Premium Ship Review: Siegfried & Agir

[LittleWhiteMouse]

The following is a review of both Agir & Siegfried, the tier IX German large cruisers.  These ships have been provided to me by Wargaming at no cost to me (though I do have to unlock Siegfried again).  To the best of my knowledge, the statistics discussed in this review are accurate as of patch 0.9.5.  Please be aware that their performance may change in the future.

Whoo, double-header!  Wait, does this count as reviews #150 and #151?  Bah, I'll figure that part out later.

Welcome to my mistake!  There is a lot of similarities between the two O-class sisters, but there are some marked differences too -- not the least of which is their actual game play.  I've tried to separate things out to make things more readable but it's kind of a mess with all the back and forth going on.  I'm worried that I've focused too hard on one ship over the other.  Oh well, I committed to this folly and I'm going to ride it out to the very end!

Let's begin!

Agir Summary:  A tier IX Odin in cruiser-form with improved main battery guns, but she has worse protection and secondaries.
Siegfried Summary:  A tier IX Gneisenau in cruiser-form with better guns, secondaries, torpedoes, AA power, agility and concealment.  She is squishier than the tier VII battleship though.
Difference Summary:  Siegfried and Agir share the same protection scheme agility and concealment. However their weapons differ.  Siegfried's has more powerful 380mm guns, is more accurate, has fewer but (much) longer-ranged secondaries.  Agir has 305mm guns and an extra two-pairs of short-ranged secondaries and better torpedo arcs.  In addition, Siegfried gets more consumables.  Because reasons.

SHARED PROS

• Strong citadel protection for a cruiser with a 190mm belt backed by an 80mm turtleback and 45mm to 60mm citadel wall.
• Good structural armour protection with 27mm thick extremities, 90mm thick upper hull and 30mm thick deck.
• Phenomenal anti-torpedo protection for a cruiser with a 37% damage reduction.  Hell, most battleships would love to have this level of defense.
• Long ranged main battery guns (18.5km for Agir, 20.64km for Siegfried).
• Excellent main battery HE penetration for both ships.
• Secondaries have 32mm of penetration, making them capable of directly damaging the extremities of even tier VIII+ battleships.
• Good anti-aircraft firepower.
• Access to the improved German cruiser Hydroacoustic Search consumable with it's increased detection ranges of 4km for torpedoes and 6km for ships.

SHARED CONS

• Turtleback isn't angled steeply enough to guarantee auto-ricochets, leaving their citadels potentially vulnerable.  Wait, how is this a flaw, really?  Most cruisers would give away their X-turret for this level of citadel defense.  Agir and Siegfried's not-perfect turtleback be damned.
• Fires spank for a full 60s, and floods waterboard you for 40s.  Kinky.
• Poor main battery HE DPM.
• Horrible main battery gun fire angles both forward and backward.
• Torpedoes are pathetically short-ranged at 6km.
• Chunktacular agility with handling for a cruiser that feels like sticking your hand in cottage cheese or duck puke.
• Large surface detection for a cruiser.

SPECIFIC PROS

• Excellent AP penetration and overmatch ability with Siegfried's 380mm guns.
• Siegfried makes use of cruiser dispersion (!) with her battleship caliber guns.
• Siegfried has long range-secondaries with good fire arcs (better than Agir's for some reason).
• Agir has the same fire-setting ability as Azuma and Alaska with her main battery guns.

SPECIFIC CONS

• Low AP DPM on Siegfried's guns (combined with that earlier low HE DPM).
• Siegfried is a bad firebug with a low fires-per-minute.
• Agir's main battery lacks AP penetration making it difficult to contest battleship armour except at ranges of less than 12km.
• Agir may have more secondaries but they too short ranged to be useful.

Overview

Skill Floor:  Simple / CASUAL / Challenging / Difficult
Skill Ceiling:  Low / Moderate / High/ EXTREME

Large cruisers tend to be pretty forgiving as far as cruiser game-play goes.  They borrow a lot from battleships which are some of the easiest ships to play.  For beginners, Siegfried and Agir provide these training wheels along with very forgiving gunnery dispersion.

For veterans, imagine German battleships that actually hit whatever you aimed at.  Yeah, scary, especially in Siegfried's case.  Stack onto that good survivability, brawling, kiting, DD hunting with their hydro, using islands for ambushes / cover -- yeah, there's a lot of room for skill to affect game play.

Let's do these next few sections out of order and focus first on where they're similar and then touch on where they're different.

Defense

Hit Points: 62,850
Min Bow & Deck Armour: 27mm extremities, 90mm upper hull & 30mm deck
Maximum Citadel Protection:  190mm belt + 80mm turtleback + 45mm to 60mm citadel wall.
Torpedo Damage Reduction:  37%

How the hell are these things balanced?  Siegfried and Roy are just a couple of key-features away from having a god-tier cruiser protection scheme.  Let's go through the checklist:

• Anti-torpedo damage reduction in excess of 25% 
• Citadel capable of repelling even large-caliber AP shells 
• 27mm extremities or greater 
• Upper hull in excess of 30mm
• Amidships deck in excess of 30mm
• Ice-breaker bow & stern

So barring having a Furutaka-style deck and a Stalingrad ice-breaker, Siegfried and Agir have about the best defenses for cruisers that are available.  But let's go into the details:

Anti-Torpedo Protection

Look, most cruisers don't have any torpedo damage reduction to speak of, never mind the "better-than-many-battleship" levels boasted by Siegfried and Agir.  At present, they have the BEST fish-protection found on any cruiser in the game. Let's not forget that these two ships also have a German Hydroacoustic Search which further reduces the dangers presented by torpedoes.  Short of these ships being more nimble (which they are decidedly not), you have the best defense you could ask when it comes to mitigating torpedo damage.

Cruiser Turtlebacks & Internal Citadels

Taken from GameModels3D.com with colours exaggerated to show the different layers of citadel protection on the O-class battlecruisers. This way you can clearly see the external 190mm belt in red (sloped at -1º to -21º), the 80mm turtleback in yellow (sloped 49º to 60º)  and the citadel itself shown in blue (0º).  Most AP shells have to contend with passing at least one auto-ricochet check to punch through her turtleback.

The protection scheme of the O-class battlecruisers citadel protection closely resembles that of a German battleship.  Their armour is optimized to protect the magazines and machine spaces in medium to close range encounters.  However, it remains vulnerable to high-penetration, long-range fire.  While these ships are not immune to citadel hits, they are about as well protected as you could hope for a cruiser to be.

The effectiveness of their citadel protection varies depending upon where the ship is struck and the angle of incoming fire. Their lateral belt + turtleback protection covers the whole range from "impossible to citadel" to "difficult but not impossible" depending.  Barring a shell moving at a perfect horizontal or slightly upward motion (possible due to normalization after penetrating the reverse-sloped belt), the O-class's turtleback isn't inclined enough to guarantee ricochets. Thus there's always a chance of a shell with sufficient penetration to punch into their magazines or machine spaces.  The two layers of armour work in tandem with the near vertical sections of belt armour around the funnels being mated with the most steeply sloped turtleback and the more shallow angled turtleback around the magazines is paired with the most exaggerated reverse slope of the belt.

The biggest danger to these ships when caught broadside are the (relatively) low velocity but high penetration shells of American battleships or the massive shells off Yamato, Musashi and Shikishima.  At range, every battleship becomes more dangerous.  Every time you get shot, you're rolling the dice and hoping that RNGeebus will be kind.  So don't go offering up your broadside unless you're one pious momo.

Their biggest citadel weakness is their enormous 27mm thick snouts which can be overmatched.  Unlike  other high-tier German cruisers, they have no 'ice-breaker', no extended waterline belt to help foil shots aimed at their squishy bits.  For opponents that aware of this vulnerability, this area can be hit for days for easy big-damage.  I'm not going to lie -- it can be frustrating to try and protect this weakness.  If your opponents aren't playing ball, you're going to have a bad time.  Make no mistake:  Agir and Siegfried are not battleships -- they can't stand up to battleship levels of punishment.

The O-class's 90mm upper hull is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it helps you resist HE shells and ricochet AP rounds when you're angled. On the flip side, it guarantees fusing every single AP shell it faces if the shell manages to penetrate, leading to Siegfried and Agir taking big damage.  The recess into which Siegfried's hull-mounted torpedoes are set opens up a further shell-trap that can be exploited by your opponents.  Be careful.

Suck it, 381mm Guns

You too, 127mm guns.

Let's step away from dwelling on citadel hits and simply talk about resisting damage entirely.

Given the glut of 381mm and smaller caliber guns throwing AP shells about at high-tiers these days, these ships can face-tank select targets with relative impunity.  Furthermore, the 27mm threshold makes them immune to direct damage from 127mm HE shells even if they're using the Inertial Fuse for HE Shells skill, so that's pretty nice too.  Their 90mm upper hull is again capable of being pretty troll when it comes to resisting damage -- both AP and HE shells, though you need to angle to resist the former.  This opens the door for some interesting (if limited) brawling opportunities.

The flip side is that this thicker armour all but guarantees everything (and I do mean everything) will have their AP shells fuse properly and deal chunktacular penetration damage.  This can be as devastating as individual citadel hits.

Overall, though, these ships are better at resisting citadel hits than they are direct damage.  HE spam from cruisers is stupid-dangerous.  Siegfriend and Agir's 30mm decks and 27mm extremities are big weak spots for HE to exploit.  Lemme repeat myself:  these are not German battleships -- they're not built to shrug off damage to the same level as those Deutsches-Stahl leviathans.  You can lose HP in a hurry even if you never take a single citadel hit.  So beware.

Barring exceptions, most cruisers can queue up to 33% of citadel damage for repairs. Agir & Siegfried's large hit point pool gives them access to better heals, but this still falls behind the extra Repair Party charge enjoyed by Azuma and the portable` dry-docks of the British cruisers.

Overall Feels

The O-class sisters remind me a lot of tier VI and VII battleships -- tough but not invulnerable, with stupidly-big weak spots that are easy to exploit.  Fire is a problem.  Overmatch is a problem.  HE spam is a problem.  AP penetrating hits are a problem, but proper angling can help mitigate it.  Citadel hits happen but they're uncommon and largely caused by your own mistakes, so that's easier to stomach.

If you think of playing one of the O-class as the equivalent of bringing a tier VII battleship up into a tier IX match, you're not far off in terms of considering their durability.  Their protection level is much better than that of the typical cruiser, but they fall well short of god-tier.

VERDICT:  Hella good, very rewarding and lots of fun.

Agility

Top Speed: 33.5 knots
Turning Radius:  880m
Rudder Shift Time: 14.0 seconds
4/4 Engine Speed Rate of Turn:  4.7º/s

These aren't cruisers.

Well, they are -- they conform to cruiser norms in terms of energy retention, for example.  The rest of their agility parameters are very much those of a battleship.  These aren't ships with which you can wiggle and dodge.  Their bad fire angles on their guns, especially when kiting, makes this dangerous to attempt -- doubly so with their 27mm extremities being the literal back door into their citadel.  They barely have more speed than most of the battleships they face, to say nothing of the cruisers, so kiting is made even harder.  You have to pay close attention to the flow of battle and plan your moves accordingly.  This largely limits their manoeuvres of defense to flashing their sides just enough to bait hits into their belt rather than their honkers and playing keep-away from the second line until it's time to brawl.

It could be worse, I suppose.  They could crawl like Roon does.

Apparently Dmitri Donskoi's in-port stats are being fixed soon!

VERDICT:  One of the weaknesses of these ships.

Refrigerator

Base/Minimum Surface Detection: 15.12km / 11.88km
Base/Minimum Air Detection Range: 10.74km/8.7km
Detection Range When Firing in Smoke: 11.9km
Hydroacoustic Search Ranges:  4km torpedo detection, 6km ship detection.

If these were battleships, their Vision Control would be excellent, but they're not.  They're cruisers, so their Vision Control kinda sucks.

While they do bring the German cruiser Hydroacoustic Search to the table, they're not pairing it with great surface detection or good sprinting speed.  This largely limits aggressive use of the consumable to misplays on your opponent's part.  Otherwise, it's just there to keep you and your allies torpedo-safe.  Like Azuma before them, these ships also lack the Surveillance Radar boasted by American & Soviet large cruisers.  That consumable is nearly a must-have in team settings, so going without a huge strike against these ships.

Overall, Siegfried feels this deficiency in concealment much less than Agir.  Siegfried's guns are more comfortable at a distance and she has longer range to boot.  Heck, Siegfried can almost stealth-fire her secondaries (one of these days, WG will screw up and I will have my stealth-firing secondary cruiser).  This, in my opinion, makes her the easier and more powerful ship between the two when combined with everything else.

VERDICT:  This is another area where they perform poorly, but it's not unexpected.

Alright, that's all of their similarities.  Let's go over what makes them unique.

Options

Let's start with the pretty mild differences of their option optimization.

Consumables

Agir and Siegfried differ in their consumable load-outs with Siegfried having more options than Agir.  I've highlighted the consumables that are Siegfried-only.

Agir and Siegfried share the following consumables:

• Their Damage Control Party is standard for a cruiser with a 60s reset timer and 5s active period.  It comes with unlimited charges.
• They have access to a German Cruiser's Hydroacoustic Search with a 4km torpedo detection range and a 6km ship detection range.  Both start with 3 charges and have a 120s reset timer.
• Finally, they both share a Repair Party.  This heals back 14% of the ship's health over 28s.  50% of penetration damage is queued up along with 33% of citadel damage and 100% of all other damage types.  This starts with 3 charges and has an 80s reset timer.

For Siegfried, I prefer a Hydroacoustic Search along with a Spotting Aircraft for my consumables of choice.

SIEGFRIED ONLY CONSUMABLES

• Siegfried may swap its Hydroacoustic Search for Defensive AA Fire which comes with three charges and an 80s reset timer.
• Siegfried bumps her Repair Party over to the fourth slot and has the option of both catapult aircraft in her third slot.  Her Spotting Aircraft provides the usual 20% bonus to range for 100s.  It comes with 4 charges and a 240s reset timer.  Alternatively, she can use a Catapult Fighter.  The squadron is active for 60s with a 90s reset timer and comes with three charges.

Upgrades

There's a smart way to build for these ships but there's also the fun way.  Being some of the first cruisers with capable secondaries, it's fun to build for them for a lark.  In Siegfried's case, this may even be slightly competitive.

• Start with Main Armaments Modification 1.
• You have a choice in slot two.  Fire damage is pretty dangerous for these ships so Damage Control System Modification 1 is a sound investment.  Alternatively, you can go into the Armory and spend 17,000 for Hydroacoustic Search Modification 1.
• In slot three, Aiming System Modification 1 is optimal for both ships.  Alternatively, you can grab Secondary Gun Modification 1 for the memes.  This will pay off more for Siegfried but it can work for Agir too, especially in PVE modes.
• Again, with full-damage fires being a threat, Damage Control System Modification 2 is optimal for slot four but you can swap it out for Steering Gears Modification 1 if you prefer to take a more active hand in your defense.
• Concealment Expert is too good not to be the optimal choice in slot five.  For those who like to live fast and dangerous, Steering Gears Modification 2 is an option, but keep in mind that these ships have bad fire angles for kiting so this isn't ideal.
• Finally, let there be no doubt that Main Battery Modification 3 is the best choice for slot six.

Captain Skills

There's a smart way to build for these ships and then there's the German secondary battleship build.  The smart way borrows the entirety of the "fire resistant battleship" build.

I agree, girls. So dull even if it is the "ideal build". You can swap out Priority Target for another tier 1 skill of your choice. Expert Loader is a good idea, but the usual standbys of Preventative Maintenance and Incoming Fire Alert are reasonable.

German battleship build, recently recommended with my Odin review!  Make sure you take Secondary Gun Modification 1 for this build and load up on Mike Yankee Soxisix signals.  All of the cool kids are doing it.

Camouflage

Both ships have their default Type 10 Camouflage and you can purchase the Nordic Camouflage separately as a cosmetic swap.  Both provide identical bonuses, so don't stress about missing out on possible economic gains by not spending more money.  These are standard bonuses for tier IX premiums:

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

So nothing too extreme there.  Let's move onto their anti-aircraft firepower.

Verdict:  Siegfried has better options than Agir by a country mile, offering two distinct and viable play styles not only in PVE but PVP as well.

Siegfried's default camo scheme, which is pretty sexy.

Agir's default camo scheme is more grim.

The Nordic camouflage looks good on Siegfried.

But it looks better on Agir, in my opinion.

Anti-Aircraft Defense

Flak Bursts: 5 explosions (6 for Agir) for 1,540 damage per blast at 3.5km to 6km.
Siegfried / Agir Long Ranged (up to 6.0km):   102 / 130 dps at 90% accuracy
Siegfried / Agir Medium Ranged (up to 4.0km):  329 / 364 dps at 90% accuracy
Siegfried / Agir  Short Ranged (up to 2.0km): 147 / 119 dps at 85% accuracy

Agir has better raw AA numbers than Siegfried.  Siegfried has access to Defensive AA Fire (if she chooses to ditch Hydroacoustic Search).  Both ships have "good" AA firepower, but this doesn't particularly matter.  Individually, these ships have enough teeth on them to make dropping on them expensive in the long run.  However, it would be a fool's mistake to think they're capable of fending off a determined CV by themselves.  Apply the standard anti-CV tactics in order to keep safe.  Blob-up and Just Dodge™.  Otherwise, you're food.

Long story short:  Agir's AA is noticeably better (flirting with Alaska-levels) but Siegfried can take DFAA.

I've ranked these in order of "effective AA DPS" -- meaning simply that I applied a formula (DPS *[range-1km]). This weights longer ranged AA mounts more than shorter ranged ones but it doesn't do so perfectly. This order only really gives an impression of ranking of personal AA defense, not overall effective values (such as providing support to an ally). At the end of the day, everything between Brindisi and Saint Louis are very, very close and this ranking doesn't really speak to in-game effectiveness. That's because none of this really matters.  Sadly, CVs can still dunk on you no matter what and the idea that REALLY GOOD AA firepower could somehow prevent drops is a thing of the distant past.

VERDICT:  Disappointingly good.  I say disappointing because good AA doesn't really mean anything unless the enemy CV is a total novice.

Firepower

Main Battery:  Nine 305mm guns in 3x3 turrets (Agir)  or six 380mm guns in 3x2 turrets (Siegfried).  Both are setup in an A-B-X superfiring configuration.
Secondary Battery:  Eighteen 128mm guns in 9x2 turrets (Agir) and fourteen 128mm guns in 7x2 turrets (Siegfried).
Torpedoes:  Eight tubes in 2x4 launchers mounted on either side amidships.

Let's start with the similarities between the two ships.

Torpeedus

Agir and Siegfried both have access to the same Steinbutt torpedoes (heh, butts).  If you imagine  Tirpitz's torpedoes but add an extra knot of speed, you're bang on the money.  So they're stupid short ranged and kinda wimpy on a per-torpedo basis all things told.  You're only ever going to get to use them in brawls or ambushes so keep that in mind.  I can forgive their performance as both Agir and Siegfried feel like battleships, even if they are ostensibly cruisers.  Their fish are super fun to use but you won't get to use them in every game.  Still, those moments are always memorable and totally worth it.

The big difference between the two ships in terms of their torpedoes are how they're mounted.  Agir has them on deck giving her good forward firing arcs.  Siegfried houses hers in the hull lower down, greatly reducing their field of fire (and opening up a potential shell trap besides).

Agir has good torpedo arcs and terrible gun firing arcs.  Siegfried has terrible torpedo arcs and less terrible (but still awful) gun firing arcs than Agir.

Secondaries

Siegfried has the better secondaries.  This is despite Agir having more of them.

Normally I wouldn't bother wasting more than a couple of sentences on cruiser secondaries, but these ships are special ... and not in that "Kiev also has a secondary!" kinda special.  Siegfried's secondaries are so good, she's arguably the first cruiser in World of Warships where a full secondary build is competitive.  While Siegfried doesn't have the broadside weight of a battleship, her secondaries are good enough with the combination of high penetration, good range and a decent rate of fire.

Mouse's impression of the effectiveness of most cruiser secondaries.

Agir should be in a similar state but she's not. Despite having the same penetration and an even better volume of fire grace of having an extra turret firing broadside, her arcs are slightly worse and she loses out on range.  While you can still make this work in Co-Op battles, it's really not viable in a PVP environment -- not for the returns you get.  Personally, I totally blame Flamu for this as he spilled the beans on how fun this is.  Now your only way to get access to this game play is by grinding out the Research Bureau.  BOOOO, Flamu!  BOOOOO!  You ruined everything!  ♥

I stress it's this deficit of range that really hurts Agir and range remains the key factor that determines secondary-build viability in Random Battles.  Agir's 5.3km base range can only be upgraded as far as 8.01km with a deep secondary build -- compare that to Siegfried's 11.49km and there's just too much of a gap.  Perhaps more importantly, Siegfried's main battery gun performance isn't as hurt by spending her third upgrade slot to increase range as it is with Agir, owing to Siegfried's improved main battery gun dispersion (more on that later).  You can make a secondary build on Agir work, but it's a pale shadow of the potential found on Siegfried.

On the whole, it's exciting to see secondaries on cruisers being viable both to a lesser and greater degree on Agir and Siegfried respectively.  I would have preferred to see this on a 203mm or 152mm armed cruiser rather than a near-perfect battleship analogue, but hey, it's progress.

No, it doesn't make sense. Whatever logic was used to determine these fire angles, it's not consistent between the two vessels. Siegfried simply has better arcs on her secondaries. I have no idea why.

Main Battery Guns

These two ships couldn't be any more different when it comes to their main battery guns.  Since I recently finished reviewing Odin, let's start with Agir's armament first because there's a lot of parallels there.

Odin, Perfected

If you read my review of Odin, the tier VIII German battleship, I wasn't very flattering when it came to my evaluation of her guns.  Odin's 305mm guns struggle to put enough shells on target.  Her battleship dispersion and her slower rate of fire just means that not enough shells stack to keep up with the damage she needs to put out.  This might not be such a big issue if Odin struck like a hammer from on high, but she doesn't.  While her 305mm guns are pretty good cruiser killers once you compare them to the other super cruisers, they're really lacking.

• Alaska & Stalingrad have improved auto-ricochet mechanics.
• Kronshtadt and Stalingrad have god-tier levels of AP penetration.
• Azuma and Yoshino have improved HE damage.

So without any of these specialities, Odin was left struggling to deal damage when someone angles or plays a battleship that won't brawl with them.

 
For comparison, here is Odin's main battery dispersion (in yellow on the left) using a standard dispersion test. This is 180 AP shells fired at 15km, locked onto a stationary Fuso bot. The Fuso lacks camouflage and Odin is using Aiming Systems Modification 1 to reduced her dispersion by 7%. Shots are coming in from right to left (Fuso is bow-tanking).  Odin's 'good for a battleship' dispersion is alright, but it doesn't do the ship any favours given the rather wimpy punch of her shells.  Agir's main battery gun dispersion (in pink on the right) following the same parameters as Odin's above. While Odin makes use of the American-British-German battleship dispersion area, Agir makes use of the Graf Spee (aka "Battlecruiser") dispersion.

Agir inherits Odin's lackluster AP penetration and anemic HE issues.  Boooo.  However, her improved dispersion and faster rate of fire compensates somewhat for this disparity in performance.  Her shells are "bad" but she fires enough of them and hits often enough to kinda-sorta offset her disastrous ammunition.  Still, this isn't a ship in which you want to be actively trading fire with opponents.  She's not a high DPM monster nor are her alpha strikes particularly impressive barring a cruiser derping monstrously.  Fire opportunistically and avoid return damage as best you can.

I struggle to call Agir's main battery firepower "good".  It's alright -- I'd give it no more than that.  There's nothing here really to get excited over.

Siegfried, on the other hand...

Gneisenau, Perfected

Imagine if Gneisenau (or Tirpitz for that matter), hit with nearly every shell she fired.  German 380mm guns are notorious for their inaccuracy so that might be a little difficult, but make the effort.  Difficulties visualizing aside, take a cruiser and equip it with a small battery of battleship caliber weapons and make them stupid-accurate.

That's Siegfried.  That's her thing.

It goes beyond that though.  Siegfried takes Gneisenau's offensive abilities and improves upon them to such a degree that it's hard to believe Siegfried made it out of testing without significant nerfs.

• She boasts a slightly more powerful torpedo armament than Gneisenau.
• Her secondaries are longer ranged, using the same excellent 128mm L/61s with their improved penetration.
• And finally, Siegfried's main battery guns hit whatever you aim at -- something the tier VII and VIII German battleships could only dream of.

It's this last part, it's her main battery guns, which puts her head and shoulders above Gneisenau despite the similarities of their armaments.  Let's take a blast from the past to illustrate why Siegfried's accuracy is so jaw dropping.

This is Bismarck's old dispersion (in yellow on the left), back when she was still using the French & Italian battleship patterns. Gneisenau and Tirpitz shared in this performance, with all three ships having 1.8 sigma. Things have improved slightly -- at 15km the width of their fall has reduced by 3 meters from 198m shown here (with ASM1 installed) to 195m with the new American battleship dispersion they're presently using. Yeah, you kinda got bamboozled if you thought the recent changes fixed anything.  Siegfried (in blue on the right) uses cruiser dispersion. No, not battlecruiser -- actual cruiser dispersion. She has the same spread of shots as you'd find on Cleveland or Henri IV.   She has their 2.05 sigma too unlike the 1.8 sigma you played with when using German battleships.  Aim well and you can hit with everything.  It's for this reason that Siegfried can get away with upgrading her secondaries rather than focusing on reducing her main battery dispersion -- it's baseline value is already good enough and ASM1 isn't changing much.

Aim well and you can hit with EVERYTHING.

Look, German 380mm L/52s aren't the most impressive of battleship weapons but they're certainly novel on a cruiser.  Even with that said, landing six out of six battleship caliber shells of a given volley is enough to make anyone sit up and take notice regardless of the ship type.  Like Jean Bart, Siegfried will tear you a new one if you're foolish enough to give her a broadside.  While the French battleship will do it through volume of fire, Siegfried will do it with a single well placed shot.

Even her awful HE performance is counteracted (somewhat) by this phenomenal accuracy she boasts.  Siegfried almost feels Soviet, what with firing high-velocity shells and having the ability to snipe destroyers from a distance.  It's that accuracy that solves a lot of Siegfried's woes -- not all of them, mind you, but a lot.

Without landing citadel hits or steady penetrations, Siegfried will lose just about any damage race.  So while her individual hits are pretty jaw dropping, it's a struggle to land enough of them to make a difference if you're not prioritizing targets properly.  As good as Siegfried's guns are on paper, without a good head behind the helm, she can be pretty terrible.

Unlike Agir's guns, which improve upon pretty forgettable weapons, Siegfried's are an improvement on some rather novel guns.  If nothing else, Siegfried makes for some interesting gunnery.

Imperfect Perfections

As different as the guns are on the two ships, Siegfried and Agir share a couple of problems.

1. Poor damage out put.
2. Poor gun firing angles.

As good as Siegfried and Agir's guns can be, they're fouled by angling.  Granted, Agir is more vulnerable to this than Siegfried, but Siegfried performs even more poorly when it finally meets a target it can't overmatch.  German HE performance is notoriously terrible and if these ships are forced to fire it for long, their numbers will tank.  Agir's only saving grace in this regard is her fire setting ability which is ... well, it's not great but it's not at the appalling levels Siegfried suffers.  In short, these ships struggle in head-up fights where they can't brawl and they can't use their AP shells reliably.  If an enemy is aware of them and reacts accordingly, they can largely shut down their damage output outside of close-range knife fights.

Agir's AP DPM is pretty darned respectable -- more-so if you consider she can make ready use of it more often than many other cruisers. Siegfried, by contrast, is way behind. But when you remember she has battleship caliber guns, capable of actually landing citadel hits reliably at a distance, this helps make up for it.  However, she's always going to lag on damage output, so she needs to aim well and survive long to keep up.

I made this graph the same scale as the AP DPM so you could compare them. The O-class cruisers really miss out on HE DPM -- Siegfried's is especially appalling.  Landing six penetrating HE shells is only 8,712 damage -- and that's a best case scenario every 22.9 to 26s.  While this will ruin any destroyer's day, other targets can shrug that off, especially when it halves due to saturation.

While Agir's HE shell performance may be lacking, her fire setting is on par with Azuma and Alaska, which is respectable. Siegfried is again pretty embarrassing.

As for firing angles, well... they're terrible, frankly.  You have to expose a whole lot of broadside to fire forward and even more to fire rearward.  Agir is especially bad for this which opens up these ships to taking a lot of damage they should otherwise be able to avoid.  Furthermore, this makes both ships very poor choices for kiting.  When engaging targets chasing them, their guns are doubly terrible.  First, their overmatch potential is limited -- Agir moreso than Siegfried, but the latter has her problems too.  Next, you're faced with the loser choice of either firing with a single turret or slowing yourself down when you open up your broadside to return fire with their A & B turrets.  Agir is much worse for this than Siegfried -- as if Siegfried needed any more improvements over her sister.

The only place where Agir's gun handling performs better is her faster turret traverse.  Once you stack on Main Battery Modification 3, Siegfried's gun traverse gets so sluggish she can actively out-turn her turrets.  I hate that.  You'll want Expert Marksman if you can afford it, but Siegfried's deep secondary build might preclude you from having the points to pick it up.

Finally, the biggest drawback of these ships is the need for time deal their damage.   While you can hope for some cruiser to offer themselves up as an easy meal, their low damage output means that you're leaning on their survivability to last longer -- giving you more opportunities to make their weapons count.   This can be from stacking fires in Agir, padding numbers with Siegfried's secondaries or finally getting a chance where you get to use their fish.  Siegfried's numbers are especially volatile with her 380mm guns providing periods of both feast and famine.  More time gives you more chances to finally find those opportunities.

Agir Summary

Agir corrects some of the problems found with Odin's armament but then takes on additional problems of poor fire angles and ineffective backup weaponry.  Firepower wise, I'd rather have Alaska or Azuma.  These ships all have similar AP penetration but Alaska has her improved autobounce angles and Azuma has way better HE shells.  All three are comparable firebugs.

Still, the torpedoes that Agir has are nice but I can't see myself enjoying her secondaries outside of co-op.  So yeah, poor marks here.

Siegfried Summary

By contrast, Siegfried's main battery guns are exciting and so are her secondaries.  Yeah, she has problems but they're not insurmountable and it's a worthwhile price to pay to have access to 380mm guns that hit with (almost) everything.

Verdict:  Siegfried's weapons are fun and unique.  Agir is Odin Two:  The Electric Boogaloo with better main battery guns but worse secondaries which is boring as all get out.

Final Evaluation

I have nothing but praise for Siegfried and I'm generally dismissive of Agir.  The basis of these feels is pretty simple:

• Siegfried's game play is new and novel -- she's effectively a glass-cannon version of Gneisenau, greatly improving offense at the expense of durability.
• Agir, by contrast, is a more-different Odin but she loses out entirely on secondaries and adds durability issues.

The other way of looking at Agir is to compare her to the front-running large cruiser at tier IX, Alaska.  Comparing the two of them, Alaska is hands down better -- she has better artillery and better team utility.  Agir only wins out in brawls.   I wouldn't go so far to say that Siegfried is better than Alaska, but at least Siegfried offers a change in game play.  Fun and novelty is a worth the price of optimization in my opinion.

I'm not surprised Siegfried is the more compelling choice over Agir, not when she's locked behind the Research Bureau grind.  Unlike Agir which seemed to be nerfed every step along the way of her development, Siegfried had only two significant changes made to her since her introduction in early 2019.  First, her AA power got played around with.  That shouldn't be unexpected given the volatility of the CV rework over that same time period but it is what it is.  Second, her torpedoes dropped from an 8km range to a 6km range. Wargaming have, quite deliberately, preserved the attractive secondary-heavy game play that turned people's heads during Agir's development.  Siegfried is a big ol' fat carrot on a stick hoping to lure you into regrinding a few tech tree lines.

To me, Agir feels like a consolation prize -- a poor man's Siegfried, as it were.  Though she is a lot more accessible and she's not terrible, she's a distant second to her sister ship and even further behind Alaska.

Given the ongoing events, if people wanted Agir, I'd steer them to Odin instead.  I can't speak for Siegfried being "worth it" for having to participate in the Research Bureau, but she is a good ship -- as I have said repeatedly, she's interesting if nothing else.  It's up to you if that's worth your time investment.

So yeah, that's the O-class.  A fun ship locked behind a painful experience and a meh ship that will forever have you looking over your shoulder wondering what you could have had instead.

Siegfried turned quite a few heads during play testing. Agir just turned stomachs with her constant nerfs.

Conclusion

Wargaming is still at it.  Champagne has been finalized so there's another ship added onto the pile that needs reviewing.  I need some time off after this one, so I don't anticipate having another review out before early July.

Thank you very much for reading.

 

[LittleWhiteMouse]

The further I go back in time, the more outdated these reviews become.  This one is a great example.  Siegfried and Agir (particularly Siegfried) were incredibly powerful and rewarding ships to play when they were released.  Commander skills were reworked the following year after this ship was released and with the change, the ability to specialize their secondaries went missing.

Beware outdated info (she says, midway through re-uploading almost a decade's worth of outdated content).

[Wolfswetpaws]

2 minutes ago, LittleWhiteMouse said:

The further I go back in time, the more outdated these reviews become.  This one is a great example.  Siegfried and Agir (particularly Siegfried) were incredibly powerful and rewarding ships to play when they were released.  Commander skills were reworked the following year after this ship was released and with the change, the ability to specialize their secondaries went missing.

Beware outdated info (she says, midway through re-uploading almost a decade's worth of outdated content).

It makes for some interesting "time capsules".  🙂 

[kriegerfaust]