On the subject of battlecruisers

[bakara]

Am I the only one which always has games where the more numerous capital ship is the battlecruiser and NOT the dreadnought? Fisher would be happy but makes engagments pretty one-sided when a fleet battle starts..

[alsadius]

I find BB to be more common, but BC are a close second. The one that really messes with me is that ships lighter than that are almost nonexistent. I routinely see fleet battles where they have more BB/BC than all other classes combined, which is completely insane. The AI does a really bad job of building balanced fleets right now.

[mycophobia]

It seems AI tends to build BC to counter existing BCs, and some time an AI nation will devote a lot, if not all its resource to BC building. As a result, this can quickly escalate into a BC race around the world if someone like US or UK decides to spam BCs, since everyone else will be trying to match.

I cant say that this happened in all my games, but I've seen it happen a few times back in rtw 1.

[jorgencab]

From a game mechanic perspective it does make sense to build mostly BC and BB ships up until carriers and air-planes start becoming the masters of the seas.

Unless there is a treaty to prohibit you to build large ships what reasons are there really other than filling up colonial needs to build something smaller than a BC?

The game do not really require the need to have even close to historical numbers of Destroyers or Cruisers on call for duty. Battle cruisers are far more potent in cruiser scenarios so you rather have them show up than a smaller cruiser. This is the reason why I try to avoid having anything but battle-cruisers and battleships and destroyers as active ships in regions and smaller most often light cruisers as raiders and for some trade protection. I even send my older battle cruisers out as raiders instead of scraping them and later turn them into CVL or CV ships.

Aside from the legacy fleet I never seem to need any armoured cruiser designs at all, which is not that far from reality either though.

The core reason why larger cruisers was built with bigger guns was the treaties during the twenties and thirties, these convoluted the design possibility and also the ships you were expected to face.

So... unless there is a treaty limiting the ships I don't see a huge reason why nations should build huge numbers of cruisers or destroyers given how the game mechanics work.

Destroyers performed soo many more duties in real life that you needed huge numbers of them. In terms of availability you could not expect 100% of all ships in any given area to be available for any given mission either. You could probably expect an availability of ships to be closer to 30-50% at any given time. This is why reliability is so important in real life.

[alsadius]

My DDs have done more killing than my BB/BCs, at a fraction of the cost. Screening ships are really very good. I can't imagine having less than a division of DDs for every division of BB/BCs.

I agree that the battle generator creates a huge pro-BC bias, but even then I find CLs useful, and DDs essential.

[jorgencab]

Jul 2, 2019 14:58:03 GMT -6 alsadius said:

My DDs have done more killing than my BB/BCs, at a fraction of the cost. Screening ships are really very good. I can't imagine having less than a division of DDs for every division of BB/BCs.

I agree that the battle generator creates a huge pro-BC bias, but even then I find CLs useful, and DDs essential.

I agree, destroyers are very useful.

It also depend on what difficulty you play on. At captain difficulty you can get extreme usage out of destroyers but at admiral difficulty they are more in line with realistic performance. Still highly useful but no overpowering.

I was mainly referring to cruisers in general and that you need far less destroyers than you needed historically to do well. You could under no circumstance expect 10 destroyers to be available in an area if you had only 10 destroyers deployed there at any given time. Given the tasks they had to perform and the maintenance requirement they need you can at most expect perhaps 30-50% to be available, the rest are out on some missions or in some stage of maintenance or refit.

[arminpfano]

Actually I find BCs much more useful than BBs, which I do not build at all - so the other nations follow, of course. I had games without any BBs.

The key is to develop dock size very fast during the first 10 - 15 years, then you can build fast BCs with roughly the same guns and armor than the smaller enemy BBs - fast BBs in principle. I never missed BBs.

[jishmael]

I personally really like CLs and build a ton of them. They perform vital scouting roles in big fleet engagements until planes are everywhere, they don't get fired upon too much when there's bcs or bbs in range and can move pretty freely to either kill the enemy screen and make way for a more aggressive push or an easier chase. I've also found them surprisingly effective in crippling enemy bcs and even bbs at close range, which they become even better at with topside torpedo tubes.

Even if they can't really join the main battle its nice to have something light and quick that can hunt down enemy CVS without being afraid of their dd Escort.

The balance shifts a tiny bit when bigger dds become available but I still love them.

I do imagine they'll be less useful outside captains mode but same goes for dds.

[generalvikus]

I think the game handles the issues of maintenance and refit perfectly well, since you will indeed often find ships in the yard for repairs due to routine mechanical failures as well as battle damage, and I've often found myself confronted with the hard choice of whether to refit a ship that I feel is needed for front-line duties. It seems to me that the battle generator does a good job of providing the proper proportion of deployed ships in combat scenarios, although perhaps destroyers are indeed a little too available.

I'm a generally risk - averse player, and so personally I feel compelled to devote considerable resources to deploying cruisers for the fleet - screening role. After DD fire control is sufficiently advanced, however, there's certainly an argument to be made for destroyers taking over the role; and perhaps you could argue that before the advent of good destroyer fire control, enemy destroyers aren't a lethal enough threat anyway to warrant dedicated fleet screening cruisers.

[jorgencab]

Jul 2, 2019 15:14:38 GMT -6 arminpfano said:

Actually I find BCs much more useful than BBs, which I do not build at all - so the other nations follow, of course. I had games without any BBs.

The key is to develop dock size very fast during the first 10 - 15 years, then you can build fast BCs with roughly the same guns and armor than the smaller enemy BBs - fast BBs in principle. I never missed BBs.

Yes... this is quite true. Once you get to a certain size your BC are basically just fast battleships with all the trim and power of both classes.

Although.. BB do have its uses. A cheaper slower ship will provide more power for blockade or to hinder the enemy blockading you for a much cheaper price. So these giant BC can be a bit pricey for that purpose.

For that reason I usually keep my old pre dreadnought around for a considerable time as Japan for example and keep building a few generations of dreadnoughts. But eventually I will build a few fast battleships to carry me into the mid or late thirties once I start shifting focus over to CV and air-planes.

[jma286]

AI definitely loves BCs more than real life countries did historically, but that's a good thing balance-wise because until fast BBs become a thing BCs are much more useful and flexible. As for CLs, the only major non-colonial role they have is as heavy scouts and screens that can bloody up opposing DDs. A non-colonial power really doesn't need many.

[rodentnavy]

Jul 2, 2019 15:37:47 GMT -6 jma286 said:

AI definitely loves BCs more than real life countries did historically, but that's a good thing balance-wise because until fast BBs become a thing BCs are much more useful and flexible. As for CLs, the only major non-colonial role they have is as heavy scouts and screens that can bloody up opposing DDs. A non-colonial power really doesn't need many.

 Which it should, really something like a coast patrol but for anti-destroyer/ light cruiser raids is needed as protecting coastal convoys was a vital role for all concerned in both world wars.  

[jorgencab]

Some things the game does not really model is the difference between naval supply of war materiel and soldiers and civilian trade. Protecting civilian trade and convoy duty in that regard is one thing and protecting troop transport and supplies to war-zones is another. Then you also have ships contribute to naval landing as artillery ships.

The Japanese for example used many old and outdated ships for convoy and shore artillery bombardment. Such ships could also in a pinch make due for ship to ship battle but their speed did not suit general naval doctrine anymore.

Cruisers was needed in large quantities because they could sail on the oceans for very long and was seaworthy in a way small ships such as destroyers and corvettes never was. These smaller vessels needed to keep much closer to ports and could not be out on the oceans for very long or the crew would suffer horribly.

When airplanes was finally introduced then the concept of scout cruiser was completely redundant as the float plane took over that role. The cruiser was then left as a long range seaworthy convoy escort ship. Smaller ships could not really keep with a convoy for very far, even in WW2 they had huge problem finding enough ships that could stay with the convoy for the entire trip over the Atlantic.

Patrolling the vast seas outside coastal areas required vast numbers of capable small cruisers and smaller ships at that time simply was not sea worthy or had the range to perform those tasks.

The trade protection system really does not seem to care if all the ships there are short, medium or long range ships for example. In my opinion you should in some cases (depending on how many colonies you have and where they are) need more or less short, medium and long range ships to fully protect the trade lanes. It should be really hard to be able to fully protect trade in most cases. Germany for example could never do this when they had many overseas colonies as they had in the early part of the game. Even great Britain had huge difficulties to get enough ships to protect its trade routes. In game you just need to build some really cheap corvettes with colony modules in order to fully protect your colonies at really cheap costs in terms of trade protection and colony patrol. Once war breaks out you can send out some cheap raiders in the form of CL and perhaps back them up with the odd old battle cruiser. This is not what happened in real life. These corvettes would not be seaworthy enough to act as anything but coastal or in very limited capacity for convoy protection and they certainly could not win in a combat against an enemy raider so would be utterly useless. Early on against submarines they were not that useful either. Their role should be as mine layer and mine sweepers which has nothing to do with trade protection per see, they also only operated close to your own major ports.

So... basically... destroyers could only operate in very small confined areas in the early part of the game and as such should be highly restricted to availability within an area. Even if deployed in the area there is a good chance it could never assist in a particular mission due to being stationed too far way. They simply did not have the range to operate with a fleet that far away from base. You needed ports really close by to have any number of destroyer able to follow you and they could not stay at sea for all that long either.

Eventually large destroyers could operate with battle fleets for long stretches of time, but they still were allot more limited than the cruisers, battleships and carriers they screened and protected and their crew needed far more rest than the crews of a cruiser or a battleship from long range missions. It is not only about a ships ability to traverse the oceans, it is also about the health of its crew by doing so. A health and effective crew is far more important than the weapons a ship carries. Destroyers also need far more maintenance from long missions than say a battleship as these small ships was more effected by the sea than bigger more seaworthy ships.

The role of destroyers also changed over times from being more of a torpedo boat threat in early nineteen hundreds to important submarine escort in WW2. In WW2 the destroyer was first a submarine escort, secondly a AA escort and thirdly as an torpedo threat. They also increasingly was made to combat other smaller ships and destroyers as destroyer gunnery became more effective and destroyers grew to the size of small cruisers. This also made destroyers very effective convoy escort as they could now perform the same roles as that of older scout cruisers in the early nineteen hundreds did.

Not sure what my point was from this wall of text... but in short... the game does not do justice to the importance of cruisers and especially smaller cruisers. Their role as scouts in battle was just a very MINOR task they could perform and not as vital a role as one might expect in the grand scheme of things. Early destroyers was rarely able to follow a fleet at very long distances and was as such a fairly limited resource. They were very potent in defence and not as much in offence unless both combatants had ports rather close to each other.

[rimbecano]

Jul 2, 2019 10:06:56 GMT -6 bakara said:

Am I the only one which always has games where the more numerous capital ship is the battlecruiser and NOT the dreadnought? Fisher would be happy but makes engagments pretty one-sided when a fleet battle starts..

In RTW1, it used to be that the AI would use a very rigid fleet mix, with BBs and BCs in roughly historical numbers. I tended, and still tend, to use A BC-heavy fleet mix with the strategy of sacrificing gun number, rather than caliber or armor, to free up tonnage for engines. Since the AI tends to go for sacrificing armor, as everyone but the Germans did historically with their BCs, my BCs would make short work of enemy BCs, and had the speed to catch up with enemy BBs, the penetrating power to wear them down, and the armor to stand up to their fire while wearing them down. I suggested that the AI adapt better to player build strategy, and whether because of my suggestion or otherwise, the AI in later versions of RTW1, and into RTW2, has tended to adapt more to the player's fleet, though more in type numbers than in design strategy. One consequence of this has been that the AI will sometimes go overboard and get really happy about building BCs.

[alsadius]

Adjusting to some extent is fine. But capital ships should never be naked, and it's getting to the point where I expect to see them without a screen. Which makes combat into an execution, which gets boring. There has to be a happy medium there.