>>3402715>>3406994>>3407012As someone who picked up AL during a burnout break from KC, then dropped it after the Nep collab:
AL advocates pride themselves with its gameplay, while at the same time auto-ing it because it's too easy, which turns the gameplay from engaging to tedious. All ships are also very much interchangeable, you can do a map with pretty much any setup, even more so without routing restrictions. So you both have casual gameplay and are stripped of any strategic depth. Resources and expeditions are also dumbed down, and the drop rates in both crafting and maps make it so that you get whatever ships you desire in two months at most, from which point there's no more incentive to play, as the game requires no thinking, and it also requires no action.
Meanwhile, you have KC, which puts an emphasis on strategic thinking. The combat isn't the gameplay, the planning is. the combat is just the end result of it. KC is a management game, which seems to slip people's minds. Ship composition is important (and doubly so during events, when you have to carefully assign your ships to each map due to ship locks), and loadout is also important (sometimes you need extra radars, sometimes you need night equipment etc.), unlike AL which is just "give them the best shit you have".
Another point of note is that AL is immersion-ruining (which doesn't affect their fans as they don't care about the naval aspect to begin with, they'll all tell you they're into it for the girls ONLY). There's nothing evocative of naval combat to it, quite the contrary, with silly bullet patterns ruining any mental image of it. KC doesn't have any detailed display of combat, but what it does display works as an abstraction of it, instead of running straight against it. AL is nothing more than a side-scroller with a naval skin slapped on it, and its only redeeming feature has nothing to even do with ships, nor is it an original concept: the room customisation options.
