Board Thread:Fleet's Prepared-ness/@comment-32647310-20180203172907/@comment-26366865-20180204050433

In my opinion, you're simply not properly considering the various costs of the upgrade mechanic. I'm not the best at explaining this, but hopefully you can see my point.

I'll use the 20.3cm(no.3) as an example. There are 3 ways to obtain it, each with a different cost:

-you can obtain it by dumping RESOURCES on minLSC hoping to get Mikuma, who can then be quickly trained to level 30;

-you can obtain it by paying EXP in order to train extra Kinugasas to level 55;

-finally, you can pay SCREWS and upgrade to it from a worse gun.

There are two important points to note when considering these costs. First, RESOURCES and EXP are mostly under the player's control, and their weight will vary depending on how much time the player can commit to the game. If you can properly micro your expeditions and have a lot of time to grind, their weight rapidly goes down. Meanwhile, SCREWS are limited, and a player can't go beyond the monthly supply by "playing harder". (obviously, I'm assuming you're not willing to pay for screws)

Then there's the fact that RESOURCES and EXP will naturally decrease in weight the longer you play, as you'll be able to dedicate more to "scrap" ships the stronger your fleet gets. On the other hand, SCREWS will become more valuable, as the late game upgrades get far more expensive.

In the end, it's entirely up to each player to decide how much weight each of these costs have. However, given both points above, my general suggestion is to simply ignore the equipment that has high RESOURCES/EXP costs instead of paying the SCREWS, because, as I mentioned, RESOURCES/EXP naturally tends to go down. There are plenty of other equipment that either have low costs or that are simply unavailable without paying screws, so you should focus on them until you feel the other costs have gone down enough to be worth paying. You WILL miss those screws later, believe me.

To put it in numbers: do you think sortieing an extra Yamashiro ~400 times (383k exp) to save 18 screws on upgrading to a proto 41cm is worth it? With your current fleet, probably not. When every BB in your fleet is level 99 but you still need to sortie them to a training map because you need second shelling, that exp cost is completely trivial.

AnimeFreak40K wrote:

- Base 35.6cm guns - That was the intent on moving forward. I don't see a genuine need (right now) for more than 8x Proto 35.6's (please correct me if I'm wrong though!), and with upgrading those 4 that I have, that will give me just about what I need.

When deciding how many guns of a certain type you need, simply consider how many ships you can realistically sortie at once. For BBs, it's perfectly possible to sortie 5 of them in a STF with a 4+1 setup, so 10 guns is what you should be aiming for. Given that Bismarck Drei will eventually give you 2 guns that are pretty much identical to the proto 35.6cm, you should aim to have 8 upgraded. Did you reach the same number with this reasoning?