I’m wanting to commission a painting of this scene, and trying to find an image for reference. Google is not helpful so far.

OVERVIEW

With the exception of the Trenton, I have played every other light cruiser in the game so far. In nearly every post regarding the light cruisers I always seem to find at least 1 guy hailing the Enterprise as one of the best ships in the game. So to compare, this post will look at the differences between it and the best CL in the game IMO, the Emden.

AMMO

People who I've seen praise the Enterprise repeatedly cite the APHE as being an amazing trump card. But when comparing ammo performance between HMS Enterprise & the Emden it's damage is no more effective than HE base-fuze. Most importantly however you are stuck with a much slower rate of fire. The APHE fragmentation is SOMETIMES effective but it's a real toss up even when hitting armored portions of enemy vessels where APHE does the most fragmentation upon penetration.

As a weird side note: the CPC ammo on the Enterprise seems to have a working fuze delay upon penetration whereas for some inexplicable reason the CPBC does not. This means that the CPC ammo despite having less penetration on paper tends to overpen whereas the CPBC ammo penetrates and detonates at the same time, allowing better fragmentation/damage against low armor targets despite having nearly 60mm more pen.

Weapon Arrangement: Primaries

The double turret on the front seems nice at first until you realize it has no armor against anything other than stray fragments and due to the rest of the guns being arranged in such a way to force you to broadside your opponents, losing that front turret limits you to a maximum of 1 other main gun while angling effectively or 3-4 guns if angling poorly/not at all. On the Emden the front weapons are split but even if you lose 1 or both of them you can angle and bring another 2-4 more with little to no loss in protection.

Weapon Arrangement: Secondaries/AA

Secondary arrangements & firing angles are definitely better on the Enterprise but are spread out and do not offer any effective density of fire to be useful and lack AA shells which would make them viable for AA defense. The AA weapons are well dispersed but offer no real advantages outside of extra 40mm cannons for defense against aircraft or PT boats. Again, the guns are dispersed enough that it works against you rather than for you in most cases.

Durability & Armor Protection

My experience so far with Enterprise has been nothing but killing or getting kill assists on one or two targets before b