Firepower

Primary Battery: Nine 150mm L/60 in three turrets in an A-X-Y superfiring configuration.

Secondary Battery: Eight 88mm rifles in 4×2 turrets

Torpedo Armament: Six tubes in 2×3 launchers, one to each side between the bridge and the funnel.

Makarov’s secondary armaments are largely forgettable, even if they do differentiate her from Nurnberg. So let’s start here. Admiral Makarov has the same 88mm rifles as Nurnberg, but where they differ is in their ammunition. Makarov’s guns do 1,100 damage instead of 1,000 and they have a base 7% fire chance instead of 4%. Maybe if these weapons were on a bigger ship that could have more of them, I’d celebrate. As it is, they have a 4.5km range and a broadside of four secondary rifles isn’t anything terribly exciting, even if they are buffed with Russian bias (we had to cram some in there!).

The other side to her secondary armaments are her torpedoes. Just like the C-Hull Nurnberg, she has a pair of triple launchers mounted between the bridge and funnel. These are your classic German torpedoes, the G7a T1 that you find on everything from Konigsberg through to Tirpitz. The best thing about them, really, is that they’re fast and hard to spot. Given Makarov’s weaknesses in a brawl, they don’t come into play very often, but it’s hilarious when they do.

The Nurnberg-class cruisers have a rate of fire better than some destroyers. On paper, she can put out fearsome amounts of damage that no ship could rightly stand up against. These guns have high AP shell damage, good range, excellent fire arcs, ridiculously fast muzzle velocity and excellent HE penetration. In reality, there’s a combination of factors that make Admiral Makarov’s firepower more of a paper tiger.

Let’s start with her AP shells. On paper, the 3,900 damage per shell looks phenomenal. Admiral Makarov’s DPM blows all of the other cruisers out of the water (literally). However, there are three mitigating factors which make these damage totals a nigh-impossible pipe dream.