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Post by RNRobert on Mar 28, 2016 16:27:02 GMT -6
<snip> Battleships have a purpose - not least that you'll be blockaded if you don't build any. And a blockade will soon raise your unrest and drop your VP score. <snip> Even with battleships, you can still be blockaded, especially if you are playing a small nation like Austria-Hungary and fighting a more powerful nation like Britain. Both times I've been this situation, and both times, my battleships got sunk with little to show for it.
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Post by RNRobert on Mar 27, 2016 10:00:47 GMT -6
I don't stay in a game very long, once the prestige goes down to a certain level, I am finished with that game. I am building Motor Ships almost immediately for deployment in ASW/coastal patrols to eliminate the need to use destroyers and I also deploy them to foreign stations possibly with a light cruiser. I am building at least 30-50 coastal submarines when available and the return on investment is excellent. I am not a devotee of guerre de course or commerce raiding but when playing the Italians it is effective against the AH's. I also mothball all the battleships until mobilization is required. They are expensive to operate and I like to reduce maintenance costs as much as possible. I also increase research concentrating on submarines, light ships, torpedoes and fleet tactics. For a small nation, this strategy seems to give me a better edge in a war. I 've found that when faced with a battlefleet against my light or protected cruisers, I use the principle of "He who fights and runs away, lives to fight another day". It seems to work as I can compensate for VP's lost with VP's gained from commerce warfare. I build a few minesweepers (MS) early in the game to help with ASW/coastal patrol, but later on I relegate my obsolete 400 and 500 ton DDs to that task (the 400 tonners I always relegate to coastal patrol, since the ones I start the game with are almost always short ranged with cramped accommodations, making them useful for little else). At the beginning of the game, when subs are not yet available, I build a number of large light cruisers for commerce raiding. They are rather lightly armed and armored, but have long range, and good speed for evading enemy cruisers. I also give high priority to research on subs and light forces. I generally don't build AMCs as I am reluctant to build ships that are scrapped after the war, but I suppose it is a cheaper and quicker alternative to submarines.
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Post by RNRobert on Mar 27, 2016 9:53:35 GMT -6
Question: Why are submarines missing from the Almanac? I asked Fredrik W. this and he said: "They are on the detailed tabs for each nation, though not in the "All" page."
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Post by RNRobert on Mar 26, 2016 20:29:01 GMT -6
I believe Yamamoto was also disappointed that none of our carriers were in Pearl the morning of the attack.
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Post by RNRobert on Mar 26, 2016 14:05:28 GMT -6
I would posit that the Guadalcanal campaign was the "decisive battle" of the Pacific War, although the Japanese didn't realize it. The IJN, despite losing four flattops Midway, still was a formidable force. The USN was still recouping from Pearl Harbor. We only had four operational carriers in the Pacific at the beginning of the Guadalcanal campaign, and of these, Wasp and Hornet would be sunk, Saratoga would be damaged and take no further part in the campaign, leaving only Enterprise available by the end of the year, and herself in a damaged state. On the other hand, the Japanese frittered away what was left of their carrier aviators, a loss from which they never recovered. Both sides suffered heavy losses in cruisers and destroyers as a result of the night actions in the waters of the Solomons (and the Japanese lost two of their older battleships to boot). However, the US was able to make good their losses, and the Japanese were not, which meant that the tide swung inexorably in favor of the US.
Update: After consideration, I wonder how we answer the question: "When did commanders realize the carrier was more important than the battleships". The standard answer is Pearl Harbor. That's silly, because Taranto should have been the convincing operation. The Fleet Problems conducted by the US and Japan along with other nations, the table top exercises; all of these games finally showed us how vulnerable surface ships actually were to a concentrated air attack. The real issue is that those were games, not necessarily accurate in their depiction of actual combat. It wasn't until Taranto, Pearl Harbor actually showed navies, what 21 inch torpedoes and 1000, 2000 lbs. AP bombs could do, that it was finally realized how dangerous carriers and their air wings actually were.
I have a book, "Our Navy: A Fighting Team, by VADM Joseph Taussig and Captain Harley Cope (Taussig commanded the first destroyer squadron sent to England after we entered WW1, and when the British Admiral asked when his squadron would be ready for action, he replied, "as soon as we are done refueling"). The book was written in 1943, at which time the aircraft carrier was proving to be the dominant warship type in the Pacific (Coral Sea, Midway, etc), yet the authors believe in the need to continue to continue to build more and bigger battleships, and calls the cancellation of 58,000 ton battleships (referring presumably to the Montana class) "regrettable," and in the last chapter depicts the USN fighting the IJN in some Jutland-style battle, with at least twenty battleships slugging it out with the Japanese. In contrast, Admiral Yamamoto in the '30s called for the abolition of the battleships, comparing them to "elaborate religious scrolls which old people hung up in their homes. They are of no proved worth. They are purely a matter of faith not reality."
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Post by RNRobert on Mar 26, 2016 13:38:58 GMT -6
The Juene-ecole (spelling?) doctrine does seem to work quite well here. In my current game as A-H I am at war with Russia, and am blockading it with 50ish submarines. In previous battles with Italy (who outnumbered me slightly in BBs and BCs) my destroyer fleet (outnumbering everyone else in the world) was key - sending waves of torpedoes in that sunk one or two capital ships each battle. I concur. Partly from playing RTW, but also from reading about the era, I have come to the conclusion that the battleship (particularly the dreadnought battleship) was the most useless warship class ever created. Yes, for their time they were the most powerful warship type, but they were also expensive and time consuming to build. This meant that when war came, the navies who had built them were very reluctant to send them into combat (and thus risk losing them), with the result that these warships, which had been built at such great cost, spent mode of the war in port. The one time they fought (at Jutland), the results were inconclusive because neither admiral wished to risk losing any of his precious dreadnoughts.
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Post by RNRobert on Mar 26, 2016 13:29:49 GMT -6
Question: Is DesignShip for RTW embedded in the application or a separate application? I believe it is embedded in the game, and not a separate application like it is for SAI.
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Post by RNRobert on Mar 26, 2016 12:32:19 GMT -6
Yesterday I completed a game as the Spanish Admiral. I fought one war with Germany, suffering a minor defeat, and two wars with Italy, the first one was a draw and the second one with a minor victory, gaining a new territory. Retired in 1926 with a prestige of 35. Excellent, congrats. I hopefully will reach that capability. I am new and my historical experience tends to get in the way. This is a game against an AI, not humans. I have just started a new game as AH and am doing better. I constantly remind myself that "no nation can escape its geographic fate". Italy is one of them. I am experimenting with coastal forts with bigger guns. One thing I have learned from playing smaller nations, is that you can't compete with the bigger nations in terms of battleships. In one game playing as Austria-Hungary, I built a handful of BBs and BCs, and most of them were sunk in a war with Britain I had tried to avoid. So, when playing smaller countries, I focus heavily on building a large submarine fleet, as well as destroyers and cruisers.
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Post by RNRobert on Mar 26, 2016 8:53:51 GMT -6
Yesterday I completed a game as the Spanish Admiral. I fought one war with Germany, suffering a minor defeat, and two wars with Italy, the first one was a draw and the second one with a minor victory, gaining a new territory. Retired in 1926 with a prestige of 35.
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Post by RNRobert on Mar 26, 2016 8:49:19 GMT -6
I recently played the Italians. I fou-ght one war with Germany and managed to fight to a draw. I fought three wars with the French and whipped them soundly each time (thanks to my submarine fleet). I retired in January 1926 with a prestige of 49, my highest score yet.
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Post by RNRobert on Mar 25, 2016 13:34:15 GMT -6
Had an interesting game a couple weeks or so ago where I was playing the USA, and was at war with THREE nations. Great Britain declared war on me first, and after a year or so of war, Russia joined in, and, after several more months France decided to pile on me. I had a few surface battles (including one where two of my BCs engaged three British BBs in a nighttime skirmish and sank all three, although I lost one BC to a torpedo hit). However, it was my submarine force that won the day. I had over 100 submarines, almost entirely medium range boats, with a few old coastal subs still in service (for some reason, in this particular game, by country never did develop minelaying subs by games end). After a few months of fighting, France- the last nation to enter the war, collapsed, allowing me to gain some territory from then. Great Britain held out for several more months before it's government was forced to resign and withdraw from the war. The sole remaining belligerent, Russia (whom my intelligence agency had reported was showing signs of war weariness) decided to call it quits as well.
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Post by RNRobert on Mar 18, 2016 13:49:41 GMT -6
This is my Savannah class CA. It is basically a repeat of my 1903 Tallahassee class CA, which had three twin 10" guns instead of three triples. It has the same number of 7" guns, although in twin turrets instead of casemates. The Savannah class is also 3 knots faster and has torpedo protection. Both classes are 18,000 tons. I think this class really blurs the line between CAs and BCs. I think it these ships were any bigger, they would be classified as BCs (however, these ships took only 24 months to build, not the 28 or more that BCs take).
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Post by RNRobert on Mar 16, 2016 8:19:16 GMT -6
My most recent game I played as Austria-Hungary. I was able to win a war with Italy, and then with France (mainly starving them into submission with my submarine fleet), and I had a prestige of 40. Then, I got entangled in a war with England around 1920. I was blockaded, and my surface forces took a beating, and to make matters worse, Italy joined in. There were protests in my country, and mutinies in my fleet (my unrest level was 11). However, England was forced to accept a negotiated peace (due to a combination of commerce raiding, and smuggling a revolutionary into the country), and I was able to negotiate a peace with Italy a couple months later with no loss of territory, and the game ended a year later in 1925 with a prestige of 27.
I have found that building a large submarine force is one of the most effective tools in winning the game. In a previous game as the USA, I had a war with Russia in the early twenties. I had a force of 50+ subs, and only a couple were coastal boats, the rest were all medium range subs (for some reason, in that particular game, the US never developed minelaying subs); and I was able to totally defeat Russia in less than a year.
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Post by RNRobert on Dec 30, 2015 6:53:27 GMT -6
I think that in the end, the A-bombs were the most merciful way to end the war. If we had had to invade, the casualties on both sides would have been appalling (I recall reading somewhere that the civilian casualties at Okinawa were equal to US and Japanese combatant casualties combined), and that even if we had just continued a naval and air blockade of the Japanese home islands, more Japanese would have died of disease and starvation than were lost in the A-bomb attacks before they surrendered.
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Post by RNRobert on Nov 24, 2015 11:29:15 GMT -6
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