Anyone experiment with Ultra-Cheap ships?

[ulzgoroth]

I've got a series of short-ranged 2x3 battleships I designed in reaction to suffering a blockade in my last war and losing most of my battle line. They've got almost all the tactical qualities of my top-flight dreadnoughts on about a third less tonnage, so attractive for getting that battleship count up.

Of course, I then left the only completed one in my home zone as the war started in the next one over, so the class isn't likely to see any action until they're obsolete.

[stevethecat]

Playing as Britain demands a significant fleet of ultra cheap colonial cruisers to satisfy the foreign station demands.

Trying to fill out the FS tonnage while still have enough money left over for a workable surface fleet is the endless juggle of the campaign.

[ulzgoroth]

Aug 15, 2019 0:41:12 GMT -6 stevethecat said:

Playing as Britain demands a significant fleet of ultra cheap colonial cruisers to satisfy the foreign station demands.

Trying to fill out the FS tonnage while still have enough money left over for a workable surface fleet is the endless juggle of the campaign.

Are cheap colonial cruisers better than cheap colonial KE gunboats?

[aeson]

Aug 15, 2019 14:05:42 GMT -6 ulzgoroth said:

Are cheap colonial cruisers better than cheap colonial KE gunboats?

Depends on what you want. A cheap colonial gunboat KE probably has the highest effective station tonnage per unit cost (construction or maintenance) and can provide minesweeping and ASW capability, but KEs appear to be ignored when calculating fleet strength. A cheap colonial cruiser counts towards fleet strength on station and can act as a surface raider or counter enemy surface raiders, but probably costs more per unit of station tonnage and does not provide any significant minesweeping or ASW capability.

Personally, I prefer to go with a mix of both.

[sloanjh]

I prefer a gunboat DD over a gunboat KE, due to the force point difference - (small) DD are the most cost-effective way to generate force points.  Ditto for ASW (although I did create a horde of small asw KE in a recent (1.06) war where the enemy had a huge number of subs and I had to boost my asw strength quickly - the quick build time was the deciding factor there).

This leads me to only use mine-sweeper KE, which I always build big enough (600 ton?) to survive between wars (I instantly mothball them).  These almost always have a ton of free space, so I used to add the colonial package to make them more effective.  I found, however, that I kept most of these KE in home waters, and so the added cost made it more efficient to simply build more KE for the same price.  In practice, I almost never use KE in the colonies due to the force point requirements - I need my ships there to satisfy double duty of satisfying tonnage requirements AND preventing enemy invasions when in a war. 3 force points from 3xDD on station require 12 force points (3xCL or 1xBC) to overcome the 4x invasion threshold.  Note that (I'm pretty sure that) ships on TP do NOT count for force point requirements (although they do count for tonnage), so I only send gunboat/escort DD to foreign station, not ASW.

[EDIT] Coming back to the original question, I mostly use CL, stiffened by some CA or even BC in critical areas, to meet the requirements of colonial service.  This gives me ships I can put on TP or R for commerce warfare when the balloon goes up. [/EDIT]

[snwh]

I use rather cheap B's usually. Getting say, 6 guns for the price of four can be a big advantage. And they go obsolete blazingly fast anyway. And when you aren't going to pen the enemy ship anyway, you don't really need heavy caliber guns.

Idk, but I find they work decently well for low budget nations.

Also, I don't know if this has been mentioned, but I also tend later int he game to use the design doctrine of 'good enough'. as in good enough to do what it's supposed to do, and not overly more. If you want a cruiser killer, you don't need 16" guns and 9.5 inches of armor. You can get away with 10" guns or even 8", and much more conservative armor, making for a considerably cheaper ship that still dunks cruisers.

[zardoz]

I am a big fan of cheap ships.

I play mainly Germany and to be able to compete with the UK and US monsters I need many ships. So the ships must be cheap at the beginning. Since the Bs are mainly in the harbor and fight only in few cases, you can really save money here and spend that on other branches  (CAs f. e.) Later I use quality.

Unfortunately the "2.100 t cruisers" are no longer really possible.

[iasach]

I am asking for some advice in regards to battlecruiser design. While I do not seek to make them cheaper for the sake of making them cheap, I have a problem with their costs and armament, as I tend to make them overarmored, overgunned, too big displacement wise. Too much resembling a conventional battleship, simply said, for the purpose of being capable of fighting off a said battleship. But this seems to be an unreliable strategy as the time goes on and fire control tech advances.

I impulsively try to give them 16 in, triple turret, AB-YX arranged guns as fast as possible, but my recent engagements in the early 30s demonstrated that they simply cannot properly engage even similarly-designed battlecruisers as the battles become far too random and unpredictable, and in case that my BC force is outnumbered (and playing Japan, that is almost a guarantee), BC on BC engagements rarely end in favor of my forces.

Thus I decided to ditch attempts at making my BCs capable of engaging BBs in favor of making them mere cruiser killers: exceedingly fast and lightly armed and armored, but with good torpedo protection and capable of wrecking any smaller vessel, disengaging otherwise.

What guns should I be using, and in what arrangement? What smallest caliber does consistently penetrate usual CA armor, that of the biggest indended prey of this design of ships? I am thinking about installing mounts along the centerline, perhaps in an A-B-Q-Y formation for both pursuit and broadside fire capability.
Then, there are the triple and double turrets; I think triple would be overkill when engaging CAs, but then a single triple forward turret could well remove the need for a B superimposed turret completely.

How do you build your battlecruisers?

[zardoz]

What about CAs with a belt of 7.5 inch and lots of 10 inch guns, at least 8? I build sometimes CAs as Mini-BCs which can sink every CA easily and can even fight against the classic UK BC with an armour of 6 inch.

[iasach]

I think that 10 in guns are way too small, I did not use them much but their perfomance on conventional CAs did not impress me in any way whatsoever.

[eskimobrother319]

What about a small BC with 12" guns maybe just triple or quad forward turrets.

[rimbecano]

Aug 19, 2019 3:18:03 GMT -6 iasach said:

I impulsively try to give them 16 in, triple turret, AB-YX arranged guns as fast as possible, but my recent engagements in the early 30s demonstrated that they simply cannot properly engage even similarly-designed battlecruisers as the battles become far too random and unpredictable, and in case that my BC force is outnumbered (and playing Japan, that is almost a guarantee), BC on BC engagements rarely end in favor of my forces.

Try cutting out the X and Y turrets (assuming you have triple turrets, otherwise ABL or ABY may be desirable). It will save you half of your main armament weight without reducing penetrating power, and once you have the all-forward armament tech, you'll get a bonus weight reduction for having a short citadel (fewer turrets means less of the length of the ship taken up by the magazines, means less square footage of armor needed, means less steel needed to achieve a given thickness, means less weight). This allows you to maintain parity with enemy BBS in speed, protection, and penetration (at the cost of less broadside weight) for less weight and cost, or to outdo them at the same cost. My general strategy is to be moderately faster, as well armored, and, gun technology permitting, much more heavily armed.

[iasach]

Very insightful, I did not know the intricacies of all-forward armament outside of the very turret placement scheme. Seems like a very good option for a pursuer-type warship; I'll definitely try it out.

I will first try out a very fast (~30 kn to be built around 1910) lightly armored BC which will have a triple A turret, followed by a double superimposed B turret for five-gun forward volleys, and another double turret aft. I am still wondering about the caliber main guns should have, but I'll first try out the 12 in ones as eskimobrother319 suggested, then 13 and 14 in ones if other navies' CAs would become progressively more and more armored with time.


Also, another question about all-forward armament; I don't think it is possible to do in game, but could this kind of turret arrangement possibly be utilized with a conventional flight deck, as a devlopment based on japanese redesigns of Ise-class BBs?

[dorn]

Aug 20, 2019 3:55:45 GMT -6 iasach said:

Very insightful, I did not know the intricacies of all-forward armament outside of the very turret placement scheme. Seems like a very good option for a pursuer-type warship; I'll definitely try it out.

I will first try out a very fast (~30 kn to be built around 1910) lightly armored BC which will have a triple A turret, followed by a double superimposed B turret for five-gun forward volleys, and another double turret aft. I am still wondering about the caliber main guns should have, but I'll first try out the 12 in ones as eskimobrother319 suggested, then 13 and 14 in ones if other navies' CAs would become progressively more and more armored with time.


Also, another question about all-forward armament; I don't think it is possible to do in game, but could this kind of turret arrangement possibly be utilized with a conventional flight deck, as a devlopment based on japanese redesigns of Ise-class BBs?

Why do you want so fast battlecruiser so early at time where other use 26 to 28 knots? Speed is quite costly and if you need reasonable costs it is the first thing to think about.

Relating to all forward armament you need invent it first to have weight advantage.

Relating to guns caliber I suggest the largest one till 15 or 16" taking into consideration their quality. Your ship will become obsolete however 15 or 16" guns means that her guns is dangerous even to much modern ships.

[iasach]

Purely for the sake of experiment, regarding speed.

I built the ship capable of achieving 29 knots, armed with the best armament I had at the moment, and it did not turn out to be that very strong. Sure, it fought a lot in ten years and defeated every CA it came across, but those same CAs did significant damage every single time: I had neglected armor too much, and after a few hits the battlecruiser consistently lost at least 5 knots, rendering investment into speed an almost complete waste. But otherwise it still outpaced every other ship, and conceptually, it worked. Those 8 in secondary guns however, did not seem to be of much use for the amount of money and weight they cost me.

As a development over this design I ordered two dreadnoughts with 24kn design speed and more than twice the armor, but without wasting resources on 8 in secondary turrets which were replaced by a large amount of 6 in unarmored batteries. This design proved much more successful, both in the role of a battlecruiser and a battleship. It was noticeably cheaper than the failed BC design without all the wasteful investment into speed. From this, I can moderate its speed slightly to produce a cheap battleline BB.  

I think I'll convert the BC into a CV later, perhaps without even refitting the machinery. 

Attachments: