[Android/iOS] 战舰少女 (ZJSN) - Warship Girls (Kancolle clone)

Making a new thread for this game.



Warship Girls is a Chinese clone of Kantai Collection, designed for Android and iOS. The game entered closed beta last September before its full release in December.



Servers

There are currently three game servers:

1. ZERO

2. Saratoga

3. Bismarck



ZERO server is essentially the beta server where new patches are released first for testing. This server was renamed from the original beta server, and is currently closed to new accounts. Admin have stated in the past that registration keys will be distributed every now and then, but to my knowledge, this has not happened so far since the full release. Aside from getting early patch releases, players on the ZERO server get a daily bonus of 1000 materials and 3 ship blueprints.



Saratoga and Bismarck are both open servers, with the former opening around one month before the latter. Players on Bismarck tend to be newer so the competition is less intense during PvP as compared to the other servers.



Gameplay



As a Kancolle clone, gameplay in ZJSN is very similar to Kancolle. Players take on the role of an admiral in charge of a dock, and can create up to four warship fleets. The warships are personified as warship girls, and these fleets can be sent on sorties where they battle enemies to gain experience, or expeditions, where they gather materials without gaining experience. PvP involves the player fighting other admirals' fleets, but the opponent's fleet will be controlled by AI. Most of the warships are real-life ships from the WWI or WWII-era.



Ships can be obtained either by completing battles with an "S" or "SS" grade, or through constructing in the dock using materials and blueprints. Some ships are occasionally awarded for completing events.



Ship types - very similar to Kancolle, so I won't rehash what they do, except to highlight some of the minor differences



Aircraft Carrier - CV

Light Aircraft Carrier - CVL

Seaplane Carrier - AV

Battleship - BB (战列)

Battle Cruiser - BC (cross between a Battleship and Heavy Cruiser; can carry large cannons and attack twice, and slightly more fuel-efficient than a BB but also more vulnerable)

Monitor / Heavy Cannon (not sure of the translation) - BM (cross between a Battleship and Light Cruiser - can carry large cannons and attack twice, but only has two weapon slots; very fuel-efficient)

Heavy Cruiser - CA

Light Cruiser - CL

Destroyer - DD

Submarine - SS



There are a number of additional classifications listed in the game, but no ships of those types have been released so far.



Comparisons to Kancolle - I've never played the actual Kancolle, so I'm simply posting about I've heard.



Pros:

- Easy to join, with no lottery and no restrictions on foreign players

- Much more variety in terms of international ships

- Supposedly better user interface (I cannot confirm this since I don't play Kancolle)



Cons:

- No voices (yet)

- Less variety in terms of ship types due to the game still being in development (e.g: only one submarine and one seaplane carrier in the game so far)

- Not as popular as Kancolle, which makes the characters a little harder to relate to since there's very little community-consensus characterisation

- Very inexperienced administrators, so events are sometimes poorly designed and frustrating



Your mileage may vary

- Warships are designed in a different style



Concluding comments

Make no mistake about it; this is a Kancolle clone. The clone will generally never reach the standard set by the original, especially since the original in this case a highly popular and successful game. This clone, however, is not one of those slipshod attempts at cashing in on the original's success, because it is clear that the administrators have put a lot of effort into the game, and that they are genuinely interested in the real-life warships.



I started playing this game because I didn't want to have to use a proxy to play, and also didn't want to risk having all my hard work to go waste should foreign accounts be deleted in the future (I know that the likelihood of this is very low). Having said that, a large majority of the player base in ZJSN are also teitoku on Kancolle, and the forums will often contain discussions about both games, so feel free to give it a try:



http://zj.p7game.com

[Android/iOS] 战舰少女 (ZJSN) - Warship Girls (Kancolle clone)