Planning Your Event
Know your Objectives, Know your Enemy
When planning for an event, two questions should take precedence above all others:
What are my objectives from this event? How do I prioritize these goals?
Never just limit your list of objectives to "Clear the event", be specific as to what you're aiming to achieve and get out of the event. For example, in Spring 2016, obtaining Iowa (E7 clear reward) by any means necessary might have taken precedence over a riskier all-hard clear.
Other goals may include farming a few useful rare ships (e.g. U-511, Prinz Eugen, I-13) or obtaining rare equipment (e.g. Duplex Rangefinder, Prototype Catapult)
The nice thing about laying out your objectives is that it doesn't matter if you're new or if you're veteran, it's something that will always be beneficial to your overall event plan.
Once you've established your objective, the next thing you should consider is the following.
What's the likely scale of this event?
This question tends to get easier to answer as the developers release more events over time. In general, trends suggest that Spring and Summer tend to be relatively larger events, while Autumn and Winter are relatively smaller.
Know Your Fleet
Notice how so far, we've not actually even looked at our ships yet, and instead have chosen to focus on your goals and the key challenges. That's because these questions are common to everybody.
Only now do we reach the questions pertaining to the state of the fleet:
- How many fleets will I need?
- Do I have enough ships to fill out aforementioned fleets? How good are they
- What do my resources look like?
What am I willing to forgo to accomplish my primary objective?
You should always be prepared to give up the chance to achieve some goals if it means you can accomplish others. In fact, if you're new, forgoing clearing the event might even be on the cards in some cases.
Expeditions
When it comes to expeditions, three expeditions stand head-and-shoulders above all others in terms of importance: Expeditions 2, 5, and 6.
Expedition 2 is the best source of buckets for an expedition, averaging one bucket every hour of play
Sparkling Your Ships
Sparkling is an important-enough thing that it gets its own header and section.
Blueprint Discipline
Blueprints are probably not what you think of as a resource, but they are. They're limited, valuable, and in this case, gamechanging
The #1 piece of advice with regard to blueprints is this: DO NOT SPEND ANY BLUEPRINTS UNTIL IT IS CLEAR YOU WILL NEED TO. This holds true even if the choice is as apparently obvious, such as Abukuma K2 versus Italia.
Blueprints don't go away if you don't use them, neither will your fleet lose levels. The only real disadvantage is in not being able to re-modernize the ship in advance. To refer back to the earlier example, although Abukuma K2 will almost always be far more useful than Amagi
We'll evaluate how much bang you get for your blueprint further in the ship guide.