Documenti di Didattica
Documenti di Professioni
Documenti di Cultura
Hello. This is a guide. I noticed a lot of other guides tend to give generalized and sometimes
difficult to piece together advice that leaves you asking as many questions as you came in with.
Stuff like what fleet do I build, how do I equip them, what is a good low cost farming fleet, how
do I acquire such a fleet, etc!
So, I wanted to write a very straightforward, easy to follow guide that both teaches you
mechanics and gives you a linear plan that you can follow to both get you through the currently
available content (and do so efficiently) as well as prepare you for content to come!
You’ll set up two farming fleets and gear them with best in slot (or close to it) gear by the end of
this guide, which should hopefully give you a solid base from which to build upon as you
continue to play! Rumor has it the ships you farm here can be used to farm even the hardest
story mode map in the game...
You can think of this like a 3rd party tutorial that teaches you both mechanics AND metagame.
For a game like this, the metagame is just as important if not more than the mechanics, and a
major failing of many guides in my opinion is to pretend that this isn’t the case. The meta is in
somewhat constant flux as new ships are released, but there are certain core ships that never
really stop being useful.
I tried to make this guide brief and easy to follow, but regrettably that means not spending entire
pages deliberating upon the merits of each and every equip listed here. I hope you can trust me.
Because of the way this guide is written, it’s meant to be read in its entirety. I promise it’s not
as long as it might look. I formatted it… spaciously, to say the very least.
You don’t have to follow everything I say 100% if you’ve already completed some of the content
being described, but you will want to read over every section nonetheless because the linear
part of the guide is interwoven with the meta stuff. You will learn from every example even if
you don’t follow every example.
For any feedback or questions, please visit #general in the Azur Lane Homeless Shelter (I’m
@Doublemint#8851, so ping me if all else fails)
Press ctrl+alt+A, or View > Show Document Outline to pull up the outline!
If you appreciate the guide, please donate here - the link is to donate to my website’s paypal
account. I do all of this for free, so every donation really means the world to me.
General Mechanic Intro:
To start with, I’ll talk you through the different features of the game and how to interact with
them efficiently.
This’ll be stuff like raids, hard mode, PvP, dorm, commissions, and item management.
General:
Common naming convention for rarities:
SSR = gold
SR = purple
R = blue
N = white
People will generally not know what you’re talking about if you say things like “elite” or
“legendary” or call gold ships “SR.” I have no idea why this is the case, it just is.
As far as rarity goes… it’s an imperfect indicator of usefulness. As you will see in this guide,
many of the best ships and gear are not SSR, and being SSR can actually be an active
detriment!
Also, remember to tap Akashi in her shop twice per day! (until she gives you 5 gold boxes, then
she won’t give you anything else and you can stop tapping her)
ALSO
Remember to bind your account to Twitter or Facebook (Twitter is dramatically more reliable so
I would recommend doing it through that, it won’t post anything to your accounts unless you
deliberately do so yourself through the share buttons in game)
Once you’ve bound your account you can open it with your twitter username and password on
any device, and even keep it safe if you should for some reason delete the app.
Speaking of deleting the app, you don’t need to reroll in azur lane! The gacha rates are
exceptionally generous and as I’ll demonstrate to you with this guide you do not need any ships
from the gacha to do well! You’ll be more than able to clear all content with ships you can obtain
through drops, I promise.
Combat/Farming:
Always rush the boss, because the boss always drops:
A ship (and has a chance on some stages, like 3-4, to drop a unique SSR to that map)
Multiple upgrade plates
Up to 2x equipment blueprints
Always try for S-Rank on every node, but especially the boss, as the above drops are only
guaranteed by S-Rank.
You can exit and retry any battle by pausing and exiting, at the cost of 1 oil per ship involved in
that fight (so if you brought 3 ships, you’d lose 3 oil).
You can still send a fleet to fight on 0 ammo, they’ll just do half the damage they normally
would. Once you’re sufficiently strong, this is often preferable to sending your much more
expensive boss fleet against a regular node.
Fun fact: ships can’t ambush you on the “corpses” of enemy fleets you’ve cleared, or when
passing over a friendly fleet, so stick to those as much as possible to avoid ambushes - this
sometimes involves manually pathing rather than just clicking your target
Fun fact #2: non-boss enemy fleets cannot spawn on top of a friendly fleet on the map. Because
of this, you can position your fleets to strategically block off enemy spawns in tight,
corridor-layout maps. This ensures there’s a clear path to the boss and prevents you from
spending excessive oil on non-boss fights after the boss has spawned.
Hard mode:
You get 6x hardmode tries per day - these allow you to play a regular story mode map with a
chance to drop a retrofit blueprint from the boss.
Do the highest world hardmode you can, no matter the oil cost, as higher worlds improve retrofit
drop rates
X-1 drops destroyer retrofits
X-2 drops cruiser retrofits
X-3 drops battleship retrofits
X-4 drops carrier retrofits
I personally recommend doing X-4 to rush for Shouhou’s retrofit, but you can do X-1 to farm for
starter retrofits or X-2 for certain cruiser retrofits like leander. Just, stay away from X-3, you’ll get
enough BB retrofit BPs from dailies and commissions.
Dorm:
Always buy Naval Curry if you’re going to buy any food at all, since it’s the only free food you
can buy with an exp bonus (5% extra exp gained by ships in the dorm, this buff only applies to
dorm exp, not exp gained via sorties)
Always buy food with oil if your canteen is overflowing (or use the oil for the long oil commission,
which I will touch upon later)
The furniture you place in your dorm has no bearing on the happiness rating of your dorm - that
factors in every piece of furniture you own
Personally I’d say try to save all your coins for limited furniture, but really it’s up to you, buy what
you like!
Save all of your gems to buy dorm slots, these are indispensable for passively leveling up ships,
something you’ll almost always want to be doing.
Academy/Storage/Docks/Shops:
Always upgrade your T1 skill books and T1/T2 boxes
Upgrade your T1 books because opportunity cost - look, you learned some economics from
your waifu bote game
Every ship in this guide has skills that are worth getting to 10 aside from the mahans and
brooklyn, for whom this is less important. You can safely invest books in these skills and not feel
as though you’ve wasted time or resources.
Consider saving gems after buying dorm slots to buy the third academy slot, if you have a lot of
skills you want to level (I personally suggest this highly, but the necessity of this is contentious)
Always buy T2/3 books for gold or medals when they show up. T1 books can be skipped.
Food with a purple border is always worth buying for coins, and may be worth buying for medals
if you have an abundance.
Consider saving dupes of everything above normal rarity for limit breaks, especially ships with
collection rewards! Otherwise just turn them into medals.
Use the enhance feature liberally on any ship you actively use - only use commons as fodder!
Gold bulins should be hoarded, purple bulins are generally fine to use on whatever
Buy gold boxes with coins until you’re level 50 HQ, then it’s up to you
I would prioritize Ironblood=Eagle Union>Royal Navy>>Sakura Nation until you hit lvl 50, then
you’re probably well-geared enough that it should go Eagle=Royal>Ironblood>Sakura
Always try to have at least 80 medals stocked up at all times during each 2-week medal shop
SSR rotation not counting those you spend on the 2-week SSR, to ensure you can buy the gold
bulin when it comes up on 3-day rotation (this happens once and only once per 2-week medal
shop rotation)
Save your merits for the merit-exclusive ships, South Dakota and Eldridge
You get a variable number of points for each completed fight in PvP
That number of points is decided by your rank relative to your opponents rank
You get the most points for choosing the leftmost opponent on the PvP interface
Set your PvP defense fleet to be as easy to beat as possible (minimizing your own rank)
Save your tickets as long as you can to wait for your opponent to spend all theirs before you do
(maximizing opponents rank)
So, for your own good, and really for the good of everyone on your server, set your PvP
defense fleet to your highest level, completely ungeared ships - as many ships as
possible, but all as easy to beat as possible.
Side note: just like regular fights, you can withdraw from PvP fights before the battle is finished
and retry with no consequences: you don’t lose a try, so you can just reset until you win (you
sometimes may not be able to win if you’re just starting out, though)
Construction:
This guide doesn’t require you to use any ships from construction, so if you’d like to do only one
build per day, 10 builds per week in order to complete the daily/weekly missions (these refund
cubes and are 100% worth doing) you are more than welcome to do so.
In fact, I recommend you save up cubes in order to save for limited event constructions.
As for which pool you should build out of to complete your missions, I personally suggest doing
heavy for Hood - she’s the strongest readily obtainable “battleship” (technically a battlecruiser,
which means different secondary gun and med vs heavy armor, plus can’t slot into the
battleship slot in hardmode) and really the only gacha-only ship that I would label as “essential”
On that note, most of the good ships in the game can be obtained through hard work by farming
in storymode stages…. Which is most of what this guide is going to walk you through how to do!
Once you have Hood, either move to the “special” gacha to try for Enterprise or move to the
Light gacha because it’s cheap to save cubes.
Beginner: Week 1 Guide:
This guide will be your introduction to playing azur lane efficiently!
… but you may be wondering what exactly efficiency even means in a waifu collection game.
In Azur Lane, every ship in a fleet costs a set amount of oil to sortie depending on:
Rarity
Hull type
LB
You probably don’t know what those things mean yet, but don’t worry, it’ll all make sense soon!
The first bit of terminology you’ll want to know going forward is the term “LB” which refers to
LImit Breaking, explained nicely here.
The less oil you can spend, the more tries you have at getting a certain ship or
equipment plan to drop in any given map, since you have more tries at it before you run
out of oil!
You’ll want to start your Azur Lane journey somewhat inefficiently, though. Just throw whoever
you manage to scrounge together at the game until the game gives in. Your main goal is to
make it into 2-3 to start farming up some ships that you can take to endgame.
Why 2-3?
Not only that, but DDs really help out your fleet’s ambush evasion rate, so throwing these two in
along with whoever else you fancy will help you conserve oil from avoiding ambushes.
As if that weren’t enough, commander/player/HQ exp is determined by the number of ships you
field. This bonus is irrespective of the ships rarity, level, or limit break, so you can effectively
double the exp you receive by including these two at the cost of a measly 2 oil per battle.
Commander level unlocks better daily quests, so you want to rush all the way to 70 ASAP, and
these two are the most efficient way to do that.
So, these two are gonna be the bread and butter of your vanguard for a while, but who is gonna
be your main fleeter?
Shouhou
Shouhou is a special type of Carrier called a light carrier, or CVL - the main hallmark of this hull
type is its smaller hp pool, generally lower airpower, and sometimes fewer plane slots (usually in
exchange for an AA gun slot) compared to regular size carriers,.
She has a dive bomber and torpedo bomber slot as well as an AA gun slot. These two planes
are the two highest damage plane varieties - she’s only missing a fighter from what would be
considered the “standard” CV loadout, and as such does pretty respectable damage for her cost
and size.
Aulicke, Foote, and Spence, and Thatcher are 4 other DDs we’re looking for on 2-3 - but not to
actually use…
These 4 are going to be commission slaves you’ll use to unlock a very useful collection reward!
More on that a little later, but for now, hold onto these lolis!
Anyways, your vanguard moving forward should be Cassin, Downes, and a ship of your
choosing.
Don’t be afraid to mess up with your choice here. I want you to learn that at least right now the
game isn’t so hard that you can’t have a little fun with who you choose. Really it never even gets
that hard, you just end up costing yourself more oil than you’d probably like. But for now,
anything works, so again, your third vanguard should just be whoever you like!
Your main fleet should be Shouhou, and just Shouhou.
Now, gear is important too.
My advice is this:
If you get a purple gun, plane, or aux, throw it on your ships! All purples should
outperform the default whites, so you’re safe to do that without any guidance from me.
Blues to look out for are blue barracuda, which comes from Royal Navy boxes (purple and gold
are also exceptional), and some Japanese ships from construction come prebuilt with blue torps
that your Mahans would be happy to have. Norfolk, who drops from 2-3 also, has a decent blue
AA gun that should serve you nicely for a while until you get purples.
You’ll also want to swap out Shouhou’s torpedo bomber for pretty much any other non-Sakura
torpedo bomber at your earliest convenience.
Sakura nation torpedo bombers have their place, but you may notice they try to hone in on
targets - not good for general purpose clearing, only really good against stationary or
slow-moving enemies, like some bosses.
Now, depending on who you chose to tag along with the mahans, you may be sitting at as cost
as low as 7 oil per battle.
Awesome, right?
Breaking past the world 3 difficulty wall is hard, though:
It should be easy around vanguard lvl 50, shouhou will be lvl 70 from flagship+mvp bonus by
then, so Max Limit Break (MLB) her. Do not limit break your mahans. If you’re still having
trouble, feed fodder ships to your ships to raise their stats. Next, try upgrading whatever gear
you’ve managed to get to +3 or even +6.
The best way to do this is by simply leveling your ships way above the level of the content
you’re trying to farm, as I kinda hinted at above, because evasion, damage taken, and
damage dealt are scaled by level difference, which is explained nicely here and here (under
“level advantage”).
...there are ways you may be able to rush this faster, but getting used to long grinds is a useful
exercise in and of itself - a long grind that levels up ships you’ll be using for a very long time is
quite worthwhile over rushing through content with stuff that ends up useless.
Now then, you’ve probably already gotten everything from 2-3 if you’ve made it this far in the
guide, so you should move on to 3-2 to farm up levels instead!
Why 3-2?
Charles Ausburne, another fletcher commissions/dorm slave and the last piece of the fletcher
puzzle. She also drops from the next place I’m going to mention, so don’t worry if you can’t pick
her up while you’re here.
3-2 drops really good gear, but try to get to world 4 as soon as possible! Then come
back and farm up one copy of SB2C, or try moving on to the next section.
If you’re having trouble getting past 3-4, just add any random ships to the back, since
Shouhou alone might not be beefy enough to get the job done. They might die. That’s
fine. This is just to get the final commission slot and to unlock world 4, because you
shouldn’t start farming 3-4 just yet-
“Wait, what?”
Before we dive into 4-1 though, I’d like to familiarize you with a very hand mechanic and
some useful strategy
This next stage has three ships that you’re going to want to start passively leveling the second
that you get them, so what you’re going to do is put them in the long oil commission and dorm
along with any of the 5 lolis you’ve picked up (Aulicke, Foote, Spence, Thatcher, and Charles)
as soon as you get them. That’s those 5 lolis and the first of the ships below that you have drop
for you.
You only need to get the lolis to lvl 30 in order to 2nd limit break them, at which point you can
sub them out for another of the ships you’ve gotten your hands on - either collection reward
ships or ships I mention further ahead in the guide that you happen to get in the gacha. You’ll
want to keep all of the ships coming up in this guide in the long oil comm until at least level 30
for 2nd limit break.
Beaver Badge!
Beaver Badge is a collection reward obtained by, you guessed it, taking all of the above lolis to
2LB. This is a fantastic auxiliary equip that gives 35 evasion at +10 (best in slot evasion boost,
gives almost twice as much as the next best option), 20% movement speed for the entire fleet
(super handy if you’re using any slower ships), and 75 HP (not a ton but it’s more than 0).
You know what has garbage evasion and movement speed? Heavy cruisers! So, if you’re ever
using a heavy cruiser, throw this on them - it’ll single-handedly make them significantly better.
It’s also fantastic on light cruisers, but... we haven’t talked about light or heavy cruisers at all
yet…
Phoenix
Phoenix is a light cruiser, or CL. She belongs to a special class of cruisers exclusive to the
Eagle Union referred to as gunboats. Instead of a torpedo secondary, she has a DD gun
secondary! This makes her much better in auto than her torp-bearing counterparts because the
AI likes shooting torpedoes into nothing.
As if that secondary weren’t enough, gunbotes actually get a second “mount” of their CL main
gun on 2nd limit break (people usually call this perk +1MGM), which essentially means she gets
to fire it twice per reload cycle. Essentially, she does twice as much damage with her main gun
(this is an imperfect explanation, it’s more like she’s equipping two copies of the gun and is able
to fire them both on separate reload timers, but that can be hard to wrap your head around).
That’s not all though, remember when I said you’ll probably not stop using Shouhou because
she heals the vanguard? This is Phoenix’s main skill:
When Health falls under 20%, heals 15% (25%) of max Health and
increases Firepower by 30% for 15 seconds. Can only occur once per
battle.
This skill makes her functionally immortal if the node she’s against can’t deal more than around
1200 damage to her (at max level). Once per battle means once per node, not once per map,
and thus her skill can proc numerous times per sortie. This skill makes her so impossible to kill
that, when geared and supported properly, she can outright solo-vanguard the entire game.
Against content earlier than world 9 you can easily just 1:1 with her - she’s one of the few ships
that can boast that, and certainly the cheapest.
Start leveling this skill as soon as you get her.
Saratoga
Saratoga is an aircraft carrier or CV with two nice nice skills, a nice loadout, and good stats. Her
first skill is:
Every 20 (10) seconds, provides supporting fire with 20.3cm guns (damage
varies with skill level)
Now, a lot of these skills that fire level-scaling projectiles are a little dubious. However, this one
fires quickly enough and does decent enough damage that it actually shores up one of CVs’
main weaknesses, which is inconsistency in damage. BBs just fire more often, so get better
damage distribution and hence better DPS (this is just one of many reasons they’re superior to
CVs). Whether this skill just accidentally pings down a suicide ship or scratches the last little bit
of HP off an enemy, it’s good icing on the cake.
Her second skill is:
Every time Saratoga launches an airstrike, increases Escort Fleet
damage by 5% (15%) for 8 seconds. Does not stack with the same skill.
This is, again, basically just icing on the cake.
Perhaps the most interesting part about saratoga is her good, but abnormal loadout - two dive
bombers, one fighter, and no torpedo bombers. What this means is she has really, really broad
coverage potential on her airstrikes, especially if you give her two SB2Cs.
There’s one more drop worth noting in 4-1:
Brooklyn
Brooklyn is another gunbote CL that drops from 4-1, and worth farming and leveling up.
Unlike phoenix, Brooklyn is more suited for a boss fleet with multiple vanguard ships because of
her skill:
Boosts the FP of all cruisers (that means light and heavy) in the fleet,
including herself by 5% (15%)
This is the reason you’ll want to raise her. LBing her also gets you closer to Wichita, a fairly
strong CA gunbote.
Once you get any of these ships, throw them in the dorm and long oil commissions as soon as
humanly possible to get them leveling up and ready for use while you farm in the next spot for
gear for these ships you’ve just gotten… 4-2!
Why 4-2?
Just stay long enough for two copies of purple twin 150mm (TbtsK C/36).
Once you have these, take Sara, Phoenix, and Brook out of the long oil commissions and 2nd
LB them (or even MLB if possible)
For the gunboats, slap tbts, 120mm twin, the highest rarity AA you have (will be replaced when
you get golds or better guns listed later in the guide), and any hp-boosting aux you’ve managed
to get your hands on by that point on them.
For Sara, put as many SB2Cs as you’ve gotten your hands on, and any fighter you’ve gotten
your hands on by this point (gold if you’re lucky, but any purple or blue will get you by for now).
Boss Fleets and Clearing Fleets:
You may have heard these terms thrown around by now and wondered “why doesn’t this guide
have me making a boss fleet and clearing fleet like everyone else?”
For the sake of simplicity, mostly, I didn’t want to burden you with that info just yet. One fleet
does fine for a long time, after all! Look how far its gotten you!
But, moving forward, you’re going to want to make use of your second fleet to keep clearing
costs low while you can throw a big costly DPS fleet at the boss to ensure nobody sinks and you
can get it down in time to S rank.
Clearing fleet:
The clearing fleet usually has stuff that’s really tough to kill, makes your other ships tougher to
kill, and doesn’t cost a whole lot - stuff like Phoenix, the Mahans, and Shouhou.
This fleet usually runs 1:1+2, with the +2 being mahans, added in mostly for HQ exp and
ambush evasion. They’re only worth using at 0LB, so keep them like that.
As for the 1:1, typically people use Phoenix + a battleship, but you don’t have a good battleship
yet and even if you did, probably don’t have good enough gear for her to outperform shouhou
yet anyways.
So, for now, just use solo shouhou. Eventually stuff gets harder, so you’ll have to use 2:1 with
the BB, shouhou, and phoenix, but by the time you get there (w9+) you’ll likely be well-versed
enough to make your own fleet composition choices.
Bossing fleet:
The bossing fleet is usually the one that costs more - you can justify it costing a little more due
to the increased difficulty of the boss and the fact you only have to do the boss once per map,
plus you want to absolutely guarantee S rank for reasons I’ve already mentioned.
Don’t be afraid to MLB your ships as they hit level limit caps, or even before then - just DO NOT
LB your Mahans for reasons explained earlier.
Why 3-4?
Once you’ve picked up one of the foxes, stick her in the dorm (and optionally long oil
commission) to get her up to lvl 30 for 2nd limit break, at which point you can switch Shouhou
out for her as you’re farming for the other.
Getting the foxes both up to a useable level is important! They’ll be your go-to bossing main
fleet in the sections to come.
Once you’ve gotten both the foxes, move some place that isn’t 3-4. I suggest doing 3-2 or 4-2 to
level them and farm gear, or just moving on to the next section of the guide if you feel confident.
Bear in mind if you go back to farm anything in this section of the guide at higher commander
levels:
“A gap between commander XP and enemy ship level diminishes the XP gain: a 21-40
level difference halves the XP gained, and a 41 and above difference reduces it to 1/10 of
its original value.”
Adept: Week 2 Guide
So, if you’ve followed everything in the guide perfectly, by the start of week 2 you have at least:
Equipment:
1x Beaver Badge
2x purple twin 150mm (TbtsK C/36)
1-3x purple 120mm twin
1-3x purple 127mm single
1-3x SB2C divebomber
Some toolboxes and fighters from fox farming
Ships:
MLB Shouhou
0LB Mahans
MLB Saratoga
MLB Phoenix and Brooklyn
MLB ship of your choosing
Both foxes
You’re going to want to move Saratoga to your trash clearing fleet now, since you’ll be looking
to get some more HP on your main fleet to prevent failing stages. Your foxes should take her
place, and shouhou can either take the bench or pad your trash clearing main fleet’s HP. She’ll
probably be overkill, though.
This next part of the guide is less linear, though I will present it linearly in the way I would go
about doing it. Here, I’ll just be letting you know how to prepare for event hard mode
requirements, which ships you can farm right now that never go out of style, and where to find
the last few pieces of gear for the slots I haven’t already mentioned.
Battleships are main fleet ships that fire large, high caliber guns in salvos as opposed to the
waves of planes that CVs send out.
They also have secondary guns that they can use to shoot down suicide ships, aka jihadis. This
second trait alone is enough to make them the main ship of choice over CVs later into the story
mode, but they also tend to have higher dps than CVs with comparable gear investment.
However, the place to farm good BB gear is in world 6, which is why I suggest you level up CVs
and neglect BBs for the time being.
But now that we’re in the section of the guide where we move into world 6, it's time to pick up a
particularly good and easy to obtain SSR one with your PvP merits!
South Dakota
South Dakota is a Battleship with excellent firepower, good hp, incredibly high AA, and two very
solid skills:
Every 30 seconds, absorbs 50% of damage taken by the backline for 8
seconds. At the end of the effect, heals for 20% (50%) of the damage
taken.
This skill doesn’t really do a whole lot most of the time - you might get some heals off with it in
PvE from tanking suicide ships but it’s inconsistent at best. Really this just tends to be kind of
nice for edging out wins in PvP early on.
15% (30%) activation when firing main gun to inflict double damage.
This is her main draw, and really speaks for itself.
Cleveland
Cleve-aniki is a gunboat cruiser like Phoenix and Brooklyn: 1 main gun with double mount on
2nd limit break and a secondary DD gun for incredibly consistent damage output which works
wonders in auto (no AI torpedo aiming? Yes please!)
While Phoenix’s main selling point was her absurdly strong skill, Cleve-aniki’s is her stupidly
high stats, among the best for light cruisers. She makes an excellent addition to a bossing
squad, and, because she’s a gunboat, has no trouble running 1:1 in earlier content.
4-4 also drops:
Unicorn
“Hey Doublemint, can I swap out Shouhou for unicorn?”
This question put me in a tough spot numerous times. Yes, you could have, if you had gotten
her from CV construction early on, but i wanted to design this guide around not rolling the gacha
to excess. Furthermore, you’ll want to have shouhou leveled to retrofit her, because her retrofit
outpaces unicorn damage-wise (and cost-wise), so I tell people “no.” for their own good(?).
Unicorn has the same first skill as shouhou, but she has a fighter slot instead of a divebomber
(divebombers do more damage than fighters, and you get the BiS one in world 3 for god’s
sake!), unicorns second skill and superior base stats might make her better for when you have a
full vanguard: it increases vanguard reload. However, this buff falls off competitively compared
to Shouhou’s superior bomber configuration in the case of 1:1 or solo vanguarding.
5-2 (and some very brief PvP talk):
(optional)
Queen Elizabeth
Also known as QE, she’s the only notable thing that drops from 5-2, but quite notable for PvP
specifically. This isn’t a PvP guide, so I won’t spend much time on her, just mention that Royal
Navy (HMS) fleets are very strong in PvP. HMS fleets are generally comprised of Hood, QE,
Warspite, Belfast, Juneau and Fortune Kai, with the vanguard being slightly more flexible. Her
skill is:
During combat, increases FP, Torp, Air Power, AA, Reload, and Evasion of
HMS (Royal Navy) ships by 5% (15%)
Which is really, really if all your ships are HMS.
She’s pretty solid in PvE as well, since her buff also applies to herself. This allows her to work
decently as a solo main fleet in the clearing fleet, or you can use her with some other HMS
ships for a bossing fleet.
Mid-Late Game Ship Leveling Strategy:
Once you’ve gotten who and what you want from the previous sections, you’re probably ready
to head right into world 6, where you can start finding purple plates to upgrade the gear you’ve
farmed to +10! Ideally, you’ll not really want to be leaving world 6 from here on, both for exp
penalty and purple plate reasons, so you’ll need a way to level ships you’re not actively using in
order to get them up to snuff. Long oil commission to the rescue!
From here on out, you’ll want to put primarily battleships and cruisers in the long oil
commissions (especially battleships!!!) and any spots in your dorm not filled by your farming
crew (trash clearing, boss group doesn’t need the morale bonuses). Any of the ships mentioned
anywhere in this guide are good candidates for these spots, but you can also consult one of the
many tierlists for further advice, or check my other guide.
You want to get at least two functional (lvl 80+) MLB BBs up and running by the time
you’re done mining for Poi (more on her later), and BBs are really not something you can
have too many of. They’re very flexible.
Farm 6-1
Helena
This is Esugee. Get used to her, because once you get her up and running she will probably
never leave your bossing fleet. Why? Not only is Helena a gunboat cruiser like Aniki and
Phoenix, but she has the skill…
Every 20 seconds, with a 30% (60%) chance to proc, increases the
damage that all enemies take by 20% (40%) for 10 seconds.
“Okay,” you’re saying, “but what makes this buff better than Clevelands?”
It multiplies your post-multiplier stats.
What do I mean by that?
Cleveland’s skill multiplies the FP of the vanguard.
...Helena’s skill multiplies the already multiplied FP AND torp AND airpower of the entire fleet.
60% of the time, your entire fleet just does 40% more damage for 10 seconds, flat out,
multiplying preexisting buffs to any stats elsewhere in the fleet.
If the power of this buff is still not appreciable, I don’t know what else I can say to make it so.
Once you get Helena, if you also leveled Brooklyn up and LB’d her, you should have Wichita.
Throw her in the backyard or oil commissions if you want to, she’s pretty strong - a gunbote
heavy cruiser, same idea as the light cruisers but equips a heavy cruiser gun and has low
evasion and slow speed. Beaver badge required for use.
6-1 also drops Vestal
Vestal
Vestal is a repair ship (AR), a special main fleet ship whose only purpose is to heal the rest of
the fleet with their special crane auxiliary, skills, and 3 repair kit consumables they grant their
fleet at the start of every map. By now I’m sure you’ve gotten one of those little green wrench
things from one of the “?” nodes on the map - repair ships give you 3 of those by default. This
may not seem useful now, but it’s among the only ways to heal your main fleet in later worlds.
ARs also give you 1 extra ammo, which again may not seem super useful now, but it’s a nice
quality-of-life addition for later worlds where you have to clear 6 non-boss nodes to make the
boss appear.
Vestal is a super long game investment - you won’t use her until world 10 and might not even
use her there depending on the strategy you choose, though if you’re going the route of phoenix
vs the world like I tend to enjoy, she’ll be your friend in a number of months.
Reminder: Equipment skills (aka cranes, in this case) do not stack. If for whatever reason you
decide to run two ARs though, their cranes will both “stack”
6-1 also drops:
Reminder: Equipment skills (aka radars, in this case) do not stack - the buff is fleetwide,
applying more to ships in one fleet will not give more flat evasion bonuses (you might get 1-2%
chance to evade from doing so, however, because you’re raising the ships evasion which raises
their chance to evade ambushes)
Farm 6-3
These two drop from every world in world 6 aside from 6-1.
They’ve also got a neat little… exploit? Mechanical quirk, wherein you can choose to retrofit
them all the way up until their “modernization” node in order to give them 30 FP, 350 Hp, 5
reload, 15 AA, and 10% main gun and 5% AA efficiency, placing them squarely above every
other regularly obtainable BB in terms of raw damage per shell.
But, you’re gonna need guns for them… 6-3 has you covered there, too!
Since I’ve just mentioned two HE BB guns as being two of the best, I should explain a little bit
about HE, mechanically, since I think at this point you’re ready to get some nitty gritty of
mechanics.
HE is strictly the best BB ammo type. The burns you inflict with BB shots are huge. This can
be amplified if you have either another BB with HE shots on a lower cooldown that does less
damage (i.e. hood with 410) or, most notably, a vanguard ship with an HE gun, because while
burns do not stack, subsequent lower damage burns inflicted refresh the timer on older,
heavier damage burns.
Oh, by the way, now that you have easy access to the good farmable BB guns, you’ll want to
start phasing out your CVs for the most part, at least for now. Akaga still makes for a fine boss
fleet, though. For the trash fleet, they just really don’t cut it compared to BBs due to lack of both
secondary guns and meaningful AA contribution.
Now, I think it's about time you start farming your first trophy ship!
Farm 6-4!
Yuudachi
Poi is a really awesome torpedo-focused destroyer that drops from 6-4. Not only is she super
cute, but she’s even got her own in-game theme song! There aren’t many situations that you
would take her over Ayanami post-retrofit, but she’s got one of the highest torpedo stats in the
game, and a really strong skill:
6% activation upon firing: For 8 seconds, increases own FP, Torp, Reload,
and Evasion by 20% (40%)
But this skill is unlike any we’ve encountered so far (at least unlike any I’ve explicitly mentioned)
- you need a fast reloading gun to make it work.
7-2 doesn’t drop any noteworthy ships that you don’t already have.
7-2 is really interesting because it has 4 “?” nodes that spawn in it - if you haven’t already
noticed, these drop gold! In 7-2 they drop gold, spawn treasure ships, and sometimes drop food.
The nodes themselves aren’t as good as they are in previous worlds, but the abundance of
them along with the stellar equipment drop table make this make an excellent candidate for
leveling ships from around 80-100 (usually ex-commission/dorm slaves)