Thud and Blunder: War in 1900

[ulzgoroth]

So I just spun up my third-ever game, and my first as a Northern Europe power.  And stepped up to very large fleet sizes.

Germany was doing some aggressive colonial expansion in the opening turns, and as France I elected to be a bit of a thorn in their side about it.  Tensions skyrocketed and war was declared in mid-1900.

Which means a war that has been thus far fought entirely by dubious legacy fleet designs.  With no fire control developments, poor-quality artillery with unimproved shells, and very primitive torpedoes.

It's interesting.  I was lucky, in that my legacy fleet has 12" guns and 10" belts while Germany has 11" guns (or worse) and 9" belts, but even my guns against their armor is useless beyond about arm's reach.  In 6 months of major fleet clashes, nothing on my side larger than a light cruiser has been significantly damaged by gunfire and nothing larger than a CL on their side has sunk without being torpedoed.  And destroyer gunnery is so ineffectual that they can't even sink each other without using torpedoes.

They've lost a few capital units after they were slightly lamed by 12" gunfire, abandoned by their fleet to be mobbed at point blank range by my battleships, and then eventually torpedoed by swarming destroyers.  I've lost nothing but a few DDs, though I nearly lost two heavy cruisers (to the same crippled destroyer) in the first engagement.  Luckily both limped into Dunkerque without quite sinking.

[kaguya]

The secret is using HE and hoping the predreads just burn to death from poor damage control, or suiciding destroyers for more consistency.

[pcasey]

I find warfare prior to about 1905 to be spectacularly un-lethal and frankly sort of tedious (which is too bad since I overall love this game).

If you have to go to war that early I'd recommend just building a lot of light cruisers and setting them to raiders. Early war commerce raiders are super effective for some reason.

For fun you can also build some "super" armored cruisers and accept all the cruiser battles ... a lot of AI Armored Cruiser designs are lightly enough armored that your 11" Armored Cruisers can actually do some damage.

[mycophobia]

B can pretty much only seriously harm another B through either fire or some lucky BE hit that lead to pretty bad flooding. So yeah, you definitely have less dramatic battles than what would happen 10 years down the line. Still if you really commit in a large scale B fight by going into a melee brawl a lot of ship will go down, if not from repeated BE hits then from lucky torpedo.

[jma286]

This is why I spend the first 5-7 years of the game avoiding wars and hoarding money to get off to a fast start when the BB/BC era begins.

[gornik]

I had several wars started in 1901. As my ships usually have from 14 to 18 7" secondaries, I set them >50% HE ammo and then look at floating fires in the darkness. Moreover, I use plenty of 4" anti-DD guns, which are quite effective against big ships at this point. Also, in such times I may come REALLY close to enemy without torpedo fear, so my lead division usually fire from 2-4K yds, and SOMETIMES even main caliber scores hit! Any enemy with damaged machinery is doomed, and I often kill 2-3 capital ships in one battle. Though, it is rear admiral mode, so I may send strong CA force to cut off part of enemy fleet and to finish cripples. 150+ medium hits from 2000 yds are deadly for everybody even early on, the only problem of my fleet is lack of ammo

[JagdFlanker]

i recently started setting all my 6" and less ammo to 100% HE, initially so i didn't have to remember to change it when DP shows up, but unleashing a 24 gun secondary/tertiary broadside firestorm (per side) has been working like a charm on any opposition

early game is where 22kt B's really shine - they can catch up to and dispatch everything without having to worry about torps too much

[fleet5]

If you play Germany, you have the AP shell advantage so I prioritise that so that just in a few years my pre-dreads can penetrate at least 9 inches of armor.