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Post by aeson on Feb 8, 2019 21:44:19 GMT -6
There is also the power of manpower restrictions. While the two classes you referred initially had similar complement sizes, the Nevada class would took a crew almost 3 times larger than Tennessee-class. Size is indeed not the sole indicator, but the complexity of syztems, crew size and other factors taken into account should meant that BCs are much more time, budget and labour demanding to build than CAs and the late game US fleet that fields more than dozen BCs, less than 10 BBs and none CAs still does not feel realisitic even in a world without Washington and London Treaties. The Tennessee-class cruisers were also taken out of service over a decade before the Nevadas, and considering that the Tennessee-class cruisers were obsolete even when the Nevadas were new I would be unsurprised if the Tennessees' modernizations lagged even while they were retained in service. Meanwhile, more modern cruisers like Pensacola or Des Moines carried complements more comparable to those of contemporary battleships. |
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Post by director on Feb 8, 2019 22:35:09 GMT -6
I've always thought that nations built Treaty-era heavy cruisers for two reasons: they couldn't build capital ships, and they could put enough armament on a 10k-ton hull to beat a 6"-gun cruiser. I've never thought the Treaty cruisers were particularly good ships but... if that's all you can build, that's what you build.
Early CAs are quite valuable if properly handled - I've sunk battleships with them. And, as said above, they do get 'competed out' by battlecruisers, so there is usually a long period where it doesn't make good sense to build them. But I have gotten some good use from using heavy cruisers in later years to 'staff up' colonial areas. If they run into a BC and can't run, they aren't too expensive to lose. And if they run into a CL or two they can kill it handily. And if they run into a BC in the dark/fog/rain... Heh. Heh. Heh.
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Post by aeson on Feb 9, 2019 1:11:37 GMT -6
And if they run into a BC in the dark/fog/rain... Heh. Heh. Heh. As to the idea that heavy cruisers are good for mugging battlecruisers in the darkness, I'd rather have more light cruisers and destroyers. 8", 9", and 10" guns might be more likely than 5" and 6" guns to penetrate battlecruiser armor even in a knife fight, but torpedoes kill capital ships that get into knife fights in the dark at least as well as 8", 9", and 10" gunfire does, and even in a knife fight capital ships tend to be more resilient against cruiser guns than cruisers are against capital ship guns.
There's also that most light cruisers and all destroyers are less valuable than most heavy cruisers, if an enemy capital ship should manage to drop the heavy end of the hammer onto one of your ships despite the darkness.
I rarely find CAs useful for colonial squadrons. You have to have a lot of colonies in one sea zone before station tonnage requirements become large enough for a big ship to make much sense, and in my experience a decent light cruiser is as much as you need against one of the computer's light cruisers while a pair of decent light cruisers can often handle one of the computer's heavy cruisers even in fair weather daytime engagements.
Beyond that, it feels to me as though my late-game CAs rarely show up for an engagement unless the computer has a battlecruiser waiting to meet them in broad daylight, and if the computer doesn't have a battlecruiser then my CAs are up against something almost worthless like an AMC. It's probably not entirely accurate, but that's the way it feels. I've never yet had a game where I built a class of late-game heavy cruisers and felt that I'd gotten better service out of them than I would have gotten for an equal investment in light cruisers; I've often had games where I've built late-game heavy cruisers and felt that I'd have been better off spending the money on almost literally anything else.
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Post by rimbecano on Feb 9, 2019 17:42:47 GMT -6
I always deploy BCs to anywhere that the enemy has capital assets deployed, so I rarely run into enemy BCs without one of my own present.
Probably where I've had the most success with heavy cruisers, actually, is as scouting / screening elements in battle line engagements, when I've built enough for them to appear as such routinely.
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Post by director on Feb 9, 2019 20:37:02 GMT -6
aeson - I agree, but 1) You don't always get the force you want where you want it and 2) a CA for a BC is a good trade. I deploy CAs if I have a little surplus cash but not enough for a capital ship. I find that keeping a 'reaction force' of 4-6 cruisers in a foreign seazone lets me rapidly reinforce a threatened seazone when the enemy moves his ships in. I'd rather risk some cruisers than let him have a cheap invasion.[/quote]
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Post by generalvikus on Feb 10, 2019 4:12:57 GMT -6
I think that we should run some tests with late game CAs to see what kind of battles the matchmaker puts them into. Although they barely fall into the RTW time period, they are much more important for the interwar and World War II era, so a little research might lead to some pertinent recommendations to give to the devs for RTW2.
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Post by director on Feb 11, 2019 19:44:08 GMT -6
Easier way is to open up the mission file for a given nation. The type of ship that is the largest that can participate in a battle is listed.
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Post by beastro on Mar 1, 2019 0:36:24 GMT -6
Ship size was climbing across the board (and still does - it is why the modern Destroyer has taken over where Cruisers were, thus opening the door for the modern Frigate and Corvettes to slip in to fill their original niche displacement wise).
Heavy Cruisers before the Treaties were but the leading edge of where Light Cruisers were going on the large end of their scale.
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Post by generalvikus on Mar 2, 2019 9:23:54 GMT -6
Ship size was climbing across the board (and still does - it is why the modern Destroyer has taken over where Cruisers were, thus opening the door for the modern Frigate and Corvettes to slip in to fill their original niche displacement wise). Heavy Cruisers before the Treaties were but the leading edge of where Light Cruisers were going on the large end of their scale. Wasn't the only heavy cruiser before the treaties the Hawkings class? |
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Post by aeson on Mar 2, 2019 14:45:16 GMT -6
Wasn't the only heavy cruiser before the treaties the Hawkings class? They were the only ones designed, laid down, constructed, and commissioned before the Washington Naval Conference, yes. Japan's Furutaka-class cruisers were designed and laid down before the resultant treaty officially went into effect and I wouldn't be surprised if they were on the drawing boards before the Conference began since they were a response to the British Hawkins- and American Omaha-class cruisers.
If you drop the requirement for heavy cruisers to have ~8" guns, the Omahas might also count as an early heavy cruiser design and were designed and laid down prior to the Conference. At around 7,000 tons they're rather larger than the typical light cruiser (~4,000-5,000 tons) of the late 1910s and early 1920s, and with a dozen 6" guns they also carry a rather heavier armament than was typical (~6 6" guns) - though the configuration of the main battery is such that their broadside isn't much better. Had the Omaha-class cruisers' main battery been configured to allow all the guns to bear on the same target, the Omaha class's weight of broadside would have been about equal to that of the Hawkins-class cruisers instead of the three quarters or so of it to which they were limited by their main battery's configuration, and the navweaps pages on the 6"/53 used on the Omaha class and the 7.5"/45 used by the Hawkins class indicate that the Omahas would also have had a range advantage (though only using the guns in the twin turrets; the casemated guns would not have been able to elevate high enough to have a range advantage over the Hawkinses' turreted 7.5" guns) and might also have been able to penetrate the Hawkins-class cruisers' belt armor at practical engagement ranges, so at least on paper the Omahas could have been a fairly comparable design. That said, in practice the Omahas proved to have been attempting too much on too low a displacement. |
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Post by director on Mar 2, 2019 15:44:32 GMT -6
If you look at cruiser development before and during WW1 you can see a clear through-line toward a single-caliber main armament, more guns mounted center-line (a weight-saving compared to guns on both broadsides), faster speed and - inevitably - larger size. The battlecruiser put an end to armored cruiser development (except for ships like 'Blucher' that were already under design/construction and minor nations such as Greece's 'Georgios Averof').
The British government mostly stopped new construction of dreadnoughts during the war, which is one reason why 'Courageous', 'Glorious' and 'Furious' were designated as large light cruisers, and were not about to spend money on a new CA type that their BCs had supposedly made obsolete. The 'Hawkins' class were not conceived as armored cruisers but rather as very large light cruisers, developed up from the successful Town class ('Birmingham'). Their high speed and thin armor, as well as the use of single-mount guns, gives clear evidence of this. I believe that if they had been designed as armored cruisers they would have had an 8" or 9.2" main armament and rather thicker armor than the 2" on the gun shields as designed. They were used as guides for the Treaty regulations purely because they were the largest new cruisers around; they were large, or heavy, not armored.
So the answer is that the AI does not build CAs for the same reason as nations historically stopped building them: the BC and CL 'grew in' to render the type obsolete. What I find is that a mid-game CA doesn't have a clear mission of its own: a good CL can kill CLs as well as a CA, are cheaper to build and operate, and can be made quite fast, while a BC can kill both types without much threat to itself. Using CAs for commerce raiding is rather like putting out a fire by smothering it in bales of money: it can work, if you don't have anything better.
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Post by dorn on Mar 2, 2019 16:33:10 GMT -6
If you look at cruiser development before and during WW1 you can see a clear through-line toward a single-caliber main armament, more guns mounted center-line (a weight-saving compared to guns on both broadsides), faster speed and - inevitably - larger size. The battlecruiser put an end to armored cruiser development (except for ships like 'Blucher' that were already under design/construction and minor nations such as Greece's 'Georgios Averof'). The British government mostly stopped new construction of dreadnoughts during the war, which is one reason why 'Courageous', 'Glorious' and 'Furious' were designated as large light cruisers, and were not about to spend money on a new CA type that their BCs had supposedly made obsolete. The 'Hawkins' class were not conceived as armored cruisers but rather as very large light cruisers, developed up from the successful Town class ('Birmingham'). Their high speed and thin armor, as well as the use of single-mount guns, gives clear evidence of this. I believe that if they had been designed as armored cruisers they would have had an 8" or 9.2" main armament and rather thicker armor than the 2" on the gun shields as designed. They were used as guides for the Treaty regulations purely because they were the largest new cruisers around; they were large, or heavy, not armored. So the answer is that the AI does not build CAs for the same reason as nations historically stopped building them: the BC and CL 'grew in' to render the type obsolete. What I find is that a mid-game CA doesn't have a clear mission of its own: a good CL can kill CLs as well as a CA, are cheaper to build and operate, and can be made quite fast, while a BC can kill both types without much threat to itself. Using CAs for commerce raiding is rather like putting out a fire by smothering it in bales of money: it can work, if you don't have anything better. I sometimes build 3x2x8" cruiser later if I am smaller nation and I have not money for larger number of cruisers. I usually build this cruiser with a little better armor so this ship has clearly advantage at longer range however it costs usually about 35-40M which is similar to late 8000 tons light cruisers. The main advantage of this cruiser is that it is getting older slow as this ship have 8" guns and thus range advantage over light cruisers. The disadvantage is that RTW takes it as AC and battles composition do not favor these type of ships after introduction of battlecruiser. |
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Post by director on Mar 2, 2019 18:09:38 GMT -6
dorn - Oh, I build CAs myself - particularly if I'm playing as the USA post-1925. I just know it's not necessarily a min/max use of funds.
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