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Is anybody else here in the World of Warships beta yet?

I am and so far it's pretty fun and it even seem reasonably well balanced. Personally, I'm terrible with destroyers, but the cruisers and battleships are great fun and I'm curious to see how the carriers will play. Does anybody else have any thoughts on it thus far?

What is the damage system actually based on?

I'm not 100% sure exactly how things are calculated, but I can tell you what I know for sure.

The game basically has two shell types for your guns at the moment (no 'gold' ammo as of yet) those being HE and AP.

HE is best used on soft targets like destroyers, certain classes or cruisers, and aircraft carriers. It does less damage per hit than AP, but it can cause fires (with a percentage of doing so per hit based on your current gun) and the game says it's best to aim it at the citadel. Fires can do some good damage and most ships seem to have 4-5 sections that can be set ablaze. Fires, and other damage like knocked out rudders and turrets, can be fixed with repair teams which all ships get for free but be careful using them too early as they're on a 1:30 cool down and if you're still taking fire you can fix one set of problems only to be left with a new set that you can get rid of.

AP is best fired at harder targets like armored cruisers and battleships, though I suspect that if their armor over-matches your shell by enough you'll want to switch back to HE at some point. You really don't want to fire this at the lighter ships because they can be over penetrated and you'll do next to no damage. The game says it's best aimed at engines and gun turrets so I always have to curb my desire to fire it right at the waterline and hope to sink them via flooding.

Many ships also have secondary guns which fire, with rather poor accuracy, at anything that gets within range. This is also how AA works, though with AA you can increase you odds of scoring hits if you can get an air wing within your guns optimal range.

The next weapons are ship launched torpedoes. These are mainly found on destroyers and the Japanese cruiser line, but a pair of mid tier American cruisers also get them. They're slow, both to reach their target and to reload, but they can do massive damage per hit and are the single best way to sink battleships in the game. One good salvo can take most of a battleship's health pool out as well as causing flooding and other nasty effects, against lighter targets even a pair of torpedoes could end you. One thing that helps to counter them is that you get warnings when they're in the water near you, but if you haven't been paying attention and are in a ship that doesn't maneuver well it may still be too late. Air launched torpedoes are much the same, but they do far less damage per hit.

Dive bombers are also in the game, but I don't know about them yet as I haven't played a carrier yet and haven't been targeted by any dive bombers while playing another ship. If I had to guess given their low damage output next to torpedoes I'd say they're the carriers version of HE shells doing better against softer targets and setting things on fire.

There are also fighters, which are often launched early into matches to shoot down scout planes and any bomber/torpedo wings that people try to sneak out in the first wave. I don't know how well they work at killing other aircraft, but I do see them in the air often enough that they must be of at least some effectiveness.

Last among planes are the scout planes which tend to be fitted to latter tier battleships and cruisers and do exactly what you'd expect them to do.

The various classes each get their own distinct roles within the fleet and all but the cruiser seem to get special abilities to help with these roles.

Destroyers are both your scouts and your battleship killers. They have tiny guns, no health, and even less armor but make it for it by being fast, nimble, hard to spot, and armed to the teeth with torpedo tubes. In addition to this they can lay down smoke screens which can help hide themselves as well as other ships in your fleet; this is on a long cool down so be sure you use it at the right time or risk being without it when you need to have it. I'm terrible with them, but in skilled hands they seem to pop up out of nowhere and drop torpedoes where you have no chance of dodging them.

Cruisers are the middle of the road in terms of both speed and number and caliber of guns. So far they don't have any special ability, but they do get some of the largest AA armament and tend to want to buddy up with battleships to screen them from both aircraft and destroyers. These are my favorites thus far because they're not dead slow to maneuver like the battleships are and they get to fire a lot of guns often which means you can take shots a BB would never chance and have a large chance of setting things on fire or knocking out subsystems.

Battleships are behemoths. Where an end game destroyer has hit points in the 20k range and end game cruisers have between 40-50k the Yamato (the only class of end game battleships currently in the game) has 97k health and armor to match. Their guns are also capable of dealing ~5.5k damage with HE and ~16k damage with AP penetrations. However both the ships and their guns are slow to turn and slow to reload. This isn't as bad as it seems though as they have massive range (the Yamato for example can fire end to end on the map and from a central position can hit anywhere that isn't in the lee of an island). They also get an action that can restore hit points meaning that if you let one escape it will heal back a large percentage of its health before reengaging your fleet.

Carriers play very differently from the other ships. I haven't seen it personally, but they seem to play in an RTS view where they direct their air wings towards various targets. Each carrier, in addition to only having a limited number of aircraft, can also only manage to operate a set number of wings at a time. So you have to manage defending your team with fighters versus going on the attack with torpedo and dive bombers. They don't have a ton of armor, but do have a large pool of hit points so even if you reach one in a cruiser or destroyer they might not be a one hit kill. Don't mistake them for WoT artillery as they are very different.

Disclaimer, I'm still new to the game and haven't done a ton of research on exactly how everything works so if this turns out to be wrong feel free to correct me.

Hm. That sounds promising from the point of view of "playable quasi-realism."

Color me interested... although I suspect that the hardware requirements are stricter than for World of Tanks?

the Yamato (the only class of end game battleships currently in the game)

What other classes of battleship are in the game?

It definitely sounds interesting. The damage mechanics as described remind me of Battlestations Midway.

Battlestations Midway was quite enjoyable, so perhaps I should check this out. It does sound fairly similar.

Indeed. I streed clear of World of Tanks because tank combat is not somthing I found very interesting. But if we can have honest-to-go big-gun dreadnoughts, I'm all over that.

Borgholio wrote:

the Yamato (the only class of end game battleships currently in the game)

What other classes of battleship are in the game?

Just a Japanese tree, Americans are coming later. Yamato is the tier 10.

Simon this is what I found for the system requirements, it was from a forum post but it seems to jive with what I'd expect.
I just took some quick screen shots of the tech trees from the closed beta, the gallery should be set to public, but let me know if you can't see anything.

Link to Gallery

Jub - access is restricted.

Try again now.

Looks neat so far...

I'll try to grab more of the stats when I'm not bagged from a night shift, but even then the UI doesn't make it easy to just grab the stats for a ship. If you want some game play footage I'd suggest checking out some of Jingles' videos.

Mm. Gonna have to wait until I get a new computer.

You could sign up for the beta and see how she runs, from what I hear if you can run WoT you can run this so you might be able to squeeze in depending on what kind of hiccups you can live with.

World of Tanks barely runs on my laptop, at a frame rate others assure me is "unplayable." They sure make it sound like this has at least incrementally higher requirements.

At least at the high end, it seems better optimized than WoT because I get 60 fps steady in ships and 30-40fps in tanks with the same settings.

As I am completely unfamiliar with WoT, is this a free game or something I have to pay for? If it's the latter, is it a one-off cost or a monthly thing?

WoT is F2P with the usual premium stuff available. This will likely be similar as their other game (World of Warplanes) is also 'freemium'.

Oh in that case I'll definitely give it a try.

Just got into the Closed Beta Test this morning. So far I'm having a blast with it, even though I'm not too good yet. The battleships don't really interest me, although American destroyers and carriers definitely do.

On that note, on the official forums, I may have just read the most wrong thing I have ever read:

Dumbass wrote: Carriers simply have to go. Do not even tell me that their performance ingame is even close to realistic. Just like how SPGs in World of Tanks WW2 did not have satellite view, fought 500m behind the frontlines and could hit a 5m target. They barely even used carriers in the Atlantic, and all they could do was sink stationary ships in harbor or submarines. Scharnhorst and Gneisenau crossed theChannel with the entire RAF looking for them and they came out without a scratch (taking damage from mines instead), while all planes could do to Bismarck was damage its rudder. They had to use battleships to destroy the Bismarck. In the Pacific, carriers again were worthless -only good for again attacking ships (Pearl Harbor) in port or other carriers (Midway). In fact, when battleships were deployed carriers had to run from them or be destroyed (Battle from Samar). At the end of the war, the Japanese had given up on planes as effective weapons and were ramming them into ships to get rid of them. When planes were sent to destroy the Yamato, by itself, it took 2 hours and took multiple carriers for her to be sunk. Given that an average WoW game lasts something like 10 minutes, a carrier should only be able to take down 10/120=8.3% of my battleship's life in a game rather than totally devastating her with one torpedo strike.

I'm not sure if I'm feeling more or about that one.

Might need to see about getting this though. I wanted it since I first knew of it, but I haven't had enough time to keep up on things.

To fill in the details - WoT, WoWP, and this new WoWS are all free-play games with various shiny things you can buy - "premium" time (extra XP/cash), exclusive (but pretty balanced) vehicles, and permanent camo/visual customization rather than paying in-game cash for limited time unlocks.

Or you can spend real money on superior ammunition (ACPR or HEAT) if you're a tragically unskilled oaf who should go back to quickscoping or whatever the CoD kids do these days.

(Also, holy shit that carrier post is hilarious ).

Venator wrote:Or you can spend real money on superior ammunition (ACPR or HEAT) if you're a tragically unskilled oaf who should go back to quickscoping or whatever the CoD kids do these days.

I don't know about plane's, but in tanks you can buy special ammo for credits and lots of the newer tanks seem to be balanced around gold being in play.