Gunnery & Tactics

Knowing the controls will not win you a fight. These are the habits that separate a captain who trades evenly from one who walks away from a battleship duel with half their hit points intact.

Angling: the single most valuable habit

Effective armour thickness is the plate thickness divided by the cosine of the impact angle. In practice this means a belt presented at 60° behaves like roughly double its printed thickness, and past about 70° from the surface normal an armour-piercing shell stops trying to penetrate and ricochets off entirely.

So do not show a broadside to a battleship. Turn your bow toward the threat and fight at an angle — around 30–45° off, far enough that your rear turrets still bear. Battleships in particular have thick bow plating specifically so this works. The cost is that angling reduces how many guns you can bring to bear, which is the trade the whole fight turns on.

The reverse is also true: when you are shooting, look for the enemy who is showing you flat sides. A broadside cruiser at close range is the best target in the game.

Choosing ammunition

The AP/HE decision is not a preference, it is arithmetic against the target in front of you.

Use AP against anything whose armour you can actually beat, and especially against a broadside cruiser or battleship — that is where citadel hits come from.
Use HE when you cannot penetrate: a destroyer that your big guns would simply overpenetrate, a heavily angled battleship, or a target you want to set on fire and strip of modules rather than kill outright.
Battleship guns against destroyers are the classic trap. AP passes straight through for reduced damage; HE will do far more.
Cruisers firing at a bow-on battleship are wasting AP. Switch to HE, start fires, and let the burn do work your guns cannot.

Remember the swap has a reload cost — decide before the target is in range, not after.

Leading a target

At 15 km a shell may be in the air for twenty seconds or more. A cruiser at 30 knots covers roughly 300 metres in that time, which is several ship lengths.

Fire at the point the target will reach, not the lead pip's position at the moment you click — the pip assumes constant course and speed.
The corollary, when you are the one being shot at: change something. A single rudder order or throttle change during the enemy's shell flight is often enough to make an entire salvo miss. Experienced captains never hold a steady course while under long-range fire.
Watch where the enemy's shells land. Splashes short and ahead of you mean they are leading correctly and you should change speed; splashes behind mean they are still tracking your old course.

Spending damage control

Damage control clears fires and flooding and repairs modules, and then it goes on cooldown. The mistake almost everybody makes is using it immediately on the first fire.

A single fire is survivable. Two or three fires at once, or fire plus flooding, is what actually kills.
Flooding is more urgent than fire — it worsens on its own and costs you speed, which costs you the ability to dodge.
If you are in a torpedo-heavy area, consider holding damage control specifically for the flooding you are about to take.
A jammed rudder is worth an immediate repair. A ship stuck in a turn under fire is dead.

Torpedo evasion

Torpedoes are slow. Detected early, they are almost always avoidable.

Turn toward the torpedoes, not away. Presenting your bow narrows your profile to a fraction of a broadside and lets the spread pass either side. Running away shows them your full length.
Do not stop. A stationary ship is the easiest possible torpedo target.
Expect torpedoes whenever a destroyer disappears behind an island or into smoke.

Concealment and spotting

You are visible when you are within a ship's detection range, and firing your main battery gives away your position well beyond it. That makes concealment an active resource:

Destroyers see further than they are seen. That advantage disappears the moment you open fire.
At night nothing is visible until it shoots or is illuminated. A star shell over an enemy formation turns a blind brawl into a shooting gallery.
Islands block line of sight and shells alike. Fighting from behind one is legitimate and effective.
Smoke breaks the spot, but a ship firing from inside smoke is still detected at close range — and everyone knows roughly where the smoke is.

Playing each class

Destroyers

Fast, invisible, made of paper. Your job is spotting, torpedoes and contesting objectives, not gunfighting cruisers. Use islands, never sail in a straight line, and remember that any capital ship that sees you will delete you.

Light cruisers

High rate of fire, weak armour. You are a fire-starting machine and the main answer to destroyers and aircraft. Stay mobile, use HE liberally, and never show a flat side to a battleship.

Heavy cruisers

The generalists — enough gun to hurt anything, not enough armour to be careless. Fight at mid-range where your accuracy is good and battleship shells are more likely to overpenetrate or ricochet.

Battleships

You are the anvil. Angle constantly, pick targets showing broadside, and accept that you will sometimes take a full salvo — that is what the armour is for. Your worst enemies are torpedoes and your own impatience.

Submarines

Patience. Position ahead of the enemy's course, dive, wait, and fire a spread at something that cannot manoeuvre. Escaping is the hard part: go deep, change course, and let the escorts drop charges where you were.

Carriers

Stand off, strike continuously, and keep fighters back. Watch the map, not just your aircraft — a carrier that loses track of the destroyer working around its flank loses the game.