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Post by aeson on Jul 15, 2019 13:20:22 GMT -6
Furthermore, according to my knowledge, an airforce was forbidden. So, the possibility in the game that you can set up a naval airforce is unhistorical. Yep. First clause of Article 198: "The armed forces of Germany must not include any military or naval air forces." The game's version of Versailles is also missing the ban on construction of coastal fortifications from Article 196, though I doubt if many of us would care all that much if it were there.
The game does have a sort of half-hearted attempt at banning a naval air force inasmuch as Germany cannot build or convert ships into aircraft carriers under the game's Versailles Treaty restrictions: I don't know why it's not mentioned in the nation overview at game start, in the tooltip that pops up for the treaty when you hover your cursor over the remaining time counter, or in the Almanac during the game.
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Post by aeson on Jul 15, 2019 13:02:00 GMT -6
They lose VPs for declining the battles, but that doesn't help keep the people fat and happy. I would happily trade a few thousand victory points in return for my opponent getting added unrest every turn. Most wars end long before unrest matters, even if the enemy refuses just about every battle.
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Post by aeson on Jul 14, 2019 12:34:49 GMT -6
Also I don’t think BE offers any protection for turreted secondary, which relies entirely on secondary Armor. Somewhere around here is a post by Fredrik indicating that either BE or DE (I don't remember which, but DE would make more sense to me) is the assumed thickness of the top armor on secondary turrets, though as within the game the tonnage cost for the secondary armament appears to be independent of any of the armor thicknesses other than secondary I don't know that I believe it.
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Post by aeson on Jul 14, 2019 10:32:11 GMT -6
I think that the First London Treaty did include Germany The only way in which Germany is part of the Washington-First London-Second London treaty system is through the Anglo-German Naval Agreement of 1935. In the current patch, the rules are specifically that the gun caliber limit is set by the peace treaty and the displacement limit is the more restrictive of the peace treaty and the international treaty. A random treaty can give you a less restrictive limit than the 10,000 tons of the 'historical' Washington Treaty...
... in which case you'll be limited to 12,000 tons by the game's version of the Versailles treaty.
Also, I'll point out that the game's version of Versailles is actually much less restrictive than the historical, which permitted the German fleet just six battleships of not more than ten thousand tons apiece, six light cruisers, 12 destroyers, and 12 torpedo boats, with the battleships not to be replaced less than 20 years after entering service and the lighter ships not to be replaced less than 15 years after entering service. The game's Versailles treaty permits as many ships as you can afford and allows them to be up to 12,000 tons if a more restrictive international treaty is not in effect.
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Post by aeson on Jul 14, 2019 10:12:42 GMT -6
So...what you're saying is that there should be a downside to using foreign yards to build ships with technology not yet researched at home? Because that's entirely what this thread is asking for. I'd need to pay the costs to set up a supply chain for 15" ammunition whether I purchased my first 15" gun domestically or overseas. Nobody's going to be making 15" ammunition in any significant quantities if there isn't a market for it, and even if there's an overseas market for it it's not very likely that my domestic arms manufacturers have much of a share in it.
What you appear not to realize is that of all the costs and trade-offs to using 14" instead of 12" guns that I mentioned in the paragraph you respond to here...
... only the surcharge that you're asking for does not already exist within the game. Exact magnitudes of the costs and trade-offs vary according to what technologies you have and what you've actually designed, of course. Who said the arguments only applied to foreign shipyards? I certainly didn't.
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Post by aeson on Jul 14, 2019 9:45:42 GMT -6
AoN ships do not receive a bonus to flotation points over non-AoN ships: Both of those ships were designed and laid down on the same turns, neither had a 'found to be overweight on trials' event, both have FloatMod=0 in the design files, and both have 13,735 maximum flotation points, as can be seen from the tooltip that appeared when my cursor hovered over the empty bar next to "Flotation" (you can't see the cursor but can see the tooltip).
What AoN ships get that non-AoN ships don't get, to my understanding, is reduced likelihood of taking 'Progressive Flooding' damage - the more dangerous of the two types of flooding in the long run, because it cannot be reduced in battle by damage control.
As to your questions about extended belt (BE) armor: BE armor represents the upper belt strake, which usually protected the casemated secondary battery, and the belt ends. The only particularly important thing that BE armor protects within the game, at least on non-AoN ships, are the uptakes - a potential hit location which can reduce your ship's speed. I personally would recommend using at most splinter protection (2") for BE armor, at least once you get to the dreadnought period, because putting enough BE armor on the ship to protect against the guns you're likely most concerned about - 11"+ (and by the 1920s more probably 14"+) for battleships and battlecruisers and 8" to 10" guns on heavy/armored/first class cruisers - starts to become very impractical, and the guns that are light enough to armor against without paying a heavy tonnage cost also aren't usually much of a concern to a battleship or a battlecruiser - excluding 12" or 14" shells from the turrets, magazines, and machinery spaces is in general much, much more important than excluding 6" shells from the gallery deck and the ends of the ship, because a 12" or 14" shell exploding in a turret or a magazine or a boiler room will usually hurt your ship a lot more than a 6" shell knocking out a secondary gun. Also, during the dreadnought period, typical engagement ranges will begin to grow to the point where the relatively light secondary batteries simply cannot engage effectively (or in more extreme cases at all), especially prior to the development of Secondary Directors.
Personally, I don't see any reason to use BE/DE instead of 'true' AoN.
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Post by aeson on Jul 13, 2019 20:09:59 GMT -6
But there's a reason you don't do that stuff in peacetime. It imposes major costs, of one form or another, and that will cause problems for your economy. Sure, but transshipping in Britain to avoid a blockade isn't going to be much, if any, better than transshipping somewhere closer to home to avoid a blockade if your peacetime traffic normally goes to the Americas.
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Post by aeson on Jul 13, 2019 19:15:52 GMT -6
But if a foreign yard had the capability to produce a design that domestic shipyards could not, would you also not expect them to capitalize on that fact and demand a higher price? Maybe some modifier such as "For each tech utilized in design that is not owned by ordering nation, price increases X%", and then further modify X by how many other nations have the tech also? So if Great Britain is the first nation to figure out 14" guns, you can bet they're gonna be charging out the nose for them. But once a couple other nations develop their own versions, the price naturally falls to represent the need to remain competitive. Private shipyards want to turn a profit, certainly, but they also want to sell you a ship, and if they're "charging through the nose" for something that offers uncertain superiority over something for which you'd be paying closer to cost, it's going to make it that much harder for them to sell you a ship. Eight 14" guns are probably better than eight 12" guns. Are they enough better than eight 12" guns to justify paying 20% more or sacrificing 25% of your armor protection for them and then adding a surcharge because the foreign shipyard is "charging through the nose" for them because nobody else can offer 14" guns? If I can get 10 12" guns onto a design that has the same armor protection as but costs ~5% less than the equivalent 14" design even before adding a surcharge to the 14" design, how does that change things? In the game, I create the designs and I'm also the only person I need to convince that a design is worth paying for. Historically, that would not have been the case - if I'm the shipyard, I need to convince whoever's reviewing the bids that my design is worth paying for despite being 25% more expensive than Bob's design, probably without knowing specifics about Bob's bid. If I'm the guy who reviews the bids and I decide that this bid that's 25% higher than Bob's and comes from overseas really is the best, I need to be able to convince the guy who holds the purse-strings that I haven't lost my mind or been paid off and that this really is something worth paying for, and both I and the guy who's holding the purse strings might have to defend this decision to somebody else further up the line, for example the US Congress when the Navy goes to ask for its budget.
Beyond that, realistically speaking, there isn't just one private shipyard or just one armaments manufacturer in a power like Britain, the USA, Germany, or Italy. Maybe I'm Blohm und Voss and I'm offering a battleship with Krupp 15" guns, but one of my competitors is Germaniawerft and they could be offering a battleship with comparable Rheinmetall 15" guns. Do I risk asking a premium for my design when Germaniawerft might not? Additionally, if I'm trying to sell you your first 15" gun, I not only have to convince you that my design is worth paying extra for but I also have to convince you that it's worth paying the additional costs to set up a supply chain for 15" ammunition and probably also to procure some spare guns, or at least spare liners for the guns, whereas if you stick with guns that you already have in service you can keep using an existing supply chain, and if you really want to cut costs or shorten the construction time a bit you might be able to use some spare guns that the Navy already has on hand rather than building new guns for the new ships. These are not things that you need to worry about within the game, but they're things that would have been issues historically.
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Post by aeson on Jul 13, 2019 17:20:34 GMT -6
You'd think that it'd be sufficient for Russia to do most of its trade overland through Germany and Austria-Hungary, but within the game it's not, so... Or that trade is enough to let you keep fighting without collapsing immediately, but it's not as good as proper oceanic travel. Either way. Regardless, if you can avoid the blockade by trading through intermediaries, you could expose your merchant shipping to less risk by choosing intermediaries in, say, Germany, Denmark, or Sweden and not have to leave the Baltic, or the Ottoman Empire and not have to leave the Black Sea, or by going overland into Germany, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire, and maybe British India and not have to put anything on a ship at all.
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Post by aeson on Jul 13, 2019 16:31:54 GMT -6
It would be sufficient to escort the convoy to a port in Great Britain and trade through intermediaries, would it not? You'd think that it'd be sufficient for Russia to do most of its trade overland through Germany and Austria-Hungary, but within the game it's not, so...
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Post by aeson on Jul 13, 2019 16:31:00 GMT -6
So yeah, there really needs to be like a big 10% profit margin tax stuck on every ship you build in a foreign yard, because in real life the foreign yard would be making a profit. Domestic yards presumably represent both private and national shipyards - most of the dock expansion is state-funded, yes, but there are also events stating that private shipyards are expanding their docks and thereby increasing your dock size limit, which wouldn't happen if the domestic shipyards were exclusively national naval yards, and historically many of the major powers - including the US and Britain - built warships in both national and private domestic shipyards rather than exclusively building warships in national naval yards. Since both domestic and foreign yards are competing for the same contract and since contracts are often enough awarded to the lowest bidder to offer an adequate product rather than to the bidder who offers the best product, it's very unlikely that bids from foreign yards would be significantly higher than bids from domestic shipyards.
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Post by aeson on Jul 13, 2019 16:07:18 GMT -6
Early protected cruisers can be surprisingly well-gunned, too - 4x 8" isn't a bad battery for 1900, and it can do some damage even to heavier ships. Except perhaps for the top-end CLs - the ~7,000-8,000t CLs that are more smallish first class cruisers with a heavy emphasis on firepower over armor protection than the second or third class cruisers that the CL type mostly represents - my feeling is that the 2x2x8" protected cruiser CLs really only come into their own in the late '00s or early '10s. You need at least Central Firing to really take advantage of the 8" gun's range advantage over 6" guns, you need a bit more armor penetration than the 8" gun has early on for it to do much better against CA belt or B extended belt armor than 6" guns would, and you need to be facing CLs that have actual armor belts before armor penetration really starts to matter against them.
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Post by aeson on Jul 13, 2019 13:54:20 GMT -6
Let's look at a map: Say that I'm Russia trying to escort convoys through a French blockade, and that my ships can stay at sea for 5,000nmi regardless of how fast they're steaming (unlikely in the extreme, but whatever). Say that I need to escort convoys from the Skagerrak to the Orney-Shetland area to get them through a French blockade - roughly 300nmi. How many times can I do this in a single sortie? Well, I need to use ~1,100nmi of my ship's cruising range to get out of the Baltic and then back to port (possibly closer to 1,300 if I'm sailing out of, say, Riga), so that leaves me with 3,900, which is 13 300nmi trips; I have to give up one of those because my ships don't have the range to make the return trip. Assuming a convoy speed of 10 knots - which is fairly fast by WWI standards and still isn't too shabby by WWII standards - it'll take my ships about one day to escort a convoy across the North Sea, which means that I can escort three convoys in and three convoys out in a week, and then I need to return to port. That's if nothing happens that forces my ships back to port sooner. Due to the time taken to get from the Skagerrak to my nearest ports, I can only do this about every other week, at best, so if I have to escort convoys with a large part of my battle fleet then I can only escort about six convoys in and six convoys out per month. Next note that for a French blockade force based out of Brest, intercepting Russian merchant shipping between Britain and Iceland isn't actually all that much worse than intercepting Russian merchant shipping while it's in the North Sea - it's a ~750nmi transit to blockade stations in the North Sea or an ~850nmi transit to blockade stations between Scotland and Iceland, but it'd roughly double the distance that I'd have to provide escort to get convoys through the blockade, thereby halving the number of convoys that my fleet can escort while at sea.
This, mind you, is a very optimistic assessment of the number of convoys I can escort through the blockade zone with the bulk of my battle fleet - I will almost certainly have other things I need to do with my ships, and at some point the ships will need to be maintained and the crews will need to be rested even if nothing noteworthy ever happens at sea. I'm also ceasing to protect my convoys long before they could arrive anywhere but Britain, Germany, the Low Countries, or Scandinavia, and trade with Germany and a large part of Scandinavia wasn't going to be interdicted to any significant extent by a blockading force in the North Sea anyways. On top of that, typical convoys probably aren't averaging ten knots until at least the second quarter of the Twentieth Century even if you don't have problems with poor station-keeping or straggling merchants slowing the convoy down.
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Post by aeson on Jul 13, 2019 9:54:06 GMT -6
Solely when it comes to opinions (so no pressure or anything), I would however, if nothing else, ditch the magazine box as well. Did not check yet, but if the immunity zone calculator utilizes the higher value, then it can be extremely misleading and the thing might go down in a more dramatic way than a uniformly 12" B or such design. The immunity zone calculator uses the number set for B in the design screen to compute the bottom end of the immunity zone and the number set for D in the design to compute the top end regardless of what armor scheme and armor scheme modifiers you use; in the case of alsadius's Giulio Cesare, that'd be the 17 inches set for the belt and the 6 inches set for the deck despite the inclined belt and magazine box options being selected.
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Post by aeson on Jul 13, 2019 9:46:44 GMT -6
You can already get Convoy Defense missions while blockaded and Convoy Attack missions while blockading your enemy. It's not explicitly stated, but it's likely that such a mission represents an attempt to force a convoy through the blockade. On Very Large Fleet Size, a blockade will probably generate between about 200 and 300 victory points per turn in force; declining a single large battle can cost well over a thousand and losing a large battle can cost tens of thousands of victory points and a point or two of prestige. I do not see any good reason to make a special mission type which carries increased penalties for decline/loss; the existing mission types' penalties for the same already typically outweigh the victory points generated by a blockade, and do so by a significant margin in the case of larger engagements.
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