Although balance changes over time mean that some information may be outdated, the collection stands as a cornerstone of community-driven analysis and remains an important reference for understanding ship roles, strengths, and design.

Special Note: Some links may not direct to the correct text or image(s).  This is currently a work in progress due to the volume of reviews.

HolycowwhatisYahagiMouseandisitanygoodnowthatitisfinallyout?
Well, I'm glad you asked.  Yahagi is a typical Japanese premium.  You may begin groaning now.

What Good About Her:  Torpedoes, mostly.  Yahagi has two center line mounted, quadruple torpedo launchers.  These torpedoes deal 17,233 damage each with a 60 knot top speed and a 12km range.
What's Bad About Her:  Torpedoes, mostly.  Yahagi's torpedo launchers have horrible firing arcs, a 120 second reload timer and a 1.6km detection range.  This gives enemies about 10 seconds worth of reaction time.

Yubari players should find this familiar.

Is that All?  No, let's break it down by section:

Firepower

I've already gone over her torpedoes, so let's talk about her guns.  Yahagi has only six of them and they're pretty bad, even with their 14.9km range.  With a nine second reload, you're not winning any DPM races even with her improved HE damage.  Furthermore, her AP penetration is the worst at her tier, behind Omaha and Marblehead.  She has less than 100mm worth of AP penetration at 7km and with terrible ballistics to match.  If you're familiar with Royal Navy 152mm gun ballistics, Yahagi's are slightly more floaty than those.  She has some 76mm secondaries, but these have only 12mm worth of penetration so...

Durability

Yahagi has a modest hit point pool, slightly on the small side.  Her cardinal sin, however, is her 60mm citadel belt which sits over the waterline for the length of the ship between her two masts.  Her extremities are also only 13mm thick, so she can be overmatched by 203mm AP shells, so watch yourself.

Agility

This is admittedly pretty good.  Yahagi has some long legs with a 35 knot top speed and great rudder shift time.  Her turning radius is on the chubtacular side at 690m, which in turn hurts her rotation rate.  Still, that quick rudder shift is nice and that top speed is nicer.  On top of this, she has access to the Engine Boost consumable, providing an extra 8% speed for 120s.  Slap on the Sierra Mike signal and activate this consumable and Yahagi will do almost 40 knots. Speed solves a lot of problems in World of Warships, I ain't gonna lie, so this is pretty nice to have.

Anti Aircraft Firepower

The big one until patch 0.8.9 rolls around and applies a big ol' kick to the junk to Hosho.  Yahagi's personal AA defense is pretty good, but only for personal use.  It's too short ranged to lend support to anyone, but it has enough volume of fire at those ranges to bruise a squadron, not stop it outright.  She has a fighter consumable, first of all, so that will make some CV players a little gun shy.  Keep in mind, there's only 2 fighters in the air group, so it's not like it's going to gut the incoming squadron all by itself.  She does not have access to Defensive AA Fire.

Refrigerator

She's pretty good here..  She has access to Hydroacoustic Search and her aforementioned Catapult Fighter to help with detection, so that's good.  Her surface detection is 11.34km base, getting down to 9.9km with Concealment Expert on your commander and her camouflage.  This isn't great, but it's not bad.  I give it a pass.

Overall Impressions

She's a Japanese Omaha with worse guns, more speed and better torpedoes.  Her fragility will let you down in all sorts of short-lived, hilarious ways.  But that speed and those fish are going to make her pretty good in the hands of an expert player.  Her fire chance isn't terrible either, so she's going to pretty competitive in the harassment department.  Just watch out for Royal Navy battleship HE shells, they will ruin your day even if they don't hit you.  They break everything. 

Overall, if I had to play a six gun Japanese cruiser, I'd much rather have Furutaka, but that's because Furutaka is bloody amazing.  Yahagi is not.  Yahagi is very not amazing. 

The following is a review of Cheshire, the tier VIII British heavy cruiser.  This ship was kindly provided to me by Wargaming for review purposes.  To the best of my knowledge, the performance and statistics discussed in this review are current as of patch 0.9.3.1.  Please be aware that the ship may change in the future.

Quick Summary:   A stealthy, but terribly squishy British heavy cruiser with a small battery of powerful 234mm guns.

PROS

• AP shells can overmatch 16mm worth of armour, including the extremities of many lower-tier cruisers and destroyers.
• Good AP penetration and improved auto-ricochet angles.
• Excellent HE penetration, capable of directly damaging most battleship decks.
• Good gun handling with 10º/s gun rotation rate.
• Excellent AA firepower.  No, really.  Yeah, I'm surprised too.
• Stealthy, with a surface detection as low as 9.5km.
• British "portable dry dock" Repair Party, healing up to 40% of her health per charge before modifiers.

CONS

• Only six main battery guns, greatly reducing her alpha-strike and DPM.
• Her "stepped" citadel presents a shell-trap for large caliber battleship AP shells.
• Only modest gun fire angles, leaves her vulnerable to return fire from AP shells.
• Mediocre range on main battery guns for so vulnerable a ship.
• Torpedoes are short ranged at 8km.

Overview

Skill Floor:  Simple / Casual/ CHALLENGING / Difficult
Skill Ceiling:  Low / MODERATE / High / Extreme

This ship doesn't do anyone any favours, new players least of all.  Like the tier VII Pensacola of years prior, Cheshire is a lemon that will punish you for simply choosing to shoot your guns at the wrong time.  As players become more familiar with the foibles of the British heavies, Cheshire (and her sister Albemarle) will become primary targets for the farming of easy Devastating Strike medals.

For veterans, as appealing as the on-paper potential for this ship appears, in practice she's just too fragile to really feel worthwhile.  You can do better in almost any other ship where skills like angling, island use, etc will serve you much better.

Options

Consumables

There's nothing much out of the ordinary here short of her god-tier healing potion.  Keep in mind that all consumables will be the premium version soon so I'm just listing those values.

• Cheshire's Damage Control Party is standard for a cruiser with a 60s reset timer.  It's active for 5 seconds and has unlimited charges.
• Her Repair Party heals back up to 40% of her health base per charge over 20 seconds.  She starts with two charges with a reset timer of 80s.
• You have the choice between two consumables in her last slot.  Both consumables start with three charges base.  Her Defensive AA Fire is active for 40s, increasing sustained DPS by 50% and explosion damage by 300%.  It has an 80s reset timer.
  Her Hydroacoustic Search is active for 100s.  It detects torpedoes at 3.5km and ships at 5km.  It has a 120s reset timer.

Upgrades

Start with Main Armaments Modification 1.

In your second slot, Hydroacoustic Search Modification 1 is optimal if you can afford it.  Obviously this dictates that you'll be eschewing using Defensive AA Fire but that's okay. This will set you back 17,000 Coal.  Otherwise, default to Engine Room Protection.

Aiming System Modification 1 is really the only upgrade worth taking in slot three.

You have a choice in slot 4 depending on how you like to play.  If you prefer island humping, then Propulsion System Modification 1 is preferable to improve your acceleration from a standstill.  Otherwise, Steering Gears Modification 1 is your best bet.

ER MAH GERD choice in slot 5!?  Well, it's not really.  Concealment System Modification 1 is still optimal.  But, for the sake of argument, let's look at Ship Consumables Modification 1 and how it affects her consumables:

• With this, her Damage Control Party will now last 5.5 seconds.  Yawn.
• Cheshire's Hydroacoustic Search will increase from 100s to 110s (or to 132s if you have Hydroacoustic Search Modification 1 installed).  This is nice.  It's not game changing, but it's nice.
• Her Defensive AA Fire increases from 40s to 44s ... which doesn't really help.  The duration of Defensive AA Fire was never the issue, but rather the damage it does.
• And here's the juicy bit:  Her Repair Party adds another 2 ticks worth of healing -- or between 4% and 4.8% of her total health depending on if you're using the India Delta signal or not.  This amounts to an additional 1,700 to 2,040hp per charge used with an upper maximum of 6,120 additional hp with three charges blown.

So, is that worth giving up Concealment System Modification 1?  Heck no.  But Ship Consumables Modification 1 isn't terrible.  It's just that Concealment System Modification 1 is (still) too damn good.

Captain Skills

Cheshire isn't a very skill-hungry boat.  For the first 10 skill points, take the usual suspects.

• Your choice of a tier 1 skill -- I prefer Priority Target to let me know when my doom is nigh.
• Adrenaline Rush is optimal at tier 2.
• Through my play-testing, I used Superintendent as my skill of choice at tier 3, thinking I would get to make use of my Repair Party's extra heal.
• And to no one's surprise, Concealment Expert rounds things off at tier 4.

Pick and choose your favourites for your remaining points.

Camouflage

Cheshire has two camouflage options:  Type 10 and Victorian White camouflage.  They both provide identical bonuses:

• -3% surface detection
• +4% increased dispersion of enemy shells.
• -10% to post-battle service costs.
• +50% experience earned.

I do like the camouflage schemes for Cheshire. She's a nice looking ship.

Firepower

Main Battery:  Six 234mm/50 guns in 3x2 turrets in an A-B-X superfiring configuration.
Secondaries:  Sixteen 113mm/45 guns in 8x2 turrets with four mounted each side in superfiring forward and rear positions.
Torpedoes:  Eight tubes in 2×4 launchers with one on each side mounted in the hull beneath the first funnel.

Celebratory Pew-Pews

Let's start with Cheshire's secondaries because they're largely forgettable.  They are decent for cruiser secondaries.  However, given that Wargaming has yet to implement any cruiser with kick-butt secondaries 'decent' doesn't matter.  At least they have 19mm of penetration, so they're capable of directly damaging anything she faces.  Their high rate of fire does spit out a lot of shells.  But without phenomenal range or improved accuracy, they're just window dressing.

I did kill a Dallas with one, so that was fun.

The muzzle blasts off of Cheshire's guns are huge.

Are 234mm guns worthwhile?

This is the big question at the core of not only Cheshire's worth, but her higher-tiered sisters as well.

• What's the big deal with large-caliber guns on a cruiser?
• What can they do that faster-firing (or more plentiful) 203mm guns can't?
• What are their drawbacks?
• And finally, are they any good?

In theory, a larger caliber gun provides inherent benefits over its smaller brethren.  These include higher penetration values for both HE and AP shells, including energy retention over distance (which factors both into penetration and ballistics).  In addition, the shells will individually cause more damage and have a higher chance of starting fires.  The final benefit is that depending on the size of the shells, it's possible for their AP rounds to overmatch key armour values, ignoring ricochet mechanics.  These benefits are typically off-set by a smaller number of barrels, a larger dispersion area, a slower rate of fire and worse gun handling.  In summary, larger guns make it more likely that individual hits will cause significant damage but with fewer hits overall compared to smaller-caliber guns.

Whether or not this exchange is worthwhile depends upon just how much these guns gain versus how much they surrender.  For the sake of Cheshire's 234mm caliber weapons, we have a direct same-tier analogue to compare them to in the form of Albemarle's 203mm armament.

Alpha versus DPM

You would think that larger caliber guns, though fewer in number, would allow you to deliver more devastating volleys.  The idea being that while you might not shoot as often, the fewer salvos hit harder. I wish that were the case.  Let's take Albemarle vs Cheshire as an example.

• Citadel Penetrations (AP):  40,500 Albemarle vs 34,500 Cheshire
• Citadel Penetration (HE):  29,700 Albemarle vs 23,100 Cheshire
• Penetration (AP):  13,365 Albemarle vs 11,385 Cheshire
• Penetration (HE):  9,801 Albemarle vs 7,623 Cheshire

Yeah, so that's a wash.  A small bump up in gun caliber size does not provide an advantage in damage output on anything but a per-shell basis.  So the increased shell damage does not make up for a three-gun deficit (though in theory it could make up for a two-gun deficit).  Understandably, with a slower reload, the gap only opens up further.

And it's not like Cheshire's reload is particularly slow either.  Let me be clear, one of her gimmicks is the accelerated reload on her main battery guns.  Drake and Goliath, using the same weapons, have a base reload time of 18 seconds.  This can be modified down on these ships with the use of Main Battery Modification 3, providing them with a 15.8 second reload.  Cheshire, meanwhile, boasts a 12.5s reload timer which is amazing -- this is a half second faster than Albemarle.

So if there's any benefit to be found here, it has to be on how easily it is to make those shells deal damage rather than the damage potential itself.   Cheshire's raw damage output values suck, so every hit needs to count.

A cruiser with only six heavy guns has crappy DPM. Who knew?

AP Performance

Cheshire's AP shells are pretty good at ensuring they deal damage compared to 203mm AP shells found on Albemarle.  I say 'pretty good' and not 'great'.  There are three factors where they hold an advantage over her counterpart.

1. She has high penetration.
2. She has improved auto-ricochet angles.
3. She has overmatch potential against a key structural armour value.

]
Cheshire has Baltimore's AP penetration values with Japanese 203mm ballistics. Note that while Cheshire does have slightly improved auto-ricochet angles, they are not on par with Baltimore's. Her AP shells feel less effective overall because of this, even though they have about the same punch over distance.

British 234mm AP shells have higher penetration than 203mm guns -- enough that it matters, but not so much where it's an advantage except at very close ranges.  Like with HE shells, AP penetration values are important when they cross various functional thresholds -- like being enough to citadel cruisers at very long ranges or having enough to penetrate battleship belt armour at specific distances.  Cheshire (and British 234mm guns in general) are capable of both of these things.  Albemarle struggles but can still manage the former and is generally unable to do the latter.  Understandably, this provides Cheshire with a bit more utility out of her AP shells -- at least in theory.

That theory is much harder to put into practice.  Punching through battleship belt armour is only possible at suicidal ranges -- well within 7km.  At such distances, you're better suited to making use of her torpedoes rather than relying on the bite of her AP shells.  I suppose every little bit helps, especially given that not all cruisers are capable of doing so.   At least against cruisers, her AP shells are much more reliable, with enough extra penetration to contend with the relative increase in armour thickness due to angling.  Of course, this only works up to a point.

Curiously, Cheshire's 234mm AP shells have slightly improved auto-ricochet angles, though only slightly -- Cheshire's AP shells automatically ricochet at an angle of 65º instead of 60º though the chance for it to happen still starts at 45º.  This runs contrary to the 234mm AP shells found on Goliath and Drake -- so it's something special found only on Cheshire.

So it's less likely that Cheshire's shells will slide off before getting a chance to punch in, but only slightly.  For example, 203mm AP shells normally have a 50/50 chance of ricocheting at 52º or so.  That doesn't happen to Cheshire until about 55º.  This a far cry from the American auto-ricochet angles, which on Baltimore run from 60º to 67.5º,  This keeps Cheshire's AP from being a universal shell.

Still, there are some targets that even angling against Cheshire will not avail them.  Her AP shells can overmatch 16mm hull sections; an important armour threshold being found on the extremities and hulls of tier VI and VII heavy cruisers and tier VIII+ very light cruisers.  It's also the armour value found tier VI and VII destroyer hull forms, providing the 234mm AP shells a whole range of targets where they need not wait for perfect broadsides in order to be effective.  So that's kinda nice, if a bit of a niche superpower that 203mm AP shells can't pull off themselves.

I did get a chance to put it to good effect against a Dallas in a brawl during playtesting which was nice -- he couldn't angle against me while I was able to smash shells down the length of his hull even when he angled.  But that was one time in all of my play-testing.  Matchmaking was part to blame in this -- being continually up-tiered meant that there were fewer targets where Cheshire's overmatch could be used, but even seeing an opponent I could overmatch didn't guarantee that I would have an opportunity to do so.

These three elements make Cheshire's AP shells more useful than the AP shells of Albemarle though they don't stray into the potency of American Piercing shells which can be used a lot more often.  So British 234mm AP shells are "more gooder" than Albemarle's 203mm AP shells, but I'd argue they're not good enough to make up for that alpha / DPM disparity.

HE Performance

The big numbers to concern ourselves with here are the thresholds needed to directly damage various parts of tier VIII+ battleships. These thresholds are: 1.) Their extremities (32mm) 2.) The upper hull and amidship deck of British & French battleships (32mm) 3.) The amidships deck of American battleships (38mm), 4.) The amidships deck of German battleships 50mm 4.) The amidships deck of Japanese battleships (57mm) 5.)  The amidships deck of Soviet battleships (60mm).

There is one thing, and one thing only to get excited over in regards to Cheshire's HE performance and that's her improved HE penetration.  Cheshire has 59mm of base HE penetration as opposed to the 39mm she would be expected to have.  This crosses an important (albeit, not crucial) threshold, allowing her to directly damage the amidship decks of many battleships along with the infamous extended armoured prows of Soviet ships.

This, to me, creates a target preference for Cheshire . Specifically, she's better suited to hammering any vessel with extensive deck armour which includes most high-tier battleships (with the exception of the French and British) than most 203mm armed heavy cruisers.  Cheshire is capable of stacking direct damage here where other cruisers will have their damage partially mitigated by shells that stray onto these thicker armoured sections.

As nice as this is for Cheshire, it's a bit of a booby prize.  While it does allow her to damage a wider variety of targets, when it comes to that DPM disparity mentioned previously, this advantage only comes into play in those select circumstances.  HE penetration is a binary after all -- you can either penetrate or your shells shatter.  There's no advantage to having more than you need.  There's no point to Cheshire's 59mm of HE penetration when she's shooting up a destroyer or light cruiser.

Thus, the only way her 234mm HE shells keep up with Albemarle's 203mm guns is through farming damage off of select battleships.  That's really it.

I've included the FPM of heavy cruisers using IFHE for the sake of comparison when trying to encroach upon Cheshire's massive penetration values (don't do this, it's silly). Overall, Cheshire is not a bad fire starter for a heavy cruiser. She's not great, mind you,but she's not bad.

Cheshire may single fire her torpedoes like other British ships which is nice. I wish she had more range.  These weapons are nice and hard hitting and could have done a lot to pad her mediocre gun DPM.

But are they worth it?

Heck no.

Look, 234mm guns aren't terrible but short of pounding high-tier battleships with HE, Cheshire's main battery firepower offers nothing worthwhile.  They didn't stand up to a direct comparison to Albemarle's guns and they're no rock stars, so where does that leave these things?

Well, not in a good place. This isn't a ship that kills anything quickly, and that can be a real problem if she doesn't have the longevity to farm meaningful damage.  To me, this means that the ship better have some miracle or gimmicks buried in the hull itself in order to make it worthwhile.  Sadly, these don't materialize in her weapon systems.

While Cheshire's six-guns are definitely a hurdle to overcome, I lay a lot of the blame with this ship's performance on her range.  Her 16.1km main battery reach and her 8km range on her torpedoes makes maximizing Cheshire's firepower difficult.  As you'll see in later sections regarding this ship, she just doesn't stand up to return fire.  More range would have provided her with at least the semblance of being able to dodge.  At 17.5km or more, I think I would have felt a lot more comfortable in this ship. 10km fish wouldn't have hurt either.

In short, Cheshire's firepower is just plain bad.  Her main battery guns can't keep up.  Her torpedoes are too short ranged to be used in any role save that of desperation and cruiser secondaries are (still) not worth it.

Like London, Cheshire's fire arcs aren't particularly good but at least they're consistent. For those wondering, "good" entails being able to fire 30º off the long axis of the ship, allowing the ship to fire while still giving her the best chance to take advantage of auto-ricochet mechanics.  Still, Cheshire's 10º/s gun traverse is sexy.

Verdict:   Awful because she only has six guns.  Also her torpedoes are too short ranged, but mostly because she only has six guns.

Defense

Hit Points: 42,500
Minimum Bow & Deck Armour: 25mm extremities with 30mm plating and deck amidships.
Maximum Citadel Protection:  152mm belt armour
Torpedo Damage Reduction: 19%

With Cheshire's firepower woes, I was really (REALLY) hoping for some miracles in regards to her durability.  I was an early optimist until I started playing this damn thing.  Lemme show you why:

[
Cheshire is a certified chungus.

Look at that.  Big healthy heals and a pretty chunky hit point pool to boot.  Awesome!  There's a whole lot to love here -- namely that Repair Party isn't a universal upgrade at tier VIII and just having one is a pretty solid advantage.  Having a British "portable drydock" which heals back up to 40% of the ship's health per charge is amazing.  In theory, Cheshire is built to outlast most of her contemporaries, which should largely make up for any deficits in her firepower.

In theory.

Cheshire's 30mm deck stands out -- normally tier VIII heavy cruisers only have 27mm thick decks. This does provide some benefits against small caliber HE shells from destroyers and overmatch protection against battleship caliber AP shells smaller than 429mm.

That all falls apart when you realize that her protection scheme is a joke.  Her citadel is specifically designed to maximize the number of citadel hits she takes -- I wish I was kidding.  It's nigh impossible to angle Cheshire successfully against battleship fire of 380mm caliber or greater.  Every incoming salvo is potentially world ending.  She practically prints Devastating Strike medals for enemy battleships if they catch her out in the open, which means the best protection she could hope for is a big ol' rock to hide behind.

The guilty party here is Cheshire's "stepped" citadel. Not only does this section sit up significantly higher (and let's keep in mind, the rest of Cheshire's citadel already peeks over the waterline), but the upright angles ensure that battleship caliber shells that are slamming down the length of the ship will still smack against the citadel if they're aimed high.  Furthermore, it creates a weak point where ships capable of overmatching her 27mm upper hull can STILL dunk shots into her citadel when she's steeply angled where as other cruisers could at least content themselves that their belt armour will keep out the worst of it.  And, while Cheshire does have some hull sections that can ricochet up to 381mm AP shells, her soft bow and stern provide openings that even these will get through.  This isn't a problem unique to Cheshire, it's shared by Albemarle and to a lesser degree by Goliath.  But spreading the pain doesn't make this any more acceptable.

Kiting and dodging in open water a fool's errand -- any shots that come in are potentially lethal.  When Cheshire is top tier, on the rare occasions where she's facing 356mm armed battleships (or smaller), surprise-surprise, she becomes a little monster.  But banking on that kind of Matchmaking is a fool's errand for a tier VIII cruiser.

I'm no stranger to playing squishy cruisers, but I'm used to there being some trade-off for it.  Maybe the ship has excellent firepower.  Maybe her consumables are amazing.  Maybe she has excellent agility and speed to facilitate dodging. Maybe her Repair Party could come off cooldown very quickly?  I dunno, I would expect something for all of Cheshire's woes.

So here's the bad news. That 'hump' of Cheshire's stepped citadel is her Achilles' heel. It's too easy to hit and it makes angling in this ship next to impossible against high penetration AP shells.  Oh, those thick citadel decks will also guarantee that AP bombs wreck you thoroughly.

Verdict:  Her Repair Party is amazing.  Too bad she can't survive long enough to take advantage of it.

Agility

Top Speed: 34kts
Turning Radius: 720m
Rudder Shift Time: 10.5s
4/4 Engine Speed Rate of Turn: 5.8º/s

On the whole, I have to give Cheshire decent marks here.  Her top speed is respectable for a cruiser.  Her turning radius isn't horrible.  Her rate of turn is acceptable.  The only real glaring flaw is her rudder shift time and even that's not irredeemable.  Don't get me wrong, she could certainly be better -- but she's not terrible.  The only thing that I wish she had was better acceleration, especially given her love of island-humping.  That can be partially corrected by taking Propulsion Modification 1 but that would preclude her from fixing her rudder shift time with Steering Gears Modification 1.  I certainly value the former over the latter given the current meta.

Given Cheshire's firepower and durability problems, "respectable" agility just doesn't cut it.  In of itself, Cheshire's agility would be fine for a heavy cruiser -- even good, but with everything else stacked against this ship, it's just not enough.  I would kill for her to have British light cruiser improved engine power -- to make taking shelter behind islands easier or to facilitate dodging.  I would love it if she was even two knots faster, to make running down destroyers or dodging in open water feel a bit more viable, but it's just not there.

Man, I've gotten to re-use this graphic three times now. All the time saved makes me very happy.

VERDICT:  She's not terrible, but she doesn't stand out here in a good or bad way.

Anti-Aircraft Defense

Flak Bursts: 7 explosions for 1,470 damage per blast
Long Ranged (up to 5.8km):   168dps at 90% accuracy
Medium Ranged (up to 2.5km):  228dps at 90% accuracy
Short Ranged (up to 2.0km):  249dps at 85% accuracy

Cheshire has some truly monstrous levels of AA firepower -- it's enough to grant her near immunity to tier VI carriers.  This, of course, translates to merely inconveniencing tier VIII and X aircraft carriers.  Cheshire will shoot down a lot of planes.  Given that she's not starved for commander skill points, you could even go so far as to spend a few towards boosting her AA performance further if you were so inclined.

This ship has to be good at something, after all.

With apologies (still) to the colour-blind. Cheshire has arguably the best AA firepower of any tier VIII vessel.  Unless it was show-stopping levels of air-defense, you couldn't sell me a premium based on its AA firpower, though.

Verdict:  Really good.  Like, "make tier VI carriers cry" levels of good.

Refrigerator

Base/Minimum Surface Detection: 12.1km/9.51km
Base/Minimum Air Detection Range: 7.51km/6.08km
Detection Range When Firing in Smoke: 7.5km
Main Battery Firing Range: 16.1km

Cheshire has good surface detection values.  They're not great, but they're good.  Any cruiser capable of dropping their concealment below the 10km range is really nice and I can't complain here at all about Cheshire's concealment values.  Had this been paired with benefits anywhere else, such as agility, durability, firepower, good consumables, etc, I would probably be singing this ship's praises, but here we are.

Cheshire doesn't interact well with smoke -- her 7.5km detection range when opening fire is scarcely better than her improved surface detection so she can't dare follow destroyers in to take advantage of their advanced smoke screens.  Again, this further relegates this ship to humping islands and hoping against hope that she's an unappealing target.

Verdict:  Good, but not enough to save the ship.

Final Evaluation

I'm not going to mince words here.  I hate this ship.  I hate playing it.  I'm glad this review is over.  I'm not touching it again until Wargaming does something to improve her lot.  Cheshire offers nothing, nothing of value.  Her 234mm guns with their improved HE penetration could have been a very interesting armament but their performance stops well short of that mark.  This ship needs more range, more agility and/or a faster reload before I would consider her to be a worthwhile investment.

Even in co-op battles, while it's certainly possible to do well, you're not really gaining anything over taking out Albemarle instead.  Yes, you might be able to get a few more HE penetrations on high-tier battleships, but you could get the same if you just stuck to peppering superstructures or the bows with 203mm guns.  While overmatching the snoots of charging tier VI and VII bot-cruisers with AP shells is entertaining, it's not worth the price paid to acquire this ship.

I'm sorry I didn't get this review out sooner.  Keep well clear of this failure.

Conclusion

Reviewing Cheshire has been really taxing.  My enjoyment of World of Warships was severely compromised with having to keep coming back to this damn thing.  It's bad enough to play a bad ship, but it makes every little frustration just that much more poignant.  Anyway, it's over, finally.  I'm going to go do something else for a bit to recharge my batteries.

The following is a review of San Diego, the tier VIII premium American Cruiser, brought to you by my patrons on Patreon.  To the best of my knowledge, the statistics discussed in this review are current as of patch 0.11.11.  Please be aware that her performance may change in the future.

PROS

• Heavy armament of sixteen 127mm guns, capable of delivering a 14-gun broadside.
• Improved ballistics.
• She has access to semi armour piercing (SAP) ammunition.
• Excellent gun handling.
• Unlike most American cruisers, she has torpedoes!
• Agile, with a small turning radius and good rate of turn.
• Decent concealment from the sea and air.
• Massive glut of consumables, including:
• a Repair Party that always queues a minimum of 50% of damage received.
• a Hydroacoustic Search on its own slot (as opposed to sharing it with DFAA).
• a Special Defensive AA Fire consumable with a shorter reset timer and increased sustained DPS.
• and access to a limited Main Battery Reload Booster.

CONS

• Tiny hit point pool for a tier VIII cruiser at 27,900hp.
• Her armour may as well be made of paper, providing almost no protection to even destroyer calibre guns.
• Slow base reload for a 127mm armed ship of 5.5 seconds.
• Low damage on her SAP shells for their calibre.
• No HE shells whatsoever, so unable to start fires.
• Limited range of 14.82km
• Painfully short-ranged torpedoes with only a 4.5km reach.
• When her Defensive AA Fire consumable is on cooldown, her AA is weak.
• Her Main Battery Reload Booster only provides a 33.3% speed increase and a painfully long 180 second reset timer.
• So many consumables to micromanage

Overview

Skill Floor:  Simple / Casual / CHALLENGING / Difficult
Skill Ceiling:  Low / Moderate / HIGH / Extreme

New fish: stay away.

San Diego is not a good ship for new players.  She's too fragile and too reliant on using (and abusing) spotting mechanics to stay alive.  Knowing where to setup and when to shoot or not is life and death in this ship and that's only going to frustrate inexperienced players.  Even her ammunition choice has a pitfall with her AP being heavily situational.  While I would like to think most will stick to SAP, I know there's going to be someone out there who wonders why they can't make the ship's ammo work.  And I pity the poor newbie that buys here thinking that her AA will always be strong. The only reason I didn't give this ship a Difficult evaluation is that she has heals and her SAP is pretty brainless once you learn to load it to the exclusion of all else.

For a veteran player, there's so much to know.  SAP trivializes ammunition choice, but there are times where her AP can net you more overall damage if you know when to use it  She has a ton of consumables to micromanage.  Her AA can be troll if a CV isn't prepared for it so you can lay an ambush if that's your thing.  Using and abusing concealment is huge.  So too is knowing what large calibre AP shells can and cannot fuse on your citadel at what range.  Her Hydroacoustic Search combined with her good concealment gives her some limited (but powerful) vision control too.

Options

Consumables

• San Diego's  Damage Control Party is standard for a cruiser.  It comes with unlimited charges, a 5 second active period and a 60 second reset timer.
• Her Repair Party comes with three charges.  It heals up to 14% of San Diego's starting HP per charge over 28 seconds.  She queues of 50% of all shell, bomb, rocket and torpedo damage received, regardless if they are citadel hits or merely penetrations.  San Diego recovers 100% of fire, flood and ramming damage.  This has a standard 80 second reset timer.
• San Diego's Hydroacoustic Search is standard for a tier VIII cruiser.  This detects torpedoes at 3.5km, surface ships at 5km and submarines running deep at 2km.  It has a 100 second active period and a 120 second reset timer.  San Diego starts with three charges.
• One of the ship's selling features is her Defensive AA Fire consumable.  It has a shorter active period of 30 seconds instead of the usual 40, but this also comes with a shorter reset timer of 60 seconds instead of 80 seconds.  While she doesn't get unlimited charges like Atlanta and Flint, she does get the American cruiser bonus of an additional charge.  This gives her 4 charges total instead of 3 other cruisers have.  But most importantly, San Diego's consumable increases her sustained AA DPS by 100% instead of the nominal 50%.  Her flak damage is unchanged at +300%.
• Finally, she has access to a weird Main Battery Reload Booster.  It increases her rate of fire by 33.3% for 15 seconds, dropping her reload from 5.5 seconds to 3.67 seconds.  She comes with two charges and this has a 180 second reset timer.

Upgrades

Sadly, there are no AA upgrades worth taking.

• Start with Main Armaments Modification 1 in the first slot.
• Then move on to Hydroacoustic Search Modification 1 which will cost you 17,000  in the Armory.  if you cannot afford that, then default to Engine Room Protection.
• Aiming System Modification 1 is the best choice in the third slot with no competitors.
• You have a gameplay choice in her fourth slot:
• Propulsion Modification 1 is the best choice.  Islands will keep you safe and using the extra acceleration to make the best use of them is the smart-play.
• If you prefer to live dangerously then you can go for Steering Gears Modification 1.
• Concealment Modification 1 is your best choice in slot five.  Though, you can try and double-down on open-water kiting by taking Steering Gears Modification 2. Just be advised that you lose your ability to ambush aircraft.

Commander Skills

San Diego isn't starved for commander skill points like similarly armed American light cruisers.  Her lack of HE shells frees her up from the obvious Inertial Fuse for HE Shells and Demolition Expert points sinks.  Thus, you can build her for a full AA spec if you wanted to without much of a depreciation in efficiency when engaging conventional surface targets.

• Start with Last Stand.  San Diego's rudder and engines break even from near misses from HE shells.
• Next, you have your choice between Priority Target (my favourite pick here), Consumable Enhancements or you can get the jump on your AA build with Focus Fire Training.
• Heavy HE and SAP Shells is the best choice at tier 3. 
• Finish off with Concealment Expert.

If you didn't take Priority Target at tier 2, you're going to want to pick it up or Incoming Fire Alert at tier 1 ASAP.  From here, you can spend your remaining 10/11 points how you wish.  I would grab Superintendent as a priority given her reliance on consumables (though admittedly, it's uncommon for you to have a match where you'll exhaust even one of them).  If you're looking to maximize her AA build then AA Defense and ASW Expert should perhaps come before that.  Afterwards you can double back to some of the tier 2 skills listed before or grab from the following:  Consumables Specialist (1pt), Survivability Expert (3pts), Adrenaline Rush (3pts) or Radio Location (4pts).

Here's the build I settled on for my test games:

Camouflage

San Diego is presently sold with only her default camouflage.  However, when she was initially released, there was also a promotional 1776 camouflage available in some bundles.

The 1776 Camouflage was available in bundles when San Diego was first sold.  This was a cosmetic swap and did not provide any additional economic bonuses.

Her default "San Diego" camouflage can be palette swapped from white & black to grey and purply-blue upon completion of part of the American Cruisers Collection.

Firepower
Main Battery:  Sixteen 127mm/38 guns in an A-B-C / P-Q / X-Y-Z layout.  A-B-C turrets superfire forwards.  X-Y-Z superfire to the rear.  P and Q are wing turrets, able to cover only one side.
Torpedoes:  Eight tubes in 2x4 launchers in wing mounts just ahead of P and Q turret on their respective sides.

Mad Mouse

I hate San Diego's guns.

I say this as someone who loves American 127mm/38s.  I have over 500 Random Battle games in Atlanta between various accounts and plenty more in various other game modes..  I love Atlanta's guns.  I was really hoping that with San Diego at tier VIII, we'd finally get to play an Atlanta-class with their historic, blistering rate of fire instead of the throttled one necessary to keep Atlanta in check at tier VII.  But sadly, San Diego doesn't inherit Atlanta's guns.  They pay only lip service to the Atlanta-class in general and frankly, her guns do not have the same fun feel of the lead-ship.  This was done to make room for the various gimmicks necessary to make San Diego behave more like Austin, the tier X ship whose game-design she borrows.

This doesn't mean that San Diego's guns aren't effective.  They are.  That, by their very definition precludes them from being Atlanta-class guns, as American 127mm/38s, with their wonky ballistics and poor penetration, are temperamental (at best!) at this tier.  But they're not Atlanta-class weapons. This is arguably a feature instead of a flaw so long as you dismiss or are disdainful of history exerting even a minor bit of influence over game play. 

This is 180 AP shells fired at a stationary Fuso bot at a range of 13km.  Normally I do 15km but neither ship can reach that far.  Shells are coming in from right to left (the Fuso is bow-tanking).  Both San Diego (left) and Atlanta (right) were using Aiming Systems Modification 1.  San Diego uses cruiser horizontal dispersion (range x 6.9 +33m) and 2.05 sigma instead of destroyer horizontal dispersion (range x 7.5 +15m) and 1.7 sigma like Atlanta and Flint.  Destroyer dispersion is much tighter at the engagement distances these cruisers fight, so despite San Diego's improved sigma, she's not as accurate as her sister ships.  The flatter trajectory and shorter flight time on San Diego's shells helps with aiming, but her accuracy is ever-so slightly more influenced by RNG.  The rounder shape of Atlanta's dispersion pattern comes, in part, from the steeper angle at which the shells are falling.

San Diego's ballistics have been conjured from the realm of make-believe.  Gone are Atlanta's infamous (and downright hilarious) rainbow arcs.  Instead, San Diego's shells have a ballistic quality that sits almost perfectly between Cleveland's 152mm rounds and the 203mm rounds of Baltimore.  Seriously, these 127mm guns have better ballistics than a 152mm gun.  This was made possible by throwing out any pretense of consistency with previous 127mm/38 weapons.  Wargaming artificially boosted the mass of San Diego's shells by around 10% while also their air resistance down by nearly half.  These shells are thus heavier than they should be and less affected by drag, allowing them to preserve speed over distance. For those familiar with Royal Navy 152mm ballistics on their light cruisers, they behave almost identically up to 11km with around a 0.3 second flight time difference to San Diego's maximum reach of 14.8km.  This poor maximum reach is one of San Diego's drawbacks making her very dependent upon concealment and hard cover to permit her to engage her targets.  This is nothing new for American cruisers, however.

I wasn't kidding.  San Diego's ballistics slot in right between American 152mm and 203mm shells.  They fly as if they were some imaginary 180mm round.

Their second deviation from the expected Atlanta-class norm comes in the form of their rate of fire.  For 127mm/38 guns, especially high-tier 127mm/38s, San Diego's reload is slow.  This can be temporarily amended with the use of her Main Battery Reload Booster consumable, though even this results in a slower rate of fire than 127mm/38 armed destroyers and only SLIGHTLY better than Atlanta's own rate of fire. 

Now, this is to be expected with San Diego's access to SAP ammunition.  You need only look at Italian ships to see that both their cruisers and battleships with SAP shells fire more slowly than those who sling HE.  But as we'll see, San Diego's SAP is weird.

These are approximate shell counts over 60 seconds worth of firing.  San Diego has better short-term burst than Atlanta but loses out over long-term sustained fire.  However, only Flint is truly capable of holding down the trigger reliably for prolonged periods of time thanks to her Smoke Generator. 

One Ammunition to Rule Them All

San Diego is a SAP delivery system.  Her SAP sucks butts, though, at least relative to what you might normally expect from SAP ammunition.

In World of Warships, SAP follows the following behaviours, generally speaking:

• SAP deals higher damage relative to other shell types of comparable calibre
• SAP has much higher penetration than HE. (HE usually has penetration equivalent to 1/6th or 1/4 of its shell diameter while SAP is slightly higher than 1/4 shell diameter plus a little extra)¹

This comes with five trade-offs:

• Guns that shoot SAP usually have a longer reload than guns that do not fire SAP.  This leads to lower DPM even once you account for the bonus damage SAP does.
• SAP shells have a chance of ricocheting, but this is only at extreme angles.
• SAP shells have no blast radius and thus cannot damage internal modules at all and can only damage an external module if they strike it directly.
• SAP shells cannot start fires.

This all said, having access to SAP is an advantage.  The high penetration of SAP rounds and front-loaded damage outweighs the numerous drawbacks.  It allows ships to engage a greater range of targets effectively while simultaneously giving the ship a more potent alpha-strike. So you hit harder and you can hurt more ships directly than you could with HE.  Dealing a lot of damage early on in an engagement is usually enough to decide encounters on the short term.  Players tend to get a little squirrelly when a huge chunk of their health goes missing in a single volley.  So what's the issue with San Diego's version of SAP?

San Diego doesn't deal increased damage with her SAP.  At a maximum of 1,800 damage per hit, her SAP shells have the same alpha strike as other 127mm/38 HE rounds all while maintaining most the same list of flaws normally afflicting SAP, but not all.  If increased penetration over 127mm/38 HE shells were the only compensation, San Diego would be a very hard sell over Flint and Atlanta. However, Wargaming made some concessions.

1. As we already discussed, San Diego was given (much) improved ballistics with her guns.
2. She has a faster rate of fire than we might otherwise expect for a SAP armed weapon.  Yes, San Diego is slow firing for an Atlanta-class, but for a SAP firing ship, she shoots more quickly than we would expect.  She trades alpha strike from singular broadsides to a sustained burst between her quicker reload and access to her Main Battery Reload Booster.

San Diego's SAP ammunition makes her preferred prey different from Atlanta's.  Atlanta is a destroyer-hunter.  Atlanta works best scattering the roaches at suicidal close-ranges.  Atlanta's Surveillance Radar digs out soft ships hiding in smoke and her HE shells and high DPM go to work at shredding them inside of 10km.  San Diego isn't anywhere near as effective in this role.   She lacks the bug-spray consumable, for one.. Her extra penetration also goes to waste against such targets.  Her SAP's inability to break engines or lighting them on fire also makes it much easier for lolibotes to escape. Similarly, the ricochet chance of her shells can make finishing off fleeing targets frustrating. So destroyer-hunting really isn't San Diego's best fit.  She can do it, but she's not specialized for it.  What San Diego can do is front-load her damage onto bigger ships like there's no tomorrow.

Harassing cruisers and battleships is San Diego's bread and butter.  If she does catch out a destroyer, she can spank it, but she risks over-exposing herself to do it.  She has to clear cover to bring those weapons to bear and that makes her a juicy target for return fire.  Once a DD turns tail, the chances of finishing it off gets much more difficult, so why risk engaging them in the first place?  Instead, it's best for San Diego to set up shop behind an island and hose down targets of opportunity.  Punch cruisers  in the nose that tries to peak out from behind an island. If a battleship tries to push, hose them down with SAP until he turns around (he will).  Harass.  Displace.  Harass again.  That's what San Diego's guns are good for.  Unlike fire-reliant ships, San Diego's SAP is harder for battleships and high-tiered cruisers to heal through, so that's an added plus.

SAP is San Diego's mainstay.  She paid a dear price to have access to it, so you had better use it.

San Diego's torpedoes have good stats everywhere except their range.  You're only going to use them if someone (either you or your opponent) screws up.

AP Shells & Torpedoes

Any time you can use San Diego's AP shells or torpedoes effectively will be memorable.

Her torpedoes are largely a weapon of desperation.  Their 4.5km range means that they only get used when someone screws up (who that is depends on who dies in the following moments).  By and large, you can forget San Diego has them.  Those rare opportunities where they become relevant are always funny, though.

San Diego's AP rounds are a trap.  Yes, they have improved ballistics.  Yes, their penetration is much better than comparable AP shells fired from other 127mm/38 guns.  Yes, they do more damage than San Diego's SAP shells.  However, they do not have "good" penetration overall for an AP shell.  They also lack any form of improved auto-ricochet mechanics.  It's best to imagine San Diego's AP as being comparable to the AP shells off a Cleveland-class.  San Diego has better ballistics but worse penetration.  The short fuse timers on San Diego's shells makes them better (but not yet ideal) for hammering softer sections of larger ships, like upper hulls and particularly bulky superstructures.  However, this same short fuse timer makes them struggle to land citadel hits against ships whose machine spaces and magazines don't abut against the hull's exterior.  Anytime your shells ricochet or overpenetrate, that's lost damage compared to having spammed SAP at those areas instead.

If an enemy big ship like a cruiser or battleship is offering a flat broadside and has a lot of squishy places for her AP to bite in? You can try your luck in padding a bit of extra damage with AP..  The same goes for close in brawls; just be aware you don't have the improved auto-ricochet angles that your SAP rounds do.  Novice players will find San Diego's AP frustrating.  Experienced players can use it to nudge their average numbers up in the correct situation, such as punching into bunkers in operations.  And like San Diego's torpedoes, those moments when AP clinches an engagement will always be amusing.

The improved ballistics of her shells gives her AP a bit more bite, but not enough to make them particularly competitive.  If you wouldn't fire AP from Cleveland at a given target, then it's best to hold off on doing the same with San Diego's AP.

Summary

San Diego is a cruiser-killer.  Her high penetration SAP is relatively reliable at medium ranges and she can stack damage quickly, at least until saturation begins to throttle her damage.  She is less than ideal in a destroyer-hunting role and her efficacy against battleships is mixed.  She does well against battleships with softer skins like the British, French and some American vessels, but has a harder time against Soviet, Italian and German ones.  Her game play focuses around the proper use of island cover, setting up supporting fire and displacing to either follow the flow of battle or to avoid reprisals.

Opportunities to use anything other than SAP will come up on occasion.  However, you can go a full game (or three) without needing to reach for AP or torpedoes.

San Diego's gun handling is excellent, traversing at 25º/s.  She doesn't quite clone Atlanta's firing arcs.  The two ships differ slightly towards the rear with one of the forward turrets on Atlanta not quite managing to reach as far over the shoulder as the other two.  While I would have loved to have seen 300º coverage on everything but her wing turrets, it's not that much of a loss given San Diego's easily overmatched armour.  Everything thrown at you hurts, so a couple of degrees off auto-ricochet angles isn't going to ruin your day.  Overall, her fire arcs are fairly comfy and it's easy to bring most of her guns to bear with just a light touch of her rudder if needs be.

VERDICT:  Generally effective. Situationally, San Diego's guns are incredibly strong but only in her area of expertise.  Pick on larger ships.  Help out on destroyers and subs when you can, but that's not your main job.

Durability
Hit Points: 27,900
Bow & stern / superstructure / upper-hull / amidships-deck:  16mm / 13mm / 16mm / 16mm
Maximum Citadel Protection: 89mm belt
Torpedo Damage Reduction:  None

San Diego shares the soft armour profile of a "very light cruiser", like the British light cruiser tech tree.  This gives her 16mm extremities instead of the usual 25mm.  This makes her more vulnerable to all kinds of damage, most notably destroyer calibre HE and small calibre rockets.  Everything thrown at San Diego hurts.  Furthermore, her 'stepped' citadel ends up being an inconvenient shell trap, 'catching' AP shells that blast down the easily-overmatched length of the ship.  San Diego has a habit of popping very suddenly when she comes under the attention of battleship calibre guns.

The best thing that could be said about San Diego's durability is that she has access to a Repair Party consumable.  Other than that, her durability is a total disaster.

She has "very light cruiser" structural plate; a mere 16mm on her bow, stern, decks and upper hull, capable of being overmatched by any AP or SAP shell that's 229mm or greater in size.  This same, thin armour plate allows even the French 100mm HE Shells off battleship secondaries to damage her directly.  Her citadel protection is thin, but not so thin that it cannot arm any size of battleship shell presently in the game. The ship is also fat enough that, unlike Smolensk, there's enough girth amidships to allow most (but not all) battleship shells time to explode after being fused. And worse, the 'stepped' geometry of the citadel creates convenient shell traps if the hits slam down the length of the ship.  If all of that wasn't bad enough, San Diego has less than 30,000 hit points -- the second lowest base total at her tier at the time this article was written.  Oh, and she has no anti-torpedo protection either, not that this is uncommon for cruisers.

So yeah, San Diego's a total glass cannon.  As I said earlier, her only redeemable feature is her Repair Party consumable.  Even that's not really remarkable. The best thing about it is that it treats all penetration damage equally, queuing up 50% of all penetration damage taken even if it's a citadel hit.  But San Diego's heals are not the chunktacular portable-drydock version that the British Royal Navy has access to.  More shame that.  This isn't a ship where you want to trade body blows.  Your Repair Party will barely keep you in a fight through incidental, unavoidable damage.  Maybe.

This fragility dictates San Diego's play style.  Either bring a friend and borrow their smoke screens or camp islands like your life depends upon it.  Because it does. 

With FORTY cruisers at tier VIII, graphical comparisons of EVERYTHING are just a silly, cluttered mess at this point.

This is (mostly) the same info, showing the highest and lowest health along with the average and mean for both the base hit point totals and the theoretical maximum (minus unique commanders).  San Diego has the second lowest base health at her tier, though thanks to her access to heals, she sits in the upper half for overall health.

VERDICT:  Yikes.  Don't get shot.

Agility
Top Speed: 32.5 knots
Turning Radius: 610 meters
Rudder Shift Time: 7.3 seconds
4/4 Engine Speed Rate of Turn: 6.6º/s at 26kts
Main Battery Traverse Rate: 25º/s

San Diego isn't a fast ship.  Her 32.5 knot top speed is downright pedestrian and she struggles to control engagement distance ranges because of it.  At tier VIII, she increasingly needs to contend with fast battleships and faster cruisers.  Keeping a wary eye on the flow of battle is a must or she can find herself exposed.

San Diego has one of the tightest turning circle radius of any of the tier VIII cruisers, best only by Tiger '59 presently.  The Atlanta-class are quite agile at tier VII and carrying that over to a tier VIII ship, where turning circle radius begin to balloon up to ridiculous levels just exaggerates this disparity further.  She doesn't quite feel destroyer levels of agile, though.  Her rudder shift time is solid for a cruiser, but not destroyer quick, so there's a been of clumsiness to her handling still.  You can correct this by taking Steering Gears Modification 1, if you wish, but I find myself prefering Propulsion System Modification 1 given how dependant San Diego is at peeking out behind islands.  Your own mileage may vary.  Still, pair this with her excellent gun handling and it's very easy to get San Diego pointed to where she needs to.

Overall?  Good marks here but not the best.  San Diego would need some type of manoeuvrability gimmick to be truly remarkable in this category.  An Engine Boost consumable might have done it, or perhaps some of the zany acceleration or energy retention some of the British light cruisers enjoy when at full engine power.  Heck, even having a top speed in excess of 35 knots would do. She lacks any of this, so she simply remains a light cruiser with a tight rate of turn but held back by a modest top speed.

Most American cruisers have a similar top speed, with only 1 knot of variance between the slowest and fastest ships at tier VIII. Thus as their turning radius increases, their rate of turn goes down steadily.  San Diego handles so well because she has the same top speed as Cleveland and Baltimore but enjoys a tiny turning radius by comparison.  If Cleveland's turning radius seems a bit out of place, it's not just you.  Both Cleveland and Montpelier bleed too much speed in a turn, behaving like a battleship in this regard instead of a cruiser.  Cleveland should be coming about at 6.1º/s, slightly better than Wichita which owes its great handling to its higher top speed relative to most of its peers.

VERDICT:  Good turning radius and that's about it.  It'll do.

Anti-Aircraft Defence
Flak Bursts: 6 + 1 explosions for 1,540 damage per blast at 3.5km to 5.8km.
Long Ranged (up to 5.8 km):  168 dps at 90% accuracy (151.2 dps)
Medium Ranged (up to 3.5 km): 91 dps at 90% accuracy (81.9 dps)
Short Ranged (up to 2 km): 115.5 dps at 85% accuracy (98.2 dps)

AA DPS by Aura

Total AA DPS

San Diego illustrates a lot of the present problems with the current AA system in World of Warships.  San Diego's AA defences are duct-taped together by her Defensive AA Fire consumable.  Without it, her AA is pretty terrible. 

The primary issue comes down to the present AA system being overly reliant upon flak.  If flak were indeed a reliable threat to enemy CV predation, then San Diego's AA firepower would be excellent. While it may work well in PVE modes, dealing flak damage in PVP is the exception, remarkable for when it occurs (and about as hilarious as a Devastating Strike against a ship).  And because Wargaming over-values flak, the rest of San Diego's damage output suffers.

It's not that San Diego's AA is incapable of being good.  It's more of an issue on what being "good" actually means in the context of AA firepower within the game's present meta.  "Good" means you do a lot of damage to incoming squadrons.  It does not mean that it will prevent your ship from taking damage or significantly mitigate the damage done by individual attack runs.  While an enemy CV may think twice about entering San Diego's protected airspace for fear of sustained casualties, if necessary, many carriers (especially the higher tiered carriers) are still capable of bloodying this soft-skinned ship.

With this said, lower tiered carriers should fear testing San Diego's AA defences for fear that she may have Defensive AA Fire at the ready.

San Diego's Strengths

There are three redeeming elements to San Diego's AA firepower.

1. San Diego's sustained AA DPS is front-loaded into her dual-purpose main battery guns.  Her 127mm/38 guns generate nearly 46% of San Diego's total sustained AA DPS output.  Thus, she does more damage sooner to incoming aircraft.  Secondly, it also makes her more effective at lending support to nearby allied ships.  San Diego's support is worth more than other vessels grace of this long-range damage.  Finally, her large calibre AA mounts are more durable than dual-purpose guns mounted as secondaries.  San Diego's large calibre AA guns have 2,000hp base instead of the more typical 1,200hp found on secondaries.
    
2. San Diego is less "skill point hungry" than other ships, facilitating the inclusion of AA boosting skills.  As discussed earlier in the commander skill section, the lack of HE makes it easier to afford experimenting with San Diego's commander skill build.  This makes it easier to afford these skills without compromising her anti-surface warfare abilities significantly.
    
3. San Diego has an improved version of the Defensive AA Fire consumable.  She receives a 100% buff to sustained AA DPS instead of just 50% like other cruisers.  In addition, the reset timer of her consumable is a mere 60 seconds instead of the normal 80.

It's point #3 that salvages everything.  But let's go over point #2. 

With Defensive AA Fire active but no other buffs, San Diego puts out comparable damage to Cleveland, Mainz or Baltimore.  Unlike these other ships, however, San Diego is more likely to have a host of the AA skill improvements (if not all of them) that buff this value further.  This only applies if San Diego has a commander with a skill build dedicated to this ship, however.  There are few other cruisers (premium or otherwise) that would work well with that build.  Thus it's hard to say how often carriers will encounter dedicated AA specialized San Diegos.  I ran one during testing, but I recognize that this may be the exception rather than the rule.  Still, the potential is there.

Actual video footage of San Diego vs Enterprise in World of Warships.  Sandy's doing something.  We're just not sure if the tier VIII carrier will actually notice...

VERDICT:  Unremarkable (and even disappointing) when stock.  Fully upgraded and with Defensive AA Fire active, she's a credible threat to incoming squadrons.  This will make her a no-fly zone to some carriers but it will not guarantee immunity from air attack.

Refrigerator
Base/Minimum Surface Detection: 11.43 km / 9.26 km
Base/Minimum Air Detection Range: 7.16 km / 5.8 km
Detection Range When Firing in Smoke: 5.13km
Maximum Firing Range:  14.82km

Being a Sneaky Butt

San Diego is a stealthy momo.  There's just a handful of numbers you need to keep in mind.  When it comes to surface detection, she is:

• The 6th stealthiest cruiser at her tier out of 40 ships.
• She ranks 12th out of 97 cruisers when she's top tier (facing tiers VI, VII and VIII)
• She ranks 8th out of 99 cruisers when she's middle tier  (facing tiers VII, VIII and IX)
• She ranks 9th out of 93 cruisers when she's bottom tier (facing tiers VIII, IX and X)
• Out of all of the cruisers presently in her matchmaking, she ranks 15th out of 140 cruisers, which is pretty damn good.

Some of these ships that are more stealthy than San Diego are much more stealthy, exceeding her best surface detection by more than 300m and as much as nearly 1km.  This is enough time for a given player to react to spotting her (though not necessarily enough to prevent being mutually detected).  This said, it's rare for San Diego to be among the screening surface vessels.  She doesn't have the speed, never mind the durability, to be in the van.  The only time she's detecting things with her face are (a) when you're being dumb and (b) when the game is almost over.  Still, it's a nice trait to have and it facilitates disengaging when things invariably go pear shaped.

More importantly, San Diego's aerial detection matches the reach of long range AA batteries. Provided she has not yet given away her position by being tripped over by an enterprising lolibote or submarine, it's entirely possible for San Diego to stage an initial interception of enemy aircraft.  If you've specialized for AA, this kind of ambush is all kinds of rewarding, especially if the poor aircraft were coming more-or-less right for you as opposed to at an angle.  They might not be able to turn away in time to avoid a mauling.

Atlanta & Flint, She is Not

As good as ambushing aircraft from concealment and not being visible from space might be, San Diego doesn't live up to her pedigree.  Yes, she has access to Hydroacoustic Search on it's own dedicated slot, and that's nice, but that's it. That's all she gets for additional vision control consumables.  She doesn't have access to Atlanta's Surveillance Radar.  She doesn't get Flint's Smoke Generator (and a sexy American Smoke Generator at that!). The only thing more fun than ambushing aircraft  is ambushing aircraft in the guise of an angry smoke cloud. And this, to me, is probably the most disappointing aspect about San Diego:  because of the lack of these radar or smoke, her game play is largely relegated to that of the rest of the American tech tree cruisers:  Hump islands, bombard ships that get too close.  But even here, she ends up losing out because she can't set those sweet, sweet fires.  Boo-urns.

Lemme be clear, San Diego doesn't need these consumables to be balanced.  She just offers less utility because of their lack.  So because of this lack, she gets a mediocre rating here.  She doesn't bring anything compelling to the table.

VERDICT:  Good surface and aerial stealth ratings, but lacklustre otherwise. 

Anti-Submarine Warfare

ASW Armament Type:  Airstrike from 0.5km to 7km (plus part of the bomb drop column)
Number of Salvos:  Two
Reload Time:  30 seconds

Aircraft:  One PBY Catalina with 2,000hp
Drop Pattern: 2 bombs
Maximum Bomb Damage:  4,200
Fire Chance: 24%
Bomb Blast Radius: 300m

Anti-Submarine Warfare (ASW) has changed a lot over this year.  San Diego went from dropping three bombs at 1,600 damage and 12% fire chance each to a pair of 4,200 damage bombs with a 24% fire chance.  Not only that, but her reload dropped from 45 seconds to 30 seconds.  She covers a smaller overall area with her bomb drops now, but her hits are much (much!) meatier.  Since the changes were made, I haven't run into any submarines so I can't comment with anecdotes about how much better or worse things are since.  I wasn't especially impressed with my ASW experiences in San Diego back when she was first released.

This said, in theory the combination of air-dropped ASW ordnance and access to Hydroacoustic Search makes San Diego a good cruiser to be in when you don't want to be picked on by submarines.  This doesn't make her a good sub-chaser, though.  She hasn't the range or the speed to do this well.  Theoretically, if you catch a sub on the surface, with Main Battery Reload Booster going, you could get a salvo or two into them before they dive deep enough not to worry about further damage.  However, AP and SAP are poor anti-submarine munitions, doing less damage than HE.  So I wouldn't count San Diego's guns as a particular strength when engaging submarines; just about any other cruiser will be comparable in such an ideal scenario. 

VERDICT:  Big buckets of pretty-terrible barring her hydro and not a cruiser I'd want to hunt subs in. 

Final Evaluation

World of Disappointment

USS Atlanta sold me on World of Warships as a game I had to play.  Watching PhlyDaily and BaronVonGamez derp about in Atlanta on YouTube during Closed Beta got me SO HYPED to play World of Warships.  I bought her immediately, loved her to death and she ended up being the second ship I wrote a review for back in July of 2015.  After Warspite, I've played her more than any other ship.  I love Atlanta.  I love her game play.

Fast forward a few years, I'm neck deep in the Community Contributor program and I'm in daily communication with employees from the WGNA office through the wiki staff.  Part of our semi-regular chats at the time involved which ships should be added to the game.  San Diego comes up often in these talks.  A tier VIII version of Atlanta just seems like an obvious move, especially in light of Wargaming's recent crossover with the Azur Lane franchise where San Diego is one of the most popular characters.  Lert publishes a proposal based on these discussions and several formal proposals are put forth to Wargaming when asked.  So you cannot imagine my excitement when I heard that San Diego was finally coming to the game in early 2022.

To say that what has come to World of Warships is a disappointment for me is an understatement.  I must preface this by saying that I don't think San Diego is underpowered or a bad ship.  My point of contention was how little Wargaming valued the historical performance of the ship when it came to her design in game.

While there is a lot of abstraction of when it comes to the systems and mechanics in World of Warships, savvy players could (and did!) figure out how a given ship's historical parameters would usually translate in game.  Armour profiles, Hit points, main battery firepower, torpedoes performance, anti-aircraft efficiency and speed could all be predicted with reasonable levels of accuracy.  This became even more accurate if a new vessel was a sister-ship or a vessel derived from an existing design already in game, further making new additions predictable.  And make no mistake, for those invested in the game, this was exciting!  It was easy to fall in love with what could-be. If you look back to threads in 2015, 2016 and 2017, there are tons of wish-list vessels people suggested, many of which are now in the game. The wiggle-room that Wargaming still had to play with factors like range, reload times, turning radii, consumables and concealment still allowed ships to be surprising and entirely their own beast.  But still, there was this core set of parameters that were largely predictable.

Now, there have always been the odd deviation.  These stood out as notable precisely because a given addition strayed so obviously from the norm.  Most of these were pretty tame at first. One of the earliest example of this is Murmansk, who (for whatever reason) has artificially boosted AP shell penetration despite using the same guns and the same ammunition as Omaha, the Marblehead-clones and Phoenix.  Graf Spee's AP shells were artificially buffed, Cleveland and AL Montpelier don't turn properly, Etc. But we'd begin to see more extreme examples over time.  Champagne and Florida have odd guns and odd armour.  Wargaming entirely threw out the consistency in their AA system when they reworked CVs with AA defence now being "whatever they feel like" on a per-ship basis without discernible pattern.

San Diego is one of these oddities.  For those looking for more variation in the game, this is a good thing.  There's no arguing that San Diego does not behave at all like Atlanta or Flint or Chumphon or Sejong.  She most closely resembles Austin in design, but even these two ships behave completely different in practice.  So from a variety for variety's sake standpoint, San Diego's design works and works well.  She is her own beast.  And they did this by taking an Atlanta-class hull and making it play like a 152mm armed Italian cruiser.

What boggles my mind is that there's still room for a tier VIII Atlanta-class cruiser in World of Warships; namely a glass cannon with 3 to 4 second reload, slinging the usual AP and HE without the need to make San Diego so weird.

Mouse, Nobody Cares...

I know, I know...

San Diego may not be the ship I want, but that doesn't mean it's not a decent vessel.  She lacks the utility of Flint and Atlanta, however, which largely relegates her to the role of fire support and anti-aircraft interdiction.  It's only this latter role that holds any interest for me.  I loved playing an AA escort back in the day and San Diego does allow for this.  She's not a no-fly zone, let's be clear, but she does make venturing into her AA bubble extremely costly; prohibitively so for tier VI carriers when her Defensive AA Fire consumable is available.  Outside of game-deciding plays, most CVs would be wise to stay clear. 

in terms of her gunnery?  I'm not impressed.  I don't find San Diego's gunnery particularly interesting.  As terrible as Atlanta's rainbow arcs are, at least they're at least memorable.  And it's kind of rewarding to lob spitwads onto the decks of a battleship from two islands away.  With San Diego's ballistics sitting between Cleveland's and Baltimore's, I'm inclined to compare them directly.  I would rather have Cleveland's firepower to San Diego's, even if this does force me down the route of needing to spend more commander skill points to prop up her HE.  Cleveland can engage a broader range of targets more successfully than San Diego can.  SAP should give San Diego the edge, but San Diego's SAP is pretty crappy.  There's no wow factor there with increased alpha or stupendous levels of penetration.  Any tier VIII, 152mm armed cruiser with the Inertial Fuse for HE Shells commander skill has 37mm of penetration to San Diego's 36mm.  And they can still start fires.  And they probably have more range with similar ballistics.

So yeah.  San Diego's gunnery isn't particular fun.  I guess the fourteen guns is pretty novel if you haven't played any of the other Atlanta-class derivatives before.

I would recommend players get Atlanta or Flint over San Diego.  Atlanta is just a fun ship, just not quite as unique as she was once upon a time.  But her low-tier Surveillance Radar shakes up PVP gameplay, especially in limited matchmaking environments like Ranked Battles.  Flint is easy to use with her Smoke Generator.  It lets you really enjoy pooping out those rainbow arcs.  Her workable torpedoes are a nice bonus.  These ships are just as competitive in PVE modes like Scenarios, with Flint being particularly good thanks to being able to avoid detection on demand with her smoke.  The only place where San Diego beats them there is that her increased AP penetration lets her bully bunkers from further away, which is admittedly quite nice.

So yeah, only grab San Diego if you want to see what decent AA could be like in World of Warships with a dedicated AA commander.  That's pretty fun.  But, with that said, this may be undermined or buffed in the near future with AA changes coming.  For now, I'd give her a pass and see which way the wind blows on any future AA changes.

And I was so looking forward to going full out on Sandy weebery for this review too.  I wanted you to be numba wan, Sandy, I really did, but I couldn't justify it.  Maybe they'll make an AL San Diego in the future.  I can't see them putting that much energy into rebalancing what could just be an easy reskin job, though.  Oh well.

Appendix

1. For cruisers, the SAP penetration formula appears to be { [ (Shell Diameter) * 0.24908 ] + 4.3766 }. This yields results slightly higher than the 1/4 shell diameter HE penetration found on German cruisers and way beyond the nominal 1/6th shell diameter penetration of most HE shells.

Source: 

The following is a review of Wukong, the tier VIII Pan Asian premium cruiser.  She was provided to me by Wargaming for evaluation purposes at no cost to me.  To the best of my knowledge, the statistics discussed here are accurate as of patch 0.9.0.  Please be aware that the ship’s performance may change in the future.

Quick Summary:  A premium Charles Martel-class cruiser with a balanced weapon-set between guns and her fish.  She has completely different consumables than the French ship making her much slower. However, she has faster reloading guns and powerful deep water torpedoes.

PROS

• Excellent main battery range of 17.6km.
• Good main battery DPM and fire setting for a heavy cruiser.
• Powerful, deep water torpedoes with good range, speed and damage.
• Access to Torpedo Reload Booster.

CONS

• Very squishy for a heavy cruiser.
• Meh to poor fire angles forward and aft.
• On the slow side.
• Only modest AA firepower.
• No access to Hydroacoustic Search.

Charles Martel vs Wukong

The French cruisers are gunships foremost with their torpedoes as a comfortable afterthought.  The Monkey King takes a more even approach with modest gunnery and a fairly potent torpedo armament, albeit with the usual targeting limits of deep water fish.  Thus, as a battle progresses, Wukong tends to prefer to get closer though she lacks the flexible, consumable tool-set of the lead of her class.  Simply put, Wukong risks more getting closer but stands to gain more when she does make that move.

Here's the complete list of differences between them:

• Wukong is a premium Pan Asian ship.  She has improved economy, access to premium camouflage, can train commanders, etc.  Charles Martel is a tech tree French ship.
• Wukong has 2 meters more main battery range.  Yep, two whole meters.  Suck it, Charles Martel.
• Wukong's guns reload faster.  The Monkey King's guns reload in 10.5 seconds.  Charles Martel's reload in 11 seconds.
• Wukong has powerful deep water torpedoes.  They are faster, longer ranged, harder to detect and more powerful than those found on Charles Martel.  They are also slower loading.
• Wukong does not have access to a Hydroacoustic Search.  She only has access to Defensive AA Fire.  Charles Martel can choose between the two.
• Wukong has access to a Torpedo Reload Booster instead of Charles Martel's Main Battery Reload Booster.
• Wukong has access to a Spotter Aircraft instead of Charles Martel's Catapult Fighter.
• Wukong does not have access to Engine Boost.  She's nowhere near as fast and flexible as the French ship.

Wukong feels very different from Charles Martel.  They still share the same base game play elements -- namely firing from the second line, but Wukong does not have the agility of Charles Martel to make her fight comfortably in open water.  Without access to the vaunted French Engine Boost consumable, her speed, acceleration and agility parameters are all downright pedestrian. Thus open engagements without cover are far more dangerous for Wukong than Charles Martel.  Exercising range to take advantage of longer incoming shell flight times on Wukong is paramount in these fights, as is silencing her guns to disappear when battleship attention strays her way.

Wukong feels closer to a Japanese heavy cruiser than a French one.  She can't quite build for stealth the way the Japanese heavy cruisers do, but it's still worthwhile for the extra play she can get out of her torpedoes with this measure.  Much higher risk, indeed.

You can play test Wukong somewhat by using Charles Martel and restricting yourself to only using Defensive AA Fire and her Damage Control Party.  Unlike with the Bajie - Izumo comparison, this is a far less perfect trial run as it does not reflect the impact of Wukong's torpedo armament and its accompanying Torpedo Reload Booster consumable.

Overview

Let's get into the nitty gritty with some graphics and details about this ship.  Like with my review of Bajie, I'm keeping this review shorter for a couple of reasons.  Most of the data surrounding Charles Martel is available to all, first of all.  Second, I want to get this review out in a timely manner and full, exhaustive reviews are enormous time sinks.  Instead, I'll be focusing upon the differences that make Wukong stand apart and hopefully this will be enough information for players to make their own judgements.

Skill Floor:  Simple / Casual/ CHALLENGING / Difficult
Skill Ceiling:  Low / Moderate / HIGH / Extreme

Wukong doesn't have any training wheels.  Doing well with her is linked directly to long-range gunnery, a player's ability to Just Dodge™ and knowing when it's time to move in and starting pushing the enemy.  These are all skill-sets more likely to be found on experienced players.

The more things change...

Wukong isn't the same ship as Charles Martel.  They're the same class, but from the top down, they're designed to play very differently. Whether they actually play differently is more the question.  You can design things to play a certain way, but if it's not optimal to be used as you envision, then all of your funky designs are just window-dressings.  Charles Martel plays best at range, using speed and agility to bombard targets from open water.  Between it's Engine Boost and Main Battery Reload Booster, it's well positioned to take advantage of this play style, with it's incredible burst and frustrating ability to dodge well making it a real threat.

Cheshire and Mainz remain works in progress and their performance is subject to change. Please note that the turning radii here are taken from their in-game performance at 4/4 speed during a sustained turn and may differ from the in-port stats provided by Wargaming.  Increases in speed, such as those provided to Bayard and Charles Martel through their Engine Boost consumables, improve a ship's rate of turn but at the expense of their turning radius.  Simply put: a ship using this consumable changes direction more quickly but needs more room to do it.

Wukong is capable of acting similarly, but without the added on-demand agility and increased rate-of-fire, she's not as well designed to survive or capitalize on exposed targets.  Placed in this position Wukong is, hands down, an inferior Charles Martel.  Wukong can compete, it's simply an uphill battle.  The best that could be said about her is that she can open up the range even further with her Spotter Aircraft, ostensibly providing a similar level of protection that Charles Martel enjoys under the effects of Engine Boost.  The duration of the consumables and practicality of the differences between increased range over increased agility doesn't make this a fair comparison, in my opinion.

This begs the question if there's an alternative play style which is just as viable for her to undertake.  The answer is 'yes' with a big ol' flaming mandrill's butt attached.

The consumable differences between the two ships, with Wukong on the left and Charles Martel on the right.  Wuking is much less flexible than her French counterpart.

Wukong has the ability to play as a stealthy torpedo-cruiser.  With a full stealth build, she can rig herself to have a concealment of 10.75km between the Concealment Expert skill, camouflage and the Concealment Modification 1 upgrade.  This provides her with a 1.25km stealth-firing window from which she can launch torpedoes at cruisers, battleships and aircraft carriers without being detected.  Combine this with the improved speed and damage performance of her torpedoes along with her Torpedo Reload Booster and this seems to be the answer, right?

If you disable Wukong's camouflage through the port UI, you get a Pan Asian colour scheme. However, if you use basic temporary camouflage, Wukong's palette changes back to a French one. Bajie does this too, but to a Japanese palette.

Wukong torpedoes are good, they're very good even.  However, they're not so good that they overshadow (or come close to overshadowing) Wukong's gun performance.  Short of your opponent being an absolute idiot (or heavily distracted), your torpedoes are never going to outshine your guns.  To me, her fish are very much in the "nice to have" category, rather than the game-defining role.  The one exception here may be co-op battles, where YOLO-rush jousting is in higher demand (and highly rewarded).  Still, it's not like a single spread of Wukong's torpedoes can one-shot a hale and healthy battleship, necessitating the well-timed use of her consumable to put one of the big beasts down.  So even in the ideal scenario where nothing goes wrong, there's still caveats holding Wukong back.

You see, Charles Martel also has the flexibility to move in when opportunity permits.  She's reasonably capable with her on-demand improved agility and speed over Wukong, to say nothing of her access to her Hydroacoustic Search consumable to help with detection. At close ranges like this, her Main Battery Reload Booster is as much of a danger as her torpedoes so it's not like Wukong is hands-down better even in this scenario.

Wukong's DPM is bloody respectable for a heavy cruiser, even if she lacks Charles Martel's burst potential through her consumable.

She's not a bad fire setting either.  It pays to keep in mind that these are only comparing her to other HEAVY cruisers.  The light cruisers at tier VIII all kick her butt thoroughly.

The more things stay the same...

Wukong is still a gunship.  She's a gunship with workable torpedoes, to be clear, but a gunship she remains.  Those torpedoes simply aren't good enough that they redefine the play style of this ship.  Wukong is still a Charles Martel-class cruiser and whatever the paper designs may imply, you're still going to get the best mileage dittoing the behaviours of the French lead of her class:  Keep at range.  Kite and bombard the enemy.  You can get closer and use torpedoes opportunistically, but your business is primarily done with guns from a distance.  Wukong may lack Charles Martel's burst-output, but her sustained DPM and fire setting is respectable.

Frankly, that's all that really matters.  Wukong is "good enough" to compete.  The question becomes if you're willing to pay money for second place.

For those not good at the math, a broadside of Wukong's torpedoes tops out at a theoretical (but not achievable) 55,200 damage. Charles Martel caps out at 44,499. This isn't enough damage to one-shot any battleship once you start account for torpedo damage reduction, so beware of YOLO rushing pristine big ships if you've got survivability in mind.

Overall Impression

Charles Martel is a good ship.  So is Wukong.  Charles Martel is simply better.  I really don't have much more to say about this ship's performance beyond that.  I will say that I find it really strange that they named a pretty mediocre, squishy ship after a quadruple-immortal powerhouse like the Monkey King.  Couldn't they have slapped a British mega-heal on something Russian?  That would have been much more in character.  Like a British mega-healing Kronshtadt or Vladivostok?

For a fun, abridged version of Sun Wukong's origin story, may I present:

Conclusion

Alright, two down and one to go.  I'm not quite sure what format Siliwangi's review will take.  I'm leaning towards a full review as there's such a long list of differences between her and the closest tech tree ship, but we'll see.  Expect that either late next week or early the week after!  Thank you for reading!

The following is a review of London, the tier VI British heavy cruiser.  This ship was kindly provided to me by Wargaming for review purposes.  To the best of my knowledge, the performance and statistics discussed in this review are current as of patch 0.9.1.  Please be aware that the ship will change in the future (like, it's guaranteed).

Quick Summary:   A British heavy cruiser with smoke.  Effectively, she's the chubby, slower Exeter I was wishing for from last year.  She uses a mix of British destroyer and cruiser consumables.

PROS

• Smaller citadel area than you would expect.
• Powerful main battery armament of eight 203mm guns.
• Heavy torpedo armament with torpedoes that may be single-fired.
• Access to a (weird) Repair Party consumable.
• Access to a Smoke Generator consumable.
• Her Hydroacoustic Search has a very long active period of 3 minutes.

CONS

• Painfully short main battery gun range of 13.4km.
• Very low DPM on main battery guns.
• Low top speed, large turning radius -- she feels like a heavy cruiser.
• Most of her AA firepower is very short ranged.
• Her Smoke Generator has a short emission period, making it easy to overshoot her own cover before the ship comes to a stop.
• Her Hydroacoustic Search is very short ranged.
• Her Repair Party is severely limited.

Overview

Skill Floor:  Simple / CASUAL/ Challenging / Difficult
Skill Ceiling:  Low / Moderate / HIGH / Extreme

London should be a harder ship to play than she is.  For a novice player, her short range, long reload time and poor handling are all marks against her.  However, the presence of her Repair Party and Smoke Generator largely alleviate any challenges presented by this ship.

For an expert player, London is almost (ALMOST) a dream ship.  It's her lack of speed and range that really holds her back her carry potential and then only just.  She has an excellent suite of consumables which, when properly used and abused, allows her to pull off all sorts of shenanigans.  You'd think Wargaming would learn to stop putting smoke on HE-spamming cruisers, but whatever.

Options

Consumables

London's consumables are pure weirdness, being derived largely from British Destroyer versions.

• Her Damage Control Party is normal, at least.  Unlimited charges, 90s/60s reset timer and an active period of 5 seconds -- everything here is in order.
• The presence of her Repair Party is nice but it's odd, akin to that found on high-tier British destroyers.  It starts with a single charge (!), healing back 1% of her health per second (!) for a mere 10 seconds (!).  Unlike other cruisers, this only queues up 10% of citadel damage (!).  So yeah, hella weird.  At least it's reset timer is kinda normal at 120s/80s.
• London's Hydroacoustic Search is also strange.  She uses the version found on British Destroyers.  This gives her a ship and torpedo detection range of a mere 3km.  On the plus side, it has a very long active time of 180 seconds.  It comes with two charges and an 180s/120s reset timer.
• Unlike other British heavy cruisers, London has access to a British light cruiser Smoke Generator.  She starts with two charges.  It has a 15s emission time, so make sure you're slowing down before deploying if you intend to sit in it.  Each cloud of smoke lasts for 99 seconds.  It has a 240s/160s reset timer.

Upgrades

The new upgrades don't change a whole lot for mid-tier ships.

• Start with Main Armaments Modification 1.
• Next, if you can afford it, spring for Hydroacoustic Search Modification 1 from the Armory.  This will set you back 17,000 Coal .  If you can't, default to Engine Room Protection.
• Aiming System Modification 1 hasn't been dethroned by the new upgrades like I was hoping it would.  It's still the best bang for your buck and always a reasonable default.
• For your fourth slot, you have a choice.  If you're the type to park in your smoke often, then Propulsion System Modification 2 is probably your best choice.  It gives more grunt to your engines when you first accelerate which can be critical for dodging incoming torpedoes.   If you're always mobile, then Steering Gears Modification 2 is the better choice.

Captain Skills

London doesn't gain vast amounts of improved performance from most skills.  I suppose with the incoming changes to Inertial Fuse for HE Shells, this is going to be a increasing trend.  For your first ten points, I recommend:

• Start with ONE of the following:  Priority Target, Incoming Fire Alert or Expert Loader depending on your personal ability to keep situationally aware.
• Next up, Last Stand is highly recommended given the relative fragility of her rudder.  This breaks often, especially when dodging HE shells.
• Superintendent is your best choice at the third tier.
• And to no one's surprise, Concealment Expert rounds out your 10th skill point.

Other useful skills include:  Demolition Expert, Adrenaline Rush and Expert Marksman which are all no-brainers, really.  You can feel free to play with some of the more odd skills like Smoke Screen Expert (handy because London doesn't slow down particularly fast) if you want.  Again, this ship isn't starved for commander skill points like some other ships, so you can experiment a bit.

Camouflage

London comes with Type 10 Camouflage.  She also has access to Victorian White - London which can be acquired through bundles or by paying 2,000 doubloons.  Both camouflages have identical bonuses, providing the usual:

• A 3% reduction in surface detection ranges.
• A 4% increase to the dispersion of enemy gunfire.
• A 10% reduction to post-battle service costs.
• A 50% increase to experience earned.

London's default camouflage.

London's Victorian White camouflage.

Firepower

Main Battery:  Eight 203mm/50 guns in 4x2 turrets in an A-B-X-Y superfiring configuration.
Secondaries:  Eight 102mm/45 guns in 4x2 turrets with two turrets per side behind the funnels.
Torpedoes:  Eight tubes in 2x4 launchers mounted on deck behind the funnels with one launcher per side.

[
HE and IFHE penetration values are reflective of patch 0.9.1... which means they'll be obsolete shortly.

Guns

There are largely two different types of 203mm guns among British heavy cruisers.  The first are what I like to call "the old timey premiums".  The second are the "tech-tree ships".  The difference is an artifact of the balance process with London preserving the first-draft version of the British heavy cruiser armament. While on paper, Devonshire, London, Surrey, Exeter and London all appear to use the same guns and ammunition, the two premiums diverge considerably.

The differences are as follows (tech-tree vs premiums):

• Muzzle Velocity:  814m/s vs 855m/s (London's shells are initially faster)
• Shell Drag:  0.304 vs 0.346 (They bleed speed more quickly, though)
• AP Damage:  4,500 vs 4,550 (London's AP shells hit slightly harder)
• AP Krupp:  2,650 vs 2,400 (But they have 10% less penetration at comparable velocities)
• HE Damage:  3,300 vs 2,850 (Her HE shells are worse...)
• Fire Chance:  17% vs 15% (... much, much worse)

On the whole, London's gun performance is a step down from her tech-tree counterparts.  This is especially evident with her lack-luster high-explosive performance.  Her AP shells aren't as good either, though the practical difference is so slight as to largely be a non-issue in this case.

Penetration and shell flight times of the cruisers with 180mm+ guns.  Compared to the other heavy cruisers (and Molotov), London's lacking in both penetration and ballistic speed. Still, it's not like she doesn't have enough penetration. She's fully capable of landing citadel hits against just about any cruiser she comes across up to her maximum range.

Being patently inferior to the guns of her tech-tree counterpart does not immediately relegate London's main battery firepower to the "meh" category, especially on the eve of the Inertial Fuse for HE Shells rework.  Heavy cruisers are largely immune to the performance changes coming and London is future proofed in this regard.  She's only going to appear stronger compared to light cruisers when the patch rolls around.

I tend to put London's gunnery on the "good enough" category, barring the deficiency of their range and reload time.  London has painfully little reach which would be downright crippling were it not for the presence of her Smoke Generator.  Her consumable transforms any pretense of challenge and risk-management to a non-issue.  Approach target, blow smoke, hold down the left mouse button.  Yes, expert players might snipe you in your cover.  Yes, her in-smoke detection range is kind of high.  But on the whole, London's gunnery benefits enormously from her smoke and it glosses over any perceived flaws in her main battery firepower.

In short:  Her guns aren't the best, but they don't have to be.  Smoke makes London's gunnery super-simple to use.

Fish

While London may share Exeter's guns, her torpedoes are a modest step down.  They aren't without their merits.  London has quadruple tubes on her launchers and her fish may be fired individually -- this gives her excellent alpha strike potential.  Like her guns, range is the issue.  London's torpedoes have a mere 7km reach compared to Exeter, Leander's and Devonshire's 8km.  This really relegates her to launching them at "suicide close" ranges -- which admittedly happens often enough thanks to her smoke screens.

Like her guns, London's torpedoes aren't ideal but they're entirely satisfactory.

Summary

On the whole, London's weapon systems are all kinds of middling meh.  With the upcoming changes to IFHE, her 203mm weapons get a bit of a boost, if only grace that that smaller caliber  guns are getting nerfed (supposedly -- we'll see what finally makes it into the game).

While London's fire angles aren't great they're at least consistent.

As of writing this article, the IFHE changes haven't been finalized yet, so consider them a Work in Progress and subject to change (I'll honestly be shocked if WG doesn't change something to do with IFHE before I publish -- if only to invalidate the couple of hours it took to make this).  If it goes through as advertised, light cruisers will have to choose between being able to deal direct damage to battleships or being good at setting fires.  Heavy cruisers, like London, don't have to make that choice.

London's DPM is pretty terrible. Thankfully, her Smoke Generator makes it easier for her to sustain fire -- something a lot of the other cruisers on this list (barring Perth, Huanghe and Leander) can't boast.

Verdict:   Good enough.  Her smoke makes them better than they appear.

Defense

Hit Points: 34,600
Minimum Bow & Deck Armour: 16mm
Maximum Citadel Protection:  114mm belt armour
Torpedo Damage Reduction: 4%

This graphic is going to be out-dated shortly after publishing. Oh well, let it remain an archive of what-was.  The best that could be said about London's protection scheme is that her citadel is a small target.

Eh, I don't want to spend too much time talking about London's armour with the upcoming Inertial Fuse for HE Shell changes in the works that also affects hull plating thickness.  These changes should be a buff for London -- not a significant one, but a buff none the less.  At the time of writing, these changes are still a work in progress -- they're not exactly confirmed at this stage.  So I'm going to keep light on discussing London's armour.  Changes are coming and what's written here is not future-proofed.

As far as citadel protection and placement goes, London's alright.  Her citadel sits over the waterline (that's bad) but it's not a large target (that's good).  Her transverse bulkhead is a mere 25mm thick, easily overmatched (that's bad) but her citadel roof, at 35mm, cannot (that's good).  Her citadel contains potassium benzoate.

The size disparity of London's citadel is largely owing to her magazines being placed outside of it -- which isn't uncommon for lower tiered cruisers.  Despite this apparently normalcy, London's magazines really should have been included.  London's magazines are heavily protected, with between 76mm and 102mm worth of armour surrounding these boxes, largely echoing the citadel of the higher tiered cruisers starting with Albemarle.  That London (and the other lower-tiered heavies) get away with having their magazines considered separate is really to their advantage.

Special mention needs be made about her Repair Party, which has pronounced differences compared to those of other British cruisers (light and heavy both).  London makes use of a British destroyer consumable, healing back up to 10% of her health over 10 seconds rather than 14% over 28 seconds.  Furthermore, London's Repair Party only queues up 10% of citadel damage done (as opposed to 50% for other British cruisers).  Combined with fewer charges, London's heals are much less potent than the presence of the consumable would otherwise indicate.  Still, she is one of the few mid-tier cruisers with a heal at all, so that's a big plus right there.

On the whole, London's scores pretty well in this category.  No, she's not going to be bouncing battleship caliber AP shells left and right, nor does she have any particular HE immunity.  But her large chunk of health, her small(ish) citadel and her heals make her objectively better protected than most of her contemporaries.

I'm shocked they gave a smoke-generating, HE-spamming, chunkamungus cruiser like London a heal at all. Perth and Huanghe don't have them and they're far squishier.

Verdict:   Pretty darned good, all things told.

Agility

Top Speed: 32.3kts
Turning Radius: 710m
Rudder Shift Time: 7.8s
4/4 Engine Speed Rate of Turn: 5.6º/s

It was a bit of a shock to play the British Heavy Cruisers the first time.  If London is your first foray into these ships be prepared:  they do not have the British Light Cruiser (and Exeter's) ability to fold space and time itself and defy physics.  London, along with the other British Heavy Cruisers, do not have the improved engine power at 4/4 settings like their predecessors.  They are entirely normal, behaving exactly as other cruisers do.  This makes them feel like big, heavy ships (which they are).

I admit, setting this bias aside was difficult and it coloured my initial impressions of this ship negatively.  She felt like a thunderchunker -- a bulbous chunkosaurus, a chonk-stonk-wallowiscious lard-laden-lass.  God, making these ships flop about felt unpleasant.  I kept expecting to see melted butter oozing out of shell holes punched into her hull.

Once I finished fat-shaming this new ship, I could finally start analyzing and evaluating her properly.  So here goes:  "Good" agility for a mid-tier cruiser is defined by having one or more of the following:

• A top speed in excess of 34 knots (with or without the use of consumables).
• A turning radius that's 650m or smaller.
• A rate of turn of 6.0º/s or faster.
• Marked improved acceleration / energy preservation.

London doesn't have any of these things. In my head I was expecting Leander.  Instead they handed me a tub of old mayonnaise.  Her turn radius is on the large side for a tier VI cruiser -- even a tier VI heavy cruiser for that matter.  This combines with a downright pedestrian (and disappointing) top speed that barely squeaks over 32 knots.  So that's not good either.  Her rate of turn understandably suffers because of this low speed, putting her on the low end there too.  The only really good point here is that she doesn't out-turn her turrets.  Poor marks all around.

In short, London is fat. This becomes an issue with the use of smoke if you're not careful -- leaving her vulnerable to torpedoes strikes even with the use of Hydroacoustic Search as she can't accelerate particularly fast from a dead stop.  This can also be a problem when receiving counter-battery fire -- getting out of the way while parked in her smoke screens isn't easy.  Propulsion Modification 2 is highly recommended to help alleviate this if you intend to sit her still when smoke's deployed.

I say boo-urns to you, London.  Boo-urns.

The new British heavy cruisers handle quite similarly to the German cruiser Nurnberg. London is all kinds of bloated meh for a tier VI cruiser, lacking the high top speed of the Soviets and French.  Nor does she have the reckless acceleration of the British light cruisers.  She doesn't even haver the nice tight turns of the American & Italian ships.  Of course, compared to higher tiered cruisers, she's okay, but let's not let facts and figures get in the way of tier VI feels.

VERDICT:  Her theme song is a mad tuba solo.  London and Graf Spee should hang out.

Anti-Aircraft Defense

Flak Bursts: 2 explosions for 1,120 damage per blast
Long Ranged (up to 5.8km):  16 damage every 0.32s (50.4dps)
Medium Ranged (up to 2.5km):  24 damage every 0.32s (75.6dps)
Short Ranged (up to 2.0km): 40 damage every 0.34s (119dps)

The bulk of London's AA firepower is too short ranged to be effective.  You're really relying on her 20mm Oerlikons to do the heavy lifting here, and they're only engaging just as or after the aircraft have launched ordnance which is far from ideal.  I mean, as far as a tier VI cruiser goes, her AA is alright -- better than average even in terms of raw numbers but it's difficult to call any of the tier VI cruisers as "good" AA platforms.

I think what I lament most about London's AA power is the lack of a catapult fighter.  Their presence does more to dissuade the average CV player than Defensive AA Fire ever could (not that London has either).

Overall, poor marks, but that shouldn't surprise anyone.

Verdict:  Insufficient and forgettable.  Park in smoke if you desperately need to avoid being bombed.

London's AA power is best described as "an angry smoke cloud spitting out small-caliber shells".

Refrigerator

Base/Minimum Surface Detection: 12.06km/10.53km
Base/Minimum Air Detection Range: 6.58km/5.92km
Detection Range When Firing in Smoke: 6.79km
Main Battery Firing Range: 13.4km

"Good enough" sums up London's surface and aerial detection.  I might beef with these values more if she didn't have a Smoke Generator but because it's present, London's consumables will largely dominate the discussion of this section.  Suffice to say, London's concealment, when upgraded, is good enough to get her into position and out of trouble when needs be, so long as she keeps her guns silent.  Even then, her short main battery range allows for some pretty easy disengagements grace of their relatively short reach, provided there are no smaller ships or aircraft keeping her lit.

So!  I'm not sure if you heard, but London has smoke.  I know!  What a shocker!  I've only mentioned her interactions with smoke fifteen times in this review already.  This consumable largely defines London's performance in the hands of most players.  London's Smoke Generator is panacea to all of the ship's possible woes.

• Is the threat of return-fire preventing you from maximizing your low DPM?  No problem, get into position and blow smoke.  That way you can cycle your guns freely without having to stop  for dodging or weaving.
• Are you struggling to use your torpedoes?  You can bait enemy ships into charging your smoke screen, making it much easier to bring those fish into play.
• Fragile hull?  Never fear, smoke is here.  You can feel much safer about your exposed citadel if they struggle to hit you.
• Not enough AA?  Only chumps Just Dodge™. Blow smoke and frustrate that CV drop.

Now, London doesn't have enough charges of her smoke to cover all of her bases all of the time.  Furthermore, it's not like she's holding onto an American Smoke Generator with their stupid-amazing long emission and duration time.  With only a 15 second emission time, it's generally a good idea to already be slowing down if you intend to park inside her smoke.  This does mean that if you're already spotted, you might be setting yourself up to get your machine spaces blown out before concealment takes effect.  Thus, her smoke is best used preemptively to spare yourself the humiliation of being blown out of the water before dropping off enemy screens.

Once she's in her smoke, things are pretty comfy.  London does have a rather large smoke detection bloom of nearly 7km every time she fires her guns, so that's worth keeping in mind.  Though once that detection goes off, you at least know you're in range to use your torpedoes, provided you can survive the next few moments.

The short range of London's Hydroacoustic Search largely limits it to defensive uses ... unless, like me, you end up constantly running into destroyers that get the bright idea to charge your smoke when their torpedoes don't hit.  I'm sure it seems like a good idea to them at the time, but I chalk it up purely to emotional reasoning.  The lesson here, children, is that listening to your heart gets your face stoved in by 203mm HE shells -- don't do it.  London's DPM may not be great, but it's still good enough to put the smack down on a pervy lolibote trying to sneak a peek under another ship's smoke-skirt.

Speaking of her Hydroacoustic Search, it's only "okay" at spotting torpedoes.  Given London's rather sluggish handling, this lead to one too many close-calls.  While this may make for some excellent highlight real footage for a Yuro Torpedo-Beat clip, you should still be wary even while this consumable is active, particularly if you're parked at a dead stop in smoke.  If you're caught broadside like this, her hydro won't save you.  She's just not agile enough.  It will simply give you enough time to string together a particularly colourful string of expletives.

Summary

So here's the take away from all of this:

• London's base levels of concealment are "okay".
• Her Hydroacoustic Search consumable doesn't quite trivialize dodging torpedoes, but it makes it much easier.  It's largely useless for offensive purposes unless your opponent is a blooming idiot.  But let's be clear, that's not the consumable doing the legwork, that's your opponent handing you a win.  Similarly, you should be torpedo-safe with this thing active unless you screw up.  That's not the hydro's fault.
• London is a decent heavy cruiser with a Smoke Generator, which immediately makes her a damn-good heavy cruiser.  This consumable is hella powerful when used (and abused) properly.

Verdict:  Smoke is overpowered.  It can make even a modest ship great.

Final Evaluation

London is a damn good heavy cruiser.  Rather, she's a very respectable heavy cruiser and then Wargaming went and gave her a Smoke Generator.  The ship would have to suck moose-balls in many categories before I could consider any cruiser with smoke to be a bad ship.  And London's pretty decent overall, with her glaring weaknesses being her poor range and slow reload time.  For most players, her Smoke Generator will be used as a crutch to overcome these deficiencies.  This won't hold back expert players, of course.

It's hard not to look at London and not think back to Exeter's release a year ago.  Exeter, even with less hit points and two fewer guns, is a hands-down better ship.  Here's the list of primary differences.

• London has more health.  She out-classes Exeter by just over 5,000hp.
• London has more armour.  Exeter's belt is only 76mm and her citadel includes her magazines.  London's belt is 114mm and her citadel is relatively smaller.
• Exeter has British Light Cruiser engine power, making her accelerate and preserve energy much better than her stats might otherwise indicate.  Despite the 0.4kt advantage in speed London claims in a straight line, Exeter is much faster in the practical sense.
• Exeter has 2km less surface detection.  She is stealthy as all get out.
• London has eight guns to Exeter's six.  Pretty easy comparison here.
• Exeter has 1km more reach.  Longer ranged guns, yo.
• Exeter has better torpedoes.  Exeter uses Leander's tier VI torpedoes.  They have more range, hit harder and are faster.  London uses Emerald's tier Vs.  At least London gets two quad launchers to Exeter's two triples.
• Exeter's Repair Party heals up to 14% of her health over 28s.  Exeter has a normal Repair Party.  This includes providing her more health per use (despite their HP differences) and she gains an extra charge.
• Exeter's uses a normal cruiser Hydroacoustic Search.  Exeter's consumable can detect ships 1km further but lasts only 100s vs Londons' 180s.
• Exeter has better AA power.  She has a fighter.  London has more AA DPS admittedly, but that matters less, sadly.

And the biggest difference of all, of course, is that London gets access to a Smoke Generator.  Exeter had one back during testing but it was nixed to shoe horn into a tier where she doesn't belong.  Yes, I'm still bitter about this. While I'm glad to see London added to the game, I can't help but lament how Exeter was included.  At least there's a marked difference between the two ships.  Exeter feels more like a hybrid, bridging the old British Light Cruiser game play with the new heavy cruisers.  It's just a shame about her tiering -- she can't be used in operations and her experience and credit earning is compromised too.   Strip out the consumables and Exeter is the better ship. I'll take concealment and agility over two more guns and a few more hit point any day.  That's even with the disparity between tiers.  But London is tier VI and London has her smoke.  She's more useful to players than Exeter, I'm sorry to say.

London is a fairly safe purchase, or grind if you've been putting the time in to unlock her with the event that's ongoing right now.  After all of the nonsense over this past holiday season, it's nice to see an easy grind for some decent, free goodies.

Conclusion

I've given up on trying to understand and predict what's coming in patch 0.9.2.  That HE penetration and IFHE change looks all kinds of disruptive.  I admit, I held my breath before reviewing London, hoping to get a better picture and then be able to speak with some authority on how heavy and light cruisers now compared.  No such luck, I'm afraid, and that's a week's worth of time lost.  Oh well.

Next up will be a review of Cheshire, the tier VIII British heavy cruiser.  I hope to have that out sometime next week.  Thank you very much for reading! ♥

The following review of Rochester, the tier VIII premium American heavy cruiser, was sponsored by my patrons on Patreon who helped me afford this ship. To the best of my knowledge, the statistics discussed in this review are current as patch 0.10.9.

Quick Summary:  Imagine a Baltimore-class cruiser with slight tweaks (generally nerfs) across all performance parameters and strip out her access to Surveillance Radar.  In compensation, give her access to Defensive AA Fire and Hydroacoustic Search and a Smoke Generator consumable.

PROS

• American/German 27mm hull extremities.
• Access to "American Piercing" AP shells with higher shell damage, penetration and auto-ricochet angles.
• Great gun fire angles, especially to the rear (it's about time I got to review another ship with these).
• Good anti-aircraft firepower for a tier VIII cruiser.
• Competitive concealment and decent stealth range while firing in smoke for a 203mm armed cruiser.
• Does not have to choose between Hydroacoustic Search and Defensive AA Fire.
• Has a Smoke Generator.

CONS

• No health regeneration.
• Low DPM & fire setting for a pure-gunship heavy cruiser.
• Painfully slow turret traverse.
• Not terribly agile.
• No access to Surveillance Radar.

Overview

Skill Floor:  Simple / CASUAL / Challenging / Difficult
Skill Ceiling:  Low / Moderate / HIGH / Extreme

Rochester pretty new-fish friendly.  Without Surveillance Radar to worry about, there's no reason to push in too close which may help reduce the amount of "death by over-extending".  Furthermore, her good concealment and decent smoke-firing properties give her a comfortable buffer.  Firing from smoke is pretty easy and Rochester makes it about as comfortable as it can get for an American heavy cruiser.  Furthermore, the forgiving nature of 203mm HE and her AP auto-ricochet angles will take the sting out of sloppy ammunition choices.  So good marks here.

Her carry potential in the hands of an expert is a little more limited.  Good knowledge of how to use and abuse islands will take you far, as will proper ammunition use.  Abusing her concealment along with her 27mm bows can yield some pretty meme-worthy encounters against 381mm and smaller-armed battleships that keep trying to use SAP or AP against her at close range.  But, while her Smoke Generator does have some team play uses (along with her DFAA and Hydro consumables), her lack of Surveillance Radar is dearly felt.  She just doesn't put the pressure on destroyers like she should, not without some incredible risk taking. 

Options

Rochester is defined by her consumables.  Really, it's the reason you're buying this ship.  So if this doesn't intrigue you, close your wallet now and skip to the end.

Consumables

• Rochester's Damage Control Party is standard for a cruiser.  It has unlimited charges, a 5 second active period and a 60 second reset timer.
• Her Defensive AA Fire is also standard for an American cruiser providing and additional 50% continuous damage and 300% flak damage for 40 seconds.  Like many other American cruisers, it comes with a bonus charge to start (four total instead of the usual three) and an 80 second reset timer.
• The Hydroacoustic Search Rochester detects torpedoes at 3.5km and ships at 5km for 100 seconds.  It comes with one fewer charge than normal Hydroacoustic Search consumables with only two (instead of three) but it has a standard reset timer of 120 seconds.
• Finally, Rochester has a Smoke Generator in her fourth slot.  Like other American smoke consumables, this generates clouds for a full thirty seconds (which is good). It comes with two charges and a 160 second reset timer.

The duration of each smoke cloud is a bit odd.  She matches Anchorage's duration of 104 seconds which is decent, but not quite top grade.  Here's some of the equivalent smoke duration times at tier VIII for Smoke Generator consumables.

• 124 seconds: American Destroyers, Loyang
• 104 seconds:  Rochester & Anchorage
• 99 seconds: Edinburgh
• 89 seconds: Most destroyers, Mikhail Kutuzov
• 70 seconds: Lightning, Cossack, Z-35, Belfast '43 (these have very quick reset timers)
• 69 seconds: Z-23, Harekaze II
• 10 seconds: Italian Exhaust Smoke Generator equipped ships (these have longer emission time)

The only other comparable values to consider are Flint (121 seconds) and Smolensk (89 seconds).  I'll talk about this more in the Vision Control (Refrigerator for you old-timer readers) section below.  But suffice to say, Rochester's smoke is pretty good.  She makes a lot of it and it lasts a fairly long time.

Upgrades

Your choices here aren't anything revolutionary.  The big decision here is whether or not to focus her upon camping in smoke or for more open-water manoeuvrability.

• Start with Main Armaments Modification 1.
• Generally speaking, Hydroacoustic Search Modification 1 is your best choice in slot two.  It will cost you cost 17,000 in the Armory.  If you cannot (or will not) afford that then default to Engine Room Protection.
• In slot #3, Aiming System Modification 1 is best.  However, if her sluggish gun traverse ticks you off as much as it does me, you can sacrifice some accuracy for Main Battery Modification 2.  This latter choice is more worth while in an open-water build if you plan to be actively wiggling and dodging.
• If you're planning to hug islands or camp in smoke primarily, then the extra acceleration provided by Propulsion Modification 1 is optimal. Still, there's a place for Steering Gears Modification 1 if you're planning to aggressively pursue a more open-water style of play.
• Finally, Concealment System Modification 1 is generally considered optimal because of the stacked bonuses of air, sea and underwater stealth AND the increased dispersion to incoming fire.  However, if you're a smoke-hiding, island-humping pro, or just intent on once again going full-hog to the open-water route, then you can get Steering Gears Modification 2 instead.

Commander Skills

I haven't talked about heavy cruiser commander skills much since the (repeated) skill rework earlier this year.  It's going to be difficult to do so without going on a prolonged rant, but here goes:  Cruisers got screwed with the rework.  While battleships had to spend more points to get the same features as before, I really don't feel like there's enough good choices for heavy cruisers to be worth investing into.  If your ship doesn't need Inertial Fuse for HE Shells then you're kind of starved for compelling, competitive options.  I would love to be able to say that this is a good thing; that you can pick among your favourites without much fear of losing in-game performance.  But the rework didn't really add anything worth discussing to heavy cruiser game play.  The most daring build would be to eschew any shell-performance buffs and dip your toe into trying to be an AA ship if you wanted.  That's kinda neat, I guess, but AA performance isn't interesting anymore.  It hasn't been since the 0.8.0 rework.  It's a shame.

For a 10 point, brainless standard build, go with: 

• Grease the Gears at tier 1.  Reasonable alternatives (in no particular order) include:  Gun Feeder, Incoming Fire Alert and Last Stand.  The extra turret traverse is best if you're going to grab Priority Target as I recommend at tier 2.  If not, then Incoming Fire Alert goes way up in value.
• Priority Target remains my favourite tier 2 skill and I admit a healthy bias towards it.  Alternatives include: Demolition Expert and our first AA skill:  Focus Fire Training.
• With Rochester's reliance on smoke, it's a pretty simple choice to default to Superintendent.  Adrenaline Rush and Heavy AP Shells are the best alternates.
• To no one's surprise, Concealment Expert is best at tier 4.  Don't get me wrong, Radio Location is nice, but give us some variety please, Wargaming!  The only other skill that vaguely interests me at this tier is AA Defence and ASW Expert and that's only if you're building an AA ship for the memes.

Feel free to double back through the options here to mix and match for a build you find works for you.  You really can't go wrong here, so don't sweat it.

Camouflage

You got one camo.  It provides the usual:

• -3% surface detection
• +4% increased dispersion of enemy shells.
• -10% to post-battle service costs.
• +50% to experience gains.

Rochester's default (pale) palette looks best in my opinion.  You can unlock the darker version through completing the 5th tab of the American Cruiser Collection.

Firepower

Main Battery:  3x3 203mm/55 guns in an A-B-X superfiring configuration
Secondary Battery:  Twelve 127mm/38 guns in 6x2 turrets with one superfiring forward over the main battery forward, one superfiring aft and the other four divided evenly along the sides.

American Piercing

Rochester has comfortable if unimpressive firepower for a tier VIII cruiser.  Her main battery of nine 203mm guns are unbacked by any other competitive assets with both her secondaries and her ASW airstrike both being entirely forgettable.  For being Rochester's sole weapon system, there is an expectation of competitive damage output from them to compensate for the lack of any other.  She kinda-sorta gets there with her improved AP shells.  For those unaware, American heavy cruisers tend to have better AP shells than their contemporaries.  Despite their low muzzle velocity, they have good penetration.  This is joined by good damage values for their calibre and reduced chance of ricochets from angled armour.  Grace of her Smoke Generator consumable, Rochester has the ability to cycle her guns more often than other American heavies -- she is not as reliant on making use of island cover to fire and stay alive.

Let's reuse this older penetration graphic from my Anchorage (and earlier, Wichita) review.  Anchorage and Wichita share the same AP penetration values.  Rochester has the same AP penetration as Baltimore, which is among the best at her tier.  At point blank ranges (such as the frequent jousts in co-op) Rochester has enough AP penetration to citadel through the belt of some battleships.

Rochester pays for this ease-of-use granted by her smoke with a less-than-ideal reload time on her guns.  While Baltimore and Wichita may cycle their weapons every 10 seconds, Rochester needs 12.  This extra bit of wait is just enough to take the edge off the competitiveness of her weapons whenever she's using anything other than AP shells.  Her damage output between fires and HE spam is comparable to that of Atago without the latter's ability to back this up with the occasional torpedo strike.  As such, it's imperative to use Rochester's AP shells whenever the opportunity arises.  Rochester can and will citadel just about any other cruiser it comes across at any engagement range if they present a broadside.  She can even smack shells into their machine spaces when they angle thanks to that one-two combination of great penetration values and those improved auto-ricochet angles.

The only issue with relying too heavily on AP rounds is the lack of fire-setting.  I can't count the number of times I got a target low with AP and they successfully managed to disengage.  A fire might have finished them off, you know, provided Rochester could stack one past their Damage Control Party.  However, Rochester isn't good at this, being among the worse fire-setters at her tier.

Charles Martel is listed twice.  That with the asterix (*) is using her Main Battery Reload Booster for 15 seconds.  Amalfi uses SAP instead of HE.  Rochester's AP DPM is competitive while her HE DPM is not.

Rochester's fire-setting ability isn't great -- especially when you appreciate that your actual chances of setting a blaze are roughly half of what you see here once you account for your target's innate fire resistance.  She's comparable to Atago and most of the heavies pale in fire setting compared to the light cruisers.  The best light cruisers have FPMs up near 16 and 17 blazes, but this gets butchered if they take the Inertial Fuse for HE Shells commander skill.

Despite having a Smoke Generator, Rochester's game play does not stray very far from that already established by the American tech-tree heavy cruisers.  This generally summarizes to:  Find island.  Peek from island.  Cycle guns until you get their attention and hide until contact is broken / their attention goes elsewhere.  Rinse and repeat this until it's time to push forward or fall back.  The ballistics on Rochester's guns (especially her AP shells) makes her very comfortable in this role, allowing her to snuggle quite close to landmasses that will safely screen return fire from battleship calibre and higher-velocity rounds.  In open water, Rochester doesn't fare so well.  The same ballistics that make yeeting AP rounds over islands makes her long-range gunnery rather poor against anything but the most predictable of targets.  Combine this with a slow rate of fire and every dodged salvo hurts that much more.  But worse, Rochester's sub-16km range (with no way of increasing it) makes her dangerously vulnerable to return fire.  Even with the comfortable over-the-shoulder fire angles, Rochester doesn't kite particularly well, having neither the speed, range or agility to pull it off.  Add on the only modest damage output with anything other than AP broadsides and she's only a modest damage-dealer.

So yeah, Rochester is just your typical American heavy cruiser when it comes to her firepower.  The pair of wrinkles to keep in mind is that she has smoke to facilitate her slower reload.

Yaaaaaaaas! ♪  It's too bad she doesn't pair this with some great turret traverse rates.  Oh well.

VERDICT:  Comfortable yet ultimately unimpressive.

Durability
Hit Points: 41,900
Bow & stern/superstructure/upper-hull/deck:  27mm / 16mm / 27mm / 27mm
Maximum Citadel Protection: 152mm belt (+27mm bows for head on shots)
Torpedo Damage Reduction:  13%

Rochester has a reasonable slug of hit points for a tier VIII cruiser, at least so long as you ignore her lack of a heal.  While you might not feel this lack when she's top tier, against tier IX and X opponents, her inability to recover health becomes a serious handicap when every other cruiser (and many destroyers besides!) can claw back health.

I can't talk about tier VIII cruiser survivability without addressing the elephant in the room:  Repair Party consumables.

Fully one-third of tier VIII cruisers have the ability to regenerate health and this creates a huge disparity between the survivability of those who can and those who cannot.  Ostensibly, the balance is supposed to wors out.  Those ships with heals are either extremely fragile (generally prone to giving away Devastating Strike medals to their opponents) or their damage output sucks, with the idea being that they need to survive longer (on average) in order to make up for the damage disparity.  That only kinda works out in practice and these rules do not apply universally across all of the ships at tier VIII.  This makes the lack of a heal feel much more pronounced on ships that go without when the difference of which ships have it (particularly legacy vessels) isn't clearly defined.

Rochester is semi-okay without heals.  I mean there are other ways to keep a ship safe and her Smoke Generator sure goes a long way to helping with that.  However, it would be a mistake to think she's going to shrug off much in the way of damage.  Her 27mm hull plating is nice but not as nice as it was, once upon a time.  While she can still troll 381mm or smaller calibre AP shells by prompting ricochets with steep angling, with penetrating hits to turrets and barbettes now giving away damage, face-tanking isn't anywhere near as effective as it used to be.  Thus, barring bullying the occasional Italian, German or British battleship at stupidly-close ranges, you can't count on her structural plate for repelling AP rounds.  Her citadel protection is decent for a cruiser though nothing remarkable.  Her citadel abuts against the exterior of the hull around her machine spaces and sticks up over the waterline besides.  Her citadel roof cannot be overmatched, however, so you're only giving away citadel damage to shells that strike near or at the water's surface, so that's okay.  Her 152mm belt also means she's proof against citadel hits from HE shells from enterprising Royal Navy battleships.  She also has a pretty healthy numberof hit points, being in the top third for her tier if you look past healing potential.

Finally, she does have at least some anti-torpedo protection, which is more than can be said for most cruisers.  It's not really going to do much against ship or submarine-launched fish but it may protect you from some flooding from carrier-borne weapons.

Rochester's armour profile is pretty straight forward for an American heavy cruiser.

VERDICT:  I wish she had a heal when she's bottom tier. Otherwise, she's okay.

Agility
Top Speed: 33 knots
Turning Radius: 750 meters
Rudder Shift Time: 10.5 seconds
4/4 Engine Speed Rate of Turn: 5.4º/s at 26.4kts
Main Battery Traverse Rate:  6.0º/s

Rochester's agility is very middle-of-the-road.  If your cruiser can't be fast, you want to turn quickly.  Rochester can do neither.

I gotta give Rochester poor marks here. Comparing her to other cruisers, you can make the following claims about Rochester's agility:

• She's not fast.
• Her turning radius isn't small.
• Her rudder shift time is slow.
• Her rate of turn is sluggish.

Being on the poor side of average has a lot of stacked detriments for a cruiser.  The most effective combination for a cruiser is range and high speed -- this allows a cruiser to stand off at a distance where she can pummel enemy ships and give herself the maximum amount of time to avoid enemy fire.  Even with horrible handling, high speed and enough range can make up for any other agility detriments to keep a cruiser in the game longer than it has any right to be.  Rochester's downright pedestrian 33 knots doesn't provide that speed threshold needed and her sub-16km range doesn't tick the other box either. Now if you can't have that speed + range combination then hopefully you have a very tight turning radius and good rudder shift time.  Up close, your reaction times to dodge are much reduced and unless you can change course and/or speed quickly, dodging fire gets that much more difficult.  And here, again, Rochester falls short.  Her 750m turning radius isn't appalling nor is her 10.5 second rudder shift time the worst we've seen (it is pretty bad, though), but neither hit the benchmarks needed to help her avoid damage.

As a result, Rochester punishes you more than other cruisers for being caught out.  Combine this with what I said earlier about the lack of health recovery and being in the wrong place at the wrong time gets her punished hard.  It's very difficult to extract her when she over-extends and she's heavily reliant upon her Smoke Generator to band-aid misplays.

Now, it really doesn't matter what the source of incoming damage is -- be it battleship shells, HE spam, torpedoes or an air-drop of some sort, Rochester just doesn't avoid things well.  She's certainly better at it than a battleship, but not by much, all things told.  Her reliance on her smoke kinda precludes her from making good use of rudder-shift upgrades (you'll really want the extra acceleration provided by Propulsion Modification 1).  That, in turn, hurts Rochester's already mediocre open-water fighting ability.  Add on her sluggish turret traverse and I'm not a fan of fire and manoeuvre in this ship.  She can do it (all cruisers can), but she's not built for that kind of game play.  It's better to stick to the American standbys of finding an island and making it your waifu interlaced with a bit of smoke play.  This isn't a problem unique to Rochester by any means.  Only Wichita, out of the American tier VIII heavies, breaks the mould.

VERDICT:  A whole lot of meh..

Anti-Aircraft Defence
Flak Bursts: 5 + 1 explosions for 1,540 damage per blast at 3.5km to 5.8km.
Long Ranged (up to 5.8km):  108.5dps at 90% accuracy (97.7dps)
Medium Ranged (up to 4km): 353.5dps at 90% accuracy (318.2dps)

Anything that doesn't specify whether it cannot or will always have DFAA has the choice of taking it, usually at the expense of relinquishing access to their Hydroacoustic Search.  Rochester's

As the meta stands currently, Rochester stands in contention for having the second-best AA power among the tier VIII cruisers (way) behind De Zeven Provincien.  The Dutch cruiser is an AA powerhouse, and one of the few rare examples in the game after the butchering of the anti-aircraft interdicting cruiser role with the CV rework (more on that in her own review).  Rochester's AA power is closely comparable to that of Cheshire.  While she lacks the higher overall damage output of the British heavy cruiser, she has better range on her medium-calibre guns, allowing them to put out damage for longer.  In addition, Rochester will always have access to Defensive AA Fire while the British heavy might not.

This may sound like pretty high praise, but it's really not.  Yes, Rochester has good AA firepower values for at tier VIII cruiser, but she's not a complete monster in this regard.  Even with Defensive AA Fire active, she's still not reaching De Zeven Provincien's levels of sustained AA DPS. In practical terms, this means that a pristine Rochester, correctly played is all but untouchable to tier VI carriers.  Fully specialized she can almost prevent tier VIII carriers from dropping.  Tier X can still dump on her but it gets expensive fast. That may be enough to discourage carriers from even attempting to poke at her but in end-game situations with the game in the balance, I wouldn't count on being immune to high-tier carrier attacks.  You'll have to Just Dodge™ like the rest of the plebs.

VERDICT:  Good as Rochester's AA firepower is, the AA interdiction cruiser archetype is still missing from World of Warships.

Vision Control
Base/Minimum Surface Detection: 12.06km / 9.48km
Base/Minimum Air & Underwater Detection Range: 7.25km / 5.87km
Detection Range When Firing in Smoke: 6.79km
Maximum Firing Range:  15.86km

So, here's the 11,300 doubloon question:  Is it worth dropping a Surveillance Radar to get access to a Smoke Generator?

Conveniently enough, this question has already been answered in another tech tree line.  The British light cruisers allow you to swap smoke for radar from tier VIII+ starting with the Edinburgh.  Generally speaking, Surveillance Radar provides more influence in a battle with the provision that you have team mates that will capitalize upon your spotting.  Sinking destroyers early on wins games, after all.  However, in solo-play, a Smoke Generator is the safer option.  If you only have your own self to rely upon, then  increasing your own survivability is the way to go.

It's a bit of a fallacy to say that Rochester is just a Baltimore that drops radar for smoke.  Rochester isn't a Baltimore-class cruiser.  There's a lot of small differences between them that adds up quickly to disparities of performance, even before you swap out consumables.  Thus, the question on whether or not smoke is worth more to radar between the two vessels is complicated. Specifically to this section of my review, Rochester has much better concealment than Baltimore.  Rochester shaves a whole 540m off her base surface detection range.  After all of the upgrades are applied, this shrinks to a 420m advantage which is still noticeable.  Rochester sits towards the upper half of concealment within her tier and near the very top within her matchmaking.  So her concealment is good and in select scenarios can even be abused to flex, attack or disengage as needs be without the use of her smoke. 

But even her use of smoke is remarkable as she has better concealment values while firing in smoke than Baltimore or Anchorage which are visible at 7.18km and 7.98km respectively compared to Rochester's 6.79km.

Rochester isn't the first "sneaky" American heavy cruiser.  We've seen all of this before in Wichita.  She and Rochester share concealment values and I find her a better ship to compare Rochester to than Baltimore.  Both Rochester and Wichita can make some pretty bold plays by using and abusing their stealth and then following it up with clever consumable use.  However, I prefer Wichita's consumable combination for this, though.  Surveillance Radar is my kinda jam as it lets me abuse lolibotes and smoked up cruisers in all kinds of hilarious ways that Rochester simply can't.  Rochester's smoke is good, do not mistake me.  It provides Rochester with a greater level of survivability than that enjoyed by most of the other American cruisers at this tier barring Congress.  However, the ability to scatter the roaches is still preferable in my books, especially when a lot of what Rochester's smoke provides can be made up for with good use of terrain. 

Who needs smoke when you have an island waifu?

VERDICT:  Wichita-good, but not Wichita-great.  I'd rather have radar.

Anti-Submarine Warfare

ASW Armament Type:  Airstrike up to 5km away
Number of Salvos:  Up to two
Reload Time:  90 seconds
Aircraft:  Two flights of two PBY Catalinas with 2,000hp per plane.
Drop Pattern: 6 bombs each dropped evenly over roughly a 4km column
Maximum Bomb Damage:  2,100
Fire Chance: 12%

Rochester's air strike reticule with some ships for scale.  The length of this column is roughly 4km.

Hey, new section!

Oh, how I wish I could take subs into the training rooms or populate them as targets.  Rochester's airstrike ability is brand new with patch 0.10.9 and represents the bare minimum Wargaming will issue for anti-submarine warfare for those who have so far gone without.  It's so new, I have barely time to do any testing of it short of derping bombs into open water because no subs are available to test against at the time I'm writing this.  Anticipate anything and everything having to do with subs still to change significantly.

So let's theory-craft a little.

Note that Rochester's 5km range is where the strike starts,.  The drop pattern covers approximately a 4km stretch with six bombs dropping per plane at fixed intervals with a left/right scatter, effectively allowing her to engage submarines up to 9km away.  It takes 15 seconds from the time the airstrike is called for the first set of depth charges to detonate.  The bombs themselves are listed as having a maximum damage of 2,100 but the reality is that like all submarine damage, this appears to follow a blast-style damage similar to that used by torpedoes, meaning there's a whole bunch of parameters modifying this damage that I don't yet understand.  Don't even get me started with how this damage scales up with skills because I have no idea.  The in port values jump up to 2,415 with all bonuses applied.  Will that reflect in game?  NO IDEA!

It's a brave new world, people.  At any rate, to engage submarines with Rochester, you're going to have to get pretty damn close which means taking an active role in order to do so.  Barring submarines being stupid (please be stupid) this largely relegates Rochester's anti-submarine combat to late-game if it materializes at all.

VERDICT:  Still not ready for Random Battles.

I do love me some PBYs.

Final Evaluation

Do you want a premium Baltimore?  You're spoiled for choice.

• If you want a Baltimore that trades AP shell performance for stealth and agility, get Wichita.
• If you want a Baltimore that trades AP shell performance and radar for smoke and torpedoes, get Anchorage.
• If you want a Baltimore that trades radar for smoke and stealth, get Rochester.

Rochester's strength here is that she more closely duplicates Baltimore's AP gunnery than Wichita or Anchorage and changes up the game play from team-based with Surveillance Radar to a more selfish style with her Smoke Generator.  That's really not my cup of tea, so I'm not going to be playing Rochester much (if at all) after this review.  Wichita is the more compelling choice for me; I prefer that aggressive style of play of providing vision and molesting lolibotes over Rochester's admittedly easier "angry smoke cloud" game play.  This said, it's not like I'd be running out to throw money at Wargaming to get Wichita either. I'm not in the market for a premium Baltimore-class.  Maybe you are. 

That's really all I have to say about Rochester.  She's not terrible -- anything with smoke and not-horrible range is always going to be competitive.  She's just not offering me the kind of play that I want.  I had only modest success in her with no amazing games (rushing this review out precluded me from getting in only a handful of games to confirm her performance) but I'm certain that some players will be able to get some truly monstrous results out of her if people let her farm.

Overall? I'm likely to forget about her before long.  She's ultimately a very "safe" premium.  There's nothing surprising here to trip up the developers when it came to balancing her or for tripping up consumers who bought her blind.  She is exactly what you'd expect out of an American heavy cruiser premium.

Thanks for reading.  Mouse out!

This review was originally published on the WGNA Forums on March 25th, 2016.

The following is aimed at new(ish) players looking to find a little more information about various ships from events, for premium currency or for real-world cash.  The goal is to allow players to make an educated decision before parting with their time and money and to find premium vessels that suit their chosen style of play, whether that is competitive, cooperative, or simply for fun.  The idea here is to elabourate on information not commonly available through reading statistics and provide some (heavily) biased anecdotal evidence to encourage or dissuade you from making your purchase.  The usual disclaimers apply:  everyone knows the Matchmaker clearly loves me because I spend money so that's why I occasionally get really good games, not because I have any particular skills of note

A very special thanks to Argh_My_Liver for his generousity in gifting me this ship.

Without further ado: 

The Soviet Navy Sverdlov-class Cruiser

PROs

• Excellent range of 19.1km, best of the tier 8 cruisers.
• Her rifles are high velocity with flat shell arcs, facilitating long range gunnery.
• Good rate of fire of 7.5rpm and very high potential DPM.
• Decent torpedo armament, with a quintuple launcher off each side and 8km range.
• Excellent AA power, particularly long-range AA.
• Good rudder shift time of 6.5s
• Has access to a Smoke Launcher charge. Can increase to 3 charges with skills and premium consumable.

CONs

• 152mm rifles can struggle to do damage to larger capital ships.
• Very little armour and a large, exposed citadel
• Has no torpedo bulges -- expect to take full damage from any torpedo strikes.
• Large surface detection range of 14.1km.
• No float plane spotter, fighter or radar options.

She still looks gorgeous.  Her camouflage doesn't have any surprises attached to it, like bonus free XP.

A lot has changed since the Mikhail Kutuzov was first introduced in January of 2016. The first and most significant change was the overhaul of Captain Skills which no longer showed the same synergy with guns with a caliber between 140mm and 155mm as they did previously. The second change was the introduction of the Soviet Cruiser line in 0.5.4, giving another series of ships against which to compare the Mikhail Kutuzov.  In short, the landscape of the game is changing and it's worth taking another look at this important Soviet premium.

Primary Armament

The stock values of the Mikhail Kutuzov's guns have improved since she was introduced in 0.5.2.  By and large, these changes were designed to preserve the maximums acquired through the Captain Skills, Expert Marksman, Basic Fire Training and Advanced Fire Training which improved Turret Rotation, Rate of Fire and Range, respectively.  The end result, however, saw a slight boost overall in Rate of Fire, while keeping the other values if these skills (Expert Marksman, notably) were retained  This means that right out of the box, the Mikhail Kutuzov is better than it was after 0.5.3.

 

She's even better when you compare her to the other light cruisers in her matchmaking bracket, that were not so fortunate in seeing their stats so favourably tweaked.

 

 

Light Cruiser gunnery statistics with the use of Basic Fire Training, Advanced Fire Training & Expert Marksman captain skills between patches 0.5.2 and 0.5.4.  Note how the Mikhail Kutuzov's RoF & DPM increased.

 

The Mikhail Kutuzov is armed with twelve 152mm high velocity rifles.  These have excellent gunnery characteristics, including flat trajectories which makes long distance gunnery very easy, even against high speed targets like Destroyers. My only real complaint with these guns is that her HE shells are lacking in hitting power against heavily armoured targets such as Battleships.  Landing multiple-hit, zero-damage volleys is commonplace and plays contrary to the large potential DPM values these guns otherwise boast.  Her AP shells are reasonably reliable.

 

 It should be noted that the Mikhail Kutuzov's primary armament are identical to those found on the Chapayev -- the tier 8 Soviet Cruiser in almost every respect except for range.  The Mikhail Kutuzov has an extra 1.8km range advantage over her sister ship without any drawbacks to her gun performance.

 Secondary Armament

 The Mikhail Kutuzov has six dual-purpose 100mm mounts which serve as secondary batteries for the ship, providing a small amount of defensive fire against ships that venture too close.  Two are positioned forward and four facing aft. Only two may fire directly forward and directly aft, with an angle needed for these guns to track targets alongside the ship. They have an excellent base range of 5.0km and rate of fire of 15rpm. Their chance for starting fires is on the low side at a mere 6%. Overall, they're decent but I wouldn't expect much out of them in close encounters.

 

In addition, she boasts two quintuple torpedo launchers off each side.  For those used to (and frustrated by) Soviet cruiser torpedoes, you're in for a pleasant surprise.  These have an 8km range, which (let's be honest) is still inadequate for her tier, but manageable at least.  The large number of torpedoes more than makes up for their modest hitting power of 14,400 alpha damage and at 60 knots, they're reasonably high speed too.  It's unlikely you will find much use for these fish, but at least they are more versatile than anything else seen in the Soviet Cruiser line until the Dmitri Donskoi at tier 9.

 

Maneuverability

Compared to the rest of the Soviet cruiser line, the Mikhail Kutuzov is downright agile.  Her rudder shift time is a mere 6.5s with a 760m turning circle.  This gives her the comparable agility to some of the IJN Heavy Cruisers, such as the Atago and Mogami.  Her straight line speed 33.0 knots which pales a little compared to some of the other long legged Soviet Cruisers, but it's still more than fair and far from being a drawback. This does preclude her from running down some of the slower DDs in the manner that some of the more fleet footed Soviet cruisers are capable.

 

With her fast turret rotation, she won't throw off your aim in a hard maneuver either.

 

Durability and Defense

The Mikhail Kutuzov's armour scheme is utterly insufficient to protect her against Battleship caliber rounds that she faces -- full stop.  Even when angled, you can and will be struck in the citadel, especially at close range by large caliber guns.  It's decent enough that in medium to long range engagements with other cruisers that angling will protect you from the worst of the damage that you'll see.  But as a large ship with a huge superstructure, she's very vulnerable to high explosive fire.

 

This is coupled with an enormous surface detection range of 14.1km which makes hiding the Mikhail Kutuzov exceedingly difficult.  Even with a full set of concealment modifications, skills and camouflage, she remains an easy to spot surface vessel.  The one saving grace is that the 152mm Soviet guns only seem to add about 4.5km to her surface detection range, giving her potentially a rather large area of concealment when properly specialized while still being able to engage enemy vessels.

 

To assist her in keeping herself safe from guns, she joins the Iwaki Alpha as one of only two cruisers with a Smoke Launcher charge.  Identical to those found on destroyers, this opens up both offensive and defensive uses of this consumable.  The Mikhail Kutuzov only starts with a single charge initially, but this can be expanded to 3 with the Superintendent Captain Skill and the premium version of the same consumable.

 

Unlike other high tier Soviet cruisers, she does not have access to radar.  She also lacks access to any form of aircraft to extend vision around her.  This limits her anti-destroyer abilities to the use of Hydroacoustic Search.

 

AA Defense

This is one of the Mikhail Kutuzov's greatest strengths.  She not only has good AA strength, it's also clustered into two long-ranged brackets -- 5.0km and 3.5km.  With 117dps coming from her dual purpose, 100mm guns, the Mikhail Kutuzov has one of the strongest long-ranged AA bubbles found from a cruiser in the game.  When this combines with AA-skills and a Defensive Fire consumable, enemy attack craft waves melt away quickly.

 

This makes the Mikhail Kutuzov an excellent anti-aircraft escort vessel.

 

Overall Impressions

 I have followed the progress of the Mikhail Kutuzov with some interest since her arrival in World of Warships, particularly as she dodged the Basic Fire Training / Advanced Fire Training / Expert Marksman nerfs that have afflicted the more senior light cruisers found in the game.  On the one hand, I was glad to see that this expensive ship wasn't getting nerfed a month after Wargaming had sold it to their customers.  On the other, I worried this might push the Mikhail Kutuzov into the role of the next Gremyashchy.

 

Like the pre-order destroyer, the Mikhail Kutuzov is better than the same tier Soviet counterpart found in the tech tree.  You need only go through the checklist, comparing the Chapayev to the Mikhail Kutuzov.

 

• Gunnery:  They have the same guns, but the Mikhail Kutuzov is longer ranged.  (Winner: Mikhail Kutuzov)
• Secondaries:  The Chapayev's torpedoes hit harder and are faster but she has less of them and they are painfully short ranged. (Winner:  Mikhail Kutuzov). 
• Durability:  The Chapayev has less HP and a similar armour scheme, but has radar.  The Mikhail Kutuzov has more HP, better AA power and a smoke screen. (Winner:  Mikhail Kutuzov)
• Maneuverability:  The Chapayev is 0.5 knots faster but has much worse rudder shift and almost a 900m turning circle.  (Winner: Mikhail Kutuzov)
• Concealment:  The Chapayev is more stealth (Winner:  Chapayev).

Now, I like the Chapayev -- though I understand she's not an easy ship to like.  The Mikhail Kutuzov has a very similar, long range play style with escort qualities that I enjoy.  However, like the entire Soviet Cruiser line, she is incredibly fragile.  This results in a high risk, high reward type of play that isn't for everyone.  You won't be successfully leading many charges with the Mikhail Kutuzov but you need to be flexible in order to help secure a win.

 

What concerns me the most is that this continues the trend of a premium tier 8 cruiser being arguably better than many of the research based tier 8 ships.  I am not certain if this is a flaw of the Atago and Mikhail Kutuzov or more of a reflection of the tier 8 cruisers being in a rough spot.  Certainly, few would argue that the New Orleans needs a look at.  Though the Mogami performs well, a few quality of life changes would make her more enjoyable.  The Admiral Hipper feels under gunned.

 

At least for her part, the Mikhail Kutuzov is a solid ship.

• For tier one, Situational Awareness should be one of the first skills you grab.  For AA escort ships, you'll want Basic Fire Training to increase your AA power for your 15th skill point.
• For tier two, I strongly recommend investing in Last Stand.  The thin skin of the Mikhail Kutuzov means you will take a lot of critical damage from high explosive rounds, including hits to your steering gears and engine.  This can help mitigate needing to reach for your Damage Control Party consumable.
• For tier three, Superintendent is your best choice, to add an additional charge to all of your mounted consumables. Most importantly, this affects your Smoke Generator and Defensive Fire consumables.
• For tier four, your choice varies depending on the role you choose.  Demolition Expert is your best choice if you want to specialize in long range gunnery.  Otherwise, Advanced Fire Training or Manual Fire Control for AA Armament is recommended with both being desirable for a dedicated AA ship, skipping tier 5.
• For tier five, Concealment Expert should be picked up for players looking to specialize in long range gunnery.  AA-escort ships can skip tier 5 and instead take another tier 4 skill and Basic Fire Training from tier 1.

This review was originally published on the WGNA Forums on May 29th, 2016.

The following a preview of the upcoming USS Indianapolis, a ship kindly provided to me by Wargaming for review purposes.  The statistics discussed here reflect those she had at the time of testing. 
Please be aware that these stats may change in the future.

The following is aimed at new(ish) players looking to find a little more information about various ships from events, for premium currency or for real-world cash. The goal is to allow players to make an educated decision before parting with their time and money and to find premium vessels that suit their chosen style of play, whether that is competitive, cooperative, or simply for fun. The idea here is to elabourate on information not commonly available through reading statistics and provide some (heavily) biased anecdotal evidence to encourage or dissuade you from making your purchase. The usual disclaimers apply: everyone knows the Matchmaker clearly loves me because I spend money so that's why I occasionally get really good games, not because I have any particular skills of note

The Tier 7 American Portland-class Heavy Cruiser
USS Indianapolis

Quick Summary: A long ranged heavy cruiser designed as a fleet escort for Battleships. The only tier 7 Cruiser with the use of radar. Though overall quite fragile, she has good bow armour against cruiser caliber weapons and a strong anti-aircraft suite.
Cost:  Ship first went on sale on May 30th, 2016 for $34.99 USD with a port slot.

Closest in-Game Contemporary: New Orleans & Pensacola
Degree of Similarity: Clone / Sister-Ship / Related Class / Similar Role / Unique
Indianapolis shares much in common with the Tier 8 New Orleans and the Tier 7 Pensacola, ending up being a sort of hybrid of the pair. She has a layout more similar of the New Orleans but with a familiar fragility of the Pensacola.

PROs

• Tier 7 Cruiser with Radar!
• Great range of 16.9km with decent muzzle velocity on AP rounds makes sniping long distance targets comfortable.
• Very good handling with 32.5 knot top speed, 620m turning circle and 9.1s rudder shift.
• Good AA armament.
• Excellent bow armour when angled towards the enemy. Can repulse even 203mm AP shells.
• Combination of range, AA power and radar makes her an excellent BB escort.

CONs

• She feels very under gunned with her 15s reload and only 9 rifles.
• Poor HE Shell performance.
• Difficult to make proper use of her radar -- she's not well equipped to hunt destroyers.
• Armour is utterly insufficient to protect her from Battleship caliber (356mm+) rounds which can overmatch her almost anywhere.
• Exceedingly vulnerable to concentrated HE fire.

The famous (infamous) USS Indianapolis.  As a Heavy Cruiser, one would think that she would be as far removed from the other tier 7 USN Premium Cruiser's style of game play as possible and rescue players from the need to use the USS Atlanta as a crew trainer.

Indianapolis has been a highly anticipated vessel.  Historically, she's a very interesting ship.  But from a World of Warships perspective, many players hope she can supplant the USS Atlanta as the go-to high-tier trainer / credit earning vessel for the US Navy.  In truth, this really shouldn't be a difficult mantle to usurp given the issues with the USS Atlanta.  But at the same time, this desperation to replace the Atlanta with something else may blindside some players into accepting anything better than the infamous rainbow-pooping light cruiser without seriously considering what's under the hood.  It's with two pairs of critical eyes that we take a look at this new USN Cruiser.  Lert will be once again joining me to provide some additional insight into this ship.

The Lert Box

LittleWhiteMouse has once again let me into her den (very trusting of a cat this little mouse is) to share my thoughts about the in-game premium version of a very controversial and tragic ship, the USS Indianapolis. This is the ship that carried parts of Little Boy to the US air base at Tinian, as well as getting torpedoed by a Japanese submarine and sinking. Of nearly 1300 crew, 900 went into the water, and by the time four days had passed, they were found and rescue efforts could get underway, only 317 were pulled out of the water alive.

But is the World of Warships version of this ship any good? Let's find out. For this review I will be comparing her to Pensacola and New Orleans. Why those two? The Portland class was basically a modified Pensacola hull, and carried an armament layout like that on New Orleans. Plus, she carries a form of radar, something not seen in the USN cruiser tree until New Orleans.

Options

You're pretty spoiled for choice with Indianapolis. The most interesting option is the use of her Surveillance Radar.

Consumables: Three slots

• Damage Control Party.
• Defensive Fire or Hydroacoustic Search
• Catapult Fighter or Surveillance Radar (8.49km range, 25s active period)

Module Upgrades: Four slots, standard options.
Premium Camouflage: Tier 6+ standard. This provides 50% bonus experience gains, 3% reduction in surface detection and 4% reduction in enemy accuracy.

Indianapolis gets access to the standard and premium American version of hydroacoustics, the standard and premium versions of defensive fire, a standard and a premium fighter, and a standard and a premium version of radar. This radar is slightly gimped compared to the regular T8+ USN radar as found on New Orleans and up, with only 8.49km range and a 25 second uptime. Still, radar at tier 7. Can't deny that's cool.

Pensacola gets everything Indianapolis gets minus radar, and New Orleans gets everything Indianapolis gets, but with the familiar 9km radar that's up for 30 seconds. As such, it won't be a surprise to anybody that I rate them the following:

Indianapolis: 2 pts
Pensacola: 1 pt
New Orleans: 3 pts

Artillery

Primary Battery: 203mm main guns in 3x3 turrets (A-B-X arrangement, super-firing)
Secondary Battery: 127mm dual purpose rifles in 8x1 turrets

The Lert Box

Indianapolis carries nine 8" rifles in the same set-up that New Orleans does, two superfiring triple barrel turrets afore, and a single turret aft. This contrasts with Pensacola's upgraded form which carries ten of the same guns, in two superfiring pairs fore and aft, carrying three barrels in the upper and two in the lower turrets. The reload on Indianapolis' guns is 15 seconds, the same as on Pensacola. New Orleans' guns reload slightly quicker, needing 14 seconds. This means that Indianapolis has the least rounds in the air of the three, with New Orleans taking second place and Pensacola first place.

The guns the trio carry are the same, firing the same shells with the same floaty arcs, the same time-to-target and the same damage potential and fire chances. Indianapolis can fire those shells the furthest out of the three, being able to lob shells at targets 16.9km away, compared to New Orleans' 16.2 and Pensacola 15.9.

Accuracy-wise the thee are the same. Indianapolis shows the worst, with 150 meter dispersion at max range. New Orleans clocks in second with 145 meter at maximum range, with Pensacola being the most accurate at 141 meters at max range. however, with the linear way dispersion works, they all have the same spread when firing at the same ranges.

All three ships have the same 8x 127mm secondaries, so nothing to write about there.

So how do I rate them? Pensacola has the most shells in the air per minute and is the most accurate, but the shortest range. New Orleans has more shells in the air per minute than Indianapolis, but at shorter range. To me, Pensacola wins because of the sheer volume of fire. But who takes second place? I'm going to give it to New Orleans, simply because the faster ROF helps, whereas Indianapolis' extra 700 meter range isn't really that much of deal.

Indianapolis: 1 pt
Pensacola: 3 pts
New Orleans: 2 pts

The use of islands as cover is invaluable for making the most of Indianapolis.  Don't get caught out in the open by enemy Dreadnoughts.  Bad things will happen.

Indianapolis is armed with the American 203mm/55 Mk14 rifles. These are identical to the guns you first upgrade on the Pensacola and use later on the stock New Orleans. She shares the gun layout of this latter class of Heavy Cruisers. They're not great guns, unfortunately, suffering in a couple of areas. This is a common problem to the American heavy-cruiser line as a whole, where they struggle with poor HE performance, have uninspired AP performance and their rate of fire isn't good enough to compensate. This is especially important as it's the only way for these USN Heavy Cruisers to do damage and their output just isn't there. Indianapolis is no different.

To put this in perspective, the Myoko has more guns that hit harder and with a faster reload. The Yorck has less guns but they hit harder and reload faster. And both of these cruisers have torpedoes as backup weaponry. At least Indianapolis can look down her nose at the 127mm off the Atlanta.

The real strength of the guns, however, is their range. At 16.9km, she has tremendous range for a USN Cruiser and it's upon this feature good performance with this ship relies. Using (and abusing) this range will keep you alive. However, while they appear to have good muzzle velocity, there's a lot of "float" in the High Explosive shells of the  USN 203mm guns, leading to a long travel time to distance making ranged gunnery a bit uncomfortable.  You won't easily bulls-eye a juking Destroyer at 12km like you might in a Soviet cruiser.  While your guns do perform well at lesser distances, the threat of reprisals, her poor armour values and the inability to match contemporary cruisers in a DPM race makes it ill advised to let anything get this close. This is unfortunate, though, given that one of her more interesting consumables is an 8.49km radar option. While she might be well equipped to unmask lurking destroyers, being so close to the enemy to make good use of it may end up being a terrible mistake.

Keep Indianapolis at range.  Look for opportunities to make use of her AP rounds against enemy cruisers.  Indianapolis can and will citadel penetrate enemy heavy cruisers at up to her maximum range with her AP shells.  If an enemy cruiser gives you her broadside, lock on and open fire.  This is the fastest way to stack up damage and help thin out the enemy team.  A good broadside can strip over 10,000 damage in a single go, with multiple citadel penetrations easily stacked in short order against unwary cruisers that are paying more attention to the lay of Battleship guns than an enemy cruiser.  Your AP performance, while good, can struggle against more heavily armoured Battleships so vary your ammunition choices as the situation dictates.

This all adds up to point a very obvious direction towards Indianapolis' intended role: She makes an excellent fleet escort for Battleships. Her range is sufficient that at the ranges where Battleships are engaging, she can often add her firepower too.  Her primary target should be cruisers where you can make use of her good AP penetration and Battleships as a secondary target.

Danger close, the secondaries of Indianapolis engage a low-health Minekaze.

Aircraft

Air Group: Single deployed float plane fighter.

If you take the fighter, you preclude the ability to take radar instead. It might feel an unfortunate waste to lose out on one of her defining graces as a premium vessel for something so mundane. The gains made by deploying her fighter are appreciable -- it does 53 dps --  but it may not be worth the cost for having a trump detection card, however short its duration.

Maneuverability

Top Speed: 32.5 knots.
Turning Radius: 620m
Rudder Shift: 9.1s

The agility of Indianapolis is downright American. This is to say that compared to the German and Japanese cruisers, she's surprisingly nimble with a good turning radius and responsive rudder. Compared to other ships in the USN arsenal, she's nothing special. Her speed does allow her to keep up with fat Battleships and redeploy to assist a straggler that may be under sudden air attack. Her maneuverability will also allow her an easier time of shifting between incoming runs of torpedoes dropped by aircraft or enemy vessels. This trading of speed for maneuverability precludes her from taking on an aggressive anti-destroyer role (not that her fragility and slow reload allowed for it in the first place). It also limits her ability to kite larger vessels effectively as any form of turning will slow her down and allow fleet footed warships like IJN Heavy Cruisers and fast Battleships to close the distance.

The Lert Box

Neither Pensacola nor New Orleans is particularly fast - especially compared to their Imperial Japanese competitors - but they're more agile than the oriental sisters. Does Indianapolis follow the same trend? To start with, her 32.5 knot top speed is exactly the same as the other two. Indianapolis' 620 meter turn radius is the same as that on Pensacola, with New Orleans requiring 660 meters to throw that behind around.

However, it's the rudder shift that lets Indianapolis down, with a value of 9.1 seconds compared to Pensacola's 7.0 and New Orleans' 6.9. I'm going to give this category to Pensacola, because I think a 40 meter smaller turning radius is worth more than a 0.1 second faster rudder shift. Indianapolis takes the last place, because of a 2.1 second slower rudder.

Indianapolis: 1 pt
Pensacola: 3 pts
New Orleans: 2 pts

Durability

Hit Points: 32,500
Citadel Protection: Up to 146mm
Anti-Torpedo Bulge: None

The Lert Box

Ah, the category all of these ships are known for lacking. Indianapolis boasts 32.500 hitpoints, behind Pensacola's 34.300 and New Orleans' 35.400. However, on paper Indianapolis has the strongest armor, with a belt clocking in at 146mm versus New Orleans' 127 and Pensacola's 102mm. In practise though, this doesn't really show. All three ships are soft, with their belts only covering their citadels and everything else being soft as tissue paper. Driving any of these, you want to avoid being shot at.

I was very tempted to tie this whole category, but that wouldn't really be fair. New Orleans is a fair bit tougher than Pensacola. But how to rate Indianapolis compared to New Orleans? The latter has more health, the former more armor - in very select places. So I've decided to tie New Orleans and Indianapolis, with Pensacola lagging behind.

Indianapolis: 2 pts (Tie with Nola)
Pensacola: 1 pt
New Orleans: 2 pts (Tie with Indi)

Indianapolis has an interesting armour layout.  Her bow armour is sufficient to bounce armour piercing rounds up to 220mm in caliber. Heavily sloped, it would take a 230mm round to overmatch her bow armour and be able to slam shells into her vitals. This allows her to tank and duel with other cruisers that are slinging armour piercing rounds and fight them with near impunity. However, everything changes when they reach for high explosive shells. High explosive does work very well against her, though, so take care of her fragility when facing high DPM vessels like the Soviet and American 152mm armed cruisers.

This fragility continues, as one would expect, when facing any battleship-caliber weapons.  It's possible to citadel Indianapolis with 356mm AP shells from almost any angle.  If you get struck by a Battleship, the best you can hope is to receive some over penetration damage, but coming under the attention of Battleship caliber weapons is always going to be a bad show. 

Yes, this really happened.  Second game ever in Indianapolis, I took a single torpedo just beneath the #3 turret and detonated.  The original armour model of Indianapolis was rife with bugs that have been largely corrected.

Concealment & Camouflage

13.9km Surface Detection, 8.1km Air Detection.

The Lert Box

Indianapolis boasts rather decent scores values of 13.4 km by sea and 8.1 km by air. Pensacola only manages 15.7 and 7.8 respectively. New Orleans meanwhile gives the best showing with 12.4 by sea and 7.5 by air. Very straight forward category. New Orleans takes the win and Indianapolis second place, despite Pensacola being less visible from the air - it's her enormous 15.7 kilometer visibility by sea that loses her this category.

Indianapolis: 2 pts
Pensacola: 1 pt
New Orleans: 3 pts

There's not much to say here.  WhileIndianapolis does have better concealment values than the Pensacola, she's still a large cruiser.  She doesn't have the ability to fire from the surface without being detected, even when you stack camouflage and Concealment Expert from your Captain onto her.  You can reduce her surface detection to below 12km but this won't be sufficient to let you sneak up on destroyers to get in range with your radar, nor is it a small enough value to make dropping back into stealth easy when enemy vessels begin focusing upon you.  As such, it's imperative with Indianapolis to make use of cover and be very conscious of the engagement ranges at which you find yourself.  Watch your minimap -- keep an eye on where and how far each enemy ship is in case you run into trouble and need to hide.

Anti-Aircraft Defense

AA Battery Calibers: 127mm / 40mm / 20mm
AA Umbrella Ranges: 4.2km / 3.5km / 2.0km

The AA power of Indianapolis is best described as "interesting".  It's not out-the-gates powerful like the Cleveland or Atlanta.  It has its flaws, most notably in the lack of any 5.0km range large caliber AA guns, being limited to 4.2km to start.  This really hurts her ability as a dedicated escort vessel to put out a wide umbrella to protect her charges.  This means the upper limits of her range when combined with AA Gun Battery Modification 2 and Advanced Fire Training is 6.05km rather than the 7.2km umbrella present on dedicated AA ships.  She does have some respectable DPS, however.  Indianapolis puts out a stock 212dps at 2.0km, with 58 of that coming from her 127mm rifles in 290 damage bursts every 5 seconds.  This scales well with the Pensacola and New Orleans with 217dps and 299dps respectively.

Overall, it means that if you lean heavily on her AA power, you can make her into a decent, but not truly terrifying AA vessel.  She won't have the reach to utterly murder incoming planes, but she will put a healthy bit of damage into said squadrons and make them think twice about attacking any ships protected by your umbrella.

The Lert Box

Indianapolis has 46 rating standard, with 8x dual oerlikon 20mm mounts, 6x quad bofors 40mm and 8x 127mm DP secondaries. Pensacola gets 46 rating standard, with 15x single Oerlikon 20mm, 6x quad bofors 40mm and 8x 127mm DP secondaries. New Orleans gets 49 rating standard, with 9x single Oerlikon 20mm, 17x double Oerlikon 20mm, 6x quad Bofors 40mm and 8x 127mm DP secondaries.

All three ships are very close in AA performance, being basically the USN standard for the tier. Good for escorting, good for self defense. While strictly speaking the Pensacola has less AA than Indianapolis with a single 20mm Oerlikon lacking over her premium Portland class sister, I'm still going to give them equal rating. New Orleans takes the win though.

Indianapolis: 2 pts (Tie with Pensi)
Pensacola: 2 pts (Tie with Indi)
New Orleans: 3 pts

Overall Impressions

Mouse' Summary:

• Great AP performance, especially against cruisers at range.
• Armour is sufficient to bounce cruiser-caliber guns and smaller at range.  Useless otherwise.
• Too slow moving and slow-firing to be a good destroyer hunter.
• Too fragile to lead a push.
• Very good as an escort for battleships.

I very much wanted to enjoy Indianapolis.  With the Atlanta being such a controversial vessel, I was hoping that Indianapolis would be a straight-up performer so that the USN would have an obvious high-tier training vessel to reach for. 

But I didn't enjoy my time on Indianapolis.

A lot of this was largely coloured by my initial impressions of her.  Before 0.5.6 launched, iChase contacted me over Skype to do some testing with ndianapolis.  We spent a little over an hour trying out her armour. Early release versions of the vessel showed that even destroyer caliber guns were capable of landing citadel hits beneath the #1 and #2 turrets with their high explosive shells. One of the Russian-speaking developers later went on to say that the armour model on Indianapolis had a few bugs and she sat too high in the water which added to her fragility. This meant that any testing really exemplified her fragility -- perhaps unfairly, but such was the first experiences I had with her. 

These deficiencies in her armour have been largely corrected.  You won't take citadel hits from casually fired high explosive shells from 120mm to 130mm armed destroyers at the side of your ship.  Knowing this bug was present, I had to split my review time into two parts and attempt to look at the vessel with a fresh pair of eyes after 0.5.6 launched (which is why you're all getting this review rather late compared to the reviews published by my colleagues).  And yet, I still wasn't having a very good time in Indianapolis while I was trying her out the second time through.

She's a very typical American Heavy Cruiser.  Her interesting "quirks" are her radar and her long range.  These two quirks don't overlap very well, as you can imagine, but they're two very handy tools for helping assist heavier warships.  And it was finally acknowledging these traits that I came to realize I had to stop trying to play super aggressive with her (as I am want to do) and take a second-line position alongside the Battleships in my fleet.   I tried to put myself in a Molotov mindset ("everything can and WILL kill me if they shoot at me") and the performance numbers started creeping back in my results, though I wasn't able to dictate the pace of matches.

You can't nuke all comers with sha-mazing gun performance.  Instead, you have to wait for your opportunities, set up your targets and pull the trigger with an expectation of doing a lot of damage quickly before the enemy can organize reprisals.  She has to be played with caution and care.  Driving up close and hitting things with your sword is right out, so that's probably why I grouched quite a bit through my playtime with her. 

So does she replace the Atlanta?  Well... not in my books.  At least the Atlanta can be fun.

The Lert Box

So, let's tally up, shall we?

Indianapolis gathered 10 points
Pensacola managed 11 points
New Orleans scrounged up 15 points

In conclusion, New Orleans is the far better ship than either of these two, right?

Well, yes. That's why it's a tier 8 and Pensi and Indi tier 7's. I included Nola purely because she is very similar, especially in firepower and maneuverability. Between Pensacola and Indianapolis though, differences are a lot smaller. Pensacola wins out in the firepower department, while Indianapolis has a very cool feature with her radar consumable. While having radar at tier 7 is undeniably a cool gimmick, it is still just that, a gimmick. Other than that, Indianapolis is exactly on par with other USN cruisers of similar tiers.

.... Which is part of the problem. Neither Pensacola nor New Orleans are much beloved. They are slow, soft, tricky to play with mediocre guns. While both have their defenders, Pensacola a bit more than New Orleans it seems, high tier USN cruisers seem to be lagging behind their counterparts, especially from Japan. Also, tier 7 is not really a very good tier for cruisers, with universally divisive ships like Pensacola, Shchors and Yorck. So, while Indianapolis is on par with her American sisters, that just means she manages to reach the lowest standard set for her. I did not enjoy my time with Indianapolis, and unless a blanket buff happens to the tier 7+ USN heavy cruisers, have little to no interest in ever playing her again.

Lert and I share the opinion that while Indianapolis is a good USN Heavy Cruiser, USN Heavy Cruisers are in general a rather poor choice.

Would I Recommend?

The Lert Box

If you want her for what she represents and the history behind the ship, yeah, I guess so. If you can forgive her her - ... USN'ness and really enjoy the thought of having radar at tier 7, sure. But her radar is only real selling point. If you're looking for a fun, enjoyable, capable and competitive ship, look elsewhere. Despite all its faults I would recommend Atlanta over Indianapolis. Much more interesting and fun T7 premium.  (Ouch, shot down by the Atlanta?  That's a pretty harsh assessment.  -Mouse)

Rather than giving a one-answer for all types of game play, let's take a look at some of the more popular reasons someone would want to add Indianapolis to their collection.
 

• For Random Battle Grinding, Indianapolis doesn't have a lot of carry potential.  She's a support cruiser, so you may find your success rate with the ship tied a lot to the competency of your team mates.  It's still possible to do a lot of damage and win yourself credits and experience needed for retraining Captains and earning coin.  However, she's not the ship you want to use to carry a match and dictate the pace of the engagement.  She plays passively, punishing enemies for their mistakes and she's forever trying to buy time to let her low damage totals stack up sufficiently to whittle down bigger ships.  I would give a pass on this one.
   
• For Competitive Gaming in the form of Team Battles and Ranked Battles, no.  Though her radar is very interesting if she was top tier in a Ranked Battle, her fragility makes her an obvious target for early elimination.  Also, she struggles to put out damage quickly to anything short of cruiser targets, making her less ubiquitous than other choices out there.  USN Heavy Cruisers are not a competitive choice.
   
• For Collectors, darn tootin'.  It's the USS Indianapolis.  She's steeped in history.
   
• For Fun Factor, ugh.  Did you enjoy the Pensacola and New Orleans?  Yes?  Then get all over this like a duck on a beetle. If those two ships didn't tickle your fancy, Indianapolis isn't going to offer you anything new and novel to make you smile.

Outfitting your Indianapolis

Recommended Modules

At tier 7, Indianapolis has four module slots to play with.  Keep in mind, she will be facing tier 8+ vessels that have access to that vaunted 5th slot which can reduce their surface detection range.  When you're kitting her out, it's a pretty standard selection for a USN Cruiser.  Decide first if you want to play as an AA escort or not and then if you're going to take Last Stand or Expert Marksman for your Captain's second skill choice.  This will largely determine which modules you should install.

• For your first lost, Main Battery Modification 1 is the only one that makes sense (they really need to re-balance these first modules).
• For your second slot, you have a choice.  If you want to exemplify her gunnery, go with Gun Fire Control System Modification 1.  This will reduce her dispersion somewhat.  Alternatively, if you want to play up her role as an anti-aircraft escort, AA Gun Battery Modification 2 will help nudge up her range.
• For your third slot, you have a bit of a choice.  If you're not going to take the Last Stand Captain Skill, then Propulsion Modification 1 is your best choice.  Any Battleship caliber shell hits that cause citadel penetration are likely to mess up your machine spaces.  This will help keep them in the game.  Otherwise, Damage Control System Modification 1, though not-very-good, is the better choice.
• And finally, for your fourth slot, Steering Gear Modification 2 is your best choice to get your rudder shift time down to 7.3s.

Recommended Consumables

Indianapolis is interesting for the consumables she could choose.  It's unfortunate that she's not fast, stealthy or better armed to take on an anti-destroyer role which would make double stacking Surveillance Radar and Hydroacoustic Search a more fun and viable option.  The first question any player should ask themselves is if they intend to dedicate themselves to an AA-role in their Indianapolis.  If so, I would strongly recommend taking the premium version of Defensive Fire to accelerate the reset timer of the consumable along with providing an extra charge.  I wouldn't bother with the premium version of anything short of the Damage Control Party otherwise. But overall, I would recommend the following for most players to keep from eating too much into your credit earning:

• Damage Control Party II
• Defensive Fire I
• Surveillance Radar I

Recommended Captain Skills

There's a couple different ways to specialize a Captain towards optimum performance withIndianapolis.  Again, it depends if you want to focus on being a long range gunship or performing anti-aircraft duties.

• For your first slot, Situational Awareness is key for both builds.  You're incredibly fragile incoming Battleship fire, so you need to be aware of when you need to begin evasive maneuvers.  For an AA-gunship, Basic Fire Training will be your alternate choice.
• From the second tier, Last Stand is arguably the best choice.  Expert Marksman may look appealing, but keep in mind it will only improve your rotation speed on Indianapolis by 0.7'/s, changing her 180' rotation time from 30s down to 26.9s.
• From the third tier, Vigilance is the best choice for a gunship while Superintendent can be preferable for an anti-aircraft cruiser for the additional charge of Defensive Fire.  This said, the latter is very situational as it would require you to use your AA consumable 3-4 times before Superintendent would worthwhile.
• From the fourth tier, Demolition Expert is best for a gunship while Advenced Fire Training should be the first skill you pick up here for an AA-gunship.  Manual Fire Control for AA Armament should be considered instead of the tier 5 skill for AA-gunships.
• From the fifth tier, Concealment Expert is the best choice for gunships.

The following is a review of Huanghe, a ship kindly provided to me by Wargaming. To the best of my knowledge, this is the release version of the ship and the stats are current as of November 30th, 2017.


Red River, Yellow River, Red River, Yellow River, Red River, Yel -- ow, I just bit my tongue.

Quick Summary:  A British light cruiser with Soviet guns, a Japanese destroyer torpedo reload consumable and a Commonwealth cruiser's smoke generator.  She's fragile, agile and tiny.
Cost:  $26.49 USD with a port slot.
Patch and Date Written: 0.6.13.1 to 0.6.14.0 November 16th, 2017 to November 30th, 2017.

 

Options

Huanghe is weird when it comes to her options.  This is, I think, symptomatic of her troubled development cycle as different gimmicks were tried and tested and a hodge-podge of abilities emerged in an effort to balance her.  Let's go through them.

 

• First, Huanghe counts as a British cruiser for the purposes of her upgrades.  As such, she cannot take Propulsion Modification 2 as it's already installed for free.
• Second, she may take a Torpedo Reload Booster.  She's the first cruiser to have access to this traditionally Japanese destroyer consumable.  This reduces the reload time of her torpedo tubes to 8 seconds.  This has a six minute reset timer for the standard consumable and a four minute reset timer for the premium version.
• Third, her Smoke Generator is odd, mirroring that found on the tier VI British Commonwealth cruiser, HMAS Perth.  This comes with three charges by default and has a 90 second emission time, with each cloud only lasting for 10 seconds.  This allows Huanghe to continue to creep forward at 1/4 speed and remain concealed while she moves.  The reset timer on her consumable is 240s / 160s depending on if you take the free or premium version.

 

Consumables:

• Damage Control Party
• Hyroacoustic Search or Torpedo Reload Booster
• Smoke Generator

Module Upgrades: Four slots.  British cruiser upgrades.

Premium Camouflage: Standard Type 10. This provides 50% bonus experience gains, 3% reduction in surface detection and 4% reduction in enemy accuracy.

 

Huanghe's upgrade choices will deviate somewhat from standard Light Cruiser equipment.

 

• Take Magazine Modification 1 in your first slot.  Huanghe's magazines are not located in her armoured citadel and they have as little as 32mm worth of armour protecting them.  She's as vulnerable to detonations as Perth and Leander are to HE shells of 152mm caliber or larger.  If you prefer to live dangerously, you can take Main Armaments Modification 1, but don't come crying to me when you get your ship blown out from under you by a stray 152mm HE shell.
• In your second slot, you have a choice. You should probably take Propulsion System Modification 1 to protect your engine. However, it's your rudder that will get knocked out most frequently. For that, take Steering Gears Modification 1.
• For your third slot, take AA Guns Modification 2 for the increased range.  Huanghe is a very short ranged cruiser, so it's difficult to justify Aiming Systems Modification 1 as it only reduces her maximum dispersion by a mere 8.7m (from 124m to 115m).
• And in your fourth slot, take Steering Gears Modification 2. 

 

Special Upgrades Huanghe is compatible with the following Special Upgrades. Hydroacoustic Search Modification 1 replaces Propulsion System Modification 1 in your second slot.  This increases the action time of your consumable to 110 seconds.  Smoke Generator Modification 1 replaces AA Guns Modification 2.  This increases the active time of your Smoke Generator from 90 seconds to 117 seconds, but shortens their duration from 10 seconds to 9.5 seconds. Both of these consumables are excellent choices for Huanghe.  If you have access to them (and no better ships to place them upon), I would highly recommend installing each.

 

Firepower

Primary Battery: Six 152mm/57 in three turrets in an A-B-X superfiring configuration.

Secondary Battery:  Eight  100mm/70s in four turrets mounted behind the funnels

Torpedo Armament: Six tubes in 2x3 launchers straddling the rear funnel.

 

 

 

A lot of justified disdain will be aimed squarely at Huanghe's main battery.  Let's get them out of the way.

 

Huanghe has only six 152mm rifles at tier VI.  This is appalling and regardless of what other merits I list here, there's no getting around just how terrible this is.  Huanghe's lack of sufficient main battery firepower really holds her back.  Are we all clear on this?  I'm saying Huanghe's guns are bad.  This "badness" is tempered by a few positive traits, that while welcome, they are insufficient to redeem the overall lack of firepower.  These traits are:

 

• Huanghe uses Soviet 152mm/57 rifles instead of Royal Navy 152mm guns.  These are the same guns found on Budyonny, Shchors, Mikhail Kutuzov & Chapayev.  These guns have excellent ballistic arcs, great AP penetration and a high fire chance per shell hit which exceeds those found on the equivalent (premium) Royal Navy armament.
• Huanghe has an increased rate of fire with her guns to help offset her low DPM and overall fire-setting abilities.  She reloads in 7.0 seconds flat as opposed to 7.5s of her Soviet counterparts.

Yep, that's it.  She's using Soviet guns instead of British and they have an increased rate of fire.  In practical terms, this means Huanghe does more damage on a per-gun basis than Perth, Belfast or Leander which is definitely a plus.  You'll set more fires, land more citadel hits, and generally be more accurate.  However, this does not offset the disparity of losing out two rifles.  Perth and Leander both struggle to kill even soft targets quickly and Huanghe amplifies this weakness.

I wish I could say that was the end of the bad news, but it gets worse.  Huanghe does not have access to the Spotter Aircraft consumable enjoyed by her British and British Commonwealth contemporaries.  This means she's capped with an awful 13.2km main battery range with no way to fire beyond that.  She also doesn't have very good fire arcs, with her C-turret only capable of engaging enemies 37º off her bow.  Her rearward arcs are better, but still not great, with all three turrets capable of putting shells on targets 33º off her stern.

 

If there's one area where Huanghe's guns are at least not-terrible, it's fire starting.  She can be a respectable firebug -- almost on the same level as a nine-gun Galissonniere if she specializes for it (and I do stress "almost").  This will come at the expense of direct damage, though.  Huanghe would need to sacrifice taking Inertial Fuse for HE Shells to do it which is almost a must have for all 152mm HE throwing cruisers.

 

I'm repeating myself, but let me be absolutely clear:  Huanghe's main battery firepower sucks moose-balls.  Not just moose-balls, but hairy and sweaty moose balls.  It all comes down to her not having enough guns.  Good as they are individually, they can't make up for the fact they're overtaxed for damage output.  You're welcome for that moose-visual.

 

Huanghe, on paper, has better overall DPM  and fire starting abilities than ships like Aoba and Molotov.  What these graphs do not describe is the ease at which this firepower is put to use.  Molotov can engage enemies at long distances.  Aoba's 203mm guns aren't reliant upon commander skills to ensure her HE shells penetrate.  Huanghe is best compared with HMAS Perth and Leander in regards to her damage output -- all three are painfully short ranged.  However, all three are capable of maximizing their DPM for short periods of time when they can setup their smoke.

 

Her torpedo armament doesn't make up for the faults of her guns.

 

 

 

Huanghe has a pair of triple launchers off each side of her ship.  If you're hoping she'll get some world-ending fish to compensate for the problems with her guns, Huanghe will let you down.  The good news is that these aren't Deepwater torpedoes -- they can engage any target she faces.  The bad news is that these aren't Deepwater torpedoes -- they don't hit especially hard, move particularly fast, have great range or good concealment.  Huanghe can't even launch these torpedoes from stealth.

 

What's more, Haunghe's torpedoes appear to have been implemented haphazardly.  It's as if they copy and pasted the British torpedo launchers, removed the British single-fire option and then forgot to replace it with the wide spread after the fact.  This means Huanghe is limited to a narrow spread and a narrow spread only. 

 

It becomes almost laughable that Wargaming baits players to take a Torpedo Reload Booster to prop up Huanghe's firepower.  This is the first time this consumable has been made available outside of the Japanese destroyer line.  In order to take it, a player must surrender access to her Hydroacousic Search consumable.  This gimmick might have more weight and appeal if Huanghe had an impressive torpedo armament -- something with more launchers or more teeth.  The ability to double dip with another helping from her triple launchers doesn't strike me as terribly appealing.  I can imagine some scenarios where it might change the outcome of a given match, but on the whole it's highly situational for an armament that's already lacking in versatility.  In my play testing, I never came across an opportunity where I could have made good use of it.

 

In short, redemption isn't found in Huanghe's torpedo armament.

 

Summary:

• Garbage-tier firepower.  Yeah, there are some redeeming qualities.  No one could argue otherwise.  But on the whole?  Garbage.
• With all of this poo-pooing of Huanghe's firepower, do not make the mistake of thinking she's utterly incapable of dealing damage.  That's not the message I'm trying to deliver.  She's not going to put out as much damage as comparable ships, or do so as reliably.  More fool you if you underestimate her.
• Are you regretting purchasing her yet?

 

Durability
Hit Points:  24,100
Maximum Citadel Protection: 70mm
Min Bow & Deck Armour: 16mm
Torpedo Damage Reduction:  None

 

Everything here is also terrible. 

 

Huanghe puts on a whole new level of 'suck' when it comes to defining mid-tier cruiser durability.  She makes Omaha look tough.  Within her matchmaking spread, there is no cruiser with less hit points.  The closest is Königsberg with 24,300hp -- a ship that's already known for capsizing and exploding violently when a loud noise occurs in the next grid-square over.  Every other ship has a more significant advantage in health.  It's well within the math for some tier VII and VIII battleships to delete Huanghe outright with no more than a pair of citadel hits. 

 

It's not like things get any better when you look at her armour scheme.  Huanghe shares a similar protection scheme to the preceding Leander-class upon which the Arethusa-class was based, albeit having a weaker scheme overall.  This comes with a few quirks:

 

• She has a small citadel, composed of only her engine spaces which sits slightly over the waterline.
• Her citadel wall extends to the exterior of the ship, making them potentially vulnerable to HE citadel hits.
• Her magazines lie outside of the armoured citadel directly beneath her guns and well submerged. 

So the only ray of sunshine is that people may miss your citadel when they think it extends further forward and back than it actually does.  If you're lucky, you'll take some overpenetrating hits there which will keep you in the game just a little longer.

As damning as this assessment is, let's be real:  few light cruisers could ever make the claim of being reasonably protected.  What's likely to kill an Arethusa-class would be just as traumatic and world-ending to a Nurnberg or Leander.  Heavy cruisers will bully you.  Battleships will savage you.  And, even destroyer-caliber guns can be painful if you have to suffer their attentions for long.  But this is worth looking into more closely.  Yes, a Leander or Nurnberg may appear on the surface to be as fragile but Leander can heal.  Nurnberg or Budyonny can sit back at 14km+ and use that extra range to give them more time to dodge.  Huanghe can't.  She has to tough it out and 'tough' is something she does not do well.

 

Really, though -- don't expect to live long under fire.  Death comes quickly and suddenly to Huanghe -- and it's your own damn fault for buying her.  Shame on you.

 

Though Huanghe's durability would have you wanting to hiding around friendly battleships in the second line, her range dictates that she must go forward into harm's way to score any damage.  This is a common problem associated with all British cruisers.  They get around this vulnerability by making use of a Smoke Generator and good concealment values -- traits Huanghe boasts as well.

 

Manoeuvrability

Top Speed: 33.0knots
Turning Radius: 570m
Rudder Shift: 6.7s

Maximum Turn Rate: 7.1º per second.

 

Alright, I can almost forgive you for forking out the cash for Huanghe for her agility.  If she had a little more speed, she'd put many destroyers to shame.  As it is, she out performs all other cruisers with her ability to dodge and twirl.  She can even out turn several IJN destroyers. It's strange, but she does this without the funny turning-acceleration quirks found in the Royal Navy cruiser line.  Huanghe doesn't preserve speed in a turn the way Leander, Belfast or Minotaur does.  She does have the equivalent of Propulsion Modification 2 installed -- her initial acceleration from a dead stop is very comfortable.  She just doesn't get all the Royal Navy manouevrability quirks.

 

The only thing she really lacks is a little more grunt in her engine and I could ignore all of the miserable, eye-bleeding terrible aspects of her durability.  She's just not fast enough to dictate engagement ranges against anything other than a standard-type battleship and that's a big fly in the ointment.  At 33 knots, she's not terrible in this regard, but I would have been much more excited to see her exceed 34.5 knots.  At least at this speed she could conceivably run down a destroyer she caught flat footed and out pace any battleships she might face without much issue.  I dunno, maybe I'm just being greedy.  But after the disappointment of her guns and torpedoes, can you really blame me?

 

 

Manoeuvrability ratings of the tier 6 cruisers.  Note that De Grasse and La Galissonniere have access to the Engine Boost consumable which increases their top speed by 15% for 3 minute intervals.  Huanghe's ability to turn and throw herself about is on par with many destroyers she faces.  She's only lacking in a good top speed to really allow her to enjoy the same level of flexibility.

 

 

Concealment & Camouflage

Base Surface Detection Range: 9.54km

Air Detection Range: 5.97 km

Minimum Surface Detection Range: 8.14km

Main Battery Firing Range: 13.18km

Detection Range when Firing from Smoke: 4.2km

Surface Detection Rank within Tier:  1st among 14 cruisers.

Surface Detection Rank within Matchmaking:  1st among 43 cruisers

 

Huanghe's concealment also redeems her somewhat, but again it's not without its flaws.

 

This is the sneakiest cruiser within her matchmaking spread and not by a small margin either.  When fully specialized, she enjoys as 450m advantage over Perth and a 600m advantage over Leander and Belfast.  The closest non-British cruiser comes in with New Orleans with nearly a 1km gap and everything else is considerably worse from there.

 

As good as this looks, let's be realistic -- it's not enemy cruisers that you need to worry about spotting you; it's destroyers and aircraft carriers.  We'll speak about the latter in the next section, but let's discuss destroyers for a moment.  Huanghe is looking at needing to sprint across as much as a 2.7km gap in order to illuminate what's detecting her, all the while being under fire from the lolibote's big friends in the back.  Given her 33 knot speed, it's just not feasible for her to cover this distance unless the destroyer makes a stupid mistake. 

 

As good as her concealment is, she can't perform the role of a forward scout even though her main battery range precludes her from skulking in the second line and firing from a distance.  You're going to need to use cover to stay undetected to move into engagement ranges -- at least until the herd thins out.   Thankfully, she brings her own concealment with her.

 

Smoke Generator

Huanghe has the same consumable found on HMAS Perth.  While each smoke cloud lasts a mere 10 seconds, it continues to dispense smoke for a minute and a half.  While Huanghe's Smoke Generator is in use, she may remain mobile and keep concealed while she does so, though she is normally limited to between 1/4 and 1/2 speed (12.5 knots).  This allows her to foil the usual traps of air dropped and ship launched torpedoes aimed at smoke clouds as she slowly crawls away.  Allied ships may also make use of this smoke, though doing so is much more difficult and it requires a conscious effort to match speed and heading.

 

Huanghe has less tools to provide her vision beyond her smoke than HMAS Perth, though.  While both use the same Hydroacoustic Search consumable, HMAS Perth has the extra advantage of a Spotter Aircraft to assist with detecting enemies.  This lack would be damning were it not for the changes in smoke detection while firing.   Any enemy battleships that opens fire within 10.5km of Huanghe is visible for twenty seconds and she can use that to give herself something to shoot at.  This is a bit of a double edged sword, however, with Huanghe herself being visible within 4.2km within her own smoke when she shoots beyond it.  This makes it risky to charge cap circles early on (a challenge she shares with Perth), especially if there are larger craft looming behind the lolibotes that have also rushed the control point.

 

Even with these challenges, Huanghe's smoke is meant to redeem all of the other weaknesses so far described.  She may have low DPM, but her smoke allows her to cycle her guns aggressively to take better advantage of their reload time for short periods.  Her fragility may be masked behind concealment.  Her difficulties in disengaging with her modest top speed can be corrected by hiding in smoke until she can put an island between her and her enemies. 

 

This is a huge burden for one consumable to bear, and I'm not certain it entirely corrects the deficiencies found so far within Huanghe.  Still, it's not hard to see how powerful Huanghe can be in the right circumstances through clever use of her concealment and smoke.

 

 
Opening moves on an Epicenter match.  Though Huanghe shares a lot of traits in common with destroyers, it would be a mistake to play her as one.  You're a support ship, not a front line scout or knife-fighter.

 

 

Anti-Aircraft Defense

AA Battery Calibers: 100mm / 37mm / 20mm
AA Umbrella Ranges: 5.0km / 3.5km / 2.0km
AA DPS per Aura: 78 / 73.6 / 28.8

 

Huanghe doesn't approve of your planes.

 

One of this ship's most surprising characteristics is her anti-aircraft firepower.  She uses a modern Soviet anti-aircraft suite -- a combination of dual purpose 100mm guns and 37mm automatic cannon to make the life of any planes within her sphere of influence miserable. It can be a rude shock for carriers that loiter around Huanghe's moving smoke cloud, hoping to spot her when the consumable wears off, only to have their air groups shredded.  This is something HMAS Perth could never do.

 

In terms of raw damage, Huanghe sits behind only Cleveland at tier VI in terms of her anti-aircraft firepower, which is no mean feat.  Unfortunately, she does not get access to Defensive Fire.   This was one of the casualties of Huanghe's long development cycle -- she used to have Defensive Fire and in this role, she could play an excellent support vessel.  However, she had to surrender this for her Smoke Generator in one of the updates, so it was a fair trade off.

 

Huanghe's anti-aircraft firepower will never truly be a dominating threat to enemy carriers and remains merely a nuisance that will cause them a few casualties, but it cannot stop attacks from being made.

 

From HuangMeh to HuangGud

Like all 152mm HE throwing cruisers at mid tiers, Huanghe's performance is really locked behind getting access to 14pt commander.  While she can perform reasonably well before this, it's the ability to direct damage to all targets that makes her come into her own.  Give the skills which optimizes her performance, she becomes a poor choice for training Pan Asian destroyer commanders, unfortunately.  Here's what your first 10pts should look like:

• Take Priority Target.
• Follow this up with Adrenaline Rush.  Your DPM needs all the help it can get.
• Next, take Demolition Expert.  Setting fires is the only thing you're good at.
• And finally take Concealment Expert.

The big skill you're racing towards is Inertial Fuse for HE Shells which should be your 14th skill point.  This gives her the ability to directly damage large areas of any battleship she might face, along with some of the heavy cruisers when she's bottom tier.  Your final 5pts should be placed between Vigilance (which stacks with Hydroacoustic Search to better spot torpedo threats while you're creeping along in smoke) and either Expert Marksman to buff your horrible turret traverse or Last Stand if you're sick of having your rudder shot out.

An inefficient, entirely situational build for hilarity's sake is an anti-aircraft build.  Drop Demolition Expert and take Basic Fire Training instead.  Load up on Advanced Fire Training and Manual Fire Control for AA Guns and complete the set with Preventative Maintenance.  This is hardly a good build, but at least you'll shoot down a lot of planes.

 

Oh, it's going to be like that, is it?

 

Overall Impressions

Skill Floor: Simple / Casual / Challenging / Difficult

Huanghe isn't going to do novice players any favours.  She's a British light cruiser without a Repair Party that has to sneak in even closer to do damage.  That's a recipe for disaster.

 

Skill Ceiling: Low / Moderate / High / Extreme

Properly managed, Huanghe can pull her own weight -- you just need to really flex those carrying muscles to do it.  This makes for an interesting challenge for those inclined.  Getting those Soviet 152mm up close opens up the opportunity for all kinds of hilarity, especially against enemy cruisers that are probably not used to getting their citadels shot out from smoke 12km away. However, her overall lack of firepower holds her back.

 

Mouse's Summary:

• Perth-lite.  Same Perth flavour with half the effectiveness!
• I kid, Huanghe isn't that bad.  She's just not as good as Perth.
• I can already tell there's going to be a counter-culture movement that absolutely loves this ship...

Can destroyer-levels of agility, the smoke generator of HMAS Perth along with good values for her AA firepower and concealment make up for garbage levels of firepower and durability?

I was full ready to slap a 'Garbage' label on Huanghe and wash my hands of her.  I don't care if she has good AA firepower -- that's a window dressing; it doesn't define a ship as being good or bad.  Destroyer levels of twirling are nice but without speed to dictate engagement  distances, it's a half measure.  Her stealth is good, but not good enough especially in light of her weapon ranges.  These arguments all strongly point towards a wholesale condemnation of this ship, but there's one thing and only one thing giving me pause.

 

It's her damned Smoke Generator.

 

Without it, this would be cut and dry:  slap a trashbote label and move on.  But, I cannot ignore how powerful this is when played well.  It allowed me in play testing to rip the throat out of several ships that, on paper, had me dead to rights based on firepower, speed and durability.  Yet, I must remind myself that a bad ship is still fully capable of doing damage and even sinking another.  This isn't a game like World of Tanks where a disparity in power levels can mean outright immunity to a lesser-vehicle's attacks.  I cannot outright dismiss the successes I did enjoy with this ship, but I must weigh them in context.

 

 Perhaps it's simply best to separate the two.  Huanghe is a trashbote with a good Smoke Generator.  So ask yourself: What you want to play with?  Is it the trashbote, or is it the Smoke Generator?  Because if it's the latter, HMAS Perth will be back around in the shops sometime soon...

 

Her Smoke Generator gets a Gudbote, though.

The following is a review of Admiral Makarov, a ship kindly provided to me by Wargaming. This is the release version of the vessel and these stats are current as of December 18th, 2017.


Bite the pillow -- they're coming in raw.

• Small hit point pool of 27,000hp.
• Enormous, exposed citadel with minimal amounts of protection.
• Magazines are exposed over the waterline.
• Her lightweight AP shells have terrible penetration values.
• Anemic HE shell damage of 1,700hp per hit.
• Not especially fast, agile or manoeuvrable for a cruiser.
• Not especially stealthy either.
• Does not get access to the German version of the Hydroacoustic Search consumable.
   

I think what disappoints me most about Makarov is her camouflage scheme.  It doesn't look that much different from the ones you can equip for 25,000 credits.  What?  Making ships pretty is important, damn it!

 

Options

The only real surprise anyone may find with Admiral Makarov is that she does not retain the vaunted German Hydroacoustic Search consumable.  She instead is forced to make do with the standard Soviet version.

 

Consumables:

• Damage Control Party
• Hyroacoustic Search or Defensive Fire

Module Upgrades: Four slots, standard cruiser options.

Premium Camouflage: Standard Type 10. This provides 50% bonus experience gains, a 10% reduction to maintenance costs, 3% reduction in surface detection and 4% reduction in enemy accuracy.

 

Makarov doesn't reinvent the wheel.  Her upgrades are what you should expect for a Light Cruiser.
 

• Main Armaments Modification 1 should be your first upgrade.  However, given the vulnerability of Makarov's magazines, you wouldn't be remiss in selecting Magazine Modification 1 to help minimize detonation chances, especially given how frequently large caliber HE-shells get thrown around.  Like Nurnberg, Makarov seems especially vulnerable to AP-shell induced detonations due to the high-water placement of her exposed ammunition lockers which makes them more easy to strike at any range.
• You have a choice for your second slot and none of them especially good. Damage Control System Modification 1 is probably optimal as this will reduce incidental fires somewhat and provide a little more torpedo-defense protection. However, Makarov tends to take a lot of damage to both her engine and rudder, so grabbing either Propulsion Modification 1 or Steering Gear Modification 1 isn't a terrible choice.
• In your third slot, you again have your choice. Aiming System Modification 1 should be your default choice and is optimal -- especially given Makarov's habit of firing at the extremes of her range. However, if you want to play more of a support role, you may elect to take AA Guns Modification 2 to help boost up the reach of your anti-aircraft firepower to an acceptable level.
• Finally, in your last slot, take Steering Gear Modification 2 to put a little more wiggle in her tush.

 

Special Upgrades Makarov is compatible with two special upgrades, but only one is worth considering.   Hydroacoustic Search Modification 1 is probably the optimal choice if you're not going to use Defensive Fire.  This will increase the active time of your consumable from 92 seconds to 110 seconds.  You're really not going to miss any of the other upgrades that fit into your second slot.  Personally, I would prefer to save this upgrade for a ship that's going to be played more aggressively, but if you have one to spare, it couldn't hurt.

 

 

Firepower

Primary Battery: Nine 150mm L/60 in three turrets in an A-X-Y superfiring configuration.

Secondary Battery:  Eight 88mm rifles in 4x2 turrets

Torpedo Armament: Six tubes in 2x3 launchers, one to each side between the bridge and the funnel.

 

 

 

Makarov's secondary armaments are largely forgettable, even if they do differentiate her from Nurnberg.  So let's start here.  Admiral Makarov has the same 88mm rifles as Nurnberg, but where they differ is in their ammunition.  Makarov's guns do 1,100 damage instead of 1,000 and they have a base 7% fire chance instead of 4%.  Maybe if these weapons were on a bigger ship that could have more of them, I'd celebrate.  As it is, they have a 4.5km range and a broadside of four secondary rifles isn't anything terribly exciting, even if they are buffed with Russian bias (we had to cram some in there!).

 

The other side to her secondary armaments are her torpedoes.  Just like the C-Hull Nurnberg, she has a pair of triple launchers mounted between the bridge and funnel.  These are your classic German torpedoes, the G7a T1 that you find on everything from Konigsberg through to Tirpitz.   The best thing about them, really, is that they're fast and hard to spot.  Given Makarov's weaknesses in a brawl, they don't come into play very often, but it's hilarious when they do.

 

 

 

The Nurnberg-class cruisers have a rate of fire better than some destroyers.  On paper, she can put out fearsome amounts of damage that no ship could rightly stand up against.  These guns have high AP shell damage, good range, excellent fire arcs, ridiculously fast muzzle velocity and excellent HE penetration.  In reality, there's a combination of factors that make Admiral Makarov's firepower more of a paper tiger.

 

Let's start with her AP shells.  On paper, the 3,900 damage per shell looks phenomenal.  Admiral Makarov's DPM blows all of the other cruisers out of the water (literally).  However, there are three mitigating factors which make these damage totals a nigh-impossible pipe dream.
 

• Admiral Makarov's shells are light weight.  This reduces overall penetration and limits energy preservation over distance.  Which means...
   
• Admiral Makarov's shells bleed energy quickly.  While they start strong with a 960m/s muzzle velocity, at range, they've lost a lot of their forward momentum.  On top of making long distance gunnery more challenging, it reveals that...
   
• Admiral Makarov has terrible penetration values.  Among the tier VI cruisers, Admiral Makarov has the worst AP penetration values, full stop.  The above issues stack with a low Krupp value (shell hardness) which further reduces her penetrative power. She's going to struggle to land citadel hits at 10km, never mind trying to land them at range.  Even a slight angle adopted by a battleship will shatter the majority of the AP shells thrown. 

Thus, while on paper, her AP shells may look to be the ammunition of choice, in reality, so many of your hits are going to bounce and shatter.  Because of their standard fusing requirements and timers, attacks against destroyers will normally overpenetrate.  Admiral Makarov does not enjoy any improved autobounce, normalization or fuse-timer features to pad these numbers.  If she had them, she'd be something truly fearsome. 

Even with these flaws, Makarov's AP shells should be the ones you fire as often as possible.  Even with the risks of bounces and shatters, her AP shells out perform her HE shells by more than two to one. 

Yes, yes, I know. Molotov is technically a light cruiser. Let's say 6" armed light cruisers, then.


And here's the big ol' fly in the ointment.  Makarov just doesn't have the penetration power with her AP shells to get the big damages.

 

Everything's not all rainbows and sunshine in HE-land, though the forecast is only partly cloudy.  Makarov retains the 1/4 shell diameter penetration value of her German origins.  This allows Makarov to penetrate areas with up to 37mm worth of armour while a normal 150mm shell would only be able to damage 24mm.  This largely mitigates any need for taking the commander skill, Inertial Fuse for HE Shells which in turn means that her fire setting chance is artificially higher than her contemporaries.  This buffs Makarov's real-world fire setting abilities, making her one of the best firebugs at her tier.

Comparison of likely skill combinations between tier VI light cruisers and how this affects their fire setting.  Without the need for IFHE, Makarov ends up being one of the best potential fire starters of her tier when equipped with Demolition Expert.

 The only true downside to Makarov's HE is their horrible damage per shell.  While her reload time mitigates this somewhat, her shells deal so little damage (and her AP shells deal so much).  When hammering saturated areas of a ship, her HE shells will do 281 damage while an AP overpenetration will do 390.  It pays to keep in an eye on the damage totals you're inflicting upon your opponents and flex to an appropriate ammunition choice.  Look for any excuse you can find to use Makarov's AP -- her HE isn't terrible, but it doesn't hit hard enough.

 

Overall, Makarov's gunnery is very comfortable -- deceptively so, even.  The 360º rotation on her X and Y turret make sailing evasive while shooting at enemies comfortable.  Her gun rotation speed is a tad slow, but nothing punitive -- you'll hardly notice.  She cannot out turn her turret traverse.  With decent range, reasonable ballistics -- what's not to like?

 

It all comes down to her durability.  Makarov needs time to deal damage to enemies -- time she doesn't have if they're shooting back.  When faced with the choice of doing a little more damage and risk being shot at or keeping your guns silent and staying stealthy, Makarov must choose the latter.  This often precludes her from putting out sustained bursts of that phenomenal DPM which can get frustrating.  Impatience in this ship gets you killed.

 

Admiral Makarov isn't found terribly wanting where fire angles are concerned -- maybe a few more degrees would have been nice, especially on A & X turret, but that's just being greedy.

 

Summary:

• I love her guns.  Her AP shells take huge bites out of ships that are dumb enough to give you their broadside and her HE is functional enough to let you nibble on them until they pull a second stupid and expose their broadside again.
• Her torps are okay.  They have great fire arcs but it's going to be super rare that you get a chance to use them.
• Russian bias secondaries are hilarious. Useless, but hilarious.

 

Durability
Hit Points:  27,000 
Maximum Citadel Protection:  19mm + 50mm + 25 mm
Min Bow & Deck Armour:  16mm
Torpedo Damage Reduction:  7%

 

You're going to eat citadels for days.

 

If there's one pronounced failing of this ship class, it's with its durability -- or rather, her lack of durability.  She doesn't have a lot of hit points.  Her magazines are exposed.   Her machine spaces are exposed.   Her citadel runs near the full length of the ship and she doesn't have a lot of armour.  Most gunship destroyers can blow out her citadel with AP shells within 7km.  Most cruisers can do so within their their weapon range.   Most battleships can blow out her boilers in a catastrophic mushroom cloud simply by looking at her. 

 

A Admiral Makarov Haiku.  At least I can be poetic about it.

 

If you're getting shot at, you're doing something wrong.  Seriously.  Don't be in front.  Don't get noticed.  Don't get shot at.

 

Ignoring her vulnerability to citadel hits, she simply lacks the hit point total to absorb any kind of abuse.  Torpedoes?  Death.  Dive bombers?  Death.  Cruiser HE seemingly plinking harmlessly off your belt armour beneath your #1 turret?  Death by Fun and Engaging.  This isn't a ship you want to trade fire in or even risk getting shot at.  Use islands.  Abuse spotting mechanics.  Hide behind friendly ships.  Above all -- do NOT get hit.  Stop sticking your neck out! Admiral Makarov has a habit of making even cursory damage turn hilariously (and abruptly) catastrophic.

 

 
Cutaway of Admiral Makarov (courtesy of Gamemodels3d.com) showing Makarov's citadel in yellow and her magazines in red. 
This entire ship is one big wet dream for battleship players.  You're essentially sailing one big, open citadel with a prow and some weapons glued onto it.  If they're not hitting your bow, turrets or torpedoes, they're blowing open your citadel.

 

 

Manoeuvrability

Top Speed: 32 knots
Turning Radius:   720m
Rudder Shift:  7.6s

Maximum Turn Rate:  5.4º/s

 

There's nothing remarkable about Admiral Makarov's handling.  Though billed as a light cruiser, she is not fast.  She is not agile.  She cannot even boast a small turning turning circle despite her lower top speed.  Her handling is identical to Nurnberg in all respects.

 

In order to dodge enemy fire effectively, you need time -- and for time, you need distance.  It's imperative to keep Makarov at range to give you as much time as possible to adjust course to dodge incoming fire.  Like avoiding torpedoes in a battleship, you need to be doing this pre-emptively.  If you're waiting for the muzzle flash before slamming your rudder hard over, it's already too late.  

 

Rate of Turn There are several factors which affect how quickly a ship comes about. The most significant are the ship's forward momentum and the size of her turning radius. As a ship slows down, their turning radius changes, but not always for the better. To make things more complicated, different ships also preserve speed better in a turn. In a high speed turn, Admiral Makarov bleeds about 20% of her maximum velocity. When it comes to changing your heading, maintain speed whenever possible. If you want a tighter turning circle, slow down to 3/4 engine power  -- but be aware that your ship will not manoeuvre as quickly. Steering Gears Modification 2 will shave off approximately half a second off their 90º turn time.   360º Rotation Rate (Ship Maximums): 1/4 speed (7.8 knots): 1.4º/s rotation, ~845m turning radius 1/2 speed (14.7 knots): 3.4º/s rotation, ~672m turning radius 3/4 speed (20.3 knots): 4.8º/s rotation, ~658m turning radius 4/4 speed (25.5 knots): 5.4º/s rotation, ~728m turning radius 90º Rotation Rate (Stock): 1/4 speed: 1.4º/s rotation for 65.1s 1/2 speed: 3.2º/s rotation for 28.3s 3/4 speed: 4.4º/s rotation for 20.6s 4/4 speed: 4.9º/s rotation for 18.5s 90º Rotation Rate (Steering Gears Modification 2) 1/4 speed: 1.4º/s rotation for 64.3s 1/2 speed: 3.2º/s rotation for 27.9s 3/4 speed: 4.5º/s rotation for 20.2s 4/4 speed: 5.0º/s rotation for 18.0s

 

Though she's not especially manoeuvrable for a cruiser, she's still a cruiser and capable of frustrating clumsy attempts to hit her with fish.

 

Concealment & Camouflage

Base Surface Detection Range:   12.42km

Air Detection Range:  6.9km

Minimum Surface Detection Range:  10.6km

Main Battery Firing Range:  16.31km

Detection Range when Firing from Smoke:  5.99km

Surface Detection Rank within Tier:  Tied for 7th out of 14 cruisers

Surface Detection Rank within Matchmaking: 20th out of 43 cruisers

 

Admiral Makarov won't win any awards for stealth.  The best you could say is that enemy battleships won't be sneaking up on her without island or smoke cover.  It's important for this ship to keep larger ships at arm's length. Sadly, her concealment doesn't do her many favours here.  What's more, to play to her DPM strengths, she needs to cycle her guns constantly which undoes any pretense of concealment anyway.

 

A special mention should be made for smoke -- use it and abuse it whenever possible.  Unfortunatley, as a second-line ship, it's quite unlikely that there will be much smoke around for you to take advantage.

 

Hydroacoustic Search or Defensive Fire? If you were sailing Nurnberg, choosing which consumable to use on your cruiser is much simpler.  The German version of Hydroacoustic Search is just too good.  Admiral Makarov has a more difficult choice to make. This isn't a ship you're (generally) going to want to play aggressively -- though there's a qualifier to that.  You don't want to play aggressive during the initial stages of a match.  Being singled out for deletion will ensure you get sent back to port in a hurry each and every time.  To this end, Hydroacoustic Search seems like a bit of a waste.  However, as the game progresses, in close matches Hydroacoustic Search becomes a godsend, particularly if there's a savvy enemy destroyer that needs some serious killing done onto their person.  Of course, this is locked behind a rather high skill wall. Defensive Fire, by contrast, is the "safer" option.  It's only going to be effective occasionally, but it's reliable.  Press a button.  Focus fire on enemy attack aircraft, dodge their munitions and hoover up some nice assistance experience and credits.

 

Anti-Aircraft Defense

AA Battery Calibers: 88mm / 37mm / 20mm
AA Umbrella Ranges: 4.0km / 3.5km / 2.0km
AA DPS per Aura: 32.4 / 92 / 12

 

Here's where Admiral Makarov differs noticeably from the C-Hull Nurnberg.  She sheds all of Nurnberg's 40mm mounts and most of her 20mm guns too and replaces them with Soviet 37mm automatic cannon.  She takes an overall loss of AA DPS, though she gains an increase in effective AA power.  With more of her flak centered around her 3.5km range guns, she hounds enemy aircraft for longer.  This is more valuable than a wall of short ranged, small caliber weapons. Defensive Fire applies its buff to medium caliber and large caliber guns (25mm+) only, thus Admiral Makarov benefits from this consumable more than Nurnberg.

 

On the whole, however, Admiral Makarov won't be frightening any aircraft carrier with her AA umbrella, not without Defensive Fire active. 

 

Makarov's AA DPS:  32.4dps / 92.0 dps / 12.0dps at 4.0km / 3.5km / 2.0km
Nurnberg AA DPS:  32.4dps / 60.0dps / 88.8dps at 4.0km / 3.5km / 2.0km

 

 

How not to go to Gulag

Makarov is a great trainer for your Soviet cruiser commanders that don't yet have Inertial Fuse for HE Shells unlocked.  She doesn't need it, so stick 'em on here and hoover up the XP needed to finally unlock it.  Then go play a good premium cruiser like Molotov or Mikhail Kutuzov.
 

•  Start with Priority Target and, for the love of toast, listen to what it's telling you.  If you see a number 1 appear, stop what you're doing, go evasive and hide.  If you see a number 2 or larger, scream loudly and curl up beneath your desk.  With luck, your room mate, significant other or your offspring will care enough to unplug your computer before you have to see your shiny premium cruiser get deleted again.
   
• Next up, grab Adrenaline Rush.  This skill is of less value on Makarov, as you tend to not take damage so much as explode suddenly.  Still, in theory it's a raw DPS gain and that's worth the two points.
   
• At tier 3, take Demolition Expert.  If you fancy yourself a destroyer-hunter, you should grab Vigilance instead, especially with those Pan Asian destroyers lurking about.
   
• Finally, at tier 4, take Concealment Expert.  If you have to ask why, you haven't been paying attention.

From here, pick and choose skills to your heart's content.  If you want to be salty about aircraft and fancy trying to provide a small bit of much-needed fleet defense, grab Advanced Fire Training, Basic Fire Training, and finish things off with Expert Marksman.  If you would rather hunt destroyers and ensure you never get ambushed, Radio Location, Demolition Expert (because you already took Vigilance) and Expert Marksman is the way to go.

 

Overall Impressions

Skill Floor:   Simple / Casual / Challenging / Difficult

Makarov is so damn fragile that even social-justice-warriors tell her that she needs to toughen up and stop being such a victim about incoming fire.  This is not an easy ship to do well in.

 

Skill Ceiling:  Low / Moderate / High / Extreme

Makarov has a surprising amount of carry potential in her, but only if you can keep her alive.  Anytime you have a platform that can deal a lot of damage (and do it quickly) while also being reasonably fast and decently stealthy, it's a recipe for a dangerous ship, especially in the hands of an expert player.  However, Makarov's fragility holds her back.  She just can't survive under duress.

 

 

Mouse's Summary:

• It's Nurnberg.
• No really, it's Nurnberg.
• Yes, I know there's some subtle differences, but really, it's just Nurnberg.
   

Did you like Nurnberg?  Do you have happy memories of derping about in that ship, even when things went horribly awry?  Did you prefer to use Defensive Fire over Hydroacoustic Search when you played her?  If you answered 'yes' to all three of these questions, then you'll like Admiral Makarov.

 

I am honestly shocked at how little "Russian bias" crept into this ship.  I expected her citadel to be lowered or her to be armed with Soviet 152mm/57 rifles with the same reload time.   Seriously, Wargaming, you're not meeting my expectations.

 

I really do enjoy my cruisers -- especially the ones with fun guns and a penchant for suffering gory demises both suddenly and hilariously.  Admiral Makarov tickles my fancy in the same way that Atlanta, Duca d'Aosta, and Prinz Eugen do.  Let me be clear though -- my enjoyment isn't contingent upon the ship being good.  Admiral Makarov certainly isn't that.  She's too damn fragile, too damn slow and not sneaky enough to ever earn a recommendation based on her combat prowess.  She is a challenge, however, and she greatly rewarded me for out playing my opponents.  This panders to my ego.  When I did well in Makarov, I know it was down to my correct positioning, target priority and manoeuvres.

 

 This ship doesn't offer anything new in terms of game play.  She's not good either, though at least she's not objectively worse than Nurnberg.  She is fun, however -- but of course this last trait is subjective.  Fortunately, you can try out Makarov yourself by simply unlocking and playing the C-Hull Nurnberg without Hydroacoustic Search.  If you have fun there, you'll like Makarov.

 

If you're sane, though, you'll stay the Hell away.

 

 

Wichita is a fast, stealthy heavy cruiser borrowing elements from Baltimore and New Orleans with just a touch of Atago.

PROS

• 27mm extremities and deck, capable of autobouncing 381mm and smaller AP shells.
• Uses "American Piercing" AP shells with improved auto-ricochet angles.
• Decent anti-aircraft firepower?  Maybe?  I mean it's okay for now...
• Agile with good top speed, rudder shift time, turning radius and rate of rotation.
• Good surface detection which can reduced down to 9.5km.
• No Gimmicks.

CONS

• Smallish hit point pool for a tier VIII cruiser and parts of her citadel are exposed over the waterline, making her quite squishy.
• No torpedoes -- entirely reliant upon its main battery for damage output.
• DPM and fire output is entirely lacking when compared to same-tier Light Cruisers.
• Horribly sluggish gun traverse.
• Shorter 9km ranged radar.
• No Gimmicks.

Overview

Skill Floor:  Simple / Casual/ CHALLENGING / Difficult
Skill Ceiling:  Low / Moderate / HIGH / Extreme

High tier American heavy cruisers aren't the most forgiving of vessels in World of Warships.  Being caught out in open water is just asking to have your face kicked in.  The striking power of their guns necessitates dynamic ammunition choices to generate competitive numbers.

For all the same reasons that Wichita isn't the best ship in the hands of a novice, it rewards veterans that have mastered the core mechanics in World of Warships.  She goes a step further rewarding abuse of vision projection, stealth and island terrain.  Her fragility and her modest gun damage hurt her carry potential, however.

Wichita is neither a front runner or the tail end Charlie in Offense or Defense. She's just kinda there. However, her agility and concealment belie her light-cruiser origins. As for her anti-aircraft firepower? It's okay for now -- maybe even good. But who knows if that will last with everything still subject to change?

– One of, if not the worst at its tier. This is a pronounced weakness.

– Middle of the pack at its tier. Not terrible, but not terribly good either.
– Has a significant advantage over her tier mates. A solid, competitive performer.
– No other ship at its tier does this as well as this ship.

Options

There's a fair bit of choice here -- namely if you want to specialize her for anti-aircraft firepower or not.

Consumables

There are no surprises with Wichita's consumables.  Everything is standard for American cruisers right out of the box.

• Her Damage Control Party has a 90s/60s reset timer with a 5 second active period and unlimited charges.

You have two choices for her second slot.

• Defensive AA Fire doubles her effective AA firepower for 40 seconds.  This has a 180s / 120s reset timer.  Wichita receives the American cruiser bonus with this consumable, starting with three charges instead of two.
• Hydroacoustic Search is standard for a tier VIII cruiser, detecting torpedoes at 3.5km and enemy ships at 5.0km.  This has a 100s active period and a 180s / 120s reset timer.  It comes with two charges base.

You have two choices for her third slot.

• Wichita's Surveillance Radar detects concealed enemy ships at 9km for 30 seconds.  It has two charges initially and comes with a 180s / 120s reset timer.
• Alternatively, you can go all Yuro and use a Spotting Aircraft.  In addition to providing you with limited improvements to spotting threats (especially over islands), this extends her main battery range from 15.83km to 19.0km for 100 seconds.  This has a six minute / four minute reset timer.

Upgrades

There seems like a lot of choice here but it's pretty uncomplicated.

• If you're trying to be memeworthy, take the special upgrade Spotter Aircraft Modification 1.  For most normal (sane) people, default to Main Armaments Modification 1 in your first slot.
• Special Upgrades dominate the choices in your second slot.  If you're playing PVP, Defensive Fire Modification 1 should be your default choice.  If PVE is more your thing (or you're feeling especially MANLY and like to brawl, aircraft be damned) then Hydroacoustic Search Modification 1 is your better choice.  If you can't afford either, then default to Propulsion Modification 1 or any of the other wiener-choices in this slot.
• Upgrading your anti-aircraft firepower is smartest in your third slot.  Take AA Guns Modification 1 until things quiet down with CVs.  Otherwise take Aiming Systems Modification 1 for that slight boost to your main and secondary batteries.
• Your fourth slot is up to you and it depends on your preferred play style.  If you like dodging in open water then Steering Gears Modification 2 is your choice.  If you make islands your waifu, then Propulsion Modification 2 is better.
• And finally, Concealment Modification 1 is the only real go-to worthwhile here.  Of course, if you want to emphasize playing in hard mode with open water dodging, you can double stack your earlier rudder upgrade with Steering Gears Modification 3 and get her rudder shift time down to 2.9 seconds.  You nutter.

Camouflage

Wichita has a single camouflage pattern: Type 10 – Wichita providing:

• 50% bonus experience gains.
• 10% reduction in maintenance costs.
• 3% reduction to surface detection.
• 4% reduction of enemy accuracy.

You can unlock an alternative grey palette swap for Wichita by completing the American Cruisers collection found under your Profile tab.

Firepower

Main Battery:  Nine 203mm guns in 3x3 turrets in an A-B-X superfiring configuration.
Secondary Battery:  Four 127mm in armoured turrets and four 127mm open-air turret mounts.

Wichita is an American heavy cruiser gunship.  This comes with all sorts of damage-dealing baggage.  You don't have torpedoes.  You're entirely reliant upon your main battery guns.   You're not going to dispense as much hurt as a comparable light cruiser using Inertial Fuse for HE Shells.  Your gun shell arcs also won't let you take advantage of as many terrain features as light cruisers.  You're also not setting anywhere near as many fires.  And, it's not like you have battleship caliber guns where your AP shells can take all comers. In summation:  the other cruisers have it easier than you do, with torpedo trump-cards or raw DPM to out-muscle their opponents.  When you're playing Wichita, you have to be that much more clever.

You're bloody-well doomed.

Almost Baltimore

Wichita shares her heavy cruiser plight with Baltimore but without Baltimore's full gunnery toolkit.  They're nearly similar -- Wichita clones Baltimore's gun performance with the same range, reload time and gun handling.  Her AP shells have the same improved autobounce characteristics.  However, she uses New Orleans' higher velocity and lower shell-weight AP shells from a tier lower.  These do less damage and have less penetration than Baltimore's.  Wchita has tier seven-and-a-half heavy-cruiser firepower at tier VIII.  Well, maybe seven-and-three-quarters.  While spamming HE, these two tier VIII American cruisers are identical, after all.  It's only in slinging AP that they differ but it's a distinct lack.

Where heavy cruisers do out-perform lights is with their AP penetration and Wichita is no different. The difference in shell weights between Baltimore and Wichita's AP rounds also shows up in a disparity of penetration, especially over range. Like her DPM, her AP performance is closely likened to those found on Admiral Hipper and Charles Martel.  Penetration values pulled from proships.ru (link in the Appendix) which hasn't been updating their site lately.  I hope they're not dead.

This isn't to say Wichita's AP performance is bad.  It's not.  It's simply not as good as Baltimore's.  Wichita's AP penetration compares very closely to that of the German Admiral Hipper-class heavy cruisers which are no slouches.  She is defined, however, by what Baltimore can do that she herself cannot -- namely reliably hit cruiser citadels at maximum range.  By the math, Wichita nearly has the capacity to do it.  She should (in theory) be capable of contesting up to 155mm of belt armour at 15km even at a modest angle.  In practice, your mileage will vary some.  I found that her ideal engagement range was closer to 13km depending upon the target and the aspect I could acquire. I was still able to land citadel hits at maximum reach if my opponents were blessedly ignorant and giving me a full broadside to shoot at, even for ships with thicker belts like Des Moines and Moskva.

What sets American heavy cruiser AP shells apart is the improved auto-bounce mechanics they receive.  While other cruisers must contend with ricochet mechanics starting at 45º angles, Wichita (and other American heavy cruisers) have another 15º worth of leeway before the game starts making their shells splash off otherwise vulnerable targets.  This comes at the expense of having a faster drop-off once this threshold is reached.  In practical terms, American heavies can continue firing AP shells when other cruisers have to switch over to HE.  In duels, particularly at close range, this can be game changing.

If you feel I'm prattling on at length about Wichita's AP potential, there's a reason. This is where the good news ends and a harsh dose of reality sets in.

Until Wargaming does something about the IFHE skill, heavies are always going to play a distant second to light cruisers in terms of HE damage output. Wichita looks pretty good compared to her heavy cruiser peers until Charles Martel activates her Main Battery Reload Booster consumable. The French cruiser's sustained DPM over 10 minutes with her consumable active on cooldown (and using all of her improved premium charges) gives her comparable HE output to Wichita and better AP performance than anything short of Baltimore. And she has torpedoes. Boo-urns, Charles Martel. Boo-urns.

Area Denial

Area denial is a point of struggle for American heavy cruisers.  It's a challenge to convince enemy ships that they would rather be elsewhere when Wichita makes her presence felt.  Against destroyers, this it's not so bad: Activate Surveillance Radar and watch the lolibotes scatter like roaches.  It's more difficult when facing off against battleships and cruisers.

Against the latter, I've already discussed at length how you're hoping for an opportunity to use Wichita's excellent AP shells and make them regret their life decisions -- hopefully before they get within jousting ranges where they can make use of their world-ending torpedoes.   Trading HE shells back and forth doesn't play to Wichita's strengths (unless you're beating up a Hipper or something much lower tier).  Given the pacing of combat, most engagements will be at long range during the onset of matches with close-range encounters typically limited to end-of-game.  So, preserving hit points and avoiding direct trades with other cruisers is key.

Then we get to battleships.  Wichita can put out the hurt with her AP shells on battleships that provide enough broadside for your shells to bite in.  You're not going to be anywhere near as good as a light cruiser pummeling them with HE shells and setting fires, however.  For a heavy cruiser, you're not terrible at it, but taxing a battleship's Damage Control Party and stacking multiple fires is a challenge without sustained bombardment or a whole lot of help.  In order to keep yourself from being deleted while harassing, you must make use of island cover to lob your shells from a point of  concealment.  Firing at a hale and healthy battleship from open water is just asking to get spanked, and not in the sexy way.

Not bad, Wichita.  Not bad at all.  Why does your turret traverse have to suck so bad, though?  It really holds her back in a brawl.

Overall Thoughts

Wichita's gunnery is comfortable if you're a veteran player of American cruisers.  Her fire arcs are nice.  Her range is workable if a little on the low side.  This can be padded with her Spotter Aircraft, but giving up her Surveillance Radar is a bit of a hard sell unless you're a meme-machine from YouTube.  Her rate of fire feels almost good enough -- especially if you're working with her AP shells.  She's not quite on Baltimore's level overall, but she is close.

You're still going to miss not having torpedoes.  You're still going to look enviously at those light cruisers spraying fires and shells at a faster rate than you can.  And so help me, I nearly pulled my hair out a few times coping with her slow turret traverse. Overall, Wichita's performance is solid, but she doesn't lead the pack in any aspect.  She's sufficient unto the task and nothing more.

Summary

• Oh yeah, she has secondaries.  Whatevs.  Her main battery gunnery is hella comfortable.
• Her AP performance is steady.  Use it whenever you can.  Her HE is good for a heavy cruiser but she'll never hold a candle to those light cruisers.
• Her turret traverse feels downright glacial when you're forced to make sudden manoeuvres.

Evaluation:
What it would have needed to be : Baltimore's AP shells or a faster reload.  I do so enjoy American heavy cruiser guns.

Defense

Hit Points:  37,900hp
Min Bow & Deck Armour: 27mm
Maximum Citadel Protection:  152mm belt
Torpedo Damage Reduction:  4%

Note not all of the fiddly armour bits are listed here, like turret roofs or how her barbettes get thicker the deeper you go into the ship. As far as tier VIII cruisers go, Wichita's armour protection is pretty good. She boasts 27mm worth of structural plate on her deck and hull which allows her to bounce 381mm and smaller AP shells while simultaneously foiling small and medium caliber HE that lack improved penetration.  She does suffer from having her citadel peeking up over the surface of the water and next to no anti-torpedo protection, however.

Tier VIII cruisers are in an interesting place.  They have two key survivability improvements over their tier VII brethren -- increased hit points (which is to be expected) and improved structural plating.  It's this latter element which is so wonderful.  The jump up from 19mm extremities to 25mm+ for most cruisers gives them the ability to potentially tank and ricochet smaller caliber battleship shells (along with all other AP).  Being able to avoid sudden deletion is wonderful, if locked behind a modest skill-wall. Yet despite this, they are largely found wanting when compared to tier IX and X cruisers due to the scarcity of healing.  The effect is to make select tier VIII cruisers feel very tanky when top tier.  When they're not, they're not (imagine that).  Wichita is no different.

To play tier VIII cruisers that lack a Repair Party is to accept this duality of being both a potential bully and a ready victim depending on what RNGesus has dispensed through matchmaking.

You're so screwed.

Wichita, like all tier VIII cruisers  is thus a bit of a mixed bag when it comes to her durability (except Prinz Eugen, but she's special).  If you're not a regular cruiser player, it's going to be hard to look past her flaws, namely:

• She has a small hit point pool for a tier VIII cruiser and no ability to heal.  Her treaty-cruiser pedigree really shows here.
• She has almost no anti-torpedo protection.
• Her exposed citadel sits above the waterline.

There is no counter argument against Wichita's small hit point pool.  This is a ready flaw.  Wichita has 4,500hp less than Baltimore which amounts to as many as three penetrating hits from battleship caliber weapons (or up to four if you're Scharnhorst - lul).  This disparity in hit points only compounds when you compare her to the heavyweights at tier VIII which includes Prinz Eugen and Atago -- two ships with the ability to heal.  If caught out, Wichita is easy meat. Wichita must use concealment, armour, terrain and her agility to keep herself safe.  In this regard, Wichita is well set-up -- see Agility and Refrigerator below and we'll talk more about her armour later.  Her ballistic arcs are also decent for making good use of island cover.

Wichita's anti-torpedo protection looks to be in a similar sorry state until you weigh her against other cruisers.  This is just a fancy way for me to say: "they all suck".  The only rays of sunshine are that Wichita's agility makes her an unappetizing target for destroyers and her Surveillance Radar has a wonderful side effect of making lolibotes wet themselves and then wish they were elsewhere.

If you're especially paranoid about torpedo damage, you could always swap out her Defensive AA Fire for Hydroacoustic Search and trust on her USN cruiser reputation to keep torpedo planes away.   That's a bit of a gamble with the rework, though

Then there's the matter of her citadel. First of all, it's not especially big.  Much of it is deeply submerged with only the machine spaces being a viable target for enemy gunnery.  This section is considerably smaller than that found on other cruisers (especially when compared to Baltimore's).  The roof of her citadel is proof against overmatching so only direct hits count here.   What's more her machines spaces are recessed further back from the ship's bows giving her considerably more protection from overmatching battleship guns where shells may fuse long before reaching her boiler rooms.

With her 27mm thick hull, knowing what can and cannot overmatch your hull is key to Wichita's survival.  Against 381mm guns or smaller, you can be lazy and ensure that your bow is no more than 30º to the enemy and rest confident that you're safe.  Against larger caliber guns, going perfectly bow on is necessary to avoid their shells striking the raised 140mm transverse bulkhead of her machine spaces through the sides of the ship.  You have less belt armour to work with than Baltimore, which means more of an area 406mm+ shells can overmatch if you're caught angled.

Your best defense, of course, is to not get hit in the first place.

Summary

• Frustrating target for 381mm or smaller AP shells when properly angled.
• Citadel is exposed over the waterline but it's a smaller target than some other cruisers.
• Squishy overall.

Evaluation:
What it would have needed to be :  A Repair Party is needed to even be a contender.

Agility

Top Speed:  33.6 knots
Port Turning Radius: 680m
Rudder Shift Time: 6.0 seconds
4/4 Engine Speed Turning Rate: 6.0º/s

Wichita is in the top 3 for all categories. She has one wiggly badonkadonk. For those curious, the * represents a ship whose in-port turning radius is a filthy lie. The 730m value is approximately its real in-game value.

Wichita's top speed bugs me.  33.6 knots -- it's the point-six which stands out.  She's the first ship to have this but not the last.  Before Wichita went into testing, every other ship in the game has a top speed with point-naught or point-five after it.  It's like Wichita's top speed was supposed to be 32.0 knots but someone glued a perma-Sierra Mike signal onto her during development (32 * 1.05 = 33.6).  This theory doesn't hold water, though, given that I would expect to see trickle-down errors in her turning radius, but she's a-okay there with an as-expected 680m.  So as it is, Wichita is simply weird with her point-six knot decimal.

Let's not get distracted by that minor gripe about decimals.  Wichita handles like a dream.  She has it all.  She has a good top speed.  Her turning radius is below 700m.  Her rudder shift time is wicked-fast.  She comes about quickly.  Match her up against the other tier VIII cruisers and she's in the top three of each one of these four metrics.  She feels like a much smaller ship than her armament would suggest.  The only gripe I have with this ship is that her fast rotation rate almost necessitates taking Expert Marksman on your commander.  She won't out turn her turrets during the initial leg of a manoeuvre but without the skill, her turrets will freeze in place when you try and counter rotate them.

As good as Wichita handles, it pays to remember that she's not fast.  33.6 knots, while good for a tier VIII cruiser isn't enough to dictate engagement ranges in all scenarios.  You need to stick a Sierra Mike signal on her to get her speed up over that much tastier 35 knot threshold which will (eventually) let you outpace most threats.

Evaluation:
What it would have needed to be :  More speed or Edinburgh's improved engine power.  It's a close race though.

Anti-Aircraft Defense

Long Range:  5 explosions at 1,260 damage and 124dps between 3.5km and 5.8km
Medium Range:  6 explosions at 770 damage and 233dps between 1.5km and 3.5km
Short Range: 282dps between 0.1km and 1.5km

Here's some old-timey values that don't mean anything anymore. This was created back when Wichita was originally finalized back in December of 2018 for patch 0.7.12. For those of you struggling to keep up with the constant changes happening to AA, this should put things a bit into perspective. Under the old system, Wichita's anti-aircraft firepower was slightly worse than Chapayev's except at point blank ranges.  It was decent but nowhere near the top of the pile. This carries over under the new system.

I can't believe I wasted five hours putting this together when it's inevitably going to change.  Oi!  Any of you reading this in the future:  This graph was made for patch 0.8.0.2, shortly after the Hakuryu-Apocalypse and probably doesn't reflect the current AA stats. These are the number of explosions and the damage done per blast for the large and medium caliber AA guns for the tier VIII cruisers. So Baltimore, for example, has five large flak bursts at 1,330 damage per and nine medium at 840 damage per. These are colour coded per their engagement ranges. You'll notice that the HP of the flak mounts has increased significantly since 0.7.12.

I've said this often and I'll say it again:

Don't buy a premium ship based around its anti-aircraft firepower until the CV rework is finished balancing.

So who's comfortable with the AA numbers that are out there?  Give me a show of hands.  Anyone?  Is it just me? 

I've invested way too much time into learning a set of values that are entirely transient. Rather than bore you all with details that aren't likely to be relevant in the long term, I've provided some pretty pictures for you to look at with lots of colours.  You can stare at them and draw your own conclusions.  In the long run, they'll be about as accurate as anything I could say here.

Seriously, those pretty charts and all of those numbers and how they affect a given attack squadron aren't likely to be accurate a month after this review is published.  Whatever anecdotes I describe may not be replicable in the immediate future.  Are we clear?

Wichita's anti-aircraft firepower in 0.8.0.2 is "okay".  It verges on "pretty darned good" if you specialize heavily into it and have Defensive AA Fire running.   This is all improved further by her small aerial detection range, but we'll speak more on that later.  You'll obliterate tier VI aircraft on the first pass with all this going for you.  Against tier VIIIs, you won't be able to prevent a drop but you will kill the planes that made the attack run as they attempt to return to the carrier and probably red-out the remaining aircraft, preventing a second strike.  Against the tier Xs, you might shoot down a single aircraft on the first attack run but they'll be able to launch a second before they take serious damage.

Of course, if the enemy CV obliges you by running into your flak explosions, then you'll annihilate the squadron suddenly and hilariously (for you).  Do note that Wichita doesn't put out as many medium and long range flak explosions as some of the other cruisers.  Her flak is (much) easier to dodge than something coming from a Baltimore which is arguably the best AA ship at her tier currently.  Wichita's sustained DPS values are only modest too, so she's definitely not a nightmare for CVs when her Defensive AA Fire consumable is on cool down.

Now make sure you forget everything I said here because it won't mean squat after the next patch inevitably changes everything.

More asymmetrical AA layouts! REEEEEE!

Evaluation: NOT AVAILABLE / IRRELEVANT UNTIL REWORK CONCLUDES

Refrigerator

Base Surface Detection: 12.06km
Air Detection Range: 7.68km
Minimum Surface Detection Range: 9.47km
Detection Range when Firing in Smoke: 6.8km
Main Battery Firing Range:  15.83km

In Wargaming's efforts to simplify stealth and radar mechanics, they made this section a heck of a lot more complicated.

Top down, Wichita's vision control can be summarized as "very good".  Her surface detection is competitive.  Her aerial detection is the best at her tier.  She has access to both Hydroacoustic Search and Surveillance Radar.  She's a Smoke Generator away from being downright overpowered in this category.  There's not many drawbacks here.

In the current (highly transitory, so don't get used to it) meta, by far Wichita's most interesting quirk here is the ability to ambush aircraft.  With a full specialization, you can get her aerial detection down to 6.2km with her long range AA spitting out shells at 5.8km.  This gives almost no reaction time for CVs to avoid running into her AA bubble, particularly for planes moving at speed.  If she had a more force projecting with her long range AA, this might be more praiseworthy.  Instead it's more of a curiousity than anything else.  She's not an easy ship to look for from the air (though it is admittedly trivial to find just about any ship right now, regardless of size).

Wichita has comparable surface detection to Mogami and American light cruisers which, while not the best within her Matchmaking spread, is highly competitive.  There is a downside to it with the 0.8.1 radar rework.  In order to mitigate stealth-radar, the lower a ship's surface detection, the less radar reach they have.  This largely divides the American radar ranges into two ranges -- 9km for the more stealthy light cruisers and 10km for the larger heavy cruisers.  Wichita is one of a few exceptions, being saddled with the shorter of the two ranges.  So, while the ship itself is more stealthy and able to abuse concealment distances, she doesn't have quite the same sudden projection of vision when her consumable activates.  It's easily a fair trade -- Wichita's concealment allows her to pull off some very aggressive stunts.

As close in as Wichita can get to her opponents before being spotted, I found myself missing Hydroacoustic Search.  Slipping within 10km makes Wichita's AP shells truly monstrous.  I lost count of the number of cruisers I successfully ambushed this way, blowing out their citadels before they could react.  Doing so wasn't without risks and I lost more than one attempted duel to the sting of a cruiser's torpedoes.  In the current meta with the CV rework, it's simply ill advised to set aside Defensive AA Fire for Hydroacoustic Search.   If things settle down it may become more viable to do so, improving Wichita's strengths.

On the whole, Wichita offers a whole lot of control where vision mechanics are concerned.  She's stealthy.  She has a nearly full-to-the-brim toolkit with her consumable options.  She's all but invisible from the air.  This is clearly one of her big strengths.

Evaluation:
What it would have needed to be :  Smoke (HA!) or not having to choose between Hydroacoustic Search and Defensive AA Fire.

Rebalancing your Captain to Tier VI

My instinct is to spend a lot of time here and go over the fine points of min-maxing Wichita for various builds.  As it stands right now with the CV rework, the value of some skills for this ship are still a bit up in the air.  Generally speaking, it's safe to glue whatever commander you're using currently for your American heavy cruisers on Wichita.  Let's just leave it at that.

Final Evaluation

Premium ship releases in 2019 are leading off with a pair of winners.  I like both Irian and Wichita for similar reasons:  they're elegantly designed ships.  They don't saturate the game with a glut of gimmicks.  Irian is a simple, small caliber gunship with a heavy torpedo armament.  Wichita is a stealthy heavy cruiser which excels at interdiction. Wichita taps into Baltimore's play style and adds a touch of dynamic sneak-and-stealth to the mix.  She's drawn from the same pedigree as premiums like Alabama, De Grasse and Ashitaka (now that she's fixed). They may look a little dull, but don't let that fool you...

It strikes me as odd that I didn't take a shining to Wichita like I have the other three premiums.  Don't get me wrong:  I liked Wichita, but she hasn't been a ship I've reached for to play casually in my off time.  I'm attributing it to a bit of exhaustion rather than an inherent problem with the ship.  I might just be running a little low on enthusiasm between all of the recent chaos.  But make I thought it was worth noting that she hasn't charmed me.

Speaking of charm ... stealth for a cruiser, never mind a heavy cruiser, doesn't quite have the charm it once did.  Aircraft are far too prevalent in the current meta to call this an automatic game-winner the way it might have been a patch or two ago.  This is important for Wichita.  While she suffers less than some other cruisers in this regard, she doesn't escape this shift entirely.  Wichita has paid for her stealth -- her lack of Baltimore's AP shells can largely be attributed to this as a balancing measure.  And you can't always use it.  I found myself missing that extra potential damage and penetration from Baltimore's shells.

If you like Baltimore's play style, Wichita is a solid performer.  If you find yourself in a game without aircraft carriers, she really comes into her own and feels distinct.  Ambushing other cruisers is so much fun and bullying destroyers away from cap points never gets old.  When the air cover is thick, Baltimore is hands down better and Wichita feels like an up-tiered, buffed New Orleans.

his review is brought to you by my patrons on Patreon.  Their support helps bring you reviews just like this, allowing me to spend more time twirling ships, mapping shell falls and writing about the game.  Graf Spee was the winner of a poll conducted for my patrons on which older review I should update first. 

My sincerest thanks to all of you who help with these projects.



And HSF Graf Spee -- cause they're one and the same, except one is better.

Quick Summary: A slow cruiser with battleship-caliber guns.
Cost: Including the port slot: 5,000 doubloons for Admiral Graf Spee and the equivalent of 5,340 doubloons for HSF Admiral Graf Spee.
Patch and Date Written: 0.7.2.1 to 0.7.3. March 17th April 6th, 2018.
Previous Review: December 15th, 2016

PROS

• Enormous hit point pool for a tier VI cruiser with 39,400hp.
• Powerful AP alpha strike with her main battery.
• Excellent penetration on her HE shells.
• Surprisingly effective secondary armament.
• Precise, battleship-caliber guns with lower horizontal dispersion and 1.9 sigma.
• Powerful torpedo armament with good fire arcs and range.
• Access to German Hydroacoustic Search consumable.
• Access to a battleship Repair Party consumable (!)
• Very forgiving in regards to commander skill selection, making her an excellent trainer.
   
• HSF Admiral Graf Spee has improved permanent camouflage with a bonus 100% free experience earned.
• HSF Admiral Graf Spee can be used to train not only any of your German captains, but also any of the High School Fleet captains regardless of their nationality.

CONS

• Large, vulnerable citadel.
• Fires on her last 45 seconds -- 15 seconds longer than normal cruisers
• Terrible DPM with both AP and HE shells.
• Poorly equipped to deal with enemy destroyer threats.
• Low agility for a tier VI cruiser with a 28.5 knot top speed, 10.3s rudder shift time and 5.2º maximum rotation rate.
• Large surface and aerial detection ranges.
• Her Repair Party only queues 10% of citadel damage instead of 33% of high-tier cruisers.
   
• HSF Admiral Graf Spee is the better version of this ship with her camouflage bonuses, but not everyone likes (or wants to support) anime crossovers in World of Warships.

Overview
Skill Floor: Simple / Casual / Challenging / Difficult
Skill Ceiling: Low / Moderate / High / Extreme
 

Graf Spee looks complicated, handing players a lot of different plates to spin. You've got battleship caliber guns.  You've also got torpedoes. On top of that, there's four consumables all need to be managed properly to make this ship work.  What's more you've got cruiser-quality armour and a citadel to protect.  You can't play this ship as a battleship and expect to succeed, nor does she quite marry up to cruiser expectations, with speed, concealment and damage output.

Experts will appreciate the variety of game play this ship offers which is an interesting departure from the norm, but overall her slow speed and small number of main-battery guns limits her flexibility.

 

 

 

• Graf Spee is largely defined by her battleship caliber gun armament, but it's her durability which is her quality.
• Contrary to her rating, Graf Spee does not handle poorly -- she's simply a slow ship.
• She earns a rating in concealment owing to her large surface detection relative to the other tier VI cruisers.  The further combination of a large aerial detection radius and her inability to capitalize on destroyer-laid smoke like other cruisers worsens matters.

•   Graf Spee's Damage Control Party is standard for a cruiser.
• or   In her second slot, you have the choice between Hydroacoustic Search or Defensive AA Fire. The latter is a standard version of the cruiser consumable, but the former is a specialized German version with an additional duration and detection range, giving Graf Spee a 114s active time, 3.66km torpedo detection range and 5.28km ship detection range.
•   Graf Spee uses as Catapult Fighter in her third slot with 1180 hit points and 48 dps.
•   Her Repair Party finishes off her consumable slots, healing back up to 14% of her maximum health (5,516hp) over 28s. This queues up damage in the same manner as a battleship.  She recovers 10% of citadel damage, 50% of all penetration damage and 100% of damage from all other sources.

Upgrades: Four slots, standard cruiser upgrades.

•   In your first slot, take Main Armaments Modification 1.

•   or   Next, take Damage Control Modification 1 in your second slot.  Alternatively, if you have access to the special upgrade Hydroacoustic Search Modification 1 you can use it here instead.

• or    Aiming System Modification 1 is optimal, especially for battleship-caliber guns. She gets a nice boost to her secondaries too. If you're particularly salty about aircraft, you can elect to take AA Guns Modification 2, but this is a highly situational upgrade you're only ever going to find use for when under direct attack from an enemy carrier.

• or   You have your choice between Damage Control System Modification 2 and Steering Gears Modification 2 in your final slot, depending on your game play preferences. The latter makes steering more comfortable while the former will improve the efficiency of your Repair Party consumable in regards to fire damage.

Camouflage: The primary difference between Admiral Graf Spee and the High School Fleet (HSF) Graf Spee lies in which camouflage patterns are available.

•   If you purchased (or earned) Admiral Graf Spee, you will have access to Type 10 Camouflage. This provides a 10% reduction to repair costs, a 50% bonus to your experience gains, a 3% reduction in surface detection and a 4% reduction in enemy accuracy.
•    Veterans may have unlocked Type 12 Camouflage for Admiral Graf Spee during the Santa's Christmas Convoy campaign. This provides the same bonuses as Type 10 above and is simply a cosmetic swap.  If you don't have it, you're not missing out on any benefits.
• or   HSF Graf Spee differs from the standard premium in that she has the choice between two camouflage patterns when you purchase her. Both camouflage patterns include a 10% reduction to repair costs, a 50% bonus to your experience gains,a 3% reduction in surface detection and a 4% reduction in enemy accuracy. In addition, they both provide 100% bonus experience. This makes HSF Graf Spee superior to the standard premium.
  
  The Type 10 Camouflage turns HSF Graf Spee into a clone of the normal premium ship appearance wise. I say again, using the Type 10 Camouflage on HSF Graf Spee makes her look identical to Admiral Graf Spee.
  
  The W207 Camouflage provides not only a different colour scheme, but it changes the geometry of the ship, most notably around the bridge section. This matches her appearance in the anime.

Upper bridge geometry differences between HSF Graf Spee (twin spotlights) and Graf Spee (single spotlight, radar assembly).

Firepower
Main Battery: Six 283mm rifles in 2x3 turrets in an A-X configuration.
Secondary Battery: Eight 150mm rifles in single turrets and six 105mm mounts in 3x2 turrets.
Torpedo Armament: Eight torpedoes in 2x4 launchers.
 

Graf Spee's fire angles aren't great.  They're not terrible, but be mindful that if you try and fire your X turret or torpedoes at a target ahead of you, you've opened up yourself to take citadel hits.

There's a lot wrong with Graf Spee's weapon systems. She doesn't have good fire angles. She doesn't put out a lot of DPM. Even her AP alpha strike is only moderately better than the other heavy cruisers at her tier. Yet, for all of these faults, Graf Spee's firepower is excellent. Graf Spee's claim to fame in game is that she rocks the same main caliber of guns as a battleship. Combined with powerful torpedoes and a surprisingly effective secondary gun battery, she's a potent threat to almost any ship she encounters.

Almost...

Secondaries
Graf Spee's secondaries are perhaps the most surprising element of the ship's armament. This comes from three parts. First, she has a comparable broadside weight to HMS Warspite with four 150mm guns and up to another four 105mm guns. Second, like HMS Baebote, they fire a homogeneous wall of HE shells (which is most welcome). Third, her 150mm enjoy increased penetration, being able to damage areas of up to 37mm thick which lets her stack damage against any target she faces at close range.

She is unfortunately lacking in rate of fire and range.

At best, with all of the range improvements you can tag onto Graf Spee, the most you'll get her secondary armament to reach is 6.0km from 4.0km which isn't terrible but it's not great. I would have loved to see Graf Spee's base secondary range up at 5.0km so she could flirt with being able to use her secondaries in conjunction with her torpedoes. Similarly, the bulk of her broadside is made up of her 150mm guns with that great penetration. Unfortunately, their rate of fire is slow.

As it stands, her defensive armament is okay, but it's not going to be a show stopper that makes a destroyer turn away. Given the deficiencies of her main battery when it comes to handling lolibotes, this is disappointing.
 

 

Speaking of her torpedoes, Graf Spee breaks the mold of German cruisers. Most German cruisers in the game make use of the G7a T1 torpedo -- the same weapon found on the stock Ernst Gaede German destroyer at tier VI but with a higher running speed and less range. Graf Spee instead uses the upgraded Gaede torpedo, the G7 Steinbutt (translation:turbot). This gives her fish improved range and speed over her contemporaries which can be a shock to opponents who are used to the short reach of most German armaments. The trade off is that they have a slightly larger surface detection range than the G7a T1s but this is hardly a concern.

Graf Spee's torpedoes are excellent, owing to the decent fire arcs, good range and impressive striking power from her quad launchers. They easily can spell the doom for any enemies that over extend and take Graf Spee lightly. Cruiser and destroyer kills are particularly prized in a knife fight. There are four deficiencies to keep in mind regarding her torpedoes, though:

• Her fire arcs are good, but they have a strong rearward bias. In order to fire on targets ahead of her, it's easy for Graf Spee to over angle and give up too much broadside. This leaves her vulnerable to reprisals from AP shells.
• Like all torpedo mounts, Graf Spee's mounts are highly vulnerable to HE (and British cruiser AP) shells. It's not uncommon for them to get disabled or destroyed, especially when under a lot of fire. Plan your attacks carefully.
• Individually, the Steinbutts don't hit particularly hard. Even all four torpedoes cannot (and will not) sink a hale and healthy battleship short of setting off a detonation or flooding them out. While this will hurt them a lot, you've now got to contend with an understandably angry dreadnought.
• Graf Spee herself isn't fast and she's huge.  This isn't a ship where you can easily sprint into torpedo range from an ambush position.  If you're married to the idea of a near suicidal rush of an enemy capital ship, expect to sacrifice a lot (if not all) of your health to get those hits in.

The extra 2km range on Graf Spee's torpedoes make them much easier to use than on other German cruisers (or German battleships for that matter), providing a welcome bit of shock-power to her armament.

 

Despite the similarities of gun caliber and mount appearance, Graf Spee does not use the same guns as found on Scharnhorst. Graf Spee's guns are an older, shorter barreled 283mm gun and this causes some disparity in performance between the two weapons. Graf Spee's guns hit harder and are far more accurate but they come with reduced penetration. Though her shells have a higher initial muzzle velocity, their shell drag coefficients are significantly worse which leads to longer shell flight times, decreased penetration over distance and higher shell arcs over range. However, it's her accuracy compared to other battleship guns that makes them remarkable.
 

Take Graf Spee's illustrated dispersion with a pinch of salt. Graf Spee suffers from a bug I call "downward drift". With the ship stationary and the guns trained on a distant target, the camera will slowly pan downward and reduce the range. With Graf Spee, this was particularly pronounced, with a loss of 60m to 80m worth of range over a 20 second firing cycle. This forced me to readjust after every salvo. This leads to an easily measurable +/- 10m vertical dispersion margin of error, but the damage on horizontal dispersion could be significantly larger, with only a distant nav buoy and rock formation to align my sites. The end result is that Graf Spee's dispersion is likely smaller than is being illustrated here. The only reason I include it in this review with these errors in mind is that the difference between Graf Spee's and Bismarck's dispersion is so pronounced that it's clearly visible even with this potential disparity. 

In practice, these are not universal guns. They are highly specialized towards punishing cruisers -- particularly light cruisers where her 283mm AP shells can overmatch their thin bows and land citadels regardless of angles. Graf Spee does not have the penetration or shell fuse timer to punish battleships with citadel hits except at close range and against broadside targets. Heavy cruisers can successfully angle against Graf Spee and mitigate much of the damage of her AP shells. Thinly skinned ships like destroyers simply take an overpenetration or two, shrug it off and then have their way with you.

Reaching for HE shells doesn't correct these problems either. While they do have impressive levels of penetration, the damage of her HE shells is anemic -- striking for less on a per hit basis than Japanese 203mm. This gives Aoba not only higher damage per minute but a higher HE alpha strike too. On a per shell basis, Graf Spee's fire chance is the highest among cruisers but combined with her rate of fire deficiencies, she's the worst fire starter short of Leander by a significant margin. And that's saying something when you remember Duca d'Aosta is a tier VI cruiser.

You're always going to be hoping for those monstrous alpha strikes -- when the stars align and you catch a cruiser broadside and slap them with two or three citadel hits. Far more often you're going to be relegated to small amounts of chip damage; a thousand hit points here and there. This ship will not win any DPM races, but that doesn't mean she cannot out trade her opponents. Graf Spee has something the other cruisers don't: longevity. She's tough enough to survive most of what will be thrown back at her, so she tanks through the pain to try and land those crippling shots.

Summary:

• Despite having battleship caliber guns, Graf Spee can struggle to do damage quickly to targets.
• While it's easy to focus on alpha strike between AP shells and torpedoes, slow and steady accumulation of damage is Graf Spee's bread and butter.  Those big alpha strikes are memorable, even if they can be somewhat rare.
• Her secondaries are surprisingly good, but not really good enough to be worth specializing.

Evaluation:
What it would have needed to be : Better flexibility with her weaponry. More range on her torpedoes, better secondaries for handling destroyers or a better HE shell on her main battery.

Defense
Hit Points: 39,400hp
Maximum Citadel Protection: 16mm anti-torpedo bulge + 100mm armoured belt + 40mm citadel wall.
Minimum Extremities & Deck Armour: 19mm
Torpedo Damage Reduction: 24%
 

Graf Spee has 10,600hp more than the average tier VI cruiser and 14,800hp less than the average tier VI battleship.

Graf Spee has an enormous hit point pool for a cruiser. When you take the average hit points of battleships and other cruisers at tier VI and compare them, Graf Spee sits just shy of the middle. This middle ground is duplicated in a few other ways with Graf Spee, both for good and ill. It makes her the toughest cruiser at tier VI by a landslide but she never gets close to challenging battleships for their supremacy of durability. She effectively has the health of a tier VIII cruiser two tiers lower, but she doesn't have everything her own way.

Fire Damage & Consumables
Graf Spee's continues to be unable to make up her mind on what ship type she is with her consumables. She uses a cruiser's Damage Control Party with its 5 second active period and 90s/60s reset timer. This does a lot to help the issues she experiences with fires. Graf Spee not only has access to a Repair Party like a battleship at her tier, she also uses a battleship version of the consumable. Graf Spee is incapable of recovering from citadel damage like higher tier cruisers, healing back only 10% of damage she receives there like a battleship instead of 33% as you might expect.

Patch 0.6.13 from November of 2017 halved the duration (and thus damage) of fires on cruisers and destroyers from 60 seconds down to 30 seconds. This means that a fire allowed to burn for its full length will remove 9% of a cruiser's total health instead of 18%. Graf Spee didn't quite get the same love, however. This is one of those instants where she sits in the unhappy middle ground between battleships and cruisers. Fires on Graf Spee burn for 45 seconds, costing her 5,319 hit points (13.5%) per blaze. This matches up almost perfectly with a single charge of her Repair Party (5,516hp).

The diminished base time on her fires does just enough to make investment in upgrades like Damage Control Modification 2 and commander skills like Basics of Survivability questionable. The 15% reduction these afford spares Graf Spee about 800hp per fire. Stacking the two saves her almost 1,500hp. These skill points and the upgrade slot could be much better spent elsewhere, such as with Superintendent to increase the number of charges she has on her consumables.

Armour Protection
In terms of armour protection, however, Graf Spee is undeniably a cruiser. There are only small traces of battleship pedigree here. Like most other German cruisers, Graf Spee's waterline citadel is completely enclosed, making her immune to citadel hits from HE shells. This also affords her slightly more protection with a combination of a belt plus an interior citadel wall. In addition, she has decent torpedo protection, reducing damage taken along her bulges by nearly 1/4. This is largely where any similarities to battleships ends, however.

Graf Spee's armoured belt is 100mm -- comparable to other cruisers like Budyonny, Leander and La Galissonnière. Her extremities are a mere 19mm thick, allowing them to be overmatched by any battleship-caliber shell she may encounter and they provide no protection against anything but the smallest caliber of HE shells being thrown about in her Matchmaking spread. Penetration damage will come regularly to this vessel.

The best that could be said about Graf Spee's armour layout is that it's sufficient to foil AP shells from cruiser-caliber guns. Properly angled, she can tank 152mm, 180mm and 203mm armour piercing shells for days, making her a very real threat to Royal Navy cruisers in particular. How fitting is that?

The Best (and Worst) of Both Worlds
You'd have to be all kinds of terrible to think that Graf Spee's durability is anything but amazing for a cruiser. Compared to a battleship, Graf Spee gets reduced fire damage and an improved Damage Control Party. Compared to a cruiser, Graf Spee enjoys excellent anti-torpedo protection, a massive hit point increase and access to the Repair Party consumable. She pays for this by taking more damage from fires than a cruiser would and her Repair Party isn't quite as good as it could be.

This seems like a trade in Graf Spee's favour.

It's important to keep in mind, however, that as good as her durability is, Graf Spee cannot go toe to toe with a battleship over prolonged encounters and expect to come out the better for it. Her protection makes her an excellent bully against cruisers. Against dreadnoughts, Graf Spee provides a little more forgiveness than you might otherwise experience in a cruiser, but only just. Devastating Strikes against you will still be commonplace if you give up her broadside, especially to some of those new French battleships with all of the guns.

Graf Spee has a second Achilles heel: destroyers. While she's well designed to outlast cruisers and limp away from unfortunate encounters with battleships, lolibotes present a very real threat. Given the weaknesses described earlier with her guns, short of lucky hits it takes far too long for Graf Spee to trade fire with an enemy destroyer gunship before they burn her down to the waterline. Torpedo boats are similarly dangerous. To be clear, this isn't a flaw of her durability but rather a weakness of her weapon systems. As tough as she is, she's not necessarily tough enough to come out the victor against a decently played destroyer.

Graf Spee's durability seems focused on making her a monster against cruisers and it does this very, very well.

Evaluation:
What would have to happen to DOWNGRADE to : Graf Spee stands well apart from the other ships at her tier. It's unlikely we'll see her knocked down from up high on her pillar. The only way I can think of would be if the Royal Navy battlecruiser line is introduced into the game as cruisers and not battleships.

Agility
Top Speed: 28.5 knots
Turning Radius: 680m
Rudder Shift Time: 10.3s
Maximum Rate of Turn: 5.2º/s

Graf Spee is slow.

There's no other qualifiers needed, really. While other cruisers are racing about at a minimum of 31.5 knots (and some in excess of 36), Graf Spee is rocking an epic tuba solo at a mere twenty-eight and a half. This has a splashdown effect across the rest of Graf Spee's handling. Though she maintains a cruiser's maximum speed in a turn (80% of maximum), her circle isn't small and her slower speed limits her agility as a result. She's one the slowest to come about, besting only Molotov -- and even then just barely. Her rudder shift time is also on the clumsy side.

Overall, Graf Spee handles better than a battleship and even better than a lot of the higher tiered cruisers, which is alright all things told. Against a good number of the battleship she faces, Graf Spee is fast enough to dictate engagement distances which will keep her alive. Finally, she doesn't even out turn her guns which makes her feel very comfortable and far more agile than she actually is.

Evaluation:
What it would have needed to be : More speed.

 
Speed Racer, she is not.

Anti-Aircraft Defense
AA Battery Calibers: 105mm / 37mm / 20mm
AA Umbrella Ranges: 4.5km / 3.5km / 2.0km
AA DPS per Aura: 49.8 / 10.4 / 30.0
Float Plane Fighter DPS: 48
 

One of the interesting curiousities about the modelling decision between Graf Spee and HSF Graf Spee is that the latter (using the W207 camouflage) has four additional, non-functional 20mm Flak 38s modeled. The rest of her AA gun mounts are identically placed when using other camouflage patterns and these four cosmetic AA guns disappear.

 

Without any bells or whistles, Graf Spee's AA power looks unimpressive. "Effective AA DPS" is equal to the DPS of the gun multiplied by the formula "weapon range - 1.0km". This stresses the importance of long-range firepower over close range AA mounts.

For a tier VI cruiser, Graf Spee has decent anti-aircraft firepower though she does not look it at first glance. Her effectiveness owes to most of her damage potential being concentrated in her large caliber, 105mm L/65 dual purpose mounts.  These put out 50dps base before upgrades and offer three benefits:

• Graf Spee's anti-aircraft firepower is "front loaded", doing most of its damage at a distance before aircraft can line up their shot. Causing casualties early may dissuade carrier players from engaging her.
• Dual purpose guns are far more resilient to damage than small and medium caliber AA guns. Graf Spee is more likely to keep her "teeth" later in a match than a cruiser that relied more on 40mm Bofors or 25mm guns.
• Large caliber guns can benefit from more skills and bonuses than small or medium caliber.  Should a player choose to upgrade them, their increased performance is appreciable.

Graf Spee responds well to investment into AA firepower, including the skills Basic Fire Training, Advanced Fire Training and Manual Fire Control for AA Guns. However, it's the consumable Defensive AA Fire which truly makes Graf Spee's defenses sufficient to the task. Without it, even fully upgraded, Graf Spee's AA firepower will (at best) only bruise attack squadrons. You're unlikely to prevent drops entirely, even against a tier V Bogue or Zuiho.

This presents a bit of a problem for players when it comes to selecting their consumables. As a German vessel, Graf Spee has access to the improved version of Hydroacoustic Search and it can seem like a waste to set this aside in favour of a consumable whose use is far more limited. It's a difficult choice to make and even I flip-flop between the two based on previous experiences. Either one is a "safe" choice but it will affect how you respond to destroyer and aircraft carrier threats.
 

"Maximum Effective DPS" includes all possible bonuses from AA upgrades, skills and signals, including the use of Defensive AA Fire where applicable (those without are marked with an asterisk). Under the effects of her consumable and a full AA build, Graf Spee proves to be quite a prickly target and one of the better defended tier VI cruisers in the game. The importance and impact of her large caliber guns becomes readily apparent. Without specialization, though, she's lackluster.

 

Evaluation:
What it would have needed to be : Graf Spee has a long way to go to separate herself from the pack. She would need a significant (and perhaps even modernized) AA-suite to make her truly advantageous.

Refrigerator
Surface Detection Range: 13.14 km
Air Detection Range: 8.49 km
Minimum Surface Detection Range: 11.22km
Concealment when Firing in Smoke: 9.47km

Destroyers will make you bite the pillow.

Graf Spee isn't a cruiser where it's generally safe to push early. While she doesn't have the worst surface detection range at tier VI, yet she still deserves a rating where concealment is concerned. She is one of the largest cruisers at her tier with a surface detection range on par with Budyonny. However, she has the worst aerial detection range of any of the tier VI cruisers. In addition, her gun bloom while in smoke is again the largest among cruisers.

Enemy destroyers sitting within smoke in an aggressive position will spot Graf Spee every time she fires where other cruisers might keep hidden. While battleships also share this problem, Graf Spee doesn't have their resilience and she quickly becomes a magnet for incoming fire. Your worst nightmare is following an advance on a cap circle only to have a friendly destroyer dump smoke when they meet resistance. You're blind yet any enemy lolibotes will keep you lit for their heavy hitters to have their way with you.

And they will have their way with you.

To this end, it's difficult to play Graf Spee aggressively in the opening minutes of a match -- at least until destroyers and CV attentions can be sniffed out. This is unfortunate given the strengths of Graf Spee's Hydroacoustic Search consumable. It could be a powerful asset on the front lines, but in Graf Spee's hands it's largely relegated to simple torpedo detection until late in a match. She is already poorly armed to handle destroyers, and her large size (and slow speed) makes spotting and engaging anything but low health destroyers problematic.

Evaluation:
What it would have needed to be : Graf Spee would need to lose at least a kilometer of base surface detection.

This will give you better awareness, an improved rate of fire, more charges of your consumable and reduced surface detection range. Ideally, you'll want to follow this up with Advanced Fire Training, Basic Fire Training and Expert Marksman at tiers 4, 3 and 2 respectively to finish this off.  This will give you a nice solid build with the flexibility to swap between Defensive AA Fire or Hydroacoustic Search with your consumables and take all comers.  As an added plus, your secondaries will get their range boosted.
 

Thea Kreuzer When you purchase HSF Graf Spee, not only do you get the bonus second (anime) camouflage scheme, but you also currently get a bonus 6pt commander in the form of Thea Kreuzer.  As if you needed any more reason for the High School Fleet version of Graf Spee to provide more value than the original. This is one of the characters from the High School Fleet show where she commands Graf Spee.  While any German commander may captain HSF Graf Spee, Thea may also captain any German ship of your choosing with a simple change of specialization.  She may commander any of your German premiums without cost, of course.  In addition, she may also command HSF Harekaze -- the Japanese premium destroyer. Using Thea Kreuzer in your ships changes the national dialogue of all ships in game to the cast of High School Fleet, making it sound like you're immersed in one of the episodes of the show.

Mouse's Summary:

• Her hitting power is pretty good, but this comes from the combination of all of her weapon systems, not just her guns.  While you're going to be hoping for those big alpha strikes, you're probably going to have to settle for a lot of middling damage hits.  Relying solely upon her main battery guns can (and does) work, but you need a lot of time to make the damage add up. 
• Fortunately time is typically something Graf Spee has in spades.  Her durability for a tier VI cruiser is great, though it's somewhat contingent on avoiding battleship attention.
• Be really mindful of enemy destroyers in this ship.  Celebrate any chance you get to hit them with your torpedoes, though.  That's always hilarious.

I didn't think very highly of Graf Spee when I first reviewed her. 

Oh, I liked her fine, but during play testing, way back in December of 2016, some of my fellow CCs just couldn't make this ship work.  This spoke to me of a higher learning curve which limited accessibility. However, if you can get over this initial hurdle, Graf Spee really mellows out and she becomes a joy to play.  What I didn't account for was how many players would slip past this obstacle and settle in.  I greatly underestimated her appeal, how doggedly people would keep at it and, as a result, how well liked she would become within the community.  I suppose people were quite willing to tough her out.  It doesn't hurt that she was initially handed out for free or that she's as historically significant as she is.

So yeah, this is a good ship.  It's fun and it offers something different for players in mid tiers. 

 

Graf Spee, like Atago and the upcoming Abruzzi release, demonstrates how much power there really is in the Repair Party consumable.  At tiers where it isn't commonplace, it's a complete game changer.  Graf Spee takes this a step further with her enormous hit point pool relative to her peers.  She doesn't flirt with battleship levels of durability, mind you, but she's no slouch.  This simply affords players more time to keep shooting.  Given enough bites of the apple, Graf Spee performs.  Sometimes its in big, high alpha strike ways.  At others, it's just a slow, methodical stacking of low damage again and again and again.

 

The promise of delivering battleship-style alpha strikes against cruisers is a seductive lure.  While this does happen reasonably often against select opponents (specifically, sweet & delicious Omaha and Emerald-class cruisers), farming Devastating Strikes just doesn't happen.  If you can console yourself to play "spot the Murmansk" in those matches where you're top or middle tier, then you may find some mileage this way, it's foolish to expect it anytime a cruiser slips between your crosshairs.  If you can wrap your mind around that, then Graf Spee is one Hell of a ride.

 

Enough praises.  Let's talk about the anime crossover, High School Fleet and how it affects Graf Spee.

 

HSF Graf Spee is all but a clone of Graf Spee.  Unlike the Kamikaze-sisters, HSF Graf Spee is hands down superior to the original which preceded her.  Even if you don't like anime at all, the ability to mount a skin which all but removes all traces of the show mitigates this.  As far as anime skins go, I do believe that the W207 is the best looking (if unhistorical) of the three that have been made available between the two ships.  If you were intending to spend money to own one of these two ships,HSF Graf Spee is the better purchase.  It's all because of that bonus 100% free experience gain which is invaluable.  While on its own, it doesn't amount to much but when combined with stacking bonuses available between signal flags, dragon flags and events, the amount you can gain is just too much to ignore.

 

As I write this, HSF Graf Spee (and HSF Harekaze) are unavailable on all other servers with the exception of the NA server.  In North America, players are given the choice between both versions of Graf Spee and the choice is obvious. This makes me feel bad for players in other regions that are missing out.  Remember to bug your contacts at Wargaming if you want the crossover version of this ship available in your region!

 

Would I Recommend?
It's worth restating (for the umpteenth time) that there are two Graf Spee ships out there.  Short of price, the Anime crossover version is superior due to the economical bonuses she has over the standard ship and the inclusion of a pre-trained commander as well.
 

• PVE Battles
  How well does the ship maintain profitability in Co-Op modes and how does she fare against bots?

Very yes.  In Co-op battles, especially, Graf Spee is a monster.  She works alright in scenarios too, though the prevalence of destroyers can be taxing on her guns.
 

• Random Battle Grinding:
  This includes training captains, collecting free experience, earning credits and collecting signal flags from achievements.

Yes, Graf Spee is a great trainer for any German captain on your roster.
 

• For Competitive Gaming:
  Competitive Gaming includes Ranked Battles and other skill-based tournaments. This also includes stat-padding.

I'd give her a pass here.  You could make her work, but you'd be better served with a ship that has more versatility with her armaments.  Dat durability, tho...
 

• For Collectors:
  If you enjoy ship history or possessing rare ships, this section is for you.

Very yes.  It's Admiral Graf Spee. 

• For Fun Factor:
  Bottom line: Is the ship fun to play?

Graf Spee offers unique game play unmatched even by the premium Soviet cruisers at tiers 9 and 10.
 

• What's the Final Verdict?
  How would the ship rate on an Angry YouTuber scale of Garbage - Meh - Gud - Overpowered?

GARBAGE - The boat is unbalanced, not fun to play and weak. The ship desperately needs some buffs or some quality of life changes.
Mehbote - An average ship. Has strengths and weaknesses. Doesn't need buffs to be viable however she's not going to be considered optimal.
Gudbote - A powerful ship, often one of the best ships at a given role within its tier. Usually considered optimal for a given task.
OVERPOWERED - The boat is unbalanced and powerful. Typically she's either horrible to play against or she redefines the meta entirely.
 

Are you cringing yet?  I tried to cram as much Azur Lane & High School Fleet in as I could -- just like World of Warships!
 

 Appendix

A list of sites, programs and people I rely upon to create my reviews.

 

Research:

• Ship Comrade - http://shipcomrade.com/
• World of Warships North American Forums - https://forum.worldofwarships.com/
• World of Warships European Forums - https://forum.worldofwarships.eu/
• World of Warships Wiki - http://wiki.wargaming.net/en/World_of_Warships
• World of Warships Reddit - https://www.reddit.com/r/WorldOfWarships/
• iChase's YouTube Channel - https://www.youtube.com/user/ichasegaming
• Farazeth's YouTube Channel - https://www.youtube.com/user/farazelleth
• Vehicles from Video Games - https://gamemodels3d.com/
• ProShips - http://proships.ru/news/
• SEA Group - https://sea-group.org/
• The Armored Patrol - https://thearmoredpatrol.com/
• World of Warships AP Penetration Calculator - https://mustanghx.github.io/ship_ap_calculator/

Artwork:

• Chobittsu Studios, Mouse & Lert artwork - https://chobittsu-studios.deviantart.com/
• Kantai Collection, fan works and official artwork - http://www.dmm.com/netgame_s/kancolle/
• Chaofanatic's YouTube Channel, for speedlines - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7cs11HaqEA
• Victory Belles, https://victorybelles.tumblr.com/
• Azur Lane, http://www.azurlane.jp/

For Graphics:

• Imgur for Image Hosting - https://imgur.com/
• Pixlr for picture editing - https://pixlr.com/
• Ezgif for animation - https://ezgif.com/
• National Center for Educational Statistics for graph making - https://nces.ed.gov/
• Google Docs for spreadsheets and data archiving - https://www.google.ca/docs/about/

Programs Used:

• World of Warships (duh)
• Notepad (seriously)
• MS Paint (also, seriously)
• iPhone Stopwatch App (yep)

Hardware:

Mouse toils away on an old i7-2600K 3.40GHz computer with 16GB RAM and an Nvidia 560Ti GPU running a 64bit OS.