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Post by garrisonchisholm on Sept 3, 2017 13:09:36 GMT -6
What I don;t hear is an account of how often these supercruisers actually get used, as opposed to building them for colonial service and/or prestige. Well, mine got used an awful lot. My Charles' design debuted in the early 40's, and I would say they appeared in... 6? scenarios by game end. My last game, where I feel I built them too soon and then they were a knot slow also, took the waves in the mid 20's and all 8 were still with me in 1950. All 8 were my SEA squadron (plus a dozen DDs), which as the Dutch against FR/US/JP meant they were used a Lot. Bombardment and response, coastal raid and response, raider interception, convoy attack and defense, I am sure they appeared in over a dozen scenarios by game end. I have no complaint about how frequently they were called upon, money well spent.
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Post by joebob73 on Sept 3, 2017 14:00:02 GMT -6
What I don;t hear is an account of how often these supercruisers actually get used, as opposed to building them for colonial service and/or prestige. Well, mine got used an awful lot. My Charles' design debuted in the early 40's, and I would say they appeared in... 6? scenarios by game end. My last game, where I feel I built them too soon and then they were a knot slow also, took the waves in the mid 20's and all 8 were still with me in 1950. All 8 were my SEA squadron (plus a dozen DDs), which as the Dutch against FR/US/JP meant they were used a Lot. Bombardment and response, coastal raid and response, raider interception, convoy attack and defense, I am sure they appeared in over a dozen scenarios by game end. I have no complaint about how frequently they were called upon, money well spent. I agree, mine see a LOT of action. Playing as the USA, it is easy to guarantee complete superiority in capital ships by the 20s, so the AI tends to decline large fleet actions. So most of my battles end up being convoy attack/defense or cruiser actions, at which supercruisers excel. I also prefer building them in my legacy fleet in place of Bs, simply because they remain useful all game while Bs tend to become obsolete and end up scrapped. ' Meanwhile a good legacy CA can go from this to this by the endgame. 27! battle stars, discovered through a look in the save file after game end. This is a pretty standard one for me, it is usually quite effective at killing other cruisers, while rarely encountering enemy BCs. If they are encountered, the 31 knot speed is usually sufficient to escape, especially at night or close to. In many playthroughs though, the AI starts armoring up its own CAs to the point where 10" are not effective enough, such as this cruiser from Russia So I reacted with a special purpose CA design, which was built much like my 12*10" gun cruiser, but then refit into this. Significantly cheaper than a BC, especially the large ones I favor, but capable of sinking any ship that could catch it, even a few of the AIs battlecruisers because it was usually two of them vs one BC.
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Post by Airy W on Sept 3, 2017 14:39:44 GMT -6
After the First World War, there was absolutely no excuse for believing that large surface vessels could produce even a fraction of the results that U-boats could achieve for a much lower cost. Read this: www.gutenberg.org/files/13529/13529-h/13529-h.htm#Page_134I would recommend reading the entire book but in particular read the part I link you directly to. As they say, there is nothing new under the sun. The same misconceptions that people had about cruisers (using the age of sail meaning of the word), they would later transfer to submarines as well as the new cruisers.
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Post by boomboomf22 on Sept 3, 2017 15:44:04 GMT -6
I like building super cruisers, but I divide them into two types. Early game blutcher-types, which are build to achieve armored cruiser superiority when good BCs still don't exist, and late game ones which are cutdown BCs. I like the latter because they are usually built at 31kts if I can manage it and are primarily for counter raiding/raiding with intent to wreck. IE I build them strong because I want them to be able to kill whatever intercepts them short of 40,000 ton fast battleship.
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Post by cv10 on Sept 4, 2017 0:20:22 GMT -6
I think the larger issue with the Kreigsmarine was that the concept of the fleet as existing entirely for the purposes of destroying enemy shipping and using U-Boats to do so was greatly delayed. Very early on, the Kreigsmarine expected to face only the Marine National (it was theorized IIRC very early on [before Germany's actions started to antagonize Britain] that a limited war against Poland would have the UK remain neutral), and as such, the Kreigsmarine felt that (once the restrictions were eliminated) parity with France could be established.Plan Z tried to plan for a fleet that could have operational capability against the British [10 BBs and 4 CVs for good measure], but to have a fighting chance, the fleet had to take on the Royal Navy in small bits. To do this, something requiring battleships to deal with had to be deployed far away. Part of the idea of using cruisers as commerce raiders was to draw British and French battleships and aircraft carriers away from the North Sea.
In a sense, I think the German fleet was following its pre-war strategy, just without the fleet that was supposed to challenge a weakened Home Fleet. For the Kreigsmarine, the war did come about 6 years before it felt it would be ready. I don't think that until Donitz took over that the Kreigsmarine had a clear vision of its role in the war as being based around U-Boats to destroy shipping.
In addition, a possible reason that Raeder might have felt that cruisers would make adequate commerce raiders was that the U-Boat in World War I was restricted in its usefulness by the introduction of convoys (the British saw their shipping losses reduced by over 70% after they introduced them on a wide basis. Numbers became even worse after airship and aircraft patrols were introduced, as only 5 ships in a convoy with air cover were sunk in World War I). Raeder could have felt that a heavy surface raider could shoot its way into any convoy short of one protected by a battleship, while U-Boats would have been ineffective against convoys and air patrols (Donitz significantly underestimated the threat of aircraft as ASW platforms).
I hate to equivocate, but in a sense if the above is accurate, than Raeder could be considered to have been both right and wrong: In the long term, better convoy organization and screens, along with the steady introduction of air cover and better asw weapons crippled the U-Boat fleet's effectiveness, but for a while, the Germans had a good chance of inflicting much more damage on the UK's shipping than it did, if it had it had more U-Boats.
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Post by cv10 on Sept 4, 2017 0:28:10 GMT -6
My strategy for late-game CAs is to go with an upscaled York-Class CA with nine inch guns and a high speed. They're generally meant to allow me to affordably protect my prestige from accusations of CA inadequacy and satisfy the cruiser envy of the politicos. Aside from that, I just don't get much use out of them as I either shuffle them off to backwaters or spend my time in fleet actions trying to keep them out from underfoot and not getting shot to pieces. And as far as colonial tonnage goes, most of the countries I experience the most CA envy can afford to build a few of those "Colonial battleships" like the one I posted in the ship design thread, and those are nice because they give a big bump to colonial invasions.
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Post by zardoz on Sept 4, 2017 6:41:53 GMT -6
I heard that plan Z was totally insane. Germany had not enough oil to move all the ships and ot enough money to purchase the steel for all the ships and not the dock capacity to build them. A really< intelligent strategy would have been to focus on submarines. A flleet of XXI class submarines would have been very effective. The German navy leadership was so bad that it did not see the enormous fighting abilities of the XXI-class subs during WW2.
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Post by bcoopactual on Sept 4, 2017 7:17:13 GMT -6
My strategy for late-game CAs is to go with an upscaled York-Class CA with nine inch guns and a high speed. They're generally meant to allow me to affordably protect my prestige from accusations of CA inadequacy and satisfy the cruiser envy of the politicos. Aside from that, I just don't get much use out of them as I either shuffle them off to backwaters or spend my time in fleet actions trying to keep them out from underfoot and not getting shot to pieces. And as far as colonial tonnage goes, most of the countries I experience the most CA envy can afford to build a few of those "Colonial battleships" like the one I posted in the ship design thread, and those are nice because they give a big bump to colonial invasions. In case you weren't aware, battlecruisers should count towards the tonnage/numbers comparison versus other navies for armored cruisers. It's really a combined figure but I believe Fredrik wrote that it would be weird seeing battlecruisers mentioned in the Event if the Event fired early in the game and they didn't exist yet. I'm not telling you not to build CA's but if you have enough BC's you shouldn't have to build CA's just to satisfy the Navy League nastygrams.
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Post by cv10 on Sept 4, 2017 7:53:50 GMT -6
In case you weren't aware, battlecruisers should count towards the tonnage/numbers comparison versus other navies for armored cruisers. It's really a combined figure but I believe Fredrik wrote that it would be weird seeing battlecruisers mentioned in the Event if the Event fired early in the game and they didn't exist yet. I'm not telling you not to build CA's but if you have enough BC's you shouldn't have to build CA's just to satisfy the Navy League nastygrams. I was aware that thy were included in the event. Perhaps it is an issue/bug with playing past 1925, as I only tend to see it fire after that point in time (and one time I'm pretty sure I saw it fire even though I had more tonnage than several other nations). Either that or the AI's love of battlecruisers simply causes me to be inadequate in terms of BC tonnage.
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Post by cv10 on Sept 4, 2017 8:19:21 GMT -6
I heard that plan Z was totally insane. Germany had not enough oil to move all the ships and ot enough money to purchase the steel for all the ships and not the dock capacity to build them. A really< intelligent strategy would have been to focus on submarines. A flleet of XXI class submarines would have been very effective. The German navy leadership was so bad that it did not see the enormous fighting abilities of the XXI-class subs during WW2. The issue with the strategy of focusing on submarines is that we can only say it with the benefit of hindsight. While a focus on U-Boats as the backbone of the navy could have had serious repercussions early in the war, German naval strategy was geared towards producing a surface fleet that could fight the British/French under the right circumstances. Another factor to consider is that before the war broke out and the U-Boat reconfirmed its effectiveness as an anti-shipping weapon, a fair number of people involved in the drafting of naval strategy remembered World War I, where the U-Boat had been defeated by the introduction of convoys and asw weapons (primitive though they were) while the blockade of Germany by the British surface fleet had hurt the German economy.
As far as the XXI-Class goes, it was an innovative design: their influence can be seen on a bunch of post-war designs. I don't agree that the German Navy leadership failed to recognize its potential as by that point, Donitz was in charge, and he certainly would have recognized it. The reason the design failed to achieve anything is that the production of them was so poorly done that almost all of them suffered from serious construction flaws that had to be rectified (they were a modular design and most of the parts were manufactured by companies that had no experience in shipbuilding much less the advanced work that submarines required). Out of the 118 built during the war, only 4 of them were ever sufficiently fixed enough to be deployed to active service by which point in time the war, the war in Europe was nearing its end.
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Post by Airy W on Sept 4, 2017 12:34:12 GMT -6
A really< intelligent strategy would have been to focus on submarines. A flleet of XXI class submarines would have been very effective. The German navy leadership was so bad that it did not see the enormous fighting abilities of the XXI-class subs during WW2. And where exactly are they going to get the chronosphere with which to acquire a class of submarines wasn't ready until halfway through 1945? However supposing you meant to say class VII instead, think through the likely British response to this strategy. If Germany builds no surface ships and builds all submarines instead, the British have no fear of cruisers attacking their convoys. They are thus free to build corvettes in huge numbers, knowing the Germans can't attack the corvettes with cruisers. The situation in 1939 would be like the situation in 1943. And Britain certainly would do so, if Germany first broke the Versailles restrictions and then refused the Anglo-German naval treaty, the conclusion would be obvious. Corvettes were smaller ships then uboats and used less expensive hulls and engines but were sufficient to chase uboats away from convoys. When British ships were travelling in convoys with escorts, German attacks became far less effective and their losses shot way up. Their successes mostly came from attacking lone merchants out of convoy. The more corvettes the British have, the fewer unescorted ships there are, the more uboats are being lost to dangerous attacks on convoys. It's a tradeoff that massively favors the British. And that's not even considering the other consequences of no surface fleet. No German invasion of Norway means that the British and Americans can send unlimited lend lease to the Soviets without needing to go halfway across the world and build a thin railway line through Iran. If the British dont need to keep troops and battleships to defend the home isles, they can interdict Italian Libya and swiftly win the North African campaign. This would then free up their surface ships to deter the Japanese and make it far easier to convince the French forces in western North Africa to join the Free French movement. The whole Donitz notion that he would have won the war with more u-boats is really no different from the silly notions the Japanese had that the Americans would first blindly send the Pacific fleet to it's doom then do the same thing with the Atlantic fleet. Assuming that your enemies will passively fail to react to your actions if only you do XYZ is poor analysis.
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Post by garrisonchisholm on Sept 4, 2017 12:34:55 GMT -6
Well, this is in diverging significantly from the Super-Cruiser thread, but a whole 'nother conversation could be had on German super projects. I think if any of us were handed Germany in 1939 in a game and told to conquer Europe we could do so by making 3 decisions. 1, let the Generals general. 2, go to a war economy immediately. 3, only focus on 3 super-projects; the type XXI, Panther, and Do-331. Let all of the other R&D be done privately and introduced privately. Those 3 pieces of hardware were sufficiently Advanced and Simple (stretching my example with the XXI i know) that with full state support they could have been available Sooner and in war-winning numbers. Though German leadership would need to negotiate and end then regardless, because the never-surrender economies of the US & USSR would eventually swamp them. Back on the OP though, I wanted to share something about this book; It has a ton of great stats and photos, and the operational histories of all 3 summarized. I would like to read more about the original architects conversations, but none the less I consider it a great buy. They exist for the other German surface ships too, but the Pocket BBs interested me the most for the engineering that made them a threat the other states spent time and resources on preparing for them.
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Post by Airy W on Sept 4, 2017 12:37:39 GMT -6
I think if any of us were handed Germany in 1939 in a game and told to conquer Europe we could do so by making 3 decisions. 1, let the Generals general. 2, go to a war economy immediately. 3, only focus on 3 super-projects; the type XXI, Panther, and Do-331. Only if the game is extremely unrealistic. The German wunderwaffen never lived up to the hype. The notion that Germany wasn't on a war economy as soon as possible is a load of long debunked crap invented by Speer (read Tooze's Wages of Destruction sometime.) And the german generals self aggrandizing memoirs with wildly inaccurate numbers should not have been the cornerstone of post-war assessment .
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Post by tbr on Sept 4, 2017 12:40:35 GMT -6
In the game, from 1916 or so onwards, you cannot build BC's with more than 12inch belt armor at less than 32kn top speed. This forces the BC into a "British" philosophy. Those expensive 30kton plus ships are vulnerable to far cheaper 10in armed CA's. 12in or 7.5in armor do not matter, both keep 6in- rounds out but are tissue paper for 10in or larger in late game. If I can build 1,6-2,2 10in armed and 7.5 to 8in armored CA's for every 14in+ armed but 12in armored BC I still win, only the "German" philosophy BC's from shortly before the cutoff are really dangerous. While I will use some CA's the enemy loss in BC tonnage is usually far more expensive.
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Post by garrisonchisholm on Sept 4, 2017 12:53:09 GMT -6
I think if any of us were handed Germany in 1939 in a game and told to conquer Europe we could do so by making 3 decisions. 1, let the Generals general. 2, go to a war economy immediately. 3, only focus on 3 super-projects; the type XXI, Panther, and Do-331. Only if the game is extremely unrealistic. The German wunderwaffen never lived up to the hype. The notion that Germany wasn't on a war economy as soon as possible is a load of long debunked crap invented by Speer (read Tooze's Wages of Destruction sometime.) And the german generals self aggrandizing memoirs with wildly inaccurate numbers should not have been the cornerstone of post-war assessment . wow. You forgot to add your; *mic drop*. lol It pains me that, as a fan of military history, I believe something that is "long debunked crap." Excuse me for a while as I re-educate myself...
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