3 guns, cv engine, speed. 

armor = .2 belt and bulge till you lost 1 knt (reduce your bulge by 1 to get that knt back)

for gameplay = haven't played sodak (i did once but crash when i leveled a friend us bb then back to his iowa :D), just wait for a time to rush in your enemy and rush out, like mega said, speed speed speed :)

 

well so far the best i have got is 43 knotts but even with 900 sd one good salvo cripples me i would rather have like 13" of belt and do 40 kts i could dpo more if i dropped rear gun and added 4 to 5" of deck or just used it as a speed boost

I'm sorry but if you ever really do 13" of belt on a Sodak, please delete all your crew and burn your password from your memory and never return.
That is just utterly ridicilously retarded,.
Except for the 0.2 belt to reduce torp damage, 13" belt does almost nothing extra in GB.You aren't hit all that much at belt, most hits are all to deck. Even if you are hit on the belt, 13 " will likely not stop the big guns. 

With your lvl 95 gunners you will not have a good spread, a Sodak with 120 gunners does not have a good spread. It will at best have decent spread. On top of that Sodak 16"aren't the most damaging 16" around. Combine those two and a 2 gun Sodak has relatively bad damage output.

Stick with 3 gunned Sodak, 0.2 belt and bulge. Loiter around the middle and wait for an opportunity to pop in, shoot a salvo or 2 and then pop out, rinse and repeat.

I just graduated from the Sodak into the Iowa and here's what I used

3x lvl 80 guns (tripple 16")

.2" belt and as much bulge as i could pack before I lost a knot

With 3 engineers and the CV engine IV(Heavy), I could overheat to 45-46 kts (At level, as they skilled up)

From there it was just a matter of hit and run tactics, the spread sucks and gets you killed sometimes (I've missed an Andrea Dorea 3x in a row with shells landing on both sides of it).  You can't stand toe to toe with ships due to the spread, but since you can go fast, its great when you see a crippled BB4-6 burning with 10k DP left to rush in and put in the couple rounds it needs to sink.

With the South Dakota, you need to learn when to rush in and attack. Start getting used to looking around for enemy scouts in the area. Also, move your ship close to the battle line. When the enemy is blind and you can see them, sneak in for a few shots and chase them down.

Well, you can really choose to focus on one of three things.

Speed, firepower, and armor. If you choose anything other than firepower, don't put the 3rd gun on there. If you set it up 3-gun you will still be satisfied with the speed, if you use the right armor loadout.

If you do it two-gun and decide to deck whore, your armor will be somewhat effective, though probably not so much as you like. If you go two-gun the best thing to do is speedwhore. With quick speed you can act as a ninja, hit and run style tactics. Or you can be a rusher, kind of like a Nelson or two-gun KGV/PoW.

Just to make sure you know - if you speedwhore ANYTHING, the thing to do is mount 0 deck, 0.2 belt, 1 bulk, and afterward, as much bulge as you can pack in without losing a knot. If you want, round it down to the nearest 5 so that you'll have room for your crew to grow. You know that as a sailor levels up he can hold more sailors, and this will cause you to gain weight, so that you will not suddenly drop in speed by 1 or 2 knots by an eventual weight gain from sailor level-ups. This is the armor setup I've used on all my BB's from Guam to Montana (no Nebraska yet), and it's what you want on a US BB in GB.

Personally, I ran my Sodak three-gun and otherwise set it to be speedwhore setup. You should have plenty of SD by the BB3 stage (400 MINIMUM, and that's if you don't have elites or boosts) if you aren't already approaching 900 (you should have 900 by the time you hit Iowa, or be close to it). The ship was definitely fast enough for my tastes, having several knots faster in overheat than the Colorado, which was my BB2. I enjoyed the firepower and still did use the Sodak as a hit and run machine. It was tons of fun, and if you play it right, you'll enjoy it too.