Battleships:
Ocean: Pretty standard first-class predreadnought battleship. I personally prefer 6" secondary batteries, but there's nothing wrong with an adequately-protected 7" secondary battery. Having said that, I think 4" armor on a 7" secondary battery might be a little light going forwards, though it's probably acceptable, and I'd caution you that the 1.5" extended deck might be a little thin later in the game since it's what protects the tops of the secondary battery. Regardless, the battleship is adequate.
One thing that you might want to consider, since you're planning a Jeune Ecole game, is to design your battleships more along the lines of a monitor, coastal defense ship, or second-class battleship, sacrificing any or all of range, freeboard, accommodations quality, and armament in exchange for reduced cost, which either lets you have more of them or spend more money on the cruisers that you really want. An example of a "monitor" that I've used is the
Wittelsbach-class monitor shown
here:
I've made - and used with a reasonable degree of success - smaller legacy fleet monitors in other games. If you really want to go small, I believe that the smallest legal predreadnought battleship is 5,100 tons and the lightest legal predreadnought battleship main battery uses 7" guns.
Armored/Heavy Cruisers:
Montcalm: I'd be slightly worried about the 7" secondary battery with only 3" secondary and 1" extended deck armor. Aside from the 7" secondary battery, this looks like a fairly normal large first class cruiser to me, and my only suggestion would be to consider exchanging the 7" secondary battery for a larger 6" secondary battery, or perhaps more tertiary guns or speed.
Gueydon: Again, looks to me like a fairly normal large first class cruiser. I might consider combining the 6" and 3" batteries into a single 5" or maybe 4" battery, maybe increasing the main battery caliber to 10" at the same time.
Protected/Light Cruisers:
Sfax: This looks like a somewhat-undergunned general-purpose second class cruiser to me, not like a fleet scout. If you want a fleet scout, I'd suggest redesigning the ship on something between 3,000 and 4,000 tons, probably thinning down the main belt and cutting the extended armor, and possibly also thinning the turret armor, dropping to short range or cramped accommodations, or changing engine priority to speed. If you want a general-purpose second class cruiser, I'd still cut the extended armor and I might also drop a knot and thin the main belt and turret armor in exchange for more 6" guns or perhaps a heavier secondary battery. Interestingly, if you're willing to cut a knot, you could redesing Sfax as a 6,200t armored cruiser using the sloped deck scheme (instead of protected cruiser), give it a 3.5" main belt, and have eight 6" guns in four twin turrets (A, Y, two wing turrets), though you'd need to drop the extended armor - and it'd be about 1.5 million less expensive to build.
Tage: This looks like a severely-undergunned general-purpose second class cruiser to me, not like a raider/station ship. If you really want a raider/station ship, I'd take this one back to the drawing board bearing several things in mind:
- One, on Very Large fleet size and using an unmodified map file, France has four sea zones that want station tonnage. The Mediterranean wants 6,000 tons; West Africa and the Indian Ocean each want 4,000 tons; and Southeast Asia wants 17,000 tons. 5,200 tons is inefficient for single-cruiser coverage of West Africa and the Indian Ocean, inefficient for two-cruiser and too small for single-cruiser coverage of the Mediterranean, and too small for three-cruiser and inefficient for four-cruiser coverage of Southeast Asia, but covers Southeast Asia efficiently enough when paired with a Gueydon that I suspect that that's something which you had in mind when you chose its nominal displacement.
- Two, commerce raiders and station ships neither need nor particularly want to be capable of fighting good cruisers - sinking other warships isn't really their job. Sinking enemy merchants and the odd AMC raider, showing the flag, and providing enough of a presence to prevent an enemy from trivially invading colonial possessions is what raiders and station ships are there to do. Cutting costs by cutting "unnecessary" armor is very much something which is reasonable to do on such a vessel. You might also cut back on the speed; station ships don't really need to be fast, though raiders like a bit of speed for evading more powerful patrollers and escaping interceptors.
- Three, raiders don't count towards station tonnage. If you want to have cruisers available to employ on raiding duties and don't want to lose station coverage during wartime, you're going to need more than the minimum number of colonial/raiding cruisers. At almost 20M/ship, you're unlikely to have that kind of slack in the colonial squadrons using Tage-class cruisers, at least until you start shifting older fleet cruisers into the colonial fleet.
- Four, raiders can be scuttled or interned for lack of fuel even with long range, and they can be scuttled or interned by mechanical troubles even with reliable engines. At almost 20M/ship, the Tage-class cruiser is in my opinion a bit of an expensive ship to have running that risk, at least when new, and they're a bit expensive to have in sufficient numbers where losing one like that isn't much of a problem.
Bearing these things in mind, I would suggest going for a much more minimalistic colonial/raiding cruiser design, or perhaps even distinct raiding and colonial cruiser designs. You can make a pretty decent legacy raiding cruiser on 2,100 tons, which, conveniently enough, is also reasonably efficient for your colonial station tonnage requirements (two each for West Africa and the Indian Ocean, one and a Montcalm for Southeast Asia, and possibly three for the Mediterranean if you don't want to detach something from the home fleet instead), and each one of them will probably cost you less than half as much as a single Tage - for the cost of four Tages, you might be able to afford eight to ten 2,100t cruisers, giving you a surplus of three to five cruisers over the minimum colonial fleet sketched out above. They won't be good combatants, but with a broadside of only three 5" and four 3" guns Tage probably isn't, either, and the 2,100-tonners will be a lot less expensive per ship.
Destroyers:
Fourrage: For what's notionally a torpedo boat, this seems to me as though it's somewhat lacking in torpedo tubes. You might want to consider cutting back on the speed, range, accommodations quality, or gun armament for a couple extra torpedo tubes, if you really want to have a torpedo boat. I personally prefer my legacy fleet torpedo boats to have six tubes, even though it means that they won't be any faster than 26 knots (or 25 knots with something approximating a decent gun armament); 25-26 knots is more than sufficient for launching torpedo attacks against predreadnought and semidreadnought battleships, and in my experience their useful front-line service lives are about as long as those of faster 500-tonners. The 600- and 700-ton derivatives get faster and can carry halfway decent gun armaments, too, though they still won't be as good as less torpedo-specialized destroyers in destroyer engagements.
Sacrifiable: Nothing much to say here, aside from that the name ("expendable") probably won't be a source of much inspiration for the crews - not that "fodder" is much better in that regards.
Personally, especially if you're only building 14 destroyers in total for the legacy fleet, I'd suggest picking one design for the entire destroyer fleet rather than building two small classes. It's less likely that you'll lose enough to be reduced to very small or mixed-class divisions when all of the available destroyers are in a single class, whereas with 14 ships split between two classes even light losses are more likely to bring you down to a point where the game regularly gives you mixed-class or very small destroyer divisions. The two classes might also experience dissimilar loss rates, in which case you might lose all the ships of one class and so be deprived of its capabilities. With how similar your Fourrage and Sacrifiable classes are, I don't know that that'd really be that much of an issue for you, but it might still be irritating.
Some suggestions for early fast light surface raiders:
I've used designs similar to all three; my preference is for the 7" or 8" versions due to how the computer reacts to them, and because their fairly heavy armament sometimes allows them to actually sink interceptors - not unscathed, mind you, unless you're really careful about controlling the range, but I've had 7" and 8" light raiders seriously damage or occasionally sink 5,000t 6" cruisers before. Just be aware that they usually lose the engagement even when they win, either sinking outright or sustaining enough damage to be scuttled or interned. 24-25 knots will probably be fast enough that nothing that the computer'll build can catch it for the first five years of the game, and probably won't really be inadequate until 1910-ish. If you really want to, my recollection is that you can usually rebuild them for around 27 knots just as their 24-25 knots starts to look inadequate and extend their service lives that way, though I don't think it's much less expensive than building new light surface raiders.