Overseas Reserve

[rob06waves2018]

Rather a small suggestion here which I am 60% certain has come up before but can he please allow ships to by laid up in ordinary (placed into reserve) on overseas stations? I generally play as Britain so I often have wars that are fought over possessions halfway around the world. Germany and France also have this problem with Japan and the US developing it later on. The budget is large enough to have surplus capital ships before a war that I find are best forward-deployed to the East Coast or South East Asia. However, once the war ends, the budget is reduced and ships need to be put into ordinary. Generally, I try to keep my best ships in AF as they have the best crews to respond to a sudden war. On the other hand, my older ships are often deployed permanently to, say, Halifax or Hong Kong. I would far prefer to cut costs on these ships (which are generally not needed for foreign stations) but I cannot be a***d moving them back to Europe to be in reserve. They will only return in a year or two anyway.

I anticipate the point about port facilities and the like but it's not like these ships are in drydocks. Ships in ordinary generally float at their moorings with a skeleton crew. If a port is large enough to routinely operate them on AF, why can't they keep them alongside when in RF?

This would be singularly brilliant when it comes to destroyer flotillas. Imperial powers in the game are not in brilliant positions to take advantage of short range because of the need to lay up vast DD and KE swarms after a war. If they could be laid up in, again, Halifax or even Gibraltar, they would be of far greater use given a sudden war and not stuck needlessly on TP in the North Sea with short range when they could have been happily operating out of Kingston or Malta, as designed.

I would be happy to pay slightly greater costs for ships in ordinary on foreign stations but it should at least be possible. A similar argument may be made for overseas refits but I know that's been rehashed before.

Sorry if that was a rant but I completed 40 short-range 900t DDs to deploy to SEA and NEA but tensions went up so fast I couldn't move them in time. They spent the war burning oil doing racing laps around the Isle of Wight. 

[seawolf]

Maybe do it with a base of 100 capacity or more?

[rimbecano]

Yeah, it should definitely be possible, for example, for the US to keep ships in reserve at Pearl.

OTOH, the harbor at Pearl is rather cramped, and it could be argued that whereas AF ships will not all be in harbor at once, RF ships will, so that keeping too many ships in reserve at Pearl will leave no room for AF ships.

So maybe something like having each reserved ship reduce your base capacity in the region, and once it hits zero, you can't reserve any more ships in that region?