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Post by vanagandr on Aug 4, 2015 10:36:52 GMT -6
My general strategy when I design ships in this game, is to slightly one up whatever the equivalent ship in the enemy fleet will be. I figure if my ships, especially raiders, can win equal numbers engagements consistently, I'll have an easier time removing enemy ships from play while keeping my own safe. Over the course of designing ships, this tends to lead to me continuously upping the tonnage to get a few extra guns and knots out of the ship, and as a result, increases the cost considerably and reduces the number of ships I can put out. What tends to happen is that I have a very difficult time in early game wars due to the enemy's numerical raider advantage. Maybe 20 months in my CAs and CLs start to pick off enemy raiders. From then I can play a slow game of forcing the enemy's unrest to go up, but a lot of the time I get too carried away with designing huge expensive ships, and handicap myself too hard to see the war go on that long. I was wondering if anyone had experience with the idea of spamming lower quality ships, using map control, and picking fights to win wars, or what other people's doctrine with regards to the age old question of quality vs quantity is.
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Post by ccip on Aug 4, 2015 10:51:19 GMT -6
Quantity has a quality of its own as they say I think it really depends on what you're trying to achieve. Especially with the way that the game AI accepts/rejects battles, for your battle line you have little reason to choose quantity over quality - you want your battleships and battlecruisers as good as you can afford them to be, and in fact, it pays to have fewer of them but managed much more carefully. For everything else though, it's not so straightforward. With raiders, their job is not to fight, and really what you want out of a raider is for it to be able to run away from armed opponents. Cruisers in general are a fickle balance, and often what I end up doing is separating them into completely different types depending on the tasks they're supposed to perform. The ones where quality matters are units that are supposed to stand and fight at least half the time, which I vaguely lump into the "fleet cruisers" category. But cruisers built as pure scouts and/or raiders, which are not meant to fight, are best built as cheap as you can. You can play it all sorts of ways! But in general, commerce warfare is an area where the best units are the ones that are just good enough for the job, and not much more. Historically, the most effective raiders were not the more expensive and complex units, but cheap, easily replaceable ones that were not designed as combat units for any other purpose. The best excuse to give cheap units a try is when you get an event that forces you to build a large number of units - I always try to build them as cheaply as possible, and then find use for them.
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Post by mariandavid on Aug 4, 2015 14:21:03 GMT -6
Almost all of my successful episodes (campaigns is too strong a word for my all too often petulant quitting when things are not working out!) have involved building ship classes that are 2-4 knots faster than the likely opposition. Which I suppose confirms the idea of quality over quantity. If one has adequate income a good way is to accept the historic and the build quality - the initial strength helps with control and blockade, the new raiders and fast scouting groups - initially AC's.
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Post by jztemple on Aug 5, 2015 1:06:12 GMT -6
I believe that this was the theory behind Admiral Jacky Fisher's concept of the battle cruiser. It could either out-shoot an opponent or outrun it.
In my current game as the CSA, my legacy battleships have 11 inch guns and the ships, which are supposed to be 18 knots, achieve only 16. So when I have engaged the USA battlefleet (no less than four times so far!) which has 12 inch guns and 18 knots, I tend to get pounded since my clever AI opponent uses his superior speed to keep me in range of his guns while my guns are shooting at their limits.
I guess my take on the Quality vs Quantity question is that for battleships quality seems to rule. For other classes, it really depends on the game engine. I have in the battle area one killer CA and two mediocre ones and darn if every time the AI rolls up a battle it seems that the lesser value CAs are the ones picked. I guess the lesson is that if you have a mix of quality, you can't depend on the better ships being involved.
Also I'm finding that accepting the default legacy builds for your nation really shapes how your game will go in the long run. I did a full game as the UK under the V1.0 version and when the game ended in 1925 I had most of my legacy ships left, some which had gone through three rebuilds.
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Post by ccip on Aug 5, 2015 3:26:04 GMT -6
I guess the lesson is that if you have a mix of quality, you can't depend on the better ships being involved. Yes, that's the absolute key thing - and that's why it's so important to fleet battles too. The way battles are generated, sometimes you won't have your whole fleet involved, and sometimes you'll suddenly find yourself with roughly same numbers of battleships in a battle as the enemy, but horribly inferior quality, and that's a recipe for disaster. However with cruiser actions, the caveat is that all you really need is ships that are fast enough, and that's not always the same as quality. A small 4-inch or 5-inch cruiser is just as capable of getting out of battle as a heavily-armed and armored one. With fleets, there is one possible motivation to building quantity - since blockade is counted by tonnage, in theory you can enforce a blockade more effectively if you have more tonnage of cheaper ships on station. What's more, generally the enemy will not risk going up against quantity in a fleet battle, and you can keep them bottled up. However, I find that in practice, if something does happen and your ships meet each other in battle, what ends up happening is that instead of a decisive battle, you'll get one where you lose one or two battleships and the enemy will get out. You might still maintain the blockade, but you've just lost thousands of VPs and good luck making that up - the enemy will never negotiate an end to the war with you now, and the blockade usually nets you something like 120-180VPs per month. So one of the key things with quality vs. quantity management is that you want to make sure that you can avoid unneccessary or unequal losses. Losing a CA or battleship of even poor quality in battle is going to very badly affect your odds of ending a war on your terms. But having cheap ships that you can avoid losing is a perfectly valid strategy, as long as you have some ships that will also kill the enemy's. So, I think there's few exceptions to the rule on quality of line-of-battle ships, except maybe when you really want that extra tonnage for blockade, or you're just so poor you can't afford first-class battleships. But with cruisers, your best bet is to divide them between fleet cruisers (expensive) and scout/raiding cruisers (cheap) in a 1 to 2 or even 1 to 3 ratio. And as I discovered through playing the game, good-quality CAs and BCs are extremely useful to have at any point in the game, except maybe when you're far enough that true "fast battleships" are a reality, and even then a fast "supercruiser" is a good choice because it'll show up in cruiser engagements and can raid effectively.
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krawa
Junior Member
Posts: 96
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Post by krawa on Aug 5, 2015 4:49:31 GMT -6
Just to give an example that even for the battleline sometimes quantity is more important than Quality:
In my current game with Germany on Historical Budget I intentionally designed my legacy Battleships as sturdy, short-ranged, cramped 17kn only in order to keep build AND mainentance costs low. The reason was that I wanted to have enough ships to prevent a Blockade by France or Russia (or make it easier to Blockade them)
Worked out pretty well in an early war with Russia, I had more but smaller B's (2kn slower and 11" guns vs 12") while the Russian had more but weaker CA's. In the first action of the war which directly was a fleet battle I managed to trap their CA's off Gotland between my CA's and my battleline before the Russian battleline could intervene. I sank two CA's which tipped the Balance in my favour and allowed me to blockade the Russians.
I guess the example is not that good as I could not have added any "real" Quality to those Battleships anyway (more impotent secondaries for example...) but shows that speed is, at least for Battleships, not always worth the extra cost.
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Post by ccip on Aug 5, 2015 5:07:14 GMT -6
Ah yes, I saw that in a game when I played Austria-Hungary - because 95% of all my battles were in the Adriatic where I was never far from my bases. Operations in confined waters are a slightly different ball game compared to blue-water fighting.
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krawa
Junior Member
Posts: 96
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Post by krawa on Aug 5, 2015 6:22:29 GMT -6
Ah yes, I saw that in a game when I played Austria-Hungary - because 95% of all my battles were in the Adriatic where I was never far from my bases. Operations in confined waters are a slightly different ball game compared to blue-water fighting. I'm not sure what you mean, from my experience the only downside of short range ships is the inability to move strategically. I've never run out fuel during a Scenario with short ranged ships, even in SEA.
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Post by ccip on Aug 5, 2015 7:52:13 GMT -6
Oh, I wasn't talking about range at all - just speed. And I agree exactly - if you're playing a nation that's mostly operating in confined waters, you're better-off investing into ships with short range, and you also don't need to worry as much about things like speed. Often you can save money by designing ships for operating in confined waters. It's just that you have to know in advance where the fighting will be.
All I meant with range is that during battles in places like the Baltic or Adriatic you can usually escape back to base when things get tough, without needing to cover a lot of distance; and you can also force battle on a faster enemy by pushing the ships up against a coast. As a result, speed is not as crucial and range is not important at all.
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Post by gornik on Aug 6, 2015 13:23:31 GMT -6
Here is my experience of Quality vs Quantity in different ship types: For early game: B: Quantity. I can't build anything which would be much more powerful than enemy ones, so I don't bother it, just sure they are equal. However extra knot of speed may play role while chasing crippled enemies hour before sunset (typical situation in my fleet battles). CA: Quality at all cost! They are the main "killers" in early game, so they should sink every cruiser, armoured or not, without chance of being sunk. CL: As mentioned by others, there are two main types of cruisers in game: "fleet cruisers" and "raiders". While playing European nation, I also usually build third one: "home raider". Usually, fleet cruiser means Quality, as their duties are to be "light CAs", though there should be not very high-you need more of them. Home raider should operate near home waters so risk of losing her is low. for her Quality is must as for CA- she should be "poisoned bite" for enemy trade protectors. Far seas raider means Quantity, as their loses and internment are intentional. EL radius, fast speed and reliable engines; and pair of guns to sink merchants - that's all they need. DD: Quality in guns! This looks weird, but let's see, what they can do? Torpedoes are unreliable even at night clashes, while guns help a lot in destroyer actions and may harm even CL. AMC: Quality. If you decided to spend cost of late DD to one, you better be sure that she survives long enough to worth it. For late game: BB: Light Quality, especially in defence, as last hulk stay afloat wins battle. BC: Late game CA, so Quality at all cost again. CA: Theoretically, quantity, as they sill meet with raiders more often than BC, but I never had money to build more than two of them. CL: All the same, usually rebuilt early game ones serve well. DD: Quantity. Late secondaries kill them fast, so it would be better to have some in reserve. AMC. All the same.
Generally, Quantity theoretically may win wars without battles - blockades are very effective weapon, and I still saw few examples of breaking it through battles. But usually blockading nation lose the war and collapses in revolution after countless defeats in small actions and Guerre de Course, so I prefer Quality.
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Post by ccip on Aug 6, 2015 14:50:07 GMT -6
For early game: B: Quantity. I can't build anything which would be much more powerful than enemy ones, so I don't bother it, just sure they are equal. However extra knot of speed may play role while chasing crippled enemies hour before sunset (typical situation in my fleet battles). Actually, here's a thought: maybe thinking quality vs. quantity is the wrong approach for battleships in general. Early in the game, building too many Bs in general is not a great idea since even the best Bs are doomed to go obsolete within a few years anyway. But even late in the game, you don't really have a need to overkill the numbers of BBs. So, maybe a better way of thinking in terms of battleships is neither quality nor quantity, but in terms of parity. What I mean by that is: with your battle line, what you're aiming for is neither too much quality or quantity, but you're trying to make sure that you have enough battleships of good quality that you can guarantee local superiority against any likely enemy and, if possible, prevent or break a blockade (which means you can also be reasonably sure that you can and will win a fleet battle if one happens). Now, of course local is different from overall superiority - some countries don't have a lot of areas to worry about, others have to spread out, so you want to be careful not to underestimate what parity means in your case. But it's usually not worth maintaining a 20-BB fleet where you know the enemy can only bring 6. Likewise, it's not worth building a large fleet with 18-inch guns when nobody is building ships with more than 10in of armor. What I'm getting to is that with the battle line, what you ideally want is to achieve parity so that you know you have enough quantity/quality of battleships to achieve local superiority when/where needed, and then invest all the the other possible resources into your "killers" and your raiders. I think that's the right approach! The more resources you can leave for your fleet's "killer ships", which should be as good as you can make them, the better - but only after you achieve parity (or slightly batter). Unless you have more money than you know what to do with (e.g. you're playing Britain with historical resources), there's not really any reason for you to overkill either number of quality of BBs. You only need 10% more than your enemy to maintain a blockade, after all, so no reason to build a 40-battleship fleet. So I think what you want is both "light quality" and "light quantity", which is best described as "parity". Now, one area where I think it's worth thinking about the quality of your BBs is not so much how extravagant and expensive they are, but in terms of quality that will make them last. BBs are something that is good to think of as long-term investments, because they take longest to build and are really expensive even at medium quality - and you want to be able to upgrade them rather than scrap them. So where I think about quality for BBs is how to make them last - which means thinking about things that you cannot replace. You can rebuild ships with new engines, new turret armor, as many light secondaries/tertiaries as you want; you can upgrade the quality level of guns - but you can't change the amount of belt armor, add more main turrets or heavy secondaries, increase tonnage, etc. So if you're looking for battleships that will last for years (or your entire game), I'd invest into those things up front. That way, you get "light quality" from them throughout the game, instead of scrapping and building new units all the time! That's what I've seen working for me so far, anyway.
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Post by gornik on Aug 6, 2015 15:48:17 GMT -6
Yes, "parity" is right term about battleship design. As for their number... Maybe as I play more often for countries with two separate fleets (Russia, USA) I prefer to build more ships, to have one fleet "attacking" and one "defending/reserve", thinking about possibility of war with two distant nations at once. Also I'm usually not Great Britain , so I should always think about war with them. Finally, I got painful experience about early game quantity: my Italian fleet fight several times with KuK navy, and their funny 9 in panzerchiffs appeared to be tough targets. Every time I had "victory", but need much luck to sink even one of them, and they still blockaded me! When their government collapsed in revolution (thanks to newly invented submarines), my own was one step from the same and mutinies in fleet became common part of sailors daily duties And conception of "battleship to rebuild" looks interesting! I should think about it more. (Now only things I'm thinking this way are triple turrets which should be replaced by double ones with more powerful guns, and speed which should be reduced by bulges)
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