Effective foreign station blueprints?

[fifey]

What are some smart designs for filling overseas requirements?

[alias72]

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMS_Panther

copy this design and build 12.

[aeson]

Some ideas for the 1899 legacy fleet designed to cover the fairly common 6,000/9,000/10,000-ton stations reasonably efficiently:

It's not a bad idea to have at least a little bit of minesweeping everywhere, and three 800- or two 1,200-ton gunboat-minesweepers fitted for colonial service would give you that while also also counting 3,000 tons towards station requirements.

2,400t cruisers fitted for colonial service and 3,000t cruisers not so fitted are cheap enough that providing a spare cruiser for the station isn't too expensive to contemplate, and each counts another 3,000 tons towards station requirements.

4,800t cruisers fitted for colonial service and 6,000t cruisers not so fitted are, generally speaking, better combatants than the smaller vessels and count 6,000 tons towards station requirements, but are more expensive and so providing 'spare' tonnage on station is a bit less affordable. It's probably possible to do it more cheaply or with better-armed/armored ships; these are just ideas I threw together quickly. Also, if you want to make a cost-efficient colonial fleet, I would advise you to look at your station tonnage requirements and see what displacements make sense for covering the requirements of the stations you actually have.

For the specific designs shown above, the smaller ships are generally more cost-effective at fulfilling station requirements, though a lot of that probably comes down the larger ships being generally faster, more heavily armored, and better armed.

Post-legacy build, I normally do not specifically build ships for colonial service. Instead, I typically build new CLs for fleet service, shift my oldest fleet CLs out to colonial stations, and retire any ancient colonial CLs that have become surplus to requirements. This allows me to keep my fleet CLs modern while preventing my colonial fleet from becoming too obsolescent without having to maintain two separate lines of modern CLs.