Wonderduck's Pond

February 17, 2018

World Of Warships: I Admit My Error

Back in November of 2016, I wrote a little bit about the newest Tier VI ship in my collection, the American Cleveland-class light cruiser. At the time, I said "it's a good ship, I just hate it." There were a lot of reasons for that; I had enjoyed the ship just before it on the tech tree, the Omaha, immensely. Most of my best games up to that point had been in the Omaha, and if there is a bigger change in playstyle from the older torpedo-cruiser to the newer ship, I have yet to find it. The Cleveland's guns apparently has to lob shells into the stratosphere to get any sort of range with them, to the point that you can easily have two broadsides and maybe three (?) in the air at once. This means that you have to perform quite a bit of witchcraft to hit anything at long range... like a battleship needs to do at 20km. Problem is, you're a light cruiser firing 6" guns at 14km and you don't get a spotting aircraft.

And while you're no delicate snowflake, maybe having the most armor of any cruiser at this tier not named Graf Spee, anything larger than a 20mm Oerlikion can penetrate you... I can't tell you how often I've been sailing along and then suddenly everything goes quiet and the hp bar gets very very red very very fast. Yet, for all of that, I have a confession to make.

I was wrong about the Cleveland. I very much enjoy playing it nowadays... there's a certain joy out of watching your shells disappear off the screen, only to reappear two minutes later and completely deluge a target you predicted would be at that very point, which was approximately 500 miles from where the target ship had been when you fired. Or getting a lovely broadside shot on an Aoba and racking up 11 hits with six citadels and a 'Devastating Strike' award. Nope, she requires some fortune-telling to play well, but it's rewarding as all hell if you can pull it off.