Low Freeboard

[garrisonchisholm]

So, I have a question for my more insightful elders within these halls.  I have never not yielded to the Low Freeboard temptation.  I.E., if the ship is Not a BC, it Will max at 21 knots with low freeboard.  I've don'e this in a dozen games, and have never not felt it successful policy.  I just can't not take the free tonnage.

Might this be hindering me in ways of which I am not aware?  How might Low Freeboard affect my Tactical or Strategic Movements?  What should I look for in my battles that I might not be seeing?

[Airy W]

I find low freeboard extremely useful for ships I never intend to leave my home area. You can get an amazing bargain on them. They aren't great at deterring raiders but they do make you immune to blockades while your real fleet is away as the US.

[boomboomf22]

I think (not sure) that casemates on low freeboard have a higher chance of being out of action due to weather

[bcoopactual]

I believe casemates are more affected by high sea states in general regardless of freeboard but it's possible it could make it worse as well. Low freeboard, according to the manual also affects your main gun turrets, I presume principally the forward ones. Their ROF will be reduced and there is the possibility they will be swamped and unusable in high sea states.  Here is the blurb from the manual.




CCIP noted in his Badnoughts thread that it was the low freeboard that really did them in.

[boomboomf22]

I knew about the effected by weather, just figured it would be worse with low seaboard. I got this impression from some games as Austria where that seemed to be the case.

[garrisonchisholm]

That would certainly make sense. I just don't associate a failure with the sea state, but that may be because the only way to tell is to read one line of text in the corner. I'll try to be more aware, but so far low freeboard does indeed feel like a simple great bargain.

[bcoopactual]

Dec 1, 2016 8:57:48 GMT -6 garrisonchisholm said:

That would certainly make sense. I just don't associate a failure with the sea state, but that may be because the only way to tell is to read one line of text in the corner. I'll try to be more aware, but so far low freeboard does indeed feel like a simple great bargain.

Well, ccip got all the way to 1926 before he ran into that battle off Cape Hatteras where his badnoughts got it handed to them.  Maybe your luck has been similar so far.  Or you fight a lot of battles away from the North Sea and Atlantic where the weather is traditionally worse than other areas.

[ccip]

Yep, exactly!

My humble experience-based view is - it's not worth it except in Bs/CAs for poorer nations at the start of the game, especially if your shipyards are small and your prospective enemy is cranking out bigger boats than you. I got a fair bit of mileage out of low-freeboard "coast defence" ships in my recent Mediterranean game as Austria for example - building those early on helped me beat Italy, because even on their larger budget, they had less armor and guns going pound for pound. At that point, the 21kt limit was a non-issue (my low-freeboard ships were actually faster than their battle line by 2kt), and it would be rare to have battles involving more than 3 capital ships per side. In that environment, they worked great - and if the conditions were not in my favour (i.e. more than a light breeze and easy swell), I could just disengage. I even built a trio of low-freeboard large (6000t) CLs which even at 21kt were basically masters of the Adriatic until 1905-1906.

But these low freeboard ships get obsolete and fast. There's no point building them after 1903 or so. There's no point building them at all unless you're a small nation whose first priority is guarding home waters. Since you're unable to ever make them faster than 21kt, their rebuild prospects are poor and they're much stronger candidates for the scrap yard than the average pre-dread - so they're not even a very good long-term investment.

The only really compelling usage scenarios for them are if it's early in the game, you're Austria, Spain or the CSA (or, say, the Ottomans if you go with galagagalaxian's mod), and you're expecting a fight against your better-armed (but not overwhelmingly superior) neighbours in the first few years. You can then pursue an aggressive strategy, beat your nearest rival, and maybe grab some colonies to help you grow into the future. On the minus side, though, you are then likely to go through a period where you'll have to tread carefully - because you'll be either stuck maintaining an inferior fleet, or you'll have to quickly decommission your old ships to free up construction budget for a smaller number of modern replacements. In either case, you'll find that you'll pay for that early half-decade of dominance over one close rival with a solid decade of falling behind every other nation. I saw that in my Austria game - and worse, it created a "generation syndrome" in my fleet, where having to rapidly pull my low-freeboard fleet offline and build a brand new fleet all at once meant that all my ships would end up very close in age to each other. So, they would have to be rebuilt/replaced all at near the same time a decade later... which meant that about every 10 years, I'd go through a 2-3 year weak phase where most of my ships were either noticeably obsolete, and/or in the shipyards. And if a war happened in those 2-3 years, well, that wouldn't be good. And that happened to me in my last game of course, at the worst possible times, twice against France in different decades. And, indirectly, it was down to the fact I had started out with a "temporary" fleet of low-freeboard ships that had to be phased out and replaced very rapidly.

Now, at the other extreme - the Badnoughts actually did work remarkably well, by luck and by sheer weight and numbers... until that one fiasco! Basically, they were caught with nowhere to run, their secondaries could not fire in rough seas at all, and as soon as damage started coming, they could not cope and foundered from what would be pretty light damage for any other battleship. I'm honestly surprised that took until the 1920s - same thing could've happened much earlier. The fact I was Britain and had so much budget that I could afford some ship losses and tactical screwups without major consequences helped. I had a lot of Badnoughts! Crummy, weird, unreliable, bad Badnoughts.... they flooded uncontrollably, and sank like rocks - which makes sense, because less freeboard also means less reserve flotation.

So, my advice is - don't build low-freeboard ships at all, except as a stopgap in the first few years of the game. As soon as common capital ship speeds go south of 20kt, ditch this design feature permanently and never look back. Decommission the remaining "coasters" as soon as feasible after that so you can replace them with something better. Larger navies with big budgets should build something better to start with anyway - having 20 normal battleships instead of 25 low-freeboard ones doesn't sound so bad, and will probably get the job done just as well. Now, IF you're Britain and suddenly AI-controlled Germany has an all-low-freeboard fleet edging in on your numbers, okay, you may be forced to keep up - but as far as I can tell, that would never actually happen. So it's best to resist the idea, no matter how nice that larger number of crappier low-freeboard ships seems. Even if you get lucky for a while (like I did with the Badnoughts), it'll catch up to you eventually. Although a 21kt battle line may sound like it could benefit from low-freeboard ships, trust me, it won't. The armor may be thicker, but as far as I've been able to tell, that's more than negated by much poorer resistance to flooding in general. And a battle line means your ships have to be ready to take a certain amount of flooding and penetrating hits. This, by the way, is also why low-freeboard ships work pretty well early on - because at the start of the game, penetrating hits are very rare and its out-of-control fire rather than flooding that's usually the bigger killer. But that reverses quickly once guns and shells improve. So, again - their shelf life is pretty poor.

In conclusion: non-working secondaries + catastrophic flooding from otherwise benign penetrating hits = recipe for a real big disaster!

Don't be cheap - just focus on the long term and go big

[frosty]

If your ships have low freeboard are they more likely to get hit in the deck turrets and conning tower, less likely to get hit in the belt?

[boomboomf22]

May 9, 2017 9:02:50 GMT -6 frosty said:

If your ships have low freeboard are they more likely to get hit in the deck turrets and conning tower, less likely to get hit in the belt?

Not to my knowledge, and the manual doesn't say anything on that subject, but we would really need a post by the team to settle that one.  As for my use of low freeboard I have always found it to be similar to ccip, with the caveat that becauseI really like fast ACs in the early game (24kts) I don't freeboard them.  In a current ongoing Germany game of mine I used it to build some 15,000 ton Bs to fulfill the Kaisers demand for them when I didn't have the budget.  They are reasonably useful solely due to the extra tonnage afforded by low freeboard.

[zardoz]

Low freeboard is a good way to save money at the beginning of the game, especially on Bs. On other ships it will hamper the possibility to rebuild with better engines. However, if you know that you will retain a special class unchanged you can save again a lot of money.

[konstantinua00]

Dec 5, 2016 13:38:01 GMT -6 ccip said:

at the start of the game, penetrating hits are very rare and its out-of-control fire rather than flooding that's usually the bigger killer

In my experience over 20 finished games I had 0, zero ships sunk by fire neither on mine or enemies' side...

[bcoopactual]

May 10, 2017 7:33:54 GMT -6 konstantinua00 said:

Dec 5, 2016 13:38:01 GMT -6 ccip said:

at the start of the game, penetrating hits are very rare and its out-of-control fire rather than flooding that's usually the bigger killer

In my experience over 20 finished games I had 0, zero ships sunk by fire neither on mine or enemies' side...

Fredrik recommended once trying a strategy of using HE exclusively against battleships early in the game due to the poor penetrating ability of AP shells early on.  Most beginning of the game B's worthy of the name have belts that you can't penetrate at zero yards because the AP tech sucks so much.  I tried it and had quite a bit of success with it against enemy battleships.  Enough that it's now my standard strategy early game and I'll slowly shift to AP, first at short range and then medium starting in the 1906-1908 time frame and finally at long range once I have Director firing control for plunging fire.  

You can tell the enemy ship was killed by fires because the message will be different in the log.  Something about fires burning out of control and being forced to abandon ship if I recall correctly.

The reason it's probably never happened to you and honestly, I can't remember losing a ship to fire either off the top of my head although I've had some close calls, is probably because the AI wasn't privy to Fredrik's posts and I don't think the AI is programmed to go exclusively HE against battleships in the early game.

Not to get too far off topic but the HE doctrine is also why I don't build semi-dreadnoughts.  I load my early B's with as many 6 inch secondary guns as I can after armoring up to get a higher volume of HE shells down range as opposed to fewer, slower-firing, larger caliber 8 and 10 inch secondaries.

[director]

I have had a ship - a B - sink from uncontrollable fires. It was one of those 'Hey, let's wander out of the battle line for no reason and charge the enemy all by ourselves' things, and the ship was pounded repeatedly. I don't remember seeing a lot of belt penetrations (could have been, just don't remember) but there were a lot of warnings of fire increasing.

And I did try the 'use HE' strategy, and have had good success with it (as Togo did at Tsushima). The problem is that I always slip up and don't change back... Instead of going purely HE for ammo you might try just shifting the ranges - using HE at close or middle ranges and AP for long-range.

Heh. I really do like semi-dreadoughts, but for exactly the same reason you give. The 9" or 10" does more damage and has a longer range than the 6", plus if I give them a reasonable rate of speed I can regularly rebuild them and use them for decades. My last USA game used slower tech (50% I think) so I was stuck with semis for a long time. I think the last class had 4x12" and something like 20x10" for secondaries... nasty, especially when rebuilt with secondary directors.

[boomboomf22]

I have this weird attachment to semis. Never found them very effective, and they rairly stick around in my fleets long enough for directors, I just like the idea. And even at 10% they rairly have their day.

As for fires I have had all of one lost to them and maybe 3-5 kills. I know it can work, but maybe the way I fight isn't conducive to it. The kills I see are either from BE penetrations​ or wrecking the enemies superstructure to slow them then torp hits on their basically sunk wreck. I counter this recently with huge amounts of BE armor. A predread class of 19000 tons I built in a recent Germany game had a continuous 12" belt. Wasn't a semi cause of tech progression at the time.