Just sharing a small experience from my latest game.

[snwh]

I recently got back into rtw, mainly because I'm extremely hyped for rtw2(as I'm sure most people here are) and felt it would help tide me over.

In some ways I've had a very lucky game. I've been playing as japan, and I got random oil in japan very early. I also managed to research 6in and 8in q. 1 guns fairly early and close together. Ino ther ways though, I was not quite as lucky. AON armour definitely took its time, (I got it immediately after I laid down my largest batch of BC's, which this post is mainly about) oil firing also came very late. And last of all, is that I had a lot of trouble getting guns of a larger caliber than 12"

Anyway, I'm rambling. I was in a long and hard fought war with the russians. I had been putting off making a BC until I had AON and larger guns, as well as oil firing, and it had showed. The Russians had only one BC, but it was making a complete mockery of me.




It not only had it's 10 13" guns, something that was better than any of my battleships at the time (I actually only had two BB's. one used wing turrets, and the other used a cross deck fire design, this was on very large fleets, so it was not a great situation), but it was also faster than all of my light craft, which mainly consisted of very badly aging light cruisers and a handful of CA's that were slow enough to only be liabilities.

My solution was the Chio class battlecruiser.




I made quite a few of them, due to a government mandate, I believe by the end of the war I had at least five of them fielded, but they turned out to be a huge disapointment. For whatever reason they were slower than the russian BC, I don't know why I designed them that slow, I guess it can only be carelessness. Not only that, but the triple turrets, and modern superfiring B and X? turrets which I thought would give the ship a massive advantage, actually harmed it significantly, I was not expecting the triple turrets to be so unreliable (I forgot you had to get a tech for that), often multiple turrets would be down, and so its extra two gun advantage almsot never came into play, not to mention they were smaller guns.The ship didn't even have better Armour having a larger displacement. The only thing that it really had going for it, was it's long range (for more intercepts) and decent deck armour (which I had added in to help future proof the design.


However oddly enough, these ships became the number one ships in my late game fleet. Which is what convinced me to write this post.

Now, I had always planned on upgrading my triple turreted 12" designs with larger caliber double turrets. So the Chio's had been made with hat in mind (hence the thicker deck armor) However I was having no luck on that front. After the war with russia, I had been biting my nails, waiting for 15" guns to fall in my lap. That was when, while looking through the almanac, I noticed that my long time ally, the British, had not only 15" guns, but 16" guns! And a crazy idea came into my head.


Could I retrofit the Chio class with British guns?

I knew you could build ships in foreign yards, but I wasn't sure I could retrofit them. And besides that, I had always been wary of building in foreign yards int he first place. I had been told it was a very scary thing, where your precious ships could be interned at the first whiff of bad relations, or outbreak of war.

However, Britain was my ally, with zero tension. Whats more, I found out there 16" guns were quality 1. I decided to give it a shot.

The result, was this




The ship was unexpectedly a monster. Although not show in the picture, after the first ship was converted, GB got improved fire control, which was two firecon's ahead (I was still on central at the time). I also rebuilt the engine room, giving it an extra two knots, putting its speed on par with most BC's. It lost some turret armor, which was sad, but with 8 16"q1 guns, and a short retrofit time of only eight months, the Chip class became the queen of the seas, and stayed that way.

Funnily enough, following japan's tradition of super capitals, all of my Battleships were too large to be refit in GB's yard, and as such The chio class finished the game far outgunning my capital ships, which out-displaced them by almost 20k tons (they were max displacement 52kton ships)

Anyway, lesson learned. I think I'm going to start keeping a much more careful eye on what my allies shipyards can do for me from now on. I also need to work a lot harder on my ship building timing.

I would love to hear comments on the design btw. I'm not very experienced in rtw, so sometimes its hard to pinpoint where I went wrong.

[aeson]

Personally, I think 90 rounds/gun, while adequate, is a bit on the low side even with 16"/Q1 guns, and I might've considered dropping a turret during the reconstruction to maintain the original armor thickness on the remaining turrets (or perhaps even up-armor the remaining turrets - 13" turret face armor is a bit iffy later in the game - though since the belt armor is only 8.5" thick it might not be worth doing even with the 3" deck armor backing up the belt armor). If the 210 tons free shown isn't an artifact of opening the design, I would also suggest spending it on something as there are no bonuses for unused tonnage.

Since submerged torpedo tubes are unusable over 25 knots, I might also consider dropping the pair you have for a single bow or stern tube for reduced vulnerability to flooding from hits on submerged torpedo flats and to free up a bit of tonnage, or replace the submerged tubes with above-water tubes if you're at a stage of the game where you can do that. That said, submerged tubes aren't that much of a vulnerability and you won't gain that much tonnage by dropping one.

I would also suggest thinking about how much that 4" extended belt armor is doing for you and whether or not it was worth the cost; it's probably not going to stop anything much heavier than a 6", 7", or perhaps 8" shell at reasonable engagement ranges, and it's costing you over a thousand tons. Similarly with the 1.5" extended deck armor.

X? turrets

The aft centerline superfiring turret you used is called V by the game, is unlocked by the Superimposed X Turret tech, and would probably historically have been called X by the British Royal Navy, 3 by the United States Navy, and C or Caesar by the Kaiserliche Marine (Imperial German Navy) in the configuration in which you designed your ship. I don't know what convention the Japanese followed for identifying specific turrets, though if it's modeled on any of these my money would be on the British system.

[mobeer]

Was this a refit? I find refitting existing ships to be rather expensive. Next time consider just the cost of upgrading the fire control only, and how much would be saved as a contribution towards a whole new ship.

I have never found benefit from having for Long Range.

If you intend to rely on the big guns then chances are the torpedo tubes will never be used.

I agree with the previous comments about ammunition - I would want a lot more. If you are short of ammunition in battle your crews will slow their rate of fire to conserve it. I would rather they have plenty to use.

[aeson]

Dec 15, 2018 10:22:16 GMT -6 mobeer said:

If you intend to rely on the big guns then chances are the torpedo tubes will never be used.

I like to have at least one torpedo tube on all my big ships even if they never use their torpedoes since it lets me see the torpedo range circle with their division selected.

[snwh]

aeson
Yeah, even while I was designing it, I was worried that 90 rounds a gun wouldn't be sufficient. However 16" ammo is so heavy, I didn't want to lower the turret armor any more to compensate for more shells. I don't think there were many other good places to take the weight out of at that time. Reducing the engine speed wouldn't work, since it was only on par with contemporaries at 28kts, I suppose I could have reduced secondaries though. It would be a tough choice. the origional design I believe carried 145 rounds of ammo for the 12" guns, so I may have gotten quite carried away reducing it. But I figured with the slow rate of fire, I would still be ok.

In hindsight, getting rid of the torpedo tubes might have bought me five more rounds, and had I known wha tthe limit was on underwater tubes, I would have replaced them.

I think a good lesson to take out of this, is that if I'm planning to replace the guns anyway, I should give the ship a bit more tonnage leeway than usual lol.

However, I feel torps were still a good choice, not just for the torpedo circle, but also for night engagments. I used to never have torps on any of my capital ships, since light forces were basically made for that, wouldn't that just be wasting space? But as I've been playing more, I've been running into more and more situations where nightime forces my BB's and BC's in closer than comfortable, and I've had to detach a lot of BB's due to torp hits. So I've revised my opinion somewhat. Plus, your a lot less likely to lose a battleship or battlecruiser, when coming in close to an enemy, than a destroyer or a light cruiser.

As for the BE armor, since it's not an AON design, wouldn't it be worse not to have it at all? It feels like the ship would be much more prone to flooding damage, as well as certain less important machinery not being protected at all. Maybe the better option would be to lose the long range, and then uparmor the extended portions a bit, i'm not sure. (sad thing is, as soon as I finished laying all the ships of this class down, I finally got AON xD)

mobeer
It was indeed a refit. The most significant change was going from triple 12" guns to dual 16" guns, but I also slightly upgraded the machinery so the design could manage two more knots. I'd made the original way too slow.

I have to agree with not using the long range next time. It does have its uses, I've read it makes interceptions of raiders more likely, and I do feel like thats the case. However, I think for this design it was just too much of a cost to be worth it, next time I think I'll leave long range for light cruisers, if that.

However, I think I have to respectfully disagree about refitting. I think it was the right choice in this situation. I believe I had five of these ships built, and once I tested them, they performed very poorly, right out of the dock. It was my mistake for designing them for the moment, and not 33 months later when they would actually leave the dock.

The monthly cost of the refit was indeed pretty high, but it was only for eight months. I don't remember the exact cost, but it was pretty close to the same monthly cost of building a new ship. Which means that I could have one new ship (with 12" guns) for the cost of 3-4 of these ships with 16" guns and better firecon. Not only that, I could get them out much quicker if I could pay for more of them at once.

Turns out it worked pretty well, the first two rolled out of dock just before a war with france, with the other three arriving early in the war. Not to mention it saved five rather expensive ships from being near useless against france.

I don't mean to be belligerent, I just feel like I should make a case for when refits can be useful. Hope I didn't come off as adversarial.

[aeson]

Dec 15, 2018 17:06:29 GMT -6 snwh said:

As for the BE armor, since it's not an AON design, wouldn't it be worse not to have it at all? It feels like the ship would be much more prone to flooding damage, as well as certain less important machinery not being protected at all. Maybe the better option would be to lose the long range, and then uparmor the extended portions a bit, i'm not sure. (sad thing is, as soon as I finished laying all the ships of this class down, I finally got AON xD)

Reducing or removing the BE/DE armor without having 'proper' AoN armor does leave the ship somewhat more vulnerable to progressive flooding from hits in areas normally protected by BE/DE armor, yes, but on the other hand you have to consider what you're protecting the ship against. 4" BE and 1.5" DE armor isn't going to do much against capital ship main battery shells, and while it might stop capital ship secondary and cruiser main battery shells at reasonable engagement ranges those guns also aren't usually that much of a threat to big ships by the time you're fielding 16" guns. The most important stuff on the ship is protected by the main belt (B) and deck (D) armor, and B/D armor is additionally more likely to be hit than BE/DE armor as it covers more area and is more centrally located on the ship (especially in long-range gunnery engagements; as range increases, it becomes increasingly difficult and eventually impossible to specifically target a given point on the ship, so the aiming point shifts to more or less where you expect the center of the target to be by the time your shells can reach it).

It's not wrong to have relatively heavy BE/DE armor, but it's also something that might be worth cutting down. It doesn't protect anything critical, and 0-2" BE armor is probably about as good as 4" BE armor when it gets struck by a 16" shell - possibly better, as the odds of a pass-through hit should be higher with less armor - while costing you a lot less tonnage.

Reducing the engine speed wouldn't work, since it was only on par with contemporaries at 28kts

On the other hand, there's also nothing wrong with a 27kn ship; 28kn contemporaries won't be enough faster than it to gain any significant advantage from their speed, and I personally don't find a maximum speed of 27kn to be much of an issue even when the computer's fielding 30kn and occasionally 31kn battlecruisers. I don't know if it would have been worth rebuilding the ship for 27kn instead of 28kn, but it's an area where you could perhaps have saved some tonnage without losing much.

That said, I might be biased; I tend to prioritize armor before firepower and both before speed, unless I have the docks and can afford to build a ship big enough to have everything.

I suppose I could have reduced secondaries though.

With only six secondary guns on each broadside I don't think it'd be very worthwhile, especially if you're concerned about defense against light forces in night engagements. Maybe dropping from 6" to 5" and putting the guns in twin or triple turrets, but I wouldn't reduce the secondary battery much more than that.

[snwh]

aeson
ahhh, I see your point pretty well now. Your right, 2" belt probably would have been a better choice. I'll try to keep that in mind when I get my next game started up. I need tos top being lazy and check penetration values more often, as it would save mistakes like this. Thanks for that ^^

Quick question, what sort of guns do you like to use as secondaries and tertiary on battleships? I've sort of just used 12-14 6" with no tertiaries as my standard secondary compliment on big ships. Pretty much in every game now that I think about it.

Would something smaller be a better idea? Or perhaps including smaller tertiary? I've always avoided them because I'm afraid of firing penalties. I know you can get them from too many similar sized shells firing at a target, as well as tertiaries not having access to any sort of fire control.

[aeson]

Dec 15, 2018 18:02:45 GMT -6 snwh said:

Quick question, what sort of guns do you like to use as secondaries and tertiary on battleships? I've sort of just used 12-14 6" with no tertiaries as my standard secondary compliment on big ships. Pretty much in every game now that I think about it.

Would something smaller be a better idea? Or perhaps including smaller tertiary? I've always avoided them because I'm afraid of firing penalties. I know you can get them from too many similar sized shells firing at a target, as well as tertiaries not having access to any sort of fire control.

It depends a bit on how far into the game you are, on what you have available, and on what kinds of targets you intend the guns to engage. My feeling is that 6" and heavier guns are more of an anti-cruiser or anti-battleship armament, 5" guns are more of an anti-small cruiser or anti-large destroyer armament, and 4" or lighter guns are an anti-small destroyer armament. My predreadnought and semidreadnought battleships tend to have a 6" or heavier secondary battery to support the main battery when engaging battleships and a 4" (or 3", if I need to save tonnage - note that a 3" tertiary battery will only engage destroyers and maybe minesweepers whereas a 4" or heavier tertiary battery will engage all ship types) tertiary battery for defense against destroyers, early dreadnought battleships and battlecruisers will typically have a 4" or 5" secondary battery, and later ships will have 5" or sometimes 6" secondary batteries - typically 5" because you can carry more guns for the same tonnage and late-game 1500t destroyers aren't resistant enough to 5" guns for me to feel that 6" guns are needed.

As a related aside, I feel that 3" guns become inadequate for anti-DD work once destroyers larger than perhaps 600-700 tons start to become prevalent while 4" guns start to become inadequate once destroyers get to around a thousand tons. 5" and especially 6" guns, meanwhile, aren't particularly well suited to engaging small destroyers as early game accuracy isn't great (which prevents you from taking full advantage of the range advantage that the 5" and especially 6" guns have over 4" and especially 3" guns), 6" and possibly 5" guns have accuracy penalties against ~700t and smaller destroyers,* and the higher damage potential of the heavier 5" and 6" shells is less useful than the higher rate of fire of the lighter 3" and 4" guns when one or two 3" or 4" hits are often enough to mission-kill or sometimes sink small destroyers.

All that said, having your lightest battery comprised of 6" guns can work well enough in the early game and a 4" secondary battery will probably work well enough in the late game.

*I am not sure against exactly what sizes of destroyers the accuracy penalty applies.

[snwh]

Thanks for the really detailed reply! This helps me a lot, really good points to think about, now I can be a lot more deliberate about my secondaries on ships. Now that I'm thinking about it, looking at their listed penetrations, and partially deciding secondaries on that isn't a bad idea either.

This has been really helpful, I think my ship design in my next match will probably be leaps and bounds better ^^

[boomboomf22]

A couple caveats. First, all respect to aeson, but I have seen my 3" tertarys engage non DDs, you just have to be at sucidally short range. Secondly BE armor is a mixed thing for me. Late game (1916ish) even without armor go all the way down to 2" is definitely the right choice, however my experience has been that heavy BE is not always a bad choice earlier in the game due to the fact that it will stop glancing main gun hits and also non glancing a longer ranges cause guns aren't as good. So there is come cause for 6"ish or heavier BE at some points especially on predreads which are prone to BE flooding. Heck I ran a game as AH once where I was doing 12" full belt ships. Definitely not optimal by ho boy where they tough footballs of armor.

[director]

I understand that there are things that cannot be changed during a refit, so I know you couldn't change the Long range classification even if you wanted to. I just think you'd have more disposable, useful tonnage had you stuck with medium. I'm assuming you had a good reason for giving them Long range in the initial design - was it to use them for raiding?

[rimbecano]

Dec 15, 2018 19:30:59 GMT -6 aeson said:

Dec 15, 2018 18:02:45 GMT -6 snwh said:

Quick question, what sort of guns do you like to use as secondaries and tertiary on battleships? I've sort of just used 12-14 6" with no tertiaries as my standard secondary compliment on big ships. Pretty much in every game now that I think about it.

Would something smaller be a better idea? Or perhaps including smaller tertiary? I've always avoided them because I'm afraid of firing penalties. I know you can get them from too many similar sized shells firing at a target, as well as tertiaries not having access to any sort of fire control.

It depends a bit on how far into the game you are, on what you have available, and on what kinds of targets you intend the guns to engage. My feeling is that 6" and heavier guns are more of an anti-cruiser or anti-battleship armament, 5" guns are more of an anti-small cruiser or anti-large destroyer armament, and 4" or lighter guns are an anti-small destroyer armament. My predreadnought and semidreadnought battleships tend to have a 6" or heavier secondary battery to support the main battery when engaging battleships and a 4" (or 3", if I need to save tonnage - note that a 3" tertiary battery will only engage destroyers and maybe minesweepers whereas a 4" or heavier tertiary battery will engage all ship types) tertiary battery for defense against destroyers, early dreadnought battleships and battlecruisers will typically have a 4" or 5" secondary battery, and later ships will have 5" or sometimes 6" secondary batteries - typically 5" because you can carry more guns for the same tonnage and late-game 1500t destroyers aren't resistant enough to 5" guns for me to feel that 6" guns are needed.

As a related aside, I feel that 3" guns become inadequate for anti-DD work once destroyers larger than perhaps 600-700 tons start to become prevalent while 4" guns start to become inadequate once destroyers get to around a thousand tons. 5" and especially 6" guns, meanwhile, aren't particularly well suited to engaging small destroyers as early game accuracy isn't great (which prevents you from taking full advantage of the range advantage that the 5" and especially 6" guns have over 4" and especially 3" guns), 6" and possibly 5" guns have accuracy penalties against ~700t and smaller destroyers,* and the higher damage potential of the heavier 5" and 6" shells is less useful than the higher rate of fire of the lighter 3" and 4" guns when one or two 3" or 4" hits are often enough to mission-kill or sometimes sink small destroyers.

All that said, having your lightest battery comprised of 6" guns can work well enough in the early game and a 4" secondary battery will probably work well enough in the late game.

*I am not sure against exactly what sizes of destroyers the accuracy penalty applies.

Early on, I tended to prefer two-battery designs even in the pre-dreadnought era, at which point I tended to use a 5" or 6" secondary battery through the entire game. I've since come to like having an intermediate battery for anti-cruiser work in the early game, which tends to be 7" at first, so my tertiaries tend to be 4". I never use anything smaller than 4" on any ship, ever, except to fill up extra tonnage on destroyers when main armament, torpedo, and speed adjustments can't bring the tonnage balance to exactly zero. I like using 5" on destroyers if centerline armament limits allow me to combine that with a reasonable torpedo armament (I find that 5" destroyers tend to perform better in destroyer-only engagements, but in fleet engagements, not having a big torpedo armament tends to defeat the purpose of having destroyers in the first place). My 1500 tonners tend to carry 6" armaments unless 5" has better quality.

[snwh]

Dec 16, 2018 20:24:12 GMT -6 director said:

I understand that there are things that cannot be changed during a refit, so I know you couldn't change the Long range classification even if you wanted to. I just think you'd have more disposable, useful tonnage had you stuck with medium. I'm assuming you had a good reason for giving them Long range in the initial design - was it to use them for raiding?

Yeah, there are some things I couldn't change when I sent them into refit. I remember specifically I had trouble with the secondary turrets, I wanted to convert them into double turrets, since by that time the tech had matured much more, but it wouldn't let me. I'm not sure if it would allow me to remove single turrets or not. I think you can change its range when you refit though, I would have to try it to be absolutely sure. (That would be a lot of free tonnage to use in a refit though. I mainly meant to stop using long range on my future cruiser designs)

The reason I used long range on the BC was so it could be a more capable raider-hunter. I don't think I would ever use a BC as a raider. I had read from a wedocument titled 'Fredrik Tidbits' (that I had dug up somewhere on this forum) that longer range improves the chance of intercepting raiders.

To clear this up:

Ships with long range will:
* Have better chances to escape interception as raiders.
* Better chances of sinking merchants if raiders.
* Better chance of intercepting raiders.
* Less risk of being interned or scuttled from lack of fuel.
* More fuel when a scenario starts (rarely of importance).

Ships with reliable engines will have:
* Less chance of engine problems in scenarios.
* Less chance of needing to return to base area when at sea (getting a *).
* Less risk of being interned or scuttled from engine problems.

However playing around with it, I'm not sure the chance is improved enough to justify the extra tonnage.

rimbecano
Thats something to think about. 5" guns on my destroyers has sorta been a goal of mine. I almost never actually do it though. I really want a 6x5" gun in three turret DD, but that sort of stuff always comes too late in the game.

I usually use 3" on DD's a lot, since I weigh them down with a lot of torpedoes. the only time I really ever use destroyer guns is in convoy raids, but I do wonder if that isn't squandering their potential.

[aeson]

Dec 16, 2018 21:45:30 GMT -6 snwh said:

I remember specifically I had trouble with the turrets, I wanted to convert them into double turrets, since by that time the tech had matured much more, but it wouldn't let me. I'm not sure if it would allow me to remove single turrets or not.

You're allowed to remove turrets completely, but if you want to change the number of guns in the turret you'll need to change the gun caliber at the same time.

I think you can change its range when you refit though, I would have to try it to be absolutely sure.

At least in the current version of the game (v1.34b1), you cannot change range during a refit even when you replace the ship's machinery.

[snwh]

oh, I should have specified I meant the secondary guns. My bad, I'll edit it. I meant moving the secondaries from 6" single turrets to 6" double turrets. I think I even tried to move them down to 5", but I don't remember well.