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Post by dohboy on Jul 12, 2019 16:43:25 GMT -6
I get that Russia is at a disadvantage in the blockading business, I understand and agree with the reasons for it. But if all my ships are faster than theirs, and I have more of them, how can they blockade me and decline battle at the same time?
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Post by aeson on Jul 12, 2019 17:13:14 GMT -6
I get that Russia is at a disadvantage in the blockading business, I understand and agree with the reasons for it. But if all my ships are faster than theirs, and I have more of them, how can they blockade me and decline battle at the same time? Because every time the Russian Baltic Fleet sorties into the North Sea it spends the better part of a week in transit? It's roughly 600 nautical miles from the Baltic States to the North Sea end of the Skagerrack, and then another 300 nautical miles or so to the North Sea end of the English Channel or the vicinity of the Orkney and Shetland Islands, which at a sustained cruising speed of 10 to 16 knots is about 2-3 days to get out of the Baltic and then another day or so to cross the North Sea, and then you have to do the same thing going home.
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Post by dohboy on Jul 12, 2019 17:21:20 GMT -6
How long can my fleet stay on station when they decline battle 50 miles off Brest? At this point I am blockading them and not getting credit for it.
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Post by mycophobia on Jul 12, 2019 17:56:54 GMT -6
I just feel if the blockade carried out as a guerre de course by constantly refusing battle and still hunting down merchants, it should be done through the game's raider mechanic and not blockading mechanic. Sending lots of ships to attack merchants and avoid battle(which is what currently the AI's constant refusal of battle blockade is doing) is fine, but it will mean that these ship cannot handle heavily escorted convoy, can be hunted down individually, and may open yourself to a counter blockade if you split too much force to raid. Currently AI gets all the benefit of a guerre de course blockade, with none of the risks and drawbacks.
If the enemy is constantly avoiding battle, he will not be able to keep the sea lane closed on consistent manner, but he can disperse his fleet(through the raiding command) and use mobility to maintain a de-facto blockade, which is represented well by the game's raider mechanic, and can be countered by assigning heavy escort(this in turn lead to a split of the defender's main battle fleet, which is useful for the raiding faction to turn the table as well). The current blockade should only be reserved situation where a nation is able to maintain consistent naval advantage and not afraid to beat back attempts of breakthrough.
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Post by aeson on Jul 12, 2019 18:34:58 GMT -6
How long can my fleet stay on station when they decline battle 50 miles off Brest? At this point I am blockading them and not getting credit for it. The whole fleet? Probably a couple days to a week, if nothing happens - it's ~1,300nmi from Kaliningrad to Brest via the English Channel if you can't use the Kiel Canal, which puts the one-way transit time at ~3.5 days at 16 or ~5.5 days at 10 knots so you're spending at least a week in transit, and I'd guess that "medium range" probably represents a ~5,000nmi cruising range at 10 to 16 knots, at least on battleships and battlecruisers, since that seems to have been roughly average for European battleships so unless you have a well-developed fleet logistical train with a decent ability to replenish ships at sea your ships won't have more than about 40% of their fuel stores available for whatever they're doing on station, and you can use up a lot of fuel fast if you have to steam at high speed for any reasonable length of time. On top of that, your ships probably weren't designed to carry food stores that would last much, if any, longer than the fuel stores would at cruising speed since you're going to need to resupply the ship before it runs out of fuel anyways, and at some point they'll also need to return to a port for maintenance work that can't be done at sea with whatever your ships have at hand.
That said, it's unlikely in the extreme that the blockade is being maintained by a battle fleet that is continuously at sea - that's extremely expensive and exposes a lot of very valuable ships to a lot of risk, and the ships weren't designed for that anyways. More likely, you'd have a bunch of obsolete cruisers and auxiliaries packed full of extra food and fuel stores keeping the blockade stations and interdicting merchant traffic while the fleet's heavy units only go out occasionally to discourage your opponent from sortieing in force against the blockade squadrons. If you were playing a power that could make the trip to the blockade stations in about the same time as the power being blockaded, or preferably less, the heavy units might also sortie in response to an enemy sortie, but as Russia blockading France your heavy units have to already have been at sea for at least a couple days before the French set out if you want to have any chance of intercepting a sortie with your own heavy units.
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Post by rimbecano on Jul 12, 2019 19:25:06 GMT -6
RtW2's "decline" button is not the equivalent of just keeping the battleships in port but every last ship of the navy; I think it obvious that a blockade could not proceed under those conditions. That's simply not true: Clicking on "decline" on a fleet battle simply means that you aren't sending your fleet to meet the enemy's fleet. It doesn't say whether you're keeping them in port or not. You could very well be keeping your battle line in port while the cruisers enforce the blockade. An enemy fleet sortie is a bunch of ships all in one place, it can, maybe, run down a few of the ships enforcing the blockade, but it can't cover a lot of sea, so its overall effect on the blockade will be minimal.
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Post by alsadius on Jul 12, 2019 20:53:44 GMT -6
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Post by dorn on Jul 13, 2019 0:51:19 GMT -6
How long can my fleet stay on station when they decline battle 50 miles off Brest? At this point I am blockading them and not getting credit for it. In reality in RTW2 Russian surface fleet cannot blockade France at all without using ports of some west European nation. It is just too far and even if this happen France could be supplied from south France. In game it is simplified by those coefficients.
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Post by mycophobia on Jul 13, 2019 0:56:50 GMT -6
How long can my fleet stay on station when they decline battle 50 miles off Brest? At this point I am blockading them and not getting credit for it. In reality in RTW2 Russian surface fleet cannot blockade France at all without using ports of some west European nation. It is just too far and even if this happen France could be supplied from south France. In game it is simplified by those coefficients. Russia and France just seems like the most unlikely pair to fight a protracted war going into a year long blockade in general, unless both are part of much larger alliances
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Post by rodentnavy on Jul 13, 2019 2:50:55 GMT -6
RtW2's "decline" button is not the equivalent of just keeping the battleships in port but every last ship of the navy; I think it obvious that a blockade could not proceed under those conditions. That's simply not true: Clicking on "decline" on a fleet battle simply means that you aren't sending your fleet to meet the enemy's fleet. It doesn't say whether you're keeping them in port or not. You could very well be keeping your battle line in port while the cruisers enforce the blockade. An enemy fleet sortie is a bunch of ships all in one place, it can, maybe, run down a few of the ships enforcing the blockade, but it can't cover a lot of sea, so its overall effect on the blockade will be minimal. Then legally the blockade is broken. Cruisers can run guerre de course under prize rules but cannot maintain a blockade against battleships. The enemy only needs there to be one route through the blockade and that blockade is broken. There was an instance from the US Civil War of a Confederate ironclad apparently breaking the blockade of single port until the US Navy brought up more ships and the British consul decided his declaration of breach had been premature. If the enemy fleet can sortie with impunity it can meet a convoy or even a few single merchantmen thus forming an impromptu convoy and that means the blockade is broken de facto but more importantly legally. Edit: The Declaration of Paris 1856 applies from the start of the and game is probably the player's best guide to contemporary legal convention the Treaty of London 1909 never really gaining traction. 1.Privateering is and remains abolished;
2.The neutral flag covers enemy’s goods, with the exception of contraband of war;
3.Neutral goods, with the exception of contraband of war, are not liable to capture under enemy’s flag;
4.Blockades, in order to be binding, must be effective-that is to say, maintained by a force sufficient really to prevent access to the coast of the enemy.
The declaration stipulation via the above link.
Basically to be binding a blockading power needed to have issued a list of what they considered contraband, the location of the blockade and the date from which it commenced. They then needed to be able to enforce it.
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Post by aeson on Jul 13, 2019 9:34:04 GMT -6
Then legally the blockade is broken. Cruisers can run guerre de course under prize rules but cannot maintain a blockade against battleships. The enemy only needs there to be one route through the blockade and that blockade is broken. There was an instance from the US Civil War of a Confederate ironclad apparently breaking the blockade of single port until the US Navy brought up more ships and the British consul decided his declaration of breach had been premature. If the enemy fleet can sortie with impunity it can meet a convoy or even a few single merchantmen thus forming an impromptu convoy and that means the blockade is broken de facto but more importantly legally. If you can only get merchant ships through by sending a large part of your battle fleet out to meet them, the blockade is working; it is simply not feasible to provide heavy escort to every merchant ship or convoy that needs to go through the blockade to maintain a reasonable volume of merchant shipping traffic to and from your ports.
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Post by dorn on Jul 13, 2019 9:48:14 GMT -6
Another issue is that at some point escort need to return back to port. But blockading nation could shadow the convoy which is quite large and easily tracked. And blockading nation has much closer to home ports (eg. Germany blockading Russia, UK blockading Germany etc.), it can wait till the point escorts cannot protect convoy anymore. This means that convoy is limited only to quite short range by escorts. Practically difficult to reach other side of Atlantic.
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Post by rodentnavy on Jul 13, 2019 11:06:02 GMT -6
Then legally the blockade is broken. Cruisers can run guerre de course under prize rules but cannot maintain a blockade against battleships. The enemy only needs there to be one route through the blockade and that blockade is broken. There was an instance from the US Civil War of a Confederate ironclad apparently breaking the blockade of single port until the US Navy brought up more ships and the British consul decided his declaration of breach had been premature. If the enemy fleet can sortie with impunity it can meet a convoy or even a few single merchantmen thus forming an impromptu convoy and that means the blockade is broken de facto but more importantly legally. If you can only get merchant ships through by sending a large part of your battle fleet out to meet them, the blockade is working; it is simply not feasible to provide heavy escort to every merchant ship or convoy that needs to go through the blockade to maintain a reasonable volume of merchant shipping traffic to and from your ports. The thing is a battlefleet can stay at sea for days at a time, it can cover multiple breaches and of the enemy hide in port for a month except for their cruisers which runaway at the sight of smoke....then they are merely pursuing commerce warfare and the blockade would be declared legally broken.
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Post by dorn on Jul 13, 2019 11:35:44 GMT -6
It depends on range. If we take 5000 miles at 10 knots it is 500 hours, 22 days. How long it take to get through blockade? What do you do when enemy will harass you? Similar tactic British used again Spanish armada centuries ago. You will need increase speed decreasing your range rapidly. You practically operate in enemy waters, any large damage could be fatal. Your position is well known, enemy can choose when, from which direction they would attack. So even smaller fleet has advantage against you.
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Post by rodentnavy on Jul 13, 2019 12:55:44 GMT -6
It depends on range. If we take 5000 miles at 10 knots it is 500 hours, 22 days. How long it take to get through blockade? What do you do when enemy will harass you? Similar tactic British used again Spanish armada centuries ago. You will need increase speed decreasing your range rapidly. You practically operate in enemy waters, any large damage could be fatal. Your position is well known, enemy can choose when, from which direction they would attack. So even smaller fleet has advantage against you. What you are describing though is not a blockade. It is commerce warfare against escorted convoys. Further but you are adding bits i.e "Your position is well known" and reversing bits from the blockader to the blockade breaker i.e "You practically operate in enemy waters". Now in 1914 the British operated for distant blockade, it was doable because of their strategic location but also because of the location of Germany's trading partners. It still required a lot of resources. It also required a fleet willing to engage the main strength of the enemy should it put to sea. Now obviously the game handles all the different factors abstractedly giving a score to various rates of ship to represent their speed and likely patrol range and their ability to operate in the presence of the enemy all represented by a single score. Which is fine. The thing is though it is a bit silly if the enemy or yourself is not willing to engage the enemy that the blockade would still stand. Historically neutrals would have said, 'Yeah but no'.
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