How hard it is to level up one tier? Bismarck on tier 8...sh*t.
I feel like giving that game a try one day. Carriers look fun as well because of the strategy-like gameplay, also feels like it's for lazy people.
I don't know how competitive is the game, it feels like all ships should be available at start. Btw, I'm judging all from the videos.
Well, to reach Yamato you must research all the ships that is prior to Tier X BB so that is Chikuma (Tier II, 1200 research points), Kawachi (Tier III, 2800RP), Myogi (Tier IV, 4200RP), Kongou (Tier V, 9200RP), Fuso (Tier VI, 16500RP), Nagato (Tier VII, 35000RP), Amagi (Tier VIII, 60000RP) and finally Yamato herself (Tier X, 140000RP). There might be an introduction of a Tier IX battleships in the future so that's extra probably 80000-100000 RP to grind. Now to sum them up, 268900 RP you need to earn before actually unlocking Yamato. On average, a decent co-op game for me can earn varying from 300-500 RP. So say on average let's call that 350 ish, since 500 I've to perform really well, that equates to 769 games. Now taking into account that actual PvP battle can earn more, and premium account (this require real money) earn you more experience, this can be shorten. If you don't want to spend money however, 769 games is probably what you'll be looking at (by just doing Co-op). Say I'm having really good games and use the 15 minutes maximum time limit per game, that equates to 11535 minutes of solid game time, which equates to 193 ish solid hours which equates to about 8 solid day of non sleep 24 hours gaming. This is obviously the longest calculation by taking into account of you just constantly playing co-op and not go to PvP, but it gives you a good understanding on how long Yamato would take to grind.
So yea, grinding to Yamato is hard, and I don't plan to doing that until the game is release since beta progress get wiped anyway, I'll probably try to get to Nagato on the Japanese tech tree, or possibly Amagi (since Checku-sama says its amazing), then probably work my way to Mogami (different tree, going from Chikuma through the CL/CA tree) and try out DD after that, since according to Checku-sama, Shimakaze is one of the most broken ship in game right now because of her insane movement speed to outrun other ships and her torpedo range is like 20 km which is like 1 meter longer than the 19 km salvo range of Amagi main canon xD.
As for competitiveness of this game, at the moment I see great potential of being a good 10v10 competitions for war game enthusiast, it have a decent small scale representation of what a real battle be like (provided we take into account of obvious simplifications and unlimited ammo...etc, the game is still very fun, addictive and rather "historically correct" whenever possible), to me CV will be the one taking the active "Commander role" since you'll be constantly on the RTS mini-map due to that's how CV is normally played and he'll be the leader who direct the team, so a good CV player is definitely not going to be easy from what I can see, a lot more forward planning, outplaying and co-ordination is required of a CV player for pro-league scene I think.