Most crushing fleet battle?

[cormallen]

I've been playing around with Low research early games trying to improve to "Historical feel" of the various AI fleet (with some great advice from Seawolf) and have played the first decade or so several times in evolving versions of my semi-historical RN fleet vs semi-historical (starting close to IRL but inevitably drifting away as the AI builds fleets).

Had one large (I play with low research rates, boosted budgets and FS12 to get closer to the real navy sizes) fleet battle against the Russians in one of my iterations of game which took place in the Baltic in mid-summer, with basically no night-time.
Clashed with the Russian fleet which fell back to the coast but it got itself trapped in a bay off Hiiumaa Island, off the Estonian coast.


imgur.com/tKPtaXd

Killed 13 out of 21 Russian Battleships for the cost of one CL (that got confused and wandered into the "Beach of Death")... This is, so far, the most crushing large fleet action I've seen in RTW1 or 2.

What are other players most "Glorious" slaughters??

imgur.com/QpTLNjO

[dontmajorchem]

Don't have an image, but I've done the classic "annihilate a pre-carrier nation with carriers"

I was playing as America in the late twenties and had probably 2-4 converted fleet carriers and some CVLs. Germany got mad and declared on me so I sent a carrier task force to the North Sea. Outright sunk 8/10 of their dreadnoughts aswell as some BCs and a few other lighter ships. War lasted like 3 months

It's pretty impressive that you sunk that many pre-dreadnoughts with almost only gunfire alone. My Bs just miss and run out of ammo

[cormallen]

The "midnight sun" played a huge part as I was able to cruise pairs of squadrons across the wide mouth of the bay for many hours. Half my battle line got confused and wandered off half heartedly chasing a few Russians that escaped being herded into the bay in the first place so it was mostly down to my two early (6 twins in hex layout) "dreadnoughts", 6-8 B and about 8-10 big armoured cruisers to do the heavy lifting. IIRC, 7 of the dead Russians were one whole class of Osliabia-esque "Fast Pre-Dreadnoughts"!
I've been trying to get the AI to build more historical feeling navies so a lot of the designs were attempts at real world ships.
I've got big wins before but usually torpedoes play a huge part, at least in finishing off wrecks, but this fight was too far from home so I only got a few destroyers.

[buttons]

Biggest victory I can remember is a battleship focused Japanese fleet against a carrier and battlecruiser focused Royal Navy. Stumbled upon four battlecruisers and wiped them all out almost immediately. Managed to track down a group of three carriers and kill them all. Kept wandering and tanking torpedo bomber hits before stumbling upon a second group of carriers and wiping them out. By the time my fleet limped into port (I think one BB had taken 6 or more torpedo hits) somewhere in China the battle stood with 4 British battlecruisers and 6 carriers sunk, and 4 Japanese battleships heavily damaged.

Honestly surprised I lost no capital ships, one sat at 100% damage, immobilized, and with flooding for like 2 hours before getting power back on and rushing back to port at a blistering 7 knots.

[generalcanada]

Dec 9, 2020 11:07:44 GMT -6 buttons said:

Biggest victory I can remember is a battleship focused Japanese fleet against a carrier and battlecruiser focused Royal Navy. Stumbled upon four battlecruisers and wiped them all out almost immediately. Managed to track down a group of three carriers and kill them all. Kept wandering and tanking torpedo bomber hits before stumbling upon a second group of carriers and wiping them out. By the time my fleet limped into port (I think one BB had taken 6 or more torpedo hits) somewhere in China the battle stood with 4 British battlecruisers and 6 carriers sunk, and 4 Japanese battleships heavily damaged.

Honestly surprised I lost no capital ships, one sat at 100% damage, immobilized, and with flooding for like 2 hours before getting power back on and rushing back to port at a blistering 7 knots.

I know that some ships can last forever. In my one game early on a fleet action occurred at night and my entire destroyer force stumbled into the entire french predrednaught battle line. Multiple torpedoes were launched and almost all of my destroyers got away scot free. Some of my destroyers were pretty battered but one was left dead in the water with enemy ships occasionally sailing by. After 2 hours of hard work by the crews they fixed her up and sailed home. Of the 9 french pre drednauchts present 2 survived.

[Deleted]

It was in RTW1, about a week or so after I bought the game. I played as the Germany and fought against Great Britain. I went fully with the doctrine of quality, rather then quantity. Britain went almost fully for both. My battle line looked something like 8 BB, 6 BC, and some minor ships. British looked something like 20 BB, 14 BC, and other ships.
I did not care so much because I had about 160 subs already spammed and next 40 waiting for completion. I went full brawl, about 6 British capital ships exploded, other went disorganized. My BB battle line circulated their bunch of ships clockwise, and my BC squad anticlockwise.
The final result was something like 16 BB and 7 BC sunk in exchange for 2 BB and 2 BC of my own. Most of the sunken ships were about 30k-40k tons, so it was a huge loss for the British navy, even though I still couldnt blockade them. They lost the war a few months later.

[alant]

Sunk 9 of 9 Japanese BBs, including 5 historical stats Yamatos in a mostly gunnery duel playing 1936 Mod. This was in May 1943 off the east coast of Borneo where the IJN was attempting an invasion.

Japanese CVs were harder to find, but sank 3 of them that were in the BB support group . . to gunnery/DD torpedoes.  The other 6, in the carrier group, got away.



Two USN CAs suffered flash fires/explosions. Each took a single heavy hit from an Ise class BB. A third USN CA had a flash fire which took out 2 adjacent turrets.

[rodentnavy]

Long time ago now somewhere off the shores of New Brunswick a strong Royal Navy squadron sailed into most of the US Navy in the dark of night. Complete confusion ensured with at least one battleship exploding and three more battleships/battlecruisers being sunk while the fleet fired wildly at anything they felt did not look British. Come dawn the sea was littered with wrecks and the USN which had been comparable to the British until that point now had three capital ships left in commission and just two destroyers (okay they had only started with twenty two because why not build more big ships but hey!). I still remain very wary of night actions. I will dig around in my saved files from my previous computer to see if I have the hard numbers. Still I think they were fairly big fleets as I usually play on large.

[kotori87]

In the early 1950's, Imperial Russia decided to join Fascist France and Germany in waging war upon the great British Empire. It was clear what they had been promised: Norway, and all her strategic reserves of resources. Since a land-based campaign would also upset Sweden and Finland, they sought to launch a sea-based invasion instead. The Royal Navy's code breakers alerted the fleet several days before the operation. It would be the last time a Russian fleet dared to venture beyond the Baltic.
youtu.be/-fhOmgzfA50
By the time the smoke of battle cleared, Russia's Baltic Fleet had ceased to exist. Only 3CA and 12DD had limped back to port, more through luck than anything else. Every single Russian capital ship, including 10 carriers and their entire invasion force, had been annihilated. In return, my losses were a single CL and a single DD.
I've fought a number of larger battles. More ships, bigger ships, etc. But that one was the most lopsided fleet action I have fought... So far. I'm hoping to top that in my next game

[alant]

This is not a fleet battle, but it did force the collapse of the Soviet government, surrender of Iceland, Finland and Kamchatka to the United States. The USN also took possession of a large late-model Soviet CV.

After 11 months of mostly indecisive war between Germany-Japan-Italy-Russia vs US-Britain-France, the United States switched to unrestricted submarine warfare . . and sank 583 merchantmen in one month.



 

[jwsmith26]

My biggest defeat did not even involve a battle. I was playing as the USA in the 1910s and I was at war with Germany. The war was going fairly well but I was having difficulty coming to grips with the Germans in far-off Northern Europe, so when I was offered the chance to send in a revolutionary in an attempt to destabilize the German government, I accepted the offer. Two months later the anarchist returned to the United States and began causing problems. Within 3 months my government turned communist, the war ended in ignominy and Germany seized my 5 best battleships. I had somehow managed to remain as commander of the navy, but my spirit broken, I resigned.

[iwst]

I remember an a few battles where I inflicted vastly disproportionate losses even though I had a significantly fewer ships, but had to retreat as the remaining enemy fleet was still to strong. There were also a few where I attacked with overwhelming numbers and simply crushed the enemy, but I don't remember those all that well.

One thing I did keep in mind was an late 1940s battle where my Imperial German Navy thought the Soviet Navy in the Baltic. As I was also fighting in another theater I had only a few carriers on station, so the fight between the carriers went somewhat in the Soviets favor, though I managed to keep them somewhat at bay. While that was going on, my 6 battleships (4 in the 45 000 ton range and 2 fast ones in the 65 000 ton range) sunk 7 soviet BCs and BBs. Then night fell, while I had to reatreat my older smaller BBs due to battle-damage, my 2 newer ones, named Bismarck and Tirpitz, hunted down some damaged soviet capital ships that tried to limp away during the night, bagged a few more of those (I had blind-fire radar, they didn't) and then I stumpled upon the main price, their carrier fleet. What followed was an utter massacre, with my fast BBs running amok among their carriers. 2 of their DDs got off some lucky hits, and I did not get all of the carriers as 2 survivors managed to launch some airstrikes once dawn broke, but with 65000tons and torpedo protection 4 my BBs just shrugged those torpedoes off.
Before that battle the Soviets had me on the backfoot, afterwards they weren't a thread anymore.

[buttons]

Dec 21, 2020 8:36:05 GMT -6 alant said:

This is not a fleet battle, but it did force the collapse of the Soviet government, surrender of Iceland, Finland and Kamchatka to the United States. The USN also took possession of a large late-model Soviet CV.

After 11 months of mostly indecisive war between Germany-Japan-Italy-Russia vs US-Britain-France, the United States switched to unrestricted submarine warfare . . and sank 583 merchantmen in one month.


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Reason I avoid sub spam, it really does break the game, in small doses and against specific nations it is fine (Germany starving Britain over 4 years through submarine warfare is fine) but when the US starves Russia into surrendering in under a year by sinking merchant ships you gotta admit that it's a bit out of hand.