Rhel

Hi! A couple of you have probably watched one or more videos from the Battlecruiser tournament currently ongoing on the YouTube channel Stealth17. I designed one of the ships taking part in the contest, the "Elisabeth Petznek," an Austro-Hungarian ship with a main armament of 4x3 12 inch guns with shortened barrels and everything tuned for maximum rate of fire, HE damage, and fire setting capability. Over the last few matches it's become very clear that my design and the British one, both focused on causing fires via HE spam, mine even more so, are beating everything else, with AP focused and mixed designs just unable to keep up. Now I know that this topic has been talked about a lot before. And I know that there are good reasons why HE and fire work the way they do right now, I remember in some early versions it was arguably more realistic but also felt kind of useless. So I think until recently it made sense to have HE do its thing without much regard for armour or penetration. But I think the recent armour changes, specifically the armour limits are an opportunity to revisit this whole topic. The new inability to put massive amounts of armour on even small light cruisers means that penetrating with HE has become much more viable in a lot of cases. To me this seems like the perfect opportunity to talk about whether HE performance, especially in regards to fires should be tied more to actually penetrating the armour of the enemy ship. I think if HE ends up in a place where it still eats small ships alive while mostly destroying torpedoes, rudders etc on bigger ships and helping overwhelm damage control as it fights against flooding that would make for more interesting,healthy gameplay. And it would also feel somewhat more true to life.