Update: June 2020

June 18, 2020

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Server maintenance is scheduled to take place on June 22, after which the Update will be pushed to consoles.

Maintenance times:

Xbox: 2:00 – 5:00 AM Central / 7:00 – 10:00 AM UTC
PS4: 2:00 – 5:00 AM Central / 7:00 – 10:00 AM UTC

Update size:

Xbox ~ 2100 MB
PS4 ~ 2100 MB

The first Update of Summer 2020 is set to be quite festive and has something for everyone! We're expanding the cruiser line of the USN fleet with a light cruiser branch, adding a new exciting project to the Bureau, and introducing new ships and Commanders inspired by the Warhammer 40,000 universe! We're also introducing cross-platform voice chat, so you'll be able to deploy your skills in organizing everyone who's willing to engage! Several important balance changes are also on the platter—read on to find out the details.

To begin with the festivities, we're going back to the New York Port, but this time it's all ready for the Independence Day celebrations. See if you can find any Easter eggs! And before you ask, yes—the festive mode is here to stay, right up until the next Update!

The Lone Veteran Campaign

Our new Campaign kicks off the American theme of this Update with the new Tier VII USN heavy cruiser, Wichita — a unique ship with a storied and successful naval career. In the game you’ll find her to be quite sturdy and able to withstand a number of battleship shell impacts when angled. You’ll also find her ballistics and shells to be a bit different from any of her USN cruiser contemporaries. During the course of the Campaign, you’ll also obtain several USN cruiser containers. These may just supply your Ports with the new light cruisers—Tier V Dallas and Tier VI Helena! Moreover, Tier VI Premium cruiser Boise is also waiting to be found in one of them. As usual, bigger containers have tangibly better chances of supplying the ships—weigh them against your expectations on our dedicated container page. Other than the containers, you can expect to receive the “Red, White, and Blue” expendable camouflage to adorn any of your ships in the pattern of the U.S. flag, as well as the common boosters, Commander items, and a new campaign currency to spend in the Admiralty Shop: Liberty Bonds. An interesting perk of this particular Campaign is that you can finish it 1 week earlier! We've added some difficult missions that will really test your abilities and reward you with extra Renown—the Shakedown Trials. Prevail in these, and you'll finish the Campaign early, but you can still finish the entire Campaign in 5 weeks if you skip them.

Please note: Tier VII USN Cleveland is not available in this Update, and will be unlocked in the next!

Check the available rewards on the infographic or in the text below:

Available rewards without Admiralty Backing:

30x common boosters
10x rare boosters
12x Red, White, and Blue camos
1,500 Global XP
235,000 Commander XP
200,000 credits
12x Promotion Orders
1x Insignia
1x Commendation
5x USN Cruiser crates
1x Big USN Cruiser crate
1x American Commander crate
7 days of Premium Account
900 Liberty Bonds
125 doubloons
1x Patch background
1x Patch symbol

Value of the rewards without an Admiralty Backing: 19,333 doubloons

Additional rewards you can get with Admiralty Backing (2,500 doubloons)

30x rare boosters
30x epic boosters
22x Red, White, and Blue camos
16,500 Global XP
140,000 Commander XP
1,200,000 credits
23x Promotion Orders
2x Insignias
2x Commendations
9x USN Cruiser crates
4x Big USN Cruiser crates
1,450 Liberty Bonds
625 doubloons
Tier VII USN cruiser Wichita

Total value of the rewards including an Admiralty Backing: 74,283 doubloons

Project Red, White, and Blue

To add even more stars and stripes to this Update, we're literally adding Stars and Stripes! That's right, this new Project features eight Segments that will supply the Stars and Stripes permanent camouflage for several USN cruisers, as well as Iowa.

The ships, ordered by Segment, are denoted on the infographic below. Once you're done with the whole project, you’ll also receive Tier V battleship California! This Tennessee-class unit is thick and heavy, and can withstand torpedo attacks with a degree of confidence. She’ll no doubt remind you of several other USN battleships in terms of her other features. Once again, you're free to research this Project at your own pace, as there's no end date for it at the time of writing.

The main rewards for the Segments in order:

Pensacola Stars and Stripes permanent camo
New Orleans Stars and Stripes permanent camo
Baltimore Stars and Stripes permanent camo
Dallas Stars and Stripes permanent camo
Helena Stars and Stripes permanent camo
Cleveland Stars and Stripes permanent camo
Iowa Stars and Stripes permanent camo
Tier V Premium battleship California

Together with this new Project, we're also making some improvements to the Bureau:

Patrons become available for all Projects from June 22! All unfinished Project Segments can now benefit from your Commanders, but keep in mind that those Commanders are specific to each Segment, and require a minimum of Rank 4, up to Rank 15 at the later stages.

Researchable ships in the fleet sections of Project Segments can now be navigated to from the “Fleet” screen. You can research and/or buy a particular ship via this method.

4th of July Victory Bonus

Something you might enjoy during the 4th of July celebrations is another reason to lead your USN ships into battle! The extra victory bonuses will be available for Tier III – VII American ships from July 3 (2:05 AM CDT/7:05 AM UTC) until July 6, (6:40 PM CDT/11:40 PМ UTC). The specific bonuses are as follows:

Tier III USN ships: 2x “Red, White, and Blue” camos
Tier IV USN ships: 2x “Red, White, and Blue” camos
Tier V USN ships: 2x “Red, White, and Blue” camos
Tier VI USN ships: 2x “Red, White, and Blue” camos, 1x basic container
Tier VII USN ships: 2x “Red, White, and Blue” camos, 2x basic containers

Warhammer 40,000 Content

The future as portrayed by the legendary Warhammer 40,000 universe is particularly grim in the 41st Millennium. We're taking a closer look at what might have been if echoes of that world reached us and enriched the naval battles of the 20th century.

You'll have two new ships at your disposal, as well as two fitting unique Commanders with especially memorable voiceovers and special themed containers for Imperium and Chaos—all of which are exclusively available in the Premium Store. Moreover, both the ships and Commanders can be found in the special themed containers, in addition to expendable camos, flags, and patches.

Choose your side! Ignis Purgatio, an Imperium battleship with Justinian Lyons XIII at her helm, or Ragnarok, with Arthas Roqthar the Cold at her helm!

While the new ships are based on IJN Nagato, they feature a more vertically pronounced ballistic arc (similar to American ships), faster gun reloading, and a significantly smaller HP pool, but they are nimbler overall. They do require you to take risks! Please note: Ignis Purgatio does not have access to the Aiming Systems Mod. 1, while Ragnarok does.

The Commanders, meanwhile, offer you a pair of new skills and as many new base traits:

Arthas Roqthar the Cold (compatible with IJN ships)
- Blind Rage (base trait/inspiration) increases your ship’s damage (+20%, static) while the Catapult Fighter is up, but reduces the Fighter's duration (–65%, max). Since cruisers can have their planes in the air for significantly longer periods of time, their damage boost is limited to 6% at the maximum rank.
- Avatars of Slaughter (skill) increases the damage that your ship’s superstructure, bow and stern receive (+25%, static), while reducing the damage your citadel receives (–25%, static) and increasing your ship’s shell damage (+15%, max).
Justinian Lyons XIII (compatible with USN ships)
- Emperor's Wrath (base trait/inspiration) increases your battleship’s overall damage (+5% max), as well as the chances for your HE shells to start fires while Repair Party is active (+40% max).
- Celestine's Blessing (skill) lowers incoming damage to your battleship (–50%, max), while the Damage Control Party consumable is active, but at the cost of said consumable’s duration (–50%, static).

Cross-platform Voice Chat

It's here! Any of your teammates who are willing to participate in strategizing and callouts are now able to do so, no matter what console they are playing on. The basic functionality of the voice chat remains the same: you can switch between your team and Division chats, or turn voice comms off altogether. Just a reminder—in battle, voice chat can be switched between "Division," "team," and "off" on the tactical map screen.

Meanwhile, the ability to form Divisions between players from different platforms is still in development, so stay tuned!

Balance Changes

We're bringing in more tweaks for this Update to spice things up a little. All of them continue to address Tier VII ships, but fear not—we're on the lookout for overall and inter-tier balance now that Legendary ships will start appearing in battles. So, without further ado:

Chapayev's firepower is very pronounced, but where Kutuzov can be severely punished, her Tech Tree counterpart was able to withstand many a heavy shell thanks to her 30mm-thick extremity plating. To bring things into line and give Chapayev's opponents a better chance at survival, we're setting her plating values to 26mm. This will result in most battleships overmatching her armor at angles, but we don't think it's going to rob Chapayev of her power. Rather, it will make the gameplay more demanding from a maneuvering perspective, which is a natural strength of cruisers. At the same time, we're improving her Repair Party slightly—its cooldown has been reduced to 55 seconds, instead of 60, and the amount of HP restored has been increased by 16.67% per second.
Despite Amagi not losing much in the way of statistical success, her popularity took a big hit and many players suggested that her accuracy was very unreliable. To compensate, we’ve narrowed her dispersion ellipse a little, which should bump up the hit rate for her shells by about 6.5%.
Richelieu has received a 50% increase to her turret HP. This has been done to give her a unique advantage over Jean Bart (which had the same initial turret HP value). Both ships are known for being quite the snipers, but while Jean Bart receives more love from the playerbase, her turrets can be disabled pretty easily when the intention is there. Richelieu will now be able to better withstand such attacks against her turrets. In comparison to Jean Bart she does lack some burst damage, thanks to Jean Bart's Main Battery Reload Booster, but she will now be better able to sustain damage over longer time periods with a better chance of operating both turrets.

Another change is coming that won’t necessarily affect balance directly, but modifies the bigger balance/economy picture:

The 25% XP bonus for Premium ships will no longer apply to base XP after a battle, but has been moved to other modifiers. We’ve also increased this bonus to 30% to keep the total XP per battle about the same.

The short version is that the only modifier in the team result table is now victory (+50% XP), and your total XP with the Premium ship bonus is now visible only in the “Economics” tab. This means that Premium ships no longer influence your ranking within a team after battle. This applies to Ranked Battles as well, reducing their impact there.

Matchmaking hasn’t been left untouched either—specifically, destroyers in Tier IV–V battles (with battle tier denoting the maximum ship tier in a battle). The high tier experiment proved successful, so we're spreading this algorithm to more battle tiers. This means that, from this update onwards, whenever you're in such a battle and there are no different tier divisions present, destroyers will be mirrored in the vast majority of cases. Note that, if the search takes too long, you might see a difference in the number of destroyers per team, but these cases will be few and far between. Uneven numbers of cruisers and battleships are allowed in order for this to work.

Miscellaneous Improvements and Bug Fixes

Several ship traits have been reallocated, and some of the more questionable combinations have been improved. For example, Monarch no longer sports Nimble Aim, but has Greater Heal instead. But remember, traits only perform a descriptive function and have no effect on ships' performance.
Tab titles in the menu are now underscored for improved legibility.
Daily Trials in the Bureau now have a minimum XP requirement. This means that, if the battle is won but a player didn’t participate in it, it won't be counted towards the Trial completion criteria.
In the previous Update, Big containers could drop duplicate ships that were compensated for at their full doubloon price. From now on, there will be no duplicates in these containers.
Personal Missions, such as those that came with Soviet battleships, could erroneously be obtained twice, yet only completed once. The correct behavior for them is single use.
In cases where there are multiple Campaigns per update, if player was in the Campaign menu whenever a new Campaign began, the focus frame sometimes disappeared.
The "Back" button sometimes flashed when a player checked mission progress from the Battle Result screen.
Whenever unlocking researchable ships from another type (i.e. Caledon to Valkyrie), the cursor pointing up didn't fill with color.
The camouflage selection window sometimes faded and became less visible.
The filter description sometimes disappeared when applying filters in the Port.
In the base capture mode, the flag icons for bases sometimes got switched around between the teams.
PS4 only: the "Prioritize party chat" sound setting sometimes, although rarely, resulted in the game crashing whenever a player with this setting activated joined a Division.
A rare bug made it impossible to play the game after reconnecting, having previously been disconnected.
A rare bug made it impossible to launch the game if a player signed out of their Xbox account while in the process of launching the game.
The navigation buttons flashed when switching between the personal and team results on the Battle Result screen.

Known Issues

There is a bug which may cause all of your ships to display a consumable that those ships don't actually have, in which case we advise to restart the game. It does not affect the consumable layout in battle. We're working on a fix, however, no ETA at this time.