User blog:Tsubakura/Mythbusting the metas of KanColle

Last updated: 22-02-2017

Countless times, I've seen people use setups which makes me raise my eyebrows. When I questioned them as to why they chose such setups, they replied to me with either that they thought this was the meta, it looks cool, or they simply felt that it performed better. The people who knows me will obviously predict my endless flaming and lecturing to what they're doing wrong.

This blog is a collection of my encounters with such occurrences, and it serves as a reminder to people that they should not be fooled by false meta or meme setups that have no scientific explanation backing them up as to why they are good. The subject will be listed here and I will offer you my insight on why it's either good or bad and what you could have done better instead.

Keep in mind that this blog serves to help you further optimize your fleet. If your plan was to create a meme fleet all along, then the majority of the comments here obviously don't apply to you.

Format
Each subject will go through several phases:
 * The claim: An elaboration on a subject as to what it actually means.
 * Investigation: An investigation will be carried out by me with the help of other people to find more information surrounding this, which in turn helps to provide us a conclusion and a verdict.
 * Verdict: Based on the investigations, a certain score will be given depending on what I discovered during my investigation:
 * FALSE : Completely false or outdated/deprecated meta.
 * QUESTIONABLE : There's a merit of truth, but there's usually better alternatives or the cost is too high for what you get in return.
 * OK : Might actually be useful in some scenarios, it got a bad reputation because it was applied in a bad way or the original meta changed somehow to what it is now.
 * If the samples and evidence used are not strong enough to tie all loose ends, the verdict will be given an (INCONCLUSIVE) as well, to signify that this will be re-checked in the future if more info is obtained. This also means that the current verdict might not be final.
 * Reason: More information and explanation as to why this verdict has been given.

The List
Keep in mind that I only know what I know. In case I'm missing something in which you find it worthy to be added to the list or if you disagree with my conclusion, feel free to message me and I will hear you out/start an investigation.

Without further ado, enjoy!

Yellow guns are better on CL(T)
The claim

are better than when used on CLT.

Investigation:

The origin stems from when CL fit bonuses was introduced. Since the battleships are known to have overweight penalties, rumors quickly spread around that CL(T)s suffer overweight penalties from equipping or anything of similar caliber.

While it is true that are now just as viable on CLTs, since CLTs lack the ability to artillery spot, it does not necessarily mean that  are inferior. The same applies to CLs, it has not been proven that is worse than using a  instead. There simply is no evidence at all that suggest CL(T)s suffers from overweight mechanics or which proves that are somehow stronger.

Verdict

FALSE

Reason:

This whole false meta started spreading because of some misconception where people thought overweight mechanics apply on ship classes other than (F)BB(V) as well. There's no scientific explanation as to why red guns should be inferior to yellow guns, so this is a case closed for me. People should just decide which guns to equip by stats alone.

is the best carrier
The claim

Kaga is still the best carrier in the game, because of her 46 plane slot.

Investigation:

Back when the Aircraft Proficiency didn't exist yet, obtaining the necessary fighter power to obtain AS/AS+ was a hard thing to do, which is when the meta to equip fighters on the largest slot sprung to live. Obviously as Kaga has one of the biggest plane slot, she was hailed as the best carrier in the game.

Now with the inclusion of Aircraft Proficiency, fighters gain flat fighter power boosts which increases with each rank, and because we now have a better understanding as to how Aerial Combat works, fighters on smaller slot sizes are preferred nowadays. Also with the inclusion of the CVB, fell out of favor as the favorite, since being able to shell during 中破 matters a lot.

With that said, is definitely not a weak ship and she's still excellent, but she is by no means the best carrier in the game.

Verdict

FALSE

Reason:

While is by no means useless, she is definitely no longer the best carrier in the game for too many reasons provided in the investigation.

The equipment works like any other cut-in booster
The claim

Like and, the  will help boost the cut-in chances of the ship the same way the other equipment does.

Investigation:

How much luck affects the cut-in chances is still a mystery to this day. While the exact values are still unknown, we know for sure that 50 is the softcap, as past that number, luck barely increases the chances of cut-ins. What is also discovered, is that provides a luck boost, unlike the  or  where the increase is a flat percentage bonus. The bonus luck obtained from Skilled Lookouts is unknown at the moment, but it is speculated to be equal to around ~5% based on KC Kai.

This basically means that a doesn't do anything if it is equipped on a ship who already has 50 or more. This makes the Skilled Lookout severely underwhelming, since all the other equipment are post-cap bonuses and buffs the whole fleet.

Verdict

QUESTIONABLE (INCONCLUSIVE)

Reason:

The is vastly inferior when it comes to buffs and it does not help improve ships who already have 50. In the rare circumstances that you actually have a free slot available and you really have nothing else worth equipping, you could consider using the Skilled Lookout, but without knowing the exact value the Skilled Lookout provides, it's obvious at the moment that there are plenty of better alternative uses for the free slot.

Always put TCI ship on last slot
The claim

You should always put the ship who is performing the torpedo cut-in on the last slot of the fleet.

Investigation:

This is actually a known recommendation by most veterans. The theory basically is that the weaker ships could either help clean up the escorts or help deal scratch damage against a high HP target. Since scratch damage deals proportional damage to a target's current HP, having a weak ship do scratch damage is usually advantageous.

After the escorts are cleaned up or if the boss is weakened enough, the ships loaded with torpedo cut-in setups are there to finish off the boss. In case there are still escorts alive, this setup still gives the last ship the best amount of chances to hit the boss.

While there is generally no problem with this, this strategy however, assumes that the your TCI ship is indeed the strongest attacker. When you are using weaker ships like and, you will obviously not do more damage than other stronger DDs with TCI setup as well, like. There's also consideration of other ship classes which deals far more damage, even with a double attack, like and.

Verdict

OK

Reason:

The real reason as to why people recommend you to put TCI ships on the last slot, is because the ship with TCI is usually your strongest attacker. The reason is not because the ship is using TCI, its because the ship deals the most potential damage. With that said, even though I gave this an OK verdict, you still shouldn't mindlessly put all TCI ships to the end without first checking out what the damage potential is of all your ships on the escort fleet.

Abyssal ships can AACI
The claim

Abyssal ships can perform AACI.

Investigation:

This rumor actually became rather popular, after bombers sent against or the  mysteriously all drop like flies, as if they all had been shot down from an AACI.

What people didn't realize though, is that those 2 enemy classes have one thing in common, they both are equipped with Twin HA guns, instead of the single ones that the majority of the enemy carries. Since an abyssal Twin HA gun has a high AA modifier compared to an abyssal Single HA gun, which has a zero modifier value, the AA attacks of those classes will obviously become much stronger as well. Using this knowledge and the Abyssal AA formula, you will easily come to the conclusion that the shot down ratio is not caused by AACI fire.

Verdict

FALSE

Reason:

There has been no known scenario of abyssal performing AACI so far. Considering how difficult it is to understand the aerial defense formulas, it comes to no surprise that people would claim that abyssal could AACI.

Echelon is the best formation for night battle
The claim

When being sent to a night battle, choose Echelon for the highest chance for survival.

Investigation:

People recommending Echelon during night battle is mainly to increase your evasion as much as possible. As this is the complete opposite of Line Ahead, where you actually actively kill everyone before they kill you, it would be a moot point to approach it this way. Instead, we compare it with 2 other similar defensive formations: Diamond and Line Abreast. For this scenario, I have prepared 2 sources: test samples of 5-3 and data mined from KC Kai.

A quick glance on the data from KC Kai tells us that the Echelon obviously does have higher evasion than Line Ahead, but still lower than Line Abreast. Diamond is seemingly the most unimpressive one, so that's obviously ruled out. Both Echelon and Line Abreast suffer from the same amount of damage and accuracy penalty, save for Line Abreast having an even worse torpedo accuracy, which is actually negligible. Line Abreast basically has higher evasion, for nearly the same handicap. Since this is actually KC Kai data, it might not apply to the browser version, hence we continue with the next sample.

The 2nd sample shows bizarre results on the evasion chart, because of the small amount of samples. Notably though, Line Abreast and Echelon are both dominating again in the majority of comparisons when it comes to evasion, and a lot of cases, Line Abreast is better than Echelon. Even with low sample size, its a sign that the evasion of Line Abreast is close or maybe even better than Echelon. The accuracy tests however, comes with a larger sample and in majority of the cases, its marginally better than Echelon. This seems to differ from the data from KC Kai.

Verdict

FALSE (INCONCLUSIVE)

Reason:

Because of the lack of samples, we cannot tie up all loose ends, but considering that there are plenty of evidence hinting that Line Abreast is superior to Echelon, I would have to conclude for now that Echelon can't be the best formation to pick for night battles.