Some of you already know that World of Warships has entered its open beta phase. If you liked World of Tanks, you should definitely give WoWS a try.

 

I participated in the closed beta test as well, and I thought I’d share my experience with the different ship types and provide some tips.

When you start the game, you begin with a cruiser. Basically you can only play against bots until you earn enough experience points and reach the appropriate account level that unlocks random battles.

 

There are 4 ship types in the game:

– Destroyers: the fastest ships, fantastic maneuverability, but they have the lowest health points, no armor at all, and miserable guns. Their strength is that they can only be detected from a short distance (as long as they don’t fire, and the anti-aircraft guns are turned off – you can do this with the P key), allowing them to get quite close to the enemy to launch their torpedoes. American destroyers have a relatively short effective range, so you need to get much closer to the enemy, while the Japanese can fire them from quite far away, but there’s a risk that the target changes course before the torpedoes arrive. Another important ability of destroyers is that they can lay smoke screens, which practically hide them and any ships that sail into them. They’re good against battleships and carriers.

 

– Cruisers: well-rounded ships that have good guns with fairly fast reload times. They have relatively good speed and maneuverability. They can fire at quite a long range, have decent health pools, some armor, and generally good anti-aircraft batteries (not all of them). Up to tier 5 on the American branch they have torpedo tubes, but these are only effective at short range. Above tier 6 this is replaced by the ability to boost anti-aircraft batteries. They can also launch scout planes that increase effective visibility. Japanese cruisers retain torpedo tubes at almost every tier.

 

– Battleships: they have a huge amount of health points, very good armor, fantastic guns (capable of dealing massive damage), but they’re terribly slow and poorly maneuverable, it takes forever for their guns to turn toward the target, and they’re inaccurate. They can fire at long range, but they’re practically sitting ducks for enemy guns. Their shells can bounce, but if the enemy fires HE (high explosive) shells, they’ll continuously catch fire (more on this later). Their special ability is fast repair, which after activation restores a portion of the ship’s health over a given time period.

 

– Carriers: the most passive class, slow, no armor, and must not engage in combat — they need to stay at the back of the map. The entire battle is viewed from a top-down map view. They can launch aircraft squadrons. With fighters they can shoot down enemy planes, with bombers they can fly over enemy ships and bomb them, and with torpedo bombers they can naturally drop torpedoes into the water.

 

About game mechanics:

– The game has two types of ammunition: armor-piercing and high-explosive. Depending on what target you’re shooting at, it’s worth thinking ahead about what you want to fire. If you fire AP (armor-piercing) shells, there are two possibilities: if it penetrates the enemy’s armor, it can deal massive damage, but if it doesn’t penetrate, it either deals no damage or only minimal damage. AP shells are best fired when you’re at the edge of maximum firing range, so the shells come down from above onto the enemy ship’s deck, giving a high chance of penetration. It’s not worth firing AP at battleships, or at ships you fundamentally can’t penetrate from the front or even from the side. HE shells can almost always be used, they always deal some damage and have a good chance of disabling the enemy ship’s rudder, propellers, torpedo tubes, and guns. HE shells can also set enemy ships on fire, which can be terribly annoying. Effective against all ship types, but especially against destroyers and carriers. (HE can take out a destroyer in a single salvo, while AP practically goes through them without dealing any damage). If carriers catch fire, they can’t launch planes.

– If you’ve been set on fire by the enemy, or your rudder/propeller/weapons are knocked out, there are two options. One is to wait for the crew to repair the given module (this is quite slow, and there’s nothing you can do in the meantime), or use the repair ability present on every ship. This puts out fires, repairs damaged modules (only damaged ones — destroyed ones can’t be repaired and remain inactive for the rest of the game), but after using it, you have to wait for it to recharge depending on the ship type.

– Be careful with torpedoes, never fire them if there’s even the slightest chance a teammate could run into them. Torpedoes are capable of dealing massive damage. They can be fired in two ways: wide spread and narrow spread. (with narrow spread, if you aimed well, more torpedoes will hit the enemy ship, causing massive damage) With wide spread there’s a greater chance of hitting the enemy ship.

– Your account levels up with the experience points earned from played games, and new options unlock at each level. (e.g., you can buy modules for your ship)

– It’s worth spending the experience points earned after battle on better modules, which allow you to increase your ship’s health pool, mount better and more guns, and improve your gun accuracy.

– The ship captain earns experience points that can be spent on abilities.

 

That’s all I can think of for now, I’ll update the post with more information later.