|
Post by aeson on Sept 20, 2018 1:53:31 GMT -6
How did you sunk enemy BC with AMC? I am interested as usually just several salvos from BC sunk AMC with easy. A 6" shell can penetrate six or eight inches of armor at about 5000 yards in the mid- to late-game, and some of the computer's battlecruiser designs - most frequently early or treaty designs - have no more than six to eight inches of belt or turret face armor. It's rather unlikely, but it's at least plausible that a 6" hit from an AMC's guns could destroy one of the computer's more inadequately protected battlecruisers with a flash fire or magazine explosion, especially if night, foul weather, or surprise allowed the AMC to close with the battlecruiser without being fired upon by the battlecruiser's main and secondary batteries from beyond the effective range of the AMC's guns. There's also the possibility of exceptional luck with fires or progressive flooding from hits at the unarmored ends of the ship, though loss of a battlecruiser to uncontrolled fire in particular strikes me as extremely unlikely in a gunfire engagement in which the battlecruiser sustained damage only from an AMC.
More likely, the AMC carried torpedoes and sank the battlecruiser with them. Of course, if so, the fact that the ship sunk was a battlecruiser is more or less completely irrelevant; battlecruisers are not inherently any more vulnerable to torpedoes than battleships are, except maybe inasmuch as the typically-higher design speeds of battlecruisers makes it less likely that a battlecruiser will be damaged badly enough to reduce its speed to 10 knots or less and so might be more vulnerable to the computer driving it under with 'high speed increases flooding' events than a contemporary battleship of similar size.
|
|
|
Post by hardlec on Sept 20, 2018 9:22:04 GMT -6
BC is struck, once. Turret flashfire, ship explodes.
AMC lands one volley on an enemy BC. Turret flashfire, ship explodes.
Raider Enterprize sinks 5 enemy merchant ships 25 VP.
I finished my last game in 1925, playing the US. I fought and won 4 wars, two against Great Britain, one with France and one with Russia. The US ended up in control of Sakhalin, Ireland, Bermuda, Jamaica, Trinidad and Nova Scotia. I finished as Admiral Mahan with 59 prestige. My critiques stem from frustrations about "winning the game."
|
|
|
Post by aeson on Sept 20, 2018 13:40:37 GMT -6
BC is struck, once. Turret flashfire, ship explodes. AMC lands one volley on an enemy BC. Turret flashfire, ship explodes. Both of these are examples of bad luck, bad design, or both. If your battlecruiser's turrets are adequately armored, then it is extremely unlikely that a flash fire will occur in any engagement fought at a reasonable range. A battlecruiser such as this will almost certainly never suffer a flash fire or magazine explosion caused by a 6" hit even at very short ranges such as might occur in a night or foul-weather engagement, and is very unlikely to suffer turret flash fires from heavy hits in engagements fought between about 17,000 and 23,000 yards in the late game and probably won't suffer magazine explosions in roughly the same range band because its armor is good enough to give the ship a zone of immunity against 16" shells in roughly that range band.
If you design your battlecruisers with adequate armor protection, they are not any more vulnerable to loss through magazine explosion or turret flash fire or torpedo attack or mine strike than battleships of similar size are. If you are losing battlecruisers to turret flash fires caused by heavy hits at reasonable engagement ranges, then that is a sign that you need to improve the protection that you're giving to your battlecruisers' turrets. If you're losing battlecruisers to 6" shells, that's a sign that your battlecruisers' armor protection is completely inadequate, at least in a short-range engagement such as might occur at night or in foul weather, and as such you'd be well-advised to consider ways of improving it. So? The victory points a raider generates by sinking merchants are more or less irrelevant; assuming you sink anything at all, except maybe for small things like destroyers and minesweepers, or even just damage a couple light cruisers, a single battle is typically worth enormously more than a turn's worth of commerce raiding even when you have dozens of raiders.
Moreover, 5 merchants sunk in a turn is nothing special; a single 2100t CL raider or 1800t AMC raider can do as much on a good turn for far less investment, and five or ten 2100t CL raiders or 1800t AMC raiders will probably collectively do at least that much with greater consistency than a single BC raider without being any greater of an investment (probably less of one by the late game; ten 2100t CLs only cost about 90 million all told while a decent end-game battlecruiser typically costs over 120 million)
|
|
|
Post by bcoopactual on Sept 20, 2018 17:31:40 GMT -6
17 inch Q1 guns with a range of almost 40,000 yards and you still had to put torpedo launchers on it... The Aichi D3A pilots will probably thank you for that later. Like having a infantryman ride an M1A2 with a shotgun. If the 120mm cannon doesn't get the bad guy and the .50 cal doesn't get them and coaxial machine gun doesn't get them that 12 gauge has got them dead to rights.
|
|
|
Post by aeson on Sept 20, 2018 19:00:45 GMT -6
17 inch Q1 guns with a range of almost 40,000 yards and you still had to put torpedo launchers on it... I like to have torpedoes on my capital ships so that I can see the torpedo range circle with the capital ship division selected, and I tend to disregard the risk that carrying torpedoes in above-water tubes poses to the ship as it appears to me as though the detonation of torpedoes in above-water tubes is not very dangerous to the ship carrying them within the game. Also, even though the theoretical maximum range of the 17" guns is 39,050 yards (at least at the present time with increased elevation checked), their practical maximum range will often not be all that much greater than that of the torpedoes; you cannot engage targets that you cannot see, I cannot recall seeing a maximum sighting range in excess of 27,000 yards, and even in good weather maximum sighting ranges below 25,000 yards are not that unusual while in even slightly-poor weather sighting ranges below 15,000 yards are not uncommon. Max-tech torpedoes have a range of 18,000 yards - reasonably comparable to maximum practical gun range even in fairly good weather, though of course achieving hits with torpedoes at that range is somewhat unlikely. Every once in a while, the torpedoes even come in handy.
I will grant that eight torpedo tubes is probably excessive, extravagant, and unnecessary, but then so are 17" guns, even with only six of them.
|
|
|
Post by bcoopactual on Sept 20, 2018 20:50:49 GMT -6
Hmmm, good point about the range circle. More than once I've liked to have had that available when maneuvering my battle line. And if you're going to install one it might as well be the quad launcher for maximum badassery. Anything less would look like a toy on a ship that size.
Very well, I retract my previous lighthearted scoffing.
|
|
|
Post by Capsized on Sept 21, 2018 0:40:11 GMT -6
So? The victory points a raider generates by sinking merchants are more or less irrelevant; Hardlec has a point there, it's just a bit hidden. If the VP are irrelevant, then they should not be presented as the primary result of the sinking. A message saying "Raider XX sinks YY mechant ships; the price of bread increases", or "XX sinks YY mechant ships; the civilians complain about shortages", then "XX sinks YY mechant ships; governement stores have been looted by hungry citizens" would be more explicit and hint at unrest.. The message should explain that commerce raiding will result in increasing unrest. Right now you know when cargo ships get sunk, you know when the unrest is really high, but there is not much that tell that one is the result of the other. EDIT: ocrap, I'm off-topic.
|
|
|
Post by hardlec on Sept 21, 2018 10:13:52 GMT -6
I'm wondering why I put torpedoes on anything. reading my AARs, almost all the time my ships (that come home) still have all their torpedoes in their tubes. If I call for a flotilla attack, maybe my DDs will use their torpedoes, but usually they shoot their 4-inch pop-guns at my opponents heavy ships.
|
|
|
Post by aeson on Sept 21, 2018 10:33:34 GMT -6
Hardlec has a point there, it's just a bit hidden. If the VP are irrelevant, then they should not be presented as the primary result of the sinking. A message saying "Raider XX sinks YY mechant ships; the price of bread increases", or "XX sinks YY mechant ships; the civilians complain about shortages", then "XX sinks YY mechant ships; governement stores have been looted by hungry citizens" would be more explicit and hint at unrest.. The message should explain that commerce raiding will result in increasing unrest. Right now you know when cargo ships get sunk, you know when the unrest is really high, but there is not much that tell that one is the result of the other. EDIT: ocrap, I'm off-topic. There are messages that come up which explicitly link merchant losses due to surface raiders with unrest and shortages. As to the suggestion of presenting unrest generation rather than victory points, there are two issues with that - One, unrest is essentially a hidden statistic, and should be a hidden statistic; it's very difficult to conduct a government satisfaction and civilian morale poll in a population when you're at war with their government, so unless something too big for their government to conceal through press censorship or other forms of information management is going on it's not that easy to reliably estimate the willingness of the people of an enemy state to continue the war. Two, while commerce raiding is very much a highly-abstracted part of the game, the number of merchants sunk on any given turn doesn't really matter unless the losses are spectacularly bad or unless you get unlucky with the RNG; commerce raiding shows its teeth when it's consistently taking merchants every turn over relatively extended periods, not when it has one spectacular success and then does nothing at all for several turns running. Losing ten merchants in January doesn't really matter; losing forty merchants over the first six months of the year does.
And no, hardlec doesn't have a point there, because what he's claiming is that battlecruisers are good commerce raiders because he saw one sink five merchants in a turn. Sorry, but a 2100t CL or an 1800t AMC can do the same, and the ten or more of them you could afford to build for the cost of a single decent battlecruiser will sink five merchants in a turn more consistently than a single battlecruiser will. If your goal is to collapse an enemy government through unrest caused by raider sinkings, then what you want is a consistently high level of merchant losses to raiders, and that is more readily achievable with a large number of cheap raiders than with a small number of powerful raiders. The power of a ship doesn't appear to have any significant effect on whether or not its attacks on shipping will be prevented by patrolling cruisers, and all surface raiders appear to sink 0 to 5 merchants with roughly the same distribution of probabilities of sinking any specific number. A dozen cheap cruisers or AMCs are a better raiding force than a single battlecruiser. How many torpedoes do your destroyers carry? Destroyers that have less than six torpedoes seem to be reluctant to launch torpedoes except when they have very good shots, and big ships tend to want to engage from beyond torpedo range if they can. Additionally, submerged torpedo tubes are more finicky than the above-water swivels; they require a more perfect setup to have a reasonable chance of hitting, and my understanding is that they are nonfunctional when a ship is steaming faster than 25 knots.
If you want to set up a torpedo run, try to get your ships ahead of and slightly to the side of the enemy, and if possible get them in close enough that the torpedoes can use the high-speed rather than the long-range run settings.
|
|
|
Post by hardlec on Sept 23, 2018 11:31:36 GMT -6
My BC raiders sink 1-5 merchants a turn, every turn. My CL raiders sink 1 or 2 merchants every other turn. CLs are good raiders, but BCs are better raiders. BCs in fleet combat almost always die to enemy torpedos or turret explosions. To armor a BC: Before 1916, I look up the data for a 6 inch gun. My BE armor will stop a 6 inch gun at 5000 yards. My Belt armor is an inch thicker. My Deck extended armor is thick enough to stop a 6-inch gun, usually 2 inches. My deck armor is an inch thicker. My turrets are 1 inch thicker than my belt, my Turret Tops are as thick as my deck. My conning tower is 4 inches. If I had the option, my ships would not have conning towers. After 1914 I use an 8-inch gun as my standard. That is until my machinery quality is good enough to build 24 knot BBs. I then stop building BCs. The monthly maintenance on 5 cls is greater than that of one BC. Monthly maintenance is where the real cost of a ship lays.
I used to put 4 TTs on all ships except DDs, which can only carry 1 or 2 mounts until they get big enough to carry more. I rebuild old DDs when I can use double mounts and so on. My standard DD when I get quad mounts has 8 TTs and 2 guns. And they almost always come home with their tubes full.
I put TTs on CLs when I can put them on above-water mounts. I used to put submerged tubes on them, but as they never deploy torpedoes I now put on one tube aft so I can get a range circle for torpedoes and stay out of range of my enemy's torpedos. The same with CAs, Bs, BCs and BBs; one TT per ship to get a range circle. I also pay extra to train my crews in torpedo warfare amd put torpedos and light units on high priority. There is about a 20% chance that if I use flotilla atack my ships will actually deploy a torpedo or two. I would like to exploit the torpedo as a weapon, but right now I see torpedos on surface ships as a waste of space and money.
BTW: Explain to me how my enemy has AMCs a month after the war starts when it takes 4 months to build an AMC and they can't be built during peacetime. ABTW: Why is it that if I try to design a CA after 1916 or so the design window automatically shifts to a BC?
|
|
|
Post by aeson on Sept 23, 2018 15:14:15 GMT -6
If you're designing your battlecruisers with only enough armor to resist 6" or 8" shells, then you have only yourself to blame for the fact that your battlecruisers cannot survive gunnery engagements with heavy ships. Armor only sufficient to resist 6"/Q1 or 8"/Q1 gunfire at 5000 yards might at best be barely adequate to resist fire from 13"/Q0 or 14"/Q0 guns at extreme range and probably isn't adequate against 15"/Q0 or 16"/Q0 guns at any range that you can reasonably expect to fight at in the game.
Losing battlecruisers to torpedoes tends to be a ship handling problem; don't let your enemy's ships (especially destroyers) get so close if you can avoid it, and when they do get close take evasive action rather than steaming on a constant bearing at a constant speed for long period of time. Possibly consider investing in more comprehensive torpedo protection on new ships and bulging old ships; Torpedo Defense 3-4 costs quite a bit more tonnage than Torpedo Defense 1-2 and bulging costs 10% of the design speed (with rounding), but if your ships are regularly getting hit by torpedoes these could very well be worth the costs. Alternatively, consider investing in more secondary or tertiary guns of calibers appropriate for engaging destroyers on your capital ships and building more light cruisers or destroyers to screen your heavier ships. A decent 2100t raiding cruiser's maintenance cost is in the neighborhood of 50,000 per month while even a 20,000t battlecruiser's is in the neighborhood of 400,000 per month; a decent late-game battlecruiser's is closer to three quarters of a million. Unless maybe you're doing a very early Tsukuba-type battlecruiser, which might possibly have an upkeep cost in the 200-350 thousand range like predreadnought and semidreadnought battleships and large first class cruisers, you can maintain at least eight raiding cruisers for the maintenance cost of a single early battlecruiser, and something more like twenty-five raiding cruisers for the cost of a decent late-game battlecruiser.
Now, sure, you can use less specialized 4000-8000t cruisers for raiding ... but why? They cost more, they aren't any more effective, and they're more usefully employed in the Active Fleet for use against the enemy's cruisers. Debatable.
If you look at these ships and compare the total construction cost to the nominal maintenance cost, you'll notice that the total construction cost is equivalent to between 10 and 18 years (about 14-18 years excluding the minesweeper) of maintenance at the nominal cost, with the larger ships tending to have relatively higher construction costs. Upkeep costs are increased by 50% in wartime or by 20% on overseas station in peacetime and reduced by 50% in the Reserve Fleet or 80% in mothballs, blank refits tend to reduce upkeep costs slightly over time, and ships above an age that I'm unsure of but which seems to be around fifteen or twenty years start to become more expensive to maintain than younger ships of the same class, so lifetime costs will probably not exactly match expected cost based on nominal maintenance cost reported in the build menu. A single month of construction costs is equivalent to about seven to twenty-two months of upkeep in service (bigger ships tend to have upkeep costs more comparable to their monthly construction cost).
As a ballpark estimate, a ship's lifetime maintenance cost is roughly equal to its construction cost, and therefore a ship's construction cost is about half its "real" cost, assuming that the "real" cost is the sum total funds spent on building and maintaining the ship from the time it is laid down to the time it is scrapped/scuttled/sunk/expended as a target. Even if you keep a ship in active service for thirty years, the construction cost of the ship will probably still be roughly a third of the total lifetime cost of the ship. Assuming uniform distribution, 1-5 merchants a turn averages to 3 merchants/turn while 1-2 merchants every other turn averages to 0.75 merchants/turn; using your 1 BC = 5 CLs estimate, this implies that for equal investment your CLs are better raiders than your BCs, because 5*0.75 = 3.75 > 3. Maybe battlecruisers are better on a per-ship basis - I don't have statistics to show one way or the other - but my experience is that the heavier a ship is, the less worthwhile it is to risk it as a raider if the only thing you're after is merchant sinkings, and as far as cost-effectiveness goes the heavier ships are worse. Probably partly because the types of ships represented in the game by the CA class (the big first class cruisers of the predreadnought period and a heavier cousin of the heavy cruisers of the treaty/interbellum period) weren't really built between about 1910 and 1925, and partly because BCs do just about everything that CAs can do within the game and do it better. Battlecruisers are supposed to supplant the big first class or 'armored' cruisers in pretty much the same way and at about the same time as dreadnought battleships supplant the predreadnought and semidreadnought battleships.
|
|
|
Post by JagdFlanker on Sept 23, 2018 17:03:58 GMT -6
i'v long ago stopped bothering with raiders other than AMCs, i just build/maintain 30-ish AMC in a pack, keep moving them around into different enemy seazones, and they do a wicked job of cleaning up merchants and jacking up enemy unrest the best part is once the war ends they all go away and your budget is somewhat close to balanced (i retire old ships to finish the balancing) admittedly they are kind of a pain in the ass to manage and they take somewhat steady losses so you have to replenish them, but they are expendable and if you can't blockade the enemy they are quite effective
once med range subs come in they are obsolete, but until then they are workhorses
|
|
|
Post by hardlec on Sept 24, 2018 8:25:30 GMT -6
What game size are you playing where you can build 30 AMCs as soon as war breaks out? You are not allowed to build AMCs in peacetime or keep them between wars. More but cheaper AMCs does seem like a good idea, but I rarely get to build more than a dozen. I stop at 1925, the design game end. It's only after 1918 that I can put battleship armor on a battlecruiser. I almost never see 14 inch guns, much less 16 inch guns in a game. My scientists seem to be fixated on developing 7 inch and 9 inch guns. I will try a battlecruiser with thicker armor, it's only a game.
|
|
|
Post by boomboomf22 on Sept 24, 2018 10:05:14 GMT -6
Can you give us an example (design screen please) of the BCs you build before 1918 where you say you cannot put BB armor on them? We (the community) may be able to give some tips on where to shave weight or whatever to free up tonnage for armor
|
|
|
Post by JagdFlanker on Sept 24, 2018 14:32:21 GMT -6
What game size are you playing where you can build 30 AMCs as soon as war breaks out? You are not allowed to build AMCs in peacetime or keep them between wars. i play very large fleet, but it usually takes 12 months or so to build that many unless you'r playing UK or USA (which i never do, i prefer them as adversaries). you only need to build them if you are not in a position to blockade the enemy, otherwise it's a waste
|
|