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Post by rimbecano on May 23, 2019 17:57:13 GMT -6
A) because in real life the only reason they were called light cruisers was because they were following a completely arbitrary definition set by the London Treaty (and settled on after extremely complex international negotiations and dealings so everyone would accept that definition) which made only sense in regulating their number and tonnage for treaty purposes, but made little or no sense in practical terms, the ships being Heavy Cruisers in almost every other regard. In real life, every cruiser that wasn't a battlecruiser or legacy armored cruiser was a light cruiser until the heavy cruiser classification was created and defined by treaty. It's not just that the definition of heavy cruiser was arbitrarily established by treaty, the distinction was arbitrarily established by treaty. Might navies have come up with it on their own trying to distinguish the roles they used different types of CLs in? Maybe, but there's no guarantee that navies with different requirements would have distinguished between scout and fleet cruisers in the same way.
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Post by ramjb on May 23, 2019 18:08:04 GMT -6
No, certainly there's no such guarantee, but on the other hand the evolution of the concept was based on what everyone does when a treaty like that happens: find loopholes if you can, and even cheat it if you want to go that far.
As a result different ships would've emerged but the trends would've been very similar as soon as the reality of what arming 10k ton tops cruisers with 8'' guns was at the time: that you couldn't conceivably get a ship with a strong 8'' battery, 30+ knots, and anything approaching sensible levels of armor with the technology of the time. So the options were either to cheat and build bigger ships but claim they displaced 30% less of what they did (what the japanese did), or try to get the best compromise within the limits given, still getting unsatisfactory ships out of it until technology allowed for them to be properly balanced (More or less what the Italians did), or to downscale main guns to 6'', get proper armor on those ships, and finally produce a balanced design (what the british and americans did)
8'' was the flavor of the time soon after WT just because it was the top end of what the Washington treaty allowed to build, and it's the nature of the beast that everyone is going to try to arm their ships with the biggest gun they could. But it was soon pretty clear for everyone that 8'' imposed compromises that ended in either woefully unbalanced ships with little armor, or ships with inadequate main battery gun count (thinking Aoba/Furutaka here). Ships navies of the time had great concerns about, and soon the flavor of the time came into a serious scrutiny about exactly how worthwhile it really was, and how worthwhile it was going for those guns or settling for smaller ones.
Had the London Treaty not gone further than the Washington treaty creating the distinction between "light" and "heavy" cruisers, we might have seen the Brooklyns or the Towns classed as heavy cruisers, for instance, but based on the path of their development, I'm sure they'd would be existed (like that or in very similar form) anyway. Maybe not the brooklyn (the 15x6'' configuration was forced by the need to "counter" the Mogamis), but something akin to the Cleveland I think would've had very high chances of happening. And based on it's tonnage, weapons, and armor it would've hardly been called a "light" cruiser.
all things considered knowing what would navies of the times call their ships without a treaty defining them in legal terms is a very fun proposition, given how classifications differed between navies. One of the things that always raises my eyebrows is that a simple deck uparmoring and mild increase of overall protection (leaving the main armored belt intact) made the Japanese call their Kongos "Battleships", for instance. Something that for any practical purpose they weren't but as there was no rule to adhere to, they called those ships that just for the sake of it. Trying to guess what they'd called their cruisers is...pure guesswork XD.
It's an interesting what-if in any case, as much as what would've happened with cruisers at all had no WT ever happened.
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Post by alsadius on May 23, 2019 20:23:16 GMT -6
You're absolutely unique. You're pretty much talking sci-fi alternate universes here and you have the courage to write this. Stunning, just stunning. Remember the mod post above where he said to lay off the personal attacks? Please do that. I agree with you on the question at hand, but there's no need to draw blood. My opinion is that the game shouldn't even *have* a heavy cruiser classification unless certain treaty events happen. The light/heavy cruiser distinction is entirely an artifact of the London treaty. If not for the naval treaties, I'd anticipate that the average light cruiser of 1940 would have been in the 15kton range, and there would have been very few cruisers smaller than 10kton. Remember that it's an AI aid as much as anything. That's not treaty-dependent. I wouldn't mind the ability to use different call letters than the class default, though.
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Post by williammiller on May 23, 2019 21:10:07 GMT -6
Ok - to those of you in this thread that are insulting &/or belittling others - this.will.stop.NOW.
The next report I get that shows this or any related issue occurring I will suspend the account of the person that does it until I am convinced that said poster will follow the rules.
I am not going to babysit this thread while I have lots of more important work to do, like help folks with their game issues and work on updates for the game. If you cannot act like an adult then do not post on this forum. Final warning.
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Post by rimbecano on May 23, 2019 22:41:55 GMT -6
My opinion is that the game shouldn't even *have* a heavy cruiser classification unless certain treaty events happen. The light/heavy cruiser distinction is entirely an artifact of the London treaty. If not for the naval treaties, I'd anticipate that the average light cruiser of 1940 would have been in the 15kton range, and there would have been very few cruisers smaller than 10kton. Remember that it's an AI aid as much as anything. That's not treaty-dependent. I wouldn't mind the ability to use different call letters than the class default, though. It's an AI aid, but it hews closer than it has to to treaty definitions, is less flexible over time than would be desirable, and in some cases that makes it so that the player can't design ships that make sense for the situation at hand in a treaty-less scenario and will be assigned to proper divisions in battle. That's why I'd like to see percentile based classifications, and perhaps doing away with classifications in favor of roles, with the difference that a ship could be assigned more than one role during the design phase. For example a ship built like a British-style battlecruiser might be assigned cruiser-killer and scout roles by the player, and maybe also a battle-line role if the player was a risk taker. A ship built like a destroyer leader might get torpedo attack, ASW, and scout roles, etc. The AI could be given stereotyped combinations of roles to build its ships with, while the player would be able to use any combination with simultaneously satisfiable requirements. For an example of incompatible requirements, a torpedo attack role might require a ship to be below a certain percentile of the costs of existing ships in all navies (for expendability) while having a speed above a certain percentile, and a battle-line role might require armor and armament percentiles high enough that the cost restriction on the torpedo attack role would make the two types incompatible, especially if the speed requirement for torpedo attack were also to be met.
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Post by ramjb on May 23, 2019 22:55:52 GMT -6
That kind of idea (Actually something similar with "Weights" for roles) has been mentioned in another thread - look for the one I opened about making a new CLAA class for the game. Some good things flowing over there.
The problem here is that we can't ask too much and go too far. The team is small and that they have managed to produce something this complex and that works this well (Relatively speaking) is amazing on itself. The system in place might not be perfect but works and makes sense for, let's say, 95% of the time. One has to understand the effort/results relationship here, and that their ability to introduce complex calculations for a battlemaker that already must be pretty complex might be quite limited, specially if what's already in place mostly works well already. My proposition about a CLAA class was based about that idea - to bring something that meshes well with the system already in place without modifying it (which always is far more complex than just adding something that works within the established framework).
Ideas about role weighing , or percentiles as yours, also can work very well...but they're based on a completely different system, which means the whole battlemaking system should be redone to work with it, which in turn means a lot of work which means a lot of time...for very limited gains on something that already works quite well as it is. Not perfect...but quite well.
As the system currently goes it's a good abstraction of what went on during the time period the game covers. And it's even elegant in some ways: instead of falling for the trap of trying to follow historical "convention" of what ships of the era were classed as by their own fleets (which I guess by this stage, was and still is a huge mess), the game introduces it's own standard of what each ship class is supposed to be, and lets the player the initiative to model his fleet and ships as he wishes to cover the many different roles a fleet has and demands.
Again, not stating it's perfect, just that saying it's "good enough". Sometimes we have to weigh the simpler "good enough" approach vs the far more complex "almost perfect" in what regards to many things, and hardly a better place to apply that than to a game like this produced by a very small team that works as well as it does even with the abstractions it uses to simplify what can be really complex things to code and implement.
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Post by jorgencab on May 24, 2019 0:46:38 GMT -6
One solution could be that we could choose what "class" a ship should belong to which has nothing to do with the AI or game in general, it would just be a definition.
Then each game class would use more appropriate role names for the different in game classes and call it role instead of class.
Something like...
Corvette = Auxiliary role Destroyer = Escort role Light Cruiser = Scout Cruiser role Heavy Cruiser = Fleet Cruiser role Battle Cruiser = Fast Capital ship role Pre Dreadnought = Early Capital ship role Battle Dreadnought = Heavy Capital role etc...
Now for the class you could define your own definition in the game and select one or the game could just have a huge list of available classification commonly used. This would pretty much satisfy everyone... no!?!
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Post by ramjb on May 24, 2019 1:05:07 GMT -6
that's not a solution, that's exactly what we do have now . The in-game "Class" system is a "Role definition" system, with design limitations for each class designed to represent the general features that historical ships with similar roles had. And each "Class" in game is actually a selection of "roles" pretty much like the ones you wrote in your post. That system is already in place. Is how the game works. And that's the cornerstone reason why the Cleveland class in-game is "CA". Because IRL those ships fulfitted exactly the same roles the so-called by London Treaty standards "heavy cruisers" did, not the roles other (so-called by london treaty) much smaller "light cruisers" did (Dido, Arethusa, Atlanta, Nagara, Omaha, Condottieri, etc). And so the game AI handles those ships as they are supposed to be used according to the historical context, their design traits (over 10k tons, belt over 3'', etc) fall under the "CA" tab, not the "CL" tab. That's what has been repeatedly stated in this thread many times over . And yes a further subdivision of in-game "classes" might be interesting. My own proposal about the CLAA goes that way: A class with similar limitations as the ones already appliable to in-game CLs (10k tops, 3'' belt max, etc), the obligation of having main battery of DP guns, that is unlocked through the anti-air technology path after 5'' DP mounts have been researched, and that the game battlemaking logic places in a "support" division close to the battleine, and not in scouting spots 10 miles in the van of the units it's supposed to provide AAA cover for (something the game tends to do right now with ALL CLs, even those designed to be specialized in AA roles). The change makes sense because that class actually existed in real life (Was used for old refurbished Royal Navy light cruisers that were fitted with 4'' DP guns replacing their old 6'' main weapons, for the Dido class and for the Atlanta class), and because it should be relatively simple to incorporate to the already existing in-game systems (while things as "weighing" roles would require a serious rework of those systems) There's no other reason why other historically extant sub-classes couldn't be also added that way, I guess. But right now I can't think of any that's not pretty well covered by the system, other than the CLAA "specialized" light cruiser. Maybe "DE"...Destroyer Escort...a Destroyer that the battle logic doesn't tend to put in fleet battles as battleline screen in lieu of the "true" "Fleet" DDs. Another class that historically existed too, and another thing that sometimes can be a nuisance (having your Minelayer destroyers being brought into surface battles as part of a fleet it shouldn't be operating with). Dunno, there are many possibilities and things that can be suggested. That's why I mentioned the CLAA thread, there were some pretty decent ideas and thoughts going around .
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