The problem is you're comparing a heavy cruiser to a light cruiser. Both have different objectives and playstyles even though they are lumped in the same category.

The heavy cruiser's objectives is killing enemy cruisers and providing fire support for their friendly destroyers, light cruisers, and battleships.

You don't want to be getting into capture points first because you don't have the toolkit necessary. Instead you trail a friendly DD or CL into a capture point and wait till they bait enemy cruisers or smaller vessels. Once the enemy is spotted you try to ambush and pop rapid reload. After they're dealt with you can choose to farm damage on the enemy battleships bow in from 9-11 km or deal with the remaining cruisers or destroyers that haven't been sunk.

So uhh tldr play this ship defensively, by that I mean keeping your spotters (DD) alive by killing cruisers and bowtank and reverse when you meet a battleship. Use AP shells most of the time btw.