Projecting power into far-flung waters

[enmalkm]

Hi, all, new RtW player here with two finished games (Japan, Germany) under my belt. I was wondering what your strategies are for projecting power during a war into regions where you have little or no base capacity—either to blockade the enemy, attempt to trigger an invasion of your enemy's colony, or protect a small colony of yours from enemy naval dominance—and dealing with the decline in crew quality that hits unsupplied ships. Do you:

-just park a fleet unsupplied in enemy waters and watch as your crew gets suckier?
-continuously rotate ships between the unsupplied region and one in which you have enough supply, giving you blockade/foreign naval superiority for a few turns at a a time?
-keep enough ships around to constantly swap ships in and out of the disputed area, so you can keep up the blockade/superiority with newly arrived ships while your old ones return home to recover?
-something else I'm not thinking of?

As far as I'm aware, long and extreme range doesn't help with supply in terms of maintaining crew quality, just preventing interning/scuttling. I try to improve my foreign bases, but it takes a looong time to get them to where they can support a decent force.

[dorn]

Mar 27, 2019 12:54:32 GMT -6 enmalkm said:

Hi, all, new RtW player here with two finished games (Japan, Germany) under my belt. I was wondering what your strategies are for projecting power during a war into regions where you have little or no base capacity—either to blockade the enemy, attempt to trigger an invasion of your enemy's colony, or protect a small colony of yours from enemy naval dominance—and dealing with the decline in crew quality that hits unsupplied ships. Do you:

-just park a fleet unsupplied in enemy waters and watch as your crew gets suckier?
-continuously rotate ships between the unsupplied region and one in which you have enough supply, giving you blockade/foreign naval superiority for a few turns at a a time?
-keep enough ships around to constantly swap ships in and out of the disputed area, so you can keep up the blockade/superiority with newly arrived ships while your old ones return home to recover?
-something else I'm not thinking of?

As far as I'm aware, long and extreme range doesn't help with supply in terms of maintaining crew quality, just preventing interning/scuttling. I try to improve my foreign bases, but it takes a looong time to get them to where they can support a decent force.

Welcome to the forum.

It depends on task, I will try go one by one.

1. invasions

- the prabability is not high so best is to focuse on region when you have basing rights (either by your bases or by allied basis)

- in case you decide to try invade colony in are where you have no basing rights best thing is to send fleet and have several ships as reserve near by to rotate ships in that area (ships with "*" have problems and are candidate to rotate to some base), for this long range and realiable engines help, but it is usually good on cruisers

2. protect your colony

- it is much easier as you have basing rights here so it is about sending fleet here to be comparable to enemy fleet. If it is some far colony, you can have some local center (could be Southeast Asia for UK as example) when you have some reserve (more) ships to use if needed

Relating to crew quality, the most important is not having cramped accomodation. Use cramped accomodation only for ships which will serve in your home area.

If your bases are not adequate than rotation of your ships is best solution. To withdraw ships with "*" and replace them by others.

[aeson]

With regards to protecting distant colonies and projecting power into sea zones containing them: If you have the time and money to do so you can invest in expanding the bases at said colonies to allow them to support larger fleets. Go to the Map tab, click on a possession, and select 'improve bases;' each expansion will cost you 900k on Small, 1.2M on Medium, 1.8M on Large, and 2.4M on Very Large fleet size and will take a year to complete, but it'll increase the possession's base capacity by either the current amount or 50, whichever is lower (as such, if you do this, the best return on your investment comes from focusing on the colony that has the largest initial base capacity in the sea zone). I also have the impression that coastal batteries have some influence over the likelihood of a possession being invaded, though it's difficult be sure as invasions are seemingly random and the mechanics for them are rather opaque beyond a 4:1 or better fleet superiority probably being necessary.

I will also say that there is a case to be made that attempting to protect distant colonies against a near-equal power with much better base capacity in the region by stationing a fleet in the sea zone containing the threatened colonies is more trouble than it's worth, especially for a power such as Germany whose colonial empire isn't worth much to it in the first place - even on historical budget, Germany's colonial empire accounts for less than 8% of its total national resources (a bit less than 3.5% on game budget) at the start of the game, and as base resources grow naturally whereas resources from colonies remain fixed the domestic share is likely to become ever more dominant as the game progresses - and whose potential enemies are mostly already on its doorstep (France, Great Britain, Russia) or can't really threaten most of its colonies anyways (Italy, Russia; arguably also the USA and Japan, though that's a bit more iffy since Kiautschau Bay is Northeast Asia with Japan while all of Germany's Pacific insular possessions are in Southeast Asia right alongside the only major holdings that Japan and the USA have outside of their home waters - holdings which also have significantly better bases, at least at the start of the game, than Germany's colonies do). A war between Germany and France, Russia, or Great Britain will almost certainly be won or lost in Northern Europe, and Germany's probably better off relying on being able to recover a lost colony at the peace table than trying to base a big squadron out in the Pacific to challenge France or Great Britain in Southeast Asia or Russia in Northeast Asia; a war with Italy, meanwhile, is unlikely to see Italy attempting to invade a German colony.

[director]

I agree wholeheartedly with aeson - if you have bases, expand them to support the sort of fleet you expect to need there.

Trying to project power into an area where you do not have bases is, in my opinion, a waste of time unless you have lots of ships to spare and do not expect to use them in your home area (IE the United States can project some power into West Africa or Northeast Asia without bases, but you have to micromanage the constant rotation and occasionally pause operations for months to let crew quality recover.

One alternative is to take advantage of treaty offers and let your ally provide basing.

But as aeson says, picking up colonies at the peace table is vastly more likely than invasions, and you have more control over what you get.

[oaktree]

Mar 27, 2019 12:54:32 GMT -6 enmalkm said:

Hi, all, new RtW player here with two finished games (Japan, Germany) under my belt. I was wondering what your strategies are for projecting power during a war into regions where you have little or no base capacity—either to blockade the enemy, attempt to trigger an invasion of your enemy's colony, or protect a small colony of yours from enemy naval dominance—and dealing with the decline in crew quality that hits unsupplied ships. Do you:

-just park a fleet unsupplied in enemy waters and watch as your crew gets suckier?
-continuously rotate ships between the unsupplied region and one in which you have enough supply, giving you blockade/foreign naval superiority for a few turns at a a time?
-keep enough ships around to constantly swap ships in and out of the disputed area, so you can keep up the blockade/superiority with newly arrived ships while your old ones return home to recover?
-something else I'm not thinking of?

As far as I'm aware, long and extreme range doesn't help with supply in terms of maintaining crew quality, just preventing interning/scuttling. I try to improve my foreign bases, but it takes a looong time to get them to where they can support a decent force.

A lot depends on my fleet and how it compares to the opposition.

I rarely do the first option unless there is some overriding reason not to worry about my fleet crew quality running down.

With smaller powers like Italy for instance I have done the second option a few times to "poke the bear" in their home waters by sending a large force in to trigger a blockade, but generally avoid a large combat. (Since without an allied base there damaged ships can be interned.) 

The third option is the usual one, especially if I provide for a reserve that can be used to supply the ships to be rotated in.  If it looks like "*" status is going to affect enough ships to put me seriously weaker than the enemy battle line I will consider a general withdrawal for a month or two for recovery.

This is one reason I try to hold a colony in NE Asia in case I fight Japan and try to throw other countries out of various regions when taking colonies from them. 

[dougphresh]

I just picked this up in anticipation of RTW 2 and I cannot for the life of me figure out where to put my ships. I've had 3 games as France so far, and while I could be building and budgeting better, my main issue seems to be that I will always be unprepared for war with Japan or Italy. In Northern Europe and the Med I have well-built battlefleets, cruisers to spare, DD flotillas, and I can beat the Italians to a pulp (after 1910, I have no idea how to design early ships).

I have CAs and CLs throughout the world, but it seems whatever I do I have merchants being sunk or am coming up against gigantic cruiser forces.

Any advice?

[dorn]

Apr 5, 2019 19:34:43 GMT -6 dougphresh said:

I just picked this up in anticipation of RTW 2 and I cannot for the life of me figure out where to put my ships. I've had 3 games as France so far, and while I could be building and budgeting better, my main issue seems to be that I will always be unprepared for war with Japan or Italy. In Northern Europe and the Med I have well-built battlefleets, cruisers to spare, DD flotillas, and I can beat the Italians to a pulp (after 1910, I have no idea how to design early ships).

I have CAs and CLs throughout the world, but it seems whatever I do I have merchants being sunk or am coming up against gigantic cruiser forces.

Any advice?

Could you describe and send pictures of your situation? I think it is the best way that we can look at it and give you some suggestions as your topic is quite general to describe everything in short.

Even better could be if you just zip your specific save folder and post it here.

Till that I would suggest going through several threads just to look how others are doing. There are now several AAR in progress, choose one of them and look what players do.

"I have CAs and CLs throughout the world, but it seems whatever I do I have merchants being sunk or am coming up against gigantic cruiser forces."

Merchant sinkings are quite normal as you cannot save them all. They can be sunk by raiders (usually cruisers) and you can counter them by assigning your cruisers at same sea zone. However sometimes you can thwart them sometimes they just sink your merchants. And sometimes you can intercept them in battle. Merchant sinkings by submarines is more difficult as you need to use ASW ships (most useful minesweepers, destroyers and AMC in case you have Q-ships invented).

You can go with this thread. There are a lot of designs which can give you some ideas how to build ships. I would suggest not start from beginning as we as players now knows much better the game and are able to design better ships that at time of release. I would look particular when there are discussions about design as it can give you different opinions and you can try them yourself and do your opinion what works and what not.

[JagdFlanker]

Apr 5, 2019 19:34:43 GMT -6 dougphresh said:

I just picked this up in anticipation of RTW 2 and I cannot for the life of me figure out where to put my ships. I've had 3 games as France so far, and while I could be building and budgeting better, my main issue seems to be that I will always be unprepared for war with Japan or Italy. In Northern Europe and the Med I have well-built battlefleets, cruisers to spare, DD flotillas, and I can beat the Italians to a pulp (after 1910, I have no idea how to design early ships).

I have CAs and CLs throughout the world, but it seems whatever I do I have merchants being sunk or am coming up against gigantic cruiser forces.

Any advice?

i always have my single main fleet in my home waters, or if i have high tensions with a country and have my own ports in their home area i put my main fleet in their home waters in anticipation of a probable upcoming war.  say if i am France and am about to go to war with Japan i would not put my fleet in their home waters because i don't have a port there so i would concentrate in SE Asia and try to invade Japan's colony there.  if after the war starts i see that my main fleet is bigger than Japan's i may then move my fleet into the Japanese home area to blockade them but i would try and never engage in a battle there since it gets costly in ship internments, so i leave a small capital ship force in SE Asia for generating battles i can engage in and try to invade the colony

my single main fleet has most of my capital ships and all of my other supporting ships - CA/CL/DD's.  i never have any of those support ships alone, they are kept with my capital ships. 

for guarding my colonies i only use capital ships - B/BC/BB, usually my oldest class currently in service - because if a battle is generated there i will always have an equal or superior ship to the enemy and will usually win the battle.  if you use CA/CL/DD's to guard your colonies you (greatly) lower the chance you will win any engagements in those areas.  CA's might be acceptable for guarding colonies at the beginning of the game if you don't have B's available for the job, but you want to replace those with B's once you have enough built

please note my minimum speed for capital ships is 21/22kts so they can chase down smaller ships in those colony engagements

also you should keep to having no more than 3 classes of B/BB in service at once - the latest you are currently building if you don't have many, the 2nd latest to bulk up your main fleet, and the 3rd latest which only guard your colonies.  i often retire an entire class of capital ships after a war to free up budget, but depends on the circumstances

to guard my colonies i only place 1 capital ship in each seazone (maybe 2 in SE Asia) and retire the extras (usually the oldest of that class).  once a war starts i look at where i need to guard my colonies from invasion and move them around accordingly - if i am France and start a war with Germany i can assume my Caribbean and Mediterranean colonies are safe so i can put one of those ships on 'FS' (foreign stations) to guard both and use the 2nd ship to bolster SE Asia to 3 ships and try to invade the German colonies there (or wherever)

for France i keep my main fleet in Northern Europe and 2 capital ships in the Med, but if tensions rise in the Med i will swap those 2 fleets and have 2 capital ships in Northern Europe (to prevent blockade) and move my main fleet to the Med.  if you have tensions in both Northern Europe and the Med it gets tricky spitting your ships to prevent your leader from getting angry, but once a war is started you can deploy accordingly

[dougphresh]

Here's my current situation - 1907, just won a war against the USA.

I don't know how -  none of my new ships saw action and the Antilles were invaded. The only actions fought were actions where my legacy CLs and DDs fought against American ships of the same types. Ranges seemed very low, hit percentages were about 2%, and ships took up to 30 hits to go down. I think I also mishandled them - I mostly kept trying to form a line and then cross the T but things were all over the place. 

Existing Ships:



Under Construction:


I am kinda proud that I was the first to build a "modern" ship. I was the first power to have 3 centreline turrets and I think first to have a ship out with main calibre wing turrets.



The only other ship I've designed is a heavy cruiser that I hope will be a world-beater. 

[dougphresh]

And here's the save www.mediafire.com/file/gy77si76x4405u4/Game1.7z
Mods - 18+ Armour mod v5, Aeson's Map mod

[dorn]

Apr 6, 2019 10:05:05 GMT -6 dougphresh said:

As France you have 2 home areas, one in Northern Europe, the second one in the Mediterranean.

You need your main fleet (capital ships, some cruisers and most destroyers) position one of the 2 zones. It depends on your enemy. You should adapt to enemy movement so if enemy send some ships from Mediterranean you should move some ships too.

Than there is main question how you would like to win against your enemy. There are mainly 3 possibilities:

1. blockade enemy nation home area

2. merchant sinking through submarines ==> increase unrest level

3. merchant sinking through raiders ==> increase unrest level

4. by victory points and than use it to get better condition

The first option depends on fleet size. As France and ability to project power to home area of enemy. As France you can do it to A-H, Italy and Rusia. Germany and UK is out of your possibility, you need to weaken their fleets first. Japan and is difficult as your fleet is not significantly large so station in Southeast Asia and move ships to Northeast Asia is risky before weaken their fleet. USA has larger fleet, you have no access to their home areas, so I will forget this.

You find out that blockade dost not work, so you need use different strategy.

The fourth point is about making battle victories if you think you can do it go that way. You can still use it with all strategies. As know you have no large submarin fleet so using raiders is viable option. For that you need dedicated ships which are cheap as possible - thus AMC or small 2100 tons cruisers. These cruiser should have long range and ideally reliable engines.  Your only long range ships are armoured cruisers which are just to expensive for that role.

So I would suggest focusing sinking ships and than push peace when you have a lot of victory points.

Now I will go through your designs. Different members could have different opinions so just think it about one opinion.

It seems that you just built legacy fleet automatically so I will not comment ships of lecacy fleet.

Main question designing each ship should be - what is her purpose, what ships she will fight, what threats she should counter and design should be build according to that.

Brenuss class battlecruiser: design has 25 knots, 6x12", 14x8" guns - I will not have so heavy medium caliber guns as it decrease accuracy and against battleships 8" guns cannot penetrate citadel. Than 6" guns as tertially are not good. It is supposed to be anti-DD but 6" caliber is too heavy for early destroyers, 4-5" guns are ideal. I would build ship without 8" guns, only 16x4" or 16x5" guns. Armour is not effective either. Why 15" belt armour when penetration of 12" guns are at 5000 yards only     8.7" year after ship is commissioned. 12" should be enough. Turret armour should be thicker as vertical protection of main belt is enhanced by sloped deck armour. And penetration turret hits means either destroying turret or flash fire that destroys whole ship. Turret top should be a little thicker than deck armour as turret top is a little sloped so effective protection is lower. The second thing is secondary guns protection. The guns of 7" caliber and heavier lightly armoured are dangerous as if there is penetrating hits there is small chance of flash fire which coudl destroy whole ship. So protection should be high or better not use them, only up to 6" guns with just splinter protection of 2". If you do this you can see the ship is just 16.500 tons and cost about 60 M, so decreasing costs significantly without decreasing ships capabilities so much.

Lille class battlecruiser: You use wing turrets when you have available 3 turrets centerline, it should be used as it save a lot of money. On opposite the armour is to thin.

Relating to counter enemy ships, you need to see where they are and send yours in that areas but I would not bother with areas where you have no zones.

Leon Gambella armoured cruiser:

I suggest going through best ships thread.

[dougphresh]

Thank you. That was really good feedback!

Going from 1907, into 1908 - if I wanted to build brand new DDs, CLs, CAs and BCs, what would they look like?

My thinking with the BCs was - I wanted as many guns as possible. In my battles so far I have barely managed to hit anything so I thought stuffing them with guns would improve performance in the early years?

When I first got RTW I tried to build the French Fleet I know about - the 1930's. So I built CA Dupleix in 1900 with 4 x 2 8in and 8 4in and got beaten by all those 1901 designs!

I see now that I'm wasting money and time as well as weight for armour and speed on all of those guns.

[dorn]

Apr 6, 2019 14:35:02 GMT -6 dougphresh said:

Thank you. That was really good feedback!

Going from 1907, into 1908 - if I wanted to build brand new DDs, CLs, CAs and BCs, what would they look like?

My thinking with the BCs was - I wanted as many guns as possible. In my battles so far I have barely managed to hit anything so I thought stuffing them with guns would improve performance in the early years?

When I first got RTW I tried to build the French Fleet I know about - the 1930's. So I built CA Dupleix in 1900 with 4 x 2 8in and 8 4in and got beaten by all those 1901 designs!

I see now that I'm wasting money and time as well as weight for armour and speed on all of those guns.

Frankly speaking I forget that it is modded game. I just try to design ship and it give me too much free tonnage for my taste.

I would suggest you to start with unmodded game to learn principles as it seems that 18+ mod is quite unbalanced in heavy favor of armour as I can put much more armour on 26000 tons ship that in unmodded game would be possible.

If you use unmodded game, armour is not so ridiculous high so penetration is quite common in shorter range. But I think you need to start designing ships with your long term goal which would be much better in unmodded game.

[klavohunter]

I beat up on Japan as Germany in that game I reference where I played as Germany and almost entirely skipped BBs in favor of spamming BCs.

My secret in that game was being ahead of the Japanese in advanced battlecruisers, so I was able to pretty much destroy their entire battle line at my leisure with just 2 brand-new ships. The third of the class didn't even get to participate in the smackdown!

[dougphresh]

I'm trying again with no mods. I really do appreciate the help.

It's 1902, I only have a legacy fleet - what do I build to project power as France?

I'm at war with Austria-Hungary and while I have them blockaded and have won battles in the Adriatic, they have CAs off West Africa!