If you're like me, you've probably moved over from World of Warships because you've gotten sick of RNGesus ruling your shots or like the idea of controlling submarines in fleet battles and if that is the case, you'll most likely assume that all of the mechanics work the same. Never mind that this is an entirely different set of rules but that doesn't really matter to noobs like you. From the first time you see an enemy Battleship that has less hitpoints than your Destroyer has total, you may ignore unimportant factors like momentum, displacement, and armor and just ram him to your death. Not to worry, pal, the first time you impale your V170-class destroyer on the belt armor of a South Carolina-class Battleship, you'll feel proud in having a long and illustrious career of Noobhood ahead of you!

If you want to go the extra mile in being a noob, you have to have the King of Noobs as one of your ship commanders who is, NOT coincidentally, one of the commanders you get to start with: Elton "Stormtrooper" Grey!




On the face of things Elton Grey seems like a decent Steersman that improves your maneuverability all around but once you get to Level 5, you unlock a totally awesome skill that really improves the accuracy of your gunners!

Shown here: Totally not a de-buff



Don't worry about the references to it "increasing" aiming speed or "decreasing" accuracy, that's just the Chinese developers failing to understand the intricacies of English and not at all them warning you to not walk into an obvious trap.

Like this!


With the aiming skills of your gunners completely and thoroughly wrecked, you will experience such joys as being unable to support your team, getting slaughtered from long range by enemy destroyers who aren't braindead, getting nuked by invisible Battleships and Cruisers, and trying all sorts of idiotic tactics just to not die horribly within the first 3 minutes. If you don't want to face all this joy, you can always buy Reinhard Von Musel the first chance you get or if that's not on option, just leave a blank space where Elton Grey should be.

So... you haven't had much luck with scouting in a Destroyer despite the pleadings of your heavier teammates so maybe it's time to change tactics. No, it has nothing to do with the fact that you're using Elton Grey as your Gunner (!!!) or that you YOLO'd in like an idiot and got within secondary battery range of every motherf'ing Battleship on the enemy team. They're just lousy experts who are taking time off from their highest tier Battleships to try out their old hunk'a Burning Love (Kongou dess!!!) and you're a f'ing noob so you know better than them!

Raiding enemy carriers has the advantage of letting them run away from you while wiggling their booty so they can bring every single one of their guns to bear on you while you can only fire your forward guns at them. It also has the bonus of leaving your heavy surface assets completely f'ing blind and unable to offer any sort of support whatsoever while enemy Destroyers spot them from invisibility and call in heavy naval artillery fire to completely massacre them without any threat of repercussions and leave you without any friends IF you survive.

In fact flanking the enemy team without any support whatsoever is an awesome idea for these exact reasons! Bonus points if you get into secondary gun battery range of an enemy Battleship in order to torpedo him.

If you're in a Destroyer, chances are you want to see the world and always push forward, not one step back! That's okay because Battleships, Aircraft Carriers, and Heavy Cruisers can actually handle themselves quite well for about a minute at best against Submarines. You've got enemies to spot, Destroyers to kill, and Aircraft to shoot down so if they can't provide effective supporting fire, it's their fault for desperately Torpedo-beating while getting incessantly shelled at the same time.

If you REALLY want to go the extra mile in Noobhood, ignore their cries for help and just tunnel-vision on whatever you were doing because if you ain't tunnel-visioning, you ain't trying!

We all know the feeling at T4, Night Battles leave you bloody blind and the only thing they give you to see your hand in front of your bloody face is a small star shell that you can only fire about every 30 seconds. As such, the best way to make use of these flares is to carpet the entire f'ing map with as many of them as possible. This has the advantage of telegraphing your position to the entire enemy team to get counter-flared and focused down as well as standing a good chance of accidentally lighting up your own teammates effectively painting a giant red bullseye on their hull.

Sure you could just watch for enemy flares and shell-fire and flare those positions, force the enemy's hand by capping, or even blunder into them at point-blank range so you can commit sodomy with 21 inches (or 24 if you're more of a weeb) but come on, this is a video game, not a differential calculus class!

It's no great secret that matches from Tiers 1-3 are padded with bots in destroyers that are given the most ret.arded AI available to let beginners get hooked in the game from the get-go and stroke their Internet Pianist (Stupid discount Speech Synth!) by farming One Man Army medals. While the bots and inevitable Elton Grey-t.ards may absolutely suck against other ships, there is nothing they love more than to forget everything about their miserable surface-combat existence and start shooting up the only target they can actually hit: aircraft.

Getting all of your aircraft shot down before they can so much as dent an enemy ship is a great way to learn the basics of carrier gameplay especially when you can get better results by using your ship as a battering ram! In fact, don't even bother with using Free XP to get to T4 because that costs actual money and the developers are so unwilling to just give it away that you can get 1000-2000 Free XP each day just through normal gameplay!

When you're in a Destroyer, it is important to be as slow as possible in getting to the frontline as well as weave all over the place when none of the enemies are spotted in order to confuse absolutely everyone about what your intentions really are. This has the benefit of p.issing off your heavier assets as they swing their turrets to match every motherf'ing turn you make and regularly throwing off their aim. Don't worry about the CTRL button either since all it does when you hold it is allow you to click on the minimap and show everyone else where you're going but that's not really important now is it?

British Destroyers are one of those classes of ships that really need a f'ing instruction manual but since you're a noob, you don't give a rat's @$$ about that! I mean, I could tell you that their guns are accurate at long range but less useful at short range or that their side-mounted depth charges take a while to splash down and the momentum of your ship carries over to them but come on! You're a noob! Why should you care?

Do you like getting shelled into oblivion by ships you can't even see? Great, because now you can take those purely "cosmetic" paint jobs that you have to pay real money for if you don't want to renew the rent every week and tell them where they can stick it!

Shown here: just how "cosmetic" those paint jobs are

You may also think that the rear-echelon ships like Heavy Cruisers and Battleships don't really need paint and there is nothing like losing a gunfight with a Laforey-class destroyer to show you how right you are

HMS Laforey re-arming in its anchorage

Seriously, paint is really just more trouble than it's worth.[/sarcasm]

So you're still having problems with spotting that [DELETED] enemy destroyer? That's probably because the enemy is using some advanced, overpowered commander set or that overpowered piece of Bulls*** HMS Zumwalt and has nothing to do with the fact that your Comms Officer isn't Level 10 yet. Because let's be honest, the level of your commanders has no bearing at how good they are at their job, just the skills they unlock.


As is shown here by a Levels 9 and 10 Comms officer respectively

This means that before get a Tier 6 destroyer, you should not do anything like powergrinding your comms officers, especially in your Fubuki (because who hasn't kept their Funbuki), or buying Naval Tactics books every chance you get in order to speed up the leveling. With every last bit of fun replaced by frustration the more matches you play, you too will probably abandon the game forever like every other noob before you and leave the high-tier games to be populated only by the truly skilled/insane.

So you've gotten a ways into the game, put a few battles under your belt and you've come to really appreciate just how squishy, delightful, and useless Carriers are. As such, you might be forgiven for seeing a lone Carrier as the last surviving member of the enemy team and think only of padding your damage. That's okay because there are only two types of Carrier captain: Worthless Idiots and F***ing Superman!

The high skill ceiling and incredibly powerful capabilities of Carriers mean that there is no middle ground and when you run into an enemy Carrier, it's really a lottery as to which kind you're actually running into. In layman's terms, that means charge right ahead into any potential torpedo hell and soon, you too will understand all those sado-masochists who play Dwarf Fortress when they say, "Losing is fun."

You may have had trouble with HMS Laforey Zumwalt sitting in a smoke cloud and shelling you from invisibility but that's really just a factor of the ship's ultra-futuristic radar systems because you know that old maxim from World of Warships: smokescreens work both ways. Never mind the fact that this is Steel Ocean and Smoke Clouds might as well be invisible when you're inside them and while this is going on, you can count on getting spotted every time you open fire.

Now you could follow proper procedure by making trade-offs between forward position and speed at time of contact, waiting for support fire, minimizing your profile to the enemy, making radical maneuvers in preparation for....

♥♥♥♥ it! I'm gonna need another guide and more booze!

It's no great secret that the devs tried to cater to the Kantai Collection fanbase, just look at the IJN submarine line! It is thus your duty as an otaku noob to be as annoying as possible. This is especially the case when sailing a Shiratsuyu-class destroyer which for all intents and purposes, is the Yuudachi-class. Poi hard, Poi fast, Poi often, and not just when you've massacred the entire enemy team. Also, make sure to refer to ships by their KanColle nicknames when trying to give your teammates valuable information in order to confuse them as much as possible...

...alright, I might be taking the p.iss here. Just have fun out there and noob on!