At the moment, due to the fact that I only have a weak ultrabook at hand, I can only play comfortably on ships. I avoided them until now, as I found them boring. Battles long, the whole point is to left-click the mouse towards the enemy. Plus they are looking for a very long time, several minutes.
Somehow, after a bunch of years was able to buy Hipper. Battles played with different colors. Now I could finally do something useful instead of eating leftovers for bigger ships. Ended up with a bunch of questions about gameplay and stuff.
How do you shoot properly? I could kind of figure out how, but I’d like to improve my performance.
What are the best projectiles to use in the current meta game?
Is it normal that cannons, caliber 200+mm can not vanshot destroyer? Even gunboats can take a hit sometimes.
What German ships 5.7+ best played? I’m halfway through the Grapf, but from the feedback from my friend who has it, it’s not a very good ship.
What is the best way to farm experience in naval combat?
I’ve been trying to find answers to all these questions, but there’s no video. Not even any actual entertaining videos on the mouth. Apparently the fleet is dead for good, since even bloggers don’t make videos. And if the player doesn’t care about it, then the developers don’t care twice as much.
The rangefinder only considers horizontal movement (at least in Realistic, don’t know how the Arcade rangefinder circle works), so you’ll have to increase/decrease range depending on whether the enemy is moving away or towards you, respectively. You can fire ranging shots to get the offset right. As you gain more experience, you can also adjust your aim to account for the enemy’s acceleration/deceleration and turn (increase lead if enemy accelerating, decrease lead if decelerating or turning). I also bind everything to my keyboard (arrow keys for horizontal and range adjustments, F for firing, R for ranging shot, Command+T to centre on target) so I rarely have to touch my mouse, but that’s personal preference.
Depends on enemy type, but generally HE and SAP. HE works very well against everything up to 5.3, and still does okay against late cruisers, but won’t do much damage to battleships/battlecruisers except for clearing their deck crew. SAP works well against cruisers and some battleships due to its penetration and the ability to explode inside the enemy ship, but it has less filler than HE so it does less damage against light targets. If your HE can penetrate the enemy armour, don’t use SAP (unless you want to one-shot their magazine). AP should only be used if you really need to kill an enemy but can’t penetrate their armour; I never use AP, unless it’s effectively the only ammo type I can use (I hate US battleships). It has meagre explosive filler, so it will take forever if you try to wear down the enemy crew. Aim for the magazines and hope to get an ammo rack explosion instead.
Yes, that’s expected. I think hull break is only implemented for costal vehicles, so the only way to one-shot a bluewater ship (even a small destroyer) is to explode their magazine. I’m not sure why gunboats can survive a hit, but maybe naval hull break is only triggered by HE (when ground battles still had hull break I think even APFSDS could trigger it), so AP shells could overpenetrate without immediately destroying the boat.
Can’t really answer that since I haven’t played German naval, but in the current meta, fire rate and damage are more important than penetration, and I think quite a few high tier German ships do well at that (e.g. Scharnhorst).
Can’t give a definitive answer on that either, but I think the majority of the battle reward (or the SL reward anyway) is gained through damage to enemy rather than number of ships destroyed, so I’ve heard people recommend using HE to slowly wear down enemies and do as much damage as possible instead of trying to one-shot them. There are also lots of bots automatically generated by the system that use lower tier ships or even costal boats, so you can pick on them to gain easy rewards while avoiding fighting other players (especially if you’re uptiered).
Naval is in a very bad state right now in terms of compression, balance, and gameplay. Unfortunately, it seems to have formed a vicious cycle: naval is bad → people don’t play naval → dev team hear fewer complains about naval compared to ground and air → dev team puts relatively less time and resources into naval → naval gets worse. There was a blogger I watched who almost exclusively did videos on naval (they had been playing naval since it was first introduced to WT), but gave up and left the game because they were frustrated by the lack of development and the overall terrible state of the mode.
Alternatively, set range correction to scroll wheel and ranging shot to scroll wheel click if you’d prefer that.
I think another vicious cycle exist here too: People won’t play Naval because compression is bad ↔ Devs don’t decompress because it will add to the queue time due to low player count
In AB the rangefinder gives you the amount of lead required, but you still have to elevate or depress to account for range changes.
This updates about 30 seconds I think - so if it looks like teh enemy is slowing or increasing it’s transverse speed you have to adjust manually.
Aim for range by putting the horizontal line in your sight below teh target (coming towards you so aim shorter) or above the target if going away - aim longer.
Depends on target and type of gun - the more armor it has the more “AP” you want - so HE is good against small and unarmoured ships, SAP a little better vs those with more armour, but also 12" AP will wreck destroyers fast enough that you may not ned to change to something with more explosives, and changing ammo in battleships takes a long time.
Yep
Graff is fine for what it is - a bit of a derp heavy cruiser - and it is best played like that. Also set it to use ranging fore with singe guns, not the entire turret.
Play games, kill the enemy, cap points - just like everywhere else in WT - the formula doesn’t change just because you have wet feet.
But there are often a lot more bots, and they can be easy experience as they are not so good at dodging as players!
I understand the basics, I understand how to play in general. But the point is that I’d like to delve into the nuances, and it’s very painful and hard to find them by poking around. I wanted to find guides, but there are none.
Usually fights look like this for me
Got it. I’m a little confused though. You say HE shells are better than AP. But until I learnt AP, I had low performance. Nowadays I shoot almost all targets with AP shells, although sometimes I use SAP against destroyers, and the effectiveness doesn’t change much.
That’s a trick I know, I’ve been using it for a long time. The point of the question was more about what is the best way to shoot. Shooting just at the hull, trying to get a little higher to penetrate the deck. Or somehow get under the waterline? (By the way, how to do that? I’ve never been able to do that) These are the subtleties I’m interested in.
I think so, too. Only the developers started this vicious circle
Ah, looks like that’s a general difference between different tech trees. On US ships (which are the ones I’m most familiar with), there is a very dramatic difference in explosive filler between shell types: HE typically has 2 to 3 times more TNT than SAP, and 6 to 10 times more TNT than AP. I’ve just checked the stats on a few German ships (which I presume is the tree you’re mostly playing), and the difference between shell types (at least a low to mid tiers) is much smaller: HE has almost the same TNT filler as SAP and only about 2 times more than AP. In that case the shell type doesn’t matter as much, although still keep it in mind, since the difference gets a bit more pronounced in higher tiers (though still not as large as US ships). German ships generally get very good SAP shells, so it’s possible to purely use those in battle.
Getting “plunging fire” through the deck is almost impossible in WT due to the short combat ranges.
Just shooting at the hull works fine in most cases. Even when facing higher tier ships with strong main belt armour, SAP shells can usually go through the weaker armour above the main belt and deal some crew damage, and of course if your AP is strong enough you can punch through their citadel armour to deal great damage and force the enemy to repair. You can also blindly blast their deck crew with HE to gain some easy rewards, and if the enemy is foolish enough to repair their AA guns while under fire, they’re going to suffer from the reload penalty.
Going under the waterline is technically possible, but fairly uncommon. You usually only try that if you want to explode their magazine. Use AP shells (SAP shells probably work too, but you’re looking for maximum penetration in this case and magazines always explode on a direct hit anyway) and set the range a bit shorter than usual and aim under their turrets (which means you’re going to be aiming a bit off centre from the rangefinder mark, unless they have turrets midships). There’s a lot of luck involved when shooting under the waterline, so it shouldn’t be your first choice of engagement. Of course, if you’re in a downtier you can turn your brain off and just blast away (thanks, BR compression!).
When you are confident to aim at a part o fa ship, shoot at the turrets - KO the armament, and also if your shots are a little low you may hit magazines.
Also move your aim along the ship from time to time - you will kill more crew and damage more structures by hitting undamaged parts.
