The French naval CBT is over! Meet the new heavy cruiser; Dupleix

Official News, Development Blogs and Updates
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We’re pleased to announce the end of the closed beta testing of the French bluewater navy and present a new French Premium heavy cruiser to boost your first steps in the mastering of the French ships!

Captains! The closed beta testing of the French bluewater navy is over! French warships are now available for research by all players, so hurry up to the bridge!

CBT participants have already trained their crews for perfect control of French ships, and so that newcomers can quickly compete with them in skill, we are pleased to announce the new French Suffren-class Dupleix heavy cruiser Premium to boost research in new ships and get a great bonus in Silver Lions!

Dupleix, heavy cruiser, France, rank IV. Premium

Features:

  • Improved protection
  • Linear layout of the main turrets
  • Good speed

Dupleix Pack

Download Wallpaper:
The Kit Includes:
  • Suffren-class, Dupleix, 1942 (Rank 4, France)
  • 2000 Golden Eagles
  • Premium account for 30 days
History▼

The Suffren-class Dupleix heavy cruiser was built under the 1925 program and had the same main guns and engines as the lead ship, but differed from her in armoring. By the beginning of WWII, the Dupleix with her sister ships Colbert and Foch served in the 1st Cruiser Division of the 3rd Squadron of the Mediterranean Fleet. Before the occupation of France, she took part in the search for the German ‘pocket battleship’ Admiral Graf Spee, the capture of the Santa Fe vessel, as well as the raid on Genoa. The Dupleix came under the control of the Vichy government and was scuttled in 1942 at Toulon after the Peace of Compiègne was signed. The remains of the cruiser were drowned by the Allies in 1944.

The French heavy cruiser Dupleix belongs to the Suffren class, which is already familiar to French navy testers from the cruiser Colbert. Rapid-firing 203mm main guns, good sailing performance and solid air defense capabilities are complemented by reinforced armor. Let’s see in detail.

So, the main difference between Dupleix from Colbert, aside from her Premium status, is a modified and improved armoring. While Colbert could only offer the captain a narrow 50mm armor belt along the hull, the Dupleix is slightly better protected. The plates of the main armor belt are 60 mm thick and, most importantly, cover a much larger area. On the sides of the hull in the central part of the hull, the plates descend below the waterline, the sections covering the main guns magazines at the bow and stern have an elongated profile. Internal protection of the boiler rooms has also been improved. Of course, this armor is not able to withstand most armor-piercing rounds even from light cruisers, but Dupleix can count on more stable protection of vital modules when being hit by cruisers’ HE and even semi-AP shells at acute angles.

The auxiliary guns have also been slightly changed. The Dupleix is armed with the same 90mm guns as the Colbert, but here they are placed in four twin mounts instead of eight single mounts. Anti-aircraft artillery is represented by four twin mounts of 37 mm cannons, a pair of quadruple Hotchkiss guns, as well as 13.2 mm Brownings for short range combat. Like her sister, the Dupleix also has a torpedo armament of a pair of three-tube launchers in the central part of the deck.

Reinforced armor obviously affects the mobility of the cruiser. Nevertheless, Dupleix can accelerate to quite tolerable for its class 32 knots (almost 60 km/h).

Purchase the Premium heavy cruiser Dupleix in the Gaijin online store and welcome aboard the ships of the French fleet in War Thunder!

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Why is she 5.7? What makes her better than Colbert aside from having 10mm more belt armor that covers a bit more area? As you say yourselves, this armor is not able to withstand most armor-piercing rounds even from light cruisers. And where are the proper AP shells for the main guns? We know data on the AP shell exists in the files.

She should be 5.3. But even then she’s not a good rank 4 premium at all, compared to all the other trees. You’re just not making the French tree that much enticing, even to hardcore naval players. There better be some good French ships coming in the next major update, such as Strasbourg, Algerie, and the La Galissoniere class(one of this class would have been the perfect rank 4 prem for the French navy but you had to just lazily copy&paste another poor Suffren class ship).

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Puh,… what a pricy piece of kit… for what it is…

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reading of cbt being over, are the french navy cbt medals in forum yet?

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This has absolutely no business being at the same BR as Myoko, Hipper, Prinz, Zara and Pola. Not only is the armor pretty poor for the BR, it doesn’t even have AP shells even though they existed. The game says it’s supposed to represent how the ship was in 1942, but doesn’t have ammo from 1936…

It’s like you’re going out of your way to make the French naval tree as unenticing as possible 😒

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Yup, it’s here already.

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The existence and exact details of that AP shell IRL is debated, as navweaps kindly mentions. But I’ve heard that the data for a French 203mm AP shell already exists in the game files regardless. They’re probably only gonna give it to the Algerie, since she has to be 5.7 or 6.0 due to the armor, and will absolutely need an AP shell to compete.

It would be great if the AP could be given to the Duquesne and Suffren classes as well of course.

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strange, where is mine then i got the decal ingame though

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Jean Moulin and John Jordan’s “French cruisers 1922-1956” does list them though.

Given that they had access to the French national archives, I’d believe them over gaijin on this one.
And besides, given that they literally made up a shell for Kronstadt, they have no ground to refuse this. I’m gonna try making a bug report for it.

And it’s done. Let’s hope they add it.
French heavy cruisers are missing their AP shells // Gaijin.net // Issues

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They already know about it. Why else would an AP shell be in the files? And I think a tech mod has already personally reported it way back.

That book is great. But it still doesn’t provide any details about whether that shell was AP or SAP. The French used the same “OPf” name for both SAP and AP shells. And that 123.1kg OPf Mle 1927 “AP” shell mentioned there is the SAP on the Colbert and Dupleix in-game. So there’s no reason to believe that the 134kg OPf Mle 1936 shell is also an AP shell, unless we can know the design details of that shell and the filler ratio, which is sadly not given in that book, or anywhere else AFAIK. We do have data on the 1927 shell and the filler is way too large for an AP shell, which is why it’s considered as SAP by most historians, and is SAP in-game.

The response to that bug report will basically repeat what I wrote above and flag it as ‘not a bug’, I assure you. Shell selections are mostly balance decisions, and such things do not get accepted as bug reports usually. Instead if you want those ships to get AP, you’ll have to complain on the forums.

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Also Kron’s AP isn’t “made up”. AFAIK it was one of many preliminary shell designs for that gun, or something close to it anyway, that did exist on paper IRL, just like everything else about that gun.

It seems like the data for the French 203mm AP is already partially made up anyway, since the filler is coded in as around 3.2kg, a figure that no source is able to list.

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https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/714246806648651777/1138908514731950100/image.png?width=491&height=630

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Even for the badge you made no effort…

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@Mobius_Einherjar I’ve posted the screenshot.

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They had years to prepare the French naval tree, and the archives at Chetellerault are pretty easy to access. Wargaming had absolutely zero issue with them for World of Warships, and in fact even commented on how easy it was to get information.
If Gaijin couldn’t get the information, frankly that’s on them at this point.

This argument doesn’t really works considering that cruisers that are better armored do get access to their AP shells at the same BR. There’s no reasonable “balance” argument for their exclusion.

Something that didn’t actually exist IRL and only on paper isn’t exactly the most convincing argument for its existence. There’s a world of difference between how things are expected to perform on paper and what happens in real life. The Kirov-class cruiser is a good example of that: Its effective rate of fire was essentially half of what it was designed due to the cramped turret space and the guns suffered from excessive dispersion due to the proximity of the barrels.

And “it existed on paper” certainly is less real than “multiple trustworthy sources says this shell existed and was in service”, so my point remains that Gaijin has no ground to refuse to add it.

Thanks for taking the time to datamine that, I genuinely appreciate it.
However, until it’s actually implemented in game I won’t be cutting gaijin any slack on this subject, especially given their response to the bug report:

So not only do they expect us to pay 55€/$/whatever for the Dupleix, but they apparently also expect us to do their damn job for them. For free.

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In France there is an expression that describes Gaijin well “Partisans of the least effort”.

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They’ve always been lazy as **** when it comes to historical research especially regarding naval and even more so for “minor” nations, expecting the community to find and report any issues, and then taking very long to actually implement them. I know it’s frustrating, trust me, but we just shouldn’t expect much from them. We’re the ones that are actually passionate about the game, not them(or at least their higher-ups). They only care about making as much money with as little effort as possible.

And WoWs doesn’t need that much real life data for their ships, since most of it will have to be all made up anyway(for example they don’t need shell filler data at all, like we do here). It’s a different story from WT.

I should have put “balance” in quotation marks there myself. Of course I don’t agree with the decision, and there sense of “balance” is totally random and weird. But it is what it is, and we have to complain in order to change their mind about such decisions.

But many other real life limitations are also ignored in the game, whether for simplicity or gameplay convenience. It’s okay as long as the same standards are used across all nations, as is the case with the Kirov’s reload. The game uses the highest official trials RoF documented for each gun system(using that word since same guns can be fitted with different loading systems on different ships), and that figure for Kirov is indeed 5.5 rpm. That figure might be bloated or falsely documented, but then there’s no concrete proof of that. That figure isn’t what was expected from that gun system as designed, which was 6 rpm.

Some guns, such as most French guns, actually have their in-game RoF artificially boosted over even their highest official trials figures and close to their design figures, in order to make them competitive(you probably know that most French guns had woefully poor RoF in both trials and actual combat IRL). So there’s that.

Dispersions are a bit of a different story. The game uses standardized arbitrary dispersion parameters that are the same for all guns with the same(or similar within a couple of milimeters) caliber, except for Russian guns which have less dispersion than guns of the same caliber because of Russian bias. It’s BS, I know. But this also means that other guns which had relatively excessive dispersion IRL, such as many Italian guns(because they also had close barrels and high MV, something that the Russians actually copied from them), don’t have such issues in-game.

As for the Kron’s shell, there’s really no other choice, when the gun itself is paper as well. If you don’t want the gun to have paper shells, you should argue that the ship herself shouldn’t have been added in the first place or added with actually built German guns and shells that were intended for her, which is a totally legitimate argument, even though I personally don’t agree with all of it.

I told you they wouldn’t accept it as a bug. I know Mag, he’s an absolutely stellar naval historical researcher himself, and aside from his voluntary tech mod position(which he was invited to take thanks to his numerous meticulously researched and passionate reports, and he accepted it only so he could make and pass his own reports faster and help pass others’ reports), he’s just another player who wants the game to be more historically accurate and is as frustrated as anyone else with Gaijin’s inconsistencies and lazy research. I’m pretty sure he wants the French heavy cruisers to get their AP as much as anyone else here. He’s also the one who provided me with the information about that AP being in the files, and the one who provided me with the screenshot.

But ultimately that statement about your bug report is techinically true, as I said above. If Jordan and Moulin, as well as Campbell, couldn’t find more detailed info on that shell in the French archives, nobody else can. As shown in the screenshot, Gaijin has already made that shell, doing some creative guesswork on the data that isn’t available. I’m pretty sure that they will give it to the Algérie whenever she comes, but not giving it to the Suffren class currently is completely a “balance” decision that we have to make them change through the forums and other platforms, but maybe not through the bug report system.

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Anybody used this ship in Battle, is it worth getting ?

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Me and honestly it’s a pasted copy of the Colbert but with less DCA and the little DCA present are exclusively concentrated at the back of the boat. It loses crew at the same speed as the Colbert, it has the same firepower and less speed. The extra bit of shielding is useless and it has 0.4 more BR which makes the difference.

In summary it is less good but at a higher BR than the Colbert.

So apart from the premium bonus it’s not a good investment in my opinion.

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the Colbert in general just under perform currently because the sap is so low pen they really need the ap shell