|
Post by bcoopactual on Sept 10, 2018 16:50:17 GMT -6
Reserve and mothball status have benefits, as do refits. The exact details are sketchy for me. I hesitate to refit obsolete ships with elite crews. It seems to me that a ship that has an elite crew is spreading elite sailors throughout the fleet and this should increase crew quality in general. An elite crew in an obsolete ship is a waste of good sailors. I usually mothball my minesweepers right away. They work up very fast and the technology on a minesweeper is not that critical. I will mothball obsolete B and some CA for two reasons. Cost is one. An obsolete B can be refit to circumvent an arms limitation treaty as can some CAs. B's take a while to work up from poor to good. Obsolete CLs and DD are of marginal value. They can be used for Patrol or on foriegn Station, but I've yet to determine if this is cost effective. The benefits of Reserve and Mothball status are entirely about money. You don't have to pay the payroll, administration or the food costs of a fully manned crew. You aren't paying for fuel, water, lubricants and spare parts for the most part. Reducing maintenance and personnel costs by putting a ship in Reserve or Mothballs allows a navy to maintain a larger fleet that can be brought up to full strength in the event of war in a much shorter period than having to build the fleet to the same numbers through new construction. Obsolete ships having the (o) tag negatively affect the ship's performance. Also, MS will actually self scrap on you if you allow them to remain in (o) status for too long. Historically you do see experience spread from elite crews to new construction ships as some experienced personnel from existing ships are transferred as part of the new ship's initial manning but to my knowledge there is no such mechanism in-game. Some events like the shooting competition will simultaneously raise several crews' experience levels but in general each crews' experience level is tracked and modified individually and only exceeds Good quality by participating in and surviving battles. If I have 20 destroyers in an ocean area and because of RNG only 8 of them keep being used in the various battles those 8 are going to have highly experienced crews and the others are going to remain static. The other 12 will never go above Good quality. I would agree with you about old CL. Speed (or the lack of it) kills in cruiser battles unless you have one of the exploitive 8 inch gun armed protected cruisers. Destroyers however are extremely useful for CP/ASW as long as you refit them periodically about every 8-10 years (keep them out of (o) status). However, a small destroyer costs between 1,600,000 and 2,000,000 depending mainly on its speed. It's maintenance costs in Reserve are in the neighborhood of 6,000-8,000 (this may go up over time but I forget one way or the other). So that's between 200-333 turns (16-27 years of game turns) before the maintenance costs of an older DD would exceed the cost of building a new one. Even a small, 200 ton MS will cost about 600,000 new. So I rarely delete old destroyers right away and use them to supplement my CP/ASW numbers because mid-late game when you start seeing enemy medium submarines you are going to want at least three times the required CP/ASW numbers.
|
|
|
Post by oldpop2000 on Sept 10, 2018 17:39:25 GMT -6
Reserve or mothball status has other advantages. One these, besides the savings in money, is the extension of the ships life. Ships in mothballs can be overhauled, updated and cocooned to protect them. This is a great way to preserve your fleet. However, there are negatives. Time marches on and so does technology. If the ship is mothballed too long, it maybe too old and expensive to try to refurbish and activate. Ships do deteriorate. So, the decision is "when do we activate, or just scrap".
One the most effective ways of training a fleet, is with Fleet Problems such as the US Navy ran from 1923 to 1941. These fleet problems allowed for the training of officers, development of new or modified doctrine and tactics and to test new technologies. The US fleet problems such as Fleet Problem XIX, actually duplicated the Japanese attack on the Hawaiian Defense Force. Fleet problems are still being conducted.
I don't know how the game duplicates this, but it is still a valuable way to develop a good navy.
|
|
|
Post by aeson on Sept 10, 2018 20:10:59 GMT -6
Reserve or mothball status has other advantages. One these, besides the savings in money, is the extension of the ships life. Ships in mothballs can be overhauled, updated and cocooned to protect them. This is a great way to preserve your fleet. As far as I am aware, placing ships into the Reserve Fleet or mothballs does nothing to extend its life within the game; regardless of whether your ship is actively steaming around the world or sitting at anchor slowly rusting away in the inactive reserve despite a heavy coating of red lead and cosmoline, your ships will gain the (O) tag about 10 years after being commissioned, and thereafter about 8 years after each refit. While it of course depends on how obsolete your old cruisers are, I would say that using older cruisers for overseas service is reasonably cost effective. The computer tends to deploy older cruisers in the colonial areas while keeping newer cruisers with the battle fleet in the home sea zone(s), so it's fairly likely that your older cruisers on colonial stations will find themselves facing their contemporaries or near-contemporaries rather than significantly more modern ships.
As far as for ASW/coastal patrol, as far as I am aware the type and size of a ship assigned to ASW/CP duty has little to no effect on that ship's effectiveness on that duty. My opinion is therefore that old CLs are too expensive to keep around for ASW/CP duty. Old DDs - especially the early 500- and 600-tonners - cost little enough to maintain that unless you're on a very tight budget or unless you have enormous numbers of them there isn't much point in scrapping them. Replacing all your old 500-600t destroyers with 200t minesweepers would save you about 6-8k/ship in monthly upkeep costs, but building a new 200t minesweeper costs somewhere around 600-700k. You'd be waiting the better part of a decade to break even on that trade, and since you'll probably find yourself wanting more ASW/CP ships at some point anyways scrapping them without replacing them isn't that attractive.
I can't really agree that the 8" protected cruisers are either exploitive or all that much more worth keeping around than similarly-old 6" protected cruisers; my feeling is that 8" protected cruisers are worse than 6" cruisers for the first few years of the game, become slightly better than 6" protected cruisers for a few years from the late 1900s to mid 1910s when fire control is good enough to allow you to take advantage of the superior range of the 8" guns and CL armor can still be heavy enough that the armor penetration of the 8" gun is meaningfully superior to that of the 6" gun, and go back to being worse than 6" cruisers in the late 1910s or maybe early 1920s when the 8" gun's armor penetration more or less ceases to be meaningfully superior to that of the 6" gun against CLs and the increasing number of 6" guns carried by 6" CLs allow them to start out-weighing a 4x8" broadside while the concentration of the 6" guns into multi-gun turrets allows the 6" and 8" cruisers' main batteries to be similarly well protected.
Also, sure, you can build a 6,000t 2x2x8" with a 12x1x6" secondary battery or an 8,000t 2x2x8" with a 14x1x6" secondary and 18x1x5" tertiary battery, but, sacrificing only turret armor, you can build a 6,000t 15x1x6" with a 14x1x5" secondary battery or an 8,000t 16x1x6" with an 18x1x5" secondary and a 22x1x4" tertiary battery that costs about as much as the same-displacement 8" cruiser. 8" protected cruisers aren't clearly superior, at least not in my experience with them - certainly not to such a degree that I'd call them exploitive even by comparison to 6" cruisers that dispense with the secondary and tertiary batteries rather than going wild with them.
I can't say I see much point in keeping obsolete predreadnoughts, semidreadnoughts, and first class cruisers around just on the off-chance that you could use them to circumvent an armaments limitations treaty before they're too obsolete for even an extensive reconstruction to save them. My feeling on heavy ships is that if they're not worth keeping active, then they're probably not worth keeping except maybe in small numbers for secondary roles (mostly trying to trigger colonial invasions in secondary theaters, maybe serving as blockade tonnage if they're not obsolete enough to be a liability in a fleet battle or battleship engagement or if you're willing to decline any engagement likely to involve them). Even mothballed, a squadron of battleships or first class cruisers isn't exactly cheap to maintain, and rebuilding them is expensive and probably won't render them much more suited to combating modern warships than they would have been without the rebuild.
|
|
|
Post by Noname117 on Sept 12, 2018 3:23:08 GMT -6
I would argue for putting most of your fleet in reserve or in the mothball fleet between wars, as I do think the advantages to doing so outweigh the disadvantages.
So to start, let's say you just ended a war. Tensions across the board are low. Your entire fleet is currently on active duty, and a good portion of your ships have elite crew, with most of the rest having good crews. The decisions you make right now are going to determine how the next few years of peacetime are going to go for you, and what sort of fleet you'll have for the next war.
So let's first assume that the next war will take place maybe 3-6 years from where you're at now. You want your navy at it's best possible strength when that war rolls around. So you need to think of how your current warships would perform in 3-6 years. Actually, since wars last for a few years, you still have to take into account the performance of the ships 8-10 years in the future if you find yourself in a longer war. So now let's imagine all of your ships in a conventional tier list. They look like this:
A Tier: The absolute best ships of a certain role B Tier: Good/above average ships of a certain role C Tier: Average ships of a certain role D Tier: Below average/bad ships of a certain role F Tier: The absolute worst ships of a certain role
So at the moment you probably have some ships in each category, although maybe you lack A tier ships if you're a weaker nation and F tier ships if you scrap ships a little earlier. You'll probably have B Tier, C Tier, and D Tier ships though. Now, the thing is that right now these ships are of these tiers, but in 3-6 years new construction of A and B tier ships will decrease the tiers of the ships currently in service, probably by about 1 tier. By the next war, your current A tier ships will most likely be B Tier ships, and your current B Tiers will probably be C tier ships, and so on.
Before you get to your reserve fleet and mothballing policies, you should decide what to scrap. Some people like to have smaller navies of higher quality, and may only keep ships which will be A, B, or C tier by the probable time of the next war. Some people may prefer to have a larger fleet by keeping around some ships which will be F tier by the next war. I generally prefer somewhere in the middle of the two extremes, keeping future D tier ships around but not F tier ships (aside from old destroyers for coastal patrol), through the early and mid game.
So now that you've decided which ships to keep for the next war, you can actually get to the question of how you should handle the reserve fleet and mothball fleet. From an economical standpoint, you want to move as much to the reserve and mothball fleet to free up as much of the budget as you can. From a war readiness perspective you want to keep as much of your fleet active as possible, as your crew quality will be much higher at the start of the next war.
In my opinion, more closely following the former policy will leave you in better shape for the next war, for a couple reasons. The first of which is that, relative to the total pool of warships in the world, your current set of warships will have declined in quality by the start of the next war. Your A tier ships will now be B tier ships, and your B tier ships now C tier ships. Keeping elite crews on ships requires that they stay in active service, but by the time of the next war those ships are going to be obsolete. You're spending much higher maintenance costs to give your B, C, and maybe D tier ships better crews for the next war, and those higher maintenance costs are going to prevent you from building a few more A tier ships for the next war. So elite crews are really only worth preserving if they're on your most modern vessels, or if you need to have some ships active somewhere and can keep some elite crews by doing that.
The other reason is that refits reduce your crew quality back down to "fair" (or is it "good," I can't remember). If you are probably going to refit a ship between the war you were just in and the next war, most likely due to technological increases regarding fire control, then there's no point keeping that ship on active duty to preserve it's elite crew. It's just going to go away anyways.
So overall my point here is that keeping your fleet on active duty in peacetime to preserve crew will result in a less modern navy by the next war; both denying you new ships in that period, and denying you upgrades to your old set of ships. In the early to mid game, I'd recommend reserving and mothballing what you can between wars; keeping the minimum, or a bit above the minimum, of what you need on active duty. You can partially counter the main drawback of reduced fleet readiness by starting to activate your more powerful units when tensions get high.
Now, the disadvantages of preserving elite crews start to diminish in the late game, especially if you play past 1925, and/or have slower technological development. During the later years of the game, and especially post-1925, technological development starts slowing down while ships hit the tonnage limit of the game. Improvements from one ship class to it's successor become less pronounced, and navies in general become larger, which means that ships will stay in their tier for much longer. In addition, refits become less common as there aren't really improvements which need to be made to new ships. These factors combined means that keeping ships with elite crews active may start giving you an advantage, as opposed to focusing on new construction.
And after reading all of this do note that the importance of elite crews may change with different play-styles. Having smaller numbers of higher quality ships will turn the more equal battles the computer generates in your favor, but will harm your ability to form/resist blockades and win fleet battles. Likewise, larger numbers of slightly lower quality ships will benefit you in fleet battles and blockades but harm you in the equal-numbers battles between several ships of each side.
|
|
|
Post by aeson on Sept 12, 2018 17:05:38 GMT -6
It's reduced to 'fair.'
Also, once again, reducing fleet readiness does not save you enough to significantly impact the scale of your construction programs unless you have a very large fleet. You need about 15 ships in the Reserve Fleet or nine ships in mothballs (ten in the Reserve Fleet or six in mothballs if running training for +50% fleet upkeep) to save enough on upkeep to fund the construction of just one ship comparable to those placed into the Reserve Fleet or in mothballs, and modern ships - especially capital ships in the period between about 1903 and 1918 - are often significantly more expensive than typical existing vessels.
Reduced fleet readiness doesn't allow you to build a larger fleet by virtue of allowing you to afford larger construction programs, it allows you to build a larger fleet by lengthening the average service lifetime of your ships without significantly increasing their lifetime costs. A ship that costs 250k/month to maintain in the Active Fleet, 125k/month to maintain in the Reserve Fleet, and 50k/month to maintain in mothballs will have cost you about 45M after 15 years in the Active Fleet, or after about 10 years in the Active Fleet and 10 years in the Reserve Fleet, or after about 8 years in the Active Fleet, 8 years in the Reserve Fleet, and 15 years in mothballs. The short-term savings - the ones that pay for your construction programs today - are fairly insignificant unless you have a lot of such ships, but the lifetime savings let you keep the ships around longer - sometimes much longer - without significantly affecting your construction programs.
One last thing - reduced fleet readiness makes more sense the less aggressively you scrap ships while increased fleet readiness makes more sense the more aggressively you scrap ships. If you only keep your predreadnoughts, semidreadnoughts, and early dreadnoughts in service for about eight or ten years, you're not going to save much by placing them in a reduced state of readiness, but if you keep them around for twenty or thirty years you could save a considerable amount by placing them in a reduced state of readiness for the last half or two thirds of their service lives.
|
|
|
Post by dorn on Sept 13, 2018 1:29:05 GMT -6
It's reduced to 'fair.'
Also, once again, reducing fleet readiness does not save you enough to significantly impact the scale of your construction programs unless you have a very large fleet. You need about 15 ships in the Reserve Fleet or nine ships in mothballs (ten in the Reserve Fleet or six in mothballs if running training for +50% fleet upkeep) to save enough on upkeep to fund the construction of just one ship comparable to those placed into the Reserve Fleet or in mothballs, and modern ships - especially capital ships in the period between about 1903 and 1918 - are often significantly more expensive than typical existing vessels.
Reduced fleet readiness doesn't allow you to build a larger fleet by virtue of allowing you to afford larger construction programs, it allows you to build a larger fleet by lengthening the average service lifetime of your ships without significantly increasing their lifetime costs. A ship that costs 250k/month to maintain in the Active Fleet, 125k/month to maintain in the Reserve Fleet, and 50k/month to maintain in mothballs will have cost you about 45M after 15 years in the Active Fleet, or after about 10 years in the Active Fleet and 10 years in the Reserve Fleet, or after about 8 years in the Active Fleet, 8 years in the Reserve Fleet, and 15 years in mothballs. The short-term savings - the ones that pay for your construction programs today - are fairly insignificant unless you have a lot of such ships, but the lifetime savings let you keep the ships around longer - sometimes much longer - without significantly affecting your construction programs.
One last thing - reduced fleet readiness makes more sense the less aggressively you scrap ships while increased fleet readiness makes more sense the more aggressively you scrap ships. If you only keep your predreadnoughts, semidreadnoughts, and early dreadnoughts in service for about eight or ten years, you're not going to save much by placing them in a reduced state of readiness, but if you keep them around for twenty or thirty years you could save a considerable amount by placing them in a reduced state of readiness for the last half or two thirds of their service lives.
I completely agree. And have large fleet could help mainly for blockades and helping for invasions. You can have mothball pre-dreadnoughts for 40-50k per month, it is 480-600k per year, 4.8-6M per decade. So to have fleet of 10 such old pre-dreadnoughts costs 48M-60M per decade, so it is about half of the price of new capital ship. But you can get a lot of help in blockade by additional 10 old pre-dreadnoughts. And you do not need to worry about them as in large fleet battles there will be somewhere most far from enemy usually not participating in battle at all. So for smaller it is very cheap alternative to fight larger powers. If you want to go extreme, than you can have large fleet of small destroyers as they are even more costs effective.
|
|
|
Post by oaktree on Sept 13, 2018 7:15:28 GMT -6
One other thing to keep in mind is that countries with "poor education" have greater crew quality issues. Takes longer to develop quality to "good", and often time to get from "poor" to "fair". And I've seen "elite" quality drop back to "good" over time as well.
|
|
|
Post by hardlec on Sept 14, 2018 12:08:16 GMT -6
My philosophie: MS: Don't bother putting them in Reserve or mothballs. They will self-scrap as worn out, even in mothballs, as they become obsolete. They have little use in peace time. I's more efficient to scrap them and build them later on.
DDs: Having old DDs in mothballs allows you to quickly reactivate large numbers of cheap ships to do CP. I'm going to try to use a class of DDs that are 200 tons, cary 2 3"inch guns and 2 TTs with engines made for reliability. Just to be fodder for CP. I can make DDs fast enough to run away, which can't be done with MS.
AMC: Moot point. They all go away after a war.
CLs. The main weapon of a CL is speed. If they can't have the speed to run away, they are of negligible value. Scrapp them.
CAs: CAs are worth rebuilding once, maybe twice, if they can keep up with speed. If they are fast enough they are good raiders. They also make good convoy escorts. As fleet units, obsolete CAs are a burden, not a blessing.
Bs: A 20,000 ton B looks great when the treaty limits new ships to 15,000 tons and 10 inch guns. It's too bad as First Sea Lord I cant assign old B's to convoy escort only. Keep them in Mothballs until you have enough BBs.
BBs: often worth rebuilding, seldom stay become mothball bait.
BCs: I personally will never build another battlecruiser. The AI puts them in the Line of Battle, where they are expensive targets for enemy guns. CAs are more cost effective raiders. All they do in major battles is die horribly.
|
|
|
Post by aeson on Sept 14, 2018 14:53:19 GMT -6
Because of the way the game handles minesweeping and ASW/coastal patrol, minesweepers may become old but will essentially never become out-dated or obsolete. A new minesweeper costs about as much as seven to ten years of upkeep on an old one and blank refits of minesweepers barely cost more than standard upkeep, so unless you don't want to bother with the refits every seven or eight years I'd say greater efficiency is usually on the side of keeping old minesweepers around more or less forever. Ships on ASW/CP duty cannot be directly controlled and will rarely if ever choose to run away in time when attacked by superior opponents.
Also, even in the very late game, 2x3" and two torpedo tubes is a very heavy armament for a 200t DD, and I strongly suspect that you'll have difficulty finding the tonnage to make such a ship fast, especially if you optimize the engines for reliability and so pay a 10% tonnage penalty. A legacy 200t DD with that armament is overweight at 21 knots - the minimum legal DD speed - even cutting every corner you can to save tonnage.
That said, I've used 200t DDs for ASW/CP work before and they seem to do well enough. They're slightly more expensive to build than 200t minesweepers with similar characteristics and I don't believe that they're any more effective at ASW work, but since they don't automatically scrap themselves they're arguably less of a hassle to maintain, and running out of destroyer names isn't really something that can happen whereas running out of MS/AMC names is a potential problem for some nations or with very large numbers of minesweepers and AMCs. Speed gives you the ability to decline or force engagements, but isn't that much of an advantage once the guns go into action unless your ship has a relevant range advantage or is so much faster as to be able to secure and maintain a significant positional advantage throughout much of the battle. The more important speed consideration, at least to me, is whether or not the ship is at least approximately fast enough to operate with the other ships of the fleet, or at least those likely to be stationed in the same sea zone. A 23kn protected cruiser is more or less useless as a screen for a 27kn battlecruiser no matter how well armed the protected cruiser is, and I don't want it slowing down a 32kn modern light cruiser in a cruiser engagement, either, but as long as it's not significantly slower than comparable opponents and has an acceptable armament for engagements with its likely opponents I'd be happy enough to keep it around for use in areas where I'm unlikely to deploy major warships and modern cruisers.
I personally find battlecruisers to be the most useful major combatant. Adapt your battle tactics and ship designs to play to a battlecruiser's strengths - there's no limit on deck or turret armor, so heavily armor the deck and the turrets and use their speed to fight at long range in good weather during the day or break away from short range engagements in foul weather or at night - or design your battlecruisers as slightly-light fast battleships with six or seven heavy guns in two turrets rather than in more historical configurations and battlecruisers forming part of the battle line won't be any more problematic than battleships forming part of the battle line. If playing on Admiral's or mostly-AI-controlled Rear Admiral's or Captain's modes, remember to make sure that any battlecruisers in the Main Force are actually attached to the battle line rather than being 'independent' divisions operating with the battle line so that they actually fall into line properly rather than charging suicidally into the enemy battle line.
As to the comment about CAs' superior utility as raiders, I would suggest that all heavy surface combatants are sufficiently cost-ineffective as raiders that cost-effectiveness isn't a particularly worthwhile concern when considering whether or not to use a heavy surface combatant as a raider. If you're trying to use raiders to collapse a government, light surface combatants - small CLs and AMCs - are so much more cost-effective that heavy surface combatants - large CLs, CAs, Bs, BCs, and BBs - aren't remotely worthwhile as raiders except possibly as something to do with a ship at the end of its useful service life. If you're trying to use raiders to destroy your enemy's cruiser forces - BCs, CAs, CLs, and AMCs - for victory points, then heavy surface combatants are more useful, and I would say the heavier the better, because the heavier a surface combatant you use, the more likely it is to be able to destroy or escape interceptors with only minor damage. You might be able to afford two or three CAs for every BC you could lay down, but you'll only ever get one of them for any given raider interception when they're the raiders anyways, and the CAs are less capable of defeating or escaping intercepting CAs and especially intercepting BCs than the BC would be.
|
|
|
Post by hardlec on Sept 15, 2018 10:22:05 GMT -6
Minesweepers seem to self-destruct. They are scrapped by the AI whether I want them scrapped or not. I can keep "obsolete" DDs forever. I can make a DD that has torpedoes, and later mines. I can't build a MS with either. I can make a DD with 30 knot speed. Not so a minesweeper. My Oh-no class has proven effective so far, although I needed to make them 500 tons. After a war I Mothball them and rebuild their machinery as the budget allows.
AMCs: Only worth the money when they can be q-ships.
I now make two classes of CL and CA. On class I keep in AF to support my heavy ships. The other class I use as raiders. My raiders are designed for speed and with long-range guns, to destroy lots of TRs fast or run away.
Battlecruisers: Pieces of stuff.
War starts. I'm in a battle before I can even assign ships their roles. My BCs are in a fight with enemy BBs. Before 30 game minutes are over, my BCs are lost to torpedoes from non-existent submarines, or mines, or turret explosions. When this changes, I might build more BCs.
|
|
|
Post by dorn on Sept 15, 2018 10:35:46 GMT -6
Minesweepers seem to self-destruct. They are scrapped by the AI whether I want them scrapped or not. I can keep "obsolete" DDs forever. I can make a DD that has torpedoes, and later mines. I can't build a MS with either. I can make a DD with 30 knot speed. Not so a minesweeper. My Oh-no class has proven effective so far, although I needed to make them 500 tons. After a war I Mothball them and rebuild their machinery as the budget allows. AMCs: Only worth the money when they can be q-ships. I now make two classes of CL and CA. On class I keep in AF to support my heavy ships. The other class I use as raiders. My raiders are designed for speed and with long-range guns, to destroy lots of TRs fast or run away. Battlecruisers: Pieces of stuff. War starts. I'm in a battle before I can even assign ships their roles. My BCs are in a fight with enemy BBs. Before 30 game minutes are over, my BCs are lost to torpedoes from non-existent submarines, or mines, or turret explosions. When this changes, I might build more BCs. You can play the game and design ship quite differently. There is no only one best way. There are people saying that the game favors quantity over quality. It is partially true but I tried the quantity over quality and it works well. AI will never be as competent as human however in this game they are lethal in several engagement and it happens me more times that I need to take higher price to overstretch myself during battle. BC and CL are usually most universal designs as there are in most battles. If you loose BC after one mine, it is very unlucky however it happened in real history (HMS Audacious) and it is good that it can happen even in RTW even very unlikely. If you loose BC by enemy torpedoes you did something wrong to allow enemy ships goings so close to torpedo your capital ship. If there is something happen which it should not, describe it well that developers could correct it for RTW2 but it should be described well, exact example.
|
|
|
Post by aeson on Sept 15, 2018 16:19:54 GMT -6
Minesweepers seem to self-destruct. They are scrapped by the AI whether I want them scrapped or not. Only if you allow them to get the (O) status. If you keep up with the refits, they'll stay around pretty much forever; I've had legacy fleet minesweepers still in service when the game ends in 1950.
Thing is, as far as I can tell, neither torpedoes nor guns nor mines nor speed nor size has any significant influence on how effective the ship is on ASW/CP duty. A 30kn 500t DD with torpedoes and mines and a decent gun armament may theoretically be more capable than a 16kn 200t minesweeper with a 3" gun and nothing else, but the destroyer costs a lot more and isn't actually any better than the minesweeper for ASW and coastal patrol. About the only advantage that torpedo-armed DDs have over minesweepers for ASW/CP work is that they might occasionally torpedo an enemy ship during something like a coastal raid. Also, minesweepers have some advantages over destroyers. Minesweepers tend to build more quickly than similarly-large destroyers, with the most extreme difference in build times being at the low end of the size scale, and while it's unlikely to matter minesweepers can be armored whereas destroyers cannot.
Unless you're strapped for funds, it's probably not going to hurt much, but you're paying more to do the same job and aren't gaining much of anything by doing so. As far as I can tell, a raider's armament doesn't actually matter except when it gets caught; all else being equal, 4x4" raiding cruisers do not appear to be any less effective at destroying merchants in the interturn events than for example 2x8"+6x5"+6x4" raiding cruisers, and a lighter armament usually allows a ship to be faster or cheaper than a more heavily armed contemporary.
Mid-engagement torpedo strikes are almost always from torpedoes that were launched by enemy surface combatants, mid-engagement mine strikes suggest that you're fighting very close to an enemy port or coastal battery or have been at war for a long enough time without adequate minesweeping forces for offensive minefields to become a serious threat, and turret explosions suggest that you're either providing your battlecruisers with too little turret protection or are fighting at the wrong range for the turret protection that you've provided.
Battlecruisers are not any more vulnerable to gunfire than battleships are when given the same armor protection, nor are battlecruisers any more vulnerable to mine strikes and submarine attack than battleships are when given the same torpedo protection. If your battlecruisers are useless while your battleships are not, then maybe it's time to think about why your battleship designs work for you when your battlecruiser designs do not. You say you're losing battlecruisers to turret flashfires but apparently don't have the same issue on battleships, so what's the difference? Are you armoring the battlecruisers' turrets as well as you armor your battleship turrets? If not, why? If your battlecruisers' turrets are as well armored as your battleships' turrets, then you need to ask yourself why the armor is adequate on battleships and not on battlecruisers - are your battleships and battlecruisers engaging at different ranges? Have you just been getting lucky and your battleship turret armor is actually just as inadequate as your battlecruiser turret armor? Is the turret side/rear armor, which if history is any guide is probably thinner than the turret face armor, more likely to be exposed on your battlecruisers than on your battleships based on how you use the two types of ships? Do you have a tendency to get tunnel-vision in battles and focus on one group of ships to the exclusion of the rest of the battle, micromanaging your Main Force battleships to something like optimal engagement range while your Scout Force battlecruisers (and possibly 'independent' battlecruiser divisions assigned to the Main Force) do their own thing under AI control?
Also, if you're going to rely on rules of thumb, remember that rules of thumb carry implicit assumptions, and that when those assumptions are invalid then the rule of thumb is also invalid. "Turret face armor is adequate when it is an inch thicker than the belt armor" carries the implicit assumption that the belt armor is itself adequate, or at the very least nearly adequate, to resist guns of the caliber that you expect to face at the range at which you expect to fight. If however you're designing a battlecruiser whose belt armor is not adequate to resist heavy guns, say because it's 1916 or later and you're running into the 12" battlecruiser belt limit or because you've discovered that heavily-armored 31-32kn battlecruisers are prohibitively expensive and barely fit within the game's maximum permissible tonnage anyways, then the rule of thumb isn't particularly applicable - it basically says that if X inches of armor is good enough, then X+1 inches of armor is better, but it doesn't say anything at all about whether X+1 inches is good enough when X inches of armor is not.
|
|
|
Post by hardlec on Sept 19, 2018 16:14:34 GMT -6
You didn't read the comment.
A torpedo hits my ship before I even get a chance to determine my course and speed. When I look at the AAR logs, the AI never launched a torpedo. Mines should not affect anything in deep water, far from land not to mention a port, and where there are no minelayers on either side. I know enough to avoid my enemy's torpedoes.
Or, to put it another way: My DDs are effective, my CLs and CAs are effective, as are my Bs and BBs. My enemy's BCs very seldom survive battles either. I've sunk a couple of BCs with AMCs.
BCs are valuable when I can assign them as raiders. They are hell-on-jets as raiders. In the line of battle with other capital ships, they are fancy coffins for great sailors.
|
|
|
Post by williammiller on Sept 19, 2018 17:23:13 GMT -6
You didn't read the comment. A torpedo hits my ship before I even get a chance to determine my course and speed. When I look at the AAR logs, the AI never launched a torpedo. Mines should not affect anything in deep water, far from land not to mention a port, and where there are no minelayers on either side. I know enough to avoid my enemy's torpedoes. Or, to put it another way: My DDs are effective, my CLs and CAs are effective, as are my Bs and BBs. My enemy's BCs very seldom survive battles either. I've sunk a couple of BCs with AMCs. BCs are valuable when I can assign them as raiders. They are hell-on-jets as raiders. In the line of battle with other capital ships, they are fancy coffins for great sailors. Do you have a save game and copy of the log for the game in question? If so would could you possibly post it here as we can then look it over?
Thanks.
|
|
|
Post by dorn on Sept 20, 2018 1:09:08 GMT -6
You didn't read the comment. A torpedo hits my ship before I even get a chance to determine my course and speed. When I look at the AAR logs, the AI never launched a torpedo. Mines should not affect anything in deep water, far from land not to mention a port, and where there are no minelayers on either side. I know enough to avoid my enemy's torpedoes. Or, to put it another way: My DDs are effective, my CLs and CAs are effective, as are my Bs and BBs. My enemy's BCs very seldom survive battles either. I've sunk a couple of BCs with AMCs. BCs are valuable when I can assign them as raiders. They are hell-on-jets as raiders. In the line of battle with other capital ships, they are fancy coffins for great sailors. How BC could be valuable as raider? It is quite expensive raider and one raider do almost nothing to merchant shipping. I do not use AMCs as usually they have no value as raiders if I can blockade enemy. How did you sunk enemy BC with AMC? I am interested as usually just several salvos from BC sunk AMC with easy. If you have problem with your BCs surviving battle you should ask yourself the following question: 1. Why my BC sunk? 2. Did I used them correctly if they were sunk? 3. Could I design them to be able to resist reasons why there were sunk? You can go through forum of "best ships" and look on other players designing their battlecruisers and have quite huge success. In case your designs are similar and your BCs are sunk than think how you use them as there would probably be the issue.
|
|