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Post by pashahlis on Jul 2, 2018 21:19:57 GMT -6
Again, this kinda ties in with my question on why someone should use CLs as scouts and not just any ship (since they all seem to have the same view range) but I just researched the "SCout force" fleet tactic which allows me to put CAs and BCs into the scouting force. What is the significance of that?
Also, how do I stop an enemy from blockading me?
Sadly my first BB was commisioned after the war.
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Post by aeson on Jul 2, 2018 22:22:20 GMT -6
The Scout Force tech essentially allows you to have two battle lines - one composed of your battleships and maybe some battlecruisers or large armored cruisers, the other composed of most of your battlecruisers and maybe larger armored cruisers. Each will have its own screening groups and scout cruisers, and they'll typically be separated by quite a bit of distance. It's very useful if you play on Admiral's Mode, because the Scout Force can be commanded separately from the Main Force. On Rear Admiral's or Captain's Mode it probably isn't as helpful, but it still lets you operate two groups independently of one another without having to worry about keeping them in sight of a single flagship. Have a larger fleet in your build area than they do. Every ship counts for some number of 'blockade points' based on its type - if I recall correctly, it's something like 12/10/8/5/3/1 for BB/BC/B/CA/CL/DD - and some nations have modifiers to their blockade strength to reflect advantages or disadvantages imposed by their geographical position when attempting to blockade other powers - 1.2 Britain, 1.1 Japan, 0.9 Austria-Hungary, 0.8 Russia, 1.0 everyone else in the unmodded game. AMCs, minesweepers, ships on raiding or coastal patrol duty, and ships in the reserves, in mothballs, being refitted, under repair, or under construction do not count towards blockade points. You'll be blockaded if your enemy has a fleet in your build area worth at least 10% more blockade points than your fleet in your build area is worth.
If you can't build a bigger fleet than your enemy and want to break a blockade, you'll probably have to sink their ships, or at least repeatedly damage a lot of the enemy's ships badly enough to keep them in the yards for a long time. You might be able to lift the blockade temporarily by sending warships and surface raiders to other sea zones to threaten your enemy's colonies and disrupt their trade because there's a chance that the computer will disperse some of its ships to counter the raiders and the threat to its colonies, but I wouldn't count on it.
Other ways to deal with blockades are to win through victory points before the enemy's surface blockade forces your government to the peace table (most of the time, you'll break the blockade in the process of doing this, but not always), win through unrest generated by surface raiders before the enemy's surface blockade forces your government to the peace table, or win through submarine raiding or blockade before the enemy's surface blockade forces your government to the peace table.
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Post by pashahlis on Jul 2, 2018 22:54:40 GMT -6
Before I continue I would like to say thanks to everyone here for answering every single one of my stupid question (of which there are now already 3 pages...)!
Anyways. I just had my first real dreadnought battle against italy and somehow I wasnt able to sink his 1 BB with my 3! BBs.
The italian BB i am talking about.
The results of the fleet battle:
(Yes, I managed to squeeze out 4 BBs in a short amount of time, making me the second largest BB fleet right now, thanks to a small loan of 50 million).
As you can see the BB is only heavily damaged ev en though it recieved well over 30 hits. Same with the pre dreadnoughts tbh. I feel like it is still an issue of my ammo selection...
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Post by dorn on Jul 2, 2018 23:39:43 GMT -6
Additional good piece of information you can find in signature of ddg. This is summary what has been said by authors a lot of useful information.
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Post by aeson on Jul 3, 2018 0:28:01 GMT -6
I wouldn't be too disappointed by the outcome of that engagement. Unless you managed to separate the Italian dreadnought from the rest of the fleet, it isn't that likely that your three dreadnoughts were all concentrating their fire upon it - you had six battleships, but the Italian fleet had four to six worthwhile targets for a battleship's main battery guns: an armored cruiser (which was probably targeted and hit by a battleship at some point in the engagement, considering the damage it sustained), three pre- or semi-dreadnought battleships, a battlecruiser (which might not really have been involved in the engagement, considering that it's undamaged), and the Italian dreadnought battleship. You had 1-1.5 battleships per target, suggesting that you'd have 1-2 battleships targeting the Italian dreadnought when the battle lines exchanged broadsides. Maneuvers and disruption to the battle line can mask a significant portion of a ship's firepower or even take it out of the engagement, and there are also a number of potential accuracy penalties which can prevent you from fully exploiting a numerical advantage. It's a bit unfortunate that your dreadnoughts were unable to sink the Italian dreadnought or at least one of the Italian predreadnoughts, but it's also not that bad of a result, and it's likely that the Italian dreadnought will be out of action for at least a couple of months. I've had engagements where the numbers were far more lopsided in my favor and done worse.
Also, capital ships tend to be somewhat hard to kill with 12" guns.
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Post by bcoopactual on Jul 3, 2018 7:35:31 GMT -6
Yes and the Italian BB had a five knot speed advantage, assuming your intelligence is accurate (not something you really control), and so probably was able to just pull away when it started to take damage. It's still a nice victory. One of my hardest learning curves was recognizing that not every battle had to be Trafalgar. I lost a lot of ships because I was over-aggressive (similar I believe to the description director provided above regarding his excellent AAR [which there is a link to in his signature]) and "had" to crush the enemy every fight because there is only one scenario played a month. If it is 1907 or so which I'm assuming it is because of all the dreadnoughts then you should have started replacing large caliber gun HE with AP guns beginning at close range and then around 1912 possibly medium range as well. In the ship design screen you can find a gun data button which will show you the max range and max armor penetration values of your currently selected main guns. If your medium range (10,000-15,000+) armor penetrations are better than the armor you are seeing for the enemy's belt then switch that as well. I wait to switch long range to AP until after I have developed Fire Control Directors. Then accurate plunging fire becomes a possibility so I would want AP shells to take advantage of that.
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Post by boomboomf22 on Jul 3, 2018 8:33:38 GMT -6
I don't usually contribute to discussions nowadays (mostly burnout from various sources) but I will pitch in. My take on AP vs HE is I tend to have big guns (11+) go back to AP at close and medium as soon as dreadnought type ships show up. I just find large calibre HE to be too unreliable for proper fleet engagements.
This of course depends on reasurch level and current AP teck. Can you give us a ballpark of the penetration of your 12" guns? To find it you go to the design screen and there should be a button below where the main battery is desplayed that says something like gun penetration. (Sorry if that is obvious and you noticed already, but I went a shockingly long time before I noticed that button existed)
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Post by director on Jul 3, 2018 11:43:42 GMT -6
I'd like to offer a slightly different reason from aeson for the use of light or scout cruisers: they were the smallest ships that were really seaworthy. So they were cheap and expendable at need, fast enough to run (or close for a better look) yet could keep to the sea in any weather. They were exactly the same in purpose as the Nelsonian frigate. What happened, of course, was that admirals decided they did not want the composition and disposition of their force known, and began to deploy bigger CLs, CAs and then finally BCs, first to deter (or sink) enemy scouts and then to blow a hole through enemy light forces in order to do their own scouting. It was an arms race, with the BC as the T-Rex of the scouting group, because the best defense against a BC squadron is a bigger BC squadron. Any victory is a victory, and that is a solid win. A Trafalgar-like decisive battle comes along perhaps once or twice per game if you are lucky, as bcoopactual just pointed out, and you can wreck yourself by pushing too hard. My mantra now is "Think of baseball. Think of baseball. Think of baseball." One battle per month, month after month. Small wins, steady points, manage the risk.
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Post by pashahlis on Jul 3, 2018 17:23:42 GMT -6
I'd like to offer a slightly different reason from aeson for the use of light or scout cruisers: they were the smallest ships that were really seaworthy. So they were cheap and expendable at need, fast enough to run (or close for a better look) yet could keep to the sea in any weather. They were exactly the same in purpose as the Nelsonian frigate. What happened, of course, was that admirals decided they did not want the composition and disposition of their force known, and began to deploy bigger CLs, CAs and then finally BCs, first to deter (or sink) enemy scouts and then to blow a hole through enemy light forces in order to do their own scouting. It was an arms race, with the BC as the T-Rex of the scouting group, because the best defense against a BC squadron is a bigger BC squadron. Any victory is a victory, and that is a solid win. A Trafalgar-like decisive battle comes along perhaps once or twice per game if you are lucky, as bcoopactual just pointed out, and you can wreck yourself by pushing too hard. My mantra now is "Think of baseball. Think of baseball. Think of baseball." One battle per month, month after month. Small wins, steady points, manage the risk. I meant more ingame reasons as to why I shouldnt just use cheap destroyers for the scouting? Or why even scouts at all? It seems to me that often the battle fleets will meet each other immediatly and never get out of sight until way after the battle.
Overall I am just not sure how useful some of the ship types are.
Why use surface raiders instead of subs? Why use CA/BCs at all when CLs and Bs can do everything they can do but more efficient? Why use cruisers for scouting when DDs are even faster and cheaper? Why use DDs for CP/ASW when minesweepers are even cheaper and provide the same number required for CP/ASW?
I dont know it. It seems someone can just remove CLs, CAs and BCs entirely and instead use DDs for screening and scouting, subs for raiding and MS for patrols.
I am 100% I am wrong on it, I just dont know *why* yet.
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Post by noshurviverse on Jul 3, 2018 19:43:22 GMT -6
I meant more ingame reasons as to why I shouldnt just use cheap destroyers for the scouting? Or why even scouts at all? It seems to me that often the battle fleets will meet each other immediatly and never get out of sight until way after the battle.
Overall I am just not sure how useful some of the ship types are.
Why use surface raiders instead of subs? Why use CA/BCs at all when CLs and Bs can do everything they can do but more efficient? Why use cruisers for scouting when DDs are even faster and cheaper? Why use DDs for CP/ASW when minesweepers are even cheaper and provide the same number required for CP/ASW?
I dont know it. It seems someone can just remove CLs, CAs and BCs entirely and instead use DDs for screening and scouting, subs for raiding and MS for patrols.
I am 100% I am wrong on it, I just dont know *why* yet.
•Surface raiders are more effective in general. A single CL raider might sink multiple merchant ships per turn, while an equivalent cost-number of subs might just barely reach that level. The CL can also serve other roles in your fleet, whereas the sub is only good for the raiding itself and the rare-ish warship sinking. •CAs work well in the early years as multi-role ships. They can clear enemy DDs out with their comparatively heavy secondary armament while being fast enough to avoid torpedo runs, knock CLs out of the way since their armor can withstand the CLs armament and usually can run away from full-fledged capitals. The only issue with them is they are eventually replaced, more or less, once the BC takes the stage and are a touch pricey for some nations. Basically, think of them as a jack-of-all-trades. •BCs are essentially an under armored BB with more speed and autonomy. You're playing as Austria, so you don't see it as much most likely, but for other nations a single BC and a small escort flotilla is a powerful colony force.
•Cruisers have longer spotting ranges than DDs, I'm almost certain. In addition, a Cruiser has the ability to force an enemy's hand by threatening his own scouts and escorts, something a DD couldn't.
•DDs are more effective at coastal patrol. You'll see more enemy subs sunk if your coast is guarded by DDs rather than MSs. In addition, especially since you're playing as Austria, they will often show up during battles, and a few extra DDs making torpedo runs is much more helpful than a puttering MS.
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Post by director on Jul 3, 2018 21:16:03 GMT -6
pashahlis - I'm not sure I understand the question, but - hey - that's never stopped me from answering before. In the early part of the game you are not permitted to use DDs for scouting because navies did not do that. The reason (I think) is that torpedo boats (and early DDs) were too frail and short-ranged for independent use, and not powerful enough to sink or damage enough enemy ships to get a good scouting report. They were principally defensive weapons that kept enemy ships from getting close to friendly battleships. The historical model was the frigate, which in the steam era became the scout or light cruiser, and the heavy frigates became armored cruisers. RtW has a randomized element; in fleet or cruiser actions the sides will see each other in about 3 moves. But in 'real life' the fleets had very limited ability to know where the enemy was (read up on the chaos in the British fleet at Jutland), so commanders often detached cruisers or battlecruisers to extend the sighting range. The game does not permit you to control starting positions, which means your advanced scouting force might get ambushed, and if you save a game just as the enemy is spotted, and restart the mission, the enemy ships may have moved. More than once I've fallen on an enemy detachment only to find enemy battleships cutting me off from home. So, since you cannot know where all the enemy forces are at the start of a mission, you need to scout. There are various proponents of surface raiding warships, AMCs and submarines. Try them out and see what suits you. Any or all can bring down even a major power - I just put Britain in revolution with a tide of 30+ AMCs. None of those ways are fast or cheap, and they all hinder your ability to build a battlefleet, but sometimes that's the only way to get at the enemy. In my current war I have classes of fast 8-inch-gunned armored cruisers with long range, and I'm getting great use out of them as raiders. As noshurviverse said, each ship type has its strengths and weaknesses. BBs beat Bs and BCs, BCs beat CAs, CAs beat CLs and CLs beat DDs... most of the time. I have whipped a battleship with CAs, beaten a CA with CLs and so forth. But generally, the bigger, better ship is the likely winner (which is why CLs and DDs are so fast - to get in close, or get away if they must). Of course there is a trade-off: speed and power mean size which increases cost and construction time. There is an ongoing debate about CP/ASW doctrine on this forum. Some players never retire an old DD and use fleets of them for CP/ASW, others use masses of cheap MS types. For myself, in my current US game battling Germany and France, I have 20 or so old DDs and 50 or so 300-ton MS on CP/ASW work. It is generally thought that 2-to-1 ships versus subs is good but 3-to-1 or higher is better. MS are cheaper to build and maintain but don't carry big guns or torpedoes... I engineer mine for 21+ knots so they can run, and that works pretty well. You aren't exactly wrong... someone (and I apologize for not remembering who) played an all-destroyer game and was able to win with massive clouds of DDs. I've won wars by going all-in on submarine production, and as I said I broke Britain with AMCs (though it isn't working against Germany and France at the moment). The US Navy of the dreadnought-era built good DDs, good BBs and not much in the way of BCs, CAs or CLs. The chief lesson of RtW is that there are a lot of ways to win, and min/maxing everything can reduce the amount of fun. And it should be mentioned that the game generates battles by ship type, so dropping CLs from your fleet may mean you don't get many combat missions. Having no BCs can mean your CAs are pitted against the enemy BCs, and so forth. I'd encourage you to try different strategies, unusual ship types and such, and let us know what you find. You can best discover the uses for a ship type, I think, by using them, but asking questions is a great way to pick up skills.
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Post by director on Jul 3, 2018 21:19:39 GMT -6
I forgot to add that there is a really good game reason to build BCs, some CAs and CLs - your nation may demand that you do so and penalize you if you don't.
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Post by aeson on Jul 3, 2018 22:43:53 GMT -6
I disagree. The key metric of success for a raiding campaign is not victory points but unrest, and while each surface raider and the submarine force as a whole will sink something like 0 to 5 merchants, the submarines appear to cause unrest more rapidly than surface raiders do. My experience is that submarines collapse governments more reliably and more quickly than surface raiders do, even when very large numbers of surface raiders are employed, despite the surface raiders sinking more merchants and generating more victory points. Really depends on what your raiding cruisers look like. The victory points generated by surface raiding are trivial, the the unrest generation appears to me to be slower than by submarine raiding, and raiders have a chance of being lost to RNG events every turn even when they're operating in home waters, so the only cruisers I normally use for raiding are cruisers that I don't consider to be worth much of anything - inexpensive purpose-built cruiser-raiders, cruisers so old that I don't particularly want them even for filling out foreign station tonnage requirements, and maybe failed experiments if I happen to have some in service. While such ships could in theory serve in other roles within my fleet, I wouldn't want them to - they're being used as raiders because I don't consider them worth using for any other purpose.
Because surface raiders are available earlier in the game than submarines, because AMCs are pretty cheap and can be put into service faster than anything else in the game, and because submarines can potentially bring other powers into the war against you whereas surface raiders to the best of my knowledge cannot.
Also, the submarine force tends to suffer quite a bit of attrition, with typically at least one and sometimes as many as ten submarines being lost in the space of a single turn while raiding enemy merchant traffic, plus potentially another one or two being lost during surface engagements. I expect to lose somewhere around 5 to 10 percent of my submarine force each turn of a war and I don't consider a submarine force to be effective with less than perhaps 20 - and preferably something closer to 50 - submarines, so in order to maintain an effective force I expect to need at least two submarines to enter service every turn, which with medium-range submarines means that I need at least 32 under construction at all times - if I'm using medium-range submarines, that's 6.4 million per turn in construction costs just to maintain the submarine force in wartime. A force of raiding cruisers, at least in my experience, isn't nearly so expensive to maintain unless the raiders themselves are too slow to run and too weak to fight. Battleships usually don't show up for very many engagements, and you don't really want your heaviest ship to be a CL when your enemy has a CA or a battlecruiser. Another reason to CAs and BCs is that there is a prestige-loss event that can happen for at least some powers if you do not have enough tonnage or enough hulls in CAs and BCs.
Also, I personally consider battlecruisers to be the most useful capital ships in the game, because battlecruisers are typically present for a lot more engagements than battleships are - I wouldn't be at all surprised if my battlecruisers average at least two times as many battle stars as my battleships do over all my games. CAs I'm rather less fond of because I generally find them to be more of liability than anything else once battlecruisers enter service, but they're fairly useful until then and can still be useful afterwards.
In addition to what noshurviverse said, I'd note that bad weather is a possibility within the game, and that destroyers tend to be the ships most affected by it. Moderately bad weather will limit ships' maximum speeds - as an extreme example, I once had a scenario where my destroyers' maximum speed was so severely affected by sea conditions that they were actually significantly slower than my capital ships (if I recall correctly the destroyers were limited to something like 12 knots while the battleships and battlecruisers were limited to something like 20 knots) - and very bad weather can damage or even sink ships. Old DDs don't scrap themselves whereas old minesweepers do. Also, I cannot specifically recall ever seeing a submarine reported as having engaged a destroyer on ASW/coastal patrol duty in a gunnery duel whereas minesweepers (and AMCs) on ASW/coastal patrol are regularly sunk in gunnery duels with submarines.
I don't think that this is true.
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Post by pashahlis on Jul 3, 2018 23:39:50 GMT -6
Hm seems like people also have conflicting opinions xD
You know what I will do the following. I will play one game where I only build Bs, BBs for the battleline, DDs screening, MS for ASW and subs for raiding. No DDs for ASW and no cruisers or scouts.
Then i will play one game where I build Bs and BBs for the battleline, CLs for raiding and scouting, DDs for screening and ASW. No CAs or BCs as well as no MS or subs.
Then I will play a game where I additionally build CAs and BCs as well as MS and subs. So all ships as normal.
And in each game I will have the same investments for each ship type.
I will then write down all losses I incur and by which ship type, all kills I do and by which ship type, all merchants I sink and by which ship type and the amount of money needed to replace losses and keep my force at the same strength.
This way we will have kinda hard data on the effectiveness and necessariness of each ship type.
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Post by JagdFlanker on Jul 4, 2018 5:10:22 GMT -6
if you want to win wars faster in RtW you have to win battles by sinking enemy ships, and the bigger the enemy ship the more VPs you get
if you really want to plan out the types of ships you should build for your fleet here are some of the types of battles you encounter in RtW:
DD battles - i wish i could turn these off since i find them a waste of time (they'r a lot of work for almost no VP), but they cost very little VP to turn down so whatever
CL battles - surprisingly this often turns be your bread and butter VP earner as a smaller nation, and a good way to help chip away at a larger enemy fleet. the secret is to build killer 8000t CLs with 8" guns and you will win most battle vs the ai since they never build CLs with larger than 6" guns. you can even 2v1 or 3v1 your 8" CLs vs an enemy CA and often win (although your CLs will usually get beat up in the process)
CA battles - CAs are only worth building at game start because once BCs join the show they are pretty much obsolete for the rest of the game since BCs can participate in CA battles and often will if you or the enemy has them. if you only have BCs and no CAs it give you a good chance of your BCs getting matched up with enemy CAs which is almost like free VPs for you
capital ship battles - your B/BB/BCs vs some enemy capital ships
fleet battles - the kitchen sink vs the kitchen sink
to effectively cover all the battle types you have to build some of each ship type (DD, CL, CA/BC, B/BB/BC), but as a small country you want to min/max to maximize your fleet effectiveness. since BCs cover 2 battle types, your best bet is to build DD/CL/BCs only
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