Premium Ship Review: Hyuga

[LittleWhiteMouse]

The following is a review of Hyuga, the tier VII Japanese premium battleship.  This ship was provided to me by Wargaming for review purposes at no cost to myself; I did not have to pay money to get access to her.  To the best of my knowledge, the statistics discussed in this review are current as of patch 0.10.3.  Please be aware that her statistics may change in the future.

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I always start these reviews with the above disclaimer.  I do it for a couple of reasons.  The first is to let you all know that there is some intrinsic bias in this review.  I am only human (beep-boop ♪) and it's possible I will make some reporting errors on stats and numbers.  It's also to let you know that I have a relationship with Wargaming through the Community Contributor program.  After all, I get these assets for free to review them and that's absolutely going to colour how I feel about a ship and my readers absolutely need to know about that partnership. However, what I wanted to draw your attention to was this:

'Please be aware that her statistics may change in the future.'

I originally wrote this to to warn players of meta shifts. While the core stats of a given ship might not change, the game most assuredly does.  Mechanics get tweaked, new ships get introduced and before you know it, your once S-tier Blyskawica is unable to keep up.

This past month, this warning has taken on new meaning: The newer premiums may have their performance stats directly nerfed by Wargaming.  This is a change from their old policy and it only applies to these newer ships.  I had originally wanted to discuss this with my Flandre review but I totally brain-farted on that.  Since Flandre, Hyuga and HSF Harekaze II have also been affected by this so it's time to make sure I cover this info.  You can see Wargaming's notice of such in the detailed description they provide of an individual premium.  I've highlighted the pertinent part:

What this means:
Hyuga and newer premium vessels do not have protection from being directly nerfed in the future.  Changes are not guaranteed, but they are possible.
Please, please, PLEASE take this into consideration before pulling the trigger on any purchase. 

Got it?  Good.  There's lots of room to discuss this change in policy and how it affects your personal buying decisions.  Please feel free to discuss it in this thread or quote back this section in a new post if you prefer.  For now, let's get back to my review of Hyuga.

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Quick Summary:  A modernized WWI-era Japanese battleship with twelve, quick-firing 356mm guns, a dispersed armour scheme and access to the Main Battery Reload Booster consumable.

PROS

• Trollish armour scheme for resisting SAP and HE hits, including thick upper hull, deck armour and voids.
• Good reach on her main battery guns.
• Very comfortable dispersion for such a large main battery.
• Excellent main battery DPM between her quick, 28 second reload and her twelve guns.
• The bulk of her secondary battery has increased accuracy.
• Has access to the Main Battery Reload Booster.

CONS

• Wonky and weird citadel geometry.  Seriously, it looks like a Picasso painting.
• Overmatch issues with her smaller gun calibre.
• Horrible gun handling and awkward fire angles.
• Only a modest top speed and not especially agile.
• Horrible anti-aircraft defences.
• Enormous surface detection range.

Overview

In the long-long ago, in the before-time, back when there was only three tier VI battleships in this game, a debate raged on which was the best.  The answer is obvious now (it's bae-bote, always and forever) but it was a very eye-opening discussion.  You see, back then it was Fuso that appealed to most.   It's not hard to see why with her trollish armour and phenomenal firepower for her tier.  She was faster than her two competitors and this was also back before sigma was understood.  Some had a grasp of what overmatch was but others did not.  It's not hard to see why Fuso was a long-standing favourite and her successor, Nagato, was often seen as a step down in terms of performance.

It's surprising to me we've had to wait this long for a premium based around her game play.  There are plenty of options with Fuso and Yamashiro from the Fuso-class and then Ise and Hyuga of the subsequent Ise-class.  Well, the wait's over.  We finally get what we've always wanted, however it is at the wrong tier.  Up-tiering Fuso's gameplay begs the question if any gimmicks could make her worth playing.  That's the Hyuga quandary in a nutshell: Is it worth paying money for an up-tiered Fuso with weird gimmicks?

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

Hyuga's pretty new-player friendly.  Keep back.  Keep AP loaded.  Pull the trigger.  You can forget about nuances of angling properly; her gun arcs don't allow for that.  She's not so fast that she'll get you into trouble nor is she so slow that she cannot keep up with the pace of battle as it progresses.  So green light all around.  She's an easy battleship to play and she'll deliver reasonable results to anyone of any particular skill level.

For veterans, well there's lots to like here.  Her consumables alone open up all kinds of opportunity for optimization, to say nothing of her fast-reload guns and her massive broadside.  Hyuga's alpha strike potential is downright cataclysmic, reigned in only by modest penetration values which is yet another bit of info to out-skill.  Still, as good as her armour profile appears, this is a difficult battleship to effectively tank damage, limiting her appeal as a front-line vessel for pushing and progressing the battle.  Overall?  Good marks for skill-potential and growth, but certainly not the best out there for that.

Options

Aside from her Main Battery Reload Booster, there's not a whole lot out of the ordinary for Hyuga when it comes to outfitting her.

Consumables

• Hyuga's Damage Control Party is standard for a Japanese battleship, meaning that it's only active for 10 seconds as opposed to 15 seconds for most other battleships (and 20 seconds for Americans).  It has unlimited charges and an 80 second reset timer.
• Her Repair Party is also standard.  It queues up to 10% of citadel damage, 50% of penetration damage and 100% of everything else.  From this queue, it will heal back up to 14% of the ship's starting hit points per charge over 28 seconds.  It starts with four charges and has an 80 second reset timer.
• Her Main Battery Reload Booster is weird (not the least of which is seeing a MBRB on a battleship at all). It is active for 15 seconds, doubling the rate at which shells are reloaded during that time (each second spent reloading counts as two).  It starts with three charges and it has a 60 second reset timer.
• Finally she has a Fighter.  This launches three (3) aircraft which orbit on station for 60 seconds.  It comes with three charges and a 90 second reset timer.

Upgrades

There's three builds to consider here:  Optimal, comfort and PVE-shenani-nani-gans. 

• Start with Main Armaments Modification 1.
• Begin your anti-fire regimen with Damage Control System Modification 1.
• So all of the fun happens in slot three.  Aiming Systems Modification 1 is your best choice here.  However, you can take the slight dispersion hit for Main Battery Modification 2 to increase her admittedly horribad turret traverse rate.  For you PVE-nutters out there, you can also consider electing for a secondary build here with Secondary Battery Modification 1 if you like.
• Whatever your choice, follow that up with Damage Control System Modification 2 in slot four.

Commander Skills

Until Dead Eye (4pts) is dead and buried, it's going to remain optimal for all battleship builds.  That's going to be the first priority on any PVP battleship build. From there, your next priority is to mitigate fire damage through Basics of Survivability (3pts) and Fire Prevention Expert (4pts). Next up comes buffs to gun performance, namely in the form of Adrenaline Rush (3pts) and Grease the Gears (2pts).  That leaves you 5pts to play with (including a 1pt skill compulsory).

Recommended skills include:

• 1 point skills: Gun Feeder, Emergency Repair Specialist
• 2 point skills: Priority Target
• 3 point skills: Super Heavy AP Shells
• 4 point skills: Emergency Repair Expert, Concealment Expert

If you're a PVE main and want to dabble in a brawling build (because bots love to brawl), then you can skip the fire prevention stuff and just load up on secondary buffing skills instead, dropping Dead Eye and avoiding Concealment Expert because neither are ever going to do you any good.

Camouflage

Hyuga has access to two camouflage options.  She comes with Type 10 Camouflage regardless of how you acquire her, but when she was first sold, the higher tiered bundle came with the Japanese Lacquer camouflage as well.  This alternative camo is merely a cosmetic swap, providing the same identical bonuses of:

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

Hyuga's Type 10 Camouflage is the usual browns and greens you've come to expect from Japanese premiums.  If you've finished the appropriate section of the Isoroku Yamamoto collection then you can palette swap to the blue instead.

I really like Hyuga's lacquer camo.  We've seen it before on Hayate.

Firepower

Main Battery:  Twelve 356mm guns in 6x2 turrets in an A-B-P-Q-X-Y in superfiring pairs.
Secondary Battery:  Sixteen 140mm guns in 16x1 hull-mounted casemates with eight to a side and eight 127mm guns in 4x2 turrets with a pair on either side of the main superstructure.

I'ma take a quick moment and start with Hyuga's secondaries.  Outside of PVE modes, don't worry about them.  If you prefer Co-Op, you can buff her secondaries and get some nice results.  Hyuga's 140mm casemates have improved gunnery dispersion, akin to that found on other large-calibre casemates of ships like Nagato, Amagi, Iron Duke and Warspite.  Her 127mm have normal ol' (bad) dispersion, though.  Fully buffed, you can get their reach out to 8.47km which is pretty respectable and more  than worthwhile when bots come rushing blindly at you.  Their smaller calibre will prevent them from dealing direct damage to all but the softest skinned targets, but you'll undoubtedly start a fire or two in every match if you get stuck in.

Don't bother with them in PVP, however.

Twelve 356mm guns with a 28 second reload with 1.8 sigma and a Main Battery Reload Booster at tier VII.

For those experienced with the game, that's all of the information you really need to know to appreciate Hyuga's strengths and weaknesses.  There's minutia, of course; other details that matter, but the lion's share of the information you need comes right there.  Let's break it down:

• Twelve guns: This is a lot, no matter how you slice it.  Most battleships in the game sit with between eight and ten guns with twelve tending to be towards the upper limit (laughs in Lyon).  Regardless of gun calibre, this promises a large broadside and huge alpha strike potential.
• 356mm gun calibre: By tier VII, this gun calibre is a bit long in the tooth as more and more vessels drift upwards towards 380mm and 406mm guns.  It is below average for its tier despite the glut of ships still using it (Poltava, California, Florida, Duke of York, King George V and Hyuga).  356mm guns obviously don't hit as hard as the larger gun calibres, but they are also incapable of overmatching structural plate that's 25mm or thicker.  25mm and 26mm structural plates become increasingly commonplace at mid-to-higher tiers, preventing ships armed with 356mm guns from being able to bully these vessels at any angle they take.
• 28 second reload:  Go back even a year, and the perceived "normal" reload time for a battleship was 30 seconds.  However, between the new American and Italian tech-tree battleships released this past year, Wargaming seems increasingly weary of keeping to this standard.  A glut of newer vessels have greater-than-30-second reloads to their name, which makes Hyuga's 28 seconds all the more remarkable.  Again, I stress that this is with a large main battery of twelve guns.  Even with their smaller gun calibre, Hyuga's damage potential is some of the best at her tier.
• 1.8 sigma:  This is the "workhorse" value Wargaming typically assigns to most battleships.  The average sigma among the seventeen unique tier VII battleships is 1.79 just to give you an idea.  The trend tends to be for ships with a large number of guns to have lower sigma; usually in the 1.5 to 1.6 range.  This afflicts the tier VI battleships with twelve guns with Fuso and New Mexico both stricken with 1.5 sigma while Arizona feels decidedly over-performing with her 1.8 at the same tier.  To see Hyuga with 1.8 sigma speaks to the comfort of her long-range gunnery.  Aim well and she'll reward you with multiple hits. 
• Main Battery Reload Booster:  This consumable is a game changer.  Hyuga already fires very quickly.  She is more likely to have shells at the ready when a target of opportunity presents itself.  The faster a battleship fires, the more forgiving the vessel is for poorly aimed shots.  This consumable turns everything on its head, providing Hyuga with shells on demand.  With a touch of a button, you all but guaranteed to be able to put shells down range to capitalize on an opponent's mistake.  This stacks with the strengths of her larger battery (twelve guns) and decent sigma (1.8) to make these shots count.  With the short reload on the consumable, it's again likely to be ready when the next opportunity arises.  The only thing arresting the overpowered nature of this combination is Hyuga's gun calibre.  If she was capable of overmatching any target she faced, this would simply be a raw DPM increase.  As it is, she still needs to look for the best shots possible. Give Hyuga your broadside at your peril.

Hyuga's 1.8 sigma makes for comfortable shell groupings.  It's not S-tier by any means, but it's a far cry better than Fuso's 1.5 sigma shotgun blasts.  This is largely the means by which Wargaming justifies Hyuga being a tier VII.

This is what Fuso's 1.5 sigma shotgun blasts look like.  Both ships are using Aiming Systems Modification 1 (but not Dead Eye), firing 180 AP shells at 15km against a stationary Fuso bot without camo.  Shells are coming in from right to left (the Fuso is bow-tanking).

Twelve guns with a 28 second reload means that Hyuga very comfortably sits near the top of the potential damage charts, even with her smaller gun calibre.  It doesn't hurt that Japanese HE shells deal more damage than most of the contemporaries of the same calibre, with only the Royal Navy HE being beefier on a per-hit basis (6,100 damage from a KGV-class HE shell versus 5,700 for Hyuga).

I swore I'd never do one of these graphics again and YET, here I am...

Twelve 356mm guns with a 28 second reload with 1.8 sigma and a Main Battery Reload Booster glosses over a lot of problems.  Hyuga's gun handling isn't particularly good nor are her fire angles comfortable (more on these in the Durability section below).  Her range is good, but it could be better.  Without access to a Spotter Aircraft, there's no temporary flexibility to chase targets just beyond her nominal reach.  Next, her HE shells aren't good fire starters.  Finally, her penetration just isn't up to scratch to compete with battleship belt armours outside of 14km.  There is also the added problem that with such fast firing guns, Hyuga remains spotted longer than other battleships, revealing herself with every blast of her weapons.  All of these problems are easy to forget with just how many shells she puts downrange and how often the land hits.  Yes, ricochets are annoying.  Yes, it sucks when a salvo of multiple hits from HE fails to start a fire.  These issues help reign Hyuga in from over-performing, because there's a little too much good going on here.

A lot of the premium battleships at tier VII use 356mm guns for some reason.  Ashitaka uses 410mm, to be clear, and is present here because she's the other Japanese premium.

Despite her increased HE shell damage, she's only a modest fire starter and only because she has so many guns and fires so quickly.  Her individual shell hits have some of the lowest fire setting at her tier.

SUMMARY:  Very comfortable gunnery platform.  Maybe a little too comfortable.

Durability

Hit Points: 60,700
Bow & stern/superstructure/upper-hull/deck:  26mm / 16mm / 149mm / 35 to 44mm
Maximum Citadel Protection: 32mm anti-torpedo bulge + 299mm belt + 32mm turtleback + up to a 230mm citadel wall.
Torpedo Damage Reduction:  26%

I'm going to start with this graphic.  It may seem a little out of place, but hear me out.

"It could be worse" sums up Hyuga's fire angles.  Between these and her poor gun handling, she gets poor marks here.

'If you can shoot them, they can penetrate you,' sums up Hyuga's firing angles.  Assuming you can set things up absolutely 100% perfect, there's still around a one in three chance of their AP shells doing unspeakably ugly things to your ship.  Get sloppy by as little as 3º and their chances jump up to half with the enusing reduction of relative armour as an additional kick in the teeth (her 299mm belt drops from approximately 520mm of effective armour down to 485mm).  Hyuga's firing angles aren't well designed for trading fire.  She's not meant to tank damage in gun duels like this.  She's much better suited at shooting things that aren't shooting back.  You're pretty much forced to choose between damage out put and tanking effectively.  She's not really agile enough to pull off both without making some serious compromises to one or the other.

It's not all doom and gloom, though.  The Ise-class is a WWI era super-dreadnought and this is reflected in her dispersed armour scheme.  This means that other than her extremities and (admittedly sizeable) superstructure, Hyuga has thicker armour than expected. Combine this with her enormous anti-torpedo bulges (which don't work very efficiently against torpedoes for some reason), Hyuga's armour profile is downright troll for resisting AP, SAP and HE shells.  The latter two especially struggle to deal reliable damage if they miss her snoot, booty or hat.  Against AP shells, it's a bit more of a mixed-blessing.  Her dispersed armour does make it more likely to AP shells to ricochet if she's angled correctly.  However, the thicker armour plate also has the effect of guaranteeing to arm the fuses of large calibre AP rounds, all but negating the chance for reduced damage over-penetrations when shells do bite into these places.  Overall, her dispersed armour scheme is more of a blessing than a bane.

Before moving on, it's worth mentioning that her turrets have about 300mm worth of usable armour between their turret faces and barbettes.  These are an admitted weak point when face-tanking if an opponent can't simply overmatch her 26mm bows with 380mm+ calibre AP rounds.  Hyuga's guns break often when forced into this role.

Hyuga's huge 32mm anti-torpedo bulge acts as a void.  Any HE or SAP attacks that strike here will deal zero damage to the ship.

Peel back that anti-torpedo protection and there's a mess of different armour values for AP shells to contend with.  None of these values are especially high, so maintaining correct angling is paramount to resisting battleship-calibre AP fire.

When it comes to citadel protection ... it's complicated.

Around Hyuga's rear magazines, her protection is pretty damn good with a combination of up to 593mm worth of steel at funny angles aimed to keep shells out.  But depending on where she's hit, this value can be as low as just 288mm.  Add onto this the wonky (janky!) geometry, especially around the P and Q turret magazines and the rear machine spaces and Hyuga's presents shell trap after shell trap after shell trap for penetration AP rounds to catch upon and deal big damage.  It's worth mentioning that her turtleback isn't angled steeply enough to resist flat-trajectory fire, to say nothing of long-range fire and it's from the latter that you need to worry about big damaging hit the most. The reason I have made such a big deal out of Hyuga's poor firing angles and gun handling has a lot to do with how badly this ship resists citadel hits from the incidental attacks that come from long range duels.

Look, I was going to show the armour values for this but ... it's like Jackson Pollock painting.  It's a total mess.  There are so many different armour values and weird geometries going on.

I want to rate Hyuga's overall durability more highly than it deserves.  In truth, her protection scheme could be really troll if she had better firing angles to capitalize on it.  Furthermore, being a tier VII battleship, that leaves those huge vulnerable overmatching holes in the form of her bow and stern for easy back-doors into big damage against this ship. And if those aren't available, you can always smack her in the barbettes and get some nice damaging hits that way -- the changes made to penetrating hits against guns has greatly hurt the durability of mid-tier battleships, especially in brawls.  I suppose the best that could be said about her is that she's pretty good at resisting poorly aimed cruiser HE and SAP spam.  However, her superstructure and extremities are large targets so you cannot expect any experienced player to ignore those soft spots.  Furthermore, Hyuga burns just as well as any other Japanese battleship.

Hyuga's health pool is only average.

VERDICT:  Pretty good if you can stay angled or your opponents are n00bs.  I wouldn't count on either one of those, though.  It'll work well against bots, though.

Agility

Top Speed:  25.3 knots
Turning Radius:  750m
Rudder Shift Time: 15 seconds
4/4 Engine Speed Rate of Turn:  3.9º/s at 18.9 knots

Tier VII is a transition-tier for battleship agility.  This is where we start to see some really fast battleships appearing however there are still some 20-knot holdovers in the form of the American standards.  This combines with a mix of different handling characteristics, with some retaining the early-battleship tight turning radii while others begin to have their turning circles balloon out to the massive sizes we see at higher tiers.  Thus there's a lot of variety between the best and worst performers and everything in between. 

Hyuga is definitely one of those in between.  Her speed is slightly below average for her tier and her turning radius is alright.  At 25 knots, it's just about enough to keep up with the pace of battle or to disengage during the opening stages of a fight.  As the battle progresses, however, Hyuga's pedestrian top speed is more of a liability where the threat of allied support begins to dry up and enemies can push more aggressively if she's exposed.  Similarly, her modest top speed leads to a cumbersome rate of turn.  The good news is that she doesn't quite out-turn her turrets.  The bad news is that you're still going to be tempted to use your rudder to bring guns to bear and that's going to open up your sides for penetrating AP hits.  To this end, taking traverse-improving skills and upgrades helps improve this ship's durability, if only to keep your fingers away from the WASD keys when switching targets.

Think of Hyuga as a slightly-faster Nelson.

VERDICT:  Nothing terrible but nothing good.

Anti-Aircraft Defence

Flak Bursts: 2  explosions for 1,330 damage per blast at 3.5km to 5.8km.
Long Ranged (up to 5.8km):  63dps at 75% accuracy (47dps)
Short Ranged (up to 2.5km): 75.5dps at 85% accuracy (62dps)

Yeah.... no.  The only reason Hyuga isn't at the bottom of the pile for AA defence at this tier is because Ashitaka is a stock, interwar-era Amagi.

VERDICT:  Yeah... no.

Vision Control

Base/Minimum Surface Detection: 16.84km / 14.7km
Base/Minimum Air Detection Range: 10.46km / 9.41km
Detection Range When Firing in Smoke: 14.84km
Maximum Firing Range:  20.31km

Have some raw data.  Hyuga's surface detection is pretty bad.

Hyuga's surface deteciton is pretty terrible.  Stock, it's 2km better than Fuso (a little bit less if they're both fully upgraded), so that's something I guess.  But that's like saying your tier V battleship has more health than Viribus Unitis.

Even with a full concealment build (which should still do, by the way), until the enemy destroyers have been thinned out, you have to count on being permanently lit if you're anywhere close to the front.  Being so easily spotted means that Hyuga spends more time being the only target available than her contemporaries.  I'm sure Wargaming has some metric out there to illustrate this that would justify my suspicions, but between Hyuga's enormous surface detection and rapid fire guns, she ends up making herself a target more often than most.  This means more incidental fire comes her way, especially from other battleships.  While not all of this will connect, it's just that little bit of extra chip-damage that will eat at her health or tax your Damage Control Party that makes Hyuga and Fuso feel squishier than their armour profiles would otherwise suggest.  It's just something to keep in mind.  Having Priority Target is recommended if only to let you know when you need to silence your guns and think about rotating towards the back of the line to ease off some of the pressure.

Hyuga's lack of a Spotter Aircraft tends to keep Hyuga closer to the action than Fuso, even with the two ships having comparable ranges.  For the sake of her gun performance, this is generally a good thing though I found myself missing that extra bit of reach-on-demand in higher tiered engagements.  Still, I have no real complaints about her engagement distances.

Hyuga has nothing else really to speak of when it comes to her Vision Control.  She's a fat battleship, possibly visible from space.  This gets her shot a lot, though often it's more incidental fire than anything concentrated.  Still, you can't count on being able to properly disengage unless you keep her in the second line.

VERDICT:  Just plain bad.

Final Evaluation

This isn't the first time Wargaming has taken an existing design and up-tiered it by making some small changes.  While Hyuga is not a Fuso-class, their design looks superficially analogous from a game play perspective, what with both ships being large, twelve-356mm gun armed Japanese battleships.  However, the differences between them is extensive.  While describing Hyuga has a Tier VII Fuso is a good shorthand for setting expectations, it's far from accurate.  This isn't a complete list of differences (you could write a book on their armour and hull geometry differences alone), but here's the important bits that separate the two vessels:

The Basics

• Hyuga is an Ise-class, with overall larger dimensions than the Fuso-class and, most notably, different P & Q gun turret layouts.
• Hyuga is tier VII, facing a maximum of tier IX opponents and Fuso is tier VI facing a maximum of tier VIII opponents.
• Hyuga is a premium with all that this entails and comes with permanent camouflage.

Firepower

• Hyuga has access to a Main Battery Reload Booster.
• Hyuga has improved sigma (1.8 vs 1.5)
• Hyuga has longer ranged secondaries (5.6km vs 4.96km)
• Hyuga has sixteen 140mm casemate secondaries, Fuso has fourteen 152mm casemate secondaries.
• Fuso is longer ranged (21.81km vs 20.31km) and she has access to a Spotter Aircraft.

Durability

• Very different armour layouts and hull geometries.  No, I'm not going into detail.  Hyuga has better overall citadel defence.
• Hyuga has more hit points (60,700 vs 57,100)
• Hyuga has better built in fire resistance from her tier (30% vs 23.5% approximately).
• Fuso has better anti-torpedo defence (34% reduction versus 26%)

Agility

• Hyuga is faster (25.3kts vs 24.5kts)
• Fuso has a tighter turning radius (730m vs 750m)
• Fuso has a faster rudder shift time (14.9s vs 15s)

Anti-Aircraft Defence

• Fuso has better AA DPS at close range (150.5dps vs 75.5dps)
• Hyuga has a Fighter consumable.

Vision Control

• Hyuga has a better surface detection range (16.89km vs 18.9km)
• Fuso has a better aerial detection range (9.74km vs 10.46km)

So Hyuga's not a Fuso clone, but really, the three big differences between the two vessels are her consumables, her range and her dispersion.  Hyuga is a much better gun platform than Fuso, even with her deficit of reach.  Her gunnery is more reliable than the tier VI vessel.  She puts more shells on target from accuracy and more shells down range grace of her Main Battery Reload Booster consumable.  In fact, Hyuga's gunnery is so much better that it feels downright comfortable; and that, to me, is always a warning sign that a ship is perhaps a little too good.  If I find myself feeling cozy in a given vessel, that's a sure sign that something about it is overtuned in my hands.  Whether or not this translates to being similarly good in the hands of the masses is another thing entirely, but a lot of the ships I like end up getting pulled by Wargaming -- just saying.

In Hyuga's case, Wargaming's new policy on adjusting premiums should keep this ship from ever getting withdrawn from sale barring her becoming way too popular.  But as it stands, I think Hyuga is a fantastic Japanese premium.  She's right up there with some of the other top-tier Japanese premium battleships including Ashitaka, Musashi and Shikishima.