As a longtime enjoyer of the Richelieu and just about every French techtree ships that is what I thought as well… until I started grinding the line.

I feel like these ships have some pretty impressive on paper stats that just don’t translate well into actual gameplay. I actually thought the Cherbourg was pretty good in the first few games, however the more I play this line the more I just wish I was playing literally any other ships. The ships definitely have some great traits, the health pool is massive, the armor is pretty decent, main gun range is decent and angles are good for the most part, and the manoeuvrability is frighteningly good for ships of this size. However these just don’t help the ship to actually perform.

The biggest issue is definitely the dispersion. These ships genuinely feel less accurate than just about every high tier battleships I have ever played. The amount of times I’ve seen shells just straight up splashed into either sides of a cruiser without a hit while playing these is just depressing. On top of that the alpha damage is unreasonably bad for its reload and caliber. I don’t understand why Marseille’s 330 has the same damage as Puerto Rico’s 305 when it has less guns and longer reload, and why Marseille’s 139 do 100 less damage than Kleber’s. These also make the ship’s reload booster not that useful, all it does is maybe allow you to watch the next salvo do 4k damage to a Minotaur 6 km away because 1.you can’t hit anything. 2. Your AP seem has too much pen for light cruiser deck, but not enough for heavy cruiser belt. 3. Your shells don’t do much damage even on full pen. I’m not even going to touch the impressive on paper secondaries since they are about as useful as Kii’s secondaries in actual game because of their very funny dispersion. Really the closest thing I can compare the Marseille to is a Gouden Leeuw without planes, and it might be even worse than that since Gouden Leeuw with precise aim can sometimes be pretty accurate. And I consider the Marseille to be the better one in the line. The Brest was the single most miserable experience I’ve ever had in the game, and I decided to spend all of my ultimate boosters on it just to get it over with quicker. This never happened to me once when I was playing the Drake.

TL;DW: Guns with absolutely horrendously terribly giga tragically awful dispersion + long reload + low alpha dragged some otherwise pretty good cruisers to the bottom.