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Post by aeson on Feb 3, 2022 1:54:28 GMT -6
I have never once seen a "torpedo magazine" hit location show up in the logs. Do you have a screenshot showing such a thing? You did read my follow on sentence, aeson? The one where I stated I'm not sure it's possible to affect them with a hit or critical? Ships with submerged tubes must have a magazine in order to reload the tubes. Them being damaged by a hit is a whole different kettle of fish. If you're going to be snitty about reading comprehension, might I point out that replying to a statement that there is no such hit location as a torpedo magazine with a statement to the effect that ships do have torpedo magazines rather strongly implies disagreement with the initial statement regardless of what you follow it with? After all, if you agree that there is no such hit location then whether ships don't have torpedo magazines or instead have torpedo magazines which cannot be hit is irrelevant.
Also, while I suppose 'torpedo magazine' would not be an entirely inaccurate appellation for any room in which torpedoes are kept, I cannot say that I can recall ever seeing a chamber containing both one or more torpedo tubes and one or more torpedoes described as such, and as to my understanding by far the most common historical practice was to keep the torpedoes in the same rooms as the torpedo tubes if there was any realistic intention of loading the tubes with them during an engagement I rather doubt that the game assumes any separate magazine for a submerged tube's reload torpedoes.
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Post by aeson on Feb 2, 2022 14:13:08 GMT -6
Don't put a name in the name box when you order a batch of submarines.
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Post by aeson on Feb 2, 2022 12:39:55 GMT -6
If it's a 2" DD vs a B, the B will have submerged torpedo tubes - and they do have a magazine for the torpedoes. I have never once seen a "torpedo magazine" hit location show up in the logs. Do you have a screenshot showing such a thing?
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Post by aeson on Jan 29, 2022 15:46:08 GMT -6
I just had a allied 2 inch gun armed destroyer sink a battleship by hitting its torpedo magazine. A log entry that reads "Torpedo Magazine hit" is recording a torpedo hit abreast of the magazines, not an unspecified hit to the torpedo magazines. Also, as far as I am aware, there is no hit location called a "torpedo magazine" in-game.
Your ally's destroyer sank the battleship by scoring a torpedo hit that detonated the main magazines, not by putting a 2" shell into the 'torpedo magazines.'
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Post by aeson on Jan 23, 2022 13:06:23 GMT -6
And idk depends on the requirements a nation has. I know of tons of nations that have used equipment long after it's been determined to be obsolete by larger superpowers. Considering it a bug seems extreme. It's a ship whose design dates to about 1890 and which probably wasn't built much later. It's 30+ and more likely 35+ years old; it's very likely that its 9" main battery guns are Q-2 (so probably something like a later-mark British 9.2" / 31.5 such as was carried by the Blake and Edward classes) and probably have pretty low maximum elevation by 1930s standards; if it hasn't been bulged then it doesn't have any underwater protection to speak of; its armor might be 12.5" thick but is so old that it's probably no better than half that thickness of modern armor (I'd expect a nickel-steel armor, which historically probably needed to be ~40% thicker than even the early Krupp armor of the mid-1890s to achieve a similar level of protection given that 10.2" early Krupp armor ~ 12" contemporary Harvey armor and 13" Harvey armor ~ 15.5" contemporary nickel-steel armor); its obsolescence means that the Italian navy probably hasn't bothered doing any significant maintenance on it for the last two decades, so its engines are likely worn out, its bottom is probably in poor condition and riddled with leaks, and any internal "watertight" bulkheads it may have probably ceased to be even a fair approximation of watertight a decade or more ago.
Also, I would regard it as quite likely that a 15- to 25-year-old cruiser or a cheap modern-ish destroyer-type vessel would better fit the requirements of even a minor power's navy than a battleship such as this - if nothing else, both the cruiser and the destroyer would be significantly faster, the cruiser might and the destroyer almost certainly would have lower crew requirements, and unless the battleship was fairly thoroughly modernized at some point in the last 20 years it'd probably be easier to find repair parts for the cruiser and the destroyer than for the battleship since the latter was already obsolete 30 years ago - and would probably be available at a competitive cost (especially a cruiser at the older end of the range given, since a major power which has a cruiser in that age bracket is probably looking to get rid of it). Oh, and whatever passes for the antiquated battleship's electrical systems are probably even more of an overburdened and jury-rigged mess than a turn-of-the-century cruiser's would be.
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Post by aeson on Jan 22, 2022 1:17:38 GMT -6
Can we sell ships to other nations or is that sold-off bit just fluff? Because selling old ships to other nations would be very cool You cannot sell ships to other powers, and I would hazard a guess that "sold off" is being used as a synonym for "scrapped," not as 'fluff' for a hypothetical sale of an obsolete ship to some other power. Most warships aren't actually scrapped by the navy that last possessed them - while naval shipyards are probably capable of taking a ship apart, that's not really what they're there for and it's not really the best use of the facility, at least insofar as the navy is concerned - but are instead sold to private concerns which then take the ships to various breakers' yards for scrapping, so the implication of a warship being "sold off" is that it's "sold off [to the breakers' yards]" or "sold off [for scrapping]."
Also, unless I'm missing something, the Leonardo da Vinci class is a ~13,000t 9"-gunned Brandenburg-esque predreadnought battleship with a design speed of 16 knots that dates back to the early 1890s - at least one of them was in commission in 1893 according to the list of ships sunk seen here, and given the name of the ship it wasn't the first of class; that post also indicates that the design year for the Leonardo da Vinci class is 1890, so while it might not quite have been a legacy design at game start it certainly isn't far removed from being such. I very much doubt that any major - or, for that matter, even minor - power would have any real interest in acquiring such an antiquated vessel in the 1930s, and if the game did allow you to sell old ships to other powers (even minor ones not directly represented in the game) then I would report any interest in acquiring a ship such as this as a bug, especially if anything more than scrap value was offered for it.
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Post by aeson on Jan 12, 2022 13:12:20 GMT -6
Yep and even then an enemy lucky hit might slow you too much and it also means your CA might loose CA v CA duels due to having too much weight in speed/machinery Another solution is to just not build CAs and build CLs instead The "only CL" solution is bad as AI CAs are somewhat armored againist 6'' gunfire, and there are many of them, so your cruiser forces will be able to do precisely nothing.
I regularly sink the computer's CAs in gunnery engagements with 6" and even 5" CLs - frequently CLs built far short of the eventual 12,000-ton limit - so I'm going to have to suggest that your claim that "CL-only is bad because your cruiser forces will be able to do precisely nothing" is, hm, exaggerated.
Honestly, it's CAs that I find to be most often worthless; I've never felt that I truly needed them, they rarely show up when I might actually want them, and they far too often show up when I'd really rather not have them. If I have to face a battlecruiser with a CL or a CA, I'd rather face it with a CL since that's a less expensive loss if I can't run away, really isn't much worse off in a gun fight by any practical measure except possibly if the computer's battlecruiser is one of those awful things with 6" armor, and is probably at least as capable of torpedoing a capital ship as a CA would be, while if I'm facing one of the computer's CAs I'm fairly confident that I can either sink or escape from it with one of my CLs and more confident that I can sink it with two of my CLs. About the only reason why I resume building CAs in the late game is that SAMs start getting in the way of all-centerline 5x3 SP and 6x2 DP armaments and can be a bit difficult to squeeze onto sub-CL-max cruisers without really cutting back on the gun armament.
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Post by aeson on Jan 9, 2022 11:44:38 GMT -6
Generally speaking, LAA guns become less effective as the game progresses - there is a chance (dependent upon the attacking aircraft's speed) that LAA guns will not engage an attacker before it drops its bombs/torpedo, and on top of that LAA guns are less powerful than MAA guns, so LAA guns are less useful against faster, tougher aircraft than MAA guns are. However, regardless of whether or not LAA guns engage an attacker before it drops its bombs/torpedo, LAA guns will apply a disruptive effect to an attacker which reduces the likelihood that the attacker will score a hit, so even in the very late stages of the game LAA guns retain enough utility that it's probably worth keeping a few of them on the ship.
I personally would say that LAA guns are at least as useful as MAA guns throughout the '20s and perhaps even as late as the mid-'30s, as aircraft are still relatively slow (therefore unlikely to complete an attack before the LAA guns can engage) and fragile (thus LAA guns aren't too much worse at seriously damaging or downing them than the heavier MAA guns), but beyond the mid-'30s the situation changes pretty rapidly as the speed and toughness of the aircraft you expect to encounter starts to increase fairly significantly. As such, I tend to start out with a roughly an LAA:MAA ratio of 2:1 in the early-'20s and gradually increase the proportion of MAA guns as the game progresses, usually having a roughly 1:1 ratio on new construction by the early-'30s and a 1:2+ ratio on new construction from the '40s onwards. I don't normally take ships in for refit just to change the balance of their L/MAA suite, so the overall balance of AA guns in the fleet might lag behind that a bit depending on how rapidly older ships get refitted or taken out of service.
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Post by aeson on Jan 7, 2022 10:59:41 GMT -6
This raises a question that has sometimes come up for me, which is how much difference, if any, does drawing out one's designs make? None whatsoever.
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Post by aeson on Jan 6, 2022 15:04:00 GMT -6
If you would like to have some decent ships at the start of the game, than ya, you want to design them yourself. If you don't mind, or want more of a challenge, then AI legacy fleet would be better. I would dispute the idea that the autogenerated legacy fleet will not give you "decent" ships; the ships of an autogenerated legacy fleet are generally at least adequate for what you'll need from them in the 1900-1910 period, and to me a ship which is adequate for the tasks it will need to perform is a decent ship. It is not necessary a good ship, but at least to me "decent" is a (usually much) lower bar to clear than "good."
To me, two much more relevant questions to answer before deciding whether or not to build a legacy fleet manually are: 1. Will I have fun building the legacy fleet? - Yes: Build the legacy fleet manually. - Definitely not: Don't build the legacy fleet manually. - Maybe/No: Continue to question 2.
2. Do I want to do something with the legacy fleet that the computer will not do for me? - Yes: Build the legacy fleet manually. The computer's not going to give me half a dozen 5,100t "battleships" and a dozen 14,000t raiding cruisers for a legacy fleet no matter how many times I restart the game; if that's the legacy fleet I want to have, then I'll have to build it myself. - No: If the computer will give you a legacy fleet that will do what you want it to do and you don't think you're going to enjoy building your legacy fleet manually, then you probably shouldn't build the legacy fleet manually.
In the released version of the game, I personally almost always play on the 1900 start and build the legacy fleet manually - not because I think I can do better than the computer (I can, but that's not really relevant and the quality of the legacy ships won't matter that much a few years into the game anyways, as by then newer more advanced ships should be getting into service and will probably become the dominant component of the fleet just a bit later), but because I enjoy building the legacy fleet and can give myself a fleet that's not basically the same starting fleet that I've had for the past five games or whatever.
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Post by aeson on Jan 5, 2022 20:48:53 GMT -6
You just don't see any income Why would you expect to see any significant change in the naval budget directly resulting from a foreign power contracting a domestic shipyard to build one or more warships? Sure, major warships are expensive things, but their cost is small relative to the revenues that a major industrial state's government should be generating, their cost is spread out over several years, not all of the cost goes to the government - I'm reasonably confident that most major warships built for foreign powers were built in private shipyards, but even if they were built in state-owned shipyards the state would only be able to collect that part of the construction price which did not go towards materials and labor - and not all of what the government collects on the sale goes to the navy. Wikipedia says that the bid that Fore River provided Argentina for the Rivadavia-class battleships was around $11 million each... but in the five years or so over which the two ships were built the US defense budget ranged from just over $300 million to just under $350 million per year, so even if the US government collected 100% of the contract price of the two ships in tax revenues and other duties and put every last penny of it into the defense budget that's only an additional $22 million or so on just under $2 billion, or little over 1% of the total - and I find it very doubtful that the US government either collected 100% of the contract price in tax revenues and other duties on the sale of the two ships or put every penny that it did get out of that sale into the defense budget.
It may also be worth pointing out that there is some historical precedent for such projects being subsidized to some extent by the government of the state in which the contractor is based, so it's at least arguably the case that a foreign power ordering a warship from one of your domestic shipyards could actually result in a reduction of your budget.
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Post by aeson on Jan 5, 2022 12:59:34 GMT -6
Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if the Royal Navy had a 123456789012345678901234567890th destroyer division. They certainly had enough ships. For those of you who are wondering, that's the one hundred and twenty-three octillion, four hundred and fifty six septillion, seven hundred and eighty-nine sextilion, twelve quintillion, three hundred and forty-five quadrillion, six hundred and seventy-eight trillion, nine hundred and one billion, two hundred and thirty-four million, five hundred and sixty-seven thousand, eight hundred and ninetieth destroyer division. It took me a while to parse it. I'm afraid that's not quite the number used for the division name in the image. - Firstly, the division number ends in 89 and thus it must be an "and Eighty-Ninth" division rather than an "and Ninetieth" division. - Secondly, if you want to parse the number it helps to notice that the number used for the division name can be broken into twelve blocks which each consist of 0123456789, so the number should be on the order of 10118 (or 10119 if we ignore that the leading digit is 0), but a hundred octillion is only 1029.
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Post by aeson on Jan 4, 2022 22:48:27 GMT -6
Will ship squadrons be something that we can name ourselves? Or is there an autogenerated system for naming them? If possible, could we have the option of naming them ourselves? This would be fun for immersion and for AAR writing. Does this answer your questions?
(I don't guarantee that this won't change before release... but I also don't see any reason why it would change before release.)
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Post by aeson on Dec 23, 2021 12:40:41 GMT -6
Now this decision is based on my ASSUMPTION that TP, ASW and MS are LOCAL sea zone mechanics and are not global which means for these to work in any given sea zone theses assets must be moved there. Trade Protection is only handled locally insofar as surface raiders are concerned, and ASW is only handled locally insofar as ASW escorts (mainly destroyers) assigned to AF in the same sea zone as your more major warships reduce the likelihood that the more major warships will be torpedoed by submarines as an interturn/post-battle event. The protection of merchantmen against and the sinking of submarines is handled globally in the released version of the game; submarines are not explicitly modeled at the level of the individual sea zones and the various ships involved in convoy escort and other ASW-oriented trade protection duties likewise function globally. There's even an artifact of this visible in battle scenarios - I am fairly confident that I've seen destroyers and corvettes assigned to TP duty several sea zones away turn up as a convoy's organic escort during Convoy Defense scenarios.
Insofar as mine warfare goes, while it is true that minesweeping is local, so is minelaying, at least for the most part - defensive minefields are assumed to be laid in each sea zone by small craft operating out of ports in any possessions held by belligerent powers in the area while offensive minefields are laid by mine-equipped warships, and apart from the minelaying submarines (which are not in any specific sea zone) none of these can lay mines in any sea zone other than the one in which they are present. It is therefore very likely that by far the greatest mine threat can be found in the sea zones where the enemy's main fleets are concentrated; as you will most likely deploy your own fleets to engage their fleets, these also represent the sea zones in which by far the highest concentrations of your most valuable vessels may be found. Ships in other areas, meanwhile, face a low-level mine threat - the mine threat in most areas may very well come from nothing more than an occasional raider, or perhaps there are a few minor colonial possessions and a mine-equipped cruiser or two - but deploying minelayers to safeguard ships in these areas against this low-level mine threat is very likely to represent a nontrivial dispersion of effort away from protecting your main fleets, because you have a limited number of minesweepers in the fleet and deploying one or more to each area where you have anything at all likely necessarily involves a nontrivial fraction of them, especially as a power like Great Britain which has colonies and commitments in almost every single sea zone. If you aren't getting any benefit other than a reduction in the already-low probability of a mine strike occurring in sea zones outside of the main areas of operation from dispersing your minesweepers thusly, you really need to consider whether or not deploying your minesweepers thusly is worthwhile - especially considering that you clearly find the management overhead of doing so onerous. You're ignoring capital investment. Converting that old destroyer might cost me 50 credits whereas building a new 600t minesweeping corvette probably costs me a minimum of around 1,000 credits, so even if my old destroyer costs 20 per turn while my new corvette costs just 14 per turn in upkeep I'm still looking at nearly a decade of service before the cost of building the corvette is paid off by what I'm saving in upkeep, and on top of that if I have enough old destroyers then converting a few for minesweeping duty doesn't carry a significant cost to my ASW forces with it - especially since converting an old destroyer into a minesweeper doesn't completely remove its contribution to my ASW effort.
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Post by aeson on Dec 22, 2021 19:54:40 GMT -6
Might it be scrapping outside of a home territory yields no funds and I'm miss-remembering the situation???
I don't see any indication that ships scrapped in home sea zones are worth either more or less than ships scrapped overseas: Pop-ups say that scrapping the Camperdown-class battleship Royal Oak in Southern Africa will bring in 1,188 in funds and say the same for scrapping the Camperdown-class battleship Barfleur in Northern Europe; in both cases, my funds increased by the 1,188 indicated in the pop-up. If you were scrapping ships in the Ships in Service tab, then this is not behavior that I've seen in any game I've played as any power, including Russia, regardless of where in the world the ships were or how many different classes of ship were being scrapped. This is however behavior that I see in the Ships under Construction tab; did you perhaps attempt to scrap the ships while refitting them?
If not, do you have a savegame where this can be reliably reproduced?
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