1.11 weird AI tendency to midget battleships?

[ulzgoroth]

I'm in the early stages of a new game in 1.11 (I'll update to 1.12, but I didn't see it when I started this) and I'm noticing that a lot of foreign battleships...really have no business anywhere near a line of battle. They've got small guns, which might be forgivable, and also very thin armor that definitely isn't. At first I thought it was just the Austrian legacy fleet, where joke battleships might be expected (though the 9000 ton boats with 3x9" main armament are a shock even there) but Germany and the British are churning out their own contributions to the 'slow heavy cruiser' category.

Building battleships in 1905 that would be helpless victims pitted against the French legacy battle line (10" armor, 12" quality -1 guns) seems like a really strange choice for two of the big-budget powers.

[BathTubAdmiral]

Are those stats from the almanac, or from spy reports ("blueprints") or battle?

Data in the almanac is subject to fog of war ...

If you want to be sure about the ships, copy the ship datafile and switch the extension to that of you nation, so you can just open them up in the ship designer:

9" belt armour in 1900 results in an immunity zone of 8000-16000m with 1910(!) shell technology, so I guess in 1900 this thing might have been "immune" to its own guns from 5000.

Haven't checked, but IIRC 12" is the biggest gun Italy has available from start  ...

[ulzgoroth]

I haven't encountered these things in battle, but I don't think the reports are too far wrong considering the piddling tonnages in play. The Monmouths are smaller than CAs that were in construction contemporaneously.

[Fredrik W]

Not so far off from these.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wittelsbach-class_battleship
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Triumph_(1903)

[dorn]

I can see much the issue that Michigan type small battleships with low freeboard are built by USA or UK even in late 10s. They have better main guns but still several thousands of tons smaller obsolete even at time of their design.