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Post by joebob73 on Dec 5, 2017 16:20:02 GMT -6
I've got a couple of them. British BB built sometime around 1920, severely overgunned. Another unusual British BB, this time the smallest BB in the world when it was launched in 1926. And finally a Russian CA with battleship-grade armor, but extremely poor firepower compared to any foreign counterpart, even significantly smaller cruisers. Checked on the AI deigns routines and the Pervenets. Agree it is a bit over-armored. The AI should normally keep belt armor less than main armament calibre in its designs. I don't really know how the computer came up with the Pervenets design, but considering the odd designs that did get built in reality, I do not think it is all that strange. Thanks for the input though! Could it possibly be a reaction to me having very heavily armed CAs? I know the AI is supposed to react somewhat to player ship design, and this particular game I did make some highly unusual construction choices. Such as not building any battleships (B or BB) the entire game. |
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Post by dorn on Dec 6, 2017 12:17:32 GMT -6
AI battleships and battlecruiser design (BB and BC) This is quite ordinary british battleship built by AI (see picture bellow). These ships were built from 1913 to 1916. Next class (real QE type) was built from 1917. However I do not think it should be ordinary as leading naval power and one of leading inventors should not build wing turrets with 15" guns. And they should certainly not build this with absence of armor. 9" belt armor and 10.5" turret armor, 1.5" deck armor in 1913 is completely useless at this time. The concept of armor is more like battlecruisers not battleship. Another ship commisioned in 1921! with 8x16" guns, 10.5" armor, 11" turret armor with only 32.000 displacement (bellow displacement limit). And the next class commisioned in 1921 used 10x13" guns (why lower caliber?) including wing turrets with cross deck firing even if UK have 5 centerline turrets!. These type are common even for other powers, however british ships are usually much more disbalanced and armor useless. Other "bad" designs for battleships/battlecruisers: - small displacement on next class (in reality from HMS Dreadnought till end of WW1 the only R class has lower displacement than previous class as I am aware of) - too many guns, but armor in scale of battlecruiser = useless - lower caliber of guns on next design (it was not in reality) Free weight is due to the design was opened in 1925.  |
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Post by dorn on Dec 6, 2017 15:04:19 GMT -6
I've seen the Almanac report different speeds for two ships purportedly of the same class, and I have a save game where I have a class of battleship in service which is capable of 23 knots according to the list of active ships and 20 knots according to the Almanac (in fact, there's at least one example of the first bit of Almanac unreliability in that savegame). I would not regard the Almanac as a particularly accurate source of information regarding the speeds of foreign ships. Also, 20 versus 22 knots could easily be the result of a good speed event on one class of ships and a bad speed event on the succeeding class of ships, if both were designed for 21 knots. Not really something I'd flag up as the computer being silly. The "official" speed values in the almanac are deliberately somewhat fudged to simulate uncertainties about the true speed of enemy vessels.
Each AI nation has a battleline speed that they design for. The preferred battleline speed will increase along with the average speed of new battleships, with some variations thrown in due to national preferences and a little randomness.
How much could be the variance? I can see 35.700 battleship commisioned in 1919 with speed of 23 knots (design file) followed by class of 27.1000 tons commisioned in 1921 with speed of 20 knots. |
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Post by dorn on Dec 6, 2017 15:26:17 GMT -6
Germany battleship commisioned in 1925. As Germany is country specialized in armor, the ship is quite strange as her armor is worse that I player usually used for battlecruisers 10-15 years ago. Its Fishers white elephant in Germany which should be armor oriented.  |
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Post by aeson on Dec 6, 2017 15:54:59 GMT -6
The "official" speed values in the almanac are deliberately somewhat fudged to simulate uncertainties about the true speed of enemy vessels.
Each AI nation has a battleline speed that they design for. The preferred battleline speed will increase along with the average speed of new battleships, with some variations thrown in due to national preferences and a little randomness.
How much could be the variance? I can see 35.700 battleship commisioned in 1919 with speed of 23 knots (design file) followed by class of 27.1000 tons commisioned in 1921 with speed of 20 knots. A 3-knot difference doesn't seem excessive, considering that the British Queen Elizabeths were ~24 knots to the ~21 knots of the preceding and immediately-succeeding classes, though 20 knots is perhaps a bit slow for a new ship by the 1920s. |
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Post by Fredrik W on Dec 8, 2017 10:46:22 GMT -6
Thanks for the input everyone! This gives me some food for thought when fine tuning the AI design routines for RTW2, which is now BTW coming along nicely.
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Post by joebob73 on Dec 8, 2017 12:08:52 GMT -6
Thanks for the input everyone! This gives me some food for thought when fine tuning the AI design routines for RTW2, which is now BTW coming along nicely. I found a few more unusual designs.  Since when is this a BB? I thought BB required more than 4 main guns.  When everyone else is building BC with a minimum of 10 14" in 1922, this is a deathtrap. |
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Post by oaktree on Dec 8, 2017 12:20:25 GMT -6
Thanks for the input everyone! This gives me some food for thought when fine tuning the AI design routines for RTW2, which is now BTW coming along nicely. I found a few more unusual designs. Since when is this a BB? I thought BB required more than 4 main guns. When everyone else is building BC with a minimum of 10 14" in 1922, this is a deathtrap. I wonder if the BB designation is due to the armor in the former, and the BC designation due to speed in the latter? That's one problem with the classification criteria some of the edge cases produce oddities when you push what you would normally think to be a pre-dreadnought across some of the criteria borders where the classes are not firmly defined by something like displacement. |
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Post by joebob73 on Dec 8, 2017 12:30:02 GMT -6
I found a few more unusual designs. Since when is this a BB? I thought BB required more than 4 main guns. When everyone else is building BC with a minimum of 10 14" in 1922, this is a deathtrap. I wonder if the BB designation is due to the armor in the former, and the BC designation due to speed in the latter? That's one problem with the classification criteria some of the edge cases produce oddities when you push what you would normally think to be a pre-dreadnought across some of the criteria borders where the classes are not firmly defined by something like displacement. The second was quite firmly a BC, but horribly under-armed. The AI should *not* be building something that weak at the same time as other, significantly more effective, designs. |
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Post by Fredrik W on Dec 8, 2017 13:13:01 GMT -6
I wonder if the BB designation is due to the armor in the former, and the BC designation due to speed in the latter? That's one problem with the classification criteria some of the edge cases produce oddities when you push what you would normally think to be a pre-dreadnought across some of the criteria borders where the classes are not firmly defined by something like displacement. The second was quite firmly a BC, but horribly under-armed. The AI should *not* be building something that weak at the same time as other, significantly more effective, designs. It is arguably a lot better than Glorious and Courageous, and those were built IRL. |
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Post by dorn on Dec 8, 2017 13:59:52 GMT -6
The second was quite firmly a BC, but horribly under-armed. The AI should *not* be building something that weak at the same time as other, significantly more effective, designs. It is arguably a lot better than Glorious and Courageous, and those were built IRL. Its true however players would not build them if they cannot be useful in the game. Is it possible to have some option not to use historical design and instead AI would build best designs. Just question. Is it not possible to build designing ship on feature that the next class is just improvement over previous class (not building the next class from scratch as it is in RtW). It was normal for cruiser force after WW1 (except economical design as York class etc). In this case AI will have chance to build useful ship and not to build ships which are useless. The main reason why players win over AI in quality design are: a) not repeating history design (principle of AoN before AoN technology in RtW - minimum secondary armament armor, minimum BE a DE - AI is losses a lot of money on it) b) quality of armor designed with immunity zone principles (AI seems to design their armor as much weaker and usually rendering ships useless against their own guns) c) backward designs - Usually building smaller design than previous design (in history it was very very exceptional from 1905 onwards) d) large cruisers design - these is impact of previous efficency as players are able to build large 6" guns CLs which can completely destroy AIs CLs flotillla in great numbers. AI cannot build them in large quantities as player as there are not so effective in BB a BC designs. I can see that a) has efficency impact, b) has basic impact on ship usefullness, c) again usefullness |
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Post by aeson on Dec 8, 2017 15:07:42 GMT -6
Making a class which is an incremental improvement over a preceding class and getting a discount on design costs for it is possible in Rule the Waves; right-click on a ship in service or under construction, click 'open design', and make changes within certain limits and you'll get a discount on the surcharge for the first ship of the new class. If I recall correctly, the limits are 100t/10%/1000t difference in design displacement, 1 knot in design speed, 1" in vertical and 0.5" in horizontal protection, and "some" changes to the secondary/tertiary batteries, but there will be a percentage and a class name in the "developed from class" line if you've made a sufficiently small change that the design still counts as being developed from an older class.
I don't think that restricting the computer to designing classes which are mostly incremental improvements over preceding classes will help much, if at all; while you could get runs of 'good' designs if the computer chose well, you could also get runs of 'bad' designs when the computer chooses poorly, and you haven't changed anything that affects whether or not the computer will choose well when it decides it's time to start afresh.
Also, I don't consider the battlecruiser that joebob73 posted to be useless. Use-impaired, yes, because a 2x2x15" main battery with a 12" belt isn't really enough to fight capital ships with about twice as many guns of a similar caliber unless said capital ships have much thinner armor, but it'd work well enough as a cruiser hunter-killer. I'd prefer something closer to the Alaska pattern than the Courageous pattern for a "large cruiser," but the Courageous pattern can work, especially if it's not crippled by historical levels of armor.
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Post by joebob73 on Dec 8, 2017 16:36:11 GMT -6
Making a class which is an incremental improvement over a preceding class and getting a discount on design costs for it is possible in Rule the Waves; right-click on a ship in service or under construction, click 'open design', and make changes within certain limits and you'll get a discount on the surcharge for the first ship of the new class. If I recall correctly, the limits are 100t/10%/1000t difference in design displacement, 1 knot in design speed, 1" in vertical and 0.5" in horizontal protection, and "some" changes to the secondary/tertiary batteries, but there will be a percentage and a class name in the "developed from class" line if you've made a sufficiently small change that the design still counts as being developed from an older class. I don't think that restricting the computer to designing classes which are mostly incremental improvements over preceding classes will help much, if at all; while you could get runs of 'good' designs if the computer chose well, you could also get runs of 'bad' designs when the computer chooses poorly, and you haven't changed anything that affects whether or not the computer will choose well when it decides it's time to start afresh. Also, I don't consider the battlecruiser that joebob73 posted to be useless. Use-impaired, yes, because a 2x2x15" main battery with a 12" belt isn't really enough to fight capital ships with about twice as many guns of a similar caliber unless said capital ships have much thinner armor, but it'd work well enough as a cruiser hunter-killer. I'd prefer something closer to the Alaska pattern than the Courageous pattern for a "large cruiser," but the Courageous pattern can work, especially if it's not crippled by historical levels of armor. It was quite useless the way the AI used it. Ran it facefirst into a squadron of battleships with 16" guns. |
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Post by dorn on Dec 8, 2017 16:56:21 GMT -6
Making a class which is an incremental improvement over a preceding class and getting a discount on design costs for it is possible in Rule the Waves; right-click on a ship in service or under construction, click 'open design', and make changes within certain limits and you'll get a discount on the surcharge for the first ship of the new class. If I recall correctly, the limits are 100t/10%/1000t difference in design displacement, 1 knot in design speed, 1" in vertical and 0.5" in horizontal protection, and "some" changes to the secondary/tertiary batteries, but there will be a percentage and a class name in the "developed from class" line if you've made a sufficiently small change that the design still counts as being developed from an older class. I don't think that restricting the computer to designing classes which are mostly incremental improvements over preceding classes will help much, if at all; while you could get runs of 'good' designs if the computer chose well, you could also get runs of 'bad' designs when the computer chooses poorly, and you haven't changed anything that affects whether or not the computer will choose well when it decides it's time to start afresh. Also, I don't consider the battlecruiser that joebob73 posted to be useless. Use-impaired, yes, because a 2x2x15" main battery with a 12" belt isn't really enough to fight capital ships with about twice as many guns of a similar caliber unless said capital ships have much thinner armor, but it'd work well enough as a cruiser hunter-killer. I'd prefer something closer to the Alaska pattern than the Courageous pattern for a "large cruiser," but the Courageous pattern can work, especially if it's not crippled by historical levels of armor. I am speaking about AI used incremental improvement. And yes it will depend on the "basic" design. However we (players) can build designs cheaper and much better and not only because we have hindsight. Its because of bad balance between firepower and armor. I am speaking mainly super-dreadnoughts and battle-cruisers with lots guns (eg. 12x14") but minimal armor around 8-10" in time where this amount of armor will not stop shots except very long range on visibility edge. To have ship with 8x16" guns with 11" armor in 1921 is useless against even battleships old 10 years. |
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Post by bcoopactual on Dec 8, 2017 18:26:47 GMT -6
I am speaking about AI used incremental improvement. And yes it will depend on the "basic" design. However we (players) can build designs cheaper and much better and not only because we have hindsight. Its because of bad balance between firepower and armor. I am speaking mainly super-dreadnoughts and battle-cruisers with lots guns (eg. 12x14") but minimal armor around 8-10" in time where this amount of armor will not stop shots except very long range on visibility edge. To have ship with 8x16" guns with 11" armor in 1921 is useless against even battleships old 10 years. made a mod of late-game design templates for the AI. Templates based on the G3/N3, 1920's South Dakota, etc. It includes destroyer and cruiser templates as well. I haven't used it but I've read good things about it. This may help you see better late-game designs from the AI. Thanks for the input everyone! This gives me some food for thought when fine tuning the AI design routines for RTW2, which is now BTW coming along nicely. That's great news. Truly looking forward to RTW2. |
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