Premium Ship Review: Munchen

[LittleWhiteMouse]

The following is a review of München, the tier VII German light cruiser.  This ship was provided to me by Wargaming for review purposes -- I did not have to spend money on this ship.  To the best of my knowledge, the statistics discussed in this review are current as of patch 0.9.7.  Please be aware her performance may change in the future.

Quick Summary:  A fast, stealthy and super-squishy German light cruiser.

A More-Better Mainz

München is very good at burning down Warspites.

München is a fast, agile and stealthy German light cruiser.   Stealth, by and large, is a non-entity among the German cruisers from tier V+, to say nothing of a high top speed.  And now we have a ship that has not only stealth and speed but good handling too.

You would think this would result in a compromise to striking power. If you crunch the numbers, sure, München appears to have a gunnery deficit, especially relative to the other German light cruisers.  However, in practice, this drawback is a non-entity in every circumstance short of straight-out slug-fests.

I know, I know, I'm already hyping this up to be a good German premium.  The memes among the community would have you believe that's not possible.  But you won't have to take just my word for it.  Everyone's favourite part-time troll and two-parts heavy-metal enthusiast, Lert, is here to help us out.

Hello and welcome to another Lertbox in which I pretend to know what I'm talking about. This time it's to write about München, gifted to me by a very generous friend.

PROS

• Great AP DPM.
• Improved HE penetration, allowing her to directly damage 38mm hull sections.
• Fast for a German cruiser with good handling.
• Good concealment with a surface detection as low as 9.4km with all buffs.
• Access to a German Hydroacoustic Search consumable.

CONS

• Small hit point pool.
• Very squishy with 16mm extremities and only 50mm of belt armour.
• Poor AP penetration, especially over distance.
• Meh HE DPM.
• Poor ballistics on her shells, with long shell flight times at ranges over 10km.
• Plagued with the same 6km range torpedoes of many German ships.
• Tier VII Matchmaking.

Overview

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

München's fragility is the only thing making her a bit unfriendly for inexperienced players.  Otherwise she's a very comfortable ride with easy-to-use HE spam and good handling.

Veterans will love the shenanigans you can pull between her HE and AP shells, to say nothing of using and abusing island cover and open water stealth to take up advantageous positions. Her speed is just delightful and she up-tiers well, making her a very flexible ship.

Options

Upgrades

München's consumables are pretty standard fare for a German cruiser.

Her Damage Control Party is active for 5 seconds and comes with unlimited charges.  It has a 60 second reset timer.

In her second slot you have the choice:

• Her Hydroacoustic Search has improved torpedo and ship detection ranges over standard versions of the consumable, picking out these threats at 3.75km and 5.5km respectively (instead of 3km for fish and 4km for ships).  In addition, the consumable lasts 10 seconds longer for 110 seconds total.  It comes with three charges and a 120 second reset timer.
• You can swap this out for a Defensive AA Fire consumable.  This is standard for a cruiser providing and additional 50% continuous damage and 300% flak damage for 40 seconds.  It has a three charges and an 80 second reset timer.

Finally, she has a Catapult Fighter.  It launches a flight of two planes which orbit on station for 60 seconds.  It has three charges and a 90 second reset timer.

You can leave Defensive AA Fire where it is.  I stick with Hydroacoustic Search.

Upgrades

Start with Main Armaments Modification 1.

• Get Hydroacoustic Search Modification 1 from the Armory.  This will set you back 17,000 Coal .  This will lock your consumable choice in, but it’s the better option.
• If you can’t (or won’t) take the hydro-mod, then take Engine Room Protection.  München's steering gears have a habit of falling off to loud noises.

Aiming Systems Modification 1 is (still) the only option worth taking in slot three.

• Because of München's propensity to hump islands, take Propulsion Modification 1 in your fourth slot.
• If you'd rather a bit more wiggle in her tush, then you can go for Steering Gears Modification 1 instead.

Captain Skills

I'm not going to deep dive on why the following skills are recommended (mostly because I spent way too much time this month already going over the proposed skill changes). Suffice to say there's a lot of potential overlap with other German light cruiser captains. This makes München a good trainer as she doesn't require any weird skills.

Camouflage

München comes with Type 10 Camouflage, providing the usual bonuses:

• A 3% reduction in surface detection ranges.
• A 4% increase to the dispersion of enemy gunfire.
• A 10% reduction to post-battle service costs.
• A 50% increase to experience earned.

Yay, we finally have alternative colour palettes for German ships!

Firepower

Main Battery:  Eight 150mm/55 guns in 4x2 turrets in an A-B-X-Y superfiring configuration.
Secondary Battery:   Four 105mm/65 guns in 2x2 turrets.
Torpedoes: 2×4 launchers with one per side.

These ain't yo daddy's German 150mm guns.  München has her turrets lifted directly from the secondaries of battleships like Scharnhorst, the Bismarck-class and Friedrich der Große.  These are the low-velocity, 55-caliber 150mm guns as opposed to the longer, higher-velocity 60-caliber 150mm weapons found on Königsberg, the Nürnberg-class and Mainz.  München's ballistics suffer from these shorter barrel length.  In addition, her AP shells do less damage.

Let's keep this short and sweet, shall we?  There's really only a couple of things to really talk about here, so lemme breeze through the rest to at least touch base.

• Her gun handling is alright.  She has a 9º/s rotation rate.  All eight guns can fire at targets 32º off her bow which is decent.  However, they can only fire 36º off her stern which isn't ideal  -- I would prefer to see this much closer to (or below) 30º.
• München's guns all have 1/4 HE penetration, allowing her to directly damage 38mm armour sections.  This is awesome.
• Her main battery firepower range is okay-ish.  16.6km is serviceable but not great.  I'd love to have more but for a tier VII light cruiser, this is average-to-good.
• On paper she is only a modest fire setter, falling well behind the fire setting potential of American and Soviet light cruisers.  Because München isn't shackled to Inertial Fuse for HE Shells (IFHE) she has the potential to have much closer performance to her tier mates.  However, IFHE isn't a must-have for tier VII light cruisers, she isn't necessarily a front-runner.  Still, she is well ahead of heavy cruiser fire setting performance.
• Her torpedoes are an afterthought.  You'll use them often in PVE modes but much (much!) less-so in PVP environments.  They're the same G7a T1s you've seen time and again on German ships with their 6km range and only modest 13,700 damage per hit.

Okay, all of that is squared away.  Let's talk about the two primary facets of München's firepower.

Only Eight Guns

How the Hell is an eight-gun light cruiser supposed to keep up with the other light cruisers packing ten, twelve or even fifteen guns?

I've already covered some of it and this just shows you aren't paying attention (YOU FOOLS!).  München has that 1/4 HE penetration value, so she's more capable of landing direct-damaging hits with her HE shells against a wider variety of targets than her counterparts.   But there's more to it than that.

München has a 5 second reload.  This is stupid-crazy.  This is the same reload as Atlanta used to have with her 127mm/38 guns.  With this being half again as fast as the standard reload of most of the other light cruisers, this allows München to put out twelve-gun numbers with only eight barrels.

München spits out twelve rounds per minute per gun.

This does beg further caveats, though.  These are German 150mm/55 guns.  They have their own issues which further complicates their numbers.

• First, they have artificially high AP shell damage values.
• Second, they also have low HE shell damage values.
• Third, München isn't the only 150mm/55 armed German cruiser with an increased rate of fire over 152mm armed ships.

To say that München's rate of fire is comparable to twelve gun ship is a bit disingenuous given that we already have a German light cruiser using the same weapons but with a twelve-gun armament. So while I could compare München to the other tier VII cruisers, I think a better comparison would be to stack her up against the other German 150mm armed ships within her matchmaking spread to better illustrate her performance.  Otherwise, her numbers are too easily taken out of context.

AP shells in blue (top) and HE in red (bottom). München isn't that much better off than the nine-gun armed Nürnberg-class ships.  With her lower quality AP shells, the race is even closer, though she remains comfortably ahead with HE. If you compare their reloads, München is the fastest at 5 seconds.  Mainz, Nürnberg & Makarov have 6 seconds and Königsberg has a 7.5 second reload.  So München is fast, but she's not that fast compared to other German light cruisers.

Look at that.  Perspective.  German 150mm guns have shorter reloads than comparable light cruisers.  München's reload is admittedly faster still but not so quick that she stands well apart from similar vessels.  It is enough to put her slightly ahead of the nine-gun Nürnberg-class ships, but she's not putting out true "twelve gun" DPM numbers as Mainz shows. So her damage output is reasonable for a German light cruiser.

With that settled, let's look at how she ranks up with the other tier VII ships.

Alright, the usual caveats apply here. This is assuming such unrealistic parameters such as 100% accuracy. Also, I did not include the Italian SAP shells nor the influence of Algérie's Main Battery Reload Booster consumable. Got it? Good. München's HE output is very close to that of a heavy cruiser.

So AP good, HE bad, right?  Well, these numbers are misleading which is why I didn't want to lead with a simple DPM graph.  München's shell performance is kind of like Atlanta's theoretical DPM -- the theoretical numbers do not necessarily reflect in-game performance.  So you have to frame these numbers with some context.

First, München's AP damage is held back by the typical AP shell caveats.  They're not going to do well against anything other than broadside targets.  Furthermore, they need to have enough penetration to deal damage in the first place.  Finally, an overpenetrating hit (375 damage) isn't worth as much as an HE penetrating hit (561 damage).  So like just about every other ship in the game, München's AP shells aren't brainless.  The extra layer of challenge here is that München's AP shells don't have the greatest punch over distance as shown here:

So as good as München's AP looks, the opportunities to use it effectively aren't plentiful.  That leaves a lot of the heavy lifting on her modest HE damage totals, right?  Well they're not as modest as they look.

With apologies to those who are colour blind. The four categories are worth explaining. "IFHE" means the ship's base rate of fire with IFHE added and no other bonuses or penalties.. "IFHE+" is the maximum fire chance with all applicable bonuses (including BFT for Flint & Atlanta). "Base"is the ship's stock fire chance and reload with no bonuses or penalties. "Max" is going for the maximum fire chance with all bonuses applied (including BFT for Flint & Atlanta).

This brings us back to that 1/4 HE penetration.  Yes, I'm saying it again.  Stop forgetting and I wouldn't have to.

Sure, when paddling lolibote butts or similarly under-developed armour profiles, München's DPM can't keep up with the other light cruisers.  But you're not paying for burst potential with München's HE -- you're paying for consistency.  While other tier VII light cruisers struggle when up-tiered, München's gunnery is consistent no matter what she faces and the numbers she puts out are very respectable.  For an eight-gun light cruiser, that's a pretty solid plus right there.

Waifus and Kite String

Here's the second facet of München's firepower worth addressing:  Her ballistics.

Her arcs are pretty terrible.  They're not quite as bad as American light cruiser trebuchets but they're close enough.  The good news is that these guns are wonderfully suited for taking advantage of your favourite island waifus and snuggling up to her to make a hot steamy mess on someone's deck.

München's ballistic arc most closely resembles that of British light cruisers.

The bad news is that they have pretty terrible AP penetration over distance.  You're not going to citadel another enemy cruiser except at stupid-close, knife-fighting, reach-for-the-Soviet-4km-torpedoes kind of ranges.  While this does make it less likely for her AP shells to over-penetrate relatively thin armour sections over distance, they still have to arm which necessitates striking a plate 25mm thick.  This makes them ill-suited to hurting enemy destroyers BUT great at hitting soft-parts of higher-tiered cruisers and battleships just about anywhere that's not their belts.  München's relatively short 0.025s AP fuse timer will help with this too.  So when facing broadsiding battleships, feel free to switch over to AP rounds once you've set a fire or two to spike your damage totals up.

Approximate AP penetration values drawn from wowsft.com.

Firing from open water is possible.  München's agility certainly allows for it (more on that later), but between her ballistic arcs and her poor(ish) rearward firing angles, this really isn't her forté. When München's guns get firing, the arcs she poops out paints a big ol' "shut me up" target on the back of her head, particularly if you're actually managing to land shells at the 15km+ distance you'll need to stay at in order to keep relatively safe.  I'm sure some of you MLG Pros out there will pull it off beautifully but I think island-humping is definitely the safer way to go.

München's oh-so forgettable fish.  There has to be some element of desperation present before you'll get a chance to use these.  Whether that's on your part or the enemy's is the question.

Summary

München's guns reward switching between ammunition types and making the best use of terrain features present on the map.  These are both higher-skilled elements which may look a bit off-putting to some players.  However, she is "good enough" even if you elect to spam one ammunition type (HE) and dodge and wiggle about in open water, hoping that the enemy doesn't shoot back.

Her firepower is easy to use and scales well with player skill.

• Good HE shells with high penetration which makes them capable against all targets.  They just don't put out massive numbers on their own.
• Her AP shells are fussy and harder to use but they have the potential of putting out a lot of damage in a very short time, but they are entirely situational.
• Depending upon your skill level, island-humping or open water wiggle & dash will give you varying levels of success.

VERDICT:  Pretty damn respectable.

Defense

Hit Points: 30,200
Bow & stern/superstructure/upper-hull/deck: 16mm/10mm/20mm/25mm
Maximum Citadel Protection: 50mm belt + 35mm turtleback
Torpedo Damage Reduction: 10%

München has a tumour.

It's one of those gross tumours.  The ones that have grown their own hair and teeth and maybe an eyeball.  This tumour is her citadel, which is one of the most hideous looking citadels I've ever had to study.  This thing sits stupid-high in the water, has useless sloping features and bulbous growths.  These features exist purely to make you the perfect sacrifice to hungry Gods.

]
You're gonna need guts to cope with this citadel.  Going berserk won't save you.

If München has a flaw, this is it.   München reminds me very much of the Nürnberg-class where death comes swiftly be it from massive alpha strikes or even by a thousand smaller cuts.  Her small hit point pool and lack of armour means that everything that hits you is going to hurt.  The shallow angle of her citadel slopes is terrible at keeping out AP rounds and the various bulbous steps and tumours along with that easily overmatched 20mm roof makes her vulnerable no matter how she angles.

So yeah.  Don't get hit.  If you needed any further reinforcement on why this thing should island camp as much as possible, just check out these next two graphics:

Yikes.

Yikes-yikes.

I'm not going to sell you any lies.  It's not like München's durability is more volatile than say Shchors or Indianapolis.  Like most tier VII cruiser, her defence is made from wishful thinking.  If you get caught out, get on your knees and beg to RNGeebus and pray he doesn't take everything from you.

VERDICT:  Don't get hit.

Agility

Top Speed: 36.0kts
Turning Radius: 690m
Rudder Shift Time: 8.3s
4/4 Engine Speed Rate of Turn: 6.4º/s

At first glance, München's agility doesn't seem like a big deal.  I mean, check it out:

For a tier VII cruiser, München's agility looks pretty decent, but nothing to get excited about.  She manages a good rate of turn but her turning radius seems pretty big. What's all the fuss?

The big deal is that she has much better agility than anything else in her tech tree from tier V and above.  German cruisers trend towards the slow side of cruiser speeds with only Siegfried & Ägir managing to exceed 33 knots and they handle more like battleships than true cruisers.  Everything else largely sits at 32 knots with a couple nudging 32.5.  And here München shows up with a top speed of 36!  That she manages to do so without ballooning her turning radius any larger than she does is a breath of fresh air for an otherwise quite sluggish line.

So while München's agility may look respectable for a tier VII cruiser, for a German cruiser, it's excellent and it opens up the possibility of some dynamic game play options they don't normally get to enjoy.  And let's not overlook that a 36 knot top speed on a cruiser is pretty damn phenomenal.  München is downright fast.  There isn't much out there that can keep pace that's not a destroyer.

 

Does it make sense now?

VERDICT:  Very comfortable.

Anti-Aircraft Defense

Flak Bursts: 1 explosion for 1,330 damage per blast
Long Ranged (up to 5.2km):  46dps at 90% accuracy
Medium Ranged (up to 3.0km):  270dps at 90% accuracy

München's AA power is meh.

It's all concentrated in her fragile and rather short-ranged 30mm batteries which won't survive long if you take any HE damage.  Taken on her own merits, yeah, she can hold her own against tier VI carriers -- or at least make it expensive for them to repeat-drop on her, but they will be able to drop on her.  There are worse-protected tier VII cruisers, at least she won't be a high priority target.

This is largely why I advocate for taking Hydroacoustic Search over Defensive AA Fire.

VERDICT:  Hurry up and get here, new skill rework.  I want my cruiser AA to be able to do something again.

Refrigerator

Base/Minimum Surface Detection: 10.8km/9.43km
Base/Minimum Air Detection Range: 5.78km/5.2km
Detection Range When Firing in Smoke: 4.89km
Main Battery Firing Range: 16.61km

München's concealment would be impressive on any other tier VII cruiser.  It's doubly so because it's on a German cruiser.  She is a very stealthy ship.  Combined with her high speed and her excellent Hydroacoustic Search, she becomes an increasingly dangerous ship the more the ship rosters on each team thin out.  München is well set up to control engagement distances.  Her short concealment range makes it easier for her to kite away from unfavourable encounters and in a pinch, she can even flush out ships hiding in smoke (at 37.8 knots with a Sierra Mike signal, she can cross 5km in just under 50 seconds -- enough to light someone with her Hydroacoustic Search).

So we're combining good striking power with good speed, good agility great concealment and an excellent detection tool.  München has an enormous amount of potential flexibility and she's a very dangerous ship in the right hands.

VERDICT:  Downright amazing.

Final Evaluation

There should be more hype surrounding München, in my opinion.  This is a damn fine premium ship and a worthwhile addition to any collection for light-cruiser fans.  That she's a German ship of all things is just icing on the cake.  The only real downside to this ship is her fragility and even that isn't that bad compared to other tier VII cruisers, not when there's the likes of Shchors or Abruzzi waiting to explode when someone passes gas in their general direction.  Given the choice between this or Mainz, I can acknowledge that Mainz is harder hitting but München is more powerful tier for tier.  She just has so much more carry potential.

I really don't have much more to say than that.  I can't sing this ships praises highly enough, so I'll let Lert close us out.

München's not really a German light cruiser at all. Sure, her camo looks German, she's flying this game's version of the German naval jack and you can train a German captain on her, but in most gameplay aspects, she's really not a German light cruiser. And in some, barely a light cruiser at all.

Allow me to explain. These are the characteristics of the high tier German cruisers:

Relatively slow

Turns sluggishly

Bad concealment

Tanky

Solid secondary armament - you know, for a cruiser

And München?

Fast at 37.9 knots with speed flag

Wriggly as a worm on a hook

9.4km concealment with stealth build

Squishy as all hell

Only like a single twin 105mm a side for secondaries

So what we have left is basically a fat destroyer leader, with an armor scheme that's not meant to handle anything bigger than 150mm thrown at it due to thin total thickness and a relatively steep turtleback angle on an oversized citadel. What we have left is a small, fast, thin and agile ship that can keep up with destroyers, has deceptively good DPM on guns designed to deal with small targets and a nasty set of volkstorpedoes as backup.

Volkstorpedoes?

Yeah, your standard, 64 knot, 6km, 13700 dmg torpedoes you find on so many mid tier German premiums. The People's Torpedo. München has a vierling set on each side.

Her AP DPM is decidedly German, artificially boosted on low Krupp shells, only good for short to medium range, broadside targets. Her HE DPM is also decidedly German, deceptively low at middle of the pack values, until you remember that she has the quarter-pen rule and doesn't need IFHE to do direct damage to armor plates up to 38mm. But where her guns fall down is in slow shell velocity and high arcs, plus mediocre range.

So we have a light cruiser with Russian CL speed, British CL agility and squishiness, American CL shell arcs and range, but German hydro, DPM values and volkstorpedoes. People call her a Mini Mainz, but I think the descriptors German Micro-Wooster or Super Nürnberg are more apt.

She has a high skill floor, and high skill ceiling. Bring your A game and she'll do you well - until you explode from a load of battleship or heavy cruiser AP ejaculated into your citadel.

But is she a good ship? You have to answer that for yourself. She's very demanding, but very rewarding if you can put in what she demands. Yeah I think she's a very good ship. Very strong - until she is misplayed and unceremoniously deleted.

Conclusion

Thank you all for reading.  This review almost didn't happen.  I nearly gave up part-way.  You may have noticed that the graphs aren't up to my usual standards.  They're pretty bare bones.  You see, I had them all done before -- pretty and perfect and raring to go until I noticed some calculation errors.  Now one mistake isn't that hard to fix.  It's about twenty minutes to half an hour's worth of work to adjust a finished bar-graph.  But I found multiple mistakes on each graph.  Given that one such graph is upwards of three hours worth of work (two being pretty average), this was a full day's work down the drain.  This interrupted my writing process as I had to go back and fix these to make sure I wasn't misquoting figures in the body of my text.

So while I was on track initially for a Monday-Tuesday publishing date and I didn't finish until Thursday.  The worst part was that I was convinced in my sleep-deprived, overworked delirium that Thursday was actually Friday.  I took some sound advice and just got some rest and caught up on some sleep.  Yeah, it's not been a good week.

Anyway, it's done.  Thanks again for your time.

[Wolfswetpaws]