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Post by dorn on Jan 29, 2018 16:55:44 GMT -6
Guerre de Course is the tactic of a weak navy. The Royal Navy does not raid, the Royal Navy blockades. Besides, in terms of point values, raiding isn't worth it. Even an AMC is worth about 145-150 points. That's 29-30 merchant vessels that need to be sunk (@5 points each) just to break even. Even small CL's are worth double that, raising the bar even higher. Blockading nets 200-250 points per turn, easily enough to offset enemy raiders, and adds discontent at a faster rate than raiding. You are right. You can blockade any nation. |
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Post by aeson on Jan 29, 2018 21:57:40 GMT -6
Guerre de Course is the tactic of a weak navy. The Royal Navy does not raid, the Royal Navy blockades. Besides, in terms of point values, raiding isn't worth it. Even an AMC is worth about 145-150 points. That's 29-30 merchant vessels that need to be sunk (@5 points each) just to break even. Even small CL's are worth double that, raising the bar even higher. Blockading nets 200-250 points per turn, easily enough to offset enemy raiders, and adds discontent at a faster rate than raiding. I don't completely agree that guerre de course is the tactic of a weak navy. It is true that a weaker navy will often have little recourse but to pursue a guerre de course against a more powerful opponent, but that doesn't make it a bad tactic for a strong power to pursue against a weaker opponent. The USN is the second-strongest navy in the early game on historical settings and has the potential to surpass the Royal Navy by perhaps the mid-1920s, but its lack of base capacity in other powers' build areas makes pursuing blockades a relatively high-risk strategy - especially against other top-tier navies - and big fleet engagements tend not to happen in the colonial areas, so pursuing a guerre de course and other forms of cruiser warfare tends to make sense for the USA, at least until it can secure bases from which it can enforce surface blockades. What makes raiding a poor strategy for the Royal Navy is quite simply that the Royal Navy has both the fleet strength and the base capacity to blockade just about any one, and in the early game perhaps even any two, other powers, with the possible exception of the USA, and enforcing a blockade against an enemy means that any raiders you have don't have much, or perhaps even any, maritime trade to prey upon, choking off even the trickle of victory points that they usually generate. I also don't completely agree that raiding isn't worth it. Victory points are victory points; how you get them is irrelevant. If you for any reason cannot enforce a blockade against another power or are unwilling to accept the risks necessary to enforce a blockade against another power and have the resources to employ raiders without impeding your other operations, you may as well do so, and strong navies have a lot more resources to play with than weak navies do. Zero to twenty-five victory points per turn per raider may be fairly negligible compared even to the victory points generated by sinking a single AMC or a couple minesweepers, but it's still zero to twenty-five more victory points per raider per turn than you'd have otherwise. Similarly for the unrest generated. Surface raiders are also another potential source of cruiser actions, which might be beneficial if your raiders are relatively powerful cruisers, especially if they're operating in areas where they're unlikely to be lost to internment or scuttling due to battle damage or if you have the resources to simply not care when such a raider is lost. That said, the Royal Navy's ability to enforce blockades against other powers means that its raiders will normally do approximately nothing in most wars against a single other power. |
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Post by generalvikus on Jan 31, 2018 6:58:36 GMT -6
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