|
Post by akinesia on Jan 25, 2020 17:24:28 GMT -6
How much ammo do is needed?
Is it different on different size guns? or different ships?
Is it just me our once the lvl 1 guns 14,15,16 etc come up is armor just totaly outclassed? I can't find a way to get much more than 13-14 inches of belt even with magazine box. That amount has next to no use against modern leveled up big guns. Deck armor is even heavier and needs to get to 6-7 to have any real effect.
I have been considering using enough armor to defeat crusier guns and then put the rest in speed and firepower. Is that viable?
One last one how much deck armor is needed in the air age to stop getting destroyed by bombs?
I know I am asking a lot of questions but RTW2 is my new obsession.
Thanks and as always Rule The Waves!
|
|
|
Post by akosjaccik on Jan 25, 2020 17:46:43 GMT -6
To start with, anything below is just an opinion of mine and may or may not be entirely correct.
Let's say, 110+-10 for capital ships (I like to err on the high side, so 115-130 for me), 140-160 for cruisers and whatever you feel like appropriate for destroyers, roughly above that, but as due to the cubic rule shell weight drops off very heavily on this end of the spectrum, it's usually easier to stow a bit more shells without needing to sacrifice something else. Of course, you can set the bar a tad bit high for starters, and then keep track of how much ammunition do you tend to finish your battles with, then tune accordingly. Hell, this is one thing you can examine with fleet exercises. As a sidenote, autoloaders, when they switch to rapid fire, can eat away your shells like nobody's business (on paper ROF +10% by default, and +30% once target is straddled, but my memory may fail me hard here); so do take that into account.
Well, some will say that by utilizing sloped deck scheme even in late-game instead of AoN, and thereby utilizing part of the deck armor in citadel protection is absolutely the way to go, because you can't or should not avoid close-range "brawling". I am, personally, not at all that convinced, but this is still one thing you can look into and form your own opinion. Regardless, in late game your damage control will be much better (and while the shell damage goes up, so do your ships' displacement), so penetrating hits are not as massively frightening as earlier on. Plunging fire also gets more emphasis, and deck does help with that, plus bombs. You can't be totally immune, yes, but arguably you don't have to be. Still, perhaps some screenshots of your designs could help, some people here are rather experienced with über-armoring ships.
Well, try and find out. I'd say it depends. I had some good, even surprising success with some specific budget-design, all-forward lightweight battlecruisers in the past, but I generally find building relatively balanced designs more appealing.
Note that this, as penetration in general, is dependent on the armor tech level (too).
|
|
|
Post by kriegsmeister on Jan 25, 2020 18:24:54 GMT -6
How much ammo do is needed?
Is it different on different size guns? or different ships? From my experience it takes between 10-20 main gun hits on a ship of equal size to outright sink it, or cripple it enough to put torpedoes into it to finish it off. Then I look at overall general average accuracy of 1-2% of shells fired tend to hit the target, so in order to get those 10-20 rounds on target at 1-2% accuracy I need approximately 1000 total main gun shells. With that I tend to design most of my cruisers (BC/CA/CL) with enough shells to sink a single enemy of equal size plus a few extra rounds for escorts so 1200-1400, where my main battleline should have enough ammo to sink 2 ships and harass their escorts so 2000+. example a 9x8in gun cruiser would have probably 130-150 rounds per gun, and a 12x16in Battleship would have 160-200. Though I should definitely note that my battleship design is definitely in the minority and that the AI generally goes for 80-110 rounds per gun for pretty much all desigs
Is it just me our once the lvl 1 guns 14,15,16 etc come up is armor just totaly outclassed? I can't find a way to get much more than 13-14 inches of belt even with magazine box. That amount has next to no use against modern leveled up big guns. Deck armor is even heavier and needs to get to 6-7 to have any real effect.
Once Super-Dreadnoughts armed with such guns start appearing, it is pretty much impossible to be completely immune to enemy fire in the same way that you can get with start o' game CA's, So you have to start thinking about making your ships have an immunity zone where they will typically engage the target. I tend to go for the 5-10k yard band that covers most of the medium range and slightly overlaps the long range of the guns installed on the ship (short, middle, long range is determined as just 1/3 chunks of the maximum range of your guns). Cruisers tend to push out further into the long range window whereas battleships might go more medium with a bit of short range as visibility rarely lets you use the maximum range of your guns. When Aircraft bombs and radar start coming into the picture though I tend to max out my deck armor at 7-8in and sacrifice belt armor, this is enough to stop pretty much any long range gun fire and be almost immune to large bombs.
I have been considering using enough armor to defeat crusier guns and then put the rest in speed and firepower. Is that viable? You have just described the basis of the Battlecruiser, and there are many many many different viewpoints on their viability. I'll let others make their cases for or against them, but IMO any capital ship should be armored against their peers for 2 main reasons. First, Magazine detonations, all guns >6in have a chance of detonating should the be penetrated, thus if you want to avoid that you need to armor your turrets and magazines accordingly. Secondly, most battlecruiser designs will forgo machinery armor (basically everything that isn't turret) which when hit won't knock out the ship instantly like a magazine hit, but will cause the ship to slow down, which mitigates the Battlecruiser's primary advantage over standard Battleship design.
My preference for BC design is to armor against long range hits (more deck, less belt) but primarily get my speed from using a small number of of the longest range guns I have (6-8) and use them more to harass and coral the enemy into my main battleline of very slow but heavily armed and armored ships.
One last one how much deck armor is needed in the air age to stop getting destroyed by bombs? According to this thread about 6.5in
I know I am asking a lot of questions but RTW2 is my new obsession.
Thanks and as always Rule The Waves!
Questions are always welcome here on the forums, hope I helped!
|
|
|
Post by aeson on Jan 25, 2020 18:55:47 GMT -6
Is it just me our once the lvl 1 guns 14,15,16 etc come up is armor just totaly outclassed? I can't find a way to get much more than 13-14 inches of belt even with magazine box. That amount has next to no use against modern leveled up big guns. Deck armor is even heavier and needs to get to 6-7 to have any real effect. The important thing with armor is to choose an appropriate range band in which you want to fight and then design your armor scheme to adequately protect your ship against the guns you expect to be facing while fighting an engagement in that range band. For example, if I want to fight an engagement in the roughly 15,000-25,000 yard range band in 1964 and expect to be facing 17"/Q1 guns, then this: is a reasonable design. Yes, my 17"/Q1 guns can penetrate the deck armor beyond about 24,000 yards, but hits at that sort of range aren't that likely to begin with and both I and the computer will probably move to close the range more than that anyways, and yes, my 17"/Q1 guns can be penetrate the belt armor below about 15,000 yards, but with a 28-knot design speed this ship's probably fast enough to keep the range above that for most of an engagement if I want to do so unless something goes horribly wrong, and I haven't had to make any particularly egregious sacrifices nor pay an unacceptably high price for a late-game capital ship in order to make that happen. A perhaps more valid concern is whether or not this ship is adequately protected against air attack - I doubt if by this late in the game there's any bomber in the world that can't heft a thousand-pound or heavier bomb 400nmi or more - but on the other hand all the armor and torpedo protection in the world isn't going to save a ship from a sufficiently heavy air attack anyways, so at some point you have to say that it's good enough or not worth the additional cost or whatever and move on.
|
|
|
Post by akinesia on Jan 27, 2020 10:03:16 GMT -6
Another question from the newbie. At what point should I look at scraping the pre-dreadnought? Are they worth keeping around for conversion into carriers?
Are they worth just hanging onto and keep upgrading and paying for?
|
|
|
Post by wlbjork on Jan 27, 2020 10:23:46 GMT -6
That all depends on your intentions for the role. If you consider them still useful, hang on to them by all means, but I think that once you have some better main guns that their lifetime is limited, not to mention that they will always be stuck with the armour available at the design phase.
Carrier conversion is an option, but consider that by the time carriers are available you will have access to significantly better technology, allowing for a ship to be faster for the same displacement with lower weight of hull and machinery which in turn allows for more aircraft to be carried for the same displacement.
Really, *you* need to decide whether the time and money saved in carrying out conversions is worth the expenditure on maintaining older, less capable ships prior to the conversion.
|
|
|
Post by rodentnavy on Jan 27, 2020 10:30:41 GMT -6
Another question from the newbie. At what point should I look at scraping the pre-dreadnought? Are they worth keeping around for conversion into carriers? Are they worth just hanging onto and keep upgrading and paying for? There is no hard and fast right answer, it will differ from nation to nation and even perhaps campaigns with the same nation. For the larger nations they can be useful making up invasion numbers in peripheral areas or counter them. They can add heft to a battle line in numbers for a time but certainly at some point in the 1920s on normal development you are going to be looking at severely diminishing returns. If you are in a tight naval arms race while the cost of a mothballed battleship might seem marginal it does add up and that becomes money better spent on dreadnoughts or even perhaps modern smaller units. The same trajectory will also apply to the armoured cruisers you may which can out muscle more modern light cruisers long after the AI tends to dispose of them. On CVL conversions the best pre-dreadnought candidates are between 15,000 and 16,000 tons, give them oil engines and a speed boost and it is likely that a carrier does not need torpedoes which is easy to forget and that can free up around a 100 tons depending on design. Above 16,000 tons you are likely only going to want to look at armoured/ heavy cruisers as they have the hulls to cope with the minimum speed for conversion to CV...not that that they make very good CV but any flight deck in an impending storm...eh? Generally though in time you will develop your own judgement depending on which nation you are playing at a given time and its circumstances.
|
|
|
Post by aeson on Jan 27, 2020 12:59:11 GMT -6
At what point should I look at scraping the pre-dreadnought? I personally usually begin scrapping predreadnought and semidreadnought battleships in the early 1910s, as by that point I normally have "enough" dreadnought or superdreadnought battleships to be comfortable discarding the predreadnoughts, and will usually have scrapped all of them by the mid- to late-1910s. Not really, at least not in my opinion. They're usually slower than the 20-knot minimum design speed for CVLs so you have to give them an engine rebuild and sacrifice some of the tonnage gained from it to improve their speed, but not actually by much because the game probably won't allow you to increase design speed by more than about five knots and the tonnage cost for doing that eats into the tonnage you can put towards the air group, and unless you developed Torpedo Protection I fairly early or built some pretty late predreadnoughts or semidreadnoughts they most likely lack torpedo protection. If you don't have a suitable CA or maybe an early BC that you can keep around for conversion then maybe keep a B around for conversion into your carrier testbed, but I wouldn't recommend it otherwise.
Depends on what you want to do with them and how long you're holding on to them. - Generally speaking, ships should "always" be acceptable for fighting their contemporaries, even if modern vessels are beginning to or have long since completely outclassed them, so if your opponents still have their old battleships, well, at least there's a chance your old battleships won't be completely overmatched. - There is some value in having a few extra ships in the battle line to help spread out incoming fire and engage as many of the ships in the opposing battle line as possible to give them the 'under fire' accuracy penalty. Whether it's enough value to compensate for the greater vulnerability of older smaller ships, the lesser offensive value of the same, and the likely reduction in maximum battle line speed due to mixing ~18kn predreadnought battleships with ~21kn dreadnought and superdreadnought battleships is something you'll have to answer for yourself, but the more dreadnoughts and superdreadnoughts and the fewer predreadnoughts and semidreadnoughts you have, the more likely the answer is to be that it's not worth it. - Old battleships are still worth more fleet score than CAs, which may be useful for invading colonies and preventing your own from being invaded. They're also generally less expensive than more modern battleships, especially when comparing early predreadnoughts to late superdreadnoughts and fast battleships, and they're less valuable fleet units than more modern battleships so sending them off to secondary theaters in support of such ventures has a lower opportunity cost than would be the case with more valuable modern ships. If you're not too concerned about them being overmatched in battles, this can also make them useful for blockade score. - If you're having trouble with surface raiders, well, an old battleship isn't exactly what I'd call an ideal candidate for trade protection, but it's probably at least an equal match for most of what the computer might use for surface raiding, it's better than doing nothing, and the opportunity cost of using one for such purposes might be preferable to the opportunity cost of using some other vessel for the same.
Also, as far as upgrades go - basic fire control and maintenance refits are cheap enough, and fire control refits are valuable enough, that they should pretty much always be given to any ship that you're intending to retain in service. Engine rebuilds - especially if increasing design speed by any significant amount - and gun upgrades are much less likely to be worthwhile outside of special circumstances, because they are generally quite expensive and even relatively "cheap" upgrades of this nature are quite a bit more costly than basic fire control and maintenance refits. Moreover, in many cases such reconstructions and upgrades don't actually help the older ships to any significant extent. Sure, 12"/Q1 guns are better than 12"/Q- guns, but an old predreadnought with four 12" guns that gets matched against a modern superdreadnought with eight or ten 15" guns - or even an early dreadnought with eight or ten 12" guns - is probably dead whether or not you've given it the new guns, and for the battle line as a whole upgrading the guns on a handful of older ships probably isn't that much of an improvement overall. Improving the speed of older ships to better match the speeds of modern ships has the added issue that the alternative method for improving battle line speed - namely, getting rid of old slow ships that can't make the same speed as the more modern ships - is considerably cheaper and simultaneously removes potential liabilities from the fleet. That's not to say that replacing the guns and rebuilding the engines of an older ship is never a correct choice, but it is something to consider carefully before you commit to it.
|
|
|
Post by JagdFlanker on Jan 27, 2020 13:00:52 GMT -6
Another question from the newbie. At what point should I look at scraping the pre-dreadnought? Are they worth keeping around for conversion into carriers? Are they worth just hanging onto and keep upgrading and paying for? in my opinion big gun capital ships older than 15 years old are taking up budget that could be used to build newer better ships
tech moves FAST in this game and a 15 year old capital ship is usually slower and has too much old baked-in tech that can never be upgraded, which *could* make them fodder for newer enemy ships
i don't put capital ships in reserves/mothballs because i want them with the best possible crew right at war start, and i want to keep that big wartime budget boost all to myself to build AMCs/buy shiny new toys. so if my navy gets too big for my current budget i scrap the oldest capital ship(s) which keeps the fleet pruned - this usually happens as soon as a war is over since that's when you get the big budget drop
|
|
|
Post by dorn on Jan 27, 2020 14:03:33 GMT -6
Another question from the newbie. At what point should I look at scraping the pre-dreadnought? Are they worth keeping around for conversion into carriers? Are they worth just hanging onto and keep upgrading and paying for? in my opinion big gun capital ships older than 15 years old are taking up budget that could be used to build newer better ships
tech moves FAST in this game and a 15 year old capital ship is usually slower and has too much old baked-in tech that can never be upgraded, which *could* make them fodder for newer enemy ships
i don't put capital ships in reserves/mothballs because i want them with the best possible crew right at war start, and i want to keep that big wartime budget boost all to myself to build AMCs/buy shiny new toys. so if my navy gets too big for my current budget i scrap the oldest capital ship(s) which keeps the fleet pruned - this usually happens as soon as a war is over since that's when you get the big budget drop And than you have a battleship which is still the most powerful surface combatant even after 25 years she was commissioned.
|
|
|
Post by akinesia on Jan 27, 2020 22:49:49 GMT -6
Thank you so much to all that responded I really appreciate the help.
Rule The Waves!
|
|
|
Post by millsian on Jan 28, 2020 8:08:20 GMT -6
Like you a newbie - played 2 games as France
1) won minor war again Germany and then quit by mistake rather than save and continue
2) whilst commuting this morning got sacked after 2 years for over spending
|
|
|
Post by director on Jan 28, 2020 8:39:56 GMT -6
My 'house rule' for capital ships is to replace them if they are over 20 years old, and/or coal powered, and/or have a smaller or poorer gun caliber than my main fleet. For example, in my current USA game I just scrapped a set of 13"(-1) ships (think 'Iron Duke' but with a worse gun) a little before the 20-year mark because they were coal-powered and my other capital ships used a good 14" gun. For the same reason I skipped the 15" gun when developed and kept 12x14" until the 16" became available.
Older BBs can still serve as artillery platforms and they are less likely to be shot-at than the better ships, so I don't worry overmuch about sending them into battle - except for their speed. The AI tends to try to engage on a slant and concentrate fire against a few of the player's ships... the 'Reluctant Dragon' formation is my stand-by for fleet actions.
(This can be used ONLY if the AI shows signs of actually wanting to engage; if it runs, as it usually does, this won't work. Instead of attempting to close the range while the AI tries to hold it open, open the range as though preparing to retire. When the AI lunges forward, pivot and move all ships inward yourself. With luck you will have a crescent into which the enemy line is drawn. Engage with guns, launch a mass torpedo attack against injured enemy ships or any which continue to advance.)
I put about half my capital ships in peacetime reserve but I keep the newest half operational. That helps with those early-war missions, where i can usually out-shoot anything the AI can bring out.
|
|
|
Post by akinesia on Jan 30, 2020 12:08:57 GMT -6
I built my opening pre Dreadnoughts as speed 20 knots and 16000 tons so i can use them as CVL conversions. I don't know if they will be that good since the heavy armor eats up tonnage which could be used for aircraft. I may use one or two as CVL's before i build purpose built CVL. Does anyone have any experience using pre-d CVL conversions?
|
|
|
Post by aeson on Jan 30, 2020 14:36:13 GMT -6
I built my opening pre Dreadnoughts as speed 20 knots and 16000 tons so i can use them as CVL conversions. I don't know if they will be that good since the heavy armor eats up tonnage which could be used for aircraft. I may use one or two as CVL's before i build purpose built CVL. Does anyone have any experience using pre-d CVL conversions? Large predreadnought battleships can usually support ~24-30 aircraft when converted to CVLs, which makes them relatively strong offensively, as early carriers go, but their low speed limits their useful service life, especially if you're planning to transition to a fast battle line in the '20s or '30s - a ~20kn CVL is barely fast enough to operate with a typical ~21-23kn 1910s dreadnought/superdreadnought battle line and doesn't belong in company with anything faster than that. A further issue is that they likely lack any torpedo protection, and for particularly large ships this may not be resolvable via bulging as if I recall correctly the 500 tons added by the bulges counts towards the 16,000t limit for legal CVL conversions.
Generally speaking, if you want to design a legacy fleet or other predreadnought- or early dreadnought-era major warship with future CVL conversion in mind, I'd recommend large CAs and maybe small BCs (especially Tsukuba-type glorified armored cruiser BCs or British-style cruiser hunter-killer BCs, not so much German-style fast battleship adjacent BCs). They can usually carry about as many aircraft as similarly-large Bs can when converted to CVLs, their usually-lighter armor isn't normally a significant issue for a carrier, and their higher original design speed gives you more freedom in trading air group size against service speed during the rebuild. Really, though, I think it's better to design ships based on what's best for you at the moment or in the near future than to allow the possibility that you might possibly convert the ship to a CVL at some point in the distant future, when the ship is at or beyond the end of its useful service life in its original configuration, to significantly affect the design; it's not like the carriers you get out of converting such early ships as legacy fleet predreadnought battleships are going to be carriers you really want to keep around for very long anyways. Besides which, if you really want to design a ship for future CVL conversion, large AVs are probably the best target, assuming you develop the technology to build them early enough.
|
|