Why the game heavily promotes BC/CL use but heavily discourages CAs

[christian]

Ca currently suffer from alot of drawbacks, notably they take up a BC/capital ship slot in the battle generator, and unlike CL they lack the "forcefield" that is to say, capital ships will target CA as if they were capital ships, unlike with CLs where capital ships will not target them, unless nothing bigger than it is present within range of its main guns, this can be seen easily from the players perspective as well, because the players ships will not target CLs even if they are 5000 yards or less from the capital ships, as long as an enemy capital ship is also within range.


Effectively this means during a surface battle, a CA providing firesupport will be shot at by main guns of capital ships and CA, a CL will however only be targeted by the much weaker secondary battery.

In addition to this 6" AP is roughly as effective at penetrating capital ships weak armor (secondaries, BU, BE, DE and anything not the main armor) as 8" AP is, thus the actual damage dealt is not much different, and due to rof and barrel count, 6" might actually be better.


On top of this, CL are cheaper than CA by a slight amount, and large "treaty like" cruisers suffer from being unable to armor themselves due to the weight curve of their armor


In short
Due to weight curve of CA and CL armor, unless building 15500 t + cruisers armor on CA is wasteful (this applies to CL as well, but keep in mind you are only being shot at by 5-6" secondaries so less armor is needed to protect against rounds, alot of it is also HE)
CL do not get targeted by main guns, unless the largest ship currently in range of enemy main guns. this is not true for CA
CA cost more
CL are arguably more effective at destroying DDs, cruisers (due to volume of fire and AI designs) and damaging battleships through BE/DE



Essentially this means if the player does decide to build cruisers, the "optimal" heavy cruiser design is an 18000 ton "CRUISER" at which point just building an 18000 ton BC makes as much sense, since as far as im concerned they seem to take up the same slot in the battle generator (hence why you can put BC into CA divs when you get an option to add a ship to a battle from exceptional command for example)



Here are two designs, one is Haguro, a 18000 ton cruiser, increasing her size to 24000 tons and giving her 10" guns and increasing her armor to fill out the tonnage, puts her at 85700 total cost, haguro as is costs 65000
The other is Kurama, who trades speed and armor, to become a BC she costs 85663, getting her to 29 knots can be done by removing the X turret, with price increasing to 90000 total


the question essentially becomes, is it worth an extra 25000 cost to upgrade from 9" to 12" guns and increase tonnage from 18k to 24k, in my oppinion, the added firepower and survivability means very much yes assuming kurama is in the 29 knot 8 guns configuration.

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[christian]

Here is a modified kurama for cheap, at only 70k but has 28 knots and 8 12" guns, this allows her later to be upgraded to 30-31 knots 

And here is the armor weight chart for tonnage.

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[director]

I take your points. The issue I run into is that 12" guns are quickly obsoleted. A 12"-gunned BC will be thrown into combat against 14"-16" BCs with equal or better speed, and will not be able to escape or win.

In one US game, I built a 12"-gunned light BC, intended for carrier escort and CA hunting, only to see them thrown up against 50k-ton monsters and sunk.

I do think the battle generator needs to differentiate between CAs and BCs, but - that's a dead horse and the developers are working on revamping it anyway.

[avimimus]

Early on (pre-1910) I find the CA provides sufficient armour to have a degree of immunity against most opponents but sufficient speed for multipurpose uses.

After 1910 I feel there is something of a cruiser arms race... with increasingly long range and armour penetration leading to increasingly heavy designs culminating in battlecruisers. I tend to see this as a bit of a dead end, since battlecruisers become a very high investment which can't be used against battleships during the daylight, and can't be used against smaller ships at night (due to torpedo threats).

I did feel the pressure to build them though... it is just that I was able to build relatively fast (28 kt) battleships by then - with sufficient protection and firepower to reliably kill battleships as well as battlecruisers and enough speed to keep the enemy battlecruisers within firing range long enough to stand a good chance of defeating them.

[tendravina]

Apr 13, 2024 15:38:02 GMT -6 avimimus said:

Early on (pre-1910) I find the CA provides sufficient armour to have a degree of immunity against most opponents but sufficient speed for multipurpose uses.

True, but this has nothing to do with the characteristics of the CA class, unlike CLs which are given extra immunity by game rules. Rather, it is because you can fit more firepower onto a CA (infamously 16x7", 24x6", 10x5") and just outgun anything that tries to tackle you while still having speed and armor left. And this firepower leaves the CA the best kind of ship during the pre-BC era.

Apr 13, 2024 15:38:02 GMT -6 avimimus said:

After 1910 I feel there is something of a cruiser arms race... with increasingly long range and armour penetration leading to increasingly heavy designs culminating in battlecruisers. I tend to see this as a bit of a dead end, since battlecruisers become a very high investment which can't be used against battleships during the daylight, and can't be used against smaller ships at night (due to torpedo threats).

I did feel the pressure to build them though... it is just that I was able to build relatively fast (28 kt) battleships by then - with sufficient protection and firepower to reliably kill battleships as well as battlecruisers and enough speed to keep the enemy battlecruisers within firing range long enough to stand a good chance of defeating them.

And... this is just wrong. 25-26 knot battlecruisers are the default capital ship from 1910-1920, as their high speeds and comparable firepower allow one to outmaneuver and outgun anything they face. They just end up transitioning into fast battleships by the 1920s (although they are really just fast battleships in the first place)

If you are struggling with making battlecruisers that can stand in the battleline it is likely you are underarmoring them. And if they can't stand up to smaller ships at night, it is likely you haven't provided them with escorts.

[director]

I don't really want to re-open the can of worms labeled 'Battlecruisers' but I will note a few things I think are relevant here.

The first six British battlecruisers really are a sort of armored cruiser on steroids, and they worked well when pitted against German armored cruisers. (Even though one nearly got blown up by an unexploded shell at the Falklands...)

After Germany began building BCs they were used as a fast scouting force and as a fast action (bombardment) and reaction force. Germany and Britain differed on what had to be given up for speed, but by the time Hood is laid down the battlecruiser idea has gone out of fashion: displacement has soared so that a ship can have a battleship's gun battery, armor and a high speed. I agree with you that everything from Von Der Tann on is basically a fast capital ship. Certainly everything from Hood onward is a fast battleship.

My preference, of late, has been to avoid the battlecruiser entirely, either by building a battle line with some QE-type ships capable of 25 knots or so, or by building 'battlecruisers' in name which actually are big, powerful and well-armored battleships (IE, fast battleships as you say). If I do build some BCs early on, I wait until I can have at least 8x12" guns, 10" armor and 27 knots of speed, and I do not build many. I find BBs to be more survivable and useful against the AI's BC-swarm-o-crap.

If I get into a capital-ship engagement (and I have a BC squadron) then I am careful not to expose them unless the need is dire. I use them to develop a flank attack (from two sides at once), to hunt down cripples, and to turn an enemy advance, but I do not put them up against an enemy battle-line. To be fair, I wouldn't do that by choice with a detached BB squadron, either... Victory = Your mass against the enemy's weak point and Defeat = everything else.


I've been in too many night (low visibility) actions where I can see the enemy and take fire from him for a turn before my ships return fire. Escorts, sadly, are often mishandled by the AI and don't provide much help, so I am more in agreement with avimimus on that.

Early on I build CAs with 10" main armament, then I go down to an 8" gun and keep the displacement reasonable at 13-14k tons. Let the enemy build monster CAs - it helps my VP total when my superior gunnery tech and superiority in numbers sinks them. For my part, I'd rather have a bigger number of smaller caliber guns... I understand that others may not agree, but it works for me.


To answer christian 's original question, I would say that if my choice is to build an 18k-ton CA or a bigger BC then the BC is what I build, because an 18k-ton CA is - in my opinion - a mismanagement of resources comparative to what I get in return. I cap a CA at 13-14k tons and go lower if I can.

[spitfire97]

I think it really comes down to doctrine. How are you going to use the ships? What role are you trying to fill?

You're talking about engaging capital ships, obviously capital ships are going to be better at that.

If money is an issue I see why you'd want to build cheaper CAs, but can they actually fulfil the "fire support" mission you mention in your post?

[krawa]

I have read the title and the OP but honestly I fail to understand the issue. Judging from the posted designs we're talking about 1910-20 period. There were no "Heavy Cruisers" around at that time, by the standards of that period the proposal for the 9" cruiser clearly qualifies as capital ship. Compare the Haguro design to the German Blücher. Do you think the RN Battlecruisers shouldn't have targeted Blücher at Dogger Bank because she's clasified as a CA?

If anything the game accurately simulates why this particular ship type wasn't built during that time.

[khorne8]

Apr 13, 2024 10:40:33 GMT -6 director said:

I do think the battle generator needs to differentiate between CAs and BCs, but - that's a dead horse and the developers are working on revamping it anyway.

Has it been conclusively established that the battle generator treats CAs and BCs exactly the same? My anecdotal read over quite a few campaigns recently is that it doesn't. I tend to disfavor CAs in the midgame, for the reasons you all have discussed. But, in theaters where I have only CLs and BCs, and the enemy does have CAs, I believe I get the bad CL vs CA battles more than the good BC vs CA ones. Could be bias, of course, I haven't kept count.

And the AI seems very enthusiastic about cruiser raiding lately, especially after I've conclusively won a fleet action or two. During the RTW equivalent of the treaty cruiser era in the 20s and 30s, the AI will competently design a CA that can absolutely eat my colonial CLs for breakfast. I don't want to pay for trade protection BCs if I can possibly avoid it, so I've returned to building at least a division worth of heavy CAs during this era for trade protection.

[director]

khorne8 -

I did some extensive research for mods for RtW2. As part of that, I went into the battle 'mission' generator (I was making up missions for new nations). While there are some types of missions that are automatically generated, each nation has a set of (8 or 10, I don't exactly recall) nation-specific missions. These have a lot of variables (such as starting points) that include permitted forces - and a lot of the time, I saw that the tendency was to allow all types, BCs or smaller, or CLs and smaller.

I have not done the research on RtW3 to see if it uses the same setups. But if it does, then given the AI's tendency to build BCs above all else, and given that the human player may build some CAs, and given the game's tendency to give the AI more resources for a mission than to the human player, then you can see how a mission with AI BCs versus human CAs could come up.

So my suggestion would be that you check out the nation-specific missions, if they are still viewable, and give allowance for the game 'padding' the AI's strength. Not saying I'm right, but that's what I think.

[mdesanta]

I remember the armor/engine weight curve heavily punishing ships at ~13000 tons back in RTW1. Ridiculous that they still haven't changed this.
In RTW1, I modded the curve and increased the speed requirement for a ship to be classed as BC instead of BB.
In RTW3, I was going to ease off on the modding and perhaps only mod the BC speed requirement, but am disappointed that the curve is still so bad.

[attemptingsuccess]

I've said this before and I'll say it before: The problem with the CA class is that it isn't actually modeling Heavy Cruisers, it exclusively covers Armored Cruisers. Heavy Cruisers are a separate and distinct class with a vastly different role.

Armored Cruisers are basically Proto-Battlecruisers. In the Pre-Dreadnought era, these ships served as second class battleships. Hence they take up BC slots, don't have cloak, and step on the toes of Battlecruisers. A CA in the game as it stands is a small, lightly armed BC. I don't necessarily think this classification should go away post 1906 (The Dutch considered Armored Cruisers in the 30s, and it might work to cover Alaska class Large Cruisers, etc.).

Heavy Cruisers started as light cruisers with slightly heavier 8 inch armament. These ships do similar role to light cruisers. Heavy Cruisers should serve as supporting ships, fighting the enemy screening light and heavy cruisers while your battleships fight the enemy battleships.

Currently building small 8 inch heavy cruisers is a bad choice for anything except maybe TP duty because they face off against AI 10 inch heavy cruisers which outclass them in every way, in turn, both end up against BCs, which trounce both of them. Either Armored Cruisers need to become their own class (ACR perhaps), or heavy cruisers need to be an extension of light cruisers.

[director]

attemptingsuccess - As I have said, I've had very good luck with 9x8" all-forward CAs equipped with floatplanes. They're big enough to carry significant AA, the floatplanes can be used for scouting, and they're heavy enough to take out enemy CLs or DDs who try to get at my carriers. Also, using them for carrier screen frees up my capital ships for independent use.

And yes - I have used them against enemy BCs with good results, particularly if backed by air strikes and/or a BC or two. Are they going to defeat a BC single-handedly? No - but probably a BC or a BB won't either. Will they take damage? Sure - major caliber bullets hurt, a lot. But if the enemy concentrates on the CAs then my other forces will chew him up, and if he doesn't shoot at the CAs then a hail of 8" will wreck things like funnels and fire control.

Would I choose to take CAs up against BCs? NO. Have I done it? Yes, as a desperate measure. Was it worth it? Oh, yeah... one time I bagged two big, modern French BCs. And... losing a CA beats letting the enemy shell the carriers.

They also make good raiders and trade protection ships... an enemy CL or AMC who runs into my CA is going to get a short, sharp shock.


If you don't have a use for them and don't build them, that's fine - there are many paths to victory. I don't build a lot, as I prefer big, powerful CLs. But I do build some - as I said above - and I find a set of four or six of them to be very useful.

Chacun a son gout!