'Item-up' Your Battleship

As the title suggest you have a maximum of 6 item slots on every ship you own and once you unlock them, you may feel obliged to purchase items continually to improve how your ship plays.

Each ship you will want to equip with slightly different items to boost a key advantage that ship has over others. For a battleship you obviously won't be loading up on torpedo items. However if you are looking for a well balanced ship then check out the first setup.

For all ships you will always want the boiler upgrade. For light and heavy cruisers you will be better served by reload rather than accuracy items.

Armour is best kept for battleships and CA's

Balanced Battleship Setup

It is my firm belief that you should always have the boiler item on your battleship. This can have the effect of increasing your speed and off-setting the speed reduction of all the other items you equip.

Bear in mind that if you are a non-premium player. The boiler item will only afford you +5% speed. Which means if you equip five other items that do -2% to speed you will always be running at -5% speed when using all six item slots.

For non-premium players a good balance setup is:

1x boiler   +5% speed

1x repair   +50dp/s

2x acc/reload items

The logic here is that overall you will have only lost -1% speed for gaining repair and accuracy or reload ability.

Alternatives are to forego the repair, reload/accuracy for armour or a mixture of any of them. But to only have 3 other items used beyond the boiler so that you loss of speed is fractional.

If you are not too bothered about losing some speed or having more repair, then go for any mixture of armour and weapon enhancements you desire.

For premium players the premium items are much more helpful. They are effectively twice as good for their advantages and half as bad in the downsides when compared to the non-premium equivalents.

The boiler item is a must and grants your ship a healthy +10% speed bonus. Couple with the fact that all other premium items affect your ship speed by -1% each you will always be up by +5% speed with a full compliment of 6 premium items.

Armoured Setups (AW BB/CA)

The logic here is to focus on armouring up your ship with 5 armour slots + the standard boiler upgrade.

For non-premium players you can have the boiler upgrade + 2  armour stacks before you lose any speed. If you don't mind losing a knot or two then you can go for filling the other 5 stacks with armour.

Bear in mind that all tier V armour stacks except bulkhead (never use bulkhead anyway) reduce ship speed by 1.8% each 

For premium users you will use the boiler upgrade for +10%, but will lose 9% of that speed if you then load up the rest of your 5 item slots with armour stacks. Which is a pretty good balance.

Speed Setups

For a speed focused setup you will only be using the boiler enhancement item to gain the +5% or +10% speed advantage.

Speed setups are great for all ships. They can really assist already quick ships ( destroyers and light cruisers), or speed up inherently slower ships (like ss, carriers and battleships [particularly the fast tier XI ones])

Plus they are also a cheap alternative, because you will only be spending credit or gold on 1 item per purchase instead of 6.

Armour only setups

If you want to have 6 stacks of armour on your ship then this setup is just for you. Actually this can be an effective setup for the majority of matchmaking games because most engagements take place at mid and close range. And most players are in the frame of mind to close down on you.

Try this setup in a tier 5-8 BB and you will have bunches of fun especially with the higher dps using secondary guns.

However, players will quickly learn that their shells are not doing much damage to you and switch to Armour Piercing. You will be extremely slow. Bear this in mind if the map is very open. Also you may be susceptible to torpedo attacks from subs or dive bombers, there will always be some weakness you have.

If you intend on getting very close to the enemy team a good strategy is to have more belt armour. maybe 4 stacks of belt with 2 stacks of bulge to counter destroyers and submarines. Again you are exposed to high angle shells and dive bombers.

Or you could go for an all round 2/2/2 bulge belt deck setup. The better options seem to be focus on what range you are going to engage. If its med-long range take deck armour and some bulge,  if its low-angle range, then more belt and bulge.