{"id":1066,"date":"2016-04-29T11:41:55","date_gmt":"2016-04-29T09:41:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/borkedcode.com\/wp\/?page_id=1066"},"modified":"2016-04-29T14:23:16","modified_gmt":"2016-04-29T12:23:16","slug":"azraels-guide-to-ranked-and-team-battles","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/borkedcode.com\/wp\/?page_id=1066","title":{"rendered":"Azrael\u2019s Guide to Ranked and Team Battles"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hi all \u2013 and thanks for tuning in.\u00a0 This article will discuss general principles of tournament-style play on Ranked and Team battles in World of Warships, most specifically with regard to the 3rd<\/sup> Season of Ranked and the 1st<\/sup> Season of Team play.\u00a0 I may issue updates depending on the changes made from season to season, but I\u2019ll try to keep the information general enough not to be confining myself to tight constraints.<\/p>\n

My goal here is to familiarize you with the concepts and setup of the matches as they differ from Random fights (where most players\u2019 experience comes from) and to point out places where they are highly significant.\u00a0 These guidelines should give you the basics of how to fight these new battles \u2013 but note that if you are playing in a team with a dedicated FC, the chain of command there should overrule my points below.\u00a0 By all means suggest tactics if you feel them valid and helpful to your captain, but remember (s)he might have a plan that falls outside of what I describe below.<\/p>\n

First off, we\u2019re going to cover the basic principles behind the fights, then the ship classes fighting on them, and finally we\u2019ll delve into the maps that are used in the fights and where on each one the battle will center.<\/p>\n

Now I will point out a very important fact here \u2013 these are my opinions<\/em> regarding these maps and the approaches on them, the ships and tactics, etc.\u00a0 They are built on a fair bit of experience on them, but they should not be taken as the only<\/em> solutions to these problems.\u00a0 I\u2019m sure as soon as I offer this up there will be a chorus of \u201cBut I had a great game running it this<\/em> way!\u201d\u00a0 Yep, you probably did, and I\u2019m sure that some people will have won fights when doing exactly the opposite of what I\u2019m suggesting here \u2013 but they won\u2019t have found whatever tack they took to be a regular workhorse practice.\u00a0 That\u2019s what I\u2019m giving you here \u2013 a \u201cbest grounding\u201d to start from.\u00a0 As you become more experienced with your ships and with the maps, I\u2019m certain that you\u2019ll embellish some of this extensively, and you\u2019ll possibly even discard some of it.<\/p>\n

Like all advice, this being free you can take it or leave it :).<\/p>\n

Battle Up!<\/h2>\n

General battle constraints, goals, and objectives are in common amongst each battle you begin.<\/p>\n

Team Makeup<\/h3>\n

Each fight under the present rules is a 7v7 match, with restrictions on certain ships:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. In the case of Ranked <\/em>fights, the first lower-tier portion of the contest is restricted to tiers 5 and 6 only; in both high-tier Ranked <\/em>and all Team <\/em>fights, the battles are restricted to tiers 7 and 8 only.<\/li>\n
  2. Only one Carrier (CV) is used in each team, and each CV is matched with a like-tiered CV on the opposite team in mirror fashion.<\/li>\n
  3. Up to two Battleships (BB) are permitted in each team.<\/li>\n
  4. Up to four Destroyers (DD) are permitted in each team.<\/li>\n
  5. There are no restrictions on the number of cruisers (CA) that participate.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Your team should, if possible, consist of maximum-tier vessels (Tier 8), unless you have specific reasons to choose otherwise.\u00a0 I won\u2019t deny that such reasons exist \u2013 for instance, if you know you are entering a destroyer-heavy fight, downshifting your Tier-8 cruiser to a Tier-7 USS Atlanta may be a very viable tactic (I do this myself, with great success).<\/p>\n

    If you choose not, or are unable, to field a Carrier, then your force should include at least one (preferably two or more) cruisers with significant AA capability.\u00a0 Some DDs can help in this regard, notably the IJN and US lines with their enhanced-AA \u201cC\u201d hulls.\u00a0 These are no replacement for a good solid AA cruiser, but in a pinch they can be pressed into service helping a BB fend off air attacks.<\/p>\n

    If and when you DO field a CV, make sure it is a Tier-8, and if at all possible, get the captain trained up to possess the level 5 commander skill \u201cAir Supremacy\u201d \u2013 this equips all squadrons with an additional fighter, which is an absolute killer advantage.\u00a0 CV captains without this skill fighting against fighter groups with it are positively crippled.<\/p>\n

    Your DD force should consist of at least two, and preferably three vessels.\u00a0 Distribution should include one IJN for the stealth-torping role, and the remainder US or Soviet for their speed and gun capabilities.\u00a0 All of these will start a match as scouts and cappers, quickly becoming involved in spotting enemy light craft for the big guns to work on.\u00a0 Mid-game they will be hunting down the remaining enemy DDs, and end-game they will be delivering finishing blows to separated enemy ships or herding enemies back into the guns of the team.<\/p>\n

    What you choose for BBs and CAs is really dependent on what your team has available and feels best in driving.\u00a0 I have a distinct rule that I try to always keep alive in every game \u2013 never force a player to run a valuable game in a ship (s)he isn\u2019t comfortable driving.\u00a0 <\/em>Your player will be worth a lot more in the end driving the CA (s)he loves than in a detested BB.\u00a0 That said, do try to fill out the two BB slots if you can with players that like driving those classes, and the remainder can be various cruisers.<\/p>\n

    Game Goals<\/h3>\n

    This is probably the most important thing to take note of that will differ from Randoms dramatically, while seeming to be identical in nature.\u00a0 I\u2019ll phrase it as a question:<\/p>\n

    What wins the game?<\/em><\/p>\n

    The answer is simple.<\/p>\n

    POINTS.<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n

    Points win the game.\u00a0 No ifs, ands, or buts.\u00a0 Yes, total elimination will win as well, but in Ranked and Team fights, points are insanely important relative to a Random fight.\u00a0 The reason for this is the lower number of combatants on these large maps.\u00a0 A single DD can evade your remaining team for a very long time and run out the clock on you before you ever wipe him out.\u00a0 If the enemy offers you a TE victory, by all means take it, but don\u2019t get caught up in tunnel-vision chasing kills.\u00a0 That\u2019s a good way to overlook that the enemy has capped an extra base and has established a point lead on you.<\/p>\n

    It is of intense<\/em> importance that you establish a point lead early, and maintain it through the game.\u00a0 Even better, establish a points gain lead<\/em> early on, and end the game sooner by capping the game out.\u00a0 Kills are wonderful to get, but they are entirely secondary to victory in terms of points.\u00a0 The only way you should be viewing the value of kills is as it pertains to protecting your captured caps, removing points from the enemy team, and granting them to your own.<\/p>\n

    Each map in the Ranked\/Team setup has two, sometimes three capture points (caps).\u00a0 These are the absolute priority in these games.\u00a0 Establish dominance on one of them right away to give your team an advantage, or at least to maintain parity with the enemy.\u00a0 If you find you are even on score, remember that even if you can\u2019t take it away, simply driving through the side of an enemy-owned cap you can stop point gain there while you are in it \u2013 and after the first tick, your team has the advantage.\u00a0 This is one of the cases where a ship might make a sacrifice play, letting the enemy destroy their ship (with the resulting point exchange) so long as the cap is paralyzed long enough to grant his\/her team a point lead after the destruction of his\/her ship.<\/p>\n

    A note on the destruction of the enemy \u2013 of course as an arcade game of warships, your goals should include the destruction of enemy vessels.\u00a0 As I mentioned above this is primarily the case in order to gain a point advantage, but there is another benefit that is almost as important:<\/p>\n

    Reducing the enemy\u2019s ability to shoot your team<\/em>.<\/p>\n

    I could dig into the game theory behind this, but if you\u2019re interested in that, there are entire books devoted to the particular calculus behind this. \u00a0Instead, I\u2019ll simplify it for the layman who don\u2019t want to be bothered with the equations J.<\/p>\n

    Here\u2019s the deal:\u00a0 every shot you take should be with the intention of reducing the enemy\u2019s firepower.\u00a0 Think of it this way \u2013 each team has a total pool of endurance (\u201chit points\u201d or \u201chealth\u201d), and a total pool of aggression (each ship\u2019s damage-per-second, or \u201cDPS\u201d).\u00a0 These pools are divided up among the seven enemy vessels unequally, and protected differently from one another.\u00a0 Let\u2019s look at each class and break out how they\u2019d look on a blackboard discussing their value.<\/p>\n

    Destroyers<\/em> \u2013 these are \u2018glass cannon\u2019 vessels with extremely light hit point pools, very low protection, and very high-alpha opportunity weapons (torpedoes) and generally reasonable \u2013 sometimes highly threatening \u2013 guns.\u00a0 They possess the almost-unique ability to find, target, and destroy enemy vessels without ever being spotted themselves, and their speed makes them an extremely flexible class capable of taking capture points much more ably than any other.\u00a0 This makes them the highest threat on the water.<\/p>\n

    Cruisers \u2013 <\/em>lightly- to medium-armored vessels with good- to high-value weapons of both the torp and cannon varieties, as well as significant secondary talents in their AA and Sonar capacities.<\/p>\n

    Battleships<\/em> \u2013 heavily-armored vessels with very high-alpha cannon, generally good self-defense armaments in the form of secondaries\/AA batteries\/torpedoes.<\/p>\n

    Carriers<\/em> \u2013 mildly durable with light armor, these vessels have self-contained weapons of the longest range and flexibility of all the ships available.\u00a0 They also have the highest intelligence value of any ship in the fleet.\u00a0 It is notable that the threat value of this class, once they exhaust their supply of aircraft, plummets to something slightly above zero.<\/p>\n

    So, how does this relate to your shooting decisions?<\/p>\n

    Because of their value to the enemy and their threat to your fleet, Destroyers should be priority targets \u2013 ALWAYS<\/em>.\u00a0 (I say \u2018always\u2019, knowing full well that there will inevitably be exceptions to that case, but I maintain that you should by default treat DDs as the highest-value targets on the battlefield.)\u00a0 If there is ever a chance that you can put a pounding on a DD, do it.<\/p>\n

    If you don\u2019t have a DD to shoot at, your entire team should be choosing a single cruiser in effective range <\/em>and dumping guns on it until it dies.\u00a0 After that, pick another and repeat.<\/p>\n

    The reason for this is that even though a Battleship might have higher threat-value, it is also significantly better armored, and has a higher health pool to protect itself with \u2013 and the abililty to recover that health durinng the course of a game.\u00a0 Most cruisers at Tier 8 don\u2019t have the ability to recover their health (the Atago being a notable exception).\u00a0 When you hit a cruiser, it will take far less effort to remove its guns from play than it would to take out a Battleship.<\/p>\n

    Let\u2019s put it into some hypothetical numbers \u2013 let\u2019s say Cruiser A has 35k hit points and an artillery rating of 50.\u00a0 Battleship B has 70k hit points and an artillery rating of 80.\u00a0 The BB also has about twice the armor that the CA does, meaning it will take about twice as many shots to do 1hp of damage than it would the CA.\u00a0 So\u2026to kill the CA will take \u00bc the number of shots that it will take to kill the BB, because the BB has twice the health and twice the armor.<\/p>\n

    So for 25% of the effort of killing the BB, we can kill a ship that has 62.5% of its firepower.\u00a0 That is a significant difference, and that difference is compounded with every moment that cruiser is left to survive (if we tried for the BB, for example, it would take four times<\/em> the amount of time to kill it than it would the CA, during which time both the CA and the BB are firing back and causing your team damage \u2013 instead, we spend a quarter of that time killing the CA and we reduce the enemy firing capability by almost half very early on).<\/p>\n

    That means Cruisers are a high-value target \u2013 and if you don\u2019t have a DD to shoot, beat a cruiser to death on a rock.\u00a0 You want to take his weapons out of the fight as quickly as possible.\u00a0 Then the next one.\u00a0 And the next.\u00a0 Save the BBs for last.<\/p>\n

    Battleships \u2013 unless no better targets are available, save these monsters to deal with last.\u00a0 When you do start on the goliaths, make sure to stick to one and have the entire team focus on it until it dies.\u00a0 The reason here is twofold \u2013 first, and similarly to your tactics against cruisers, because you get rid of his\/her guns quicker.\u00a0 Second, because BBs can heal up the damage they take.\u00a0 By waiting until last, you deny them this ability early in the game, and by focus-firing until the target expires, you prevent the healing from having any significant impact on the outcome.\u00a0 It\u2019s worth noting that once you begin on a battleship, generally you need to keep at it until it is dead for this reason.\u00a0 If you give it a chance to escape, it will heal up a significant amount of the damage you\u2019ve done, will put out fires, stop flooding, and so on, which means you\u2019ll have to repeat all that work you put in to damage it in the first place.\u00a0 Repeating work is a no-no.<\/p>\n

    Carriers \u2013 if a CV player gives you a clean shot to shoot it, by all means do.\u00a0 It\u2019s a high-value target second only to DDs in value early in the game, and killing a CV early can give you a really healthy advantage.\u00a0 One thing to check \u2013 if the CV has exhausted its supply of planes, or if all it has left are fighters and your DD players indicate that this isn\u2019t a big deal to them, then you can safely ignore the CV until all other targets are dealt with.\u00a0 The important thing here is to make sure you pull its teeth \u2013 that means its threat value against your team is just about zero (its only option will be to ram you, and you\u2019ll see that coming with plenty of time to react).\u00a0 Rule of thumb: If it has no planes and you have other targets you could shoot, ignore it and focus on others.\u00a0 Under any other circumstance, burn it to death.<\/p>\n

    So in short, unless the tactical situation dictates otherwise, your targeting priority should be as follows:<\/p>\n

    DD > CV > CA > BB.\u00a0 Choose the one with the least health to start with and work your way up that chain.<\/p>\n

    There is a lot more information to come – I’ll be linking each individual page for the maps, and one for the ship-roles, below.<\/h2>\n

    Ship Class Roles:<\/p>\n

    This section will be a short essay describing the purposes of the various ship classes in the different stages of the game.\u00a0 It is not meant to be rigidly adhered to, as some ships tend to \u2018break the mold,\u2019 but to serve as a general guideline of what your ship should be doing if you are having trouble establishing that.<\/p>\n

    I will divide the conceptual portions of the game into three parts \u2013 early, mid, and end-game.\u00a0 These aren\u2019t necessarily related to the number of minutes on the clock, but how close you are to the actual end of the game (1000 points or total elimination).<\/p>\n

    Early<\/em> game is the very beginning \u2013 both teams are still fully stocked, and the scores are even with neither side having an advantage.<\/p>\n

    Mid<\/em> game starts after a few losses have been established or one team achieves and holds a point lead for more than about sixty seconds.<\/p>\n

    End<\/em> game starts when one team has a 2-3 ship advantage, or a team has a lead and a score >700 with one or more caps adding to that score every tick.<\/p>\n

    Destroyers<\/a><\/h3>\n

    Cruisers<\/a><\/h3>\n

    Battleships<\/a><\/h3>\n

    Carriers<\/a><\/h3>\n

    Maps:<\/h2>\n

    Because of the importance of points and capturing bases in these fights, the position of starting points and cap points on the maps involved dominate the tactics on which they are fought.\u00a0 There are at the time of this writing, six maps on which Ranked and Team battles are fought:<\/p>\n

    Atlantic <\/strong><\/a><\/span>\u2013 a temperate-themed mix of islands with a stretch of open water, two cap points.<\/p>\n

    Islands of Ice<\/strong><\/a><\/span> \u2013 an Arctic-themed map littered with islands\/icebergs and a small strip of open ocean through the center, three cap points.<\/p>\n

    Land of Fire<\/strong><\/a><\/span> \u2013 a rather unique map with one side dominated by a mix of small islands, the opposite side being almost open, and three cap points of varying sizes.<\/p>\n

    North <\/strong><\/a><\/span>\u2013 moderately open, this map is dominated by large land masses in the center which create alleyways and natural choke-points.\u00a0 Two cap points.<\/p>\n

    Ocean<\/strong> <\/a><\/span>\u2013 a terrain-free map, entirely open.\u00a0 Three caps.<\/p>\n

    Shatter<\/strong> <\/a><\/span>\u2013 similar in nature to \u201cNorth\u201d in that it is moderately open around the outside, but dominated by large land masses in the center and a smattering of islands among them.\u00a0 Three cap points.<\/p>\n

     <\/p>\n

     <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Hi all \u2013 and thanks for tuning in.\u00a0 This article will discuss general principles of tournament-style play on Ranked and Team battles in World of Warships, most specifically with regard to the 3rd Season of Ranked and the 1st Season … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-1066","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/borkedcode.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1066","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/borkedcode.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/borkedcode.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/borkedcode.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/borkedcode.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1066"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/borkedcode.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1066\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1106,"href":"https:\/\/borkedcode.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1066\/revisions\/1106"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/borkedcode.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1066"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}