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Post by rimbecano on Feb 4, 2021 10:57:15 GMT -6
When endurance reaches 0/0, ship speed drops down to 5knts. The first time it happened to me was also playing Japan in southeast Asia. Note however, that that's 0/0, not 0/[positive number]. Somehow fuel capacity is being reduced to zero, whereupon the ship runs out of fuel because the tanks have been eaten by the wild pointer kraken or the buffer overrun leviathan or some monster from the depths of the fencepost error trench. Looks like a bug to me.
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Post by rimbecano on Feb 2, 2021 10:43:32 GMT -6
The budget downturn after a war has been there as an intentional feature since RTW1, but it got to be a fair bit worse in the late game with RTW2, and I'm fairly certain it got even worse somewhere between RTW2 1.0 and 1.24. I'm not sure if the devs intended it to be as bad as it is now: a US player with about as much money in the bank as you can have --without the treasury department deciding you aren't using your budget and taking it away-- can be bankrupted within a few months of the end of a war even if they mothball *everything*. I think I once went from a surplus to about a 40M/month deficit after a late-game war. In RTW1, the US would generally pass Britain in naval strength by the end of the game in 1925. Now, you're struggling to keep up for about as long as the game remains playable (postwar deficits become crippling in the mid to late 30s), because every time you begin to catch up, there's another war, and when it ends everyone's budget collapses, but the UK's "naval preeminence" perk guarantees that they recover faster than you. If you try to speed up your recovery to get to a point where even that perk can't keep them ahead by choosing aggressive options for events that affect the budget, you just bring the next war upon yourself faster. It's probably my number one pain point with the game right now, as it makes the game unplayable well ahead if the official end date.
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Post by rimbecano on Feb 1, 2021 23:49:10 GMT -6
One potential problem you can run into replacing heavy turrets with light turrets (not entirely modeled in game as you can simply get rid of turrets) is that the ship's hull form is designed to produce as much buoyancy at a given frame as there is weight at that frame, so that the ship is supported evenly along its length. If you remove a mid to heavy caliber turret and barbette, that section of the ship has the same buoyancy, but less weight, so it wants to float higher than the sections directly fore and aft, which creates a bending force on the ship. This isn't an insurmountable problem, but it makes such a refit less than trivial.
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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 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 rimbecano on Jan 27, 2021 15:55:50 GMT -6
RTW1 has, among other things, fewer buttons to cram in.
But when it comes down to it, you have to recognize that XP is old enough to vote and no longer supported by MS. Playing anything modern on it is strictly an own-risk proposition.
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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 rimbecano on Jan 27, 2021 6:42:38 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.
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Post by rimbecano on Jan 26, 2021 9:29:56 GMT -6
rimbecano - The mission generator is the second-largest problem with the game. Inability to sort your own ships into groups (and select ships for missions) is the largest. I can't tell you how sick I am of starting a scenario with ships scattered here, there and yon, the slow ones guarding carriers and the fast ones carefully placed to fall under the guns of the enemy fleet, while I can't re-organize them or do anything to save them until the enemy is sighted. I'm by no means satisfied with the mission generator. I'm just not bugged by the specific problem that was raised. If missions don't cover the entire sortie from dockside to dockside, so to speak, then they have to begin at some point in the middle, and sometimes the specific placement in which ships are spawned may put the player at a disadvantage, which I'm fine with if I can imagine making decisions that wouldput me in that situation, which for bad placement relative to enemy ships is easier to imagine than bad placement relative to shore installations (which is why spawning at noon deep under air cover in 1940, when the base you sailed from isn't under air cover, is maddening). And yeah, I'd definitely like to have some control over formation generation, too, though that's more so I can stick my slow ships with my 24-knot carriers so my fast ships can run down the enemy fleet. :-)
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Post by rimbecano on Jan 26, 2021 9:08:25 GMT -6
Blockades and engagement rules in the game are dubious. Germany always had the option to force an engagement almost at any time - even if the British did not want this (they would've probably prefered to just wait the German army defeat), by shelling British land installations or conducting an agressive mine warfare around Scapa Flow or even landing at Shetland Islands, for example. The British had the same choice and they prefered the save option as the war was going well for them anyway. In the game you have to randomly wait for a ridiculous amount of time. Blockade rules would not have bothered me if there was an option to force a "decisive battle" every month and thus eliminating enemy BBs (or pinning them to their ports) and forcing a "close blockade" on an opponent. None of the German coastal raids that actually happened resulted in a fleet engagement. Even if both sides wanted to engage each other, it was not guaranteed that they would actually meet if at least one side didn't have intelligence on the other's plans in order to be in the right place at the right time. And bombarding the enemy coast was hazardous: Seydlitz struck a mine during the bombardment of Yarmouth and Lowestoft, and repairs from this delayed the Jutland operation. If anything, battle line actions are too common in the game.
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Post by rimbecano on Jan 23, 2021 22:41:15 GMT -6
As far as i know the concept was never seriously proposed for a capital-ship gun. The physical dimensions are so very much greater - an 8" shell weighs around 200 pounds while a 16" can weigh 2700 pounds, and with propellant the 16" shell-and-charge is a lot wider and longer - that the space required would probably force a reduction in number of guns per turret while not really providing a commensurate increase in rate-of-fire. I'm not sure that the space required for the machinery would be all that much more: for shells of that size a fair bit of machinery was already necessary: I think the reliability of an autoloader is more the concern at that size.
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Post by rimbecano on Jan 23, 2021 4:17:40 GMT -6
This is a large mission in support of land battle, which starts 1 hour before dawn. Near Guam, which the Japanese have invaded. The scenario spawned with enemy ships within visual range of my carriers. Unidentified ships turned out to be BBs and BC, accompanied by CLs. They were headed north and my CVs got away unscathed, as did the Japanese. I shudder to think what dawn will bring, CVs within gunnery range of Japanese BBs? Certainly no space to maneuver 6 CVs for carrier strikes. View AttachmentA few turns into the game more Japanese groups turned up to the south and southeast. One near my flagship battle group, which promptly torpedoed the flagship. Another near the unprotected American convoy. Called up the Task Manager and sent this scenario to hell. But you have to ask, really? The game will really put you in this kind of unwinnable situation? I've blundered into the enemy in the dark after the start of a battle, and gotten the worst of it, often enough that I don't entirely mind starting out in that scenario (or I do, but I get mad at the RNG and not at the devs). If it's a mistake I could make myself, I don't mind starting the battle with the mistake having been made. What really gets me mad is when a couple cruisers on a bombardment mission spawn well within the range of enemy land-based air cover at noon (and not in a region like the Med where you can't avoid air cover), which is a situation that I would never be dumb enough yo put a ship in.
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Post by rimbecano on Jan 21, 2021 21:46:42 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. It sounds logical at first glance, but it doesn't match up with how things actually happened in WWI. The German fleet made a number of sorties that the British did not oppose (or failed to make contact with), but this had no effect on the blockade because the ships actually doing the legwork to enforce the blockade were spread out over a wide area and had to be hunted down individually (and even then could only be sunk if German force that made contact had faster ships).
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Post by rimbecano on Jan 15, 2021 15:42:58 GMT -6
Well "Great Britain" doesn't even actually refer to the UK, it refers to the island of Great Britain, which is physically the largest of the British isles, thus the name.
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Post by rimbecano on Jan 9, 2021 17:34:53 GMT -6
Exactly. You must have possessions in an adjacent zone. Distance determines what you can invade, zone adjacency determines what territory you can take in a peace settlement.
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