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Post by generalvikus on Dec 6, 2017 23:39:22 GMT -6
Britain truly struggles to protect its colonial empire and that's why I don't often play as them. After playing many games, my strategies about colonial protection are to allow the colonies to languish with obsolete ships whose purpose is show the flag, and to run away or die bravely in the opening months of a conflict while I move a true battlefleet into position. Occasionally, if I feel the need, I'll make Long-Range colony-protection (or colony invasion!) predreadnought battleships that hopefully don't break the maintenance budget, and keep them through the length of a game. Sure, I'll replace the colonial light cruisers, but I'll do that when I can, squeezing smaller production runs in between the capital ships, until combat losses force me to produce more. Also, I like to cheese my light cruiser count by making a lot of 2000-2500 ton ships that stick with the fleet in Northern Europe (Or wherever the primary battle area is for my current nation). They can eat Destroyers, and if armed heavily enough, can threaten enemy CLs too, along with torpedoing enemy capital ships. They can be terrible when they get pulled into 1v1 cruiser battles, though they are cheap enough you can roll the dice on them performing miracles and winning if you are sick of running away from battles. Sorry to hear about you losing the capital ship tonnage race to USA, but that is inevitable if you build expensive Fast BBs (Unless you use your tactically-superior ships to sink their fleet!). Making cheaper 21-23 knot BBs is a great way to pad out your tonnage and number of total units, and it's what I'm sure they did. I found the challenge of Imperial Defence to be a very interesting one which forced me to face strategic dilemmas in both ship design and building. In the end, I didn't actually face nearly as much of a challenge as I had expected in the colonies; almost all of the fighting took place in Northern Europe, and the threat of enemy raiders was minimal. The colonial pre-dreadnought is an interesting concept! Why long range, though? It's not as though they could intercept raiders - or, for that matter, anything else besides other pre-dreadnoughts. I keep my pre-dreadnoughts around to use as power projection ships in wartime, but I never considered custom - building a few for that purpose. What other design specifications do they have? Your cheap cruisers are also intriguing, though they go against all of my experience so far in the game. For me, cruiser battles have always been so prominent compared to fleet engagements that they determine the outcome of more than half of my wars, and I always found that my large, well armoured cruisers could accumulate a large number of VPs killing the lighter designs of the AI. I certainly wouldn't want to face that effect in reverse, but your concept for these ships seems solid. Again - any more details on the design? I was hoping that my fast battleships would be able to keep pace with the USA in tonnage, if not in ship numbers, but you're absolutely right - fast BBs are more expensive pound-for-pound, and I wasn't even building fast battleships - like I said, 'slow battlecruisers' is a more appropriate term. The whole reason I didn't resign when I dropped the game is I felt it might be worth having a final showdowin with the American fleet to see how the two fleets compare, so we may yet get to judge who made the more cost- effective force. Mostly, though, I think that my high peacetime readiness (dreadnoughts never went into the reserves until they had become obsolete well into the 1920s) and especially my constant gunnery training were my downfall in the dreadnought race.
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Post by aeson on Dec 7, 2017 0:00:13 GMT -6
On the chart, however, the 4800 ton ships are listed as having an effective tonnage of 6,000, not 7,200. Am I working it out wrong? I thought that colonial service made ships count for 1.5 times their tonnage. In v1.34b, which is the version I'm playing on, ships with the colonial service tag count as 1.25 times their tonnage for the purposes of fulfilling foreign station requirements. It may be different in other versions of the game, so if you're not on v1.34b you may want to check what the actual multiplier is by building a ship with the colonial service flag set and checking how much tonnage the game says you have on station by clicking on the sea zone in the map tab. Evidence: 4800t cruiser with colonial tag, counts as 6000t towards force requirements. I can't say that I've ever built a 4" CL that wasn't a dedicated raider, myself, but as the ones that the computer builds tend to be nearly-free victory points whenever one of my typical 6" or occasional 5" general purpose cruisers catches one I wouldn't recommend them if you want them to be suitable for engaging other cruisers. For dedicated fleet scouts/escorts which will always be operating with something heavier (not that you can guarantee that in the game), for raiders, or for cruisers which are only intended for strategic functions (only there to fulfill the tonnage requirements, trigger the "[your cruiser] thwarts [enemy raider]'s attack on merchant shipping" messages, or for blockade score) and maybe kill an occasional AMC or DD, a 4" main battery is arguably good enough, but I wouldn't want to use one for anything else. As to the cruiser with the small 6" main battery and large 3" secondary battery, it can work, it'll probably be reasonably effective early on, and it'll remain useful as a screening ship for your battle line to ward off destroyer attacks for a while longer, but as gun ranges, penetrating power, and accuracy improve it'll start to lose out to cruisers with larger 6" and perhaps even 5" main batteries because it'll become more and more difficult for it to bring its 3" guns to bear before suffering crippling damage, and as torpedoes improve it'll also become more dangerous to close far enough to bring the 3" guns into action (if I recall correctly, you can expect torpedo range to become about equal to 3" gun range c.1910). Try it and see if it works for you, but I wouldn't expect it to really have as much longevity as a cruiser with a larger 5" or 6" main battery. Ships with long range are less likely to get the * state when operating in or passing through areas with inadequate base capacity, which means that they're less likely to be lost to internment or scuttling during wartime if you put too many ships into the same sea zone. It's also useful for projecting power into colonial areas where you have little or no base capacity to try to trigger colony invasions, or maybe blockade a weak power.
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Post by generalvikus on Dec 7, 2017 2:30:54 GMT -6
I can't say that I've ever built a 4" CL that wasn't a dedicated raider, myself, but as the ones that the computer builds tend to be nearly-free victory points whenever one of my typical 6" or occasional 5" general purpose cruisers catches one I wouldn't recommend them if you want them to be suitable for engaging other cruisers. For dedicated fleet scouts/escorts which will always be operating with something heavier (not that you can guarantee that in the game), for raiders, or for cruisers which are only intended for strategic functions (only there to fulfill the tonnage requirements, trigger the "[your cruiser] thwarts [enemy raider]'s attack on merchant shipping" messages, or for blockade score) and maybe kill an occasional AMC or DD, a 4" main battery is arguably good enough, but I wouldn't want to use one for anything else. As to the cruiser with the small 6" main battery and large 3" secondary battery, it can work, it'll probably be reasonably effective early on, and it'll remain useful as a screening ship for your battle line to ward off destroyer attacks for a while longer, but as gun ranges, penetrating power, and accuracy improve it'll start to lose out to cruisers with larger 6" and perhaps even 5" main batteries because it'll become more and more difficult for it to bring its 3" guns to bear before suffering crippling damage, and as torpedoes improve it'll also become more dangerous to close far enough to bring the 3" guns into action (if I recall correctly, you can expect torpedo range to become about equal to 3" gun range c.1910). Try it and see if it works for you, but I wouldn't expect it to really have as much longevity as a cruiser with a larger 5" or 6" main battery.Ships with long range are less likely to get the * state when operating in or passing through areas with inadequate base capacity, which means that they're less likely to be lost to internment or scuttling during wartime if you put too many ships into the same sea zone. It's also useful for projecting power into colonial areas where you have little or no base capacity to try to trigger colony invasions, or maybe blockade a weak power. My experience with 4 inch guns - both in my own limited use of them and the extensive use by the AI - seems to concur. I agree about the 3 inch brawler - the whole point of upgrading the colonial cruisers was to make them last longer, after all. Another option is to take these things all the way up to 7 or 8,000 tons and buy a lot of them in the legacy fleet. The technology for protected cruisers doesn't advance very much from the start of the game to the advent of light cruisers, whereas other ship types like armored cruisers benefit from being built a little later than the legacy fleet, with the heavy secondary batteries and the like. Buying a large number of heavy colonial cruisers early in the game in exchange for a lighter investment in CAs, and then building CAs from about 1900 - 1905 might be a good strategy. As for the colonial Bs - they're not necessary for Britain, I assume, since it really never has to operate anywhere without adequate base infrastructure. Countries like France or Germany could certainly benefit, though.
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Post by klavohunter on Dec 7, 2017 2:55:31 GMT -6
Your cheap cruisers are also intriguing, though they go against all of my experience so far in the game. For me, cruiser battles have always been so prominent compared to fleet engagements that they determine the outcome of more than half of my wars, and I always found that my large, well armoured cruisers could accumulate a large number of VPs killing the lighter designs of the AI. I certainly wouldn't want to face that effect in reverse, but your concept for these ships seems solid. Again - any more details on the design? This here is a perfect little buddy for your battle-line, armored cruisers, or even your bigger CLs. You could make it slower, better armored and armed if you'd like. Here's a random example later example from a slow-tech CSA game: And here's a very extreme example with end-game technology! All of these have very reasonable pricetags around 10 million. This also leads into the sister design of these baby cruisers: The tiny raider. 2100-ton Long Range 25-knot CLs with a handful of guns are enough to cause havoc on enemy shipping in the early game, but their luster wears off once submarines become more reliable, and bigger enemy ships become faster.
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Post by bramborough on Dec 7, 2017 10:16:03 GMT -6
Excellent and very interesting AAR!! Kudos for taking the time and effort to write it up in such detail. Coming at this with three campaigns' (France, US, Germany) experience (which is to say, not very much compared to most other folks in this forum!). Just a few observations in no particular order.
1. I'm intrigued by that Conquest CL design, having experienced something similar to what you describe. My "standard" legacy CL has been 23kt 8x6" 2.5/1/2.5 (no secondaries). Didn't have it for France (where I took the AI's legacy fleet, lol, won't do THAT again!), but it performed well in my US game and during Germany's first wars vs Italy. Then I ran up against Russian 3/1/3 CL's with fewer mains but bristling with 3" secondaries. Lol, this caused some problems. I don't think I actually lost any CL's this way, but had to disengage a few times, having taken the worst of it in damage exchange.
2. One other thing I noticed among most of your CL designs was the dual forward turrets, rather than the centerline "A". I've consistently built early CL's in an A/B with 3x wing configuration, the theory being that I get a 5-gun broadside with a weight-saving 8 turrets total. BUT...so many cruiser 1v1 battles wind up being tail-chases...I can see the utility of more guns up front (or rearward, for that matter, if I'm the one running). Gonna have to try this out next campaign.
3. You almost certainly know this, but I mention because I didn't catch on til midway through 3rd campaign. Up til then I had been "manually" placing the necessary tonnage in each overseas zone. So there was a lot of tonnage overkill, with something like two 4000t CL's covering a 6000t zone requirement. Then I discovered (belatedly), that one can simply designate the necessary ships to "FS" and cover the tonnage requirement much more efficiently. I had seen the option from the start of course, but I had been under the impression that to meet tonnage in, say, West Africa, that the ships actually had to be in West Africa. Nope, not the case. Covering colonial requirements suddenly got a lot simpler and more economical. I also realized that destroyer tonnage counts; being able to tack on a couple extra thousand tons with superseded legacy 500t DD's was quite helpful. (Edit: One other thing. At one point I did a very rough cost-per-ton comparison for meeting colonial requirements. Unsurprisingly, DD's were the cheapest. Somewhat less intuitive, however, was that predreadnought B's were, ton-for-ton, actually more economical than using my purpose-built CL's, let alone CA's).
4. You mostly used the data cards to represent the various ship classes, but in a few cases used the ship design windows (Diadem and a few others). One thing that jumped out at me in (all of) these: 4-digit numbers of excess "weight remaining". In one case, almost 2500t unused weight in Centurion. Was this some kind of later-in-game anomaly, maybe representing weight-saving technology 20+ yrs later? I haven't noticed that in any of my own games thus far. Or were these ships actually built this way at the time? If so, it seems to me you could've built these same designs on far less tonnage (or alternatively bumped up some other attributes significantly).
5. I've noticed also a similar disparity between BC vs BB sinkings. During Germany game, my primary opponents were Russia (multiple wars) and France (one very long war in early 1920's with quite a few fleet engagements). I sank few BB's (and those smaller first-generation 12" models), but the Russian/French BC divisions were consistently wrecked. I didn't lose any of my own BC's, but mine also tended to take the brunt of overall damage received, and had to prematurely disengage more than once. I think the reason isn't solely lighter armor, although that's certainly a factor. Instead, I think the main reason is speed; the BC's are often first to engage, and therefore are under fire for the longest duration. After taking a few hits, even if they're not initially very dangerous, that speed advantage drops off. It's a lot easier to get into range quickly than to get out of it. I think you were onto something with countering BC's using faster battleships, rather than more of your own BC's. I also think this somewhat mirrors the historical record; I suspect the ghosts of Hipper & Beatty might not entirely disagree with our observations.
6. I know this is design-focused AAR. I'd be interested, however, on some of your (and others') thoughts regarding light forces, the submarine/ASW war, coastal fortifications, etc.
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Post by generalvikus on Dec 7, 2017 11:17:50 GMT -6
Excellent and very interesting AAR!! Kudos for taking the time and effort to write it up in such detail. Coming at this with three campaigns' (France, US, Germany) experience (which is to say, not very much compared to most other folks in this forum!). Just a few observations in no particular order. 1. I'm intrigued by that Conquest CL design, having experienced something similar to what you describe. My "standard" legacy CL has been 23kt 8x6" 2.5/1/2.5 (no secondaries). Didn't have it for France (where I took the AI's legacy fleet, lol, won't do THAT again!), but it performed well in my US game and during Germany's first wars vs Italy. Then I ran up against Russian 3/1/3 CL's with fewer mains but bristling with 3" secondaries. Lol, this caused some problems. I don't think I actually lost any CL's this way, but had to disengage a few times, having taken the worst of it in damage exchange. 2. One other thing I noticed among most of your CL designs was the dual forward turrets, rather than the centerline "A". I've consistently built early CL's in an A/B with 3x wing configuration, the theory being that I get a 5-gun broadside with a weight-saving 8 turrets total. BUT...so many cruiser 1v1 battles wind up being tail-chases...I can see the utility of more guns up front (or rearward, for that matter, if I'm the one running). Gonna have to try this out next campaign. 3. You almost certainly know this, but I mention because I didn't catch on til midway through 3rd campaign. Up til then I had been "manually" placing the necessary tonnage in each overseas zone. So there was a lot of tonnage overkill, with something like two 4000t CL's covering a 6000t zone requirement. Then I discovered (belatedly), that one can simply designate the necessary ships to "FS" and cover the tonnage requirement much more efficiently. I had seen the option from the start of course, but I had been under the impression that to meet tonnage in, say, West Africa, that the ships actually had to be in West Africa. Nope, not the case. Covering colonial requirements suddenly got a lot simpler and more economical. I also realized that destroyer tonnage counts; being able to tack on a couple extra thousand tons with superseded legacy 500t DD's was quite helpful. (Edit: One other thing. At one point I did a very rough cost-per-ton comparison for meeting colonial requirements. Unsurprisingly, DD's were the cheapest. Somewhat less intuitive, however, was that predreadnought B's were, ton-for-ton, actually more economical than using my purpose-built CL's, let alone CA's).4. You mostly used the data cards to represent the various ship classes, but in a few cases used the ship design windows (Diadem and a few others). One thing that jumped out at me in (all of) these: 4-digit numbers of excess "weight remaining". In one case, almost 2500t unused weight in Centurion. Was this some kind of later-in-game anomaly, maybe representing weight-saving technology 20+ yrs later? I haven't noticed that in any of my own games thus far. Or were these ships actually built this way at the time? If so, it seems to me you could've built these same designs on far less tonnage (or alternatively bumped up some other attributes significantly). 5. I've noticed also a similar disparity between BC vs BB sinkings. During Germany game, my primary opponents were Russia (multiple wars) and France (one very long war in early 1920's with quite a few fleet engagements). I sank few BB's (and those smaller first-generation 12" models), but the Russian/French BC divisions were consistently wrecked. I didn't lose any of my own BC's, but mine also tended to take the brunt of overall damage received, and had to prematurely disengage more than once. I think the reason isn't solely lighter armor, although that's certainly a factor. Instead, I think the main reason is speed; the BC's are often first to engage, and therefore are under fire for the longest duration. After taking a few hits, even if they're not initially very dangerous, that speed advantage drops off. It's a lot easier to get into range quickly than to get out of it. I think you were onto something with countering BC's using faster battleships, rather than more of your own BC's. I also think this somewhat mirrors the historical record; I suspect the ghosts of Hipper & Beatty might not entirely disagree with our observations. 6. I know this is design-focused AAR. I'd be interested, however, on some of your (and others') thoughts regarding light forces, the submarine/ASW war, coastal fortifications, etc. Thanks for your reply! I'll try to talk to each of your points; 1. Those Russian CLs are by far the most dangerous of the AI protected cruiser designs; in fact, I found the Russian designs to be of generally very high quality throughout the game. I really like the 3 inch guns early in the game, and use them extensively on my CLs, CAs, and Bs. In my experience, a large 3 inch secondary battery is an extremely cost - effective (in terms of both cost and tonnage) method of improving the overall fighting qualities of an early CL. Heavy belt armour and limited deck armour was another less I drew from those Russian designs; a lot of people seem to like to put very heavy deck armour on their early ships to improve longevity. I think this is justified for Battleships, since early in the game, it's relatively easy to proof the belt against heavy enemy shells, and battleships are valuable enough that you really need to avoid losing them if possible. However, in terms of cruisers, the weight budget is much tighter (for cost saving reasons and speed) so I think that 1.5 inch deck armour is probably prohibitively expensive, and I'd rather spend it on having 3 inches on the belt. That's made doubly important by the fact that cruisers are relatively much more vulnerable to the weapons of other cruisers in the early game than battleships are to other battleships. The combination of the 3 inch secondary battery and 3 / 1 / 3 armour scheme made the Conquests easily my best legacy cruisers so far, and I expect they will set the standard for future designs. I highly recommend them. 2. I like to always have two guns up front and rear in my cruisers, and rarely deviate from that model. The 'triangular' turret configuration was a quite specific adaption of the colonial cruisers, since I expected them to be engaging a lot of light, fast enemy raiders which would need to be pursued in a tail - chase, whereas they were less likely to have to run away. It was actually a new innovation in this game, and one that I shall probably repeat in future. 3. I do know about foreign station, but all the same I manually assigned my colonial forces in this game in order to make sure I had the right numbers of ships on each station in wartime. I wanted to make sure that every sea zone was locked down against enemy raiders. This meant I had to do a lot of juggling, so maybe in my next game I'll try out the 'Foreign Station' option and see how well the AI handles itself. 4. All of the pictures were taken after the end of the game, so the excess weight represents the advance in technology. 5. For the purpose of clarity, I ought to point out that the term 'fast battleship' which I applied to HMS Mars and her successors is a misnomer; they were classified as battlecruisers by the game, so I think it would be more appropriate to call them 'slow battle cruisers.' This was important, because it allowed them to engage enemy BCs in cruiser battles, coastal raids and the like. A true fast battleship - that is, a ship classified by the game as a BB - might not have had nearly as much utility against enemy BCs. My thinking was - and I really should have mentioned this in the post - that they could afford to be up to 2 knots slower than the enemy BCs and still be able to fight them reasonably well. This turned out to be more than true; as I said at the end of the post, much of the damage done to enemy battlecruisers was inflicted by 21 knot battleships. 6. I haven't used submarines yet because I haven't had occasion to, and I feel that there's little fun to be had in off-screen action. I've never built coastal fortifications so far, but I've heard that they can be used to create minefields on the tactical map, which I would like to learn more about. As for ASW / coastal warfare, I think this is one of the weaker points of the game, since ASW technology isn't something you actually have to install on your ships, there's no reason not to have a 200 ton MS built in 1899 and never upgraded fighting the Battle of the Atlantic in 1941. For this reason, I never scrap MS or DDs; once old DDs become obsolete, they go into the reserves forever and get put straight onto coastal patrol at the outbreak of war. I think this misses a major part of the development of navies and naval strategy in the period; it would be no exaggeration that the arms race between U-boats and escorts was crucial in determining the outcome of both world wars. As for light forces - I am not yet experienced in their use. So far, I have never carried out a successful flotilla attack against an enemy fleet; torpedoes have only ever been used in smaller, close range engagements or (most commonly) to finish off crippled ships. Learning how to use destroyer tactics properly is something I hope to focus on more in the near future.
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Post by bramborough on Dec 7, 2017 12:29:45 GMT -6
3. I do know about foreign station, but all the same I manually assigned my colonial forces in this game in order to make sure I had the right numbers of ships on each station in wartime. I wanted to make sure that every sea zone was locked down against enemy raiders. This meant I had to do a lot of juggling, so maybe in my next game I'll try out the 'Foreign Station' option and see how well the AI handles itself. Yep, I was doing same. Then I tried the blanket-FS approach with as minimal otherwise-useless tonnage as possible (oldest/cheapest CL/DD which otherwise would've been scrapped or relegated to CP)...and just ignored the raiders, let them do whatever they wanted. It really wasn't that big a problem, and I still got plenty of raider-intercept battles and "raider-thwart" messages in Northern Europe. Sure the raiders would get a few VP per turn, but peanuts compared to the 150-to-200 VP of my blockade. One thing I noticed was that old crappy AI FS ships tended to move to zones with no enemy presence, so even though they were outclassed by just about anything they'd encounter other than an AMC, such encounters rarely occurred. And if I did happen to lose an occasional FS ship (which I don't think actually happened), then who cares, it was old, incapable, not a huge VP value, and would've been scrapped otherwise anyway. All in all, I found it worthwhile to give up some overseas anti-raider capability in exchange for an economical and low-micromanagement solution to the foreign tonnage problem. Some caveats: 1. I found this to work well for Germany, whose usual opponents in that particular game (France, Russia, Italy) were relatively easy to blockade, and who didn't have a large overseas presence themselves. Such a strategy might not have worked well if I had gone to war with Britain, who probably would've been blockading me instead and also would almost certainly have had a much larger overseas presence than the nations I actually fought. Similarly, Japan or USA might've been problematic as well; although the fleet sizes were more in line with mine, lack of basing would've made it difficult to blockade them, thus making raid/counter-raid a bigger factor in the monthly VP exchange, and of course a lot more cruiser-level combat overseas with them as well. 2. It was easy to ignore the relatively low VP loss from enemy raiders...but I don't have a feel yet for how the game mechanics handle mounting unrest. Sometimes just a few raiders & subs seem to quickly ramp up the enemy's unrest to peace-seeking or even revolution levels, while other times a blockade (far more VP-per-turn) has no visible effect. I suppose much of that is nation and/or government-type driven. In my long war vs France, I maintained blockade throughout...the French admiralty may have chafed, but their population seemed not to care a hoot (because liberal democracy, I guess). Meanwhile in my second Russo-German war, the Russians were driven to revolution pretty quickly. In any case, enemy raiding activity rarely budged my unrest levels (probably because of consistently regular fleet action success). If it had been otherwise, yeah, my ignore-the-raiders overseas posture would've required some tinkering.
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Post by oaktree on Dec 7, 2017 23:01:21 GMT -6
Excellent and very interesting AAR!! Kudos for taking the time and effort to write it up in such detail. Coming at this with three campaigns' (France, US, Germany) experience (which is to say, not very much compared to most other folks in this forum!). Just a few observations in no particular order. 2. One other thing I noticed among most of your CL designs was the dual forward turrets, rather than the centerline "A". I've consistently built early CL's in an A/B with 3x wing configuration, the theory being that I get a 5-gun broadside with a weight-saving 8 turrets total. BUT...so many cruiser 1v1 battles wind up being tail-chases...I can see the utility of more guns up front (or rearward, for that matter, if I'm the one running). Gonna have to try this out next campaign. [snips fore and aft] Much like how you can legacy design a CA to carry 13" guns you can legacy build a CL that has twin A/Y 6" guns. They get an ROF penalty, but also go a good ways towards providing some extra firepower during tail-chases. The designs tend to hang around in my games since I like refitting my fleet 6" CLs into mine-layers or colonial support ships as they get old and too slow for main fleet engagements. And even if slow their armament is still enough that it can sometimes gives a more modern CL a nasty surprise.
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Post by aeson on Dec 8, 2017 0:48:07 GMT -6
I'd argue that single guns in the 1 and 2 or 3 and 4 positions offer better firepower for tail chases than twin turrets in the A or Y positions. 4x1 1234 gives 2 guns on 0 to 30, 2 + [wings] on 30 to 150, and 2 on 150 to 180 while 2x2 AY effectively gives 1.2/1.6 guns on 0 to 30, 1.2/1.6 + [wings] on 30 to 45, 2.4/3.2 + [wings] on 45 to 135, 1.2/1.6 + [wings] on 135 to 150, and 1.2/1.6 on 150 to 180, so 4x1 1234 is a bit better for end-on scenarios (target between -45 and +45 or +135 and +225) while 2x2 AY is a bit better for broadside scenarios (target between +45 and +135 or +225 and +315).
If you're using light enough armor for single mounts to count as being shielded rather than turreted, single mounts in the 1 and 2 positions are also lighter than a twin mount in the A position (same for 3&4/Y), while the opposite is true if you're giving the guns enough armor that the single mounts count as fully turreted.
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Post by oaktree on Dec 8, 2017 8:18:28 GMT -6
I'd argue that single guns in the 1 and 2 or 3 and 4 positions offer better firepower for tail chases than twin turrets in the A or Y positions. 4x1 1234 gives 2 guns on 0 to 30, 2 + [wings] on 30 to 150, and 2 on 150 to 180 while 2x2 AY effectively gives 1.2/1.6 guns on 0 to 30, 1.2/1.6 + [wings] on 30 to 45, 2.4/3.2 + [wings] on 45 to 135, 1.2/1.6 + [wings] on 135 to 150, and 1.2/1.6 on 150 to 180, so 4x1 1234 is a bit better for end-on scenarios (target between -45 and +45 or +135 and +225) while 2x2 AY is a bit better for broadside scenarios (target between +45 and +135 or +225 and +315). If you're using light enough armor for single mounts to count as being shielded rather than turreted, single mounts in the 1 and 2 positions are also lighter than a twin mount in the A position (same for 3&4/Y), while the opposite is true if you're giving the guns enough armor that the single mounts count as fully turreted. Fully armored turrets in this case. I think there is no absolute best way to go about designing and handling cruisers in the game. It is to me clearly a matter of taste and preference. Mine is towards ~6000t 6" CLs as fleet mainstays and early on an additional force of 4" armed ~4000t raiding CLs. I continue improving the the 6000t types for more speed, torpedoes, etc. And also treat CAs as a supporting group and do not build that many of them.
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Post by aeson on Dec 8, 2017 13:14:02 GMT -6
Mine is towards ~6000t 6" CLs as fleet mainstays and early on an additional force of 4" armed ~4000t raiding CLs. I continue improving the the 6000t types for more speed, torpedoes, etc. And also treat CAs as a supporting group and do not build that many of them. I usually do much the same for the fleet CLs, though my ~6000t 6" CLs have more of a firepower focus (more guns, less armor) than your example. I don't usually build raiding cruisers, but when I do they're high-speed (for whenever they were built) 2100t designs, at first 4-8x1x4" with some armor, now usually something with more of a firepower focus and virtually no armor since the 4" ships couldn't really do anything against faster intercepting cruisers whereas a 2100t cruiser with a pair of 7" or 8" guns or a 6x6" broadside can at least hurt, and will sometimes sink, even 5000-6000t interceptors.
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Post by joebob73 on Dec 8, 2017 14:27:20 GMT -6
Straight gun fight, on a foggy night in around 1935. By then I had removed the 7” secondaries entirely, as the 13” were accurate enough by around 1912 with a director refit. The 5” are enough to handle any DDs, so I usually throw them on when I do the engine refit. It doesn’t hurt that they’re always lucky ships, either. Exceptional hit rates and resistance to damage, which is surprising when I compare their results to much newer and definitely better ships. My CLs weren’t taking much flotation damage, but they keep getting their uptakes shot off, usually several times per battle, knocking them down to cruise speed as their maximum. So I decided that overkill was the way to fix that. It doesn’t entirely replace the standard 6” gun CLs, but they do their job well. There's no such thing as 'always lucky'; if they always work well then it must indicate there's something that makes them work. My guess would be that the exceptional hit rates are, perhaps counter-intuitively, due to their age; over the course of so many engagements, they'll become elite very quickly. That might explain why they did so well against new 40 k ton battlecruisers; they were able to hit earlier and more often whereas the enemy crews suffered at night. Depending on which nation they were from, the enemy ships might also have suffered a base penalty to crew quality, which in my experience has been a massive factor; in my many fights against the Russians, it was typical for my ships (using very advanced fire control and gunnery training, mind you) to land scores of hits and receive none in return, and this was somewhat mystifying until I saw the 'crew quality -2' on one of the ship cards; it's due to their poor education, I believe. As for the CL - I'll have to give it a shot, perhaps modified for my preference for heavier armour. If you use these in conjunction with other, 6 inch gun CLs, what do you use each type for? I know "always lucky" doesn't exist, but it feels like they are. Maybe the AI is trying to fight them like normal CAs, which they aren't. Or maybe the way I do battles really works well for ships like them. I'll usually use my long-range 6" gun CLs for raiders, and the heavy gun CLs to attempt to counter raiders as well as in normal battles. Since the battle generator picks almost entirely based on ship class, I'll usually end up with a serious firepower advantage. These ships too can be refitted for higher speed, and if I add colonial service to them they can just sit on my colonies in the later game. Then, they get to intercept and sink raiders, and the overkill firepower is helpful here because it keeps them from taking any damage that requires repair, so I don't have tonnage shortfalls due to repair time.
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