Zero Research Budget

[JagdFlanker]

held out for RtW2 for a full 6 months, but couldn't take it anymore and have played this freaking game almost every day since new years lol

keeping in mind i play at 10% research rate/historical resources/varied tech, for something new i decided to try playing as Germany with 0% research budget

was surprised to find that although i'm not ahead in tech, i'm (generally) not far back either.  definitely get more opportunities to buy/steal new tech, and when i went with a tech sharing agreement with Russia they got a ton of tech from me and i got nothing from them so it's not crippling my research as much as i would have thought

definitely makes research a LOT more random - it's 1918 and i finally got my first gun upgrade, stealing 12" +0 from Italy so that progression has been a lot slower, and light forces i only have 2 things researched, 600t DDs and i stole double torp tubes from Japan

the big plus though is the cash you save - right now (1918) i get an extra $5mil/turn which lets me build an extra BB per batch

overall if you are looking for something different i highly recommend giving 0% research budget a shot

[dorn]

Quite interesting. I have already thought about it but I know trying to find how gun research works.

I expect that for smaller nations it could be quite good alternative or smaller nations could buy ship from other nations and focus only on important technologies which affect them - AP, HE shells, torpedoes, submarines, subdivision, ASW and fleet tactics.

[yemo]

Mar 2, 2019 11:44:00 GMT -6 JagdFlanker said:

held out for RtW2 for a full 6 months, but couldn't take it anymore and have played this freaking game almost every day since new years lol

keeping in mind i play at 10% research rate/historical resources/varied tech, for something new i decided to try playing as Germany with 0% research budget

was surprised to find that although i'm not ahead in tech, i'm (generally) not far back either.  definitely get more opportunities to buy/steal new tech, and when i went with a tech sharing agreement with Russia they got a ton of tech from me and i got nothing from them so it's not crippling my research as much as i would have thought

definitely makes research a LOT more random - it's 1918 and i finally got my first gun upgrade, stealing 12" +0 from Italy so that progression has been a lot slower, and light forces i only have 2 things researched, 600t DDs and i stole double torp tubes from Japan

the big plus though is the cash you save - right now (1918) i get an extra $5mil/turn which lets me build an extra BB per batch

overall if you are looking for something different i highly recommend giving 0% research budget a shot

Just posted in another thread that I only have 12 inch guns as germany in 1916, with 100% research rate, 10% research budget and gun research set to high from the start.

Since that means that I have (and had) to order BBs and BCs from overseas anyway, I guess I could have set my research budget to 0 from the start of the game and not be worse off. Doesn t make much of a difference to order lower class ships from overseas as well.

Great idea, will try that for the next game. Dont need to buy tech either, no point having it without competitive gun calibers.

edit: Except for the areas mentioned by dorn which are player specific and not ship builder specific.

[director]

I'm trying a USAvsCSA game with the house rule that BBs can't go much above 35,000 tons and BCs can't go much above 38,000 tons. What I wanted was to build up numbers of ships at the expense of absolute quality. What I found was that I couldn't save enough to build many more capital ships, so after 1935 I went to a 42,000-ton design with 9x17" guns. Prior designs were built around a 9x15" main armament.

I did usually have a slight budget surplus which I spent on some nice CLs (29-knot, 12x6") and very nice DDs (34-knot, 6x5" and 8TT). Won a victory over Germany with those - pulled his BBs into the sack with BCs and CLs on the NW and SW, then brought the BBs up the middle. His BBs were almost as fast as my BCs so I concentrated on damaging some, waiting for the others to fall back to support, then unleashing 24+ DDs in a cavalry charge. Bag was 6 BBs sunk and one escaped to no losses on my part.

I think if I'd wanted to succeed at a strategy of mass I'd have had to cut my BB design to 30k or even 28k, and I wasn't willing to do that.

[Adseria]

You say it makes research more random? My latest game, I'm playing UK, 10% budget, it's 1940 and we still haven't worked out how to give our light cruisers and destroyers mine rails. Everyone else has, they've been building them for decades. Me? Not so much.