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Post by aeson on May 22, 2019 8:25:18 GMT -6
Agree on the idea of the "non-modified" CVL as long as you want it to get the ability to get high research on aircraft and don't plan it to use it as a viable combat carrier for very long. Because CVs do need all the speed they can get to properly shadow your flagship movements, while being forced to fly into and out from the wind all the time. My experience with bulges on low 20s knot ships is that speed is reduced by just 2 knots. At least the ones I've rebuilt with a bulge and increased the speed by 2 kept their speed. Bulged ships with 25kn plants make 22 knots in service, no failed-to-make-design-speed event required: Bulging costs you 2 knots with a plant designed for 24 knots or less, 3 knots with a plant designed for 25 to 34 knots, and 4 knots with a plant designed for 35+ knots. That's 10% of the design speed with standard rounding. Replacing the guns is expensive, time-consuming, and not particularly worthwhile unless it's a significant upgrade on a reasonably modern ship.
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Post by dorn on May 22, 2019 9:20:32 GMT -6
Here's one, don't know if someone mentioned it, but in rtw, you usually wanted to leave a bit of extra tonnage, maybe like 20 or 30, for new fire controls. You need a lot more than that in rtwII, in my experience. especially around the thirties. cause your AAA is improving, and that stuff is pretty heavy, depending on the size of the ship. Im gonna have to pull the floatplanes off of my new CA's, because I forgot to leave enough tonnage for my new medium AA and directors, 'doh! You can overweight ship. If overweight is only slight, it is nothing dangerous. I do it regularly if I have no free displacement. It is better than missing AA guns.
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Post by warlock on May 22, 2019 9:30:02 GMT -6
I always did well in RTW1 with ships that have superior speed. I haven't fought enough in RTW2 yet to determine whether or not that still holds. Speaking of speed - remember that BCs became almost extint when battleships could equal their speeds. For a good reason. Once your BBs can top 27-28 knots while still sporting a brutal punch and massive protection, to field ships that can't have more than a limited ammount of deck and belt armor is just asking for trouble. And you know how Murphy's Laws go, right?. Once the bar has been reached where in order to keep your ships labelled as BCs you have to give up innaceptable ammounts of protection ,just stop building them and build faster battleships instead. By that stage you will be able to build CAs with 8-9 or 10 inch guns for cruiser roles for FAR cheaper (roughly two of those for each one of the BCs). Finally...don't overgun. Yes, yes I know the hype of the 18'' guns. Yamato had them'n'stuff. Bigger is better right?... Turns out that no, not really. 16'' guns can (And will) trounce almost anything they find in this game without even blinking twice. Why go 18'' (god forbid 20'') and pay the huge expenses in displacement and money for guns that are just absurdly overkill?. Well, I guess that for the memes and because it's cool . But if what you're looking for is cost-effective design, just don't even bother with guns bigger than 16''. They demand too much compromise in displacement and money to make it worthwhile. Two questions on these two points. First, the BC. From my experience the reason you can't go an all BB route even when BBs get fast as a BC would be, is that the game treats BCs as being Cruisers. If I don't have a strong BC force, then when the enemy has BCs, I am facing down their BCs with my CAs which doesn't go well for my CAs. I have played Italy through 1953 where the game is finally showing a resurgence of CAs being built by the AI but since I have kept my BCs while the enemy has been building lots of CAs again, I am finding that in those medium engagements, very often it is my BCs being matched against their very modern, but still inferior CAs that can't compete against BCs with 10+ inches of armor belt and 14-16 inch guns. As far as the gun sizes, one thing I noticed was that even though 16 inch guns have nearly the same penetration values as 18 inch guns, I don't think they do as much damage per hit. This might be entirely subjective but I built 2 BBs and 2 BCs with 18 inch -1 quality guns, just because I could and they shredded the enemy with what seemed like very few hits. About 4 turns later I researched 16 inch +1 Quality guns which quite honestly matched or even out performed the 18 inch -1 quality guns at least as far as penetration was concern so I refitted all my 18 inch gun ships for the weight savings. Then when I engaged the same enemy ships with my now 16 inch armed BCs and BBs, it just seemed to take much longer to kill or do serious damage to the enemy. Again I have no way to know for sure but theoretically and likely in real life, an 18 inch shell would carry significantly more explosive filler than a 16 inch shell meaning given equal penetration each hit would be significantly more damaging. This subjective observation makes me wonder if this might not be modeled in game which would also mean that despite the weight of the larger guns, there really might be a advantage to using 18 or even 20 inch guns.
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Post by ramjb on May 22, 2019 10:04:39 GMT -6
I've seen enough BBs in "Cruiser engagements" thus far to know that not having BCs doesn't mean you won't have heavy guns in a cruiser encounter. YOu just won't have your full battleline. Not to mention that I'm not saying "once that happens go and scrap your BCs". You will still have BCs...you just won't be wasting money in new ones that don't justify their cost with their protection issues. Besides all that: by the time the BC goes out for me, CVs are a thing (at least CVLs), and in cruiser engagements they do play a far more dominant part than a BC would. In that scenario having 2 times the number of CAs (and heavy AAA DP mounts) at play is what really matters, the torpedo and dive bombers will do the rest. (and during the night you simply turn your force in the opposite way to the enemy, as real carriers of the time did ). Re: Guns. ofc bigger guns hit harder - bigger shells hurt more per hit. But as long as your shots are going in and the shell can pen the enemy armor, it's not a case of individual hits being more or less damaging - is a case that if you need a ship 10000-15000 tons bigger to carry a similar number of those guns to battle, it's more cost effective to bring more smaller guys to the fray. I just did the test in a 1941 game I'm playing with the US. I have a 27 knot 47000 ton BB with top class armor armed with 9x16'' I designed in 1936: I did the test and swapped guns for 18''. No changes in armor or speed, all I did was upscaling the 3x3 configuration to bring 18'' guns to the table. It forced me to upscale the design by 14000 tons to get out of the red (And this is 5 years after the design was built originally, for a new ship I wouldn't have those 500+ spare tons to begin with) and costed a total extra 25% more to build on the pricetag. All that to do more damage per hit?. Sure, the 61k ton version is going to have a harder punch. But at which cost?. for the same price that 3 of those monsters cost me, I can build 3 of these AND a quite massive fleet carrier. It's just not worth it.
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Post by marauder on May 22, 2019 10:08:20 GMT -6
Speaking of speed - remember that BCs became almost extint when battleships could equal their speeds. For a good reason. Once your BBs can top 27-28 knots while still sporting a brutal punch and massive protection, to field ships that can't have more than a limited ammount of deck and belt armor is just asking for trouble. And you know how Murphy's Laws go, right?. Once the bar has been reached where in order to keep your ships labelled as BCs you have to give up innaceptable ammounts of protection ,just stop building them and build faster battleships instead. By that stage you will be able to build CAs with 8-9 or 10 inch guns for cruiser roles for FAR cheaper (roughly two of those for each one of the BCs). Finally...don't overgun. Yes, yes I know the hype of the 18'' guns. Yamato had them'n'stuff. Bigger is better right?... Turns out that no, not really. 16'' guns can (And will) trounce almost anything they find in this game without even blinking twice. Why go 18'' (god forbid 20'') and pay the huge expenses in displacement and money for guns that are just absurdly overkill?. Well, I guess that for the memes and because it's cool . But if what you're looking for is cost-effective design, just don't even bother with guns bigger than 16''. They demand too much compromise in displacement and money to make it worthwhile. Two questions on these two points. First, the BC. From my experience the reason you can't go an all BB route even when BBs get fast as a BC would be, is that the game treats BCs as being Cruisers. If I don't have a strong BC force, then when the enemy has BCs, I am facing down their BCs with my CAs which doesn't go well for my CAs. I have played Italy through 1953 where the game is finally showing a resurgence of CAs being built by the AI but since I have kept my BCs while the enemy has been building lots of CAs again, I am finding that in those medium engagements, very often it is my BCs being matched against their very modern, but still inferior CAs that can't compete against BCs with 10+ inches of armor belt and 14-16 inch guns. As far as the gun sizes, one thing I noticed was that even though 16 inch guns have nearly the same penetration values as 18 inch guns, I don't think they do as much damage per hit. This might be entirely subjective but I built 2 BBs and 2 BCs with 18 inch -1 quality guns, just because I could and they shredded the enemy with what seemed like very few hits. About 4 turns later I researched 16 inch +1 Quality guns which quite honestly matched or even out performed the 18 inch -1 quality guns at least as far as penetration was concern so I refitted all my 18 inch gun ships for the weight savings. Then when I engaged the same enemy ships with my now 16 inch armed BCs and BBs, it just seemed to take much longer to kill or do serious damage to the enemy. Again I have no way to know for sure but theoretically and likely in real life, an 18 inch shell would carry significantly more explosive filler than a 16 inch shell meaning given equal penetration each hit would be significantly more damaging. This subjective observation makes me wonder if this might not be modeled in game which would also mean that despite the weight of the larger guns, there really might be a advantage to using 18 or even 20 inch guns. Larger guns do inflict more damage, yeah. Also, gun quality has no influence on the damage a shell does. So an 18"Q-2 would still do more damage than a 17"Q+1. (At least that's how it was in RTW1, but I don't think anything changed.)
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Post by aeson on May 22, 2019 11:28:58 GMT -6
Specifically, at least in the first game, the expected damage done per hit by a gun of a given caliber was proportional to the weight of the shell. 18" shells are about 40% heavier than 16" shells; the expected damage per 18" hit is roughly proportionately higher as compared to a 16" hit. Note, however, that there is a degree of variability in actual damage per hit.
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Post by pedroig on May 22, 2019 11:37:49 GMT -6
Agree on the idea of the "non-modified" CVL as long as you want it to get the ability to get high research on aircraft and don't plan it to use it as a viable combat carrier for very long. Because CVs do need all the speed they can get to properly shadow your flagship movements, while being forced to fly into and out from the wind all the time. My experience with bulges on low 20s knot ships is that speed is reduced by just 2 knots. At least the ones I've rebuilt with a bulge and increased the speed by 2 kept their speed. Bulged ships with 25kn plants make 22 knots in service, no failed-to-make-design-speed event required:
Bulging costs you 2 knots with a plant designed for 24 knots or less, 3 knots with a plant designed for 25 to 34 knots, and 4 knots with a plant designed for 35+ knots. That's 10% of the design speed with standard rounding. Replacing the guns is expensive, time-consuming, and not particularly worthwhile unless it's a significant upgrade on a reasonably modern ship.
Sorry I wasn't clear. I mean if you go from 12" -1 to 12" 0, that is a fairly minor upgrade, only 6 months or so. To go up or down in guns is a New Design 99% of the time.
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Post by aeson on May 22, 2019 12:09:45 GMT -6
Sorry I wasn't clear. I mean if you go from 12" -1 to 12" 0, that is a fairly minor upgrade, only 6 months or so. To go up or down in guns is a New Design 99% of the time. Replacing with same-caliber higher-quality guns is what I understood you to mean, and it costs about 10 million over eight months even on a 2x2x12" preadreadnought battleship; on a 4x2x14" it'll run closer to 30 million over eight months. That's an expensive, time-consuming refit, and especially if you're not going from Q- to Q1 it's a pretty marginal upgrade.
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Post by blackvoid on May 22, 2019 12:28:51 GMT -6
Here's one, don't know if someone mentioned it, but in rtw, you usually wanted to leave a bit of extra tonnage, maybe like 20 or 30, for new fire controls. You need a lot more than that in rtwII, in my experience. especially around the thirties. cause your AAA is improving, and that stuff is pretty heavy, depending on the size of the ship. Im gonna have to pull the floatplanes off of my new CA's, because I forgot to leave enough tonnage for my new medium AA and directors, 'doh! I usually leave 200+ of free tonnage on BCs and 100+ on CAs/CLs. It helps immensely with flooding damage. Also on BCs you need future tonnage for AAA and AAA directors. I think my best ship design in GB playthrough was a 56Kt BC with 9 16" guns and 13" (may be 12") belt armor and tier 4 torpedo defence built in 1928. Stupid expensive, but it had enough free tonnage to accept 3 modernizations. In one battle i think it was hit with 9 aerial torpedoes and survived. I also built my first purpose CVLs with no armor and high speed. 12kt, 30 knots and 26 a/c (8F and 2 squadrons of 9TB). Very useful early on to beat on enemy without CVs.
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Post by aeson on May 22, 2019 13:49:17 GMT -6
I usually leave 200+ of free tonnage on BCs and 100+ on CAs/CLs. It helps immensely with flooding damage. There does not appear to be any bonus to flotation points for having unused tonnage in Rule the Waves 2 and there was no such benefit to it in Rule the Waves.
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Post by janxol on May 22, 2019 13:59:42 GMT -6
I am pretty sure there is no benefit to flotation from spare tonnage.
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Post by blackvoid on May 22, 2019 14:12:29 GMT -6
Devs can clarify. I can be wrong. In my experience both RTW and RTW2, ships with no spare tonnage or overweight sink faster.
But if I am wrong about the flooding, you still need space for AAA.
And thinking logically:
1. Lost buoyancy method. The volume of the flooded compartment does not belong anymore to the vessel, while the weight of its structures is still part of the displacement.
That's what game uses as a flood bar.
2. Added mass method. The water entering a damaged compartment is considered as belonging to the ship; its mass must be added to the ship displacement.
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Post by aeson on May 22, 2019 14:19:15 GMT -6
Devs can clarify. I can be wrong. In my experience both RTW and RTW2, ships with no spare tonnage or overweight sink faster. Overweight has a penalty, yes, but there is no difference between having exactly 0 tons remaining and 200 tons unused, insofar as flotation points are concerned.
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Post by wknehring on May 22, 2019 14:59:07 GMT -6
About gun-caliber and refitting guns: Compare all calibers 16" to 20"- when I remind that correctly all of them have the same 6,5" maximum deck-penetration at ranges 25k and further. Here is the question, do you want to have the one hit potential with alow rate of fire (here I have to say, that such things don´t happen as oftenas you wish it) or do you want to have a stable amount of damage with a higher rate of fire that often means that your enemy don´t return fire, because of the shock effect (there is something similar ingame- the enemy rate of fire drops significantly after serious hits). Personally I prefer the smaller caliber- I would say 4x3 15"Qu1 is better than 3x3 16"Qu1 is better than 3x3 18"Qu-1. And a potential quality-refit depends on the caliber. Normally I refit 15" and smaller with the next FC-refit, because they need that bit of higher range and better penetration. Smaller midgame units (DDs and CL) get their 4" to 6" refitted out of the same reason, especially my lategame DDs in RtW1 have 3x2 or 4x2 4"Qu1 with High AP-tech, so they can feast on CL and light up capital ships easily. A new thing will be, that I won´t build 10" CA anymore, because they are too expensive (before I built 3x3 or 4x3 10" CAs I build some Large Cruiser/BCs with 3x3 12" and imunity against 8" and high speed- go all or nothing!). 8" CA are way enough for their tasks (dealing with CL, raiding, escorting, show off in your posessions) and here even 8"Qu-1 are way better than 6"Qu1, so I am not sure if I refit to better 8" guns once I have them. 16" and bigger calibers don´t get this increase of punch you hope for. I do not refit them. But to be honest- in one of my games I will build one BB with 24 knots, imunity against 16" and 20" boomsticks- I want that biiiiiiiiiig boy in only one game to see what happens
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Post by janxol on May 22, 2019 15:23:06 GMT -6
Devs can clarify. I can be wrong. In my experience both RTW and RTW2, ships with no spare tonnage or overweight sink faster. Overweight has a penalty, yes, but there is no difference between having exactly 0 tons remaining and 200 tons unused, insofar as flotation points are concerned. That would definitely be correct for rtw1, and seems to be true for rtw2 as well.
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