
Tbh this choice option had kind of blurred out of my line of thought, now that she has been in my fleet for several months. Just for fun, I will try and alternate them from battle to battle a couple of times, to see which kinds of differences this can lead to. Thank you for drawing (for me, renewed) attention to the differences between Conqueror's two gun variants. Given T10 BB are either hard to citadel or painfully easy to, the short fuze won't deny you a lot of those.

Kurfürst gets 12, Montana gets 12, Republique gets faster reload, Yamato gets overmatch, so Conqueror against most lacks the shell output and the only comparable ship in number of shells fired will wreck Conqueror in an AP contest hard, as Conqueror has 32 mm plating all over, while Yamato will just bowtank it all. Per shell, a 457 mm Conqueror shell does respectable damage, with the highest damage AP shell in the game (14.9k vs Yamato's 14.8k) But it only gets 8 guns. Though, that is not to say Republique isn't scary to cruisers up close, because you can't really bet on that overpen in most of them. Against cruisers, at all ranges Republique is likely more scary, due to the faster RoF, but in alpha strike, Conqueror is better up close, while Republique is better at range (of which it has more too), as it needs less time for shells to travel to the target and at range, the penetration is no longer overpenning. As was said before, Conqueror has short fuze, but also, Conqueror has slower shells, while Republique has insane penetration on its high velocity shells (at certain ranges surpassing Yamato).
