Video Game / World of Warships

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World of Warships is a Naval Combat Simulator from Wargaming.Net (the same company behind World of Tanks and World of Warplanes). Announced in 2014, the game went through a closed beta and open beta through much of 2015, with its formal official launching on September 17, 2015

This game is essentially Cool Boat incarnate.^note Or, Cool Boat: The Game if you think about it.

Here, you start out with warships from the pre-World War I era up until the post-World War II-era, with a few early 20th century ships here and there. They range from mass-produced ships like the Fletcher-class destroyer or Cleveland-class cruiser, to single prototypes like the ''Taiho'' or ''Shimakaze'', or even vehicles that only made it into blueprint stage.

Ships here are divided into five categories as of the current patch: destroyers (DD), cruisers (CA/CL), battleships (BB), aircraft carriers (CV/CVL), and submarines (SS). Destroyers are used for escorting larger ships, as well as for attacking battleships and aircraft carriers with their torpedoes and rapid-firing artillery. Cruisers are essentially similar to the medium tanks of WoT in that they're usually the mainstay of a team, and are capable of fulfilling several tasks throughout a match, ranging from mobile Anti-Air platform to escorts for carriers and battleships, and even hunting destroyers and other cruisers. Battleships are for engaging enemy ships at long range with their powerful main armament and are capable of destroying smaller ships in a few salvos. Aircraft carriers have planes that can be used for scouting enemy ships, intercepting enemy aircraft, and damaging or destroying enemy capital ships, at the cost of having no primary armament or defense whatsoever. And lastly, submarines are for sneaking around underwater and firing torpedoes at any surface ship that comes within range.

It is the company's third MMO entry, which features American, Japanese, Soviet, British, German, French, Italian, and Polish warships. So far, only the American, British and Japanese trees are fully populated: the Germans currently have three lines plus a single premium aircraft carrier; the French and Russians have three lines; the Polish tree has only a single premium ship; the Pan-Asian Navy (a whole group of non-Japanese Asian navies who aren't worth being added into the game as separate nations) consists of three Premium ships and a single Destroyer line; the "Commonwealth Navy" (a catch-all for British-affiliated smaller navies like Australia) has two premium ships; and the Italian Navy has three premium ships and a single cruiser line. Currently in the works are a Pan-European Navy (non-Great Power navies compiled together like the Pan-Asian Navy), which will start with a single destroyer line, including one premium battleship and destroyer, incorporating ships from the Swedish, Dutch and Austro-Hungarian navies.

A mobile version, World of Warships Blitz, was released on September 12, 2017, for iOS and Android.

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This game provides examples of:

Tropes A-M

• Acceptable Breaks from Reality: Like World of Tanks, the game is filled with them. Necessary to make each ship class equally impactful in battle (cf. IRL when C Vs invalidated the power dynamic of capital ships in general, and no-one would say a BB in battle is worth as much as a DD, while in-game, most of the best players understand that a well-played DD is the most impactful ship in a battle), such breaks include:
  • Torpedo reloading. In real life, only the Japanese warships with their turreted torpedo tubes were capable of reloading torpedoes in the middle of battle (and in turn only carried at most 1 reload sufficient for all their torpedo launchers). Other nations' ships equipped with torpedo launchers of any kind would have to leave the fight, or return to a port to replenish their torpedoes. This is especially true (and startlingly obvious) with most destroyer classes as the locations of their launchers, mixed with the cramped interiors meant that firing their torpedoes was effectively a one-time attack.
  • Torpedoes in this game often (but not always) tend to move much faster than their real life counterparts did. Torpedoes' wakes can also be seen at longer range than was possible in real life. The Japanese Type 93 torpedo (the infamous "Long Lance") was so deadly in reality not just because it was a 24" torpedo with a larger warhead than other nations' 21", but also because it produced no wake at all and thus the first warning Allied sailors got of a Japanese torpedo attack was their ship being blown up by the undetected torpedo. Since undetectable high-speed torpedoes would be completely broken in a video game, Japanese torpedoes in World of Warships actually are detected at slightly longer ranges than American ones.
  • Torpedoes always detonate if they hit a ship and have had enough time to arm. In reality most nations at the time deemed a torpedo successful if detonated more than 50% of the time when it struck the target. This isn't even accounting for the tendency of some torpedoes to veer off course or run too deep in the water. Modeling these phenomena in the game with any degree of accuracy would make torpedoes a very frustrating weapon to play.
  • Cruisers and destroyers have greater survivability against torpedoes than real life while carriers and battleships have a little less. While a cruiser or even a destroyer could survive a torp hit, they usually did so at the cost their bows or sterns being blown off and almost always were disabled by the event.
  • Citadels penetrations always do 100% damage no matter what type of ship it is on. This makes dispersed citadels used on ships like the Perth and Alabama^note This was such a problem on Alabama it was removed completely a disadvantage. In real life, this was done to minimize damage by spacing out machinery, but just serves to make the ships citadel a bigger target in game. Conversely, compact citadels like those featured on German battleships should be vulnerable to critical chain reactions.
  • Fires on most ships aren't all that bad unless all four points are set alight. While in real life this would apply to fires burning in the superstructure or on the weather deck, below decks any fire that is left unchecked is a threat to the ship. This is especially true with carriers which have magazines filled with aircraft ordinance, and tanks filled with aviation fuel. Neither of which react well to a fire below decks.
    • This is even more jarring with aircraft carriers after the CV rework in 2019, which made control of the aircraft carrier itself almost completely automatic so that players can focus on "flying" a squadron of bombers. This included damage control automatically activating when set on fire. Since AI isn't advanced enough to know when it would be a good idea to just let a single fire burn (a standard tactic of skilled players whenever there's a risk that more fires could be set immediately after damage control goes on cooldown; conversely it's also a standard tactic to try to bait the enemy into exactly that situation), CVs were constantly on fire in the initial testing of the rework. So Wargaming decided to make CVs automatially extinguish any fire after a mere 5 seconds^note Battleships and a handful of supercruisers have a base fire duration of 60 seconds, with other supercruisers having 45 seconds and standard cruisers and destroyers having 30 seconds. Pre-rework aircraft carriers also had a 60 second fire duration., rendering them effectively immune to fire. Whether this break from reality remains "acceptable" is highly contentious among players.
  • Warships that have secondary guns are unable to use said guns unless the target is within a set distance from them, and even then, they can barely hit anything. Even at higher tiers, it takes choosing the right captain skills and upgrade modules to make secondaries truly dangerous, while at the bottom tiers they seem to be aimed by sailors who are both blind and drunk. In real life, these guns were mostly, if not all directed by the same gun directors that the main guns were, and could be fired in sync with the main battery for maximum volley tonnage. The secondaries are also in some cases (most notably the 5"/38 turrets on American high-tier cruisers and battleships) much slower to reload than they were in reality. Like most breaks from reality involving battleships, this is to keep destroyers from being made irrelevant. In real life, the firepower of a battleship's secondary battery would be like bolting a destroyer or even a light cruiser on each side.
  • Destroyers and light cruisers can still be seen with depth charges on deck during battles. In reality even if their was an high submarine risk a warship under fire would dump its depth charges because of extreme danger an accidental depth charge detonation risks.
  • While a ship may explode if its magazines are hit, it never will because its torpedoes are hit. In reality torpedoes where an extreme explosion hazard and were often jettisoned or fired at the first opportunity when a ship armed with them came under fire. Japanese "Long Lance" torpedoes were even worse since they used compressed oxygen as an oxidizer instead of air.
  • Aircraft carriers don't have magazines in their damage models. This is because only main battery magazines are subject to the magazine detonation mechanic, not secondary or AA guns. Carriers don't have a main battery, so there's no main battery magazine. Carriers in reality all had magazines to store the bombs and torpedoes for their strike aircraft, which were every bit as much of a detonation risk as the magazines of other warships.
  • Similarly, torpedoes do not count as part of a ship's magazines. In reality, torpedoes were often even more prone to detonation than the main guns' ammunition and powder magazines. Especially true of the Japanese Type 93 torpedoes that used pure oxygen rather than compressed air in their fuel system; there are multiple recorded instances of destroyers and cruisers being lost because of torpedo rack detonations. But since torpedo tubes are never armored and in most cases are right out in the open, making them part of the magazine hitbox would result in detonations being far too common and ruining everybody's fun.
  • The way concealment works is a bit... odd, given that most battles take place during clear days. For example, destroyers are practically invisible at higher tiers, in reality though a Destroyer's smoke plume could give it's position away to lookouts when it was cresting the horizon. Even in foul weather, radar or passive hydro acoustics would give a ships position away long before it would in game. Also, if a destroyer has friendly ships nearby that can spot for it, a smoke screen becomes a one-way mirror, allowing the destroyer to see and fire on enemy vessels while remaining invisible.
  • Warships are scaled about 3 times bigger than the distances would indicate, and also cover much more distance with speeds being scaled accordingly. If they were scaled to the rest of the map they would hardly be much more than pinpricks at long range unless you zoom in, and battleship shells would take around half a minute to reach 20 kilometers. This scaling is to make battles on a 20-minute timer actually possible.
  • Turret rotation speed is much more of a factor in the game because of the scaling and the distances the combat take place at. In reality even at 5 kilometers (point blank range for a battleship) it would take more than half an hour for a destroyer at full speed to sail a circle at that distance.
  • Japanese cruisers invariably have shorter-ranged torpedoes than destroyers of the same era, even if in real life the ships in question had identical torpedo tubes, as having cruiser guns and the ability to fire torpedoes from beyond detection range would be overpowered. Though starting at Tier VIII it's possible to, with the right upgrades and captain skills, give IJN cruisers a very narrow window to fire their torpedoes from concealment, this is difficult to take advantage of.
  • In general, battles are significantly faster than they were in real life due to the game utilizing distance compression. Naval engagements took hours, and were sometimes multi-day affairs, with fleets breaking or losing contact with the enemy fleet for several more hours, before reengaging latter.
  • Every ship's detection range by air is shorter, usually significantly so, than its surface detection range. Obviously this makes no sense (the higher you are, the further away your horizon is; this is the entire point of masts), but this serves to make concealment still relevant in games where aircraft carriers are present. Carriers can still very effectively scout the map on account of the huge speed advantage of their planes (especially fighters), but it's not auto-detection to have a plane overhead.
  • Nearly every battleship of the historical period covered were equipped with torpedoes as part of their defensive armament, though this was excised due to balancing concerns (only the German battleship line features them with few exceptions). Also, many cruisers and destroyers had additional torpedo launchers placed in the bow, which was likely left out to make torpedo hit-and-runs more challenging. This is also a matter of game mechanics; such torpedoes were invariably fixed to fire either directly ahead or at a 90-degree angle to the side, but World of Warships is only set up for torpedo tubes in turret-style mountings that can be rotated to aim. In one case, a ship that historically carried fixed torpedo tubes in the sides of its hull was given a completely fictional set of deck-mounted trainable launchers in their place.^note That is the Tier V Japanese cruiser Furutaka, which historically only received deck-mounted trainable torpedo tubes in a major refit 12 years after entering service. That refit in World of Warships is represented by the third hull upgrade. The "A" and "B" hulls were given fictional torpedo tubes in the same location (but with 1 fewer tube per side) because torpedoes are a major part of every Japanese cruiser's armament and thus a single ship in the middle of the line without them would've been quite jarring to players.
  • Sometimes secondary and primary guns that could in reality be used as dual purpose guns don't have that function in game. Sometimes the exact same guns will count as dual purpose on one ship but not the other, as demonstrated but Scharnhorst and Gneisenau.
  • Several ship in the game, notably every battleship, had to de-elevate their guns in order to reload them. This would give ships that had to do this a slight advantage as it would be harder to see where they were aiming during reloads. At the same time, many ships in reality had significant variance in their reload time on the basis of whether the guns were elevated.
  • In game destroyers are more accurate than cruisers which are in turn more accurate than battleships. If a destroyer or a cruiser mounts a light cruiser or or battleship gun respectively you can bet they will be more accurate. In reality Battleships were more accurate than destroyers until decades after WWII when digital computer assisted aim was perfected. This is because a battleship is bigger and heavier and is thus less affected by waves and recoil than smaller ships, not to mention being large enough to have target plotting rooms and mechanical computers. The game is the way it is for balance reasons.
  • US Navy warships in World War II had a fantastically advanced gunfire control system using radar and in some cases (the Iowa-class battleships and Alaska-class supercruisers) early mechanical computers, giving them incredible accuracy out to extreme range. As this would be insanely game-breaking, they have to make do with the same completely visual trial-and-error gunfire control as everyone else. Using this system, USN warships could generally "straddle" on the first salvo and start landing hits on the second.
  • Speaking of the Iowa class, Vice Admiral Katz (Former commander of the USS New Jersey) stated on the Warship Podcast [1] that the NJ took three MILES to stop from full speed to dead stop. Obviously, this is much shorter in game for balance reasons.
  • The tactic of "Crossing the T" is pretty much suicidal as you have to expose your entire broadside to do it, invariably resulting in the length of your ship getting pummeled. There are a number of reasons for this:
    • In Real Life, shell dispersion for a full broadside tends to trend towards the vertical rather than the horizontal at most combat ranges, therefore facing your enemy head-on would increase a ship's chance of being hit in most instances. The opposite is true in-game.
    • The accuracy of naval guns is heavily exaggerated, and the issues that come with maneuvering to get all of a ship's guns on target aren't modeled at all. Using the standard in-game tactic of angling, quickly exposing some of your broadside to get a salvo off, and then angling again with a real battleship would only serve to make whatever firing solution your directors had come up with useless.
    • The game considerably exaggerates the capabilities of a ship's bow plating thanks to the "overmatch" and "autobounce" mechanics. In reality the armor most ships have in this area wouldn't be enough to withstand cruiser-calibre guns no matter the angle, let alone battleship shells.
  • Destroyers does not have designated citadel area unlike real life, or they will die too fast to make meaningful impact to the match ^note In real life they do have magazines and machinery space that would count as citadel like bigger ships. In the early alpha, they do have citadels, and quickly died in droves. The citadel area is quickly removed thereafter..
  • The game is mostly free of "escort" type vessels which often served in larger numbers than their more expensive cousins. This is mostly because escort ships were more poorly armed, armored, and slower than their peers, the whole point of them being to pad numbers and avoid Quality vs. Quantity. They just wouldn't be fun to play.
  • A direct hit to the bridge would normally disable a ship, at least temporarily, with command and control functions lost until secondary command positions can be brought online. In the game, blasting away at a ship's superstructure can actually produce less damage than hitting the hull.
  • Unless the engine is damaged, a ship is able to maintain full speed no matter how many torpedoes or shell hits it has taken. Obviously, damage to the outer hull of a ship will cause it to slow down, either by disrupting the hydrodynamics, or because high speed will cause it to take on more water.
  • Ramming an island is more an annoyance than a danger in the game. In reality, running aground can cause serious damage or even total loss. Even when there is minimal damage, it's rarely simply a matter of throwing the screws in reverse, with ships often stuck so fast they must offload fuel, ammunition, and sometimes even strip off armor plating before they can be pulled free by multiple tugboats.
  • Several real-life shortcomings of various ships (American torpedoes going in circles or failing to detonate, British quad-turrets jamming, French guns bursting, Soviet high-velocity guns wearing out quickly, Italian shells made to loose tolerances resulting in massive spreads, terrible Japanese AA guns) are handwaved, because such failures would make gameplay too random and frustrating.
• Accidental Aiming Skills: A major contributor to torpedo kills, primarily caused when a ship comes sailing around an island only to discover enemy torpedoes now less than 3 seconds from impact intended for an entirely different target. It can also happen with conventional artillery, though more rarely, thanks to concealment mechanics: aim at a visible battleship, but because of how it's sailing, the shells land with devastating effect on an unawares cruiser which was unfortunately nearby... yet undetected.
• Ace Custom: Quite a few premium ships are from the same class as the free ships found in the tech tree. The premium versions however tend to have different stats that reflect real life modifications made to the vessels.
  • A strange exception to this is USS Marblehead. The real USS Marblehead (CL-12) had her two lowest casemate guns removed and replaced with a single high-mounted gun in a turret, the ship implemented in the game has the baseline gun armament but Marblehead's unique torpedo launchers.
• Advancing Wall of Doom: In an unusual case of this trope, this is essentially what happens when two or more high tier destroyers fire off their torpedoes in tandem at a target. An example of this tactic here◊, from a Shiratsuyu, Benson and Kagero^note The battleship in the picture is a Gneisenau, which cannot maneuver well enough to avoid that spread of torpedoes.
• After the End: The Savage Battle event takes place on a post-apocalyptic Earth, with ships fighting amid the remains of a city that gradually collapses during the battle. It is possibly the most fast-pitched mode in the entire game, with players only able to control destroyers that dart around the battlefield, trying to avoid enemy fire while a ring of fire around the map slowly collapses.
• All There in the Manual: An interesting variant. Not all of a ship's characteristics can be found in game, especially its shell characteristics. If you weren't paying attention to the game website or various YouTubers Wargaming works with, you wouldn't know about the "secret" abilities that makes certain ships great or at least unique.
• Alternate History: Besides the inclusion of un-built paper ships, many of the hull upgrades (or hulls in some cases) are made assuming history progressed differently. For Example:
  • Early German battleships have a theoretical final hull that add additional AA, superstructure modifications, and secondaries as if they had undergone a postwar refit and not been sunken at Scapa Flow.
  • Lyon, Alsace, and République have final hulls that not only assume they were built but eventually escaped France to join the United States Navy as attaches (as stated by the developers and evidenced by their USN standard AA). This assumption is based off of Richelieu doing the same in WWII, but would not have been a given had they been built (Dunkerque, for example, did not escape). The French cruiser line notably doesn't follow this same line of thought.
    • République also has a post war refit evidenced by a (sadly non-functional) helicopter port replacing its catapult. Richelieu was not modernized post war.
  • The only hulls currently available for Amagi follow a history where she was finished and rebuilt between wars into a fast battleship in the same vain is the Kongo. She would have also have needed to survive the earthquake that eventually destroyed her (during an air craft carrier conversion process).
  • Kii, Hakuryuu, Ibuki, and Zao feature the ultimately un-produced Japanese copy of the 40mm Bofors.
  • Kii features rebuilt engine rooms from the historical design as well as secondary and AA upgrades in line with a major post war rebuild with the twist that that IJN had many more anti aircraft guns available than they actually did.^note  had the building program that produced Kii not been stopped by the Washington Naval Treaty, its likely that Japanese battleships would feature less AA guns due to having to distribute the same number of guns over a larger amount of ships
  • Conqueror is based around hypothetical battle cruiser designs from the 20s but is stated to have theoretically been completed in 1949 to explain the more modern hull, suggesting a lot in universe Development Hell.
  • The Gneisenau was either built with the intended 15inch gun turrets or survived long enough to receive them as planned near the end of her life rather than the 11inch turrets she actually served with. The modified secondary scheme suggest the latter.
  • The stock hull Chapayev assumes that at least one of the ships of the class was launched during the war instead of either evacuated to safer locations and then completed after the war's end, or simply destroyed in their slip by the invading Germans. Evidence of this are the presence of its torpedo launchers and seaplane facilities, both of which were removed from the surviving ships (as well as the installation of radar) that were completed in the 50s. Of note, is that the B-hull, which represents the finished ships of the class, still retains the torpedo launchers.
  • De Grasse entered the game in her intended configuration as a light cruiser suggesting completion before WWII. She was actually completed as an air defense cruiser in the style of Atlanta. Such a configuration would eventually be represented in-game by her sister ship, Colbert, which was made available for testing by Community Contributors in late May of 2019.
  • The in-game appearance of Huang He, formerly ROCN Chongqing / HMS Aurora, assumes that she was rearmed with Soviet armaments following her re-float, rather than being disarmed and hulked following the re-float and spending the rest of her life as a barracks ship. In-game, her main guns were one-to-one replaced with their same caliber Soviet counterparts (ie. The same 6-inch guns as found on the Chapayev and Mikhail Kutuzov), while her secondaries were replaced with a quartet of twin 100mm guns also taken from the latter ship. This would be physically impossible, seeing as each of the Soviet 152mm/57cal guns weigh MORE THAN TWICE the weight of the British 152mm/50cal guns they were replacing, and lead to a ship that would go straight to Davey Jones' locker. This probably also counts as Acceptable Breaks from Reality. Even with the more powerful armament and a host of favorable consumables, Huang He is still often viewed as trash thanks to its abysmal durability and extremely low gun count.
  • New York and Texas both feature an aircraft catapult launcher on the middle turret. While these ships did at one point have these, they did not feature them in the configurations depicted in the game. This suggests a shift of USN policy where these ships would not be paired with other ships capable of launching aircraft.
  • The German tier 10 ships have postwar radar mounts on them, this combined with their very existance implies Nazi Germany survived the war or at least these ships did. According to the developers, Roon and Hindenburg were started as "cruiser killers" like the Deutschland class and converted to regular heavy cruisers before completion. This is a handy explanation for them being different than the designs they are based off of.
  • The fact that Kroshdadt and Stalingrad coexist in the game is interesting, as the Stalingrad class was designed because of the damage to Kronshdadt in her slip during the war.
  • Similarly Dimitri Donskoi, Moskva, and Stalingrad were all competing designs. Stalingrad was the winner and the name "Moskva" is derived from one of the incomplete Stalingrad hulls.
  • Kreml, the tier 10 Soviet battleship is an American built model, as evidenced by its imperial unit weapons. The USSR really did contract outside firms before the war for designs on Sovietsky Soyuz class. Kreml seems to have been purchased after or built during the war. Post WWII Soviet American relations would have had to be way friendlier for this hand off to occur however.
  • The presence of Hybrid Battleships in general suggests this, as the Hybrids were an Inter-War idea that was quickly tossed out for having the advantages of neither battleships nor carriers and all of the weaknesses on top of the logistical problems of supplying all that stuff on one ship. In-game, aside from the easier to hit superstructure, Hybrids can go toe-to-toe with other ships with little problem.
• American Eagle: A few skins for American ships such as the Cleveland have American eagle-themed decorations, usually released as part of a July 4th promo.
• Anti-Air: With the exception of a few early tier vessels, all ships are equipped with anti-aircraft guns to passively fight off enemy aircraft.
  • For all cruisers starting at Tier 6, US destroyers starting at Tier 5, provided they mount the researchable hull upgrade, Russian destroyers of the branch line starting at Tier 8, HMS Hood, the second UK BB branch line, the second US BB branch line, HMS Thunderer, Pan-EU DD branch line, Groningen, Tromp, the second German DD branch line, Tier 8 premium Pan-Asian destroyers, Marceau and DKM Mecklenburg, captains will be able to mount the Defensive Fire for Anti-aircraft consumable. This drastically boosts AA firepower, but also, more importantly, empowers the AA flak clouds by certain modifier, meaning that planes that accidentally or intentionally fly into them will be instantly annihilated without any mercy.
  • Historically, the Atlanta- and Cleveland-classes were designed and built with anti-air in mind since they were meant as anti-aircraft escorts for aircraft carriers and battleships. In essence, they're floating embodiments of this trope ("If it flies, it dies").
  • Soviet destroyers of Tiers 5 and higher have surprisingly good anti-aircraft capabilities, with some high-tier Soviet destroyers having dual-purpose secondaries and AA firepower to rival Japanese cruisers.
  • Later tier American battleships and aircraft carriers ^note  The most recent patches have given carriers of both sides a variation of this consumable, albeit only affecting small caliber AA guns , while lacking the defensive fire consumable found in the cruisers and destroyers, make up for it by bristling with dozens upon dozens of quadruple Bofors guns and Dual Oerlikon mounts.
    • The North Carolina-class fast battleship deserves special mention, as many players tend to augment its already insane AA suite. In Tier 8 matches they usually have the best AA rating out of any ship. What makes this bizarre is is that the North Carolina is a battleship, which are normally prey for aircraft carriers. The North Carolina however can protect its allies from air attack and its not uncommon for them to have more plane kills than any other ship in the match. This was very much Truth in Television; toward the end of the war, American battleships had just about every spare bit of deck space crowded with a boatload of 40mm Bofors and 20mm Oerlikon guns.
    • The premium battleship USS Texas has the most AA of its tier by a fairly wide margin. When outfitted with an AA load out she can easily shoot down entire squadrons of planes at and even above her tier.
  • Battleship Jean Bart and cruiser Worcester are notable for have post war AA suites with an "all long range" setup. As you may have guessed, this means that all their AA guns can fire at max distance ^note Well close enough, which means it is not a good idea to attack either of these ships when their are other targets.
• Anti-Frustration Features: Following the introduction of Submarines, all ships were given some form of depth charges to defend themselves with.
• April Fools' Day: Although Wargaming tied it to Cosmonauts' Day the week after, the belated observation of April Fools 2015 in World of Warships is considered epic by anime buffs. Why? Because SPACESHIP WARFARE, complete with the frickin' SPACE BATTLESHIP YAMATO.
  • 2016 saw players sailing in Palette Swap scale models of Captain Bad Advice's cruiser, in Captain Bad Advice's own Jacuzzi.
    • The Wargaming website also included a series of fake signal flags for April Fools' Day, including a commemorative The Mighty Jingles Flag which has the listed stats of a 10% chance to misidentify spotted ships (something Jingles is infamous for in his Youtube videos) and an added 15% chance of setting a ship on fire if it's hit in the rear (a veiled reference to his use of the "surprise buttsex" meme in his videos).
  • 2017's April Fool's joke was the addition of an unplayable submarine to all player's ports, with a captain called "Bussianrias". If one attempted to enter battle with the sub, a tooltip appeared, stating that "One does not simply enter battle in a submarine." The submarine (a real Soviet WW2 "Shchuka" class) also had snowmen visible manning the deck guns and the helm.
  • 2018 brings back Space Battles, with considerably expanded ship options (albeit with Yamato not in roster) and localized weather effect on map. Wargaming Japan also made Twitter posts joking about putting in some of Azur Lane's mechanic into the game...then followed up the next day (thus not April Fools) that they're actually having collaborations with Azur Lane.
• Arbitrary Weapon Range:
  • Torpedoes (especially aircraft ones) require a few seconds to arm after hitting the water which means that dropping them too close to an enemy ship will result in a dud attack. Truth in Television, because arming before hitting the water would cause the torpedo to explode harmlessly when splashing into the water. The delay was meant to prevent premature detonation. World War II Japanese destroyer captain Tameichi Hara of Amatsukaze also stated that Japanese Type-93 Long Lance shipboard torpedoes had safety devices that would arm the torpedo only after 500 meters, a fact that saved USS San Francisco from being sunk by his ship. The delay was meant to prevent torpedoes from sinking their parent ship by colliding with them after launch or accidentally exploding too close.
  • The programmers set "effective maximum range" as the hardcoded limit for every gun instead of "actual maximum range" which would've made engagements very ridiculous as it simply would've made the maps too small to stay out of the firing range of the Battleships. The obvious solution to this problem would have been to increase the map size to 200-300% which would've drastically increased the system requirements to run the game and, in turn, would've increased the chance of a desktop crash for players with low end machines. It would have also drastically reduced the tactical options for players turning the game essentially into a long range tag match. Even on current maps it can take several minutes to traverse them - doubling or tripling the size would turn matches into a massive yawnfest.
  • Yamato's maximum range is 42,000 meters while the effective range is only 26,100 meters. Likewise, HMS Warspite, which scored the record for the longest range gunnery hit in history at 26,000 meters, is restricted to a mere 16,000 meters in-game. Some of the "effective range" considerations stem from the need to make battleships of different nations and tiers play more differently than they otherwise would - for instance, Japanese battleships tend to have longer range than their American and British counterparts at the cost of maneuverability.
  • With the release of the Open Beta, the "effective maximum range" is now increased when spotter aircraft are airborne.
• Armor-Piercing Attack: Par for the course when AP shells are available, but here are some examples that better fit the trope:
  • High-explosive shells only look at the base thickness of the surface they're hitting to determine penetration, and ignore effective armor thickness.
  • If a surface is penetrated by an armor-piercing shell whose diameter is more than 14.3 times the armor's thickness, the shell automatically penetrates regardless of the angle being presented, and once again ignoring effective armor thickness. This is known as "overmatch", and is very similar to the "Three Calibers Rule" in World of Tanks (Shells with diameter more than 3 times the thickness of what they hit automatically penetrate).
  • Submarine-launched torpedoes are capable of one feat that no air-dropped or surface-launched torpedoes can do: They can ignore a ship's torpedo protection.
• Arrow Cam: Firing a shell with middle click will make the camera track your shot. If a player has already fired a shot, pressing the 'Z' key will also make the camera track any shells in flight or torpedoes still running.
• Artistic License – Physics:
  • Perhaps the most noticeable is the ballistics and how strange the scale of the game can seem if one pauses to think about it. A cursory browse of any of the ship databases which list various features of the game's ships (consumables, artillery, general performance etc.) can leave a newcomer scratching their head. To explain, nearly all main battery guns have a muzzle velocity in the 750-1000m/s range, which reflects real life artillery performance. However, the time to distance (even without considering the drag coefficient which defines how much a shell loses speed while in the air) makes it seem like the average velocity is several times the listed value. This was done to make the battles faster paced and more dynamic (all battles have a 20 minute time limit while most naval artillery engagements ran to the order of hours). Thus, meters and kilometers, when used in-game, have different scales applied to those specific units (for example, a ship's length as compared to docks, houses, or other map debris).
  • Carelessly sailing into an island will, thankfully, not damage your ship. It will make you very vulnerable to enemy gunfire and torpedoes, however, and if you're really unlucky, get you stuck in place for the rest of the match.
  • As an Anti-Frustration Feature, colliding with a friendly ship, even a much larger vessel, does little damage when in real life such collisions would inflict crippling damage on or even sink the ships involved. Averted with enemy ships, however.
  • In real life, a sudden moment of heeling over/keeling over is potentially catastrophic for any ship out at sea. But that doesn't seem to be the case at all in this game.
• Ascended Glitch: The "catapult aircraft direction center" captain skill is inspired by a glitch in the "air supremacy skill." When air supremacy is applied to a ship with catapult aircraft it unintentionally causes two aircraft to be launched.
• Ascended Meme: Yuudachi's Poi Verbal Tic which is often spammed in chats made its way into the game's glossary.
• Bash Brothers: Well smash sisters. Every pair of sister ships in the game technically counts, but the siblings that get the most attention however the Scharnhorst sisters. Unlike most ship duos in the game, they fit different armament schemes (the premium Scharnhorst is in her historical configuration with nine 11in/28cm guns in triple turrets, while the non-premium Gneisenau represents a never-completed refit armed instead with six 15in/38cm guns in twin turrets), so one is not clearly superior to the other.
• Bling of War: Before World War I, many ships - especially American ships - had paint schemes that were showy and colorful. On the more practical side, Naval camouflage is designed to "dazzle" the eye of the observer, and to be deceptive as to the ship's actual speed and course. This is taken to a somewhat interesting place with holiday camouflage, which is brightly colorful but has the same effects as the more traditional naval camouflage designs. There is a New Year & Christmas themed camo that was given away in 2020 that sees the ships painted in a contrasting swirl of two dark blue colours, but tops it by adding a metallic rocky design to the waterline, a Christmas Tree & a brightly lit up star to the bow, with Christmas lights draped across the gun barrels and superstructure.
• Bottomless Magazines: Averted for main battery guns, with ships carrying a maximum of 10,000 for each type of shell that can be fired by their main guns (eg. A ship with access to both HE and AP shells for its main guns carries a total of 20,000 rounds). However, playable ships have functionally infinite ammunition as no ship in the game is capable of even firing off 10,000 rounds within the confines of a 20 minute match.
• Bribing Your Way to Victory: To an extent, any free-to-play game has this in that people can pay money to speed up tedious grinds.
  • Mild Example 1: Experience earned on a ship by default only counts toward that ship's tech tree (e.g. Tier V cruiser counts toward Tier VI cruiser). However, a ship that has been made "elite" by purchasing all of its upgrades may have its experience converted into "free XP" which can apply to any ship of any nation. Of course, doing so requires an in-game currency that...you guessed it...can be bought with real money.
  • Mild Example 2: Researchable ships are all Double Unlock items (in-game credits + in-game experience). While you cannot buy experience (see above), you can buy credits.
  • Typical Example: "Premium" ships sold in the shop also qualify, as a player can simply buy a higher-level ship without learning anything about the game.
  • Blatant Example: The Arpeggio of Blue Steel event of November 2020 put the Tier X (highest level) Japanese battleship Yamato on sale. Keep in mind this ship has some of the largest guns in the game...
• Butt-Monkey: Captain Bad Advice, the cartoon mascot of Wargamming's official tips series to show players what not to do while playing the game and strategies you should ignore. Even when he seems to do things right, things conspire against him to make it go wrong. By extension, his pet goldfish, who is far more intelligent than he is and acts as a stand in for the players who do know what to do and try to convince bad players (like the Captain) to play using the correct strategies. Unfortunately, she tends to get ignored all to often and along with the rest of the Captain's team, suffers the rippling consequences of such terrible decision making.
  • Also Mikan of the Puka Puka Fleet series.
• Combat and Support: All ship classes can do a mix of this, though some are more suited to one than the other. Players who ignore this and prefer to engage in pure combat regardless of their preferred ship class are often sunk quickly and can cause whole matches to be lost for their team.
  • Battleships are primary combat vessels as one would expect, however at high tiers their numerous anti-air guns make them effective at support in defending carriers from enemy air strikes. Their long range, long reload time and slow turret rotation also means they're best at medium to long range combat, effectively serving as artillery support, rather than close-range brawlers. Some battleships take this even further - higher-tier German battleships have access to the Hydroacoustic Search consumable, allowing them to augment their already great ability to spearhead a push with a vastly enhanced detection range for torpedoes, potentially avoiding spreads of torpedoes that would otherwise stop an advance cold. Yet another battleship that has enhanced detection capability is the USS Missouri, which has access to the Surveillance Radar consumable, lighting up destroyers and British cruisers in their smokescreens, or any ships behind islands.
  • Cruisers have a strong combat role, but are also suited to anti-air support and anti-destroyer support, as their guns turn and fire faster. This is especially true for the mid-late tier American and British cruisers, which boast particularly lethal AA suites.
  • Destroyers are often support ships, working best to capture targets, set smokescreens and to harass enemy ships, although they can go toe-to-toe with battleships and carriers in direct combat with their maneuverability and torpedoes, serving as lethal ambushers and long-range snipers. They do not survive long against cruisers, though. Soviet destroyers seem to invert this with their generally terrible torpedoes and excellent long-range guns and anti-aircraft firepower, functioning more like small cruisers.
  • Carriers are primarily long range combat ships, using their dive bombers and torpedo bombers to devastate enemy battleships and cruisers, though they can also provide fighter support against enemy bombers. They can also serve as fairly effective scouts, using their air groups to locate and track enemy ships; this is in fact the only real use of fighters if the enemy has lost their carriers, or said carriers have run out of planes.
  • Submarines fulfil a mixed role due to their Mechanically Unusual Class nature - they can inflict large amounts of damage with their homing torpedoes, but their ability to move underneath the surface makes them excellent scouts.
• Composite Character: In use for certain ship classes. In general, a non-premium ship will represent its entire class in the game, while premium ships represent a specific ship (but even then are sometimes composites in some ways). To explain, here's some examples:
  • The Kongo-class battleship is represented by Hiei with her unique superstructure that served to prototype ideas for the Yamato-class, but its later hull upgrades are undoubtedly from Haruna, as Hiei was sunk very early in the war.
  • Each of the three hulls for the Fubuki-class destroyers represent one of the three subclasses^note A would be Type 1 Fubuki, B, would be Type 2 Ayanami, while C would be Type 3 Akatsuki. This makes the updated ship description a little weird, since it says there's only 10 Fubuki-class destroyers in service, which means that the description only counts the Type 1 ships as members of the class even if the upgrades were from Type 2 and 3 subclasses, which would have been 24 in total. Now averted with Akatsuki (the most distinct of the three subclasses), which has since been implemented as its own ship.
  • Similarly, the Benson-class destroyer's 2nd and 3rd hulls have elements of the succeeding Gleaves-class and Bristol subclass, especially with regards to turret and AA arrangement. ^note  There are even historical sources that consider the two as one class. The reason for the class distinction is due to the shape of the funnels, the shipbuilders, as well as other minor arrangements in their machinery.
  • The hull shape and the AA gun on the stern unambiguously point at a post-1942 refit Gremyaschy, but its haze grey paint instead of a post-'42 dazzle camo is reminiscent of the original Gnevny.
  • Both of the Lexington-class carrier's hulls are undoubtedly that of Saratoga. This is on account that the Anti-Air mounts the ship is bristling with would not have been implemented in early 1942, when the Lexington herself was sunk. Also, even the stock hull lacks the 8-inch gun turrets both ships carried until 1942.
  • The Wyoming-class battleship is an interesting case. The final hull configuration is actually that of the second ship, Arkansas (Wyoming was used as a training ship during World War II). However, that ship's pre-war configuration is also included as a premium ship, rewarded to players who participated in the closed beta (and thus the name Arkansas Beta). There are, of course, major differences between the two versions.^note The main differences between the non-premium and premium versions of the Arkansas are that the non-premium version has better hull stats from the refit, as well as AA armament, at the cost of the majority of her secondary armament. The premium version, being based on the pre-war config, has absolutely no anti-air guns, but keeps the pre-war configuration's massive amount of 5-inch secondaries, as well as having the usual premium benefits, and unusually, access to the same selection of modules as a tier 10 battleship.
  • The Bismarck and Tirpitz have a similar relationship. Bismarck is not only clearly Tirpitz without torpedo launchers, but its a later version of Tirpitz than the in game version of Tirpitz. This s most obvious with Bismarck's superior AA which the real Bismarck was sunk too early in the war to receive.
  • The New Orleans-class heavy cruisers could be distinguished from each other by slight differences in the shape of the bridge and splinter shields of their secondary battery. The upgrades switch through the different splinter shield configurations, while all (including the stock hull) use the dramatically-reduced bridge profile that San Francisco, New Orleans, and Minneapolis got during their 1944 refits, rather than the graceful, art-deco-style swept-wing bridge they were built with.
  • The Tier 4 premium cruiser Iwaki Alpha (so named because it was a gift to the game's original alpha testers) isn't so much a composite of different ships as a composite of categories of ships. While it's sort of a halfway point between the Tenryu and Kuma (being an improved Tenryu-class design that was rejected in favor of the even more improved Kuma-class), it plays more like a destroyer with armor since (in addition to having torpedoes like most Japanese cruisers) it can lay smokescreens, otherwise an ability unique to destroyers.
  • USS Marblehead in-game is actually a combination of several Omaha-class Light Cruisers, but not Marblehead herself, on account of the rear turret arrangement still having the standard layout instead of said ship's unique layout.^note While the rest of the Omaha-class simply had the lower two of the rear casemate guns removed in 1939 due to their being too low to the water to use in anything other than calm seas, Marblehead also had a new single-gun turret◊ (basically a casemate with a roof)◊ mounted on top of that rear casemate deckhouse◊.
  • IJN Taiho's second hull has elements of the canceled "super-Taiho" class air craft carriers (which eventually evolved into what this game calls the Hakuryu). The real Taiho was sunk shortly after it was launched and no modernizations were made during its brief career.
  • HMS Belfast is used to represent the Edinburgh sub-class of the Town-class light cruisers when the ship is fully upgraded. As with USS Lexington, the HMS Edinburgh was sunk very early in the war. However, Belfast in her post-war refit is also included as a premium ship, though it's placed one tier below her tech tree counterpart mostly due to her torpedo launchers being removed as part of the refit.
  • On a similar note, the Fiji's B hull is represented by other Crown Colony-class Light Cruisers such as HMS Gambia and Bermuda, due to the lead ship herself also being lost early in the war.
  • La Galissonnière is clearly one of the members of the class the decided to fight for the allies during the war.^note Leygues, Montcalm, Gloire. This is evidenced the aviation facilities being removed and replaced with large amounts of US navy standard AA. La Galissonnière herself as well as two of her sisters sided with Viche France and were scuttled with almost all of the rest of the French fleet that did the same.
  • HMS Acasta, sitting at Tier 5 on the Royal Navy destroyer tech tree line, is the tech tree class representative for the A-class destroyers, with Anthony as a limited-time premium ship featured in the original run of the Operation Dynamo event. However, its upgraded hulls will be represented by other ships in the class as, like Edinburgh and Fiji, she was sunk early in the war, alongside sister ship Ardent and the carrier HMS Glorious in an engagement against the Scharnhorst sisters.
  • Republique is a combination of a proposed (but unused) "AA battleship" finish out for Jean Bart, The Gascogne batteship concept, and a postwar "battle carrier" ^note  Not a CV with battleship guns but A CV with battleship armor intended to be used as a command ship design mated to fictional guns. France found Richelieu and Jean Bart more than sufficient to meet its postwar battleship needs so no more designs were made after the Alsace-class.
  • All non-premium ships lack hull numbers and name plates and are almost all named after the lead ship of the class.^note Generally the exceptions is that the ship's name is already used somewhere else, like the German T4 cruiser Karlsruhe actually being of Königsberg-class, which the T5 also shares the name, or the US T3 cruiser St Louis, which also shares class name with 1939 light cruiser (which will use the name Helena instead, at T7), or the French T9 cruiser, which gets around by using Saint-Louis spelling instead. 2nd, There's also cases with the lead ship being a premium ship, like Scharnhorst vs Gneisenau. 3rd, it's being named after a specific ship because the class name isn't really a name, which many British ships fit. 4th is the case of the nation didn't actually build the ships themselves and get the ships from other nations, which shows up with the Pan-Asian tree. And finally the case where the tech tree name is not the lead ship name for no real good reason, like the Nürnberg (of Leipzig-class) This reinforces the idea that they are meant to represent an entire class of ships. Premiums ships however do have names and hull numbers included are meant to represent a very specific ship.
  • The Pan-Asian faction so far represents both the Republic of China and the People's Republic of China. With the confirmation of the Pan-Asian destroyer line, other nations, such as South Korea, Thailand, and Indonesia, will also be represented.
    • The Commonwealth is what is now the Common Wealth of Nations. That is to say colonies that were a part of the British Empire during the second world war but not Britain herself.
    • The Pan-American faction is a combined Latin American faction ^note  Though it can be assumed Brazil, Argentina, Peru (notable for having last gun cruiser in service), and Chile will get the lion's share of attention given their naval prominence. The only other countries on the American continents are either already represented (USA) or part of the previously mentioned commonwealth (Canada).
    • There are plans to fold Poland into the "Pan European" faction, I.E. everyone in Europe but Britain, France, Germany, Italy, or Russia/USSR.
• Cool Airship: Multiple real life examples show up in ports and one of the early maps.
• Cool Boat: The premise of the game is to duke it out with a number of famous (and some less so) historical warships.
• Counting Bullets: More like counting seconds (as noted above under Bottomless Magazines players have zero chance of exhausting their technically limited ammo given match length). Battleships in particular tend to have long reload times (20-40 seconds). Thus, if a player is aware that all battleships which could fire at them have just fired at someone else then that player can be assured of safety from battleship fire until said battleships reload ^note Notable ways to reduce this time include an optional captain skill speeding reload as hitpoints decrease, reload boost consumables for certain factions, slotted equipment purchased with ingame credits, and activated talents for special commanders.
• Covers Always Lie: The Random Battle queuing screen depicts a Clemson-class destroyer making a torpedo run on an Izumo-class battleship, while overhead, a biplane is being chased down by a monoplane fighter, guns ablazing. A Cleveland-class and Omaha-class light cruiser can be seen in the background. While the Clemson (Tier 4) could be matched up against those two higher-tier cruisers (6 and 5, respectively) and lead to matches where all three were present in the same battle, none of these ships would ever be matched up against the Izumo (Tier 9), meaning the only way any three of these ships would ever see the Izumo is if they were brought into battle in a division with a ship that's at least Tier 7 or higher (A Clemson or Omaha div-ed up with a Tier 7 would result in a Fail Division, due to having a Tier spreading of more than one tier). Patch 5.10 has instituted a Tier spread limit for divisions (No divisions with a tier spread greater than one tier allowed), to curb "Fail Divisions", so only the Cleveland would potentially be matched up against an Izumo if it's in a Division with a Tier 7 ship. It also changed tier spreads for certain ships, meaning a Tier 4 ship like the Clemson would NEVER be matched up against anything higher tier 5 (Such as the tier 6 Cleveland) unless it joined a division with a Tier 5 ship, while Tier 5 ships would either be top tier (T3-5) or bottom tier (T5-7) in any battle they were in.
• Crippling Overspecialization:
  • Carriers define this, that Wargaming points out themselves is a feature of the rough guideline for Tactical Rock–Paper–Scissors. Properly controlled and assigning squadrons properly can easily make the carrier and its flight squadrons the most dangerous unit on the battlefield as they can take on just about any ship type. However, its defense is severely lacking, and any enemy ship that spots it will have an XP and credit buffet to feast on. And poorly handling the squadrons can end up leaving the carrier with none to launch for the remainder of the battle, or worse yet, let the enemy follow a returning flight group right back to the carrier.
    • American carriers suffer from an especially bad case of this. While IJN carriers also must make a choice between having more fighters or more bombers, the difference between the two load outs is no where near as extreme as in American carriers. Most Anti-ship American carriers don't have any fighters in their load outs and none of them have torpedo bombers in their anti-air squads. For the record, this has no historical basis.
    • Japenese C Vs have a bad case of this after the 8.0.0 rework and subsequent hot fixes. While they are capable of attacking all ship types reasonably effectively, each of their planes basically counters one thing much better than the others. This can mean they can lose their flexibility if any one type is deplaned. Their attackers are arguably better than both American options using many high damage rockets, but they have bad penetration that limits their use to superstructure hits on non-destroyers. Their AP dive bombers are great against cruisers and sometimes battleships, but nearly useless against destroyers. Their torpedoes usually take to long to arm and aim for use against destroyers and often cruisers as well.
  • Battleships as well. Despite having access to the strongest guns, and some of the longest ranges in game, they have large dispersion at those ranges, making it somewhat common to watch the shots from one bracket an enemy ship at long range, but not score any hits. At close ranges, their slow turret traverse speeds, and long reloading times can give destroyers that survive the first volley of main battery shots or aided by an ally distracting the battleship all the breathing room the destroyer needs to make an attempt to sail alongside, and unleash every single spread of torpedoes readied at the battleship. That said, what does get hit by a battleship's guns, will be hurting afterwards.
  • Prior to the Open-Beta, the Japanese had a premium cruiser, the Kitakami, which had 20 torpedoes on each side, allowing for a Macross Missile Massacre when all 40 were sent off, but only 4 pop-guns for backup, and a slow reload on the torpedoes. It was removed when the game went to Open-Beta (though not completely, as Wargaming employees can still use it), and while no reason was given, this trope was cited by some. (Others being that it played too differently from other cruisers to be enjoyable, and that its 20-torpedo spreads made it a team-killing machine in the hands of careless players.)
    • While no reason was given it's highly suspected to be related to the fact that, astoundingly, Kitakami server wide actually did more damage to teammates then the enemy. It was literally more dangerous to have on your team then it was the enemy's!
  • Early Russian destroyers have terrible guns^note typically inflicting pretty good damage for a destroyer but with turret rotation speed that would be slow even by battleship standards; it's often faster to put the ship through a 180 degree turn than to rotate the turrets and torpedoes^note often the torpedoes are fast and in some cases there are downright huge number of tubes, but with range so short it requires a suicidally close approach to hit the enemy but they can win races and run circles around the opposition with their insane speed and maneuverability.
  • British cruisers have no high explosive shells, only armor piercing. While their AP is set with an unusually short fuse in order to avoid overpenetration against soft targets like destroyers, if a target is angled in such a way as to bounce the shots a British cruiser has to rely on hits to the superstructure - and given damage saturation mechanics, this is often not enough to destroy a ship completely. This is also bizarrely ahistorical, as the Royal Navy's "armour piercing" shell was actually a high-explosive shell given an armour-piercing cap, rather than a proper AP shell - the RN primarily used high explosive for its all-purpose ammunition.
  • Most Japanese destroyers focus far more on torpedo armament and than they do on guns. This can give them unrivaled damage opportunities in the right situation but also makes them virtually useless in others.
    • Asashio is the god king of this trope in the game. she has 20km 20k damage deep-water torpedoes. However, unlike the Pan-Asian deep-water torpedoes, Asashio's torps run under cruisers as well destroyers. Combined with her sub-par guns and her abysmal AA, Asashio is essentially only effective against Battleships, but is downright overpowered in this department.
• Critical Hit: As in World of Tanks, multiple kinds of critical hits exist in this game.
  • Subsystem Damage: Well-placed shots can knock out the target's guns and torpedo launchers (temporarily disabling, or even outright destroying them for the rest of a match), as well as the Engines/Propulsion drive and Rudder (knocking speed down to a crawl of 5 knots or less, or locking the rudder in the position it was at when it took the damage, respectively). Destroyers are particularly vulnerable to this, as they're so small that any given shot will likely knock out something valuable.
  • The extra damage kind of critical, caused by hitting juiciest target for pure damage, the citadel (usually in the center of the hull at the base of the after stack, or near the water line, or directly underneath the main gun batteries where the magazine/powder rooms are located). A solid volley of AP shells that penetrate armor and find the citadel can instantly cut any ship's health bar in half or more. The citadel is the best-armored part of a ship and thus more difficult to penetrate, but the results are more than worth it. Aircraft carriers tend to have very weak armor but they still have citadels, meaning that even HE can sometimes cause citadel penetrations to them. A lucky roll on the RNG when hitting the magazines, can lead to detonating the ammo stockpile with a single shot. You know you've hit that, if along with the remaining portion of the target's HP immediately setting a course for Davey Jones' locker, you see an explosion icon in the killfeed, and the unlucky victim receives an "award", aptly called "Detonation".
• Crossover:
  • With Arpeggio of Blue Steel in 2016, complete with an optional port of Yokosuka, skins, and unique interface voiceovers to replace the standard one for certain IJN ships (the Kongo-class battleships, Myoko-class cruisers, and one Takao-class cruiser).
  • A crossover with High School Fleet follows in 2017, with a reskin of the Graf Spee and a unique variant of the Kagero the HSF Harekaze (having the option to switch between the standard 127mm guns, rapid firing 100mm twin mounts, or the extremely rapid firing 127mm single mounts) having been made available as premium ships.
  • 2018 and 2019 has a dualvertisement crossover with Azur Lane, with some Azur Lane shipgirls becoming captains in World of Warships, and some tier 9 (and 1 tier 8) paper ships in World of Warships being available in Azur Lane as shipgirls.
  • 2020 has three crossovers:
    • hololive, with Fubuki and Marine becoming captains in the game.
    • Warhammer 40,000, granting ships from the Imperium and the Forces of Chaos.
    • Transformers, bringing in Optimus Prime, Bumblebee, Megatron and Rumble as captains and skins themed after them.
  • 2021 features Godzilla vs. Kong, with Godzilla and King Kong joining as captains.
• Damage Control: There's the standard Damage Control Party consumable, used for fighting fires, floods, and repairing incapacitated modules such as engines or rudder, and then there's the Repair Party consumable, used for repairing the integrity of the hull (which translates to HP being partially restored).
• Damage Over Time: Torpedoes, destroyers' primary weapons (and some cruisers' secondaries), often inflict the Flooding debuff, which causes damage-over-time. An even more common variant, though not unique to any one ship type, is using high-explosive shells to set fire to enemy ships. This is in fact one of the best ways for especially ships with weaker guns to deal damage to battleships; their armour-piercing shells may not be able to penetrate the thick belt armour of these lumbering behemoths, but shooting HE into the superstructure can and will set a lot of fires, which keep burning merrily, eating away at the battleship's massive hitpoint pool. A common tactic, particularly with Japanese cruisers (which tend to have good HE and very good torpedoes) is to wait until a battleship is set on fire and uses its damage control party to put out the fire before firing torpedoes. That way if flooding is inflicted the battleship is basically doomed because damage control will be on cooldown while thousands of HP get drained away. This is why a savvy battleship player will simply let a single fire burn itself out unless he's already on dangerously low HP, because flooding drains HP much faster and it's important to be able to fix it quickly.
• Darker and Edgier:
  • The Operation Dynamo event is a lot bleaker than the rest of the game and its older stablemate, World of Tanks. The French coast is covered with discarded vehicles and and fire while the skies swarm with planes. You are tasked with evacuating soldiers at Dunkirk, much like the real thing. Every time one of your ships takes damage, some of those soldiers die. When a ship sinks you have the option of stopping to pick em the troops, who constantly drown until you do. Excluding the ships and plane's crew, thousands of people die on even on a good run.
  • The Savage Battle event is possibly the darkest of all events, taking place on a post-apocalyptic Earth amid the crumbling ruins of a city.
• David vs. Goliath: Due to the strength of their torpedoes, destroyers can often devastate much bigger battleships at close ranges. However first they need to have a good approach and generally a single salvo from a battleship will obliterate them.
• Death from Above:
  • The carrier's role is to stay in the rear and deploy aircraft for whatever situation arises. Fighters protect the fleet against enemy aircraft, dive bombers blast lighter ships and set them ablaze, while torpedo bombers are lethal to battleships and enemy carriers.
• Death of a Thousand Cuts: Destroyers and light cruisers will eventually chip away at battleships and carriers with their fast-firing guns.
  • The Soviet Tier 10 premium Light Cruiser Smolensk is the absolute king of this type of damage. It has 16 guns located in four quadruple turrets, firing 130mm shells that are just on the right side of various captain skills that increase range, fire rate, fire setting chance and HE shell penetration. With the right skills active it can fire upwards of 330 shots in a minute. It is a devastating weapon against anything in the game as it will be capable of immense direct damage, it will also set multiple fires even if the enemy ship uses it's fire extinguishing damage control skill.
  • The American ''Atlanta''-class premium Tier 7 cruiser has only 5-inch guns (destroyer armament) but it packs 16 of these (14 to a broadside), making it a weight class champion, and exceptionally good for operations missions.
  • The tier 6 American Cleveland-class light cruiser is no slouch in this category either, with 12 rapid-firing 6-inch guns capable of killing destroyers in one salvo and setting ships of equal or bigger size afire in a matter of minutes. Plus another 12 5-inch guns for its secondary battery, if you get in close enough for them to start firing.
  • The tier 3 American St. Louis-class protected cruiser can take on an equal tier enemy battleship (normally suicidal for a cruiser) due to the large number of guns it has and their rapid fire rate - it can wear down the battleship with constant damage, critical hits and setting of fires while avoiding or absorbing the battleships alpha strikes - its armour profile means that a high explosive salvo is unlikely to penetrate whereas an armour piercing salvo is likely to overpenetrate - both outcomes seriously reduce the amount of damage it takes. It takes this to the point where the biggest non-destroyer threat to a St. Louis is neither battleships or tier 4 ships, but other St Louis's.
  • The tier 3 Russian premium cruiser Aurora plays in much the same way as the St. Louis and has the same number of guns. The tier 3 non-premium cruiser, the Bogatyr, has 12 guns but fires 8 on a side, achieving much the same results.
  • The tier 2 German cruiser, the Dresden, has two fewer guns than the St. Louis and has smaller caliber weapons than most cruisers, but compensates with an insane rate of fire that makes it probably the most powerful ship at its tier. Good players in the Dresden can even circle a St. Louis while pummelling it into oblivion.
  • Certain battleships will get this effect if they are built & skilled towards the use of the secondary battery, which can be as far as 11.3km. The German battleship line has this as their main gimmick from Tier 8 and above starting from Bismarck, while the United States boasts several ships that can also have this ability, such as the Georgia.
  • Some players prefer to keep the Tier 8 Mogami-class cruiser in its light cruiser configuration (15 155mm guns) instead of upgrading it to a heavy cruiser (10 203mm guns). This was especially true before the Basic Firing Training, Expert Marksman and Advanced Firing Training captain skills got nerfed.^note Originally, those skills provided buffs to call guns up to 155mm caliber, with in Expert Marksman's case a much smaller buff for larger-caliber guns. After the nerf, this threshold was reduced to 139mm and smaller guns (and secondary guns regardless of caliber), meaning that only destroyers and a handful of cruisers that are specifically armed with destroyer guns get their main batteries buffed by those skills. Prior to the nerfs, a Mogami mounting 155mm guns whose captain had those skills had the the reload time dropped from 10 seconds to 9, the abysmal turret rotation speed of 3.5 degrees per second (the major weakness of the 155mm Mogami) increased to the same 6 degrees per second of the 8-inch Mogami, and maximum range buffed from 15.7km to 18.8km. In fact, this is a major reason why those skills got nerfed, as during the Beta Test they helped make Mogami extremely overpowered (whereas afterward it's become basically the ship that wishes it were Atago).
  • High-tier Russian destroyers have powerful gun systems almost better-suited to light cruisers.
  • The tier 2 Japanese premium battleship (and the only tier 2 battleship), the Mikasa, has 4 12-inch main guns (the least of any battleship at any tier) and those guns are ridiculously awful in terms of accuracy, penetration and rate of fire. But if it gets close enough, it can easily inflict this trope with its secondary battery of 14 6-inch guns and 18 3-inch guns, which has been described by players as akin to strapping a St. Louis to each side of the ship.
• Decomposite Character: A few ships are in the game multiple times, often under different names but not exclusively.
  • Admiral Makarov is the Nurnberg after being transfered to the USSR.
  • Oktyabrskaya Revolutsiya is the upcoming tech tree ship Gangut modernized and given a proper "revolutionary" name.
  • Lo Yang is Benson transferred to the Republic of China Navy.
  • West Virginia 1941 and the upcoming West Virginia 1944 are both obviously the USS West Virginia
• Dare to Be Badass: Basically one of the pre-scripted lines. But expect players to quote other games ^note such as Ace Combat4s opening order in "Invincible Fleet", "Sink the Invincible Aigir Fleet while it's at anchor!", movies ^note  Players will check in, and even animes at the start of the match to try and pump up the players on their team... or to find fellow fans of said media.
• Difficult, but Awesome:
  • What better than having a battleship torpedo a higher-tier destroyer?
  • Or the now-removed Kitakami equipped with 40 torpedo tubes for that matter. In the hands of experienced players who are truly skilled^note mostly players who are skilled in commanding IJN destroyers as both requires mastery of similar tactics, she is a strategic weapon capable of decimating even the most heavily armored battleships. However, her torpedoes has a limited range and are fairly slow, and have a high detection range^note Her torpedoes have a maximum range of 10km while she may be detected by her enemies from as far as 14km away, though a capable ship commander may reduce her detection to ~8.8km while her slow moving torpedoes may extend the effective range somewhat for target ships that moves closer to her torpedo salvos, making it extremely hard if not outright impossible to get close enough just to unleash even half of her devastating firepower due to her slow turning rate. Furthermore, any hit even on just one of her many torpedo launcher tubes is a critical hit that would take off half of her health, making her the epitome of the Glass Cannon definition as she will not survive from even a single salvo from a battleship.^note But then, what do expect when you've got the armour and HP of a Tier 4 cruiser playing at Tier 8? To top it all off, her torpedoes (like all others in the game) are not friendly fireproof, meaning it would sink more allied ships compared to the one on the opposing side in the wrong hands.
  • Aircraft Carriers. Even When they were far more powerful, they were always hard to learn due to the more RTS like play style. The entire category of ships as a whole has been greatly nerfed by ever increasingly effective AA, making it even more difficult to learn and play CVs. When you do figure out how to look for weaknesses in AA and exploit them, they are a deadly as they have always been.
  • The British Cruiser line in general ^note Or according to some players, from Tier VI and up . While they lack HE rounds and have little to no armor at all, they have a different AP shell that excels at penetrating lightly-armored targets ^note  Destroyers, Light Cruisers, upper belt armor of Heavy Cruisers, the upper belt and superstructure of Battleships and nearly Destroyer-like maneuverability.
  • Des Moines is generally considered as this. Unlike the Mosvka, Hindenburg, and Zao which can sit comfortably at long range and snipe, or the Minotaur who can sit her own smokescreen, Des Moines has poor range and shell velocity, meaning she can't engage at long ranges and has no torpedoes, giving her no close range defense. However, her primary strength is her extreme rate of fire on her 203mm guns and her very punishing superheavy AP shells. A good Des Moines player that can bait an enemy ship into their ideal engagement range can simply overwhelm their opponent with sheer weight of fire.
• Down to the Last Play: Closest this comes is when the last ship on each team decide to engage the other, meaning that whoever gets the kill wins the game for their team. This is otherwise averted as the match ends immediately when a victory condition is met.
  • When the game timer runs out, the game will determine winner and loser based on whichever side has the highest number of points, or determine a draw if both sides have equal points, at the very moment the timer hits zero. Any changes to the points that occur in the split second between that point and the game actually ending are disregarded, thus preventing situations that occur in World of Tanks in its Standard Battle game mode, where the enemy team, upon having their base captured, have a few seconds before the match actually ends in which they could either force a draw (Via capturing your base in return) or even turn a defeat into a victory by eliminating any surviving tanks on your team.
  • Likewise, when a team's score hits 1000 for even a split second, any changes to the points that occur after (ie The enemy team sinks one of your ships and causes the points lead to change) are disregarded. In both cases, this makes it entirely possible for a team to win with zero ships afloat, so long as they were in the lead when the clock runs down, or they reach 1000 points, before they lose all their remaining ships.
• Early-Bird Cameo:
  • One particular "Captain Bad Advice" video, made to coincide with the release of the German battleship tech tree, has Captain Bad Advice taking his shiny new Bismarck out for its first battle, and later gets sunk by torpedoes to demonstrate exactly why it is a very bad idea to sail battleships down narrow channels with no support when you know there's something on the other side. The only enemy ship that he hits and sinks in during the battle is the HMS Hood. Hood herself is introduced as a premium months later.
  • Premium and/or event ships are often made to test new concepts/ideas that eventually manifest in tech trees later.
    • The Mikhail Kutuzov was made to test the viability of high-tier light cruisers (which is later realized with both the British light cruiser line, and the light/heavy cruiser line split starting at Tier 6 for the US cruiser line), and cruisers with smokescreens (realized, again, with the British light cruiser line).
    • Lo Yang was the first destroyer to have the option of mounting the otherwise, at the time it came out, cruiser-exclusive Hydroacoustic Search consumable. This eventually was realized with the German and British destroyer tech trees.
    • USS Black was the first destroyer to have access to the otherwise, at the time it came out, cruiser-exclusive Surveillance Radar consumable (though the Missouri was the first non-cruiser surface vessel in game that got it). This filtered down to the higher-tier Pan-Asian destroyers (Tier 8 and above). The difference between the Black and the Pan-Asian DDs, is which consumable the Radar shares a slot with (Shared with Speed Boost for Black, shared with Smokescreen for Pan-AsianDDs).
    • Some smokescreen-equipped vessels, like the high-tier Pan-Asian destroyers, had a consumable that shared the same slot as smoke (eg. Radar or Repair Party). Le Terrible marked the very first destroyer to not have a smokescreen whatsoever (in contrast to the Aigle, making that the only French destroyer with smoke), with the rest of the French tech tree destroyers following suit, being introduced without a smokescreen.
• Enemy-Detecting Radar: The radar consumable given to US and Soviet Cruisers functions as one, capable of detecting ships even in smokescreens or behind islands as long as they're within range. Hydroacoustic Search (available to cruisers from tier 4 onwards) has a similar function but with much shorter range, and with the added benefit of improving torpedo detection.
• Escort Mission: The Halloween 2016 mode has you escorting the Transylvania, an unarmed Paddlewheel/Sailing ship. You fight off hordes of Zikasa "Zombie" battleships and fireball launching catapults. The Final Boss is the Rasputin, a Battleship with 200,000 HP! For reference, the Tier IX Iowa BB only has 79,000. The Tier X Großer Kurfürst, the highest HP ship in the game, has 105,800.
  • Two of the PvE scenarios recently added to the game are also this: Operation Aegis, which has the players liberate a convoy from enemy ships, and escort them to an escape point, and operation Raptor Rescue, which has players first repairing the titular Raptor, and then, as with Operation Aegis, leading the Raptor to a designated escape point.
  • During the Closed Beta, a convoy escort mission was briefly tested in the random battle rotation, but was removed without explanation within a week.
  • Update 0.6.6 introduced "Operations", a rotating set of PVE scenarios in which 7 players go up against multiple waves of increasingly powerful AI controlled ships. Of the original 4 scenarios, 2 are escort missions.
• Exact Words: War gaming said they would never sell a premium tier IX or X vehicle in any game but the popularity of the IRL USS Missouri couldn't really be ignored. So they released her as the first even "freemium", in other words a type of premium ship that has to be researched with free XP instead of being bought directly from the premium shop. These words would eventually fall flat on its face in 2020 with the Black versions of USS Alaska and MN Jean Bart (Both Tier IX)^note The regular Alaska was a free XP ship like the Missouri, and the regular Jean Bart was obtainable from the Armory with Steel., and Arpeggio of Blue Steel re-skin of the Yamato (Tier X), with all 3 available for purchase directly from the Premium Shop with doubloons.
• Extreme Mêlée Revenge: The worst mistake that a player can make when they take an enemy carrier dead-to-rights at close range is to get in front of them. And if battleships get into a close-range brawl, the player who gets the upper hand should be very careful to avoid a last-ditch ramming by the loser.
• Flawed Prototype: The American Navy has USS Ranger, their first purpose-built aircraft carrier. Thanks to their inexperience in designing purpose-built carriers (the two prior classes, Langley and Lexington, were converted from existing ships), the resulting ship suffered several technical and design drawbacks such as misplaced elevators, etc. The in-game description even brings it up.
• Fragile Speedster: Destroyers in general tend to be faster and more maneuverable than other ships, but pay for it by having the lowest HP and armor.
• Friendly Fireproof: Averted. Pincering the enemy from two sides or charging into their formation will open up the possibility of being hit by friendly gunfire and torpedoes and while friendly fire by cannons is rare, destroyer torpedoes are always addressed "to whom it may concern". Careless captains can easily torpedo friendly ships. Aircraft torpedoes are less dangerous to friends because of their shorter ranges, in theory...
  • It is also entirely possible for an aircraft carrier to be sunk by its own aircraft, if it's forced into a close in engagement, and not careful with where it's ordering torpedo-bomber squadrons to drop their torpedoes. To make matters worse, carriers that damage or sink themselves this way land up getting classified as...
  • ...teamkillers. An anti-team killer function flags players who repeatedly damage allies, causing the extremely careless and trolls to begin suffering damage to themselves every time they hit an ally (or in the above case, themselves). According to Wargaming, upon inflicting enough friendly fire that the game flags an account and highlights the player's name in pink as a warning to all players, the reflected damage is multiplied several times back at the offending ship, and eventually leading to the team killer being banned from the game if they continue to shoot allies. It's unclear exactly how much team damage it takes to be flagged as a teamkiller, but actually sinking a friendly ship inflicts pink status automatically. To remove teamkiller status requires going at least 5 games without inflicting any team damage at all, not even the scratch damage from incidental collisions. Thus, a "pink" player has to be very careful for the next 5 games to go back to normal. Games in which the pink player goes AFK do not count toward removing pink status, so they have to at least make a token effort to participate while avoiding team damage. However Co-Op battles do count, so the usual penance for becoming a teamkiller is to spend those games in PVE and just do a YOLO charge into the middle of the AI enemy fleet 5 games in a row.
  • Careless collisions can result in getting the teamkiller status, and the reflected damage can effectively remove a ship from the game.
    • Note that division mates can kill each other without repercussions, a practice that when done intentionally is called "scuttling".
  • The problem with careless destroyer captains torpedoing friendly ships by accident has become so endemic that patch 0.5.2 reduces damage done by torpedoes to friendly ships by 50%. This doesn't solve the problem but it makes things easier for anyone hit by a friendly by accident.
  • The problem of a ship's secondary batteries inflicting friendly fire damage and setting friendly ships on fire has also become so endemic (due to the general inaccuracy of low-tier ships' secondaries) that patch 0.5.10 removed friendly fire damage from secondary batteries. Secondaries can still inflict fire on friendly ships, however, which can often inflict pink status on its own, without anything controllable by the player.
• Genre Shift: Holiday 2017-18 events have provided themed ships and maps: Halloween came with a steampunk theme, Christmas with a Santa Claus theme, and April Fool's with outer space warships fighting in a galactic sea far in the future.
• Geo Effects: Islands provide refuge and concealment, allowing for respite from hostile gunfire and opportunities for surprise attacks. Tall Islands work both ways: They protect against gunfire and conceal ships from aerial detection but also conceal incoming aircraft, allowing bombers to minimize their exposure to anti-air fire. On the other hand, flat Islands will only provide cover from torpedoes.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: Invoked, as the developers don't even try to hide the fact that the game is aimed squarely at the American market, thus the American and Japanese navies of the Pacific War as starter factions for testing.
• Glass Cannon:
  • Destroyers, especially a lot of the earlier-tier models, are fragile and very lightly armored, but their torpedo attacks are utterly devastating.
  • Apply to a lesser extent to Japanese cruisers, who sacrifice some toughness of their American counterparts for raw destructive power in the form of torpedo armament (which high-tier American cruisers lack).
  • The Pensacola-class heavy cruiser in the American tech tree has a reasonably powerful main armament and Anti-Air battery, but has armor equal to a light cruiser^note In real life the Pensacola-class were originally given CL ("light cruiser") hull numbers, having been designed to serve a "light cruiser" role despite their larger guns, but after a couple of years were reclassified CA ("heavy cruiser") to reflect the internationally standardized definition that any cruiser with 8-inch guns is a heavy cruiser., making it extremely vulnerable to fire from other cruisers, battleships, and occasionally, even destroyers. A number of incremental buffs have improved it, but it is still a glass cannon.
  • Most of the German cruisers qualify. They generally have pretty good gun range and accuracy and a good set of decent torpedoes, but pay for it with poor armor and mediochre mobility, which forces them to either take full advantage of said range or die.
  • The entirety of the British cruiser line applies, with special mention going to the Minotaur and the Neptune that can output more potential damage than two or three equivalent battleships whilst routinely imploding when shot at by battleships, cruisers, or slingshots.
  • The Soviet tier V cruiser 'Kirov' is incredibly well armed with 3 triple-mounts of high-velocity 180mm guns with great range and ccuracy to go with their huge punch and even the fire rate isn't bad. Plus, it can do a class-leading 35 knots, and if you get close enough it has 3 high-speed high-damage torpedoes per side. The price is pathetic armour including a vulnerable citadel and poor steering. Well sailed, it is a monster beloved by it's captains. Poorly sailed, it's an artifical reef.
• Half-Truth:
  • That damage value listed for your AP and HE rounds? Can only be done by a citadel penetration. Under the current damage model, you will deal only 33% of listed damage on penetration (but not citadel penetration), and 10% on overpenetration. This can be lowered to 16.5% if the ship section being hit has reached a certain damage threshold, and will stop taking damage entirely if it reaches a 2nd threshold. Shots can also do no damage whatsoever if the shot cannot penetrate the armor or it bounced off due to angling.
  • Muzzle velocity is an important attribute for any player that will rely solely on the ship's guns to deal damage since a low muzzle velocity means that the guns are almost ineffectual at long-range. But while the Artillery stats lists the muzzle velocity of a ship's guns, it doesn't take into account the shell weight as a lighter shell will hang in the air for much longer, increasing the probability of a miss the farther the target is away from your position. Or air drag coefficient, which isn't shown in the game. Because of this, guns with high muzzle velocity can have a deceptively bad hit-rate at maximum range.
• Halloween Special:
  • The Halloween-themed event for 2015 includes a "spooky" port at night with the full-moon, ghost-shaped cloud formations, glowing Jack-O-Lanterns floating in the air and flying witches. Also included are "The Salem Witch" a Tier X Des Moines-class cruiser^note It's based on the sole surviving ship of the class, the USS Salem, named for the city of Salem, Massachusetts, which is one of the world's top Halloween destinations. The ship was chosen specifically due to the Salem Witch Trials. at Tier IV with severe speed restrictions and "The Phantom Fortress", a Tier IX Essex-class (specifically, USS Hornet (CV-12), which is reputed to be haunted) aircraft carrier at Tier V with an air wing consisting of what in real life were failed prototypes with Halloween themed paintjobs to match the carrier: the Vultee XP-54 "Swoose Goose" as a fighter, the McDonnell XP-67 "Moonbat" as a torpedo bomber and the Vought XF5U "Flying Flapjack" as a dive bomber (in reality all three were intended to be fighters, and only the XF5U was designed for carrier use). Destroying the Halloween themed top-tier (albeit nerfed) ships results in a special prize. Buying a special Halloween-themed camouflage for regular ships also gives double experience for battles.
  • The 2016 Halloween event is an appropriately nightmarish Escort Mission. The player picks from three "Tier XI" ships which are actually Steampunk redesigns of Tier III ships: the battleship Jackal (Nassau), cruiser Igor (St. Louis) and destroyer Blade (Wakatake). Seven players are sent into a co-op mission to protect the unarmed Transylvania from swarms of Zikasa (Mikasa) zombie ships, flame-throwing catapults and the massively overpowered Rasputin (Imperator Nikolai I).
  • By popular demand, the 2017 Halloween event will include a repeat of the 2016 mission using the new "Operations" system (the enemies are made stronger with more catapults that are better protected, but the player ships get 19-point captains instead of the 0-point ones they had before and the Transylvania is able to heal HP of ships that are close enough to it), followed by a "sequel" mission with new steampunk redesigns of Tier VIII ships: destroyer Urashima (Kagero), cruiser Svyatozar (Chapayev), battleship Magnu-S (Tirpitz) and aircraft carrier Nobilium (Lexington). This sequel mission includes a corrosive mist that drains HP if ships enter it, along with versions of other Tier VIII ships redesigned with demonic themes: destroyer Ghoul (Benson), cruiser Scarab (Charles Martel), battleship Varg (Bismarck) and aircraft carrier The Great Gorgon (Shokaku). Also answering widespread player requests, the sequel mission will include crates that offer a chance to get permanent camouflage for both the Tier III and Tier VIII ships so that their Halloween redesigns can be mounted on the regular versions of the ships (including the demonic-skinned enemy ships, though being premiums it's uncertain whether Mikasa, Imperator Nikolai I and Tirpitz will get this treatment).
  • Halloween 2020 had a futuristic mission where all players controlled ships representing Mega Corps from a Cyberpunk setting, battling against both each other and Sea Monsters. The map, meanwhile, has a unique goal where players must kill gigantic monsters located close to the center of the map and acquire a portal key that can be used to escape the map, which is an Instant-Win Condition. Any players still around when the portal closes are then taken to an arena known as "The Octagon" where they fightuntil only one remains. Players can form divisions to help take down the bosses carrying the keys, but there are a maximum of three people in a division and only four keys, meaning that alliances my be broken if there aren't enough keys for everyone to get through.
• Heal Thyself: In addition to the universal "Damage Control Party", battleships of all tiers, British tech tree cruisers from tier 3 and above, high tier tech tree cruisers of other nations, and the Russian destroyers Tashkent and Khabarovsk get a limited-use "Repair Party" that can mend any "light damage" ^note Such as damage from fire/flooding, HE penetrations, and a portion of damage taken from AP penetrations. slowly. Rather than merely preventing continued damage, this also restores some of the lost HP. Some damage is inherently unhealable, namely 10% of citadel damage and 50% of non-citadel AP penetration damage. All other damage can be 100% healed so long as you have enough time and enough charges of the Repair Party. Notably, the same consumable on the HMS Warspite and eventually the British tech tree battleships (but not HMS Hood) can repair 60% of non-citael AP penetrations, most cruisers can repair 33% of citadel damage, and British cruisers at Tier VIII and above can heal 50% of citadel damage (in other words treating it as no different from non-citadel AP damage). And of course Tashkent and Khabarovsk, being destroyers, don't have citadels and can heal 50% of all AP damage and 100% of everything else. Most ships' Repair Party heals 0.5% of the ship's maximum HP per second and lasts 28 seconds before going on cooldown. The American Tier VII battleship Colorado, to compensate for its unusually low HP total compared to other B Bs in its tier, has the same heal duration but can heal 0.66% per second. British cruisers Tier VIII and above, battleships Tier IX and above and the premium Tier VII battleship Nelson have a much stronger Repair Party that heals a whopping 2.0% of of maximum HP, but lasts a shorter 20 seconds before going on cooldown. The cooldown is universally 120 seconds, or 80 seconds with the premium consumable, though the British Tier IX and X B Bs are being tested with a longer cooldown because their stronger heal proved to make them ridiculously hard to kill.
• Hell Is That Noise: Given these are naval ships, there are many klaxons, sirens, and warning bells that you will learn very quickly to respect them for their alert of "HEY! Pay Attention! Something bad is happening!"
  • Capture Siren: While your base is being captured, you will hear an increasingly loud and fast, erratic siren essentially urging you to do something about it. Considering how difficult it is to quickly rally the other side of the map, it quickly becomes aggravating.
  • The Collision Warning: Sounds typically when you've tunnel visioned into scope mode for long range barrages, not paying attention to the island you're about to crash into. Failure to heed it's warning, means you'll be run aground for a few seconds, as you desperately slam on the reverse to get free, while every enemy in range of you suddenly sees an easy target. It should be noted this signal isn't ship specific and therefore will not start earlier in a larger, faster or more unwieldy ship.
  • Fire Klaxons: a portion of your ship is on fire. Have enough fires onboard at once, and you get...
  • Fire Alarm: When three or more fires are burning on a ship. A much louder and scarier version of the collision warning.
  • Flooding Alert: This is a status you *must* fix as soon as possible, as it inflicts heavy damage when in effect, and will sink a ship easily. Most generally caused by the weapon which causes the next sound...
  • Sonar Pings: The sound you will learn to fear the most, as they mean one thing and one thing only: incoming torpedoes, the hardest hitting projectiles in the game. The frequency and pitch increases as they get closer, which does nothing to help you maneuvering to avoid them. Made worse by the fact it can also be triggered by allied torpedoes fired too close to you.
  • Tinnitus: You just took a citadel penetration and/or a hit for massive damage.
  • As of Patch 0.6.3.1, all ships in motion now feature shrieking, clanking engine-room sounds, which makes absolutely no sense as you're supposed to be the captain (who generally lives on the bridge, because it's difficult to shout orders over what sounds like two scrapyards fervently copulating).^note Though some interpretations are that the player is actually the entire ship's crew (or maybe even a personification of the ship itself) since all basic combat operations (steering, aiming the guns, activating any radar or sonar, selecting targets for AA guns and secondaries) are directly handled by the player.
• Herd-Hitting Attack: Carrier commanders can use the "Manual Attack" command (Alt Key + Left Mouse Button) to order fighter squadrons to perform a massed strafing run through a designated patch of sky. Any other aircraft, friend or foe, that happens to be in the attack corridor when it happens, will take massive damage, practically guaranteed to destroy multiple aircraft, if not entire squadrons in mere seconds depending on how long they're in the area, and how many fighters remain in the attacking squadron. It comes at the cost of using up a significant portion of the squadron's remaining ammunition it has for that sortie, but it's very effective when a squadron is at reduced strength or has a massed attack of enemy bombers heading for their fleet, and can't risk solo engagements.
• Hoist by Their Own Petard: Improper use of a smoke screen can blind a player while the enemy can still see them.
  • Its possible for aircraft carriers to torpedo themselves.
  • Players marked team killers can easily kill themselves with their own torpedoes because all damage done by a team killer to friendlies is reflected back.
• Hot Sub-on-Sub Action: As of the update 0.9.4. submarines are now in the game in a limited game mode, and it's not that uncommon for submarines to sink other submarines with homing acoustic torpedoes.
• Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy: Secondary batteries tend to have astounding dispersion, even though they only fire at less than 5 kilometers (unless you're an end-tier battleship like the Yamato). Justified since even low tier battleships have lots of secondary guns and could outgun cruisers on their strength alone.
  • Averted to a degree with later patches which gave commanders the ability to learn a skill that reduces the dispersion of secondary batteries (To the tune of a 60% reduction) when you 'mark' a target, meaning that getting into close-range of a battleship with this skill is incredibly dangerous. Additionally, certain premium battleships and carriers have signifigantly increased secondary precision.
• Interface Screw: Discussed by The Mighty Jingles after doing a demonstration battle during the 2016 Wargaming League Grand Finals, where the client, much like its Tanks counterpart, is modified for the benefit of the audience. For example, rather than having your enemy being red, the team colors are fixed so that the 'red team' is red no matter which side you are playing for, which led to some confusion until they got used to it, so that they shot at the 'blue' teams rather than their red allies.
• I Don't Know Mortal Kombat: Quite a few real world naval tactics are utterly useless here. The most notable is escorting aircraft carriers, a staple of naval fleet formations in WWII, and increasingly useless here. For starters the only viable reason for escorting an aircraft carrier is to protect it from enemy planes, all carrier captains even a quarter competent know to avoid enemy ships at all costs. however most carriers in the game have a good AA stat and beyond tier 7 they get use of defensive fire, which essentially makes them immune to air attacks. Its a far better strategy to focus on killing the enemy and leaving the CV to worry about his own safety.
• Jack of All Stats:
  • Cruisers are the intermediary class between destroyers and battleships. Their primary strengths are flexibility and providing an umbrella against enemy aircraft. The Japanese ones are capable of pretty much taking on any ship type and class thanks to their intermediary gun armament and torpedo armament.
  • Destroyer-wise, American destroyers are this, with it having better gun armament than the Japanese and better torpedo than the Soviet, but aren't as good as either on their dedicated role. Higher tier American destroyers can also serve as limited AA escort, furthering their versatility.
  • German Tier V battleship König with all upgrades and proper captain skills has the manoeuvrability of a heavy cruiser, a reasonable rate of fire and it can pummel the opponents easily with 10 big guns.
• Jolly Roger: The Jolly Roger flag is available as one of the many flag options that players can fly over their ships. In the "Naval Legends" series, the flag itself is most associated with the destroyer USS Kidd (itself added into the game after the video was made), in honor of the legendary pirate Captain Kidd. Notably, in Real Life, it was also the only US Navy ship allowed to fly the flag.
• Kill It with Fire: Expect to incur a lot of potential damage when your ship catches fire and the Extinguishers aren't ready. Destroyers are naturally susceptible to catching fire since they're the thinnest in terms of armor. It should be noted that you can set someone on fire up to four times, one fire per ship section. While one fire burning won't cause too much damage, having at least two at once will cause very substantial damage.
  • Fires will render a carrier's flight deck unusable, making them easy pickings.
  • This is actually a popular strategy with the U.S.N. destroyers, and cruisers that fire large salvos of shots, and/or have fast reloads, combined with a Captain's Skill that boost the chance of starting fires with HE rounds. The sheer amount of hits means they can light multiple ship sections on fire quickly, and overwhelm the Damage Control cooldown of the target between the fires, and module damage, letting the Damage Over Time pile up and leaving the enemy ship dead in the water.
• Lead the Target: This is the very first mechanic you're expected to learn and master. Your success at it plays a large part on your success at the game.
  • For main guns it will take several seconds for a salvo to reach the maximum firing range, and good ranges to shoot from often take 7-10 seconds to hit. All it takes is a slight miscalculation and a sudden change in course for most or all of the shells to miss. That said, successful aiming seems to be not too difficult, even without a WoWP-style leading reticle, due to the ships' much, much slower speeds. Aiding in this, the crosshair when using the zoomed-in view has a horizontal bar to help judge how far to lead your shots. The tick marks on the reticle can be used to determine the lead for a ship at a certain speed, because the lead changes little with distance since the shell flight time correlates roughly linearly with the distance^note As long as the reticle remains scaled appropriately, the distance represented by the space between the tick marks of the reticle increases linearly with the distance at which you are aiming at. At double a distance, a ship at the same speed will take double the time to cover the distance represented by the ticks, but the flight time of the shells will also roughly double. Shells still slow down in flight, but this does not factor much unless you are firing a low caliber high velocity gun. The dynamic crosshair is especially useful for leading, as it keeps its scale constant at different zoom levels and allows you to standardize your lead. As long as you know the rough speed of what you're shooting at and account for when they're angled to sail away or towards you, it can be an invaluable aid.
  • Ship-launched torpedoes get the benefit of having an arc of fire zone displayed, with an shaded area showing the amount of lead needed before launching to likely score as many hits as possible, based on the enemy ship's current speed, course, and range. Emphasis on current. A ship with sufficient warning, paying attention to what's going on, and sufficient maneuverability can dodge many, if not all the torpedoes. Even battleships with sufficiently aware captains can pull this off by turning ahead of time, or by simply throwing the ship into a full reverse to slow down in time, laughing as the torpedoes pass harmless in front of the bow of the ship, before turning their attention and guns to a very unlucky cruiser or destroyer. And then they may just turn for an entirely different reason oblivious to the Advancing Wall of Doom in the water (eg. One of your battleships decides to engage the target, leading the enemy to angle his bow against the new threat) and coincidentally miss the entire salvo. On the other hand, a well-coordinated team can make it very difficult for even the most skilled captain to dodge the torpedoes, by having one destroyer lead the target's current course and the other(s) leading the most likely courses it would use to dodge.
• Leitmotif: Each nation gets one every time one checks the tech tree and selects a respective nation. While the notes are overall similar, the prime difference lies in the instrument being used.
• Lightning Bruiser: Several battleships and high tier cruisers classify as this, having good speed and being heavily armed and armored.
  • A notable example is the German Tier 6 battleship *Bayern*, featuring the third-best top speed, second best guns and some of the best armor for battleships at her tier, and having better range than even *Warspite*. The tradeoff for these is horrible main gun dispersion at range and her turtleback armor scheme being less effective the further away from the enemy she is.
• Macross Missile Massacre:
  • The IJN's Tier 8 Premium cruiser in closed-beta, the Kuma-class torpedo cruiser Kitakami, carries 40 torpedoes in ten 4-tube launchers, and can fire off 20 fish to a broadside, but fell victim to Crippling Overspecialization.
  • A lesser variant by the Tier 10 destroyer, the Shimakaze, with its 15 torpedo tubes, which can fire on either broadside. The Shimakaze averts the fate of the Kitakami by being blisteringly fast and having decent guns (although nowhere near its US counterparts' weaponry; like other Japanese destroyers its guns are relatively slow to turn and slow to reload).
  • The Soviet Derzki class destroyer is capable of firing off 15 torpedoes at a time and each launcher reloads in a mere 15 seconds. Though the range is pitifully short at only 3 kilometers, it can be a nasty surprise when one gets too close. Or gets careless coming around an island.
  • For actual missiles, (well unguided rockets but close enough), this is how Carrier attack aircraft do damage. Special mention goes to Audacious which sprays 42 missiles in one run.
• Made of Explodium: All ships apparently, since when they're destroyed they ALWAYS go off in a big fireball, no matter the cause of sinking. Yes, this includes even destruction via flooding.
• Medal of Dishonor: The Detonation medal which like the name suggests, is awarded by suffering an unlucky Detonation.
• Mercy Mode: A daily reward, is the consumable Signal Flag item "Juliet Charlie", which makes your ship immune to Magazine Explosions. Its received by suffering a Magazine Explosion, thus sinking your ship. For extra bonus points, Juliet Charlie in naval signal flag code means "no danger of explosion".
• Mighty Glacier: Early-tier battleships are all about outgunning the enemy with little regard for speed. Later-tier battleships, on the other hand, avert this heavily with a speed range of 25-32 knots without sacrificing firepower and armor.
• Military Mash Up Machine: The Okhotnik may be classified as a destroyer but it is closer to a this trope in practice. It has the stealth of destroyer, the armament of a (torpedo) cruiser, and the maneuverability of a battleship.
• More Dakka:
  • American cruisers and battleships, especially the upper tiers, may use smaller guns than other navies for their primary armament, but they do pack more of what they do carry, giving comparable munition weight per salvo/minute. Latter tiers up the ante by having auto-loading mechanisms as part of their designs, boosting the rate of fire significantly.
  • The champions of these would arguably be the Cleveland and Atlanta class Light cruisers, with rapid firing main armament in addition to their highly lethal AA batteries. The former has twelve 6-inch guns and another twelve 5-inch secondaries (which are dual-purpose to boot), while the latter has a whopping sixteen 5-inch guns as its main armament, plus (unlike other American cruisers) a pair of quadruple torpedo tubes.
  • Even U.S. destroyers get in on this. While their torpedoes aren't the greatest, their main guns are significantly better than the IJN's destroyer ships.^note USN destroyers have very good traverse speed, and reload extremely fast, making them excellent for High Explosive shell spam, constantly inflicting module critical hits, and setting enemy ships on fire, as well as excellent counter-destroyer support. Where as most of the IJN line's vessels get better torpedoes, or torpedo tubes as their main armament upgrade, USN destroyers get's better guns, or number of main battery guns more often than not. Additionally, like most of the American tech tree, they eventually get a significant amount of AA guns, making them useful to quickly sail around and provide AA defense for their team where needed.
  • At low tiers the American tier 3 cruiser the St. Louis is king of this - it carries fourteen main gun batteries (though it can't fire them all at the same target simultaneously).
  • In Tier X, the USN is the absolute King of Rate of Fire, and potential DPM through the sheer number of shells they can put out, if not in terms of outright alpha damage, thanks the U.S. Navy adding Auto-Loading assistance to their ships. The Gearing-Class destroyer, has 3x 2-barrel 5-inch gun turrets that fire every 3 seconds, and faster with the Basic Firing Training captain skill. The Des Moines-Class Cruiser has 9 barrels of 8-inch guns in a 3x3 turrets/guns configuration that fire every 6 seconds. And because they're 8-inch/203mm guns, suitable for AP against both enemy cruisers, and even close range Battleships that are broadside on, not to mention, the best AA-Defensive guns in the game. The Montana-Class Battleship, while packing smaller guns than the Yamato with the same reload speed, packs 3 more gun barrels in a 4th turret to make up for the lower damage per-shell.
  • The closest the IJN has to this via main batteries would be the Mogami-class cruisers when armed with 6-inch guns (fifteen of them). Otherwise, most of them tend to go for bigger guns. However, IJN Battleships have the heaviest secondary armament count in the game. A Yamato with full secondary armament upgrades and captain skills, effectively has two destroyers worth of fire-power bolted to the side of it's super structure. And they can fire out to 10.6km range. Here's a video of atsf/Eurobeat demonstrating just how much damage the ''Yamato'''s secondary guns alone can inflict, including 32,000+ from the 152mm AP secondary shells. And that's before including the fact that Yamato has the biggest guns ever mounted on a ship, both in game and real-life.
  • Not to be outdone, the Soviet/Russian line has a hefty dose of this as well, with the tier 3 cruiser Bogatyr that has twelve main guns (two less than the St. Louis, but it can also fire eight on a broadside, making them equal) and the tier 3 premium cruiser Aurora that has fourteen main guns in the same arrangement as the St. Louis .
  • All of the Soviet cruiser between Kirov (tier V) and Moskva (tier X) are rapid fire light cruisers including the premium Mikhail Kutuzov. Russia keeps using small caliber guns on light cruiser even at tier nine with Dmitri Donskoi, where all other nations switch over to heavy cruiser after tier 6. Russian light cruisers make up for this with a very high rate of fire, and, unlike many examples of this trope, very high accuracy.
  • Higher-tier British cruisers are this as well, and, amusingly, the Tier 1 British cruiser, the Black Swan, with 6 guns, each with a 3 second reload - exactly the same base shells per minute of the USN Tier 10 destroyer, the Gearing. Even so, there's a noticeable progression in the level of dakka as one progresses through the British light cruiser line as, for the most part, number of guns increases and reload gets quicker (Edgar can spit out so many 6in AP shells, a division with multiple Edgars can often get confused as to whose shells are whose when they're targeting the same enemy).
  • Probably the one cruiser which takes this concept to its logical extreme is the Tier X steel ship Austin. When captained by Halsey, upon triggering his Implacable talent, receiving some damage to generate some Adrenaline Rush buff, obtaining full buffs collected from the Arms Race battle mode, Austin's main battery reload booster (which would, at base stats, reduce reload to 2s... and is unique for having unlimited usages) can lower her reload to barely a fraction of a second, as this full health unfortunate Smolensk discovered much to their horror.
  • The German tier 2 cruiser Dresden has twelve rapid-firing guns that can rip apart enemies just as easily as the St. Louis.
  • Russian destroyers look to be invoking this in terms of both their guns and their anti-aircraft defenses, with high-tier Russian destroyers being some of the most powerful in the game in terms of gun firepower.
  • In terms of sheer amounts of guns to a broadside none beat the Lyon, the tier seven French battleship. It mounts sixteen main battery guns, and, unlike many other ships with a high gun volume, it can fire them all to one side in one salvo. And then it has its secondaries.
    • A tactic that has been seen is the "Lyon Division"; Three Lyon battleships, operating in formation, all firing at the same target at the same time, meaning some poor sucker can have forty-eight large-calibre shells landing on them at the same time. At close range this will erase essentially everyone of the same tier or lower.

Tropes N-Z

• Names to Run Away from Really Fast: Given the Royal Navy's historic naming convention, this is to be expected.
  • HMS Dreadnought, which roughly means "fears nothing." She made every single warship in the world obsolete when she was commissioned and is the Trope Maker for The Dreaded Dreadnought. In-game, there's also Devastation, the British super-battleship, and with 16 high-calibre shells per salvo with excellent fire starting chances, Devastation is guranteed.
  • Gremyaschy ("Thundering"), easily the most famous and successful Soviet destroyer.^note It is available as Tier V premium ship, with 38 knots flat-out, turning on a pin, and armed to the teeth. In the Real Life Soviet Type 7 destroyers suffered from poor seakeeping and weak hulls, but in the game, where the sea state doesn't play a role, it is not an issue, while its four 130-mm guns and six torpedo tubes are a bane of CVs and battleships. And now her sister ship Gnevny ("Wrathful") has entered the game as a non-premium.
  • Bogatyr ("Demigod"), the Tier 3 Russian cruiser that has a broadside to rival the American St. Louis.
  • HMS Warspite. The Grand Old Lady of the Royal Navy, the ship with the most battle honors in all history, the most prestigious warship of the Royal Navy and a battle-scarred veteran of both World Wars, surviving innumerable bomb, shell and missile hits and dealing out damage in a way that put every other battleship in existence to shame. It doesn't help that this ship's destructive potential and armor is reflected in game.
  • Hakuryu ("White Dragon"), aka Project G15/Taihou-Kai. Armored aircraft carrier with 8 flight groups available, more than enough planes to swarm even a Yamato or Montana to death. Also heftier AA armament than other Japanese ships, carrying the Type 5 (reverse-engineered 40mm Bofors) that the real-life IJN never got into production.
  • Kongō. It means "Indestructible", named after a mountain in Japan, as were her sister ships, Hiei, Kirishima, and Haruna. A class of battlecruisers designed by British Naval architect Sir George Thurston^note Knight of the British Empire for his work with the Royal Navy, based on the British Lion class of battlecruisers. The name ship was built in Britain, and the other three ships, in Japan, all in the early to mid 1910s. After several refits throughout the decades leading up to WWII they were upgraded to fast battleships, adding nearly 5000 tons of total displacement with hull, armor, weapon, power plant, and other upgrades, and capable of reaching speeds in excess of 30 knots. They were the most active capital ships of the IJN during WWII. In game, they're arguably the best tier V battleships yet, with an all-round balance of speed, firepower, and range, though they do sacrifice some armor for it
  • USS Midway's name doesn't sound scary in and of itself, but she's named after a battle in which US carriers managed to defeat a numerically superior Japanese carrier fleet. It was also claimed she was named this because her large size and advanced aircraft made her more powerful than all the carriers that fought at Midway combined.
  • HMS Lion is named after a ferocious predator cat.
  • USS Black's name isn't that scary, though it is cool. Its designation is a little worrying though, DD-666.
• Necessary Drawback: An odd example with the "first blood" award. Its the only award in the whole game which doesn't award ten of a corresponding signal flag. Instead "first blood" gives the player just one signal flag (boosting the amount of credits earned in battle by 20%). This is to prevent the team from mass suiciding to get the signals.
• No Range Like Pointblank Range:
  • The worst thing that can happen when you're in a battleship or a cruiser dealing with an enemy destroyer is when they get right next to you: You'll never dodge their torpedoes. However, the DD really does not want to literally be point blank to the enemy BB (<100m), since their torpedo cannot arm if the enemy's too close. And if they accidentally sailed near enemy's bow...
  • Don't try this against Japanese cruisers (except Chikuma, which can't launch torpedoes), American scout cruisers (the Atlanta, Phoenix, and Omaha), the majority of new German cruisers, or German battleships like the Scharnhorst, Gneisenau, and Tirpitz, as demonstrated here
  • Recent updates have given battleships a significant accuracy buff at close range, under the logical assumption that you shouldn't miss targets a mere boat-length away.
• No Swastikas:
  • Per the Wargaming standard, the German ships use the Nazi Germany naval ensign with the swastika replaced by an Iron Cross. This flag is also used on Imperial German vessels due to the fact that the Imperial flag is sometimes used by neo-Nazis as substitute for the Nazi flag.
  • The Hunt for the Bismarck event introduced the paint scheme that the actual ship itself wore during its first, and final, sortie, as well as a damaged version. In both cases, the swastikas on the fore and aft ends of the deck have been replaced with the Iron Cross.
  • The Japanese "sun burst" flags were present in early builds of the game but were quickly removed and replaced with Japan's national flag. The sunburst is associated with Japanese militaristic expansion and it is still considered offensive in most parts of East and Southeast Asia.
  • Oddly though the same hasn't been done for Italian Facist symbols, which can be seen on the few ships they have in the game save for Roma (historically she wasn't adorned like other ships were). It may help that the flags themselves aren't considered offensive and were used before the rise of Facism and have been used after.
• Not-Actually-Cosmetic Award: Quite a few of the "Battle Hero" achievements award signal flags that can be equipped to provide various bonuses for the next battle. The most valuable of these, the 1.5x experience "Equal Speed Charlie London", requires earning either the "Confederate" or after Patch 0.5.2, the "Kraken Unleashed" award, both of which are much more difficult compared to their World of Tanks counterparts (Shared name for former, "Top Gun" for latter).^note Confederate in World of Tanks requires the player to score damaging hits on at least 6 vehicles, while in Warships, in addition to damaging at least 6 ships they also need to deal at least 20% of each ship's health pool in damage. Kraken Unleashed is harder than Top Gun because while both require 5 kills, there's less ships available to sink in a match, and they're also harder to kill compared to a tank.
• Not the Intended Use: When selected, torpedo launchers have a lead indicator showing where to fire a torpedo salvo to hit the targeted ship if it doesn't change course or speed. Fans of the battleship Tirpitz discovered that this feature is helpful for aiming the ship's main guns, since the torpedo lead indicator makes it obvious if someone is trying to slow down to avoid an impending artillery barrage.
  • Catapult aircraft are intended to help with AA or boost the range of the main guns depending on which is selected. However people found out they are rather useful for spotting incoming torpedoes and detecting ships over islands since they still count as an airplane. Wargaming has since released a few commander skills and upgrades that support this use of catapult aircraft.
    • Ditto with the fighters CV's can deploy from their squadrons. They are intended to be used to keep specific allies safe from air attack for about a minute. But after the CV rework it took players about three hours to figure out that they can be used to provide a minute or so of fixed spotting, freeing up the squadron the pursue other targets. The devs weren't quite as supporting of this one and nerfed fighter durability, though it still remains a popular tactic.
• One-Hit Kill:
  • A shell in the right spot can trigger a Magazine Explosion which is instantaneous and fatal.
  • Same applies for many ships unlucky enough to be caught in a torpedo spread. A single torpedo hit in the right spot can also detonate a magazine, and of course depending on the damage potential of the specific torpedo and the hit points of the target, it's possible to one-hit kill a destroyer without scoring a detonation.
  • The awards "Detonation" and "Devastating Strike" are awarded to players who detonate magazines or sink a target in a single salvo, respectively.
• One Stat to Rule Them All: Almost every ship class has a singular stat that takes priority above all others.
  • Destroyers - Concealment. Given destroyers' role to be scouts and ambushers, a destroyer's effectiveness is generally decided solely by its concealment, as better concealment reduces the chances of being spotted and gives you the advantage against destroyers with poorer concealment. Examples include Kamikaze, Cossack, Fletcher, and Kitakaze.
  • Cruisers - HE Damage. For most cruisers, their effectiveness is based solely on their ability to deal damage that can bypass heavy armor. In most cases, this means cruisers with high penetration HE shells or shells with a very high fire chance. Otherwise, cruisers that have enhanced AP capabilities like improved penetration angles are also highly valued and considered top tier. Examples include Zao, Hindenburg, Worcestershire, Minotaur, Stalingrad, and Alaska.
  • Battleships - Dispersion. Considering their incredibly slow rate of fire, being able to hit your target consistently from long range is extremely important for battleships. As such, battleships with with very low dispersion and very high sigma values are considered the best performing battleships in the game. Examples include North Carolina, Montana, Slava, Kremlin, Thunderer, and Yamato.
• One-Steve Limit:
  • Ships are identified by name both in the in-game displays and in the game files, and thus must have unique names. This sometimes requires a class in the tech tree to be named after a ship other than the actual class leader, on account of the name already being in use elsewhere. For example the Tier IV German cruiser Karlsruhe is the second ship for 1915 Königsberg class. This allowed the more famous 1927 Königsberg class to represented by the lead ship at Tier V. However, it's only a problem if the the ships' names are identical, not if they're similar (with one exception).
  • Enforced with the WWII-era St. Louis-class light cruiser, which will be represented by USS Helena, to avoid a name conflict with the existing St. Louis-class protected cruiser. Slightly averted insomuch the French Tier IX main line cruiser is 'Saint Louis' (but both ships share the same ultimate namesake, Louis IX of France, albeit via the city in Missouri in the USN ship's case).
  • When tech tree splits are being tested in which some existing ships will be moved to new tiers (as has happened so far with Japanese and Russian destroyers), this will result in two versions of the same ship being temporarily in the game files, one for regular players and planned new version for supertester accounts. The test versions of the re-tiered ships will be given a provisional name of a sister ship if any is available, and if not simply a plausible-sounding name matching the nation's naming conventions.
  • Enforced for a premium version of the Amagi, using its now-removed pre-pagoda mast A-hull. It is given the very early name Ashitaka (later renamed to Takao) because the names of the Amagi's sister (Akagi) and would-be sister ships (Takao and Atago) are already in use in game in some way, shape, or form.^note Akagi, in aircraft carrier guise, was teased way back in the alpha, while Takao and Atago appear as Tier VIII Takao-class heavy cruisers
  • An example of a name change due to similarity. The Allen M. Sumner-class destroyer sitting at Tier X on the Pan-Asian destroyer tree was initially the USS Brush, and appearing as the ROCN Hsiang Yang. However, due to the name being virtually identical to the Hsieng Yang (ex-USS Macomb, a Gleaves-class destroyer) at Tier 8, another one of Brush's sister ships sold to the ROCN was brought in to replace it, the Yue Yang (ex-USS Haynsworth).
  • République was known as France until very shortly before its release. This was because people kept getting the ship and the nation it was from confused.
  • Increasingly averted with many more recent releases, often with the same actual ship, albeit at different stages of their career: Belfast vs Belfast '43; Renown vs Renown '44; Tashkent vs Tashkent '39; West Virginia '41 vs the upcoming West Virginia '44, etc. Slightly further from this is the Royal Navy's Tiger (a WWI battlecruiser) vs Tiger '59 (a post-WWII light cruiser), though all of these instances use the year of construction or refit to distinguish between them. The only actual exception to this convention is the Commonwealth's Vampire vs Vampire II (WWI and late-WWII destroyers given to the Australian Navy by the Royal Navy) which can be confusing for a very rare few players when competitive clans recruit and select based on ownership of 'Vampire' (Vampire II is an often popular pick due to its high HE DPM, utility, and battle impact, while clan battles have never taken place at Tier III, where Vampire 'I' is).
  • Related to the above is the same ship which appears in-game multiple times, albeit in different navies (more IRL than in-game): Giulio Cesar vs Novorossiysk; Chungking vs Huanghe; and Boise vs Nueve de Julio. More examples exist, though more as identical sister-ships rather than the literal same ship.
• Palette Swap:
  • There are 3 versions of the lead and name ship of the Kamikaze-class destroyer, all featured as Tier 5 premiums. There's Kamikaze herself, then there's the R variant with her own unique camo, obtained by participating and completing the "Project R" event, and then there's the Fujin, essentially a Kamikaze with a Halloween-themed camo. All three of these ships are identical in every aspect, including the bonuses from each ship's unique camo (reduction of surface detection range and extra bonus to experience earned). Kamikaze herself was actually the last of the trio to be added to the game, being sold on the Southeast Asia server's premium shop and as a random in-game offer for doubloons on the other servers. All three are sometimes mistaken for palette swaps of the very similar Tier 5 non-premium Minekaze, but they aren't.
  • The Fog Fleet counterparts for each of the four Kongou-class battleships are all palette swaps of each other. Specifically, each takes a fully upgraded Kongou (which is effectively Haruna, as she was the last surviving member of the class prior to her sinking, with Hiei's superstructure) and applies the appropriate Fog Fleet markings on it. Likewise for the Fog Fleet versions of the four Myouko-class heavy cruisers. For players who don't use the Arpeggio of Blue Steel themed "Yokosuka" port, other players' Fog ships (tagged with "ARP" in front of their names) simply show up as regular Kongous and Myoukos, since the Arpeggio events can be entirely opted out of by anyone who doesn't like anime ships in the middle of their arcade-style World War II naval battles.
  • Many of the Azur Lane collaboration ships fall into the same category as Fog Fleet ships, typically merely being reskinned versions of existing ships in the game with slightly tweaked stats. One of the most egregious palette swaps was the AL Littorio, which not only was not only functionally identical to the Roma, but also used the exact same ship down to the the name Roma still being visible on the hull. The error was eventually patched, but the damage was already done.
• Pintsized Powerhouse: Destroyers and torpedo bombers are potentially deadly equalizers that can hammer a ton of damage, making them dangerous to the slower-moving battleship and aircraft carrier.
• Play Every Day: The first win each day for a ship gives a 1.5x experience multiplier. In addition, there are daily missions built in that give credits or free experience upon completion.
• Pyrrhic Victory: Possible in the temporary post-apocalyptic "Savage Battle" mode. Unlike previous game types, Savage battles have four teams battle royal style. The main point of them is to complete missions for fuel tokens and earn XP for the next upgrade of ships in the mode. However, very few of the objectives revolve around winning and it's more than possible the losing teams will earn far more XP and mission progress than the nominal winners. Playing passively in this mode will only get you a nominal victory.
• Ramming Always Works: Ramming an enemy ship is rarely done in the normal course of gameplay because the underlying mechanics meant damage was based on the health pool not health remaining, would result in extremely high damage to both ships, often an immediate double sinking. Apart from accidental collisions, the usual reason for a player to ram is because they are low on health, about to die, but can inflict massive damage or even sink a high health opponent ship. Before the CV rework bought unlimited aircraft, matches with just carriers left would sometimes be resolved by one or more carriers heading into the cap zones and ramming the other.
  • It's rare, but particularly crafty Carrier captains have been know to sink DD's that try to torp them by evading the spread then swerving in front of the other ship so that it smashes into them. Given the size difference the carrier can survive this while the DD will crumple like a tin can.
• Random Number God:
  • The amount of damage you receive when hit by an enemy shell, bomb, or torpedo is random. At its worst, you could either get a magazine detonation or a citadel hit. At best, minimal or no damage is inflicted.
  • Shell dispersion is also subject to the Random Number God; while gun has its own max dispersion stat (based on a standard distribution) dictating how far off a shell can be from point of aim, the RNG dictates where within that radius each shell actually lands.
• Reliably Unreliable Guns: American torpedoes when compared to their Japanese counterparts, at least until the highest tiers. Truth in Television: the Americans weren't able to solve the issues with their torpedoes up until mid-1943, meaning they had to work with torpedoes that had shorter ranges and were less reliable for the first half of the war. German and Russian torpedoes had similar issues, with Russian torpedoes being amongst the worst performers.
  • In terms of actual guns there is the very unique Japanese tier 2 Premium Battleship, the Mikasa. Her primary armament has awful dispersion even for a battleship combined with lackluster penetration, and it only has 2 turrets for a total of 4 main guns. Even attempting to use those guns is an exercise in frustration. Instead, as demonstrated by The Mighty Jingles, it's actually better to equip the Mikasa for the use of her fairly powerful and reliable secondary armament.
  • While we're talking about the IJN, their Destroyers' guns up until Tier 7's Hatsuharu. Atrocious rotation speed, and very slow Rate of Fire, slower than even Cruisers. The guns velocity and flight trajectory also leaves much to be desired, and the Damage Per Minute no where near the USN or Russian Destroyers. This further encourages the stealthier torpedo focused gameplay of the IJN Destroyers, with the consensus being that unless their guns just so happen to be pointing in the right direction if they get spotted, its better for them to run. And when not spotted, in most cases it's a bad idea for IJN destroyers to fire their guns at all since that just increases their detection range and thwarts opportunities for stealthy torpedo launches.
    • The newly-announced split of the IJN destroyer line culminates in a ship that's expected to avert this in a big way, the Tier 8 Akizuki. Unlike every other Japanese destroyer, the Akizuki will have four fast-turning turrets each mounting two rapid-firing guns with very flat trajectory^note 3 second reload time, 1000meter/second velocity, 11 second 180-degree turn time, but only minimal torpedo armament. While its 100mm guns will be smaller than any other high-tier destroyer and historically didn't even have an AP round, their machine gun-like HE spam should be ideal for killing other destroyers and setting larger ships on fire. There's also speculation that it will be the first Japanese destroyer to get the Defensive AA Fire consumable, since historically the Type 98 100mm gun was primarily an anti-aircraft weapon (and in the game already operates as such in the secondary armament of the Japanese Tier 9 and 10 cruisers and aircraft carriers).
• Shell-Shock Silence: Occurs when your ship suffers a particularly vicious hit from enemy shell fire. Although, in practice, it comes off as more of a "Sssssssssssss..." sound.
  • As of the latest patches, it comes off more as a ringing sound, rather than being actual silence.
• Short-Range Long-Range Weapon: You'll need to check and memorize the Muzzle Velocity stats if you're mostly going to rely on just the main guns. A lower muzzle velocity means that your ship is going to have trouble hitting even a Battleship at maximum range in which case you'll have to lead very heavily or refrain from firing until you're at a closer distance. A higher muzzle velocity means that the shell will fly to the target in a shorter time, increasing the probability of a hit by reducing the amount of leading you need to give when placing your crosshair on the heading of a targeted ship.
• Shout-Out: All tier XXX spaceships (initially revealed for April Fools 2015, then available to play on Cosmonautics Day of the same year) are shout-out to other works, including the Yamato, Zaya (Takao/Maya)^note It was supposed to be referencing the Maya, but Zaya got Takao's pattern instead, Resettini-class Flyfire (Firefly-class Serenity), and Enterprice (Enterprise) and Galaxy (Galactica).
• Shown Their Work: Some very subtle ones, but those with a sharp eye will see them. Some of the most notable are:
  • In recent patches, the Iowa's A hull now corresponds to how it looked like when the ship was first built. ^note  The signature closed bridge with rectangular windows was not implemented on Iowa herself until 1945, after the ship had been damaged in a typhoon. Instead, it has an open bridge as shown on said hull.
  • On the US Ship Icons, and the flags on the US ships themselves, the flag only contains 48 stars. Considering the time frame the game is set (Pre-World War I to immediate post World War II), this historically correct as Hawaii and Alaska didn't become states until 1959.
    • On many US ships the decorative custom flag is placed higher than the American flag, which would normally be a sign of disrespect as all other flags are supposed to be subordinate to (and thus flown lower than) the nation's flag. It wasn't the case for ships of that era though, as the higher masts often placed the flags they sported in the path of exhaust. Thus American flags were usually placed lower on the ship to avoid soiling them.
  • Similar to the US Navy ensign, Russian ships will show either the Russian Imperial ensign (white St. Andrew's Cross on a blue field) or the Soviet ensign, depending on when the ship was built/refitted.
  • American torpedoes are very short ranged. So short ranged in fact, that the ships using them have to get within suicidally short ranges to use them effectively. This was a common issue with American torpedoes in real life, and it wasn't until the later part of the war that the USN had torpedoes that were actually reliable enough to be used in large numbers. On top of that...
  • It also shows American torpedoes used by later destroyers such as the Mahan class as having much better range, due to the fact that the problems with the torpedoes were ironed out by mid-1943.
  • German torpedoes, like American torpedoes, suffered from serious shortcomings in range and reliability that were worked out as the war progressed. The poor range of the German torpedoes is evident in the first released gameplay footage featuring the Tirpitz.
  • Initially, Russian torpedoes were even worse in terms of speed and range, and this is reflected in-game. Later on, however, Russian torpedoes are blisteringly fast (for example, Tier 6 Ognevoi's 53-39 mod. 1 can do 70 knots, the only non-Russian torpedo that can match that speed is the Zao's, which can do 76), but still has range issue.
  • Torpedoes have arming ranges, which means that you can't get in the face of an enemy warship and let loose with the torpedoes, you have to balance getting close enough to guarantee a hit, while far enough way that the torpedoes actually arm. And this goes for both ship launched, and air launched torpedoes.
  • Several ship classes have anti-torpedo blisters. In real life, these blisters were designed to reduce the risk of severe damage or flooding of the ship in question. Ingame, this is represented by nearly eliminating the flooding chances, and significantly reduce the amount of damage taken if the ship takes hits in those areas (the apex of this being Yamato, whose torpedo bulges reduce damage by more than half^note While the real Yamato-class had some weak points in their torpedo protection, as a whole it really was this good. Yamato took 11 to 13 torpedo hits (along with at least 17 bombs), including some that hit in the same spot as previous torpedoes, areas where bomb damage compromised the torpedo bulge and, after listing from the earlier hits, torpedoes that hit below the bulge. Her sister ship Musashi took an even worse beating, only sinking after 19 torpedo hits along with 17 bombs. In-game, 19 torpedoes from any US carrier other than Langley add up to a maximum damage of 187,473: nearly enough to sink two Tier X battleships without any help from flooding.). It won't save the ship in question from a full spread of torpedoes, but it will help if you can't dodge the entire spread, or an ally manages to hit your ship by accident.
• Smoke Out: Most destroyers^note HMS Anthony, MN Le Terrible, and all of the French tech-tree destroyers do not get this consumable AT ALL., certain cruisers have access to smoke generators, which allow them to lay out smokescreens and give them room for escaping, or, alternatively, allow them to invisi-fire on enemies from within. Other ships with this ability include most British cruisers and several other premium or limited-release cruisers.
• So Last Season: German cruiser torpedoes have a range of 6km, which is equal to or better than any other type of torpedo... at tier IV. However, they will never improve past that range and only get slightly faster, meaning they become less and less useful with each ascending tier.
  • Averted with regard to range for the upcoming German destroyer line, which is understandable for balance purposes since destroyers are so torpedo-reliant. But played straight with damage output, which remains the same (a maximum of 14,400) for every German destroyer from the Tier VII Leberecht Maass to the Tier X Z-52, despite each higher tier having to face enemies with bigger HP pools and better torpedo protection.^note As mentioned above, Yamato gets a whopping 55% damage reduction to torpedo hits in the anti-torpedo bulge.
  • In effect with Russian cruisers and their torpedoes as well. Kirov, Chapayev, and all the cruisers in between essentially use the same torpedoes mounted in a single quintuple or triple launcher. The exceptions are the Murmansk, which uses shares its longer-ranged but slower torpedoes with the Gremyashchy, the Mikhail Kutuzov, which also has longer-ranged but slower torpedoes, the Dmitri Donskoi, same as before, and the Moskva, which has no torpedoes.
  • In effect with guns to an extent. British cruisers for example use essentially the same round 6inch Ap from tier II to tier X. At lower tiers its devastating and punchy, at tier X its only acceptable because of the absurd rate of fire.
  • The armor scheme on British aircraft carriers. Starting at tier 8 they have a large armored 76mm rectangle on the flight deck surrounded by 36mm plate around that and thinner plates at the extremities. At tier 8 this makes them very tanky and they are reasonably effective ad thwarting dive bombers and rocket attacks. Unfortunately Audacious at tier X uses basically the same armor scheme, while Midway and Hakuryu have a 90ish mm plate on the entire flight deck.
• Sound-Effect Bleep: Pressing F11 sends an preset message to chat of Symbol Swearing, and broadcasts a voiced over radio message to your team or everyone with some form of curse. The less obvious in meaning, or more inventive curses^note Such as "By Neptune's Beard!", or "Storm the crows!" aren't censored. But the ones with actual swearing, like "Son of a B-" or "What the F-", have the Curse Cut Short with a radio beep for "end of transmission" cutting in.
• Super Prototype:
  • The Japanese tier X destroyer Shimakaze, which served as the first and only member of a powerful new generation of destroyers that was never built due to Japan's declining war situation.
  • The Japanese tier IV Yubari was basically a ship for testing various ship designs, and was the prototype for the Japanese light and heavy cruisers that were later built.
  • The upgrade tree for Japanese tier V Furutaka didn't initially reflect the upgrades she received historically until a fairly recent patch. Oddly enough, this patch, which concentrated her six guns into three turrets where there used to be six turrets, actually turned the The Alleged Ship into a What a Piece of Junk that is actually a fairly deadly cruiser in her fully upgraded form. A fully upgraded Furutaka is largely identical to a stock Aoba, except with much better torpedo arcs (Aoba can only launch her fish along the rear arc, essentially requiring her to show a full broadside) and worse rate of fire on the guns. This accurately reflects that the historical upgrades to Furutaka were meant to incorporate the improvements introduced starting with Aoba.
  • The tier IX aircraft carrier, Taiho - just to show how many superb ships the Imperial Japanese Navy had planned and yet failed to build due to a lack of industrial capacity. The tier X carrier, Hakuryu, in real life known as Kai-Taiho as it never progressed far enough for any to actually be named, was intended to be the next generation after Taiho.
  • The Soviets get the tier VIII destroyer Tashkent. Extremely fast, with impressive firepower for a destroyer of her type, but the only 1 of her class built due to the outbreak of war. The tier VII Kiev was actually meant to be an improved version of the Tashkent but was cancelled while only half completed due to the invading Germans overrunning the shipyard, yet for whatever reason she's lower tier than her prototype in the game.
  • The American tier VIII aircraft carrier the Lexington, despite the fact she had a sister named Saratoga. She and her sister were America's second and third carriers respectively, commissioned in 1927. For comparison, her Japanese counterpart the Shokaku was commissioned in 1941 and the her predecessor on the tech tree Ranger was commissioned in 1934. Despite her age Lexington is still a fantastic carrier and boasts some of the strongest AA and secondaries mounted on a CV.
• Tactical Rock–Paper–Scissors: Destroyers kill aircraft carriers and battleships with torpedoes and their high maneuverability. Cruisers pack enough punch to defeat destroyers while being maneuverable enough to dodge their torpedoes. Battleships outgun cruisers and can easily tank their guns. Aircraft carriers launch airplanes that can easily defeat battleships.
• Taking You with Me: Players who sail into a very bad situation with no hope of escape can still make a good tradeoff on the enemy fleet via ramming.
• Taking the Bullet: Torpedo in this case. Usually done when a ship is about to die anyway and its wreck will proved some temporary torpedo coverage.
• Target Spotter: Much like the Light tanks from World of Tanks, this is one of the destroyers' roles, acting as a scouting party and finding enemy ships ahead of the main fleet.
  • Later tier Battleships and certain cruisers can also make use of one of two types of scout planes, both of which will allow them to spot an enemy ship that blunders into the detection range of the scout. The fighter scout can also be used to attack incoming aircraft, while the spotter scout increases the ship's main battery gun range.
  • Aircraft carriers are also quite adept at this for obvious reasons. many carrier players who are bottom tier will focus on keeping targets, especially destroyers, lit up above anything else. While for balance purposes, aircraft have shorter spotting range than ships, the sheer speed of fighter planes makes them excellent scouts.
  • Update 0.5.12 finally made target spotting part of the economy.
• Technician vs. Performer: Present when comparing most USN ships with their IJN counterparts, although inverted when comparing USN destroyers with their Russian/Soviet counterparts.
• Tech Tree: One for each of the five navies - the United States Navy, the Royal Navy, the Imperial Japanese Navy, the Kriegsmarine and the Soviet Navy. However, the full tech trees for all four classes of ship are likely to be available only for the first three navies, the only three to have true aircraft carriers during the Second World War (unless the incomplete German carrier Graf Zeppelin is brought in as a premium ship). And even taking into account ships that were never actually completed, the Soviet Navy also doesn't have anywhere near enough battleships to fill that branch of the tree. The Soviet tech tree was started early in part so that the Imperial Russian turned Soviet cruiser Aurora (which is preserved as a museum ship and literally visible out the windows of the developers' St. Petersburg studio) could be included in the game.
• Time-Delayed Death: Any ship that takes multiple torpedoes (or gets rammed) and neither does sink from the initial explosions nor have emergency teams ready will slowly flood to death. The same thing happens for a ship with multiple fires. Flooding causes damage much faster than fire, so savvy battleship drivers will (unless already perilously low on health) let a single fire burn if there's any chance at all of being torpedoed. Players can win an award for sinking an enemy ship after their own is sunk using this mechanic. It's also possible to get this award if you have shells in the air or torpedoes in the water when sunk, and those go on to inflict a killing blow, but that's less common.
• Took a Level in Badass: Apparently, The Rasputin in the Halloween event mission is piloted by Captain Bad Advice himself.
• Trial by Friendly Fire: You will be tempted to fire torpedoes at a target while a friendly craft is downrange. However, you also really shouldn't, as Murphy's Law is never your friend where torpedoes are concerned. A common rule of thumb in the game is to never fire torpedoes when friendlies are ahead/will soon be ahead.
• Truth in Television:
  • When designated citadel areas had been given to destroyers in-game (in early alpha), their paper-thin armor would ensure that destroyers would die extremely fast because every hit would be a citadel penetration.
  • The camouflage patterns used in the game tend to look bizarre and flashy, not at all the kind of thing people are used to seeing on military vehicles. That's because most warships used "dazzle camouflage" in that era. Dazzle camo isn't intended so much to hide ships but rather to make them harder to hit by obscuring their distance, orientation and/or heading, a fact which is reflected in the bonuses dazzle camo gives ships (increasing the dispersion of shells targeting the ship).
  • Up until about Tier VIII, most battleships you'll get will usually start with their World War I design that can be upgraded to a World War II refit; most players will notice that not only does the World War I version have less armor and speed (which makes sense, as both were upgraded in the interim) but also less effective guns (which seemingly does not, as the guns remain the same caliber). The reason for this is that most armor-piercing shells during World War I were found to be ineffective due to fuse defects: even battlecruisers could and did stand up to a storm of fire and survive. Upgrading to the World War II refit gives you access to the reworked armor-piercing shells, which work far better.
  • Most World War II refits also significantly bump up the anti-air capabilities of a ship (Some of the WWI era hulls don't have any) to reflect the increased threat posed by enemy aircraft against capital ships. Those ships built during or right after WWII itself usually have fearsome AA to start with "stock" and can be made even better with the right modules and upgrades.
  • Ships of this era really could do something closely approximating the engine boost consumable. Steam ships obviously use steam pressure to make the engine work. However, not all the steam a ship generates is used on the engines, some is used to heat the ship and generate power. By diverting steam from these, the crew could make the engine run faster. Granted this runs the risk of blowing the lines connecting the boilers to the engines.
  • While its often not discussed among naval history fans, fighters (and other aircraft) really did use rockets against shipping, especially latter in the war. One of the in game rockets, the Tiny Tim, was even designed especially for that role.
• Unexpected Gameplay Change: Over the course of the game's lifespan, Aircraft Carriers have two distinct control styles, neither of which is anything like that for surface warships.
  • The first version was effectively a Strategy Game game controlling several squadrons of aircraft over the whole map Essentially, with your carrier as a moving base.
  • The CV rework where control was limited to one squadron at a time in a third person over the squadron viewpoint was intended to avert this trope. While aircraft are now controlled with WASD keys and the mouse like the warships are, the experience is still very different.
• Variable Mix: The music playing at Port will seamlessly change according to what you're doing. Try swapping between Port, Modules, Tech Tree, and Profile. There are no hard cuts to other tracks — just different instruments emphasized on each screen.
• Viewer Pronunciation Confusion: For several ships (usually those whose native name is written in a non-alphabetized language, e.g., Chinese and Japanese), the English-speaking community at large (influenced by the developers themselves, but more so community contributors and content creators on Twitch and Youtube) has accepted mispronunciations of their names. Examples include Zao, Yueyang, Jinan (in some cases), Huanghe, and Sun Yat-sen. Some ships 'closer to home' also fall victim to this due to the lack of similar phonemes in English (the Swedish ships among the pan-European destroyers in particular, even the seemingly innocuous 'Halland' is ever so slightly mispronounced more often than not).
• Weather of War: The cyclones that occasionally break out during the middle of match, which reduce visibility to 8 km, can change the outcome of a battle entirely.
• You Are Number 6: All but 2 of the German destroyer line have simply a letter and a number as their "name". This is because most German destroyers during the WW1 era were officially considered "torpedo boats" despite their size and armament being comparable to other nations' destroyers, and mere boats were considered to not merit naming. This established a tradition of any ship for which torpedoes were the primary armament getting only a hull number, not a name. During the interwar period the Kriegsmarine briefly abandoned this tradition with the Type 1934 destroyers (represented in-game by Leberecht Maass at Tier VII and the rejected prototype Ernst Gaede at Tier VI) in favor of naming destroyers after naval officers who died during World War I, but reverted to hull numbers only with the Type 1936A destroyer (represented by Tier VIII Z-23). For WWI-era German destroyers the letter prefix of their hull number represents which shipyard built them, while for interwar and WW2-era ones "T" represents fleet torpedo boats (the equivalent of small to midsize destroyers in other navies) while "Z" means a large destroyer.
  • Certain American and British Premium ships have their hull numbers or pennant numbers painted on their hull, with the more prominent examples being the Missouri (BB-63) and Belfast (C35).

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