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Post by oldpop2000 on Jan 27, 2021 15:05:19 GMT -6
Here is what I consider a good raider, blockade ship. I had to move to 7000 tons to get the extreme range, reliability, and colonial service. She has four torpedo tubes Sub, and a 23 knot speed. If I move to 6 inch guns, I have to reduce speed to 22 knots which is tolerable with the extra fire power.  |
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Post by rimbecano on Jan 27, 2021 15:50:31 GMT -6
The calculation for blockade being weighted so heavily towards the quantity of capital ships is what makes it so irritating. I will often be outnumbered in battleships, but be quantitatively superior enough to be seeking a major fleet engagement. I will have a numerical superiority in cruisers, yet I am blockaded while the enemy refuses battle. It would be nice if there was a bit more balance in the blockade calculation, reduce the weight of battleships and possibly take quality into account somehow. Your tension with neutral nations should also increase when you are blockading, more so if it's a paper blockade. One thing I'm wondering is if the contribution of capital ships to blockade strength is actually linear. If the blockading force has 40 cruisers and no capital ships, while the blockaded force has 10 capital ships, then the blockade is likely to be ineffective: merchants can travel in convoys with a single battleship escort per convoy, and even if the battleships can't catch the cruisers, they can prevent them from interfering with commerce. If capital ship strengths are closer to parity, then the two battle lines are going to have to mostly be concerned with each other, and a fairly narrow advantage in cruisers may be sufficient to maintain a blockade. |
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Post by oldpop2000 on Jan 27, 2021 16:24:21 GMT -6
I would also suggest that when a war starts, each warring nation be given the right to declare a war zone around the opposition. Any ship, neutral or other wise that enters that zone, will be sunk.
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Post by dorn on Jan 28, 2021 8:23:41 GMT -6
The calculation for blockade being weighted so heavily towards the quantity of capital ships is what makes it so irritating. I will often be outnumbered in battleships, but be quantitatively superior enough to be seeking a major fleet engagement. I will have a numerical superiority in cruisers, yet I am blockaded while the enemy refuses battle. It would be nice if there was a bit more balance in the blockade calculation, reduce the weight of battleships and possibly take quality into account somehow. Your tension with neutral nations should also increase when you are blockading, more so if it's a paper blockade. One thing I'm wondering is if the contribution of capital ships to blockade strength is actually linear. If the blockading force has 40 cruisers and no capital ships, while the blockaded force has 10 capital ships, then the blockade is likely to be ineffective: merchants can travel in convoys with a single battleship escort per convoy, and even if the battleships can't catch the cruisers, they can prevent them from interfering with commerce. If capital ship strengths are closer to parity, then the two battle lines are going to have to mostly be concerned with each other, and a fairly narrow advantage in cruisers may be sufficient to maintain a blockade. I think it is even more complicated. I cannot see how Germany in WW2 will go through blockade even if Royal Navy has only half of capital ships to Germany. In this case the geography makes the difference. Germany would be able to send whole fleet with one convoy but how many ships get through and how effective can capital ships defend convoy in night against superior light forces of Royal Navy. And another issue for Kaiserliche Marine would be range as what would be destination of that convoy. |
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Post by ushakov1799 on Jan 29, 2021 1:49:12 GMT -6
Do you really think that a landing at Shetland islands for example would have been ignored by the British? A landing on the Shetlands would not have been ignored by the British, but it also would have been at least as suicidal as the abortive "Last Ride of the High Seas Fleet", which is the action that never happened because it triggered a mutiny that became a revolution that brought down German government. And now you're not only having the fleet go on a suicide mission, but you're adding ground troops to the mix as well. And with the army engaged on two fronts, one of which is an attritional grind, where are you even going to get the troops for this operation. Normandy was hard enough for the US and UK in WWII, with both countries having experience in expeditionary and amphibious warfare, with the invasion beaches close to the point of departure, with WWII landing craft, LSTs, amphibious tanks, etc, with paratroopers dropped behind the invasion beaches the night before the landings, and with the allies having complete naval and air superiority. The Germans would have none of these advantages landing in the Shetlands during WWI. Your bid to force the enemy to action has to be something you can actually *win*, otherwise it does no more good than operation Ten-Go. And yet somehow what is common sense to you now, over 100 years later, was not common sense to Jellicoe or Ingenohl or Scheer, who had built their careers around naval warfare and actually experienced WWI. As I said, this was a basic logical illustration but you spent 75% of the answer on these technicalities and not on the point I made. Germans were to well aware of the Russian Tsushima experience to take the risks so they did not take them and German navy was in general passive during WW1. They did not seek a decisive battle with the British and looked for some very improbable lucky opportunities which never arrived so your last sentence does not make any sense because I did not imply that Germans had to do anything, I was illustrating a possible strategy which Germans could employ but I did not imply that this could be a correct strategy. This was an extremely basic example of how you could get a fleet engagement to show that game mechanics are wrong. Probably, I should've given a more abstract example with countries A and B. And also it is very funny to compare a WW2 Normandy invasion with an invasion of a probably loosely guarded isolated islands during WW1 when aircraft was not a serious naval threat - but again I did not imply that this could be a right German WW1 strategy. German navy was doomed to be defeated by the much superior British fleet. In the game you have absolutely different scenarios. You could have a fleet with much, much worse battleships blockading a country which can't properly respond because game mechanics do not allow it and so the blockaded country has to pray to RNG to get the battleship engagement which is ridiculous... |
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Post by rimbecano on Jan 29, 2021 8:43:53 GMT -6
I was illustrating a possible strategy which Germans could employ but I did not imply that this could be a correct strategy. This was an extremely basic example of how you could get a fleet engagement to show that game mechanics are wrong. And my point is that as a German strategy, it would not merely be incorrect but insane. Would you really be satisfied if the battle generator offered you literally unwinnable battles, just because those would force a fleet engagement? Another part of my point is that when they attempted something much less insane at the end of the war to try to force a fleet battle *their sailors mutinied*. So your example wouldn't even be a possible strategy the Germans could employ, and it wouldn't get them a fleet engagement, because they wouldn't be able to actually execute it. The in game equivalent would be "click here to cause a revolution and get sacked". The purpose of the comparison to Normandy was to point out that Normandy was *hard* when the Allies had every conceivable advantage, including advantages that didn't exist yet in WWI, and that the Germans would have none of those advantages in your scenario. And yet somehow, while I may not get one every month, I get a comfortably higher rate of battle line engagements than occurred historically. |
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Post by ushakov1799 on Jan 29, 2021 22:34:03 GMT -6
I was illustrating a possible strategy which Germans could employ but I did not imply that this could be a correct strategy. This was an extremely basic example of how you could get a fleet engagement to show that game mechanics are wrong. And my point is that as a German strategy, it would not merely be incorrect but insane. Would you really be satisfied if the battle generator offered you literally unwinnable battles, just because those would force a fleet engagement? Another part of my point is that when they attempted something much less insane at the end of the war to try to force a fleet battle *their sailors mutinied*. So your example wouldn't even be a possible strategy the Germans could employ, and it wouldn't get them a fleet engagement, because they wouldn't be able to actually execute it. The in game equivalent would be "click here to cause a revolution and get sacked". The purpose of the comparison to Normandy was to point out that Normandy was *hard* when the Allies had every conceivable advantage, including advantages that didn't exist yet in WWI, and that the Germans would have none of those advantages in your scenario. And yet somehow, while I may not get one every month, I get a comfortably higher rate of battle line engagements than occurred historically. I stated that I did not imply that the mentioned strategy for Germany would've been a correct one not once but twice... This game is not historical at all. It is 100% alternative history in which naval budgets are much, much bigger and navies could actually win wars. In reality naval battles would have never heavily influenced a Russian-German war, for example. You did not get many major battles historically because the amount of naval conflicts historically was extremely lower than what we have in the game and during basically all of these conflicts except for Russo-Japanese war one side had a total advantage in naval power over the other side. This game barely has alliances or wars on 2 fronts and wars happen extremely often. It is wrong to draw any historical parallels. At the end of my previous post I made a definite example from the game - you could have a fleet with much, much worse battleships blockading a country which can't properly respond because game mechanics do not allow it and so the blockaded country has to pray to RNG to get the battleship engagement. Doesn't this appear extremely wrong? If something like this happened "in reality" (maybe on another planet, whatever you prefer) the blockaded country would have crushed the blockading country probably in less than a month. |
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Post by rimbecano on Jan 30, 2021 3:46:11 GMT -6
I stated that I did not imply that the mentioned strategy for Germany would've been a correct one not once but twice... And I stated that it is not merely incorrect. It could not be done. It would never be approvedby the Naval Office, the Army would refuse to provide troops, and the politicians would forbid it. If despite all this it somehow went forward, the lower ranks would mutiny (and did when a much less suicidal plan was put forward). Actually, the largest fleet size available does not provide sufficient budget for the fleets that existed historically. But yes, the impact of naval warfare, at least for certain pairs of nations, is exaggerated in game. But the game does try to put you under the same kinds of constraints that a real admiral would face. More wars is one reason you see more naval battles in game than in reality, but you also see a higher rate of battles within a war as the game is right now. No, it doesn't. It is quite common, across many kinds of warfare and many periods in history, that the stronger side has to be *much* stronger to actually score a decisive victory. Stalemates happen. Heck, the land war in WWI is a perfect example of such a phenomenon turned up to 11. And when you do have a stalemated situation, the stronger side risks losing its advantage, or, worse, suffering a decisive defeat if it tries too hard to attain a decisive victory without having a big enough advantage to actually do so |
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Post by oldpop2000 on Jan 30, 2021 9:22:27 GMT -6
Hello, I've been following this game for some time and watched several let's plays and I did not lick the blockade mechanics. Realistically, a blockaded force can try to remove the blockade at any time by steaming into the sea and facing the blockading for there. If blockading force retreats then there is no blockade anymore. Even more, a smaller force can blockade a bigger but less active force by performing unapposed blockade actions - and if the opponent responds, then you can force an engagement. Therefore you can get blockaded only if you allow it. In the game, however, big battle events do not appear every month, and when they do, they can end quickly without enough time to finish off the enemy for example. So you need several such events with waiting time potentialy exceeding 1 year when the war could be over already. None of this makes sens to me. I use submarines, and my blockades win wars all the time. As to real history, the Kaiser's Fleet tried to get the British to come down to the bight but it never worked. They tried to attack the SE coast towns and only managed Dogger Bank and Heligoland Bight action. They could never find a solution to the distant blockade due to their acknowledged geographic position. All this is from Reinhard Scheer's book on the High Seas Fleet. The actual solution to the blockade problem was to take France, Eastern Europe, and Russia to gain the necessary natural resources, food supplies and bases from which to blockade the British. Now the shoe was on the other foot. |
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euchrejack
Full Member
Don't feed the Trolls. They just get bigger and more numerous.
Posts: 139
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Post by euchrejack on Feb 10, 2021 20:55:33 GMT -6
One mission I've gotten lately and is quite relevant is the Convoy Escort mission as a nation being blockaded. The Battle Generator was nice enough to give me a couple battleships. Hence it really was like my fleet was challenging the integrity of the blockade. If the enemy nation really wanted to enforce it, they had to do it over the sunken hulls of my battleships. If my convoy got through, I got well in excess of the victory point that I lost for being blockaded.
...course, in that campaign things were not going my way, so after a few missions like that and others, I *lost* one of my battleships and reverted to just sneaking by the blockade instead of engaging the blockading forces.
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