Premium Ship Review: Marco Polo

[LittleWhiteMouse]

The following is a review of Marco Polo, the tier IX Italian battleship.  This ship was provided to me by Wargaming for review purposes at no cost to myself.  To the best of my knowledge, the statistics discussed in this review are current as of patch 0.10.1.  Please be aware that her performance may change in the future.

Marco Polo's gimmick is that she's a perfectly reasonable, nine 406mm-gun armed battleship; a gun calibre not present in the main Italian tech-tree. While there are some Italian flavour-crystals mixed into Marco Polo's build, the concentration isn't as high as the rest of the line.  It's not like buying Marco Polo gives you the full Italian battleship experience; you're paying for her 406mm gun calibre by losing out on an Exhaust Smoke Generator. What's more, arming her with nine 406mm guns makes Marco Polo analogous to a whole slew of ships at tier IX.  Iowa, Missouri, Izumo, Bajie, Sovetsky Soyuz, AL Sovetskaya Rossiya and Lion all offer variants of this nine 406mm gun armed game play.  Does Marco Polo do it better or even more-different enough to be worth playing?

Quick Summary: A short-ranged  Italian battleship with nine, slow-firing 406mm guns and no Exhaust Smoke Generator.

PROS

• Trollish outer-armour, good for foiling HE spam.
• Comfortable fire arcs and decent gun handling
• Access to SAP shells
• Good AP penetration for a 406mm shell, even over distance
• Decent agility for a tier IX battleship

CONS

• Small hit point pool
• Same wonky dispersion as Roma
• Short ranged for a tier IX battleship
• Painfully long reload time on her main battery guns.
• Flawed anti-aircraft firepower
   
• Lacks an Exhaust Smoke Generator (!)

Overview

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

The only thing that keeps Marco Polo from earning a Simple rating owes to her exposed citadel.  So, she's not German-battleship easy.  However, she does inherit the ease-of-use of the Royal Navy's singular ammunition type.  You can spam nothing but AP or SAP shells (player's choice) and do alright, so that removes that element from the equation.  If you can get used to one, you'll do fine.

For expert players, dynamic ammunition choice is definitely one of those key elements which will spike Marco Polo's performance.  Knowing which boolets to put into which heads will make this Italian Heavy happy.  From there, though, the well gets pretty dry.  Her short range and large surface detection radius make flanking difficult and this also makes taking a central positions more tricky as she has to continually watch her sides.  She does tank well, especially cruiser-calibre HE shells, but that's not something she (or any other battleship) can stand for long as she burns just as well as any other.

Options

Consumables

The only thing out of the ordinary with Marco Polo's consumables is her lack of access to an Italian Exhaust Smoke Generator.  Otherwise, her consumables are standard for a tier IX battleship.

• Marco Polo's Damage Control Party is identical to those found on anything that's not weird (Warspite, most Soviet, American and Japanese battleships are all weirdos).  This has unlimited charges, an 80s reset timer and a 15 second action time.
• Her Repair Party starts with four charges.  It heals back up to 14% of the ship's health over 28 seconds, queuing 10% of citadel damage, 50% of penetration damage and 100% of everything else.  It has an 80s reset timer.
• In her third slot, you have the choice between a Spotter Aircraft and a Catapult Fighter.  The former comes with four charges, increases her main battery range by 20% for 100s and has a 240s reset timer.  The latter launches 3 fighters which stay on station, orbiting the ship at a range of 3km for 60s.  It comes with three charges and has a 90s reset timer.

Upgrades

• Start with Main Armaments Modification 1
• Start your anti-fire based regimen with Damage Control System Modification 1 in slot two.
• Buffing your main battery guns is the best option for slot three, so grab Aiming System Modification 1.
• Your next stop into just saying no to fires is Damage Control System Modification 2 in slot four.
• Concealment Expert is still the best choice in slot 5.  Wargaming, can we have some variety in this slot, please?  It's worse than slot 3.
• Main Battery Modification 3 is arguably the best choice for slot 6, dropping her reload from a miserable 36 seconds down to a merely mildly upsetting 31.7 seconds.  However, if you want to buff your range (and increase the window in which you can use Dead Eye) then Gun Fire Control System Modification 2 isn't a terrible choice.  This will increase he reach from 19.02km to 22.06km.

Commander Skills

This is the commander build I settled on.  I dropped Dead Eye for hipster reasons, but I've included the math for you to take it if you wish.  Marco Polo, like many battleships, benefits from anti-fire, survivability build and that served me well during play-testing, even without the memes of back-of-the-line sniping (which, quite frankly, Marco Polo doesn't do well for a number of reasons I'll get into in the Firepower & Vision Control sections). 

There is a little wiggle room with tier 1 and 2 skill choices.  Pick your favourites.  Grease the Gears will help counter the traverse slow down of Main Battery Modification 3, for example.

Camouflage

Marco Polo has access to two kinds of camouflage.  Type 10 and Legion.  The Type 10 Camouflage has the following bonuses.

• -3% surface detection
• +4% increased dispersion of enemy shells.
• -20% to post-battle service costs.
• +100% to experience gains. 

I have not yet seen the Legion Camouflage in game.  I have been told by Wargaming that it has the same bonuses as Type 10 above but until I see it, I cannot confirm that.

The promotional image for Marco Polo's Legion camo by Wargaming.

Marco Polo's lines and camo are reminscent of Roma.  She's not quite as pretty as the Littorio-class's lines, but Italian battleships are gorgeous.

Firepower

Main Battery:  Nine 406mm guns in 3x3 turrets in an A-B-X superfiring configuration.
Secondary Battery:  Twelve 152mm guns in 4x3 turrets with two turrets per side and twenty-four 90mm guns in 12x2 turrets clustered around the funnels. 

There's is ironically a lot to go over here but at the same time, not a lot to say.  The TL:DR is this:  Use Dead Eye, keep way back and spam SAP.

Secondaries?  More Like Moist Flamethrowers

Let's get the largely irrelevant out of the way first.  Marco Polo's secondaries are terrible.  Their range is fine.  Their rate of fire is okay.  Their damage output is on the low side for secondary guns, but it's not so low that it's not comparable to other tier IX battleships (it's about on par with Georgia's DPM).  However, it's the penetration from her 90mm guns that holds her back.  Like the French battleships, the bulk of Marco Polo's secondary fire comes from guns too small in calibre to directly damage the hulls of destroyers or the superstructures of battleships.  At best you can hope for them to break the occasional module or to start fires.  They are not worth specializing into and their poor performance is a good reminder to keep this ship outside of brawling range.

SAP Delivery System

It's that Armour Overmatch which matters so much.

Let's pretend citadel hits are an impossibility -- that they simply do not exist.  What reason would you ever have to use Marco Polo's AP shells?

That's the crux of Marco Polo's game-play (and indeed, the entire Italian battleship line).  If you struggle to land citadel hits with Italian battleship guns, then SAP is the hands-down better ammunition to use.  This goes double for Marco Polo grace of her excellent overmatch potential with her SAP rounds.  Other Italian battleships cap out at being able to overmatch 26mm of hull armour with their 381mm guns.  Marco Polo overmatches 28mm.  The phenomenal auto-ricochet angles on her SAP rounds outright ignore all cruiser extremities in the game. If you hit a cruiser on the butt or the bow, you will do damage.  If an enemy battleship doesn't angle just right and you boop their snoot, you'll do damage. And not just damage; chunktacular damage.  SAP rounds do not over-penetrate. Short of striking a lolibote or an oversaturated hull section, that's a guaranteed 2,327 to 4,653 damage per penetrating hit  And with 102mm of flat penetration regardless of range, there's a whole lot of hull sections she can hit without worrying about her shells shattering.  It's that simple, it's that easy to use.  I won't go so far as to say it's that good, but it's consistent at least.

This is the reason Marco Polo has such a terrible rate of fire.  Her 36 second reload is downright appalling.  Main Battery Modification 3 can drop this down to 31.68 seconds, but you'll really feel that slow reload and that's only if you choose to equip it rather than trying to band-aid her sorry range. 

Her 19.02km reach hurts.  It really does.  You can forget about taking a comfortable central position on the map, confident you'll be able to reach exposed targets on either side.  You can forget being about to out-range most cruisers.  You can forget having a comfortable window to activate Dead Eye.  With her god-awful concealment, Marco Polo is largely relegated to moving up on one side, sitting bow in and trading fire with whoever is parked right in front of you.  They'll try and burn you.  You try and SAP them into submission.
If it sounds boring, that's because it is.

Marco Polo totally sucks at damaging destroyers.  Paolo Emilio players take note:  YOLO rush the Italian BBs.  Between bad secondaries, long reloads and ineffective ammunition, they're a good target.

Marco Polo has THE worst AP DPM at her tier, and by an appreciable margin.  This is yet another reason you want to stick to SAP rounds as much as possible, dipping into AP only when there's a chance to land citadel hits in order to spike your damage totals.

Why you should probably use AP

SAP is wonderful and all, but it's largely limited to chip-damage.  Here's a thought exercise:  Iowa and Marco Polo are each trading fire with a bow-tanking Friedrich der Große (84,300hp).  Iowa is using HE rounds and Marco Polo is using SAP.  Our battleships are only using their front two turrets. Assuming a modest 1/3 accuracy rate and all hits penetrate for full damage (an abstraction, though Friedrich could be using their Repair Party to extend the de-saturation point) we get the following numbers:

• Iowa:  7,524 damage
• Marco Polo:  15,510 damage

However, if Iowa gets one fire through Friedrich der Große's defences, that brings her number up between 16k and nearly 23k damage.  So, you might think that my argument is that HE is better than SAP.  That's not the argument I'm making.  There are many holes in this brief SAP vs HE example, not the least of which is that it's going to take Iowa (on average) a minimum of three full salvos to guarantee their first fire which is a point in SAP's favour.  Similarly, there's also the chance of stacking multiple fires which swings the argument the other way. 

The point I'm trying to make here is that the SAP's damage output is limited to just steady penetrations. It takes a long time to kill anything with SAP.

While citadel hits with SAP rounds are possible (for example, I had a very satisfying citadel hit on a Seattle in one of my test-games) the number of ships vulnerable to taking those hits is severely limited.  By and large, SAP is only going to land penetrating hits, which is fine.  It's consistent.  But it does not offer the highs and lows of AP shells, the RNGeebus-blessings of fire stacks nor the jackpot lottery winning when you detonate someone.  There were few things so infuriating in my test games than having been trading SAP with an opponent only for them to finally (FINALLY) flash their broadside.  And what did I have loaded?  Not AP rounds.  So the salvo that landed did no more than the chip-damage I had been harassing them with the whole time anyway.  For this reason, I strongly (STRONGLY) advocate having the Gun Feeder commander skill to swap out shells when those opportunities arise.  To do well, not just middling performance, but well in Marco Polo, you need to take those AP citadel shots when they're available.  

Now if only her guns would behave to make those citadel hits happen. 

Marco Polo has excellent AP penetration values for its tier, almost rivalling the high-velocity, high Krupp Izumo rounds.

Roma Gunnery

I was kind of concerned when I heard some players describing Marco Polo as "accurate".  She's not.  Not unless you think Roma's accurate.  Marco Polo has the same dispersion pattern and sigma value as Roma along with comparable ballistics.  This means that sometimes RNGeebus will play nice and you can't seem to miss.  At others, her shells overshoot / undershoot by an enormous margin and make you want to pull your hair out in frustration.  For a ship with such a horribly long reload, watching your shells scatter to the four winds is incredibly infuriating -- especially if it's one of those rare opportunities where you're going fishing for a citadel hit. 

Given her poor concealment, this is a ship that's going to tend to be firing from 16km+ away from targets if you intend to make use of the Dead Eye commander skill.  I certainly recommend that you make full use of it while you still can as it does tighten up Marco Polo's dispersion to a more tolerable level.  This won't fix all of her gunnery woes, but it will make her a little more consistent while camped in the back line.  As much as I hate to advocate for this kind of passive game-play, Wargaming has painted Marco Polo into a corner with the combination of fragility, small hit point pool, short range and poor concealment.  If you're going to invest into this ship, it's best to accept that now.

180 AP shells fired at a stationary Fuso bot with no camo at 15km.  Marco Polo was using Aiming System Modification 1 (but not Dead Eye).

Summary

• Her SAP shells are powerful and easy to use, providing very consistent damage.
• You should still fire AP shells when you have a chance of landing citadel hits.
• Beware destroyers.  You have very poor weapons for dealing with them.

An extra couple of degrees on A & B turret and I would have nothing but praise for Marco Polo's fire arcs.  Oh well.  Her gun traverse is alright, but if you pair it with Main Battery Modification 3 Marco Polo is capable of out-turning her turrets which isn't fun.

VERDICT:  Spam SAP.  (Pro-Gamer Move:  Don't.)

Durability

Hit Points: 69,100
Bow & stern/superstructure/upper-hull/deck:  32mm / 19mm / 70mm to 80mm / 55mm
Maximum Citadel Protection: 320mm belt + either 25mm turtleback or 50mm citadel wall
Torpedo Damage Reduction:  27%

Yikes. You doin' okay there, little Marco?  I only ask cuz you seem a little anemic.  Like a little French battleship.

Marco Polo has the hit points of a tier VIII battleship; an admittedly chonky tier VIII battleship, but a tier VIII battleship none the less.  Thankfully, her Repair Party consumable hasn't been neutered in any way, unlike those of the Soviets and Hizen.  Still, Marco Polo is near the bottom of the pile for effective health.  Individual damaging hits hurt her more than her contemporaries (though fires and floods hurt everyone the same).  Instead of tanking and healing damage, Marco Polo is designed to shrug it off entirely.  She's almost good at it.

In World of Warships, reinforced upper hulls and deck armour has little to do with resisting battleship calibre AP rounds or aircraft bombs and everything to do with shattering the binary penetration of HE rounds. At 55mm thick, Marco Polo's deck is proof against most standard HE rounds up to 330mm in calibre (or 220mm for 1/4 HE penetration ammunition).  This is just thick enough to shatter the HE bombs off Lexington's planes and all British bombers, but not enough to see off those from Midway or Franklin D. Roosevelt (Lowenhardt's can too but you're only going to see her if someone horribly fail-divisions).  Similarly, Marco Polo's deck is proof against most rockets but not Tiny Tims.  Generally speaking, HE attacks form cruisers and carriers aimed at her amidships will get less consistent results making her seem tougher under these kinds of attacks than her contemporaries.  However, without an ice-breaker bow and extended waterline belt, her bow and stern are big damage sponges just waiting to squeeze out some tasty hit points for commanders who know to aim there.  Marco Polo (and the Italian battleships) are KINDA troll versus cruiser-calibre HE shells.  Soviet battleships do it best, though.  And don't think for a second her armour will help you versus Royal Navy battleship HE spam.

This is why you have to suffer a 36 second reload.  Like other Italian battleships, Marco Polo has good external armour.  It's not quite Soviet-good, but it's very respectable and downright troll for repulsing cruiser-calibre HE spam.  The odd armour and geometries on deck both help and hinder incoming AP rounds that are aimed at the superstructure.  Sometimes they may cause a ricochet.  At other times, they'll simply arm the shells that might have otherwise over-penetrated.  Do keep that stepped deck on her butt in mind.  That acts as a shell trap which can cause you problems while kiting.

Against AP shells, things get much (MUCH) worse. To the rear, her stepped decking makes for an obvious shell trap.  When kiting, Marco Polo takes more damage from incoming AP than I would have liked.  Her (almost) good gun angles do facilitate maintaining auto-ricochet angles against single targets, especially on the attack but they're less reliable when she withdraws.

Her citadel protection is trash-tier.  Her 320mm belt, though reverse sloped, isn't thick enough to seriously contest the kind of ammunition being thrown about at high tiers.  Without angling, just about any battleship you face can punch through her belt and get to her gooey centre within most engagement ranges.  That's not a death-sentence in of itself, it's uncommon for a belt to be thick enough to break up incoming AP rounds when flashing too much broadside.  However, where Marco Polo's defences fall apart is her citadel protection.  Her 25mm turtleback is easily overmatched by 380mm+ AP shells.  That means if the shells DO get in past the belt armour, shells of this calibre, so long as the shell's path strikes this bit, angle, shell trajectory and armour thickness is irrelevant.  It will result in a citadel hit. 

Marco Polo gives up citadel damage on the regular.  Do NOT take her into brawls.  Be exceedingly careful when you come about.  Her small hit point pool will vanish in a hurry if someone gets her flank.

Internally, Marco Polo's protection scheme is disappointing.  She echoes the tech-tree Italian battleships with a super-thin turtleback sloping that can be overmatched by 380mm and greater AP shells, providing easy-access to her magazines and machine spaces.  This is disappointing.  Given the slope and citadel height, she could have been a lot tougher.  All this means in practice is that if you give up her broadside, you can expect to take big damage which is nothing new for battleships.  Keep her out of a brawl and be careful when coming about and you'll be fine.

VERDICT:  Decent protection against cruiser and destroyer calibre guns.  When properly angled, she's a tough cookie, but when flanked, battleship AP shells will tear her apart with alarming alacrity.

Agility

Top Speed: 32 knots
Turning Radius:  860m
7Rudder Shift Time: 16.7 seconds
4/4 Engine Speed Rate of Turn:  4.3º/s at 24.1 knots

I don't have a whole lot to say here.  While it's true that Marco Polo has decent agility for a tier IX battleship, she's just one spoonful of Crisco away from being a tub of lard.  None of the tier IX batleships handle especially well.  Marco Polo stands out only in that she handles like an average tier VIII battleship at tier IX.  Battleships take a steep step down in how well they wiggle at the very high tiers while not increasing much in speed since tiers VII and VIII.  With ballooning turning radii and rudder shift times, they simply lack the flexibility of their lower-tiered brethren.  That's good news for Asashio and other torpedo destroyers, I suppose.

Marco Polo has some of the best agility for a tier IX battleship, though she definitely sits behind Georgia's flexibility in this regard.  This doesn't make her agility good, though.  That's the reason you're squinting at this graphic and aren't able to find her easily.  She's #4 on the list.

VERDICT:  Good for a tier IX battleship, but unremarkable if she was just a tier lower.

Anti-Aircraft Defence

Flak Bursts: 6 + 2 explosions for 1,330 damage per blast at 3.5km to 4.6km.
Long Ranged (up to 4.6km):  196dps at 75% accuracy
Medium Ranged (up to 3.5km): 199.5dps at 75% accuracy
Short Ranged (up to 2.0km): 206.5dps at 70% accuracy

When I started doing the math and making my comparisons, I almost got excited here.  Yes, Marco Polo (and most Italian battleships) have terrible range on their large-calibre AA artillery BUT the numbers she was putting out looked respectable enough.  I was naive enough to think that big numbers might make up the difference until I started stacking up the tier IX battleships and comparing them.  Marco Polo has comparable AA DPS to Alsace & Wujing which isn't terrible.  But that lack of range means less exposure to both flak and that long-range aura.  Yes, Marco Polo can mess up a squadron that loiters in her AA bubble.  Co-Op bots are prone to doing this but you cannot count on players to be so myopic.  The best individual defence that Marco Polo can put it up is to launch a Catapult Fighter and hope that discourages attack.  Given Marco Polo's lack of range, it's tough to give up her Spotter Aircraft however.

I guess it's back to the same old tricks:  Group up and Just Dodge™.

Once upon a time, I actually looked forward to talking about AA firepower.  It's been a long time since I've had anything nice to say about it and the constant negativity is really starting to wear me down.

VERDICT:  Admittedly not as bad as it could have been. 

Vision Control

Base/Minimum Surface Detection: 16.8km / 13.2km
Base/Minimum Air Detection Range: 12.98km / 10.51km
Detection Range When Firing in Smoke: 16.26km
Maximum Firing Range:  Between 19.02km and 22.06km (max of 26.48km with Spotter Aircraft).

This honestly surprised me.  And I think it's arguably the most disappointing flaw Marco Polo has after that 36 second reload.

There are two elements here:  Marco Polo's poor surface detection and her lack of an Exhaust Smoke Generator.  The latter is what it is.  I was surprised to see that she didn't get one but I can make do without it.  Without smoke, players must be more cautious when it comes to flashing Marco Polo's sides.  They can't rely on being able to pop smoke to cover such manoeuvres.  Similarly, you have to watch your mini-map more with Marco Polo, keeping an eye on when it's time to disengage if your flank starts to fall.  Finally, the lack of smoke also limits those rare (in PVP but common enough in PVE) moments where you can use her smoke offensively to foil torpedo attempts, make a move out of island cover to setup a flank or set up a favourable joust.

As for her surface detection, I admit a bias here made by previous premium Italian battleships.  Both Roma and Giulio Cesare are very stealthy battleships for their respective tiers.  I had it in my head that this would likely be a trait that carried forward with the rest of the Regia Marina dreadnoughts.    So colour me surprised when Marco Polo ends up being on the poor-side of things when it comes to surface detection.  I think I know why.

The cynic in me wants to believe this has something to do with mitigating Dead Eye's influence on her poor gunnery dispersion.  I base this only on my previous experience with open-water stealth firing back in the day, when this increasingly became the defining feature my peers looked for in new lolibotes, we ended up seeing Wargaming take measures to limit it, such as adding a 2km "stealth tax" onto German destroyers when they launched.  This is where my cynicism took root, imagining that it was a knee-jerk response by Wargaming to downplay the awkwardness of the new meta.  Given that her surface detection has been nerfed since she was announced, dropping from an impressive 15.3km base detection range (12.02km when fully upgraded), my feelings seem more and more justified.  Of course, Wargaming could have changed it for any number of reasons.  I do not know what the official reason is for gutting her concealment.  I just know that it has been made pretty terrible.

The drawback to such poor concealment stacks with Marco Polo's poor reach.  Unlike Roma and Giulio Cesare, you cannot get this ship out onto a flank very easily.  This limits the effectiveness of her AP, which in turn overvalues her SAP rounds even further.  If you can't get the flanking shots you need to make AP shells effective, you may as well just stick to spamming SAP, right?  It's disappointing.  Poor rate of fire?  I can deal with.  Her short reach is a problem but I can manage by sneaking into positions.  But taking away concealment means that Marco Polo doesn't so much outplay her opponents as she relies upon her enemies to make openings for her.  Her game play becomes even more passive as a result.  Ironically, if my suspicion of her concealment nerf having been made to make Dead Eye less effective, Wargaming has actively encouraged Marco Polo players to take Dead Eye more as they're forced into a passive camping meta due to their poor concealment.

And passive game play sucks.

Take Dead Eye. Sit back with your bow pointed at the enemy.  Spam SAP.  Top-tier Marco Polo game play in a nutshell.

VERDICT:  Terribly disappointing.

I'm with you, Obélix.

Final Evaluation

Back in 2019 we were introduced to the Soviet battleships.  They launched with powerful (if temperamental) guns, tremendous HE and fire resistance and superb, BALANS™-based bow-in technology.  They quickly established themselves as the new meta just as the British and German battleships had in years prior.  Here we are, two years later and the Regia Marina battleships have arrived.  Surely THEY will now take their turn and become the new hotness?  Italian battleships, after all, have powerful SAP ammunition, good cruiser-calibre HE resistance and can similarly troll ships that don't bow in directly at them.  And that smoke!  Ooh, that smoke!  So weird!  So strange!  So vaguely useful in very specific circumstances!

I dunno about you, but the Italian battleship releases feel less like a Soviet, British or German battleship release and more like a French one.  I mean, yeah, there's a couple of nice ships in the line but République and Alsace made some noise but hardly changed the entire King of the Sea tournament line ups the way the Soviet battleships did.  And while it's still early, we haven't seen social media on fire the way Conqueror lit up the enemy battleship lines in Randoms.

So what hope does Marco Polo have in being good when the rest of the line is merely interesting?

Well, what Marco Polo has is British HE levels of stupidly easy ammo to use.  Take Dead Eye.  Build for stealth & fire resistance.  Park yourself nose in.  Load SAP.  Spam it at anything that moves.  Given your general inability to land citadel hits, it doesn't really matter what you shoot at.  Aim for the upper hull and pull the trigger.  Pray RNGeebus that dispersion is less troll than it usually is and hoover up some respectable but not terribly interesting damage totals.  At least the Soviets made you change ammunition choices.  And that's really the summation of Marco Polo.  She's Royal Navy battleship brainless gunnery slapped onto a Soviet-lite battleship hull.  Yeah, you're more vulnerable to fire and you can't start fires yourself, but so what?  Marco Polo's pretty darned easy to use.  You just have to watch out for citadel hits, torpedoes and being set ablaze.  Easy peasy.

In my playtesting, I admit to having resisted spamming SAP as much as I could.  I tried just to use AP rounds, going so far as to use just that over SAP; y'know, the other kind of myopic ammunition choice espoused by the community from 2015 until 2017 when it finally became socially acceptable for battleships to use HE.  My results were predictably less than stellar.  Her AP works.  But if you're going to be a hipster like I was, understand that you're severly handicapping yourself and you may as well play an American battleship or Soviet battleship instead.  The reason to buy and play Marco Polo is to play with that 406mm SAP and to spam it as often as possible.  If you like big numbers then those opening salvos are super worth it.  Savour 'em, though, cuz once saturation kicks in Marco Polo's numbers look pretty mediocre.  There's no constant damage ticking in from multiple fires.  There's no cataclysmic one-shots coming from multiple citadel hits.  Only one person got salty at me for spamming them with SAP constantly.  I had tons of people get mad at me for throwing HE around in British battleships.  If that's not a sign Marco Polo isn't as powerful as she could be, I dunno what is.

So yeah.  That's Marco Polo.  She's a big ol' fat Italian battleship.  She's reasonably competent.  Her SAP spam is much more reliable than the tech-tree battleships because of her higher gun calibre.  She's also kinda tough.  Kinda.  My time in her wasn't terrible but it's hard for me to think highly of a ship that I was so thoroughly bored in.