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Post by secondcomingofzeno on May 30, 2019 4:07:48 GMT -6
Personal experience? Don't bother with any coastal stuff, airbases and airships included. They just...Barely ever do anything.
With around 10 120 plane bases, I think I had a single airstrike using them, and it killed a cruiser.
For that cost I could have a couple extra big ships going around killing stuff.
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Post by rimbecano on May 30, 2019 4:17:16 GMT -6
The one case where shore batteries are useful is if you share a sea zone with Japan: Placing shore batteries covering your major harbors in the region can repel a (surface) surprise attack. This is especially the case at Manilla, since the narrow harbor entrance guarantees that the attacking force will have to pass your gun emplacement on the way in.
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Post by aeson on May 30, 2019 13:27:23 GMT -6
Unless you seriously damage the guns themselves rather than merely dismounting them, driving off their crews, and cratering the earthworks protecting them, it doesn't take that much time to put a coastal battery back together, and if you're planning to invade then knocking defenses at likely landing points out a month or more in advance is very likely to backfire unless you can more or less completely isolate the target area from significant reinforcements - possibly feasible for the islands of the Pacific, maybe vaguely plausible for North Africa, very unlikely for North America or Europe - because it's going to draw attention to your interest in the area, which may very well lead to the area being reinforced, as happened with for example the Gallipoli operations, where the naval bombardment in November 1914 alerted the Ottoman authorities to the weakness of the defenses and the naval attempt to force the straits in March 1915 highlighted Entente interest in the region, and by late April an Ottoman army was ready to oppose the Allied invasion.
Also, you're ignoring that invasion preparation is by no means the only reason to conduct naval raids on coastal targets. What of the raid on Scarborough, Hartlepool, and Whitby? Cuxhaven? The bombardment of Yarmouth and Lowestoft? Naval gunfire support for the front in Belgium? Naval operations against the Adriatic coast? None of these were meant to suppress coastal defenses in preparation for an amphibious assault and destroying coastal batteries would have been of only incidental value towards accomplishing the actual operational objectives. Coastal batteries and littoral minefields are part of the system of coastal defenses; where you find one, you will often find the other - especially when the one is a permanent or semi-permanent coastal fortification such as is represented by coastal batteries in Rule the Waves 1 & 2. A naval minefield makes it more difficult to approach a coastal battery; a covering battery makes it more difficult to sweep a minefield; the value of each is enhanced by the presence of the other.
There is also a reasonably common type of defensive minefield - the controlled minefield - which, as the name implies, was controlled from a coastal installation rather than being a fully passive system.
So should (permanent) coastal batteries. Both 'should' also be present at likely landing points for amphibious assaults, and at strategically-important points vulnerable to naval attack, like major rail junctions and bridges near the coast.
The ships that we can fit for minelaying in Rule the Waves 1 & 2 are fairly long-range ocean-going vessels which would be mostly used for major minefields like the Dover, Otranto, and North Sea barrages of the First World War and for offensive minelaying, whereas defensive littoral minefields would often have been laid and maintained by minor vessels like the Ottoman Nusret of only ~360 tons or by mine planters - specialized minelayers designed to lay defensive minefields with great precision - which are either only implicitly represented within the game by the defensive minefields around harbors and coastal batteries or at most might be represented in the minelaying destroyers and scenario-spawn like Patrol Boat-class KEs.
Also, if the player invests in coastal fortifications, it is not unreasonable to assume that this implies that the player is investing in the system of coastal defenses - not just the fortifications themselves, but also the minor minelayers and gunboats upon which fell most of the burden of laying and maintaining the defensive littoral minefields around harbors and other strategically-important locations. An investment in minelaying destroyers and cruisers, on the other hand, is much more likely to be an investment in offensive minelaying - high speed, heavy armament, and reasonable endurance are not particularly valuable attributes for a ship meant to lay defensive littoral minefields close to home, but they're much more useful for a ship that lays mines in areas where opposition is reasonably likely. Have you actually checked the Almanac, or are you basing this on how often you see them in battle scenarios? My experience is that the computer normally builds somewhere around ten additional batteries over the first decade or two of the game, usually - though not always - mostly concentrated in the home possession(s). The total number of coastal batteries each nation has built is listed on the Nation Data tab of each nation's Almanac page, and if you click on individual possessions you can see how many (if any) batteries are present.
Less commonly, the computer will invest ever so slightly more in coastal defenses:
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Post by dougphresh on Jun 18, 2019 13:34:15 GMT -6
I would really appreciate mine warfare, MTBs and coastal guns getting a second look. The North Sea, English Chanel and Baltic have a lot of potential for coastal warfare but as-is, there's not much of a point in investing the resources.
Fire-control for the turret coastal guns is woeful, and they are often outshot by obsolete warships. I'd appreciate directors being added, in the same way that AA guns and DP guns appear on batteries in the 20's. More to the point, for as much as these major coastal guns cost, their emplacement is not usually useful.
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Post by garrisonchisholm on Jun 18, 2019 23:23:20 GMT -6
Good Grief!! I think director just had a coronary!!
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Post by director on Jun 19, 2019 12:22:17 GMT -6
garrisonchisholm - no coronary here. For A-H that's a viable option, albeit an expensive one. I saw something similar in RtW1, also; once Byzantium beat their capital ships they withdrew into the island maze, peppering them with batteries, mines and launching ambushes with cruisers and destroyers. 82 shore batteries and 106 submarines in the cramped and enclosed Adriatic... that makes my skin crawl. Once they get a serious number of aircraft based around, I'll take my vacation somewhere other than 'Damnatia', thank you.
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