User blog:Tsubakura/Mythbusting the metas of KanColle

Last updated: 23-02-2017

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 * FALSE : Completely false or outdated/deprecated meta.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!

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.

Cannot double attack?
An interesting question was raised after this was published. "If a CLT is equipped with a, doesn't it effectively prevent them from double attacking during the night if you give them ?"

The answer is, no, because one thing that differentates a from a regular torpedo is that a  does not count as a torpedo. It will in no way affect your night special attacks and people using 2x setups on CLT will soon realize as well that they never TCI.

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, whether they are, or.

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 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 even 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.

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 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 and you definitely should also consider the possibility of flagshipping your TCI ship instead, which grants a bonus to your cut-in chances.

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.

But what about ?
s are just as big of an offender as the above 2 examples. They are equipped with, which functions as an Air Radar and their forms come with both Twin HA guns and AA Machine Guns. As have a modifier of 6, instead of the 4 from, they are way more dangerous to your planes, yikes.

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.

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

Investigation
People recommending Echelon during night battle are those who mainly aims to increase your evasion as much as possible, instead of actively killing everything with high accurate shots. 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 and compare those 2. 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.

The claim
As using torpedo equipment on CLT benefits their daytime opening torpedo as well, they should always be using torpedo cut-in setups. After all, has above average base luck and TCI deals huge amount of damages.

Investigation
The people claiming this aren't exactly wrong actually, but they miss a few too many details, which makes this a flawed option. To tackle this, you first need to know how damage calculation works.

During day, all your attacks are softcapped to 150. In case your damage output goes over it, the remainder past the cap will get square rooted. There's generally no reason to go over the day cap, especially if its torpedo stats, since everything past it will come with heavily diminished returns.

One of the reasons people recommend using TCI on them, is because they claim that the torpedo equipment apparently also benefits the opening torpedo. Well, let's check it out.

Both and  have 63 + 139. Since the is a mandatory equipment on CLTs in almost all cases, you might as well add the 12  stats on top of the 139 and suddenly it becomes 151, which is already above the day cap. Assume the // setup if people insist on using TCIs anyway with this idea, that's 139 + 12 + 12 + 12 = 175. The remainder 25 that went over the softcap gets square rooted which makes the final number 155.

Considering how adding 2x torpedoes only raised the damage by 4, it's obviously a blatant ripoff if you could optimize your setup in a better way. Instead, using 2x raises your shelling power by 20 just fine, so that the torpedoes benefit your day shelling is obviously nonsense, if the guns do a better job in it.

Night battle damage is basically +  combined, which is further amplified by special attacks. Unlike artillery spotting, night special attack is not post-cap, so it will be nerfed by the 300 damage cap during night. The DA gives you 2 attacks with a multiplier of 1.2x, while a TCI gives you 2 attacks with a multiplier of 1.5x. While the TCI looks like it is one strong attack, it is in actual 2 separate attacks that is combined into one.

Both and  have 63 + 139  = 202 night battle firepower.

Assume has a // setup. This pushes her night battle firepower to 202 + 12 + 10 + 10 = 234.

Multiply it with the DA multiplier of 1.2 x 234 = 280.8

Now lets check the TCI setup, in which we assume the // setup. The night battle firepower is 202 + 12 + 12 + 12 = 238.

Multiply it with the TCI multiplier of 1.5 x 238 = 357.

Since the total goes over the 300, the remainder gets square rooted, the final number being 307.5.

Now you must think be thinking: "There's a clear difference of 27 damage, obviously the TCI is better, right? and you wouldn't be wrong if that's the only thing. The difference between DA and TCI is that DA has a 99% chance to trigger, while TCI is completely luck based. Assuming has a base luck of 30  and she's level 50, we can calculate the chance using haru's formula: So assuming a base  who is not luckmodded, is not the flagship and none of the things like  or  goes off, you only have 42% to successfully fire a TCI.
 * ( level / 20) + ( x 0.85) + 14 = 42%

Now all of a sudden, the DA setup looks a lot more attractive then a RNG based attack which has 58% chance to fail. If with 30  already has such low chance, I probably don't need to tell you how worse it is for  who only has 13.

Then you might be thinking about just luckmodding them both, so that they could TCI properly right? The problem with luckmodding and  is that they do not benefit as much in comparison to the other combat ships like DDs and CLs. Both and  are already capable of dishing out high amount of damages through DA, and allowing them to TCI only increases their damage up by 27, while if you luckmod  instead, the difference in power between her DA and TCI is nearly 100 damage! That's damn a lot.

Alternative scenario: Improved Equipments
W.I.P.

Alternative scenario: Moderately damaged state
W.I.P.

Verdict
QUESTIONABLE

Reason
With that said, nobody is stopping you from luckmodding and  anyway. I've only given you the best optimization advice, who am I to stop you from letting you play however you want? While that doesn't mean I'm telling you not to ever luckmod them, you should consider your priorities and luckmod those who benefits the most from being able to TCI.

The claim
When fighting against Installations, you should try to equip as well on the main fleet of a combined fleet.

Investigation
This rumor sprung up when some of the newer faces first got to taste the horrors of having to fight against an Installation boss. When they first learned of their weaknesses, one of them being the against Soft installations, it somehow spread to using  on the main fleet as well.

There are a few problems regarding this:
 * Installation bosses all have high armor, at least 130
 * While have an armor value of around 90, they do not share the same weaknesses as soft installations.
 * There exist a day damage softcap of 150. Since the main fleet do not participate in night battle, they cannot unleash the full potential by getting a 300 night battle softcap.

In other words, even if the main fleet is equipped with the respective weaknesses, they still wouldn't be able to do much helpful things against installations in the majority of the cases during day. You might as well either optimize your fleet in a better way by equipping AP shells instead to enable post-cap bonuses. In case of CA(V)s in the main fleet, you might be able to get away with using a on the easier difficulties, but the escort fleet benefits way more when the damage softcap is increased during the night and this isn't realistic when on harder difficulties, the enemy armor way exceeds over the day cap. In this case, I would suggest using a instead to maximize your DA chances.

Verdict
FALSE

Reason
Really, don't waste your time and equip anti-installation equipment on the main fleet in general, as you wont be able to efficiently punch through their base armor anyway during day. Just focus on equipping AP shells instead for your (F)BB(V) to deal with all the other threats, as they carry a postcap bonus which in the end will help you a lot more than a does, while letting all the escort fleets do the anti-installation work during night battles.