User blog:Jifaru/The Two-Week Teitoku and the Perfect Storm

When I was in Japan during the late summmer of last year, I don't think Kancolle was much of a "thing." There was not a single Shimakaze to be found between the towering visages of Neptune and Misaka Mikoto, but I think that things might be a little bit different now. I'm not exactly sure when I was made aware of Kancolle's existence, but it seemed like forever ago when the first wave of folks on the RandomC IRC channel were raving about this game. "Oh," I thought to myself, "moe anthropomorphized World War II ships." What a characteristically Japanese flavor. While I was interested, when I saw that I would have to be up at 4 in the morning and use VPN to attempt to get into a lottery, I quietly filed away my knowledge of this game's existence into some academic portion of my brain along with moe Heidigger and Kant-senpai.

On April 23rd, 2014, something possessed me to throw my life into this really sparkly countdown simulator of a game. After watching Kancolle streams for an entire day, I decided that while the life of a pirate may not have been for me, lording over a bunch of 2D shipgirls might be closer to my cup of tea. Of course, there was no lottery on the night of the 24th (in Japan), so I got a whole day to fret over my prospects of getting into the game. I'm starting to scare myself with my penchant for only tangentially relevant prattle, so I'll get to the point - I committed to being a teitoku on the 25th, and I also made the commitment that I would acquire Amatsukaze-chan, whatever it took. Thus, two days after the beginning of the Spring Event, I was dropped into the middle of a run-down naval office with nothing but a stack of empty boxes and a pissed-looking kanmusu. Murakumo was her name. (Now it's Murakumo Kai - she even has sonars and depth charges).

I spent my first day with two dozen wiki pages open, half a dozen forum guides open, and bothered everyone on IRC with random questions. When I learned about good farm spots such as 1-5, 2-2, 2-3, and 3-2, I knew that there was no time to waste. I started spamming battleship recipes, and my first crafting recipe yielded the mighty Kirishima. While my victories were swift and decisive, my supplies dwindled rapidly. Yet I continued to push forward, completing dailies and weeklies as quickly as possible and hungrily devouring the resources that they yielded. With the addition of Yamashiro and Ise on day 2 and the acquisition of my first CVLs, my fleet quickly turned into a fuel and ammo-draining monstrosity. On my third day, I opened up my third fleet and completed the quest for the bauxite queen. However, I had read up on her peculiar habits and kept my bauxite reserves safe. Later on day 3, I crafted Soryuu, cementing a powerful fleet consisting of 1 BB, 2 BBVs, 1 CA, and 2 CVs. Within 4 days of starting the game, I had cleared E-1.

However, by the time I progressed to E-2, the growing threat of my fuel-inefficient fleet had completely paralyzed my economy. I was unable to farm up levels and progress through the game even if I wanted to. I spammed expedition 3 and 5 as quickly as I could using my 2 additional fleets, but Yamashiro and Ise were no longer cutting it against the heavily armored Ru-class flagship BBs. While I do not have as many horror stories about the night battle node that many of my fellow teitokus do, I did encounter my fair share of difficulties there, and would frequently be sent home with a repair bill of up to 750 steel, and 500 fuel/ammo. I knew that each attempt HAD to count, because it took me a good chunk of the day to generate enough resources for a single attempt. I made my first sacrifice in order to secure a second kill on the boss, a decision that would deprive me of my only high-leveled CA. As I struggled through the map, my luck began to run dry. I had not seen another Kongou sister since my first day of play, and my BBVs were becoming more of a burden than what they brought to the table. Atago was my patchwork replacement to fill Haguro's void, and although her stats were superior, she was more expensive to operate, and ate up a lot of buckets in her attempt to keep up with a superior fleet and more dangerous foes. After spending the last of my resources to risk one more attempt, I finally brought down the E-2 boss. I suppressed a cry of joy as Mutsu appeared on my screen as the boss went down, took a deep breath as I briefly set Akashi as my flagship for a few minutes, giving her an obligatory load of sexual harassment  click to hear her lines, and then proceeded to prepare for E-3. I was on a roll, and Amatsukaze-chan was within reach.

It may be anticlimactic, but there isn't much to be said about E-3. It was simply a gear check - did you have a sanshiki or not? I happened to luck out - my first attempt to craft a sanshiki was successful. Since then, I've tried unsuccessfully dozens and dozens of times, but that's besides the point. I loaded the sanshiki onto Kirishima and sent her out to take down the Airfield Hime. After a few poor initial attempts in which Kirishima would get crit to red before she had a chance to become effective, I swapped around my setup slightly, putting her in the last slot instead of the flagship slot so that she would have the last say during the night combat phase when most enemies had been cleared out. Despite peoples' warnings to do otherwise, I brought in my freshly-obtained Kitakami Kai, then barely level 10, as a substitute for not having a 4th BB. It was during that moment when KTKM-sama earned my love and respect, consistently able to take out a foe during the pre-emptive torpedo strike, paving the path for Kirishima to get 6 clear shots on the Hime's face. The double attack with sanshiki proved to be instantly fatal every time, and less than a week into my teitoku career, I had obtained Amatsukaze (and proceeded to mofu mofu her extensively).

E-4 was basically an all DD map, and I was completely caught off guard. Since I had obtained my battleships and CVs so early, I was always running an extremely heavy-hitting fleet, and put short of no effort into training my DDs. I spent the morning of my 7th day crafting ASW equipment and leveling whatever DDs I had available, and soon I had 4 level 20 DDs equipped with sonars, depth charges, and a damecon for insurance. I hit level 45 in the middle of my attempts for this boss, and the difficulty of the last node increased slightly. While I failed to S-rank the boss a few times, I went a little more aggressive, doubling up on depth charges instead of using a turbine on my flagship, and E-4 was quickly cleared as well. For the rest of my second week, I focused on farming up resources and buckets and preparing for E-5. However, after dozens of failed attempts to get Reppuus and Sanshikis, and failing to breach the wall even once, I realized that I simply did not have what it took to complete E-5.

I had completely shattered the goals that I had set when first starting the game, but that also afforded me a breath of relief. Two weeks after the beginning of my journey, I am now HQ level 61 even though my average fleet level is probably only 2/3 of that. Oh well, people advised me against overfarming, but after doing a whole day of sub runs, it's probably too late to turn back. This game has been an amazing journey so far, and I'm glad that I was dropped into the middle of this event with such a clear goal and focus in mind. With the Midway event approaching, I must soon face my next dreaded foe - the temptation to hate my resources doing LSC.