In this article, I will explain how to build a well-rounded functional fleet. I will go over each ship type and their roles and recommend the best ship to invest in each role. Focus on the ship you like the most first, but there are many other ships needed so your fleet can handle different situations.
Contents
- 1 Destroyers
- 1.1 Recommended Destroyers
- 1.2 Destroyers and their role in the fleet
- 2 Light Cruisers
- 2.1 Recommended Light Cruisers
- 3 Heavy Cruisers
- 3.1 Recommended Heavy Cruisers
- 4 Battleships
- 5 Carriers
- 5.1 Recommended Carriers
- 6 Healers
- 7 Submarines
Destroyers
Recommended Destroyers
1.Ayanami
Greatest torpedo damage for boss kill/torpedo stats checks.
2.Yukikaze
Most tanky destroyer with team defensive bonus.
3.Z23 and Laffey
High firepower destroyers annihilate light armor enemy. Both of them fit into the same role, so retrofitting one of the two is fine if you are short on blueprints.
4.Javelin
High evasion stats with decent damage output. Suitable for filling the evasion stat checks. Fortune retrofit is also a good evasion filler with a defensive bonus.
5.Eldridge
A specialized destroyer, when taking damage, has a chance to make the vanguard invulnerable. She is helpful in difficult boss fights.
They are widely considered the weakest ship type, and yet they are necessary for various situations.
Most destroyers share these characteristics:
- Fastest movement speed, putting DDs in vanguard will boost the entire vanguard’s movement speed.
- Low HP with high evasion. DDs are very tanky in the early game because enemies have low accuracy, but enemies gain more accuracy/damage as you get deeper into the game. DDs have abysmal survivability in the later worlds.
- Low firepower and can only equip low-caliber guns. This means most DDs struggle against medium and heavy armored enemies.
- Significant torpedo damage, but torpedoes are unreliable when auto-playing.
Destroyers and their role in the fleet
Destroyers provide these functions to your fleet:
- Avoid ambush; the rate of hitting ambush is tied to your fleet’s total evasion. DDs can have highly high evasion (more than a few other ships combined), reducing your chance of being ambushed.
- Extra movement in events, using 1 DD will generally give you +1 tile movement per turn.
- Manually killing bosses, torpedoes from DD can do an insane amount of damage if you hit every single torpedo.
- Meeting stats requirement for Hard Mode, DD, in general, has the highest Torpedo/Evasion stats that are always required when you want to enter hard mode maps.
Light Cruisers
They offer lots of utility. The most helpful ship type in the game is based on its many functionalities.
Most light cruisers share these characteristics:
- Good anti-air, which means they take reduced damage from aircraft and can shoot down more aircraft.
- Fairly tanky, especially against torpedoes.
- Most top light cruisers have excellent team buffs; there are many good supports in the light cruiser class.
Recommended Light Cruisers
1.Helena
It makes all on-screen enemies take extra damage. Best boss fight support in the game.
2.Phoenix
Low-cost tank with regenerating ability. Allows you to run solo vanguard for low-cost farming.
3.Belfast and Cleveland Class Light Cruisers
They have very high stats. They are good Cleveland class ships are very similar, but the best is Montpelier.
3.Jintsu
Drop only at 10-4 boss. Greatest torpedo damage in CL-class and hugely boost your DD torpedo damage as well.
4.San Diego Retrofit
Sandy can single-handedly carry the entire fleet in chapters 12 and 13. However, her retrofit is a time-limited event.
Heavy Cruisers
Most important ships to level are used as tanks to soak up damage and level, affecting how much damage you take directly.
Most top-heavy cruisers share these characteristics:
- Tanky and have a high HP pool. By putting some evasion gear on them, they will have the highest survivability in the vanguard.
- Great damage, they can equip the highest caliber gun in the vanguard, so their main gun deals more damage to medium/heavy armor targets.
Recommended Heavy Cruisers
1.Portland retrofit
Extremely tanky and decent damage at a meager cost.
2.Roon
Tanky and has a shield to protect teammates, and she uses both AP/HE ammo to handle different types of enemies.
3.Takao
She is pretty good in both offense and defense.
Battleships
They are the primary damage dealer. They deal a high amount of single target damage and can equip auxiliary guns to defend the backline against suicide boats. The best battleship you can get is Hood; her barrage deals tremendous damage, which will demolish most bosses you face.
Carriers
They use airstrike to deal massive damage to a wide area. They are necessary for the following reason:
- Air superiority system, which will be implemented with chapter 13. It forces you to bring at least 3 carriers in the later maps.
- Airstrike will clear all projectiles on the screen.
- Carrier can deal insane damage if the enemy has low anti-air.
Recommended Carriers
The elite 4: Enterprise, Essex, Centaur, and Formidable.
Healers
There are 4 dedicated healers in Azur lane. Unicorn and Akashi are the most critical 2; they are necessary for clearing chapter 9. Shoushou and Vestal are the weaker versions of Unicorn and Akashi.
Submarines
I only recommend leveling submarines after you’ve fully leveled up all the previous ships listed above. Submarines are optional, so I do not recommend beginners touching submarines until you have a solid high-level fleet.
