Premium Ship Review: Oklahoma

[LittleWhiteMouse]

Massachusetts she is not.

The following is a review of the tier V American  premium battleship Oklahoma.  This ship was kindly provided to me by Wargaming for review purposes; I did not have to pay for her.  To the best of my knowledge, the statistics discussed in this article are accurate as of patch 0.9.10.  Please be aware that her performance may change in the future.

Unfortunately for Oklahoma, Texas exists.  In nearly every respect, Texas is the better state ship.  Oklahoma doesn't clone Texas' performance but gives you the choice of a "more different" alternative that dittos Texas' game-play with some style changes. Specifically, Oklahoma is an attempt to provide Massachusetts-style game-play at tier V, with improved secondaries though this comes at the expense of her reload times and horrible (HORRIBLE) AP shell performance.

Quick Summary:  A slow-firing American standard-type battleship with crappy AP shells but improved range, heals and secondaries.

PROS

• Good main battery range of 17.13km (19.87km with APRM1)
• Secondaries are long ranged (5.5km) with improved dispersion.
• Small surface detection range of 13.52km.
• Improved Repair Party which heals back 18.48% of her health per charge instead of 14%.

CONS

• Soft-skinned externally, with most of the ship covered by only 19mm worth of steel.
• Painfully long reload time of 40 seconds on her main battery,.
• Horrible AP penetration.  Like seriously.
• Lacklustre AA defence.
• Sluggish and slow.

Overview

Skill Floor:  Simple / CASUAL / Challenging / Difficult
Skill Ceiling:  Low / MODERATE / High / Difficult

Battleships at tier V and below don't have it easy.  They play on claustrophobic maps. CVs abound as do seal-clubbing torpedo destroyers.  Furthermore, every single battleship can overmatch the bows of every other battleship (barring Gangut & Pyotr Belikiy), so you can't simply nose in and face-tank.  The good news is that it's relatively easy to score some big numbers as everyone can reliably damage everyone else. Their primary prey, the plethora of light and scout cruisers, are made of citadels so Devastating Strike medals are commonplace and help offset the constant barrage of tier IV planes and constant waterboarding from torpedo-soup.  And that's the joys when they're top tier!  When bottom tier, they are outclassed so hilariously that the map size alone is enough to ruin their experience.  So... yeah.  Tier V battleships aren't in a good place.  Inexperienced players can manage, but there's a lot of unpleasantness to watch out for.

For veterans, Oklahoma offers nothing that Texas doesn't already, and Texas scales better with player skill with her dispersed armour values.

Options

Oklahoma doesn't have anything out of the ordinary beyond her Repair Party.

Consumables

• Her Damage Control Party is typical for American battleships.  It has a 20 second rather than a 15 second active period common to battleships from most other nations.  It has unlimited charges and an 80 second reset timer.
• Her Repair Party is also an American battleship version, though this version doesn't tend to appear on premium battleships.  It has four charges base and an 80 second reset timer.  It queues up 10% of citadel damage, 50% of penetration damage and 100% of everything else.  It heals back up to 0.66% of her health every second for 28 seconds instead of the usual 0.5% found on most battleships.
• Finally, Oklahoma has a Spotting Aircraft.  It provides a 20% bonus to her range for 100 seconds.  It starts with four charges and a 240 second reset timer.

Upgrades

There are pretty much two builds to consider with Oklahoma:

Choose between either increasing her main battery gun range with Artillery Plotting Room Modification 1 or emphasizing the strength of her secondaries Secondary Battery Modification 1.

Captain Skills

You're again making a choice between two different builds.  The first is the boring ol' battleship build where you focus on mitigating fire damage.  Or you can build for her secondaries.  With Manual Fire Control for Secondary Armament having the efficacy wall at tier VII+, it's not worth taking.  Veterans will recognize this build as being analogous for a classic Warspite build.  This is a lot more interesting, in my opinion, even if it's less effective overall.

The graphic on the left is the default battleship build.  The one on the right is chock-full of pluck and awesome.  Pick your favourite tier 1 skill (in green) and then hoover up all of the yellow circles.

Camouflage

Oklahoma has two camouflage options.  The first is her standard Type 9 camouflage.  They're simply cosmetic swaps of one another.  They both provide:

• 3% reduction to surface detection.
• 4% increase to enemy dispersion.
• 10% reduction to service costs.
• 50% increase to experience gains.

The alternative dark-blue on her Type 9 camo is nice and striking, but it's the military camouflage I like the most.  Gotta love that checkered funnel!d

Firepower

Main Battery:  Ten 356mm/45 rifles in an A-B-X-Y superfiring configuration with three-gun turrets for A & Y mounts and two-gun turrets in B & X.
Secondary Battery:  Ten 127mm/51 single guns in casemate mounts and eight 127mm/25 singles in open mounts mounted a deck higher.

Main Battery

In the spirit of not spending forever writing this, I'm going to cut right to the chase.  There are two stupidly-huge flaws with Oklahoma's main battery guns.  The first is pretty obvious -- they say it right on the tin:  Oklahoma has a 40 second reload.  That's terrible.  It seriously hurts her damage output and it's just plain not-fun to have to wait so long in between trigger pulls.  Admittedly, this isn't that much longer than the already painful 34.3s reload on USS Texas, but I hate that reload too and this is worse.  If this were Oklahoma's only main gunnery flaw, maybe I could overlook it if this paid for a bunch of other fun stuff, but the ride doesn't end there.  She has horrible HORRIBLE AP penetration values for a battleship.  Oklahoma makes use of the old-timey, not-in-the-game-anymore stock New York AP shells.  These are so terrible she cannot best battleship belt armour outside of 10km engagement distances -- and even then, there will be some battleships she can't best until she gets even closer.  You must aim for weak points which, with battleship dispersion, is tricky.  So not only are you dealing with a very long wait between shots, but when you're finally reloaded, there may not be anything worth shooting at because of how poorly her AP rounds perform.   It's tempting just to spam HE, but USN battleship HE shells are pretty terrible.

In short:  Her main battery gunnery sucks moose-balls.  It's a disaster to use against other battleships.  Stick to picking on cruisers unless you have no other choice.

Oklahoma's AP penetration of her released version (patch 9.10) is buttacular.  This runs contrary to how it performed during the last leg of testing (patch 9.9).  See my rant below with the In Closing section about this.

Have a quick DPM graphic.  Oklahoma wins no prizes here.

American battleships aren't particularly good fire setters.

Oklahoma's fire arcs are decent.  Her gun rotation rate of 3º/s is pretty terrible, though.

Secondary Battery

Ostensibly the woes of her main battery armament are counteracted by her secondaries.  Ostensibly.

Sure enough, if you can get Oklahoma in close enough to activate her secondaries, her opponents are going to have a bad time.  Oklahoma has the same improved secondary dispersion as found Massachusetts and Georgia.  What's not as well known is that this is the same secondary dispersion as found on all large calibre secondary gun batteries, such as the 152mm on Kongo and Warspite.  I don't say this to nay-say Oklahoma's secondary performance, but rather to illustrate that one element isn't so rare at this tier, as a lot of the casemate weapons of tier V battleships are larger calibre.  This said, what is out of the ordinary is Oklahoma's range.  With a base reach of 5.5km, between upgrades, skills and signals, it can be extended out to 8.32km which is very impressive for her tier.  It's a shame Oklahoma isn't faster because you're only bringing those into range if the enemy comes to you.

I found the volume of fire coming from her secondary batteries to be a bit wanting.  Her longer-barrelled 127mm/51 guns in the lower casemates have a 7 second reload compared to the 4.5 seconds of the upper-deck 127mm/25s.  On top of this longer reload, they also have a worse fire-chance per shell, so it's the shorter-barrelled weapons which are really carrying the weight when it comes to shell volume.  At least her forward fire angles are generous with six guns being able to open up at targets as little as 10º off her bow, with a maximum broadside of 9 guns from 40º off her bow to 108º.  These are not good weapons for kiting, as towards her rear-quarter she is typically stuck with only three weapons firing.

Overall, I rate Oklahoma's secondary weapons as "nice to have" but not game-changers.  They're definitely more powerful against lower-tiered targets where their 21mm of penetration can hurt everything they come across.  I again lament that Manual Fire Control for Secondary Armament's efficacy is tied to tiering, because super-accurate secondaries could have been a game changer for Oklahoma.  While a 30% buff is alright, it's a big point sink -- points that could be much better spent on fire mitigation and concealment.  Oh well.

VERDICT:  Her secondaries are nice.  Her main battery guns are anything but.  That reload sucks.  That AP penetration sucks more.

Defence

Hit Points: 48,200
Min Bow & Deck Armour: 19mm extremities, 25mm upper hull & 19mm deck
Maximum Citadel Protection: 25mm anti-torpedo bulge + 343mm belt + 51mm citadel wall.
Torpedo Damage Reduction: 18%

I was going to make an armour profile graphic, but it's pretty uninformative.  She's a standard-type battleship (one of the first) so she doesn't have a dispersed armour scheme with interesting bits like extended waterline belts or what have you. Oklahoma's extremities and deck are all 19mm thick.  Her belt is completely covered by her 25mm anti-torpedo bulges and this armour value extends up to that aforementioned 19mm deck amidships.  Thus, barring her 13mm superstructure, everything you can shoot at on Oklahoma is either 19mm or 25mm, which is all kinds of squish.  The downsides to this layout is having that 19mm armour almost everywhere.  It can be overmatched by any battleship caliber AP shell you come across, to say nothing of allowing HE penetrations from even destroyer-calibre rounds.  In this regard, she's hardly unique.  New York and Texas suffer from similar problems, even with their dispersed armour scheme, but it's only found on the American battleships at this tier.  All of the other battleships have at least some amidships deck armour values that are higher, allowing them to ricochet and shatter AP and HE shells respectively.  Thus, Oklahoma takes a lot more incidental damage than her contemporaries.  To compensate she has access to the improved Repair Party of American tech-tree battleships.  This heals up to 18.48% of her hit point pool per charge instead of the usual 14% of most Repair Parties.  In theory, this gives her a larger effective health pool if properly managed.  The catch, of course, is that she has to survive long enough to make use of all of those healing charges for this to off-set her fragility. 

Her citadel is at least reasonably protected.  It sits at the waterline with turtleback sloped sides.  The 51mm of the turtleback and citadel walls stacks nicely with her 343mm belt giving her some healthy protection.  Her citadel roof is 38mm thick so it can't be overmatched.  Oklahoma will take citadel hits if you expose her sides but overall the protection isn't bad.

Overall, Oklahoma'a durability is alright.  It's not fun to take damage from everything being thrown at you but at least she's given something to compensate for it.

Viribus Unitis is a standard unit of measurement for battleship health.

VERDICT:  You're a piñata with a soft outer-skin but decent citadel protection.  Manage your heals carefully and be careful of exposing your sides.

Agility

Top Speed: 19.7 knots
Turning Radius:  610m
Rudder Shift Time: 13.4 seconds
4/4 Engine Speed Rate of Turn:  3.7º/s at 14.7 knots

It's rare to see such an obvious and clear loser like this.

This is downright embarrassing.

Oklahoma manages to simultaneously be the slowest and the least agile of any of the tier V battleships.  That's a pretty damning rap sheet right there but it gets worse.  She lacks any kind of energy preservation.  While New York was also stripped of her own improved energy retention in patch 0.9.6, Texas still maintains hers.  This means that under any kind of manoeuvres, Texas is the fastest of the three, holding onto a minimum of 18.7 knots while New York flounders at 15.9 knots and Oklahoma wallows with 14.7.  And you'll be putting her through manoeuvres often, if not to throw off the aim of your opponents then to try and counteract her horrible turret traverse.  The 3º/s rotation speed of her guns often needs help and you'll be sore tempted to accelerate acquiring a target by swinging the ship's butt about.  This has the net effect of further slowing down Oklahoma's average speed.  The 19.7 knots you see on the tin is more like a constant 18.5 knots in practice as you're seldom going in a straight line long enough to take advantage of it, even when redeploying.

Just to add insult to injury, even a slug-lord like Oklahoma can still out-turn her turrets unless you stack on Expert Marksman at a minimum -- Main Battery Modification 2 does not provide enough of a bonus to mitigate this disparity.

For a ship reliant on making her secondaries count, it's not just her lack of speed that's disappointing, but her lack of energy retention too.  She's not just slow, she's consistently slow -- unable to catch a break.  The only way to make her secondaries work for her is to either corner someone when the opportunity presents itself on one of those smaller, low-tier maps or hope someone brings their ship into range for you. 

VERDICT: I cry everytime.

Anti-Aircraft Defence

Flak Bursts: 3 explosions for 1190 damage per blast at 3.5km to 4.8km.
Long Ranged (up to 4.8km):   95dps at 75% accuracy
Medium Ranged (up to 3.0km):  21dps at 75% accuracy
Short Ranged (up to 1.5km): 84dps at 70% accuracy

Aircraft carriers are omnipresent within Oklahoma's matchmaking.  It is not uncommon to face two carriers -- and sometimes two tier VI carriers at that, so anti-aircraft defence is more important for ships at this tier than any other.  I'm sorry to say that Oklahoma doesn't have good AA firepower by any measure.  She has neither the damage-per-minute, range or consumables to truly be a threat to aircraft.  She has about as much sustained DPS as König but with worse range brackets and one fewer flak bursts.  This means you're going to get dunked on.  A lot.  In my test games, even a Langley to perform two drops with the same squadron of torpedo bombers -- and that's with my ship being pristine AND having my AA boosted with Basic Fire Training and focus-fire.  Yes, I ended up shooting down a few planes.  Yes, this will probably unsustainable for the carrier in the long run.  No, that's not going to save you.

VERDICT:  Not good enough to matter.

Sigh.  With Oklahoma's uniform 19mm thick deck armour, she's exceedingly vulnerable to rockets and the bomblets dropped by Hermes and Ark Royal.

Refrigerator

Base/Minimum Surface Detection: 13.52km / 11.8km
Base/Minimum Air Detection Range: 10.25km/9.23km
Detection Range When Firing in Smoke: 7.12km
Maximum Firing Range:  Between 17.13km and 23.84km

Oklahoma has better-than-average concealment for a tier V battleship.  It's not god-tier by any means.  It's not like Viribus Unitis where she can manage a 10km and change detection range.  Still, make sure you use and abuse this concealment whenever you need to, especially in the later stages of the game when destroyers are thinned out.  This can help you set up ambushing shots on cruisers or simply give you more time to come about or let a key consumable come off cool-down in order to save your ship when you're on low health.  If Oklahoma had more speed, this trait would have more value, allowing her to flex unseen and pop up in places people do not expect.

VERDICT:  Nice to have but not game changing.

Final Evaluation

I'm glad you can earn this one for free.

I don't like Oklahoma.  Her gunnery is frustrating.  Her agility is frustrating.  She wasn't a fun experience for me.  I hate waiting on her stupidly long reload.  I hate having to wait even longer for a proper target to appear because my stupid AP shells can't reliably penetrate other battleships. I hate how stupidly sluggish her gun traverse is.   I hate how slow she is.  Hate. Hate. Hate.  Sure, you can have some alright games in her, especially when she's top-tier.  And in Co-Op, you don't have to worry about her AP penetration or struggling to bring her secondaries into range as the bots will oblige you by driving in close.  In those two aspects, she's perfectly reasonable.  But taken as a whole?  Blech.  Skip this one.  Do not pay cash-moneys for her. 

That's my hot take, anyway.

But lemme step away from quotable crap and elaborate further.  I love American standard-type battleships.  I love how they look.  I love their history.  And for the first few years of World of Warships' life, I loved how they played.  New Mexico was my bae for a time.  Lert and I had a great time playing our Arizona bricks side by side.  I didn't mind Colorado, though she was my least favourite of the early three.  I was disappointed when West Virginia appeared not in her late-war rebuild but in her 1941 state, adding my own voice to those dissenting Wargaming's choice to use her as a stock-Colorado instead of a phoenix that rose from the flames of Pearl Harbour and kicked so much butt at the Battle of Leyte Gulf.  While West Virginia 1941 was at least a reasonably powerful ship, the offerings since then have not been.  California was a disaster.  She's been relegated to being one of the least memorable ships of 2020.  Oklahoma is destined for similar ignominy.  Her secondaries are meant to be fun, but there are so few opportunities to use them decisively.  Had Oklahoma the old-style American battleship energy retention of yesteryear, it might be a different story.  Like with West Virginia and California, Wargaming missed the opportunity to make a truly interesting vessel.  Oh well.

In Closing

Before I conclude this review, I feel I need to speak to some of the challenges faced preparing these articles.  My aim is to be as accurate as possible.  While I don't feel that any of my fellow content creators would go out of their way to present false information, sometimes Wargaming makes it difficult for us to be accurate.

The Community Contributors were told on October 22nd that Oklahoma had been finalized and that we were free to begin creating content which could be published on October 27th.  I began work on the written portion of this review over the weekend of the 24th and 25th. Part of my process is to cross-reference the statistics of the current test-ship to the development blog's list of changes.  Sometimes stuff gets changed at the last minute.  Sometimes announced changes don't go through at all.  Without clarification from Wargaming, it's impossible to know what the final product will look like.  I've been burned by making assumptions here and I've learned to get specifics from Wargaming directly.  In Oklahoma's case, the test-ship I had access to and was being asked to make content for was not what was going to be released.

We were being asked to make content based on a ship whose performance was changing significantly post-launch.  In Oklahoma's case, it was her Krupp rating -- a statistic which directly affects AP penetration values, which was being dropped by a whopping 40%.  The 0.9.9 version of Oklahoma had better AP performance than any other tier V 356mm armed battleship.  She could blow out the citadel of a Colorado at 16km.  The launched version has the worst by far -- so bad she can't pull the same trick until she's within 5km of Colorado.  This is a big deal!  It completely changes how the ship feels to play.  I didn't like Oklahoma's test version -- she was slow with a slow reload, but at least her main battery guns had some punch to them. 

Now I spoke to Wargaming about this and they were very open in acknowledging that the disparity between test-ship performance and release-ship performance is very much a serious issue when it comes to Community Contributors producing content about a ship.  Steps are being taken to help mitigate any misinformation coming out in the future (how well this pans out will have to be seen).  HOWEVER, the point I am making is that it's very important that when you're making buying (or time investment) decisions in regards to a premium vessel, check out multiple sources before pulling the trigger.  This discrepancy was found in time for my review, but what about the other Community Contributors?  More importantly, what did I miss?  I'm not perfect.  I don't have a team of fact-checkers dedicated to helping me spot things.  I coordinate and collaborate with the other Community Contributors to try and find stuff like this but stuff will inevitably fall through the cracks.  Please, please, PLEASE make sure you check out multiple reviews before you make a decision. You can always message me here or via Discord (AprilWhiteMouse#0536) if you have any questions about ship performance. If I don't know something, I will admit to as much and we can go find the missing information together.

Thank you for reading, and thank you to my patrons on Patreon for supporting the production of these reviews.

[Wolfswetpaws]