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Post by tortugapower on Jun 12, 2019 22:14:43 GMT -6
I think I've seen this mentioned by a few other people, but I don't want to be so presumptuous as to call it a bug (although it seems that way to me), but the AI has stopped building escorts. My world is extremely top-heavy from a warship perspective. I'm not sure what to think but it makes me uncomfortable
Circa 1928
Nations are about 1:1 in (BB+BC) to (DD), which doesn't seem right, and well over 5:1 BBs+BCs to CLs. Is this a bug? Is anyone else getting this?
Edit: also ships do not show up anywhere when rebuilding... is that also a bug?
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Post by ramjb on Jun 12, 2019 23:13:42 GMT -6
You're looking at DDs only. Look at the number of corvettes, though, AI is building plenty of them. Given that in wartime the trade protection needs are very high, those KEs will be covering that while the DDs are doing fleet duty. And judging by your overall DD tonnage / number of DDs seems you're keeping all the early game small boats for that role yourself (hence you don't need KEs), so in the end you have almost as much tonnage in escorts as the AI does in total escort tonnage. They just have it spread across DDs and KEs, and on less hulls, but that's perfectly fine. They're just using dedicated KEs for the role you're using the small obsolete DDs (something I also do in my games, btw). The only case I'd say is a bit extreme is France, which is lagging behind in DDs. I'm not following your LP series, but given France's budget and big ship numbers, I'd daresay you kicked it in the butt and it's still recovering. So nothing out of the ordinary, It'll eventually catch up. The rest I think are keeping a pretty decent escort tonnage, and the tonnage/hull number ratio of all the nations points out that most of them must be over 1100 ton DDs, so very capable ones to boot. So, yes, it's a bit top heavy but not insane and nowhere I'd call it a bug. Yes, the lack of CLs is a bit extreme, but in some games AI goes a bit more Big ship-centric than in others, that's all. Seen games myself where the AI had a lot of them. As long as it doesn't go beyond a certain level, I'd say it's OK and for me that screenshot only screams at me "WTF 110 DDs" (then again...I'm the same too, I never scrap dds and just do basic rebuilds for them to keep them as ASW/Minesweepers so...yeah guilty as charged myself ).
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Post by stevethecat on Jun 13, 2019 0:28:34 GMT -6
You're looking at DDs only. Look at the number of corvettes, though, AI is building plenty of them. Which is a bit of an issue itself as KEs are almost entirely insignificant, a single DD can handle divisions of them.
Those AI's look like my fleet composition, I stop building cruisers in order to force the battle generator to stop giving me a single cruiser to face off against enemy BCs. You can't spawn me with one if I don't have any.
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Post by wknehring on Jun 13, 2019 2:13:24 GMT -6
I can confirm that.
I got several prestige hits because of messages like "The naval secretary/Kaiser is upset, that we have the lowest tonnage in BC and CA", while I have by far the largest amount of CL, but only a hand full CA and BC each, while the AI, even with such small nations like AH, builds a BC-programme I wonder how this is possible. For example: actually I am playing Italy 1900. I had a 26 months war against AH starting in 1905 (because 5 end of war events were derailed by hardliners and so on), gaining Dalmatia and sinking the whole enemy cruiser fleet (1 single CA came back, because it was interned). 4 predreadnoughts and 9 DDs were left.
In 1912 there was another unpreventable war against them (because AH normally goes full retard against Italy- and vice versa) and they had 3 BBs, 9! BC, 3 CA, 9 DDs- no CL and later only some mobilization KEs and AMC (let´s summarize: they built 3 BB, 9 BC and 2 CA in about 5 years!!!). What the heck? With about 50% higher budget I was capable of building 4 BCs and 4 BBs, while scrapping my entire predreadnought fleet and only keeping 2 slightly modernized semi-dreadnoughts. In addition I build 3 new CAs and 4 new CL and 1 AV (in preparation to rebuild it to my first CVL).
The ship composition in not a single game was something like balanced. It is OK, when there is a treaty with 12000/8" that all nations start to spam CAs. But they forget to build CL and DDs. Ever played against the USSR with Germany 1920 (Versailles and Washington active)- I had a war starting in 1936 where the USSR had 24 CA, while only having 6 CL- and I was proud of 6 new CAs! But I had more CL and much more DDs.
Imo this should be investigated, because this is a fun-killing issue, because the problem is (as mentioned earlier), even with a hand full of fast BBs (29-30 knots), your convoy raids are done by 1-2 CAs against 4 times higher number BB+BC and you have to decline all fleet battles, because although you have a well balanced fleet composition, you have to play hit and run. I bet a Jeune Ecole fleet consisting of CVL, CL and DD is capable of dealing the same amount of VP once you have landbased planes, like a 4/4 fleet with a well balanced belly of CA and CL and a big DD-screen. Sorry, but this sucks. If I want to play Jeune Ecole I want to chose this and not being forced to play this.
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Post by dorn on Jun 13, 2019 2:16:21 GMT -6
If I remember well it has been already reported.
I have already thought about it. I am just playing France with very small fleet and in 1920 when scrapping of legacy fleet is done by all nations, my 4 light cruisers are the highest number with UK and USA. My 16 destroyers is the highest number, after that UK with 15 and USA with 11, everybody else has no more than 7 destroyers. I have 12 corvettes in peace time, nobody else has more than 3.
I am in war with Italy and I need 14 ships for trade protection duty to defend against 8 submarines. Italy has after loosing 1 BC, 1 CL, 1 DD this fleet:
1 BB, 7 DD, 3 KE (+4 under construction), 8 SS. I would like to know how they can enough ships for trade protection.
I have budget about half of UK and USA.
UK with 1900 start and very small fleet need 59,000 tons for foreign station duty. As I had no war with UK they lost only Falkands by rebelation but it does not decrease FS requirements.
I can look at UK fleet, first ships under 6000 tons: 1 x KE - 900 tons 15 x DD - 20400 tons 4 x CL - 21000 tons As I am in war right now I cannot see location of ships. But we can think about sitation in war. I expect that almost all DD and KE are needed for Trade protection. Thus for FS there are 21000 tons of cruisers. I do not believe that all of them are colonial cruiser but we can take it as assumption. It give us 26250 tons, we are still missing 22750 tons!
We can look at capital ships (displacement): BB 22400 tons
BB 28000 tons
BB 28000 tons BC 21300 tons BC 21300 tons BC 31500 tons BC 32100 tons
It means additional at least 2, but probably 3 capital ships are needed for FS duty.
Conclusion: AI UK in 1920 (small fleet) need about: - trade protection - all DD/KE
- foreign stations - all CL and probably 3 older capital ships This means that UK have 4 modern battleship available for fleet duty without any escort. Quite strange. Right now UK is building 1 BC, 1 CVL, 1 SS, 2 coastal batteries but no CL, no DD, no KE.
This means there is no challange as capital ships without escort is easily slaughtered or dangerously wounded.
note: righ now I have finished battle with Italy in Adriatic where I have battlecruiser (19100 tons) with proper support units - 2 light cruisers, 8 destroyers against more modern Italian battlecruiser (30800 tons). He has no chance at all. As contact was made exchance of heavy fire started, Italian ship get damaged by my 6x13" guns, I get only light damage from her 9x12" guns, Italian battlecruiser was 3 knot faster but because of some battle damage both battlecruisers were about 24 knots. After it was clear I cannot sink enemy ship by gunfire as I have only about 30 % remaining heavy shells I ordered torpedo attack during day. Enemy battlecruiser has no chance against 8 destroyers running full speed (note: most modern destroyer was commissioned in 1912 and only 600 tons) with support of 2 light cruisers and battlecruisers. The first 3 destroyers made 1 hit, the second batch made 2 hits instanly ending scenario.
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Post by tortugapower on Jun 13, 2019 2:37:39 GMT -6
You're looking at DDs only. Look at the number of corvettes, though, AI is building plenty of them. For simplicity, I shall define "BB" = BBs + BCs, and "DD" = DDs + KEs. I will count built and building.
Ratio of BBs to DDs
- Japan ~1:1 (26:28) - UK ~1:1 (45:48)
- USA ~2:3 (45:61)
- Russia ~1:3 (23:63)
Again, I'm including KEs as DDs for the above numbers. So AI doesn't seem to be building plenty of them. Now, BBs+BCs = "BBs" compared to CL...
Ratio of BBs to CLs: - France 1:0, infinite (13:0) - Russia 23:1 - Japan 13:1 (26:2)
- USA ~5:1 (45:10)
For fleet escort duty, so not including KEs which wouldn't quality, the picture is horrible:
Escorts (CL+DD) per battleship (BB+BC)
- Japan = 0.77 (20:26) - France = 0.77 (10:13)
- UK = 0.93 (42:45) - Russia = 1.22 (28:23) - USA = 1.49 (67:45)
Most nations have less escorts than capital ships.
I hope you said this without looking at the numbers carefully -- take a look at the numbers above. They do seem insane to me (or at least very a-historical). Alternatively, we have different concepts of reasonable fleet compositions.
Note: this is going to make for an interesting game, but I'd rather it not be the norm.
Note 2: I do fear the AI will blockade me but decline battles because they have no escorts.
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Post by jorgencab on Jun 13, 2019 2:51:30 GMT -6
If you look at for example WW2 then fleets were usually made up of about 1-1.5 destroyers for every other warships. On the US side then Light and Heavy cruisers were mainly screening ships and acted more like traditional battle cruisers with their roles basically the same. On the Japanese side who had much smaller light cruisers they were more of scouts and pickets in the sense they were in ages past and so would be counted into the escort category.
Most US battle fleets had surprisingly few destroyers. At Midway for example the US main battle force in action had less destroyers than other warships for example. When destroyers displace upward of 2500t they are more versatile in their performance and you don't need so many of them anymore. I think the game will more or less represent this as well.
The BC are the screening ships for the BB while the CL and DD are the escort in RTW2, for the most part anyway. Once CV are developed things change quite drastically in my opinion and with destroyers getting bigger and bigger you will need less and less of them for fleet duty.
In real life they needed destroyers for many more things than you do in the game. In the game you only need them for one mission at a time and if you have five or six stationed at an area they will almost always be available to you. In the real world there were many non combat tasks for them to conduct such as patrol, supply convoy escort, troop convoy escort etc.. In real life about 20-30% of your fleet would be in some sort of refit or maintenance cycle and not available for a specific mission. Just because we only have one mission in the game does not mean there are dozens if not more missions taking place in the background all the time, they just don't result in combat.
So... in order to force both players and AI to build more destroyers and less capital ships the game need to abstract these duties to the smaller ships and make it so that you need more for them to actually show up in any significant numbers in the scenarios that you play.
I have not played enough to know if the game really weight the number of escorts in this way or not properly. If it does not then you don't need that many destroyer in order to have them available in missions for you.
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Post by tortugapower on Jun 13, 2019 3:01:40 GMT -6
Hi jorgencab , I wasn't sure what a realistic looking ratio was, so I did a quick google search and found this:
USN, August 1945: 28 aircraft carriers, 23 battleships, 71 escort carriers, 72 cruisers, over 232 submarines, 377 destroyers... Including CVs as capital ships, that would be a ratio of 7.4 DDs per capital ship, or 8.8 escorts per capital ship.
I see your point about less DDs in fleet escort duty for the USN, but if that were the case in the game, we should see more CLs in the fleet compositions, not less/none.
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Post by rodentnavy on Jun 13, 2019 3:16:41 GMT -6
Attachment Deletedstevethecat highlights the issue with the lack of light cruisers in the enemy fleets is that given the nature of the random match up system your light cruisers become a liability. The AI might find itself occasionally losing a couple of KEs but then in late game its air power might bag a CL so a good risk for it and it might have a BC or BB in the scenario instead. In RL the reason navies built a great many light cruisers was not because they liked them but because they needed them. Corvettes emerged when the submarine became a major threat but before that it was the surface raider and first class cruisers could not be built in sufficient numbers to cover all the missions required even by a navy whose role was restricted to running coastal convoys. Having a light cruiser or two along meant the enemy had to send at least a heavy cruiser out as raiders generally do not wish to risk disabling damage on their mission. Some kind of mechanic such as jorgencab suggested for destroyers but for cruisers needs to be considered.
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Post by dorn on Jun 13, 2019 3:39:00 GMT -6
It is quite similar for RN. At start of war ratio capital ships: cruisers : destroyers is about 1:4:12
Royal Navy at start of WW2:
Built / building
BB & BC: 15 / +5 CV: 7 / +6 CL & CA: 66 / +23 DD: 184 / +32 / +20 (escort type) KE: (escort and patrol vessels): 45 / +9
SS: 60 / +9
Royal Navy 9/1945: BB & BC: 15
CV & CVE: 55 CL & CA: 67
DD: 308 SS: 162BB
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Post by dorn on Jun 13, 2019 3:50:01 GMT -6
This is my first game as UK starting 1920, mainly played in v1.00 and 1.01
May be something went wrong in some other version from v1.00 as distribution between type of ships are not so bad. UK, very large fleet, 1956 end game. Look more on tonnage as reconstructions are not shown by numbers.
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Post by L0ckAndL0ad on Jun 13, 2019 3:51:49 GMT -6
I've had the same experience in my 1920-1950 US game. AI is very top-heavy, building both fast BBs and BC at the same time, and neglecting DDs big time.
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Post by Antediluvian Monster on Jun 13, 2019 3:55:07 GMT -6
I've had similar top-heavy AI buildup in all my RtW2 games (all started in 1900, both manual and automatic legacy fleet).
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Post by jorgencab on Jun 13, 2019 5:13:38 GMT -6
stevethecat highlights the issue with the lack of light cruisers in the enemy fleets is that given the nature of the random match up system your light cruisers become a liability. The AI might find itself occasionally losing a couple of KEs but then in late game its air power might bag a CL so a good risk for it and it might have a BC or BB in the scenario instead. In RL the reason navies built a great many light cruisers was not because they liked them but because they needed them. Corvettes emerged when the submarine became a major threat but before that it was the surface raider and first class cruisers could not be built in sufficient numbers to cover all the missions required even by a navy whose role was restricted to running coastal convoys. Having a light cruiser or two along meant the enemy had to send at least a heavy cruiser out as raiders generally do not wish to risk disabling damage on their mission. Some kind of mechanic such as jorgencab suggested for destroyers but for cruisers needs to be considered. I agree... in addition to trade protection there should also be a need for naval fleet logistics where you need to assign destroyers, cruisers, escort carriers and even capital ships for escort duty and routine patrol in low intensity sectors. Ships here could be slower older battleships, slower and older or purpose built cheap carriers and second rate destroyers and cruisers. In naval terms there was a very large contrast between supply and troop protection and regular civilian trade protection. There are also allot of other naval tasks that needs to be performed such as mining and mine clearing that you should not just be able to do that efficiently while assigned to trade protection. I would like to see a second abstracted role of fleet support that could also be used to generate missions in addition to what we have now. So a ship could be assigned for Fleet Action (Active ships currently), Fleet Support (mainly escort of fleet logistics and mine laying etc...), Trade Protection and Raiding. This would force everyone to build more realistic number of ships. It would also be interesting to get a report which ships are unavailable due to maintenance and repair issues after each mission, ships that could have been part of a mission but was not. Reliability is a real important thing in the real world, this is one reason why you will need to scrap older ships too and refit their engine plants once in a while. It is included for air planes and should be equally important for ships as well. Every ship should have an individual reliability level that drops over time and that resets during refits somewhat, ships will always be able to do extra deep maintenance and overhaul work during refits in general. The more extensive a refit is the more the reliability of the ship will increase as a bonus. I also thin that capital ships should be even more susceptible to random submarine attacks if your destroyer numbers are too low. You can't expect all of your ten destroyers on station to be able to cover 10 BB/BC all that efficiently in an abstract sense, there are too many duties and reason for ships to not be available. Another thing is mothballing and reserve, there are very few downsides to this except some minor experience loss. This loss is almost negligible because you are quite likely to refit most ships between wars anyway. If reliability was introduced for ships then ships in reserve and especially mothballed ships should be reduced in reliability significantly and once taken into active status this would slowly raise to more normal level. This would make the choice of putting ships into reserve or active status a much bigger decision. Currently there is no discussion on this, you mothball and reserve as many ships as you can to save money. outside of role-playing there are almost no reason for active ships except for the bare minimum necessary.
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Post by alsadius on Jun 13, 2019 6:47:13 GMT -6
Some quick addition in my current game (1918, very large fleet, Italy) Numbers are split BB+BC+B / CA+CL / DD+KE UK: 25/30/45 France: 20/6/21 (lost two wars against me, 1906 and 1910) A-H: 6/10/17 (lost war against me, 1914) Russia: 21/14/33 Germany: 28/15/34 USA: 23/33/43
So it's top-heavy compared to history, but not as egregious as your cases. For reference, I'm 14/24/47.
Edit: For some percentages, that means my fleet is 16% battle fleet, 28% cruisers, and 55% escorts. The combined AI fleets are 123/108/193, which is 29% battle fleet, 25% cruisers, and 46% escorts. So definitely a fair bit more top-heavy than mine, and mine is a bit top-heavy by historical standards too.
Dorn's RN stats, minus carriers (since CVEs aren't broken out, and those will skew things badly) are 15/66/229 in 1939 (5%/21%/74%), and 15/67/308 in 1945 (4%/17%/79%). Even with all carriers of all sizes included in the battle fleet, the 1945 stats are only 16% battle fleet.
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