World of Warships: High Score

Due to gentle proddings from friend Ben over at Midnight Tease, the hooligans over at Bo Time! Gaming, and my innate interest in a naval combat game similar in style to War Thunder, I downloaded the free-to-play game World of Warships a couple of weeks ago.  I'm trying to catch up with Ben so we can squad up... that seems to be the best way to play in head-to-head... but the game has a fairly robust player vs bot play too.  The bots can and will kill you dead if you give them half a chance.  After nearly 100 matches against bots, I decided to try my hand at head-to-head earlier today.  The results surprised me:

The short version was that most of my team went east, while myself, another cruiser and a destroyer went west.  I was lagging behind the other two (they were in Tier IV and V ships, while I was in a stock Tier III St Louis) when they rounded the islands at that end of the map... and discovered that almost all of the enemy team also went west.  Meanwhile, the rest of my team discovered to the east that the bad guys had left three battleships to bottle up that side of the map.  Effectively, as it turned out.  When I saw the approaching red horde on my side of the map, knowing that all I could do to help my two teammates was get myself killed, I reversed course... and headed for the center capture point.  The bad guys got the west point, we got the east... and a couple of minutes later, I captured the center.  I did, however, take an aerial torpedo in the bows, the result of a desultory air attack that I couldn't quite dodge, and a stock St Louis has an Anti-Aircraft rating of "zero."  As they flew away, I noticed that they were disappearing from view after descending about 10 km away... almost like they were landing.  As the only enemy in sight was both a long ways away and something I had no desire at all to engage, I decided to see if I couldn't cause a slowdown in enemy flight operations.  Sure enough, both enemy carriers were sailing together, less than a half-kilometer apart... and on the near side of a decent sized island.  I told my Chief Engineer to disable the engine room's safety features and give me all ahead full as I closed in on two helpless Langley-class flattops.

Well, "helpless" is a relative term.  As I charged in, they both began flinging torpedo planes at me as fast as they could.  At one point, they even managed an absolutely textbook "hammer-and-anvil" attack on me that if I hadn't seen it coming would have killed me deader than disco.  As it was, I ate two torps that took my health down to below half... anything with guns could have taken me easily.  But Langleys, like most carriers, are armed with slingshots and spitballs.  Soon enough I was giving the lead carrier full broadsides.  It rolled over and sank in a couple of minutes.  The other carrier was frantically trying to reverse course back towards the Myoko, which would have had me for lunch even if I'd been at full health.  It never completed the turn: my first volley disabled both his engines and his steering.  The third set him afire.  I didn't need many more past that.

Meanwhile, my team's carriers, given control of the air, did bad things to the Red Team's fleet; they still had the western cap point, but they never even came close to getting anything else.  We won a resounding victory; I was second on the scoreboard but I rightfully feel like I won the game for us.

World of Warships isn't anywhere near perfect.  It's very arcadey, destroyers are incredibly overpowered (the guy above me on the scoresheet was in a DD that sank three enemy ships), and the next time someone calls it "realistic" will be the first time.  But it's pretty fun, and really, that's all I need. 

Posted by: Wonderduck at 11:59 PM | Comments (32) | Add Comment
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