It’s a shame this is only temporary for now. I wanted to play a few matches before I gave an opinion about this mode, and I have, so I shall.

I only played four matches so far: three wins, one loss. The first match was with my Tirpitz B and didn’t go well at all. We got stonewalled before we even got close enough to start shooting at transports. Quick and brutal loss.

The next match I used a Lenin and it was going very poorly at first. I got taken out after we sunk the first or second transport–can’t remember which since they both died within moments of each other. We went on to win though.

The third match I was also on the attacking team because of course I was. I was getting sick of battleships so I dusted off my Prinz Eugen and secured the game by shooting and sinking the last transport. That one was a fun line up with all the T8 Hipper hulls present save Tallinn.

The last match I used my Graf Zeppelin B and finally got to play as an escort instead of an attacker. My performance wasn’t stellar since I haven’t played GZ regularly in quite a long time, but I did my part and got fairly close to knocking out the enemy CV (Kaga) to tie up the match. I was a few hundred hitpoints shy and I think we had only lost one ship by that point, so the focus fire was immense. She was going down within a few seconds no matter what. I just happened to do a good chunk of damage near the end.

I think I prefer escorting transports to attacking them but while writing this I’m not quite sure. I think I’ll need to play some more matches this weekend to really get a feel for the mode. The battleship gameplay is fairly hit or miss though with the way convoy interception works. It forces you in close so it’s better to have a brawling ship than a sniper. The problem is that Asashio is a thing and deep water torpedo ambushes are pathetically easy to pull off when you know where all the big ships are and where they have to go to be effective. That’s why me and a Massachusetts B got walked all over near the beginning of my first Convoys match.

I’ll play the mode more this weekend and see how I like it, but regardless of anything else, it’s a breath of fresh air and I really hope this isn’t the last we see of the mode. Wargaming should make it a permanent game mode, even if they have to put it into some kind of rotation in the random battle mode. That’s better than doing nothing or leaving it as a one off or annual experiment. The mere mention of convoys was enough to get people excited, so hopefully WG doesn’t let this go to waste.