User blog:Ameno Miragu/Lessons from Spring E-4

Spring event is over. I did not complete E-5 but I did not intend to do so anyways as I knew it was designed for a fleet much stronger than all of my best capital ships can handle. Instead, E-4 became my E-5. Here's my story:

I don't have a whole lot of time to invest into Kancolle. I have a long commute to work (from San Jose to San Francisco) and value my sleep. By the time I could sit down and start this event, I was already 2 days late and was aware that as a level 77 admiral, I could only make it through E-3 and maybe E-4 by the time I was level 80, by then I expected my fleet to be outgunned by the enemy.

E-1 through E-3 were relatively simple for me despite my work schedule. I made it through each one by sending out my best 4BB2CVs out on as many sorties as I could at the end of my work day. I lucked out getting Tanikaze on E3's boss the third or fourth time I killed her.

I carefully played my game before E-4, aiming to "game the system" and roll through an easy E-4. I avoided practice fights and other unnecessary sorties to prevent a premature lv 80 and got to E-4 with ~8000 exp to spare.

I entered E-4 with my best ASW fleet expecting to breeze through it and reap some easy rewards. Then, it hit me: Why is the enemy composition the one for lv 80+ admirals? Holy $#!T this is going to get ugly.

I had exactly 4 DD's (Hibiki, Inazuma, Kasumi, Yuudachi) modernized and upgraded with full stats excluding AA, and exactly one CL (Kuma) upgraded the same way.

The first two sorties I do at the beginning of the last weekend for the event fail at node D (with my weaker DD's bearing the brunt of the hurt), I begin to wonder if I have hit my limit. I try a few more times, hoping a support fleet could help shell node D into pacification, but they quite literally never showed up.

At this point I reckoned I'm prolly best of brute forcing the map with the non-ideal setup. I swap out my 2 "burden" DDs for Nagato and Hyuuga, reasoning I needed "tanks" for the damage I took on node D. First try led me to wrong node, and second was a resounding first success at blowing the crap out of the boss. Here I thought, "it might not be so bad."

It was. After this success I either never made it from node E to D or always had one of my ASW ships badly hurt in node D. The one time I make it past, my ships don't even touch the boss. I found out over the course of Saturday night and Sunday that this wasn't going to work; I did not have the time to do the amount of sorties it would take to have a probable chance at lucking out from E to D and killing the boss 5 more times. But I needed to finish E-4. What if the new +13 engine is event only? What if the extra repair facility is too? How much easier would Midway be with those things? (It probably was. 3 months of playing Kancolle has taught me this game is highly centered on your ship's equipment. It's like battle results are calculated (with some RNG of course) before battles as the game takes a glance at what you have equipped. )

Wait, I have a lot of engines. Why not just fill my weak DD's with engines and hope for the best? It's not like I needed a full ASW setup to kill the boss anyways. I try this first with Kaga on the ideal setup, and voila, 2nd boss kill on my first try of this. I reason after this, perhaps the game focuses on your defense and evasion? Maybe I just need a high enough evasion to match what would be a high-level DD fleet and pass this? I aimed for an evasion of 75+ for all DD's and CLs, higher for lower level DD's reasoning the level number itself played a role too.

However, the downside of missing a BB(V) with only 2 DDs and 1 CL on ASW duty showed fast: The next 3 times I reached the boss, my ships hardly targeted her, I even resorted to night battle mode by now just to scratch the boss (and scratch they did).

Gotta have more shots at the boss, my other DDs can't do that (I did try swapping one of three engines on my pure engines DD for a sonar, but that hardly upped their ASW damage compared to them without), so Kaga needed to go.

Now I swapped my last ship between Nagato, Haruna and Hyuuga. Kaga didn't work well as I did not have enough shots to get boss everytime. Nagato had horrid recon at D node (resulting in occasional death from above for me) and did nothing at sub nodes. Haruna (along with Kaga earlier) made my fleet 'feel' a little more evasive, but not too much diff than Nagato. I had to use sacrificial scout planes to stand a chance in recon with my BBs, by then I just went with Hyuuga and her seaplanes. Hyuuga helped best, with her seaplanes scouting and damaging subs. My last two boss kills were with Hyuuga.

I had the feeling during all this that the enemy fleet "memorizes" your fleet. 3 of 4 times I switched my escort capital ship (from Kaga to Nagato to Haruna to Hyuuga), I immediately won the following run at node D.

Very very VERY many tactical defeats (35+ losses) but for a worthy strategic victory. That extra +13 engine, repair facility and goddess will be extremely useful for future events (I'm looking at you midway)