from the Sevastopol project, were laid down at the St. Petersburg shipyards in 1909. This project intended to improve battleships based on combat experience that occurred during the Russo-Japanese War, and were the first “dreadnoughts” of the Russian fleet. Marat took part in the First World War, as well as the dramatic events of the October Revolution and the Civil War in Russia.
During the siege of Leningrad, the armor and guns of Marat were used to build a line of defense around the city. The Marat itself, whilst in the port of Kronstadt, conducted intense fire on advancing enemy troops. After continuous air raids, Marat partially sank, but despite this, still continued to provide artillery support to troops until 1944. In 1943, the ship’s name was returned, and after the war, the ship was renamed again to “Volkhov”. After this, the Marat was used as a training ship.
In War Thunder, Marat has been created in its 1940 modernization configuration. The main, distinguished features of this ship include: a powerful main artillery battery of 12 305mm guns, as well as massive armor, with defenses in the form of 76mm anti-aircraft guns, 37mm caliber anti-aircraft machine guns, and large-caliber machine guns. Anti-torpedo bulges as well as the Marat’s horizontal armor were not upgraded, which meant that it could reach a maximum speed of almost 22.9 knots (about 42.4 km/h).
I have mixed feelings about this. On one hand, decompression in both research and BR would be very nice. But more powerful ships are the last thing naval needs right now. Naval needs more polishing and improving and balancing of the core game and TT gap fillers(where’s my Derflingger class battlecruiser Gaijin?), not more powercreep.
Also these premium battleships are just going to make the botting issue even worse. How are you going to deal with that? Will the last month’s ban list nuke 2000+ botting accounts or something like that?
…I do sort of think that padding the two already best nations for naval with two more premium ships (especially battleships) maybe might be a bit of a bad idea
Even more so when there’s been a nation that just had their naval tree released that’s severely in need of competent vessels…
$70 is pricy for what you get especially since we seem to be both speeding towards and past super dreadnoughts.
Even when we get decompression I expect these will still encounter some of the monsters like Scharnhorst and Kronshtadt on the norm and spending that much for their experience of being beaten to a pulp by those I worry won’t help with the lagging player base.
I appreciate how well detailed and modeled ships are in this game compared to other naval based games but thats still a very pretty penny to spend for modernized early dreadnoughts.
Algerie, Dunkerque/Strasbourg, and La Galissoniere would make the French navy much more interesting yeah… Make people buy more premium time and vehicles to grind them as well. French navy is really unpopular rn because there aren’t any good ships.
This exactly, I really hope they actually have something lined up to try and fix the botting problem if they’re trying to sell us rank 5 premium battleships…
Very bad decision to make Tier VI in naval in such way. And especially bad decision to add premium BBs now. And that’s why:
Bot users problem isn’t solved. Now we’ll get bot users on BBs! And with current level of their aim-bot they can aim direct to ammo rack. So gameplay on cruisers will be destroyed, because vast majority of 6.7 online will contain bot users on BBs. Before add premium BBs, bot users should be banned, and some algorithms to determine suspicious activity should be added.
Problem of too many time to research ships won’t be solved. To solve it, you should have to move cruisers from Tier V to Tier IV, and to make folders with sister-ships.
It’s great that the community is expressing their concern over premium battleships, but is no one going to ask about the backstory of that bricks and fences camouflage the Marat has?
Worth noting it was called St. Petersburg for 200 years before Czar Nicholas II renamed it Petrograd in 1914 (to remove any German reference) and before the communists renamed it Leningrad in 1924 (to pay homage to Lenin after his death). St. Petersburg was founded in 1703 by Tsar Peter the Great.
Yeah I hope adding Rank VI and slightly reducing RP needed wasnt the proposed progression rework from the roadmap. The techtrees are truly in need of a rework and it would be best to split the modern fleet from the ww2 fleet and put them in seperate gamemodes. It just feels so weird shooting missiles in a game with ww1 / ww2 battleships. There are some really good proposals out there to do this and I hope they decide to look into it.
And yes, the current Coastal grind is really bad. Especially with ships at the top that are more often then not just worse then the reserve bluewater fleet. Meanwhile costing ~300.000 RP to research.
The Rank VI would have been nice… if i wasn’t playing the French Navy.
You see, i read that Gaijin will move the Lorraine to Rank VI and the thing is… i was wondering if i should buy the Dupleix or not.
I am close to have the Paris but if you move the Lorraine to rank VI, how the Dupleix could have any use for me then?
Our naval tree was just released and is severly lacking, i get that we are only an after though but come on, give us decent ships for their BR at least.
