Yeah, I was wondering why they still have a lottery as well,haha.
I got three ship girls playing 1-1 node A four or five times. I then got another ship girl moving on to try the boss at node C and completing 1-1. You need "development materials" for ship building right? Is there a good spot to get that right at the beginning of the game?
For the first boss node I waited until I had four to five ships and they were level 2-3. Is there anywhere as far as recommended levels for the different maps? I just don't want any of my ship girls to get sunk if I can avoid it.
If you do the quests, you'll get development materials from doing those. It's why you want to prioritize unlocking fleet 3 and 4 as soon as you can, so you can do more quests.
Ships can only be sunk if you continue a mission after a battle where a ship is in the red. Basically the kanji/chinese for "BIG" means you don't want to battle. If you accidentally do go into battle, just quit your browser ASAP as you can usually cancel out of a battle that way.
I think the first few maps of world 1 are relatively easy. World 1-4 becomes hard because they introduce carriers and you don't really have a counter until you get your own carriers and battleships to at least try to counter them.
Also, use Kancolle Viewer if you aren't already. Even if you can read the Japanese, having access to all your information in a simple manner makes life easier than using the flash interface.
I am pretty sure that the hints we got so far lead to the whole war being changed thanks to Fubuki and the insistence of the admiral to have certain things changed or fixed that seem weird. Akagi's dream also let's me think that this happened before. Maybe they replay the mission, or somebody is a time traveller or this is a unique repeat of the things that happened in actual WW2 (they are the souls after all).
It's too bad the game doesn't have American ships, because it would be neat if an American fleet just showed up at the last minute to save them.