Board Thread:Fleet's Prepared-ness/@comment-28301281-20180727171552/@comment-26366865-20180727194726

Ok, this will be a long one...

-The reason why the Akigun is still the best despite all the new guns that have come out recently is the fleet-wide boost it provides to AA. In fact, it’s one of the few weapons that should be upgraded to MAX instead of stopping at +9. Because of air strike nodes and the possibility of disabling carriers before shelling, AA stacking is a really powerful ability, doubly so on harder difficulties, and you really should look into upgrading them ASAP. The FB+ACC bonuses are just a nice extra.

-The Type D FB boost is nice, but in most situations where you need to min-max DD damage, you’ll use torpedoes anyway. The only real use you’ll get from them is on DD-focused maps with little enemy air power, which are basically Transport maps.

-20.3cm (No. 2) will work just fine until you fail a boss kill that leaves it at 1 or 2 hp. Then you’ll curse to no end and spam craft Mikumas to fully equip all your CAs with (No. 3) between events (source: personal experience). I suggest you skip the cursing part and just get the (No. 3) early.

-When it comes to large guns, FBBs get priority on upgrades for the very simple fact that you are far more likely to sortie them due to speed discrimination, so you should focus on your proto 35.6cm and 38cm kai before the proto 41cms. You might also want to upgrade a single pasta gun for better control of firing order when sortieing multiple BBs, but that’s optional. As for the 46cm, just upgrade the 51cms instead. The only ships that will ever use either are the Yamatos, so just go for the stronger ones.

-The GFCS is a fantastic gun, but it’s by no means necessary – I did full Hard on the previous events and I don’t have a single one of them. On the “is +4 enough” part, conveniently enough, someone posted a blog about the proper improvement steps just the other day: https://kancolle.wikia.com/wiki/User_blog:Kappakaze/something_on_improvement_priorities

-Same as the No.2 and No.3 above, quad torps work fine until the boss is left at 1 hp.

-Secondary guns still have some limited use on night-only FP-focused CA builds, but that's very situational and shouldn’t be considered a priority.

-Don’t turn your T21 (skilled) into a T52 – in fact, you should be looking into getting even more T21s to use on your LBAS. It’s the only obtainable plane with 7 range, so there’s a high risk of not being able to send LBAS on long-range nodes if you don’t have enough fighters to escort them (sending LBAS under AI is effectively useless).

- The night planes provide huge boosts to night battle, far more than any other plane. Whether or not that’s going to be necessary is up to the devs, but as an anecdote, I only managed to kill the Super BB Hime from the last event after I removed Zuihou from my fleet, so it’s not impossible to compensate for the lack of night planes. Still, the F6F-5 is tied with Iwai in fighter power, so having it at MAX and only converting when/if needed is probably the best way to go.

-The Keiun is indeed pretty meh, hardly a priority.

-LoS is only a problem if you retreat ships, but compensating that kind of loss would require you to upgrade a whole bunch of seaplanes, which is not really worth the cost IMO.

-You have more than enough seaplane fighters, so you should look into upgrading them soon. Do note that, as with carrier figthers, a single extra point of AA won’t make much of a difference – you really need to stack a lot of upgrades for it to actually matter, meaning this is an expensive, long term plan. The sooner you start, the better.

-Radars are expensive to upgrade, can be somewhat compensated by levels and won’t really see that much use – you’ll usually bring yasen equipment on most event sorties, and upgrades don’t apply to Support expeditions. There’s not really a lot of benefit on upgrading them, aside from the ones you’ll use for AACI.

-ASW is cheap on screws, so upgrade them when saving up for something else. Unless the devs come up with some new SuperSS, you really don’t need a lot of upgraded ASW.

-No comments on the K2 rockets, never really felt the need to use them.

-The amphibious equipment get the same FP boost as small guns, which is nice to have, but hardly game-breaking. Stacking modifiers for hilarious 1k+ damage is far more effective vs installations. Though it’s probably worth mentioning that Ka-Mi gave extra TP on the last event.

-As for reinforcement expansions, the important ones are Maya, the CLs/CAVs that can equip guns there and Ise+Musashi so they can become fast. Everything else is situational, so just keep them on hand until if feel the need to use them.

AnimeFreak40K wrote:

I can say however that for the Reinforcement Expansions, ships that benefit the most from them are as follows:

Battleships (all) - in addition to the extra AA guns, you can also put in Torp Buldges, which give an armor bonus.

An important note on armor: due to the way damage is calculated, it’s perfectly possible to reduce a ship’s survivability by increasing armor, sometimes greatly so. As an example, full hp Kirishima K2 has ~15% chance to be shot straight to taiha from a BB Hime shot. If you give her an standard heavy bulge, that chance increases to a brutal ~32%. (source: http://kancolle-calc.net/suffering.html) I suggest playing around with that tool for a bit, but the important part is that armor has a very complicated relationship with survival, so unless you want to run a lot of math, it’s better to just ignore armor boosts.