User blog comment:Dethyl/Thoughts on preparations for large scale (and difficult) events/@comment-5344991-20150915090246/@comment-25174240-20150915100751

Hi, and thanks for the comment.

Yes it is still possible to get a diverse and balanced fleet as recommended above. within the initial 100 ship limit; by using the lower end of the recommended list. e.g. for 4-6 FBB, just prepare 4, or for 20-30 DDs,  train up at most 20 (for large 6-7 map events) - in fact with careful deployment about 12 should do, however this will give up the critical spares, so you have to be certain with deploying your DDs with ship locking. You can also get around some restrictions by selecting easy difficulty for certain maps where the clear rewards are not as nice to you. It's always a fine balancing point between sending a fleet strong enough to clear a map and not having a strong ship locked out.

A good example would be during Summer 2015 - E6 medium/hard gave the catapult item as a clear reward, which meant locking would be applied, the player needs to decide early on who to use for E1-2, E4 and E-5 since only E-3 and untagged ships would be available for E-6 if they were aiming for that item.

By relaxing restrictions on yourself in these few ways, the number of ships you need for a major event would drop significantly from about 70 to maybe 40. The guide errs on the side of caution - a lot of senior players were restricted because they wanted to clear Summer 2015 on all hard but didn't train enough CA or CVL to high levels. This time around, 4 CA were found to be hardly enough, some players were sortieing to E-6 hard using level 25 CA.

So far, we've been lucky that no event has needed us to lock more than 2 CL, that's why a lot of players might say that I'm asking for too many CL to be prepared here. However, what if summer 2016(next year) needs more CL? It's not a rare ship like Akitsumaru that some players may not have, but an entire ship class, so if the devs decide to lock out 4 CL by the middle of the event (3rd map) for easy routing and the next map is a combined fleet map (needs 1 CL in 2nd fleet) then players who didn't prepare enough will be forced to deploy underlevelled ships..