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Post by rimbecano on Jan 9, 2021 15:20:14 GMT -6
I do feel that if the enemy if blockading you and you sail out seeking a battle, and the enemy refuses to fight, that ought to mean an end to the blockade. Similarly, whether you are blocking the enemy, that should be determined by who is prepared to come out and fight rather than notional fleet strength. At the very least they should not gain the VP from it and assuming there is an internal timer how long you have been blockaded that should partially reset as well. I'm assuming here that merchant will hear that the enemy is refusing to fight and use the couple of days the fleet stays at sea to get their own ships in and out. Even that seems a bit too much to me. A blockading force will generally be spread out, a fleet attempting to give battle will be concentrated in one spot. Basically all that refusing battle means for the blockading force is that it refuses to concentrate itself (or, if some ships are enforcing the blockade and others are sitting in port, that the ships sitting in port refuse to sortie). What I'd do with the blockading side refusing to engage: 1) There us a risk (but not a certainty) of an unexpected battle in which the whole of the challenging fleet encounters a single ship from the blockade force. If that ship isn't fast enough to run, it will likely be defeated and the blockade force can (maybe) be whittled down over time by this method. 2) The challenging side gets one convoy through the blockade (directly escorted by the challenging fleet). 3) The challenging side can move ships to one other sea zone that month without having to set them as raiders and risk internment.
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Post by rimbecano on Jan 8, 2021 1:07:31 GMT -6
Yeah, especially given how military spending absolutely collapses after every war in the late game in recent versions. The collapse wouldnt matter much if it also happened to the ai. But generally they will match your increased spending during wartime and then simply not dropp down leaving you with a perpetually underfunded navy in comparison.
Oh, they take a hit when a war ends, but they tend to rebound faster, especially Britain. I used to pass Britain as the US sometime in the 1920s, but now the postwar cuts are so drastic that they stay ahead of me consistently well into the thirties with the naval preeminence perk, and if I try to rebound aggressively after a war, I just end up triggering another one. And by the time I catch up, if I do, I reach a point in the mid to late thirties where the end of a war will bring me from a huge pool of saved money to complete insolvency within a few months, even with evening mothballed and scraping more than I can afford.
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Post by rimbecano on Jan 5, 2021 21:01:49 GMT -6
Peacetime unrest of 10 just after a war seems a bit high though. Yeah, especially given how military spending absolutely collapses after every war in the late game in recent versions.
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Post by rimbecano on Jan 2, 2021 18:53:07 GMT -6
Have been playing as Britain and been at war with Germany for about 13 months, so far about 9 of the months the picture attached has been the mission selected. Always the same bombardment mission, aways the same location, always the same 3 CAs, depsite having 14 B's in the area that have yet to fire a shot in the entire war. It would be great to see more variety among missions of a given type, but battleship engagements shouldn't really be common; in fact, at least in the pre-1925 stage of the game they should probably be *less* common: The entire history of the steel battleship is even more frustrating to us naval geeks when we look back on real life history and see very few battle line actions than when we play RTW and have trouble getting a fleet action.
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Post by rimbecano on Jan 2, 2021 18:45:48 GMT -6
As mentioned, taking ships is an option, but fairly rare, and I've never taken more than one. I'd love to see this made a bit more aggressive, as after WWI the British basically took possession of the entire German navy (although many of the ships were then sabotaged by their crews, that happened after they had been delivered to Scapa Flow).
Ooh, that would make for an interesting game event "German crews have sabotaged the ships that we took as reparations, the following ships have been sunk:"
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Post by rimbecano on Dec 29, 2020 0:51:58 GMT -6
In my role as gadfly I must point out that we assume that Hiei sank. In fact, both sides lost contact with her in the hours of darkness, and she vanished. No survivor ever was found, nor has the wreck been located. She remains perhaps the last great mystery of WW2 naval combat. If she had not sunk, then she would have been found, at the latest, with the advent of global satellite imagery.
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Post by rimbecano on Dec 27, 2020 20:34:21 GMT -6
I seem to recall that a few updates ago a rule was added that you can only take possessions in areas adjacent to areas where you already have possessions.
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Post by rimbecano on Dec 25, 2020 18:09:45 GMT -6
I, for one, am disappointed there isn't a "steam line rupture" event for steam-driven ships. I don't know about that. Any penetrating hit to a machinery space is almost certain to rupture some part of the steam circuit, so I think the information that machinery damage has occurred is enough to imply that.
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Post by rimbecano on Dec 24, 2020 3:10:37 GMT -6
In the game, for battleships (not Pre-Dreadnought in the 1900s), the superstructure hit caused Fire and Fire spreads. I have burned a lot of battleships to death with small caliber ammunition. This is so strange, what is burning? Is the cannonball burning? Is the steel burning? Is this the magic flame of World of Warships game? And it’s also strange that the buoyancy is vented without being penetrated in the core area. Paint was a huge culprit. I recall an account of the Solomons campaign that related how, after some of the early actions of the campaign, US crews spent a good long time stripping paint, as it had proven so flammable in combat. In a short-range night or bad weather action, small caliber guns still can devastate a battleship. Look at the case of Hiei at first Guadalcanal. She was crippled so badly as to be unable to leave the area before dawn, which left her a sitting duck for air attack. But none of the ships she faced had guns heavier than 8".
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Post by rimbecano on Dec 23, 2020 18:50:44 GMT -6
I disagree. Those ships and guns were perfectly capable of handling these missions: Trade warfare and protection, shore bombardment, scouting for carriers and carrier protection. What they *weren't* capable of handling was standing in the line of battle against post-treaty battleships. Sure, they could stand in the line of battle against WWI BBs, but without the treaty, those would all have been scrapped as obsolete by the time of WWII.
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Post by rimbecano on Dec 23, 2020 11:49:20 GMT -6
I think the Alaska class of large cruisers probably were battle cruisers. They had 4 inch deck armor, 9 in. belt with 12 inch guns. It might a stretch, but I think they qualify. They could sail at 33 knots and had a 12,000 mi. range at 15 knots. Sounds like a Fisher battle cruiser to me. Personally, I don't regard 12" as a capital ship caliber in the WWII era. I regard both the Alaskas and the Scharnhorsts as exceptionally heavy heavy cruisers (which is how the navy classified the Alaskas). They would have been eaten for lunch by any post-treaty capital ship built or planned. I'd put the line between capital ship and cruiser at somewhere around 35,000 tons and 13 or 14" weapons. I'm really doubtful about whether the Dunkerques even qualified, and I'd rule them out entirely if any single other capital ship class in service during the war had been built with an inch higher caliber guns than it was historically. I'd rule out even the KGVs if the US had been a bit quicker about deciding to pull out of the treaty after Japan did, and the SDs had accordingly been built to a design with tonnage closer to the Iowas, or if any second power had built an 18" class.
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Post by rimbecano on Dec 23, 2020 10:18:47 GMT -6
The game, I believe, currently classifies any BB going above 30 knots as BC, which is not very convincing... The Iowa class had a design speed of 33 knots and USS New Jersey had a top speed of 35.2 knots at one point. The Richelieu class could go at 32 knots and the Bismark class 30.8 knots. The argument that the Richelieus, and even moreso the Iowas, were really BCs is quite strong. Both were faster than any BC ever completed, and the Iowas' armor scheme was uncomfortably light for their gun caliber. Even Richelieu had less than an inch more belt armor than Hood, and of the three you mentioned, she had the thickest belt. Bismarck's deck was uncomfortably thin for the WWII era, too. Furthermore, neither the USN nor the French Navy had, to my knowledge, ever completed a BC as such, and so the institutional inertia towards designating anything as a BB instead of a BC was probably very strong. Does it really matter? For Fast BBs (those over 27 knots, as I recall) the difference between a BB and a BC in gameplay terms is pretty much nil, as the battle generator will select either type for both battle line and cruiser missions.
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Post by rimbecano on Dec 22, 2020 14:33:32 GMT -6
Hood, like all warships traveling at high speed, piled up water near the bow and had a hollow, or trough, just about at the mainmast (this is the phenomenon the Japanese 'wavy' deck line exploited). A shell hitting there would not have been deflected by passing underwater (or by going just a few meters underwater) and could have easily struck the exposed hull below the armor belt. The article actually mentions the trough, and its potential to allow a shell to bypass the belt, in passing, though it doesn't dwell on it.
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Post by rimbecano on Dec 19, 2020 21:37:09 GMT -6
unless Intelligence actually believes that the fighter has no offensive weaponry/capability at all, in which case their department title is completely inappropriate. Seems to be about par for the course, givenall the jokes about "military intelligence".
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Post by rimbecano on Dec 17, 2020 2:32:52 GMT -6
In a couple games, I've kept nearly all of my legacy Bs and CAs as CVL conversions to the end of the game. I also tend to keep destroyers for a long time as TP vessels, to avoid the micromanagement that results from MSes autoscrapping, and the poor performance of MSes in gun duels with subs.
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