Warship Wednesday - Goodbye Zuiho, Hello Ryujo

Click for weirdness.

I've been motoring along on my tier V Battleship (Kongo) and Carrier (Zuiho) and earning experience to the point where today I was finally able to unlock the tier VI Ryujo, a carrier I have fond memories of from Closed Beta.

I moved the captain up and demounted the one upgrade I had on the Zuiho so I could install it on the Ryujo, then sold the carrier that did me very well over the past few weeks.

The Zuiho has easily been my best ship since I purchased it. I was in 27 battles, 63% victory rate which is exceptionally high, and 43 warships destroyed. My next best, the Kongo, destroyed 35 ships in 38 battles. Experience wise it was always a big earner with an average of 1630 pts and a high score of 2909, my second best after an amazing game I had once in my Isokaze destroyer where I got over 3000.

The reason I am doing so well in the Zuiho is a number of factors. First off, I practiced the crap out of manual torpedo drops in Closed Beta and I've become pretty good at it now such that I'll manually drop on cruisers and destroyers and feel confident of a hit and/or kill. (Related note, manually dropping drops is fearsome deadly and probably should be scaled back a bit.) Secondly, at tier IV most captains are still not used to facing carriers and what they should do to protect themselves, i.e. remaining situationally aware and turning hard as soon as the planes are spotted heading your way. Thirdly, AA is terri-bad all over at tier IV, only marginally better at tier V. Its not until tier VI that cruisers start to shred planes... IF they are in the right position or the carrier commander is not careful.

Combined... yeah, its been seal clubbing. For example, in the last battle in my Zuiho there was an enemy Zuiho and we both went after each other right away as luck would have it. He did auto drop torps and got a couple hits which I easily survived. I manual dropped and sunk him with 5 hits. Practice that manual drop.

On the battleship side of things, I've been doing well in the Kongo and I've got about 2-3 more battles to go before I have the 47000 experience for unlocking the fearsome Fuso. I'll miss the Kongo, its a nice vessel overall and performs well with decent speed and AA.