The Tempest: a prize at the top of the ladder

June 27, 2026 · naval combat

The naval unlock ladder needed a summit — something to chase once you've earned the battleship. So meet the Tempest: a premium heavy cruiser with autoloading guns, modeled on the real USS Des Moines, whose autoloaders let her eight-inch rifles fire continuously instead of one deliberate salvo at a time.

The Tempest heavy cruiser at speed on open water, a long sleek hull with twin funnels and three triple-barrel turrets, the forward turret trained out to starboard — The Tempest — a long heavy-cruiser hull, twin funnels, and three triple autoloader turrets.

What makes her special

Every other hull in the game reloads its main battery on a deliberate timer — three and a half seconds for the Bastion cruiser, a full eight for the Dreadnought's big rifles. The Tempest's autoloaders cut that to barely over a second. The alpha of each shell is smaller than a normal heavy cruiser's, but she throws them so fast that her sustained damage — and her rate of starting fires with HE — is the highest in the fleet. She's a damage-over-time machine: hold the trigger and walk a storm of shells onto a target until it's ablaze.

The trade is that she's a cruiser, not a battleship. Heavy-cruiser belt armor and a big, bright hull mean a battleship's AP will citadel her if she's caught broadside, and she carries no torpedoes — she's a pure gun line. She rewards captains who can keep the range open and the guns bearing, not brawlers.

A reward, not a regular

The Tempest sits at the top of the unlock ladder: forty ships sunk, well past the battleship. And she's premium in a specific sense — the AI patrol never fields her. The bot fleets stay the tuned destroyer / cruiser / battleship mix they always were, so adding her didn't touch the balance work; you'll only ever see a Tempest in another human captain's hands. Earn her, and the storm is yours.

How she's built

Mechanically she's almost entirely data: a new hull in the warship roster with a very short reload and her own armor and gun figures, plus a premium flag the AI-spawn logic reads to skip her. The autoloader isn't a special case in the firing code — it's just a fast reload, which is exactly what a Des Moines autoloader is. The unlock rides the same ships-sunk gate as the rest of the ladder, enforced on the server. A blocky three-triple-turret model and a hangar card round her out. Small footprint, big payoff.