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Post by Adseria on Mar 8, 2019 11:18:47 GMT -6
Playing as the US, I ordered four 3x2x12" ARY battlecruisers - Ranger, Congress, Constitution, and Independence - from Britain, because while I had main battery wing turrets and both superfiring turrets I lacked cross-deck fire or a third centerline turret (also, Britain had 12"/Q1 guns, which are probably better than the 13"/Q- and definitely better than the 12"/Q- guns I could use if I built them domestically). A few turns later, I get my third centerline turret. Sigh.
Just before these four battlecruisers completed, I got the fourth centerline turret and 14"/Q- guns. Okay, great; the next group of capital ships is going to be built domestically. The Rangers start to commission and I have enough free budget - and $17M in the reserve - so I lay down Yorktown, a heavily-armored 3x2x14"/Q- ABY battlecruiser which I expected to be the first of a two- or three-ship class. Three turns later, I get 14"/Q0 guns. Sigh. Now I get to decide if better guns are worth losing 3 turns of construction and a $19M investment (~$4M/turn in construction costs plus a ~$7M design fee)... At least United States gets a 90% discount for being a Yorktown with better guns and so only costs me ~$700k in design fees.
It's just going to be that kind of game, isn't it?
Personally, I would have let the design finish as it was. You can always upgrade the guns in a rebuild later. And you never know, while you're waiting for a rebuild to be worthwhile, you might get 14"/Q1 guns, or better versions of whatever calibre your secondary battery uses, or better fire control, or any number of other upgrades that you can include in the rebuild.
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Post by aeson on Mar 8, 2019 12:21:52 GMT -6
Personally, I would have let the design finish as it was. You can always upgrade the guns in a rebuild later. And you never know, while you're waiting for a rebuild to be worthwhile, you might get 14"/Q1 guns, or better versions of whatever calibre your secondary battery uses, or better fire control, or any number of other upgrades that you can include in the rebuild. If I want better main battery guns on it, it'd be better to cancel and reorder it. Replacing the main battery guns in a rebuild would take the ship out of service for eight months and probably cost on the order of $25M; cancelling and reordering it to the improved design only costs me the $12M and three months already invested in its construction and gives me a main battery gun that probably isn't worth replacing with 14"/Q1. Furthermore, even if I did decide to complete the ship as is, it is unlikely to be worth replacing the main battery guns with 14"/Q1 guns except maybe if I get them early in the ship's service life. It may heavily armored for a 1908 battlecruiser, but it's still only a 1908 battlecruiser with half a dozen 14" guns.
Also, the secondary battery uses 6" guns, and I already had 6"/Q1 guns when I designed it.
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Post by Adseria on Mar 8, 2019 12:56:38 GMT -6
Personally, I would have let the design finish as it was. You can always upgrade the guns in a rebuild later. And you never know, while you're waiting for a rebuild to be worthwhile, you might get 14"/Q1 guns, or better versions of whatever calibre your secondary battery uses, or better fire control, or any number of other upgrades that you can include in the rebuild. If I want better main battery guns on it, it'd be better to cancel and reorder it. Replacing the main battery guns in a rebuild would take the ship out of service for eight months and probably cost on the order of $25M; cancelling and reordering it to the improved design only costs me the $12M and three months already invested in its construction and gives me a main battery gun that probably isn't worth replacing with 14"/Q1. Furthermore, even if I did decide to complete the ship as is, it is unlikely to be worth replacing the main battery guns with 14"/Q1 guns except maybe if I get them early in the ship's service life. It may heavily armored for a 1908 battlecruiser, but it's still only a 1908 battlecruiser with half a dozen 14" guns.
Also, the secondary battery uses 6" guns, and I already had 6"/Q1 guns when I designed it.
Maybe that's what you'd do. I was saying what I'd do. I never claimed it was the right choice!
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Post by Adseria on Mar 9, 2019 20:35:25 GMT -6
I just counted, and I currently have 32 ships in service with the AON armour scheme (7xBB, 2xBC, 6xCA, 17xCL). That number doesn't include 5 destroyers which technically use AON "armour," 1 dreadnought and 2 battlecruisers currently under construction which will have AON armour, or 11 ships (plus one more destroyer) which have been sunk that had AON armour. That's a total of 46 ships (52 including destroyers) that had AON armour. For reference, my total number of ships (excluding unarmoured ships, but including sunk ships) is 108. Just over 40% of my ships (again, excluding unarmoured ships - including destroyers, the proportion would be significantly lower) use AON armour.
We still don't know what it is, though.
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Post by bcoopactual on Mar 10, 2019 1:23:29 GMT -6
I admire your willingness to use technologies your boffins don't fully understand. Like protoculture or the wave motion engine.
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Post by akosjaccik on Mar 10, 2019 4:12:54 GMT -6
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Post by Adseria on Mar 10, 2019 14:30:38 GMT -6
So, we sank 3 light cruisers, 3 minesweepers, a merchant ship and a submarine, but none of them were ships?
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Post by Adseria on Mar 10, 2019 15:14:09 GMT -6
Below are the combat reports for the first minute of gunfire in a fleet battle. The combination of bad weather and the fact that it's night time left me groping around in 2kyds sighting randes (3kyds day sighting range).
Does anyone else feel kind of sorry for the crew of HMS Mohawk?
EDIT: I've just played on for a few minutes. Turns out that Mohawk encountered a pair of enemy battlecruisers at a range of about 1kyds.
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Post by aeson on Mar 10, 2019 15:17:48 GMT -6
So, we sank 3 light cruisers, 3 minesweepers, a merchant ship and a submarine, but none of them were ships? It's not a ship if it's not ship-rigged: More seriously, those kinds of missions only count ships sunk within a certain distance of the mission objective marker.
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Post by Adseria on Mar 10, 2019 17:21:50 GMT -6
So, we sank 3 light cruisers, 3 minesweepers, a merchant ship and a submarine, but none of them were ships? More seriously, those kinds of missions only count ships sunk within a certain distance of the mission objective marker.
I didn't know that, so thanks.
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Post by Adseria on Mar 10, 2019 23:44:22 GMT -6
About f***ing time!
EDIT: And no, I'm not playing on varied tech.
EDIT 2: I've played on a couple of months, and we just unlocked advanced signalling. I mean, you'd think we'd have worked out what a radio is by July 1943.
EDIT 3: Naturally, the mine rails unlock had to come as I was in the process of rebuilding my destroyers to a uniform design. A solid half of my destroyers are being refit, and then, just as they finish, I'm sending them straight back into refit to give them mines. Would it really have been so hard to invent mines a year earlier? You know, while I was still at war with France, when they would have actually been useful?
EDIT 4: Note particularly the Crusader class:
The 1943 refit is actually a refit of the 1942 refit, not an entirely separate design.
EDIT 5: Ok, a couple of months later, and now literally every single one of my 44 destroyers is in refit.
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Post by Adseria on Mar 11, 2019 0:48:22 GMT -6
Ok, I thought that torpedo hit on Taiho in 1944 was bad, but I think this one beats it.
You know it's bad when it turns your ship invisible.
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Post by Deleted on Mar 11, 2019 10:41:45 GMT -6
Ok, I thought that torpedo hit on Taiho in 1944 was bad, but I think this one beats it.
You know it's bad when it turns your ship invisible. Its a special half-monitor hybrid, it goes hull-down it the open seas. Top technology. There is just the struggle that torpedoes tend to turn such ships into submarines. I hope Taiho is fine, but I doubt it, because with flooding over 300 tons per minute, it would weight like Dreadnought in less than hour.
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Post by Deleted on Mar 11, 2019 10:46:43 GMT -6
These almost 70 pages are scientific proof that this game tends to troll you in hundreds of unexpected ways...
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Post by noshurviverse on Mar 12, 2019 21:12:03 GMT -6
I started a relatively standard game as Italy, 50% tech rate and with the AI in charge of the legacy fleets. The first thing I did was take note of what the preceding Admiral has built and was building. Things seemed rather normal, a handful of standard predreads, the Italias, with 12" main guns and 6" secondary casemates, a couple 4x8" CAs, a pair of CL classes of nearly identical stats in the mid 3000t range and some fast but rather lightly armed DDs. All well and good.
Taking a look over to the construction queue raised some eyebrows though. Alongside a new, larger class of CA and some more DDs was a new class of predread. This one, the Regina Margerita, was a full 1000t larger than the model currently in service, but rather disconcertingly seemed no better. In fact, the designers had seen fit to place it's secondary 5" batteries in twin turrets, an arrangement that would surely reduce their firerate immensely. Even worse, it was a knot slower than the Italia-class and only seemed to have a half-inch thicker belt to make up for that. While I was tempted to order it's cancellation, I decided to forge onwards.
The next step was to sieze up my rivals in Europe. Inspection of the currently British, German, Austrian and Russian fleets revealed nothing of particular note. France, however, had evidently been lead by a man with some rather innovative ideas. The Gueydon-class armored cruiser was a marvel to behold. Nearly the size of a battleship, she was devilishly fast, capable of outrunning all ships in my fleet save the DDs. Her 6" belt armor was certain to turn aside all but my capital-ship guns and her heavy intermediate batteries would almost certainly tear any of my own cruisers to shreds. In short, I had no answer to her. I made a note to avoid conflict with the French for the time being and began my campaign.
About a year later the Regina Margerita was commissioned into the Navy. She took no time making an impression upon all gathered there by proving completely incapable of making even her paltry 18kt design speed. 17kts was the best she could manage, and that may have been only because of a fortunate wave that pushed her along during the trials. Furious, Ammiraglio Noshur demanded to be shown the Regina Margerita's design documents. What was within them was startling, the Regina Margerita-class was designed over a thousand tons underweight and with a large amount of space entirely empty. Brushing aside an advisor's insistance that "on-board Marine battalions" and "invasion battleships" were the future, an order was quickly passed down to fill the empty space with larger engines.
A year later, Regina Margerita went through her second round of trials. She easily made 22kts, nearly a 30% increase in speed with essentially no modification other than using what space had been available since the day she was laid down.
At the celebrations that evening, Ammiraglio Noshur was quietly asked if he could step aside for an urgent message. A man dressed in dark clothing, wide-brimmed hat pulled low across his face met him in an unoccupied office. Identifying himself as a member of the Italian Naval Intelligence Division, he informed the Ammiraglio that their top agent within the French government had just managed to get the complete plans for France's newest class of battleships. A sealed manila envelope was handed across the desk. As the man rose to leave, he was forestalled by the Ammiraglio. Whatever newfangled design the French had come up with, the Intelligence Division had to be ready to act. Mentally preparing himself, Ammiraglio Noshur opened the documents.
A few moments passed.
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