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Post by cwemyss on Nov 3, 2018 10:51:57 GMT -6
I play as the US most of the time, and a (minor) frustration is that all shipbuilding is on the east coast. I'm in a war, building DDs, and there's an extra couple turns to get them where I want them (usually the place I just unwisely lost a half dozen in a futile torpedo charge).
The USS Olympia (6k tons) and USS Oregon (11k) were built on the west coast in the 1890s. By 1940, the west coast had built battleships (USS California, 33k), and Pascagoula on the gulf coast was able to build escort carriers. I don't know (haven't researched) specifics but France and Russia could have similar issues... or even the UK, with shipyards in Canada, India, Singapore, etc.
I know you guys have a lot on your plate, but is it possible to consider allowing shipbuilding in all areas? Maybe with differing starting capacities; for example, at game start the US may be able to build 16k tons on the east coast, 8k on the west coast, and 1k on the gulf, and all colonies at zero. When starting a new hull (or initiating a rebuild) the player would be given a choice of where to build, depending on capacity... similar to the option to design/build in another nation in RTW1.
It would give the player more strategic things to consider... a player could choose to create a shipbuilding capacity in their colonies, with the risk of technology proliferation if the colony is lost. A player could build up one home area at the expense of others, and find themselves severely lacking flexibility in wartime. Shipbuilding capacity in a sea zone could even be made to have an influence on repair times from battle damage, particularly for the heavies. Players could choose to try to take a particular enemy colony in wartime, because there's a good shipyard. In turn, a player may put a lot more effort into shore batteries and MTBs in a particular location if they have a good shipyard, because they're worth defending.
It opens up a lot of strategic possibilities without (imo) overly complicating gameplay. That said, i have no idea what it would cost from a coding standpoint.
Thanks for your time!
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Post by williammiller on Nov 3, 2018 11:04:05 GMT -6
Good ideas & suggestions, thanks.
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Post by director on Nov 3, 2018 19:39:00 GMT -6
And of course, there's always the Black Sea...
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Post by oldpop2000 on Nov 3, 2018 19:52:31 GMT -6
I play as the US most of the time, and a (minor) frustration is that all shipbuilding is on the east coast. I'm in a war, building DDs, and there's an extra couple turns to get them where I want them (usually the place I just unwisely lost a half dozen in a futile torpedo charge). The USS Olympia (6k tons) and USS Oregon (11k) were built on the west coast in the 1890s. By 1940, the west coast had built battleships (USS California, 33k), and Pascagoula on the gulf coast was able to build escort carriers. I don't know (haven't researched) specifics but France and Russia could have similar issues... or even the UK, with shipyards in Canada, India, Singapore, etc. I know you guys have a lot on your plate, but is it possible to consider allowing shipbuilding in all areas? Maybe with differing starting capacities; for example, at game start the US may be able to build 16k tons on the east coast, 8k on the west coast, and 1k on the gulf, and all colonies at zero. When starting a new hull (or initiating a rebuild) the player would be given a choice of where to build, depending on capacity... similar to the option to design/build in another nation in RTW1. It would give the player more strategic things to consider... a player could choose to create a shipbuilding capacity in their colonies, with the risk of technology proliferation if the colony is lost. A player could build up one home area at the expense of others, and find themselves severely lacking flexibility in wartime. Shipbuilding capacity in a sea zone could even be made to have an influence on repair times from battle damage, particularly for the heavies. Players could choose to try to take a particular enemy colony in wartime, because there's a good shipyard. In turn, a player may put a lot more effort into shore batteries and MTBs in a particular location if they have a good shipyard, because they're worth defending. It opens up a lot of strategic possibilities without (imo) overly complicating gameplay. That said, i have no idea what it would cost from a coding standpoint. Thanks for your time! Here is a link that you might find interesting - www.shipbuildinghistory.com/shipyards/public.htm
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Post by noshurviverse on Nov 3, 2018 20:17:41 GMT -6
And of course, there's always the Black Sea... Don't forget about the coast of Moscow.
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Post by kyle on Nov 3, 2018 20:35:19 GMT -6
And don't forget the Soviet union - the Baltic fleet and Black sea fleets. I would not expect other countries than the US and USSR to have widely distributed shipyards for major ships, but if they wanted to invest the money...
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Post by oldpop2000 on Nov 3, 2018 21:19:52 GMT -6
And don't forget the Soviet union - the Baltic fleet and Black sea fleets. I would not expect other countries than the US and USSR to have widely distributed shipyards for major ships, but if they wanted to invest the money... it isn't just a matter of investing money. The site for the shipyard must be on the edge of a body of water of sufficient depth and large enough to permit safe launching of ships after being built. The location has to have an adequate delivery system for large and heavy materials needed for building the ships and it should be close to suitable housing facilities for the workmen. There has to be a deep and wide channel leading to the sea so the completed ships can pass out to sea. Most times, along a waterway, the ground has to be strengthened to support the building. If the ground is on very good rock like granite, limestone, or something similar, you don't need pilings. However, if it is on clay material, sandstone, siltstone, it will require extensive piling along with reinforced concrete. If your pilings are made out of wood, then you need a good source of strong wood nearby to build them, trees like fir and pine. Weather can play a large part since all shipbuilding except for steel and iron production and fabrication shops, is outside. Generally, you have three types of shipyards; private, naval and overseas. It depends on the nation which one it uses the most. Another issue is whether this location has already been used for shipyards and whether there is enough room to build a new slip and dock to build your ships. Warships tend to get longer and wider, so the slips have to be either improved or new wider slips built. Is there enough room to perform this necessary modifications. The British had a similar problem on the Thames with the Royal Shipyards. The maximum beam could only be 90 feet due to the crowded nature of the area. Anyway, it gets complex and you can't just snap your fingers and a fully equipped shipyard appears. Read the Battleships Builders for some good information on British shipbuilding. One advantage the German's had in the late 19th century when they began building warships, was that they did not have any shipyards and therefore they could build all new ones, with the latest technology and could use as much room as necessary. It greatly enhanced the design and building of their warships.
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Post by oldpop2000 on Nov 4, 2018 9:13:54 GMT -6
Another issue in this discussion of shipyards, is the availability of shipyards during a war. In wartime, ships will need repairs, that is a given. However, ships will be sunk and have to be replaced. Now, with limited shipyards, how do I balance replacing ships and repairing them. Sometimes, as the Japanese found out, I can't do both. The real solution is good preparation during peace, but the nation might not want to expend a lot of money on extra shipyard capacity. A good solution is floating drydocks. These innovations can repair submarines, destroyers, destroyer escorts and many other types of smaller ships and can be moved forward during combat operations. Repair ships can augment your ship repair problems. Damage is not always to hulls.
The team should investigate this idea.
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Post by cwemyss on Nov 4, 2018 9:22:19 GMT -6
Another issue in this discussion of shipyards, is the availability of shipyards during a war. In wartime, ships will need repairs, that is a given. However, ships will be sunk and have to be replaced. Now, with limited shipyards, how do I balance replacing ships and repairing them. Sometimes, as the Japanese found out, I can't do both. The real solution is good preparation during peace, but the nation might not want to expend a lot of money on extra shipyard capacity. A good solution is floating drydocks. These innovations can repair submarines, destroyers, destroyer escorts and many other types of smaller ships and can be moved forward during combat operations. Repair ships can augment your ship repair problems. Damage is not always to hulls. The team should investigate this idea. And that's where the devs have to decide what's abstracted and what's discrete. But exactly that balance, what to spend scarce $$ on in peacetime, is what i started thinking after the initial suggestion. Somewhat related... floating drydocks aren't ALWAYS the right answer. ;-) www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/24547/huge-floating-dry-dock-holding-russias-only-aircraft-carrier-has-accidentally-sunk
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Post by oldpop2000 on Nov 4, 2018 9:27:34 GMT -6
Another issue in this discussion of shipyards, is the availability of shipyards during a war. In wartime, ships will need repairs, that is a given. However, ships will be sunk and have to be replaced. Now, with limited shipyards, how do I balance replacing ships and repairing them. Sometimes, as the Japanese found out, I can't do both. The real solution is good preparation during peace, but the nation might not want to expend a lot of money on extra shipyard capacity. A good solution is floating drydocks. These innovations can repair submarines, destroyers, destroyer escorts and many other types of smaller ships and can be moved forward during combat operations. Repair ships can augment your ship repair problems. Damage is not always to hulls. The team should investigate this idea. And that's where the devs have to decide what's abstracted and what's discrete. But exactly that balance, what to spend scarce $$ on in peacetime, is what i started thinking after the initial suggestion. Somewhat related... floating drydocks aren't ALWAYS the right answer. ;-) www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/24547/huge-floating-dry-dock-holding-russias-only-aircraft-carrier-has-accidentally-sunkThe US floating dry docks never had a problem because we had researched and built them well. Floating drydocks were a great innovation during the Pacific War. It allowed the US to maintain our fleet whereas the Japanese fleet simply deteriorated because all the damaged ships had to try to sail back to Japan. The Chinese have just begun to venture into the Blue water area and become a naval power, building junks to sail the coast is not the same. They can, with external help achieve their goals, but don't use their failures as a guide for building anything naval.
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Post by Procopius on Nov 4, 2018 10:54:50 GMT -6
The US floating dry docks never had a problem because we had researched and built them well. Don't apply poor Chinese workmanship and research on this. Floating drydocks were a great innovation during the Pacific War. It allowed the US the maintain our fleet whereas the Japanese fleet simply deteriorated because all the damaged ships had to try to sail back to Japan. It's our regular dry docks we have a problem with: www.defensenews.com/naval/2018/07/13/partial-dry-dock-collapse-floods-us-navy-ship-under-construction/The USS Alamogordo (ARDM-2) sank but was raised after an accident in the '60s as well. HMS Valiant was famously damaged almost beyond repair by a floating drydock collapse in 1944. It happens, but not often. I suspect the poor state of the Russian Navy didn't help them any in the case of the Kuznetsov.
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Post by oldpop2000 on Nov 4, 2018 11:14:17 GMT -6
This incident occurred at the National Steel and Shipbuilding plant on Midway Drive in San Diego. It was not a floating dry dock, it was a standard dry dock that collapsed.
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Post by ccip on Nov 4, 2018 11:57:16 GMT -6
I seem to recall that the idea of floating drydocks, tenders and support ships was floated (no pun intended!) during the RTW 1 days - I think it's a useful one to keep in mind for sure, considering especially the extent to which the US Pacific campaign relied on mobile support capability rather than fixed docking. I don't think these necessarily need to be build-able units - actually, modeling it as more of a "pool" (like dock capacity) or modifier might be a better approach. But I think it is a good idea to have some sort of mobile support/tender/replenishment/floating dock mechanic to mitigate the penalties for units outside of base areas. The construction thing actually worries me a bit less! Because let's be fair, building outside home areas should be an edge case. Even the multi-sea powers have historically done the vast majority of their construction in one area: e.g. the example of Russia is a good one, since the vast majority of their tonnage was built in the Baltic, regardless of where it eventually served (this is still true today). Most of the non-home construction, meanwhile, tends to be limited and almost always focuses on smaller, cheaper ships. Even powers like the US and France have always had a noticeable disparity between their two major shipbuilding coasts (although for the US, the West Coast did see an immense amount of growth during the RTW 2 timeline). I think it could just be tied to base capacity. Here's a possible easy idea for how this might be implemented: allow the player to specify construction area (or use standard home area by default), and use the base capacity of possessions as a resource. This would be one more column on the construction sheet - location, either left blank for main home area, or specified for a given possession. The default home area has no restrictions or penalties. Elsewhere, take each possession's base capacity x100, and you get a total tonnage that can be under construction there with no penalties. So, a brand new colonial station can have a maximum of 1000t of ships being built, meaning you can have a couple of 500t DDs or MSs under construction there at the same time, while a major "2nd home" base with 200 capacity can build up to 20000 tons, enough for a few cruisers or a small battleship, and so forth. As ships come off the line, capacity frees up again, or you could manually pause construction to avoid the penalties. You can exceed that capacity, but as soon as you do, construction time (and therefore cost) increases proportionally - e.g. if you're building 1600t of ships in a possession with a base capacity of 10 that can only do 1000t, the remaining construction time on all ships in progress there is multiplied by 1.6x. So yes, in theory you could do something silly and lay down a 16,000t ship in a non-home area possession with just 40 base capacity, but it would take 4 times longer (and therefore more expensive) to construct, so economic logic dictates that no player would actually want to do that - so I'd actually argue that there's no need to play around with the maximum dock capacity mechanic that's there's now or impose artificial restrictions on what the player is allowed to build outside of home area. If the player wants to build dreadnoughts in Zanzibar - let 'em! They would have to sink a lot of money into it, either through construction time penalties, or through investing into long-term base improvements. There are also added risks to non-home area construction that would already make it potentially more problematic - blockades, invasions, enemy bombardment of the area, strategic bombing (assuming it's in RTW 2) during wartime would neutralize or destroy that base capacity; and in peacetime, depending on tech and intelligence, things like higher potential for construction delays or sabotage could play a bigger role than home area. To keep things simple, I'd still keep the concept of home area working as it does now (because it works well and keeps things reasonable - I don't think the player should have to micromanage construction capacity, unless they want to specifically build outside the home area for some reason). I'd also let the AI fudge it rather than use it fully (i.e. just let a certain portion of their constructed ships "spawn" at non-home possession depending on base capacity there, without telling the player which ships they're building where). So that would be a supplementary feature which doesn't have to change what works well in RTW now. It wouldn't make building ships in the game more complicated than now, which I would prefer - but would give a few new options. One thing I like about this possible approach is that it would give base capacity at possessions more meaning than currently in RTW - you might have more motivation to build up new bases (especially over a 50 year timeline), while activities like blockade, invasion, bombardment, strategic bombing could neutralize or even destroy it, hampering construction (for the player) or preventing the enemy from "spawning" any newly constructed ships except in their home area. Something to consider, perhaps
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Post by oldpop2000 on Nov 4, 2018 13:07:32 GMT -6
I seem to recall that the idea of floating drydocks, tenders and support ships was floated (no pun intended!) during the RTW 1 days - I think it's a useful one to keep in mind for sure, considering especially the extent to which the US Pacific campaign relied on mobile support capability rather than fixed docking. I don't think these necessarily need to be build-able units - actually, modeling it as more of a "pool" (like dock capacity) or modifier might be a better approach. But I think it is a good idea to have some sort of mobile support/tender/replenishment/floating dock mechanic to mitigate the penalties for units outside of base areas. The construction thing actually worries me a bit less! Because let's be fair, building outside home areas should be an edge case. Even the multi-sea powers have historically done the vast majority of their construction in one area: e.g. the example of Russia is a good one, since the vast majority of their tonnage was built in the Baltic, regardless of where it eventually served (this is still true today). Most of the non-home construction, meanwhile, tends to be limited and almost always focuses on smaller, cheaper ships. Even powers like the US and France have always had a noticeable disparity between their two major shipbuilding coasts (although for the US, the West Coast did see an immense amount of growth during the RTW 2 timeline). I think it could just be tied to base capacity. Here's a possible easy idea for how this might be implemented: allow the player to specify construction area (or use standard home area by default), and use the base capacity of possessions as a resource. This would be one more column on the construction sheet - location, either left blank for main home area, or specified for a given possession. The default home area has no restrictions or penalties. Elsewhere, take each possession's base capacity x100, and you get a total tonnage that can be under construction there with no penalties. So, a brand new colonial station can have a maximum of 1000t of ships being built, meaning you can have a couple of 500t DDs or MSs under construction there at the same time, while a major "2nd home" base with 200 capacity can build up to 20000 tons, enough for a few cruisers or a small battleship, and so forth. As ships come off the line, capacity frees up again, or you could manually pause construction to avoid the penalties. You can exceed that capacity, but as soon as you do, construction time (and therefore cost) increases proportionally - e.g. if you're building 1600t of ships in a possession with a base capacity of 10 that can only do 1000t, the remaining construction time on all ships in progress there is multiplied by 1.6x. So yes, in theory you could do something silly and lay down a 16,000t ship in a non-home area possession with just 40 base capacity, but it would take 4 times longer (and therefore more expensive) to construct, so economic logic dictates that no player would actually want to do that - so I'd actually argue that there's no need to play around with the maximum dock capacity mechanic that's there's now or impose artificial restrictions on what the player is allowed to build outside of home area. If the player wants to build dreadnoughts in Zanzibar - let 'em! They would have to sink a lot of money into it, either through construction time penalties, or through investing into long-term base improvements. There are also added risks to non-home area construction that would already make it potentially more problematic - blockades, invasions, enemy bombardment of the area, strategic bombing (assuming it's in RTW 2) during wartime would neutralize or destroy that base capacity; and in peacetime, depending on tech and intelligence, things like higher potential for construction delays or sabotage could play a bigger role than home area. To keep things simple, I'd still keep the concept of home area working as it does now (because it works well and keeps things reasonable - I don't think the player should have to micromanage construction capacity, unless they want to specifically build outside the home area for some reason). I'd also let the AI fudge it rather than use it fully (i.e. just let a certain portion of their constructed ships "spawn" at non-home possession depending on base capacity there, without telling the player which ships they're building where). So that would be a supplementary feature which doesn't have to change what works well in RTW now. It wouldn't make building ships in the game more complicated than now, which I would prefer - but would give a few new options. One thing I like about this possible approach is that it would give base capacity at possessions more meaning than currently in RTW - you might have more motivation to build up new bases (especially over a 50 year timeline), while activities like blockade, invasion, bombardment, strategic bombing could neutralize or even destroy it, hampering construction (for the player) or preventing the enemy from "spawning" any newly constructed ships except in their home area. Something to consider, perhaps I believe the suggestion about shipbuilding in other areas is good one, but it must be kept simple. On this I agree and that is why I tried to explain how complex it can get. KISS, Is always my motto.
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Post by cwemyss on Nov 4, 2018 13:09:16 GMT -6
I like that approach too. And thanks for steering the thread back to building.
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