Sandbox/Event Planning
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 and Resource Planning
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. Sparkling involves getting your ships above their default level of morale (49).
Battle-wise, sparkled ships possess increases their evasion and accuracy; strategically, sparkled ships enable expeditions to return with great successes, granting 50% more resources.
Some of the more important things ways that morale may change are:
- +1 for an S-Rank (flawless or not), less one for every rank below S
- +10 for being the MVP of a battle
- +3 if starting the battle as the flagship
- -15 at the end of a sortie
As such, it is possible to see that being the flagship and MVP for each battle in a sortie comprising of two battles will grant 10+10+3+3-15 = 11 morale, plus up to 2 more if those battles are S-rank.
As this is an event guide, the methods here will be the more important ones, more methods can be found on the morale page.
1-1 Sparkling
1-1 sparkling is as basic as sparkling gets, take your desired sparkling target, equip her with the longest range equipment you have, and send her to 1-1 to do both nodes. 1-1 can be used to sparkle any ship in the game.
If you have a maruyu, it is extremely useful to use pair her up with the ship you want sparkled to prevent scratch damage to your sparklee.
DDs tend to have a slightly harder time here because of their tendency to have their MVP stolen (due to their short range), fortunately, there is an even more efficient way to sparkle DDs in the form of 1-5.
1-5 Sparkling
1-5 sparkling is far more efficient than 1-1 sparkling, by going to three nodes, you can increase your morale gain to 24 morale for 3 nodes, more than double the morale for a 50% increase in cost. More importantly, A node's submarine becomes a Ka-elite past HQ 80; this means that ships will find it difficult to kill unless fitted out with ASW gear. This in turn makes it easy to ensure that your flag gets MVPs.
This method requires the use of level 1 fodder ships so as to draw fire away from your flagship and to reach the 4 ship quota needed for line abreast formation. While it is (obviously) easiest to sparkle OASW ships here, OASW is by no means required.
Over many sparkling runs, there will be instances where your flagship will be hit and you will' forced to retreat, or where a level 1 DD crits and steals MVP, or where your flag misses; this is completely normal and simply a result of probability. Your flagship will still benefit from flagship protection (i.e. your flag will be targeted far less than 25% in a fleet of 4) and you will average greater returns than at 1-1 due to the greater sparkling efficiency.
Dealing with any sparkled DDs that have taken damage is often simply a matter of letting them repair in the docks for about 1-2 hours, just be sure to leave at least 1 dock open so you can bucket any other more important ships.
Your Core Expeditions
Expeditions are your primary source of income in the game, you should aim to have them running at all times. Below is a list of the hourly resource rate of the most important expeditions in the game.
| # | Key Resource | Time | 
|
|
|
|
+
|
Total Gross Resources per Hour[1] | 
|
Sparkling Load [2] |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2 |
|
0:30 | 200 | 60 | 200 | 230 | 1 | 8+ for GS | ||
| 3 |
|
0:30 | 90 | 90 | 120 | 180 | 300 | 9+ for GS | ||
| 5 |
|
1:30 | 133 | 133 | 13 | 13 | 266 | 318 | ||
| 5 GS |
|
1:30 | 200 | 200 | 20 | 20 | 400 | 477 | 3 1⁄3 [3] | |
| 6 |
|
0:40 | 120 | 360 | ||||||
| 6 GS |
|
0:40 | 200 | 600 | 6 | |||||
| 21 |
|
2:20 | 137 | 116 | 253 | 253 | ||||
| 21 GS |
|
2:20 | 206 | 174 | 380 | 380 | 1.7 or 2.1 [4] | |||
| 37 |
|
2:45 | 138 | 98 | 138 | 236 | ||||
| 37 GS |
|
2:45 | 207 | 147 | 207 | 354 | 1.5 or 1.8 or 2.2 [5] | |||
| 38 |
|
2:55 | 144 | 69 | 144 | 213 | ||||
| 38 GS |
|
2:55 | 216 | 104 | 216 | 320 | 1.4 or 1.7 or 2.1 [6] |
Expeditions in Brief
- Expeditions 2, 3, and 6 form the chief short expedition group, and
- Exped 2 is your primary source of buckets, averaging 1 bucket per hour, regardless of sparkling. It also serves as a great source of ammo.
- Exped 3 will be your main early-game source of steel. Its high sparkling load renders it unfavorable to sparkle, and it will likely be supplanted by other sources of steel later in the game.
- Exped 6 is be your primary source of bauxite. On a side note, it technically gives the highest "gross" resource per hour, but the utility of bauxite tends to be limited.
- 5 and 21
Blueprint Discipline
Blueprints may not be the first thing that comes to mind when you think of resources, but their value is undeniable. They're a limited, somewhat hard to obtain, and sometimes gamechanging resource
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.