Premium Ship Review: Agincourt

[LittleWhiteMouse]

The following is a review of Agincourt, the tier V British premium battleship.  This ship was provided to me by Wargaming for review purposes at no cost to myself; I did not pay to get access to this ship.  To the best of my knowledge, the statistics discussed in this review are current as of patch 0.10.4.  Please be aware that her performance may change in the future.

Summary: A slow but stealthy WWI era Dreadnought armed with fourteen 305mm guns in seven turrets (!) and a powerful secondary battery.

PROS

• Dispersed armour scheme with an icebreaker bow & stern and resilient upper hull and amidships deck.
• Comfortable forward fire angles for most guns and that gorgeous Friday 360º turret traverse.
• Massive broadside of fourteen 305mm guns.
• Improved HE penetration.
• Powerful, accurate secondaries with long range and increased rate of fire.
• Tiny surface detection.

CONS

• None of her armour is especially thick, making her easy to damage with battleship AP if not perfectly angled.
• Painfully long 36 second reload.
• Horrible main battery dispersion with 1.5 sigma.
• Terrible ... nay, craptacular AP penetration.
• Reduced HE damage.
• Slow and cumbersome.
• No anti-aircraft firepower whatsoever.

Overview

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

For an inexperienced player, Agincourt is a bit of a rough ride.  This is all down to her horrible rate of fire.  At 36 seconds, a missed volley is downright painful and this is further complicated by the poor performance of both her AP and HE shells.  You might aim properly but still find everything shatter or ricochet. There are further challenges with trying to manage her poor armour values and sluggish handling.  At least they don't need to worry about managing AA defence as she doesn't have any.

Admittedly, Agincourt's skill ceiling all comes from managing the brawling side of things.  If you ignore that potential, then her skill ceiling is no higher than Moderate.  But Agincourt fully encourages you to get your brawl on and it's a lot of fun.

Agincourt embarrasses a full health KGV in a joust with a Devastating Strike.

Options

One of the nice things about reviewing lower-tiered ships is that there are fewer options to worry about.  Still, there's quite a bit of weirdness going on here so pay attention.

Consumables

• Her Damage Control Party is standard for a British battleship.  It is active for 15 seconds, repairing all critical damage and removing fires and floods.  It has unlimited charges and an 80 second reset timer.
• Agincourt's Repair Party is strange only in that it's perfectly normal.  It lacks the additional damage queue normally found on British battleships nor does it heal an additional amount.  Instead it queues up 50% of penetration damage from shells, bombs, rockets and torpedoes, 10% of citadel damage and 100% of everything else.  Each charge heals up to 14% of her starting health over 28 seconds.  She begins with four charges and an 80 second reset timer.

Upgrades

• Business as usual here.  Start with Main Armaments Modification 1.
• Then take Damage Control System Modification 1.
• For your third slot, you have a choice between main battery optimization or going with some secondary craziness.  Aiming Systems Modification 1 is generally optimal for your main battery performance though there's a good argument to be made for taking Main Battery Modification 2 to reduce the time it takes to switch aim between targets.  HOWEVER, the Agincourt does very well with a secondary specialization (yes, you read that right), so taking Secondary Gun Battery Modification 1 is the start of that magical journey.

Commander Skills

There are two builds worth considering here.  The first is your typical fire resistance specialization.

• Start with your choice of Emergency Repair Specialist (1) or Gun Feeder (1).  That's 1pt spent.
• Grease the Gears (2) is next.  That's 3pts total.
• Basics of Survivability (3) is the first of our fire-mitigation skills.  We're now up to 6pts.
• And Fire Prevention (4) caps us off.  That's 10pts.

From here, you're encouraged to pick skills that again emphasize survivability and main battery performance where possible.  Good skills include:  Emergency Repair Expert (4), Concealment Expert (4), Adrenaline Rush (3) and Priority Target (2) along with doubling back for the tier 1 skill you skipped.

The second build is a brawling spec. You want to pair this with the Secondary Gun Battery Modification 1 upgrade for maximum effect.

• It starts pretty familiar with either Emergency Repair Specialist (1) or Gun Feeder (1) again but we also toss on Pyrotechnician (1) as a tertiary option (in both meanings of the word).  That's 1pt spent.
• Grease the Gears (2) is still the best option, though Priority Target (2) is equally good for dealing with low-tier lolibotes, so it becomes a choice here.  Now we're up to 3pts.
• Long Range Secondary Battery Shells (3) is the first major deviation we're seeing.  Grab it.  This is 6pts spent.
• Finish this off with Improved Secondary Battery Aiming (4).  And that's 10pts.

From here, grab a mix of survivability and gun performance skills along with doubling back for some of your favourites you had to pass over.  Good skills include:  Emergency Repair Expert (4), Concealment Expert (4), Adrenaline Rush (3).  Fire Prevention (4) and Basics of Survivability (3) still have their place but you'll have to make some compromises somewhere.

It is worth mentioning two controversial skills for Agincourt's secondary build.  These are Inertial Fuse for HE Shells (2) and Swift in Silence (4).  The former will make Agincourt's 76mm secondaries capable of directly damaging most tier VI and VII destroyer extremities, along with buffing her 152mm secondaries to be capable of doing the same versus tier VI and VII battleships.  This comes at the cost of gutting their fire chance, which is a pretty stiff blow when dueling other dreadnoughts, especially with the prevalence of dispersed armour schemes that even the improved HE pen on her 152mm won't be able to best.  Still, it's hard to argue with more direct damage.  As for the latter skill, I go into more detail in the agility section below.  I'm not a fan.

Camouflage

Agincourt has access to two camouflage patterns, Type 9 and Veteran of Jutland.  They are cosmetic swaps of one another and both provide the following bonuses:

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

You can unlock the alternative colour palette (the blue) by completing the appropriate section of the Royal Navy Destroyers collection.

Agincourt's Jutland camo.  Like the ship itself, this is only available from a loot box.  Where's that puky emoji?

Firepower

Main Battery:  Fourteen 305mm guns in 7x2 turrets in an A-B-P-Q-X-Y-Z layout.  A-B are in a superfiring configuration.  P faces forward, Q aft.  Y-turret superfires over X and Z, with X facing forward.
Secondary Battery:  Twenty 152mm guns and ten 76mm guns.  Fourteen 152mm guns are mounted in casemates in the upper hull, four mounted in casemates in the fore and aft superstructure and two deck mounts straddling the main bridge.  Eight of the 76mm are mounted in casemates on the upper-superstructure with a pair of turrets one platform higher on the rear superstructure.

Fourteen Guns and They're All Crap

Agincourt's guns are terrible.  Ostensibly she uses the same guns as Bellerophon and Dreadnought, the tier III British battleships.  However, they somehow manage to be worse on a per-gun basis.  Specifically, Agincourt's 305mm guns have a longer reload than her tier III predecessors, worse dispersion and gutted HE performance.  Yes, you have fourteen of the bloody things, but they're terrible.  Unequivocally terrible.  If Oklahoma weren't a thing, Agincourt's guns easily takes the prize for the worst gun performance at her tier.  Thankfully, they have two redeeming qualities.

• She has fourteen of them.
• She has improved HE penetration.

The major issue facing Agincourt's gun performance is her AP shells.  If Oklahoma's AP was bad, Agincourt's is worse.  It's so bad you can't reliably penetrate battleship belt armour outside of 8km distances.  This necessitates keeping a ready list in your head of what the armour thicknesses are of select battleships and, in turn, what ranges you can engage them.  Does New York have in excess of 340mm of belt armour, or is it only 280mm?  At what range can Agincourt citadel a broadsiding Izmail?  How much relative armour does a Conte di Cavour have at a 50º angle?  When in doubt, you can always aim higher and hope for penetrating hits but you're working against troll, 1.5 sigma dispersion. Now you could be forgiven for thinking that Agincourt's AP penetration woes would make her better at landing citadel hits on cruisers, but this simply is not the case.  Unlike other low-tier, small-calibre guns, she does not have the shortened, 0.01s fuse timers ideally set to for dealing with the smaller breadth of low-tier cruisers.  Instead she has the longer, 0.033s fuse timers that are better suited for plunging deep into a heavily armoured vessel in order to destroy machine spaces and magazines.  Thus, Agincourt's AP shells work at cross purposes to themselves.  She does not have the penetration to readily duel with other dreadnoughts and her fuse timers are poorly set for popping the thinner citadels of low-tier cruisers.  About the only targets where this low penetration and long fuse timers work to her advantage is blasting shells down the length of bow-in ships you can overmatch.

Waiting that painfully long 36 second reload, setting up for that perfect broadside shot only to watch everything thrown at your opponent over penetrate or shatter is heartbreaking.  That's painfully commonplace.

Agincourt has some of the worst AP penetration values at her tier.  And just to make things more frustrating, she has abnormally long shell fuse timers too which makes over-penetrations against cruisers more likely.  So they suck on both ends of the spectrum.

The two differences between the HE shells on HMS Dreadnought and Bellerophon versus those of Agincourt.  Graphic pulled from gamemodels3d.com which i cannot recommend highly enough for players looking to expand their knowledge into the more esoteric details of World of Warships.

Things get a little better with Agincourt's HE shells, but it's not all sunshine, rainbows and puppies here either.  You need only look at the difference between Bellerophon and Dreadnought's HE shells versus those Agincourt was dealt.  Dreadnought's HE shells hit 18% harder than Agincourt's and have slightly improved fire setting characteristics.  Thus Agincourt's broadside is the equivalent of a 12-gun British battleship, not 14.  Agincourt's HE DPM is little better than Wyoming, the tier IV American battleship, though the differences count.  Perhaps the best saving grace of Agincourt's HE shells is that they retain the 1/4 HE penetration of the British battleship tech-tree.  At 76mm, the modest damage output of her HE rounds becomes much more formidable and she is capable of landing citadel hits on a whole list of cruisers within her matchmaking, including but not limited to such prominent targets as the American Omaha-class and Pensacola-class.  Farming up some of those black ribbons with HE shells is very satisfying, especially after being repeatedly trolled by her AP, let me tell you.

Guess which ammo you'll be relying on?

Agincourt's a decent fire setter.  If you can land the hits, a full broadside is quite formidable.  The catch to that, of course, is landing those hits in the first place.  Her dispersion isn't kind nor is her reload.

There just isn't anything really redeeming about Agincourt's main battery firepower short of the number of barrels.  That 36 second reload is painful in the extreme.  Her 4º/s gun rotation is lame, but at least she cannot out-turn her turrets (even if you slap on a Sierra Mike signal and the Swift in Silence commander skill).  Her fire arcs aren't great on the whole.  Some of her gun turrets are amazing but in order to maximize her firepower, you have to expose a lot of broadside.  Her ballistics are incredibly floaty, with her shells suffering from a heavy amount of drag.  And finally there's that awful shotgun dispersion of her's which can foil even the most carefully aimed shot.  On the flip side, every now and then you'll land this amazing, Devastating Strike and it will make you wonder why you can't do it more consistently.

I'm not a fan of Agincourt's main battery guns, if you can't tell.  You can make them work, don't get me wrong, but it's an uphill battle.

Okay, making this graphic nearly broke my brain.  Y-Turret is my favourite (TGIF! ♥).  Not only does it have great arcs, it can also rotate 360º.  So long as you keep P and Q turret masked, Agincourt's forward fire arcs are very good.
Historically, these seven turrets were named after the days of the week, from Sunday through Saturday, fore to aft.

One of my standard dispersion tests.  This is 180 AP shells fired at 15km.  Agincourt is equipped with Aiming Systems Modification 1.  Shots are coming in from right to left with the stationary Fuso-bot effectively bow-tanking.  Agincourt's 1.5 sigma makes her gunnery all kinds of wonky.  Their low velocity has their shell fall angle coming in at a rather steep 17º angle.

I Need a Hero! ♫

Agincourt's secondaries to the rescue.

Low-tier secondaries have long sat in the shadow.  This was largely owing to the old Manual Fire Control for Secondary Armament skill which provided a 60% dispersion reduction to tier VII+ ships that designated a target for their secondaries but only a 15% for lower tiered vessels.  For four skill points, it just wasn't worthwhile.  That's changed with the skill rework, with low-tier battleships gaining the same flat 35% dispersion reduction as higher tiered vessels.  So while high-tiered battleships definitely had the potential of their secondaries nerfed with the rework, lower-tiered vessels had their's buffed.  But there's more to secondary performance than how well it synergizes with a particular commander build.  There are four main elements to look for to see if secondaries are worth specliazing into:

1. Range.  This is the real kicker.  If your secondaries don't have the reach, they're not of much use.  A 5km base range is really the minimum I consider to be viable for secondary builds.  Between skills, signals and upgrades, a 5km secondary can reach out to 7.56km which is outside of torpedo range for most destroyers, giving the guns some comfortable use.  Most low-tier secondaries sit between 4km and 5km in reach.  Agincourt's have a 5.5km base range, maximizing out to 8.32km which is very usable in lower-tiered matches.
2. Volume of Fire.  You need a lot of guns and/or a fast rate of fire to make a secondary build worthwhile.  This simplifies to looking at the damage-per-minute potential of the base secondaries and seeing if they're putting out big enough numbers to make opponents balk.  Agincourt has more DPM potential than a lot of the high-tier secondary heavy-weights.  Yes, really.  The reload on her guns is ridiculously short, with a mere 2.7 seconds on her 76mm and only 4 seconds on her 152mm guns.  She puts out a lot of fire, very quickly.
3. Penetration.  Having a lot of potential damage doesn't matter much if those guns are incapable of directly doing any harm to the targets they hit.  This is what largely damns a lot of high-tier French battleships.  This is one area where low-tier battleships luck out.  Structural armour plate at low tiers allows for even small calibre guns to be useful.  Agincourt's 76mm can still directly damage the hulls of all tier IV and V cruisers and destroyers and even those of the very light cruisers at tier VI and VII.  Her 152mm are a threat to anything but tier VI+ battleships and select heavy cruisers. 
4. Accuracy.  The final piece of the puzzle is accuracy.  If this isn't present but all of the others are excellent, then it can be overlooked.  However, having this is definitely the icing on the cake.  Agincourt has improved secondary accuracy on ALL of it's guns, not just the casemate weapons as found on ships like Warspite and Iron Duke.  This gives her Massachusetts-style dispersion patterns on her secondaries.

Agincourt's secondaries fall under the "accurate" category.

Agincourt ticks all of the right boxes.  Good range, solid DPM, workable penetration and great accuracy.  I am firmly of the opinion that if you do not specialize Agincourt with a deep secondary build, you are doing it wrong -- or at the very least, you are missing out on one heck of a ride.  While I can appreciate that some people do not find the AI driven guns to be entertaining, there is no arguing their efficacy on this ship.  Fully tricked out, Agincourt's secondaries shred exposed destroyers and I've seen them make cruisers and battleships panic.  As if their direct damage weren't enough, they're INSANE fire starters -- like Worcester levels of fire starting potential.  If you've already been throwing HE shells from your main battery guns about, your secondaries will often find targets that have their Damage Control Party consumable on cool down, making for some easy damage as you move in to a joust.

I cannot sing high enough praises for these weapons.  Bring them into range whenever possible.  You won't be disappointed.

Have some perspective.  Of the 452k done by Agincourt's secondaries, 330k comes from her higher penetration 152mm casemates.  These can be buffed with IFHE to make them capable of damaging the hull extremities of anything within her matchmaking.

If mapping her main battery guns nearly killed me, this turned me into a trigonometry zombie.  This maps the fire arcs of Agincourt's secondaries with her 152mm in red and her 76mm in light blue.
Agincourt's secondaries have most of their arcs weighted rearward.  However, do not ignore the fact that she can still bring six of her 152mm guns to bear on a 30º angle forward, giving her a very meaty weight of fire on a brawling aspect while maintaining auto-ricochet angles.

Go ahead and take IFHE if you want.  She's got FPM to spare.

Summary

• Terrible (HORRIBLE) main battery AP shells but decent HE.
• Long reload and wonky dispersion makes for very trollish gunnery.  Sometimes it works.  Sometimes it's heart breaking.
• If you're not spec'ing Agincourt for secondaries, you're missing out.  Seriously.

Durability
Hit Points: 48,400
Bow & stern/superstructure/upper-hull/deck:  19mm / 13mm / 152mm / 38mm
Maximum Citadel Protection: 229mm belt + 38mm turtleback + 38mm citadel wall.
Torpedo Damage Reduction:  14%

Dispersed Armour

The thickness of Agincourt's armour is a serious issue.  In order to cram so many guns onto her hull, her armour was compromised, shaved down to the level of a WWI era battlecruiser.  She simply does not have the overall thickness needed to repel battleship calibre AP shells at any range.  Even heavy cruiser AP rounds become an issue at closer distances.  Without careful angling, Agincourt surrenders too many hit points to high-penetration AP attacks.  The thick plates covering the ship ensure that every AP shell that does best the armour will fuse for full damage.

The only ray of sunshine here is that while she may not have thick armour overall, it is well dispersed which can be downright troll against certain attacks.  For cruisers and destroyers slinging HE and SAP shells, Agincourt has only a few vulnerable areas, namely her bow, stern and her small superstructure.  Everything else they throw at her will shatter or ricochet which makes Agincourt feel quite tanky.  Similarly, these vulnerable points are the only areas where battleships can land overmatching penetrating hits when Agincourt angles correctly.  With her icebreaker bow, waterline shots will simply ricochet off.  It pays to keep her gun fire angles that we discussed earlier in mind.  Unmasking P & Q turret will generally leave her vulnerable to returned AP shells.  You don't want to nose in perfectly as this will bait shots into her vulnerable upper snoot and barbettes, but sit her at a slight angle.  If you can unmask everyone's favourite day of the week (Y-Turret) then you're doing it right.

Thus Agincourt's armour protection rewards player skill; both for the attacker and defender.  Knowing how to exploit her weaknesses bipasses a lot of her strengths.  Knowing how to properly angle her can mitigate a lot of incoming damage.

Look at that lovely dispersed armour scheme.  Agincourt's armour is excellent when angled in a close-range brawl, though it doesn't quite stand up to long-range punishment.  Still, keep her angled and she'll serve you well, resisting AP, SAP and HE shells equally.  Do it wrong and those thick armour plates will ensure that battleship calibre AP shells fuse and deal full penetration damage.  Her big 19mm snoot and butt are obvious weak points.

Citadel & Turret Protection

Understandably, the issues with her thin belt carry over to a poor citadel protection scheme.  In particular, Agincourt is highly vulnerable to 380mm+ calibre AP shells as there are sections of her citadel which may be overmatched; namely the walls of her boilers, machine spaces and the roof.  Still, Agincourt isn't a free meal for overmatching weapons.  There is a hidden 25mm and 38mm plate in her bow and stern that caps directly on top of her 102mm and 152mm belt respectively, along with her 38mm turtleback.  While the 25mm plate cannot resist 380mm+ AP shells, the latter 38mm will foil shots that come in a bit higher. Her turtleback isn't a significant barrier on its own.  However, if she is angled, it's one more plate that may prompt a ricochet and save her for from taking a citadel hit. And really, that's the best you can hope from Agincourt's citadel protection: to turn a catastrophic hit into merely a serious one.

One of the things AP shells LOOOOOVE to fuse on are Agincourt's turrets.  She has a lot of them and they act as catchers mits for battleship calibre rounds.  This leads to a lot more  damage than you might otherwise expect and it's definitely a weakness to exploit when going toe to toe against her.  While their turret faces are a chunky 305mm in thickness, this isn't enough to repel anything but the longest range fire from the weakest guns out there.  Furthermore, below deck, the barbettes of her P, Q and X turrets are just 76mm.  Penetrating AP hits love arresting within these rings and blowing up your guns.  Similarly, the roofs of her guns are only 76mm.  While their slope alone is more than enough to see off AP and SAP shells, Royal Navy battleship HE can and will penetrate if you're unlucky enough to get hit there.  This will deal HE penetration damage AND prompt a critical damage check and again, you may end up temporarily losing a turret.  Because so much of Agincourt's deck space is taken up by main battery guns, they get hit often.  This in turn means more critical damage rolls so be prepared to see more temporarily disabled weapons on this ship than you might otherwise be used to.  That's okay, though.  You have more where those came from.

The last thing to touch upon here is that with Agincourt's citadel being so long (long, long maaaaaan! ♫) every torpedo that hits you will be causing citadel damage.  Agincourt has almost nothing in the way of usable anti-torpedo defence.  She floods easily and you're not healing back much (if anything) from torpedo hits.

Agincourt's main battery turrets are not very well protected, with P, Q and X-turret having very thin barbettes. It is not uncommon for any of her weapons to be disabled or permanently knocked out over the course of the battle when trading fire with other battleships.  Y and Z turrets mirror B & A's barbettes respectively.   Furthermore, Agincourt's citadel has 25mm sections of it vulnerable to 380mm+ AP shells overmatching. Be careful when facing battleships with these higher calibre weapons.  Do keep her hidden geometry in her bow to help protect from overmatching hits punching through her 19mm bow and stern.  Also, there's a 38mm turtleback that runs from the 152mm plate in the fore to the one dittoed in the rear, adding to her citadel protection but it's angled incorrectly to prompt ricochet checks.

Health and Heals

The strangest thing about Agincourt's durability is that it's so normal.

Royal Navy battleships have, since their introduction into World of Warships, had special Repair Party consumables.  While the portable dry-docks of Nelson, Lion and Conqueror are perhaps the best known among the community, Warspite always healed back more damage per charge of her consumable while also queuing up more damage as well.  Even Iron Duke queues up 60% of penetration damage.  Agincourt doesn't have any of that.  Her Repair Party consumable is completely normal, healing back a "mere" 14% of her starting hit points per charge (base) and queuing up a "mere" 50% of penetration damage.  The only ships she has a leg up on are Soviet battleships with their reduced number of healing charges.  So while she may have a comparable number of starting hit points to Oklahoma, for example, she has less overall healing potential.  Similarly, while Iron Duke's theoretical hit point pool is smaller, the tech-tree battleship has more efficient heals.

So there's nothing really worth getting excited about.  Thanks to the smaller hit point pools of Conte di Cavour and Viribus Unitis, Agincourt has a better-than-average base hit point pool but that's nothing remarkable.

Nothing too out of the ordinary here.  For those wondering, Agincourt's maximum effective health is 2.61 Viribus Unitis while New York, the best of the bunch, has 3.05.

Summary

• Agincourt's dispersed armour scheme is a mixed blessing.  It's good against small and medium calibre HE and SAP but only good against AP when perfectly angled and useless when not.
• Her guns get knocked out often and this has a spillover effect leading to Agincourt taking more penetrating hits.
• Nothing special about her heals.

VERDICT:  Pretty average for a low-to-mid tier battleship.  Better than some, worse than others.

Agility

Top Speed:  22 knots
Turning Radius:  670m
Rudder Shift Time: 13.4 seconds
4/4 Engine Speed Rate of Turn:  3.8º/s at 16.6 knots

While Agincourt may have a battlecruiser's armour, she does not have a battlecruiser's speed.  This is a slow, cumbersome ship.  Her only saving grace is that there are a lot of slow, cumbersome ships at tier V so she doesn't feel horribly out of place.  This said, her turning radius is one of the largest at her tier.  And while a 670m turning circle radius looks pretty good if you're used to higher tiered ships, this is pretty bad down here in the kiddy pool where islands are plentiful.  When paired with her pedestrian top speed, this results in one of the slowest rates of turn for a low-tier battleship.  Agincourt feels big and sluggish.  What's more, she doesn't get anywhere quickly.  This isn't so bad if she ends up on a low-tier map, but when Agincourt gets uptiered, you really start to feel this lack of flexibility.

Maybe there's room for the new Swift in Silence skill?  I want to be able to recommend it.  I would love it if the skill was competitive for certain ships and certain builds, but it's so hard to justify.  With it and combined with a Sierra Mike signal, Agincourt's speed gets up to an impressive 25.4 knots, which largely corrects any flexibility deficiencies.  That's incredibly enticing.  The catch is, of course, that she needs to go undetected in order for this to work.  Put one aircraft carrier in play or end up on a flank with a concealed lolibote and her boost goes away.  One of the major reasons I want the extra speed is to allow Agincourt to kite but if she's detected (or firing her guns), that's not going to work.  Furthermore, the skill and signal combined do not significantly boost her rate of turn, upping it to 4.0º/s.  This comes at the cost of her turning circle, jumping up Agincourt's radius to 730m.  At four skill points, it's just not quite there in my opinion. Maybe if the speed was always on?  Maybe if it provided more speed?  I dunno.

Agincourt has some of the worst agility at tier V.  She's not only slow, but she has a large turning radius at her tier too.  Granted, that 670m is pretty small compared to higher tiered battleships, but still, it gives her some of the worst handling at her tier by a noticeable margin, making her feel like one of the higher tiered thunderchunkers when she tries to come about.

VERDICT:  Crap.  Arguably one of, if not the worst at her tier.

Anti-Aircraft Defence

Flak Bursts:  None
Long Ranged:  None
Medium Ranged: None
Short Ranged: None

There are two ways of looking at Agincourt's complete lack of anti-aircraft firepower. 

The first is to look at it as a crippling flaw.  Any aircraft carrier that knows that Agincourt is bereft of AA defence can attack her with impunity; especially if she's isolated.  Furthermore, tier VI carriers can drop fighters on top of her and keep her perma-spotted until she sails out of their spotting range.  At her slow speed, this will take quite a while and it strips her of her stealth advantage.  The general lack of long-range AA support at low tiers makes this quite likely and carriers can engage her confident that they will less planes than if they attacked one of her supporting team mates.  Playing on the receiving end, it's a bit disheartening to know you're going to take repeat drops and it necessitates changing some behaviours.  We already know that Agincourt is not agile enough to pretend to Just Dodge™ ordnance but if the CV player is in a hurry, they might flub a torpedo or bomb drop.  But what's most important is to properly gauge when to use her Damage Control Party.  Don't make the mistake of dousing fires too early or patching up floods you could just heal through.

The second and cynical way of looking at things is that Agincourt's lack of anti-aircraft firepower doesn't matter.  Few tier V battleships have any kind of anti-aircraft firepower worth getting excited about nor can they see to their own protection.  In this sense, Agincourt dispels any illusions of counterplay against a carrier. There's not much anyway, so removing it entirely provides a more "pure" CV vs Surface Ship experience.  Man, that's [edited].

And they said there's no such thing as a free lunch.

VERDICT:  There is now a level zero. 

Vision Control

Base/Minimum Surface Detection: 12.24km / 10.69km
Base/Minimum Air Detection Range: 8.7km / 7.83km
Detection Range When Firing in Smoke: 9.35km
Maximum Firing Range:  15.34km

Upgraded includes the use of a camouflage providing a concealment bonus and the use of the Concealment Expert skill and Concealment System Modification 1 upgrade if available.

Agincourt has no right being as stealthy as she is.

She is the stealthiest battleship in her matchmaking pool.  If she were a tier V cruiser, she'd be sneakier than half of them.  It's a shame she's not a faster battleship because she could then take full advantage.  The closer Agincourt can get, the better.  Her armour just isn't thick enough to trade at range and her own AP shell performance is piss-poor until you're up close -- sometimes point-blank-range close.  As it is, you can almost (almost!) get her to within secondary battery range before she's detected which is pretty hilarious.  You need simply sprint the last 2.37km to start opening fire.  Unfortunately, that 2.37km "sprint" is more of a wobbling bag of rancid liposuction meat gently rolling downhill.  2.37km is pretty substantial for a ship that can only manage about 22 knots; it takes her a full 40 seconds to cover that distance.  Without the use of island cover, boxing your target in or your opponent making a mistake, Agincourt's not sneaking up on anyone this way. 

Agincourt's stealth is meant to band-aid a lot of other flaws.

• Bad AP penetration?  Sneak up and get closer.
• Reliant upon secondaries?  You can almost sneak into range.
• Poor armour protection from long range fire?  Keep silent and go stealthy to mitigate it.

I mean, Agincourt's stealth certainly helps but again, that lack of speed really makes it difficult to fully capitalize upon.  It's only on those claustrophobic, island choked maps where this stealth + speed combination works in her favour and can be used offensively.  In all other aspects, Agincourt's stealth becomes a purely defensive ability and used whenever she holds fire.  Now this can be used to great effect by an experienced player.  Disengaging at the right time will keep you alive, after all.  But there are a whole range of "what ifs" that undo it -- the most simple of which being a shadowing lolibote or aircraft. Agincourt's stealth is a trait that's nice to have but it's hard to argue that it's especially powerful without speed to control engagement distances.

VERDICT:  Cool to have but not game-changing.

Final Evaluation

As Drachinifel has elucidated, Agincourt has always been a troublesome vessel.  Her acquistion caused problems then and it's causing problems now.  The only way to get Agincourt at her launch was through gambling through loot boxes.  There was no direct sale offered.  Using my press account, it took me 11 pulls before she dropped.  That's 8,250 doubloons worth if I bought the crates individually.  I didn't, I bought a huge bundle so it technically would have cost me 13,750 doubloons.  That's the cost of a tier VIII premium for a tier V ship.  While receiving dragon signals is nice, I have no practical use for any of the other contents from the containers.  Ergo, these loot boxes are worthless to me but for the ship and the permanent camos.  If I didn't get access to Agincourt via Wargaming, I would not touch this vessel with a ten foot pole. 

And that's a shame.  This is a really fun ship.  I've enjoyed Agincourt immensely and I highly recommend her for anyone that misses brawling in higher tiered vessels.  But I hate loot boxes. I cannot and will not support them.  So hard pass on Agincourt until she's made available by more conventional means.

Thank you for reading.