Italian Battleships were recently buffed with a baseline 30% "Gun Feeder" function. You can swap shells more easily which helps as situations change and SAP and AP needs vary. You can further enhance the shell-swap capability by taking the Gun Feeder skill on your commander, and I really recommend doing so.
The nature of SAP shells on the Italian line is that you don't expect to deal with Overpens. Even a few hits go a long way because of the rather potent base damage of the SAP shells, so you see some pretty gnarly dispersion to try and avoid them power-clapping ships.
Keeping the poor dispersion does help to force the player to take a more aggressive position which the armor, concealment, and smoke capabilities make possible. The line is designed for medium to close play.
I suppose that's worth looking into, but Marco Polo does have a difference in its caliber size. 406mm overmatches 27mm whereas the tech-tree line does not have such overmatch capability.
German Battleships are heavily invested in Secondary play-styling. If Italian Battleships copied this style of play, that could be too much similarity to let each line feel unique.
The question is better represented in terms of damage outcomes.
If firing at a nose-on enemy at 8km, a normal battleship without overmatch would either fire:
HE, which has reduced base damage but chances at starting Fires
AP, which might pen in the superstructure, but likely results in ricochets and shatters.
If you fire AP at said nose-on ship, you might receive poor results due to dispersion, but if you fire SAP you are likely to catch full-pens on superstructure or anything the SAP's advanced pen angles can bite into.
The SAP shell on a Venetto has 12,500 Base Damage, whereas HE on a Bismark is 4,400. That's a nearly 3-to-1 damage ratio meaning a single Venetto SAP shell will deal similar Pen damage that would require 3 Bismark shells to connect. That being said, there is no Fire chance on SAP.
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In short, you must factor in the full pen damage of SAP shells being as consistent as they are. Yes, throwing a fist-full of confetti can be frustrating, but the connections are very, very potent.
DDs have not been able to take full pen damage from Battleship AP for a long time. Base Damage values on SAP are similar to AP, so they are similarly limited.
You can consider Italian Battleships to be uniquely weak to Destroyers while uniquely capable at Pen'ing light cruisers.
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