Premium Ship Review: Dido

[LittleWhiteMouse]

 

The following is a review of Dido, to tier VI premium British light cruiser, supported by my patrons on Patreon.  To the best of my knowledge, the statistics discussed in this review are current as of patch 0.11.1.  Please be aware that her performance may change in the future.

The purpose of this review is to support the players, not the company behind the product. 
Posting this review is not an endorsement of current goings on nor is it a statement about them.

It's been a while, and not for the lack of trying.  I have a half-finished Giuseppe Verdi and Kearsarge reviews archived before I got distracted with mapping sustianed AA DPS (kinda important when talking about Kearsarge's planes).  My AA project has ballooned out of control which I feared it might.  I'm putting those reviews on hold to get a (relatively) faster one out.

Now Dido is a ship that players have wanted for a long time.  A quick forums search finds talk about these ships going all of the way back to the game's launch, with players eagerly looking forward to more "Atlanta-style" ships.  This ship has definitely been one I've highly anticipated knowing how important it is to not only Royal Navy enthusiasts but also players in the Commonwealth nations where she might be used (with modifications) to represent HMNZS Bellona or HMNZS Black Prince.  Wargaming seems to have developed allergies for rapid-fire ships over the course of 2021 (to say nothing of AA specialists), with ships increasingly having longer and longer (and unfun) reloads and Dido's implementation obviously suffers from this new design direction.  I was expecting Nürnberg levels of rapid-fire.  Instead we got Dallas with much weaker guns.

The silver lining (supposedly) is that they gave her smoke.  So let's see if reaching into the Box o' Gimmicks™ has saved us from unfun design choices.

Quick Summary:  A fragile British light cruiser with ten, slow-firing destroyer-calibre guns.  She's agile with good concealment and boasts a Short-Burst Smoke Generator.

PROS

• Small citadel.
• Large battery of ten 133mm guns that fires both HE and AP.
• 360º traverse on rear turrets.
• Powerful, single-fire torpedoes.
• Excellent acceleration and decent agility.
• Good concealment.
• She has smoke.

CONS

• Tiny hit point pool.
• Very thin citadel protection, vulnerable to even 203mm AP overmatching.
• Uses cruiser dispersion instead of destroyer dispersion.
• Slow firing for such small-calibre guns.
• Low HE and AP penetration.
• Clumsy main-battery firing angles.
• Bad anti-aircraft firepower.
• No access to Hydroacoustic Search.

Overview

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

Dido has a nice, comfortable skill floor for inexperienced players.  Park in smoke, apply HE to faces.  Displace.  Rinse and repeat.

For veteran players, there's a lot to know.  Map awareness, map positioning, proper smoke use habits, commander skill builds, ammunition juggling, using and abusing concealment, etc.  They'll all serve you well here and help pad some of the ship's obvious weaknesses.  Dido's carry potential is somewhat limited, however, by the issues with her penetration and damage output.  She just doesn't hurt things quickly enough for bold plays barring a torpedo strike, so this is a ship that requires patience, caution and even more patience.

Options

The most variety you're going to find in optimized Dido builds comes from commander skill selection, and that's mostly focused around whether or not to take Inertial Fuse for HE Shells or to emphasize fire setting instead.  One of these is a bad idea.

Consumables

• Dido's Damage Control Party is standard for a cruiser.  It comes with unlimited charges and a 60 second reset timer.  It is active for 5 seconds.
• Her Defensive AA Fire consumable is standard for a non-American cruiser at this tier.  It starts with three charges and it has a 40 second active period and an 80 second reset timer.  While active, it increases sustained damage by 50% and quadruples flak explosion damage.
• Dido comes with a Short-Burst Smoke Generator reminiscent of that found on Belfast '43 and British destroyers.  However, it's very much its own beast with no direct clones that I could find.  It starts with five charges and emits smoke for 15 seconds.  However, the smoke clouds only last for 35 seconds each (Belfast '43's smoke lasts for 40) .  Her reset timer is also longer than her tier VIII cousin, with an 80 second wait time instead of 70 seconds.

Upgrades

Not much variety here.

• Start with Main Armaments Modification 1.
• Next, take Engine Room Protection. 
• Aiming Systems Modification 1 is the only upgrade worth considering in slot three.
• And finally, Steering Gears Modification 1 is also the only upgrade worth taking.

Commander Skills

Why haven't you taken Heavy HE & SAP Shells yet?

YOU MUST TAKE HEAVY HE & SAP SHELLS for Dido.  There's no reason not to.  Take it now.  NOW.
Have you done it yet?  Okay, good.  Now we can talk.  You're going to want to pair that with Inertial Fuse for HE Shells along with the usual light-cruiser suspects of Concealment Expert and Last Stand is also recommended.  You've got some wiggle room after that.  I highly value Priority Target and I wanted the extra charge of smoke with Superintendent (though you're not always going to get to use it).  With such as a small hit point pool, the extra 2700 (or 11% total) hit points from Survivability Expert is worth taking, though you could trade one of the latter two for Adrenaline Rush if you wanted.  Finally, I had a point leftover which I dropped into Grease the Gears.

Here's some of the skills I'd consider but didn't have room for in my current build:

• Gun Feeder - On more than one occasion, I wish I had this skill when the flat broadside of a cruiser finally presented itself.
• Demolition Expert - Nice to have, but expensive at two points.
• Adrenaline Rush - Mentioned above.
• Radio Location - See Demolition Expert.  This would be nice to have but it's too expensive given Dido's priorities.

Of course, if you're only playing Co-Op and scenarios, than other than Heavy HE & SAP Shells, your choice of skills doesn't matter much.

Camouflage

If you unlock Dido through the Gibraltar Pillars event, she comes with two camouflage options.  Her Type 10 and Atlantic camos are palette swaps of one another, providing the identical bonuses of:

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

This is Dido-s standard Type 10 camouflage.  If she's put on sale on the regular later, this is the paint scheme with which she'll come.

You can unlock this alternative palette for her Type 10 camouflage through completing a specific part of the Naval Aviation collection.

For early adopters, they also received this Atlantic - Dido camouflage which is nice and striking.  My guess is we'll see this as a purchasable option for and estimated 1,000 doubloons or 6,000 community-tokens for later-comers if they become available separately.

Firepower

Main Battery:  Ten 133mm/50 guns in 5x2 turrets in an A-B-C-X-Y superfiring configuration. 
Torpedoes:  Six tubes in 2x3 launchers on wing mounts straddling the rear funnel.

Dido barely survives a ram attempt from Kijkduin, using her powerful torpedoes to sink the cruiser just before impact.  Dido has better rearward than forward torpedo arcs.

Torpedoes

Let's start with the fish!

Dido has surprisingly powerful fish for her tier.  This is owing to her using the same torpedoes found on the tier VIII destroyer, Lightning, giving her quite a heavy punch.  Their 8km range means you're not stealth firing at anyone barring extreme kiting situations or using concealment to setup a torpedo attack.  However, their individual hits are devastating.  A full broadside of her torpedoes will sink just about any cruiser she comes across.  BUT (and I stress this but!) three torpedo hits aren't enough to take down any of the battleships she faces short of Viribus Unitis, so don't suicide charge anything that's not already damaged.  Like other British cruisers and destroyers, Dido can single fire her fish which is welcome.

It's just a shame these aren't a little longer ranged. Oh well, they're good at what they do when you are able to use them.

Those these may be destroyer calibre, they do not have a destroyer's rate of fire.

Tech Tree versus Premium

I'm honestly surprised Wargaming chose to release another premium with destroyer-calibre guns, to say nothing of a whole tech tree lined based on the armament, without first addressing player concerns about their performance.

Firepower wise, specialized cruisers are in a rough spot since the commander skill rework a couple of years back.  Wargaming has made improvements, but super-cruisers and cruisers with destroyer-calibre weapons had their efficiency severely reduced.  Ostensibly, Dido's arrival long after the rework (nevermind a full Pan Asian line dedicated to this armament choice) means that Wargaming has designed these ships with these deficits in mind.  Ostensibly.  Maybe they're couching their implementation with the promise of future fixes.  I dunno.  I can't hold their feet to the fire like I used to. These teething troubles are still apparent with Dido's gunnery and it takes a careful hand (and careful skill choices) to fix these issues.  She's not quite a comfortable gunnery platform -- she gets close, but her weapons are far from the fun weapons of Atlanta and Smolensk, for example.

As a premium version of Rahmat, the tier VI Pan Asian tech-tree vessel, it's natural to want to compare her and Dido.  There's a lot of give and take between the two ships.

• Dido has better range than Rahmat, with a reach of 14.1km to Rahmat's 12.496km.  This is a huge improvement.
• Rahmat has better fire angles on her Y-turret with a 270º arc compared to Dido's 268º.  Minor, but still.
• Rahmat has the better rate of fire, reloading in just 7.5 seconds to Dido's 8.5 seconds.  This is pretty big.
• Dido's shells have less drag and thus better ballistics.  This is important.
• The reduced drag gives Dido's AP shells better penetration too.  This is not so important, as we'll cover.
• Dido's AP shells have longer fuse timers of 0.033s instead of 0.025s.  This is more of academic interest than practical.

This all translates to Dido being a more comfortable platform to engage targets at a distance, which is good, but you pay for it with overall damage output. Of course, besting Rahmat's range is like bragging that your ship is faster than New Mexico.  It's a pretty damn low bar to hurdle.  Dido is short ranged, make no mistake, but she is the longest-ranged of any of the smoke-bearing cruisers at this tier barring Trento.  Between having to choose between range and rate of fire, I'll take the range, especially when paired with Dido's improved ballistics.  I'm not happy about Dido's rate of fire, especially when paired with her penetration woes.  This isn't a cruiser that kills things quickly.

Dido's DPM is middling.  Her lack of penetration makes it very difficult to realize these numbers, however.  It should be noted that Dido (and Rahmat) can boost these listed numbers by 10% by taking the Heavy HE and SAP shells commander skill, which they totally should.  This bumps up Dido's AP DPM from 180,000 to 198,000 and her HE DPM from 134,118 to 147,530.  With her guns being only 133mm in calibre, she doesn't suffer the accompanying concealment penalty normally associated with this skill.

Dido's improved ballistics means that her AP penetration is lightly better than Rahmat's, even though they're using the same guns.  This ballistic difference translates into Rahmat's shells taking 10.63 seconds to reach 12.5km.  Dido's cover the same distance in 9.46 seconds and doesn't experience the same kind of floaty arc as Rahmat until a range of 13.47km.  These arcs allow Dido to make good use of terrain cover to lob shells over islands.

Dido's penetration isn't good.  Her AP penetration is among the worst for cruisers at tier VI.  Landing citadel hits against cruisers requires not only the enemy ships to provide a broadside to shoot at, but also specific armour thresholds.  While something soft and squishy like Pensacola's 76mm belt over her machine spaces can be contested in excess of 12km, the 102mm plating over her magazines is proof until you get into sub-10km ranges.  Dido's AP works well against lower-tiered and very light and scout cruisers but it's nowhere near reliable against higher tiered ships.  The long fuse timer on her shells also makes overpenetrations more likely against soft parts like battleship superstructures.

Her HE penetration doesn't get much better.  Sure, the 22mm she starts with is enough to contest all destroyers and most (but not all) tier V, VI and VII cruisers she might face.  This is also enough to hurt the extremities of tier V battleships and the superstructures of the remaining vessels.  Taking Inertial Fuse for HE Shells greatly expands the targets she can directly hurt, being able to smouldering HE holes into any cruiser she might come across as well as opening up the extremities of tier VI and VII battleships as well.  Pair this with the Heavy HE and SAP Shells commander skills and Dido's DPM starts to look respectable.  This comes at the expense of setting fires, of course, but Dido's not a great fire starter to begin with.  Even with a deep build into fire setting, she barely gets close to the stock-values of the 152mm armed ships.

So I stress again:  Take Inertial Fuse for HE Shells and Heavy HE and SAP Shells on your commanders or Dido's gunnery performance suffers.

I'm not happy with this solution.  It means that in order to be competitive, destroyer-calibre armed ships like Dido must pay a commander skill tax.  If skills like these are so game-changing as to become mandatory, that's bad for the player-base.  Players are punished if they don't take them.

Dido is only ever a modest fire-setter.  You can dump skills and consumables into trying to improve it, but you're only ever going to be as good as a stock Makarov.  It's better to bite the bullet, take IFHE and go from there.

British ships are notorious for having bad fire angles.  Dido's forward fire angles are good for four out of her five turrets, but Y-turret sucks.  Her rearward fire angles are pretty bad, though.  There are two good points though:  Her X-turret has phenomenal fire arcs and both it and Y-turret have a 360º traverse arc.

Gun Handling & Accuracy

Dido keeps up with the British tradition of cramming their guns in so tightly to their superstructures that it impedes their gunnery arcs.  Her fire arcs are bad, with her Y-turret being especially awful.  You can mostly ignore this when firing forward, with four guns capable of addressing very accute fire angles.  It's just Y-turret that's nigh-impossible to bear without flashing your full broadside.  Unfortunately, things are worse rearward, with her forward turrets having bad arcs.  At least her turret traverse isn't painfully slow and her rear turrets can rotate 360º.  So you're not going to be able to fire all five guns safely without cover.  Being out in the open is just asking for trouble with Dido anyway, so use the crummy arcs as a bit of a reminder to get back into cover ASAP.

Special mention should be made about her dispersion.  Dido, like Rahmat, uses cruiser horizontal dispersion formulas; namely: dispersion in meters = {[(range in km) x 6.9]+33 } as opposed to the more accurate destroyer dispersion formula {[(range in km) x 7.5] + 15}.  Wargaming has never been consistent with when it applies one formula or the other.  Bogatyr and Krasny Krym, for example, use cruiser dispersion while ships like Atlanta, Flint and Smolensk use the destroyer version.  The difference isn't huge, but it is noticeable -- especially with destroyer calibre guns that fire as slowly as Dido's do.

Summary

As a weapon platform, Dido is okay, but only okay.  There's nothing novel about her gunnery.  She's not like Atlanta or Smolensk or Colbert where a smaller calibre weapon brings the promise of a greater rate of fire.  This is a shame, because spamming small calibre shells is a lot of fun.  Instead, it's better to think of Dido as analogous to a 152mm-armed ship but with nerfed AP and HE performance.  Her shells are bad; they can be made functional with the correct commander skill build, but that's more of a bandaid solution than a true fix.  You can bring them up to a state of usability but they're never going to cross that threshold into being truly competitive.  The same goes for her fish.  They hit like trucks (which is awesome), but having only three isn't enough to make them a true trump card.  Furthermore, her 8km range is only ever going to be okay and not great.  She'd need another 2km onto their range to become something that could be used on the regular and another 2km beyond that to become a mainstay weapon.

VERDICT:  Very meh.  Functional, but very meh.

Durability
Hit Points: 23,600
Bow & stern/superstructure/upper-hull/deck:  13mm / 10mm / 89mm / 25mm
Maximum Citadel Protection: 89mm belt
Torpedo Damage Reduction:  4%

That's not a lot of health.

I don't think anyone was expecting Dido to be anything but squishy.  She's not a heavily armoured cruiser and as far as tonnage goes; she's quite small compared to her contemporaries.  The only question I had was whether or not she would get access to a Repair Party consumable to pad these vulnerabilities and the answer is decisively: "Very no".  As it stands, it takes as little as a pair of 381mm citadel hits to send her to the bottom.  Fun!

I'm not going to tell you that "Akchooally, dis is gud," cuz it's not.  This sucks.  This sucks moose balls.  This sucks so much that it makes Survivability Expert not only a viable skill choice, but arguably a necessary one.  The commander skill-tax on patching Dido's flagging performance gets more and more expensive (for those keeping track, we're up to 10 mandatory skill points).

The only decent thing about Dido is the size of her citadel.  It's a small target and in my playtesting, its small size has kept me alive just a little longer as players overestimate it's scope.  So catastrophic ends, while still possible, are a little less likely owing to this small target.  Of course, once word gets out and familiarity with this ship jumps up with exposure, this advantage will mean less and less.  Most of us now know how to blow apart an Omaha-class or an Emerald, for example, despite their citadels being smaller than higher-tiered cruisers.  That same kind of baseline knowledge will eventually disseminate down to Dido as well and she'll pop as readily as the rest of them. 

Still, you might be able to pull off the occasional troll manoeuvre.  Angling in Dido is generally a bad idea as even 203mm AP shells can overmatch her bow and blow her machine spaces apart (incidentally 203mm AP can overmatch much of her citadel roof too, so dueling with American heavy cruisers is generally a stupid idea).  Remember that at ranges less than 8km, it's better to show a full broadside to most enemy battleships than to try and angle against them, trusting that their AP shells don't have sufficient time to arm inside your ship.  This doesn't work for shorter-fuse timers from AP shells, such as the 305mm rounds on König, Scharnhorst's 283mm or Yukon's 381mm guns, but go nuts on trying it out against other battleships.  Just remember:  flat broadside.  Any kind of angle and you risk giving enough room for those shells to pop you good.

Given Dido's short range, German secondaries ended up being something I dreaded facing.  HE of just about any calibre hurt and it's important to keep a respectable distance away from anything bristling with functional (or semi-functional) secondaries.  This dittos for HE spam from gunship destroyers, but they tended to keep a healthy distance from Dido's guns for the most part.

So, yeah.  Dido's durability sucks.  No surprises there, though, so don't get hit.

Dido is made of squish.

Dido's citadel is much smaller than players might think.  You have to aim beneath her funnels to score citadel hits.  Otherwise, you're very likely to overpenetrate.  Dido's citadel is shown here in yellow.  Her magazines do not count as part of the citadel and are featured here in dark red.  This image comes from Gamemodels3d.com..

VERDICT:  Bad but not like, meme-worthy bad (which would be kind of redeemable).

Shooting beneath Dido's turrets may disable them or even knock them out, but you're not getting citadel hits if you aim there.  You can try baiting shots here by offering up a full broadside at very close ranges, trusting her thin armour to prompt overpenetrations from battleship calibre guns.

Agility
Top Speed: 32.3 knots
Turning Radius: 580 meters
Rudder Shift Time:  6.5 seconds
4/4 Engine Speed Rate of Turn: 6.9º/s at 25.8kts
Main Battery Traverse Rate:  10.0º/s

Dido does not have all of improved agility characteristics as other British light cruisers do.

Still, Dido has some pretty good agility  according to her in port stats.  She has a tiny turning circle radius and a good rudder shift time.  However, the tech tree British light cruisers and destroyers have improved engine performance, given them much better handling than their stats alone would otherwise indicate.  Dido gets a half-measure of this bonus.  She accelerates much faster than normal ships.  However, she doesn't get the improved energy retention in a turn, decelerating to the normal 80% of maximum speed when she comes about instead of retaining 97.5% to 98.5%. 

You can see this here in the time it takes the tier VI cruisers to each 30 knots.  The percentage in brackets is how much 30 knots is relative to their top speed, with the idea being that the closer this is to a ship's maximum speed, the longer it will take them to accelerate.

1. 10.0 seconds Dido (92.9%)
2. 10.5 seconds Perth (92.3%)
3. 10.8 seconds Leander (92.3%)
4. 11.3 seconds Mysore (94.9%)
5. 22.9 seconds Dallas (92%)
6. 23.8 seconds Molotov (83.3%)
7. 24.3 seconds Budyonny (85.5%)
8. 24.5 seconds Duca d'Aosta (82.0%)
9. 24.9 seconds Trento (85.5%)
10. 26.5 seconds Aoba (85.5%)
11. 27.0 seconds De Grasse (89.6%)
12. 27.5 seconds London (92.6%)
13. 27.9 seconds Huanghe (90.6%)
14. 28.8 seconds Pensacola (92%)
15. 29.8 seconds Kijkduin (90.6%)
16. 30.8 seconds Canarias (90.6%)
17. 32.1 seconds La Galissonniere (96.8%)
18. 32.1 seconds Nurnberg (93.8%)
19. 32.1 seconds Makarov (93.8%)
20. 35.5 seconds Devonshire (95.5%)

It's obvious looking at this that Dido, along with Perth, Leander and Mysore, has much improved acceleration over their peers.  She's hitting 30 knots while they're struggling to make 10.  Even when her rivals are equipped with Propulsion Modification 1, their acceleration just doesn't compare.  Here's a few examples of the same test, but this time equipped with the upgrade:

• Dallas: 20.8 seconds (2.1s faster)
• Budyonny:  19.2s (5.1s faster)
• Nurnberg: 26.9s (5.2s faster)
• Duca d'Aosta: 19.4s (5.1s faster)

(Note:  There's something weird going on with Dallas).

So other than that, there's nothing too surprising going on here.  Dido's not especially fast (she's not slow either).  She has a good rate of turn, but not outstanding.  Her turning circle radius is nice and tight, which is great.  She doesn't get top marks in this category (Perth and Leander are a thing), but she's pretty damn good.

Dido combines the small turning circle radius of Huanghe and Rahmat with the improved acceleration of Mysore, Leander and Perth.  She does not have the improved energy preservation of the latter two, though, which would have spiked her rate of turn from 6.9º/s up to 8.4º/s!

VERDICT:  On a scale of one to awesome, Dido is super-great. 

Anti-Aircraft Defence
Flak Bursts: 2+0 explosions for 1,260 damage per blast at 3.5km to 5.2km
Long Ranged (up to 5.2km):  63 dps at 90% accuracy (56.7 dps)
Medium Ranged (up to 2.5km): 63 dps at 90% accuracy (56.7 dps)
Short Ranged (up to 2km): 94.5 dps at 85% accuracy (80.325dps)

DPS Aura Ranges

Total DPS by Range

Effective Damage vs 186.2knot Aircraft

Dido's AA firepower stinks worse than unwiped monkey butts.  And I take issue with this.

Dido's 133mm only have a 5.2km range and this makes me grumpy.  'What's the big deal?' you might justifiably ask.  After all, the dual purpose guns on the KGV-class, Famous & Historical Monarch and Yukon all share the same range. It's that consistency which is bothering me.  You see, Rahmat, using the same guns, gets a 5.8km range. Yeah!  No consistency there.  In the Pan Asian cruiser's case, I imagine it's to make the 133mm guns feel like a 100% upgrade over her 113mm weapons.  Can't have the upgraded guns making her AA worse now can we? 

I also take exception to Wargaming's game design in regards to large calibre anti-aircraft firepower.  It's been troublesome and busted since the rework back in 2019 and no iteration has worked sufficiently to my liking.  It nerfed the Hell out of Hood's defensive AA rockets.  It made Atlanta's AA power go from top tier to bottom.  It makes Dido's AA power terrible in game, despite having a good track record historically.  This is not the first ahistoric gameplay element to marr World of Warships but given the sorry state of surface ship to aircraft interaction, it's infuriating to me that Wargaming still hasn't ressurected the AA-picket ship role that has been gone since patch 0.8.0.  Dido was a chance to amend this and they didn't take it.  I'm not surprised they didn't.  The whole CV rework reeks of incompetence three years on.

Dido's AA, when paired with Defensive AA Fire will shoot down a plane or two so long her small and medium calibre AA guns are still intact (these will break as soon as you get hit by HE).  She doesn't do enough damage, nor does she spit out enough flak bursts for any specialization into this role to be worthwhile.  So don't bother.

A few HE rounds between the funnels will strip her of most of her small and medium calibre AA and there's nothing you can realistically do about it.

VERDICT:  Ahistorical and laughably bad.

Vision Control
Base/Minimum Surface Detection: 10.54km / 9.2km
Base/Minimum Air Detection Range: 5.78km / 5.2km
Detection Range When Firing in Smoke: 4.43km
Maximum Firing Range:  14.1km

There's good and bad here.

THE GOOD

• Low surface detection
• Upgraded aerial detection matches her long-range AA battery range
• Smoke!

THE BAD

• Cannot stealth-fire torpedoes
• No access to Hydroacoustic Search
• Each smoke cloud only lasts 35 seconds (a max of five salvos)

It's the lack of access to Hydroacoustic Search that stings the most.  Especially because her Defensive AA Fire is so bloody useless when paired with her abysmal AA values.  Parking in smoke out in open water is just asking to get fish shoved up your butt, which is an embarrassing and carpy way to go out.  I found myself prefering to keep smoke on standby while using islands as my prefered way to keep out of sight.  Using smoke if spotted by aircraft or by an unseen vector became the better play.  I even used it to help flush out a destroyer in a Ranked Batlte which was much more useful than parking in it.  If Dido did have hydro, she could make some aggressive plays on occasion and behave a little more comfortably in open water, but it's not meant to be.

Overall, she's good here.  As limited as her Short-Burst Smoke Generator is, it's still very handy to have and it will help you win games.  I'm just being bitter.

Islands make better waifus than smoke.

VERDICT:  Good save for lacking hydro

Anti-Submarine Warfare

ASW Armament Type:  Depth charges
Number of Bombs per String:  Five
Number of Strings Carried:  Two (may be increased to four with Depth Charges Modification 1)
Reload Time per String: 40 seconds
Drop Pattern:  Rolled off rear deck in a line.
Maximum Bomb Damage:  5,000 (estimated 2,567 damage)
Fire Chance: 20%

At the time of writing, submarines have been removed from public testing.  I'm merely recording the data as it exists.  It may become relevant later.  Without Hydroacoustic Search, taking on subs is going to be a bad idea with Dido.

Drop order of Dido's depth charges.

Final Evaluation

So Dido's good.  Not great, but she's good.  She's a cruiser with smoke that exists in an environment that's not saturated with Surveillance Radar and claustrophobic maps with lots of islands to shoot over.  She'd have to be pretty terrible across most metrics not to do well.  I'm not a fan of her given her lack of Hydroacoustic Search, mostly because I like bold-aggressive plays at low and mid-tier matches and not having the tools to dig out lolibotes sours me to the whole experience.  Go figure, I don't have fun when my own idiocy gets me justifaibly blown out of the water for over-extending.

Her lack of AA performance also bothers me considerably more than it should, admittedly.  I wasn't looking for her to be god-tier when it came to shooting down planes.  I just expected her to be better than bloody Molotov and Leander for crying out loud. But such isn't meant to be.   Sucks to be me and have my preferences, I suppose.  I admittedly haven't played her as much as I should, what with trying to get some Ranked Battle time in and poking at Canarias too.  Still, the more I played her, the better things were turning out.  I'm very curious to see how the community receives her.  I personally feel her tiering holds her back.  Wargaming just isn't incentivizing playing mid-tiers enough and they really should.  I think it's a riot, but that's just me.

Speaking of preferences, London is the better buy when it comes to tier VI premium British cruisers.  She's much more reliable and nasty.

In Closing

I want to talk a little about what goes into making one of these reviews and just how much of a time investment these are.  This one graphic demonstrates it quite well, I think.  It takes me about two hours to put together one of these twirling graphics, assembling it through assets I make by hand with MS Paint and a calculator and then importing them over to photoshop to piece together in layers.  That's already a lot of work, but it's only scratching the surface.

There was no template for this.  I had to make it.  That took a lot of trial and error and a lot of botched attempts.  I listened to feedback from my readers and my peers on how to improve my earlier results until I could create something that would show with a reasonable level of accuracy, how individual ships performed in a way that cut through the obfuscation of in-port statistics.  I'm reasonably happy with how these turned out, though the number of ships at a given tier is making them too cluttered, so I will have to pair them down to only the relevant ships.

But that still doesn't speak to all of the work that went into this, because there's all of the data collection that went into it as well.  Simply timing ships twirling isn't all of it either (as arduous a task as it is keeping that database up to date).  That ignores all of the testing and head scratching and math that went into figuring out how the in-port stats were created in the first place.  This was further complicated by just how many ships had incorrect values listed in port too which created further hurdles.  I have over 100 hours of recorded twirling data in my archives.  100 hours spent watching ships twirl in circles.  And this is just for one graphic, I remind you.  This has been repeated for other elements as well, be it detonations and module damage, smoke emission and ship hit boxes or god knows how much time I've lost trying to map dispersion.  I'm not getting that time back short of using the data to share information.

And I'm just speaking about my own time invested in these. @Lert and @Chobittsu are right there beside me, listening to me grumble.  They provide feedback and suggestions, art and editing.

To be able to speak confidently about any one aspect of a given ship's performance -- something I can back with actual provable stats -- takes time.  It takes more time than you might assume from some throwaway DPM graphic or a funny little blurb about moose-testicles or an Angry YouTuber "meh".  These reviews stand upon a a mountain of 'behind the scenes' work, an investment of a bunch of time about a video game that, let's be honest, hasn't treated me well over the last couple of years.  It's hard producing these reviews.  It's a lot of hard work that's built upon a lot of other work done in the past.  Every new ship that's added to the game increases the workload.  The last time I reviewed a tier VI cruiser, I didn't have to worry about Rahmat, Canarias, Dido or Kijkduin.  Now I have to make sure those ships are covered too.

I say this all not to complain, but to express my gratitude.  The only thing that makes all of this time spent worthwhile is that you all see value in what I do here.  For that, I am forever grateful.  Thank you for reading.

[That WoT Player]

You got me thinking with this review: would it be better to train Rahmat’s captain for guns (heavy HE/SAP, inertia fuse, top grade gunner) than for the usual torps? 

[LittleWhiteMouse]

9 hours ago, That WoT Player said:

You got me thinking with this review: would it be better to train Rahmat’s captain for guns (heavy HE/SAP, inertia fuse, top grade gunner) than for the usual torps? 

Whenever you're thinking about what weapons to specialize for, reflect on where most of your damage comes from.  Torpedoes may hit hard when they do hit, but how often are you landing those hits?  This is why for most ships barring some (but not all) Japanese destroyers, it's better to buff your guns.

[Foxhound421a]

A ship I like but I just find disappointing she wouldn't have been broken with a heal or hydro or a better ROF.