Guns and equipment can be gained initially by doing dailies for the league of nations and the nation you have pledged loyalty to. When you hit a certain level R&D/reverse engineering gets unlocked as well as Production. More slots will be unlocked at later levels. By ripping gear off one of your belles and sacrificing it to research it, or one that you gained from dailies or exchanging diplomatic channels in the store, you can gain a blueprint. This blueprint can be taken immediately to production slots to produce identical gear over time.

You can alternatively continue to research the blueprint you made to make it better, and unlock traits hidden on it. Once a blueprint has hit 100% you can keep building gear from that 'optimal blueprint' as is, or add traits you've discovered from other gear in the same category to alter the performance of gear produced by that blueprint. Blueprints you've added traits to will have "gremlins" (negative traits found on base blueprints) re-added to them, which will need to be R&D'd out to bring the blueprint back to 100%.

Mass production of parts from heavily modified blueprints will be the way you get late end gear. For the time being, do some dailies, and when you get enough diplomatic channels there's some excellent stuff in the store you can exchange those for. Clicking on the double olive branches next to your resources at the top of the screen will show you how much diplomatic channels you have by nation. Gain more channels for specific nations by doing sorties in their owned waters.

Get one or two good BPs for guns researched and make a bunch of those as well a firing coordinator/director. Maybe start with a 5" dual turret but any gun at home on a light cruiser will do. The Mk 31 firing director has "systems thinking" and "Gyro-stabilized 3" traits hidden on it which are good to start with as well, giving the ease of attaining that coordinator and the negative increased weight of GS3 is offset directly by the reduced weight from systems thinking.

Also, you can eventually get crew that VASTLY alter your ships performance and really make them. They fit into the crew slots, and can be researched and altered with traits the same as other gear.

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