|
Post by babylon218 on May 10, 2017 16:55:14 GMT -6
If the damage is beyond minor, and it's one of my Battleships/Battlecruisers, I slow the whole formation and turn away. If it's a cruiser or destroyer, I detach - and if the AI decides to detach at full speed, I take control and manually lower the speed until the ship loses sight of the flag.
|
|
|
Post by babylon218 on May 10, 2017 14:45:49 GMT -6
I found 'Dreadnought' to be terrifically interesting because the focus is on personalities and politics. 'Castles of Steel' is informative but very dry... factual but without the 'zing' of the first book, so not nearly as readable. True, but I personally found Massie's detailed and thorough analysis of each engagement riveting from a tactical perspective, and very useful for understanding the subtleties of naval combat (I also recommend S. Woodward, One Hundred Days, for those interested in more modern naval combat as well).
|
|
|
Post by babylon218 on May 10, 2017 12:50:55 GMT -6
I'm going to be occupied until Saturday afternoon, so the planning for the next turn will probably not be done until then, with the operation phase probably coming on Sunday. Just got Robert K. Massie's Dreadnought: Britain, Germany, and the Coming of the Great War, and Castles of Steel from the library for some light reading. Should make good reading once I can find the time to read them. I can say from experience that those are very good reads. Though 'light reading' is not how I'd describe them.
|
|
|
Post by babylon218 on May 5, 2017 15:24:49 GMT -6
Yep, looks like they're all working now.
|
|
|
Post by babylon218 on May 4, 2017 16:05:35 GMT -6
I'd be happy to take a British Yard.
|
|
|
Post by babylon218 on May 4, 2017 15:57:07 GMT -6
I tend to build two BC types in my games: Fleet Battlecruisers and 'Light' or 'Colonial' Battlecruisers.
Fleet Battlecruisers: Intended for home waters, either interdicting enemy Raiders, Cruiser Battles or as Fleet Scouts. Decent Armour on Belts and Decks with heavier armour over the turrets. Sacrifice number of main guns for speed and armour.
Light/Colonial Battlecruisers: This is a concept I'm still experimenting with. Essentially, these are smaller battlecruisers with fewer and smaller guns (usually 10-12 inches depending on gun quality) designed to fight enemy colonial forces, hunt down raiders or operate as raiders themselves.
Depending on the situation, I would build at least 2 Fleet Battlecruisers (regardless of design philosophy) to give yourself the capability to fight enemy BCs - otherwise, it becomes difficult to contest cruiser battles because of the risk you may encounter enemy BCs which completely outmatch your CLs/CAs. The Colonial Battlecruisers, as I said, are still a concept I'm experimenting with, but I'd say you'd only want as many as needed to contest enemy colonies in your sea zones (with the provision that this obviously isn't as feasible for Britain). Maybe 2 as France, 2-4 as Germany, 1 as Japan, 4 as US and GB. But those are purely speculative numbers, and I suspect many of those nations wouldn't even need such ships.
|
|
|
Post by babylon218 on May 3, 2017 17:06:03 GMT -6
Well, fortunately I'll be finishing this semester at Uni in the next few days, so I'll have some free time. However, I do have two exams coming up so I can't guarantee consistant participation until the end of the month. If you guys start before then, I would quite like to join as an 'apprentice' designer.
|
|
|
Post by babylon218 on May 2, 2017 15:00:02 GMT -6
babylon218 - I do mostly agree with you, except to say that he was ferociously loyal and could inspire great devotion from subordinates. His clashes with the 'old navy' set (principally Lord Charles Beresford) were bitter, in part because Fisher was such a bad winner - he never stopped praising himself for being right. Fisher got a lot of technical matters right - he was one of the few senior officers of the Royal Navy at the time who seems to have been genuinely interested in technology. He had an ability to persuade, enough passion for ten men, and a whim of iron. But he believed utterly in his own rightness and saw any deviation as heresy. Indeed, Fisher's greatest problem was theological - his Holy Trinity featured himself as a prominent member. And when he got something wrong - or only partially right - the results were very bad. On the plus side, he gave Britain the lead in all-big-gun ships and coined the memorable class-name dreadnought for them. He invented the term destroyer, promoted aviation and submarines, worked tirelessly to improve gunnery and general efficiency of the fleet. He recognized the threat from Germany, reduced the 'gunboat fleet' and concentrated on building a modern, powerful battlefleet. But he believed that turbine-powered ships could at least partially dispense with armor, using their superior speed to hold open the range and their big guns to destroy an enemy at ranges from which he could not effectively reply. This was absolutely true - for a few years and until other powers built dreadnoughts and battlecruisers of their own. if Fisher deserves credit for the idea of the dreadnought then he also bears direct responsibility for the lives of the 3300 crewmen lost in the explosion of HMS Indefatigable, Princess Royal and Invincible. From 'A Special Providence' comes my take on a Beresford Admiralty: Certainly, I never intended to question Fisher's loyalty - a man more devoted to the service I cannot think of - and he undoubtedly had a collossal impact on the course of naval history. I merely meant that he was by no means perfect: he was absolutely convinced of his own rightness, to the point of rejecting responsibility when he was wrong, with the results often being catastrophic (as you point out). On another note, regarding the Admiral-Class. It's important to note that they were ordered in 1914 as Battleships, being redesigned as Battlecruisers to match the threat of a class of new German Battlecruisers laid down the same year. As had been the trend started by HMS Lion, they were to have heavier armour than they're predecessors. After Jütland, the RN decided to abandon the Admirals due to the budgetary prospects of up-armouring them and something of a crisis in confidence regarding the Battlecruiser concept itself, with the Hood being saved because her hull was already nearing completion. The RN then spent the interwar years consistently trying to up-armour the Hood to acceptable levels while trying to keep her up-to-date with the latest fire control tech and gunnery ranges. Put simply, interwar Britain never really managed to properly modernise and up-armour Hood before her origins caught up with her in May 1940. Anyway, this is a discussion more suited for a different sub-forum.
|
|
|
Post by babylon218 on May 2, 2017 3:11:47 GMT -6
the more I hear about him the more the description of Fisher as a "Lighthouse, with moments where his briliance illuminates all and he is stunningly right, but long periods of darkness in between" becomes increasingly right seeming. I think probably the best term I've heard to describe Fisher is 'tempestuous'. He was brilliant in his own way, but he knew it. He was incapable of acknowledging his own mistakes and was entirely convinced of his own righteousness. He was virtually impossible to work with according to accounts and totally uncompromising.
|
|
|
Post by babylon218 on May 1, 2017 16:24:49 GMT -6
Add me to the list of people enjoying the read. Churchill may have boasted that the Royal Navy would force the Germans out, but in reality they had no means to do so. Welcome aboard! I agree. I think that the inaction of the North Sea Campgain might have contributed to some of the grandiose plans that he hatched when he was First Lord: in addition to the Dardanelles Offensive, I think that there was also a plot to use British ships to land Russian troops on the Baltic Coast and then march on Berlin That plan did exist, but it wasn't Churchill's: it was Fisher's. Fisher and Churchill had gotten into a long row about where to open up a second front with the Central Powers - Churchill favoured the Ottoman Empire at Gallipoli, believing the Entente could quickly sieze Constantinople and open supplies to Russia via the Black Sea. He also believed that once the Ottomans surrendered, the Entente could March up through the Balkans and relieve Serbia. Fisher favoured attacking Germany directly, and even laid down 3 'large light cruisers' designed for coastal operations (all three would be converted into Aircraft Carriers after Fisher was forced to resign in 1916, and their 2 15-inch guns each would eventually go to HMS Vanguard in the 1940s). Needless to say, Churchill won the argument.
|
|
|
Post by babylon218 on May 1, 2017 6:33:57 GMT -6
I thin it's purely coincidental. Most European navies adopted 13-in (the British used a 13.5-in gun) because it provided superior firepower to the 11/12-in they'd been using up to that point. US adopted the 14-in to overpower the British and German 13-in guns and Britain adopted 15-in to match German 15-in guns believed to then be in production. Britain did try to adopt the 16-in gun with the Nelson and Rodney, but their 16-in guns had reliability problems and the 15-in gun then in use had superior characteristics. They tried again with the Lion-Class in 1938, but they were never completed (aside from HMS Vanguard, which recieved 15-in guns from Courageous and Furious).
|
|
|
Post by babylon218 on Apr 30, 2017 17:10:44 GMT -6
Actually, early on Intel was pretty good for the British as far as movements via Borkum went. Nearby Bremen was a hive of British agents who would cross the Ems into the Netherlands, telegraph their information to Blighty, then return across the river to Bremen. The Harwich Force was able to catch a division of German torpedo-boat minelayers before they could mine the Dover Approach and threaten a group of monitors bombarding German forces near Antwerp thanks to Intel gathered in Bremen. However, Intel regarding movements out of Wilhelmshaven and Kiel, or short-notice sorties, would have been harder to discover I suspect.
|
|
|
Post by babylon218 on Apr 29, 2017 18:19:29 GMT -6
If you guys want to start a new thread, I'll be available (and interested) next week.
|
|
|
Post by babylon218 on Apr 28, 2017 15:35:27 GMT -6
Isn't it technically against international law to lay mines off the coast of a neutral nation?
Look forward to watching this campaign develop!
|
|
|
Post by babylon218 on Apr 27, 2017 14:04:28 GMT -6
So, here is my Moltke-Class Colonial Battlecruiser from my last game as Germany: Specs are similar to this: Main difference is that I deleted the R Turret to free up displacement and thus make the class cheaper. I was experimenting with the concept of a 'Colonial Battlecruiser' - a light battlecruiser which could wrest distant seas from the enemy and maul her shipping lanes - at the very least occupying heavy opposing units to take pressure of the Battlefleet. This ship and its sister, S.M.S. Goeben, proved very useful during a war with France, wresting control of the Far East from her and securing my colonies in the Pacific. I ended up building two more 'Colonial Battlecruisers' to an updated design as the game went on (one with a superfiring aft centreline and one with two triple turrets). Unfortunately, this 1910s war with France turned out to be my last war of the game as a naval arms treaty kept tensions low until mid-1924, so the Colonial Battlecruisers and the Fleet Cousins never got a true test. Ideally, I'd have liked a war against Britain or the United States (or just France when she had more than one Dreadnought to throw at me!). Next time, I think I'll play past 1925 to see how the concept performs over a longer period of time.
|
|