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Post by oldpop2000 on Dec 29, 2021 10:27:51 GMT -6
My last comment is simply that 20th century warfare.... game included is attritional. It's better to have more than less. I believe it is better to have two 35,000 tons BC's than one 70,000 ton. Its cost per performance as usual. Just my simple opinion based on my gaming and historical analysis. Enjoy. I have to respectfully disagree with you there, at least when it comes to the game. Real world circumstances such as the UK colonial obligations or America's current commitments mean numbers are important but the way the game's battle generator tends to work you'll tend to get pitted against the same number or pretty darn close to it number of opponent ships which means it's highly unlikely they'll ever have an actual 2 to 1 advantage in hulls in the first place and even if it did that 70k ton ship could very likely face down both 35k tonners on its own anyway. Obviously the number of hulls is important for things like blockade, and losing a 70k ton ship to a mine or torpedo will hurt a hell of a lot more than one of those 35k ton ones, but you will get way more from the 70k ton ship than the smaller alternatives. There's a reason the dreadnaught race was such a big deal. Dreadnaughts weren't just better than their forebears, they were magnitudes better and failing to keep up was seen as likely to be disastrous. It's the same if the battleship race had continued and air power hadn't come along to render the whole race irrelevant on that front. Maybe I'm wrong but I believe that most navies (outside of the UK of course) had been given the option of having half their enemies fleet in numbers of battleships but each would have been double the tonnage, they likely would have happily taken it. We all have the right to disagree. You answer is probably just a viable as mine. All the books and historians that I have had discussions with, state that war in the 20th century is attritional and that number count.
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cvl
Junior Member
Posts: 50
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Post by cvl on Jan 15, 2022 11:10:30 GMT -6
So this is more of a design philosophy question.
I'm playing as Britain on small fleet size. It's the early 1930s, with slow aircraft development but a 100% tech rate.
I'm seeing that I can't maintain battleship parity in terms of numbers with the USA (though to be fair, they retain first generation dreadnoughts) due to an early game decision to use light cruisers for FS work, which tied up much of my budget in the cruisers.
So, I come up with the idea to build a standardized class of series-producable fast BBs mounting 8 16 inch guns in a 2x4 all forward mounting. They're not the most capable thing I *could* build, just the most cost effective. Each one of them has the same armament as my older dreadnoughts whose deck armor is starting to look a bit thin, but they are 4 knots faster, matching my somewhat ageing BCs at 28 kts.
Now the main impetus for these was a war between Germany, France, and I which saw me wiping out all BBs, BCs, and even most CAs belonging to my enemies, while retaining all of mine. This essentially removes all constraints on future dreadnought building for them by giving them a massive budgetary surplus.
So my one big question is if that was the right decision.
(I could focus more on carriers, and I plan to once dive bombers or advanced torpedo bombers come online, so any recommendations to shift to carriers are moot.)
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cvl
Junior Member
Posts: 50
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Post by cvl on Jan 15, 2022 11:15:07 GMT -6
Should also mention that I have varied tech on.
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Post by cormallen on Jan 15, 2022 15:40:45 GMT -6
I'm tempted, in one of my numerous play through games honing the IDes lists for other nations, to try out the Acworth concept of building loads of small (6x13.5-inch, coal fired, 18-23 knot in the original) Battleships to fully lean into the "quantity" angle. In Game it's likely to fail badly due to the battle generator's assorted fixations (and in reality would also be a bad idea, albeit for different reasons?) but it maybe amusing to try one time? The reality I suspect is that for anything that maybe completed and put into service during the length of your war (so IG probably only really small cruisers and destroyers but IRL mostly everything BUT BattleshipS - certainly for first rate Nations) it's an attrition game but for everything else (since few game wars last more than 2 or 3 years) quality matters more ...
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cvl
Junior Member
Posts: 50
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Post by cvl on Jan 15, 2022 18:17:19 GMT -6
I should add that while not the most capable ships I can construct, their armor, guns, and FC make them more than a match for my european enemies.
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euchrejack
Full Member
Don't feed the Trolls. They just get bigger and more numerous.
Posts: 139
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Post by euchrejack on Jan 20, 2022 12:49:54 GMT -6
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Post by oldpop2000 on Jan 20, 2022 14:01:01 GMT -6
Every nation that has desired to build a navy has had to consider construction and maintenance costs. It goes with the territory. Navies have to develop strategies that can convince their governments to build the ships that are required. Most of the time they don't get exactly what they want, but it has to be sufficient for the execution of the strategy. Many times, navies get more money and ships than are needed by their geographic position and the army suffers. The German Army during WW1 suffered for the building of the High Seas Fleet. The IJN fought a constant battle with the IJA after its entrance into China.
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Post by vonfriedman on Jan 21, 2022 2:42:15 GMT -6
I'm tempted, in one of my numerous play through games honing the IDes lists for other nations, to try out the Acworth concept of building loads of small (6x13.5-inch, coal fired, 18-23 knot in the original) Battleships to fully lean into the "quantity" angle. In Game it's likely to fail badly due to the battle generator's assorted fixations (and in reality would also be a bad idea, albeit for different reasons?) but it maybe amusing to try one time? The reality I suspect is that for anything that maybe completed and put into service during the length of your war (so IG probably only really small cruisers and destroyers but IRL mostly everything BUT BattleshipS - certainly for first rate Nations) it's an attrition game but for everything else (since few game wars last more than 2 or 3 years) quality matters more ... To test Acworth's bizarre idea, it would be enough to prepare a battle scenario in SAI, with several slow mini battleships versus a smaller number of normal 1930s battleships, testing the scenario from both sides. The battle is to be expected to turn out to be a series of T-crossings, with the head or tail of Acworth's battleline gradually being disabled or sunk.
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Post by vonfriedman on Jan 21, 2022 11:03:04 GMT -6
I just put the above test into practice. First I noticed that with SAI Designship it is impossible to get a battleship of the type described by Acworth with only 12600 tons: at least 18500 tons with narrow belts are needed. For the actual test I used the scenario of the battle between Bismarck, Hood and PoW, pitting two Bismarcks against five Acworth-type battleships (total point value roughly equal). For the German it is not easy to cross the T of the enemy battle line, despite the large difference in speed. After consuming all the ammunition Bismarck and Tirpitz managed to sink one of the enemy BBs and severely damage two others, with relatively little damage to themselves. Playing on the side of the British, I was facilitated by the AI's insane decision to shorten combat distances, so that the slow British battleships were able to cross the opponent's T, causing them medium damage, after which Bismarck and Tirpitz headed away at great speed.
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euchrejack
Full Member
Don't feed the Trolls. They just get bigger and more numerous.
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Post by euchrejack on Feb 8, 2022 9:50:02 GMT -6
I've fiddled with Ultra Cheap Battleships as Austria-Hungary, and while I can achieve parity in numbers for blockade purposes, they don't last long in actual battle. There is a low end to the what you can get away with in the Quantity vs. Quality scale for Quality. Personally, I prioritize Deck and Belt armor as much as possible. I usually advocate All-or-Nothing armor schemes, even before the research is available. They'll "mostly" stay afloat. In the early game, your destroyers and their torpedoes can do the killing. In the late game, your aircraft carriers and planes can do the killing.
What you need out of your Battleships is for them to survive.
Speed is a cruel mistress. You fill a quarter of your ship with the fastest engines, only to have the enemy produce a faster ship. You don't get that tonnage back, and it's now utterly useless.
Now, if you use the largest guns available, then it'll be a while before the enemy exceeds those. And you CAN improve them, in a couple of ways. Number of guns -> That is where the sacrifices come in.
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Post by wlbjork on Feb 8, 2022 10:36:42 GMT -6
Aye, whilst quantity does have a quality of it's own, quality needs to be close enough for the numbers to match.
Consider the T-34 and M4 tanks. Both were solid designs when they entered the war, and they soldiered on with a moderate number of upgrades. They totally overwhelmed the German's superior - on paper -tanks through being available in 10-20 the quantity. Had the Germans deployed something akin to the Leopard 2A7 tank on the other hand...
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Post by ludovic on Feb 8, 2022 20:53:28 GMT -6
I've fiddled with Ultra Cheap Battleships as Austria-Hungary, and while I can achieve parity in numbers for blockade purposes, they don't last long in actual battle. There is a low end to the what you can get away with in the Quantity vs. Quality scale for Quality. I've come firmly into this camp based on the results of an experiment I did last week in which I tried another time to create a surface raiding fleet (unsuccessfully, because surface raiders have no effect when you are blockading an opponent, whereas subs continue to sink shipping even of a blockaded enemy, which is a double whammy on the opponent's unrest level.) I did, however, find that my useless minimally-armed cruisers did very well at providing blockade heft for price. But, as you say, they don't last long in actual battle, and furthermore, even when I put them on Raider or Trade Protection, they'd still show up for fleet battles, which I'd lose due to the battle generator enforcing ship number parity. In addition to sometimes getting sunk by enemy raiders. So I've decided to go with only slightly less-than-minimally armed cruisers and see what happens. (Before the experiment, I'd try to go for CLs with 6 6" mains to start off with, if not more, and my experiment last week focused on 2 6" mains. Now I'm going to try to only use all my available centreline slots for my CLs with maybe 2 or 4 wing mains in order to maximize firepower for weight and cost.)
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Post by cormallen on Feb 9, 2022 2:53:05 GMT -6
I'd not realised that submarines still sink blockaded merchants! I generally play RN so usually set what subs I do have to hunting the enemy fleet. Counter-intuitive at the least, I wonder if they'll fix it at some point?
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Post by ludovic on Feb 9, 2022 8:29:41 GMT -6
I haven't found a noticeable difference in the amount of shipping sunk by subs when you are blockading versus non blockading. In the manual, it does state that the effect will be "sharply reduced" if you are blockading, rather than non-existent, so I wouldn't mind if it were reduced a bit more, because even if it is reduced, it is by a small amount rather than "sharply".
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Post by buttons on Feb 9, 2022 8:37:19 GMT -6
I'm tempted, in one of my numerous play through games honing the IDes lists for other nations, to try out the Acworth concept of building loads of small (6x13.5-inch, coal fired, 18-23 knot in the original) Battleships to fully lean into the "quantity" angle. In Game it's likely to fail badly due to the battle generator's assorted fixations (and in reality would also be a bad idea, albeit for different reasons?) but it maybe amusing to try one time? The reality I suspect is that for anything that maybe completed and put into service during the length of your war (so IG probably only really small cruisers and destroyers but IRL mostly everything BUT BattleshipS - certainly for first rate Nations) it's an attrition game but for everything else (since few game wars last more than 2 or 3 years) quality matters more ... I doubt it will work simply because even with a 2:1 advantage in capital ships most fleet battles would be about equal in numbers of ships and even when you have an advantage concentrating force would be hard. As an aside my general doctrine is lightly armed BCs (12-14” guns max) and conventional BBs, sometimes I do pure BC games where I start with fast Bs (like 22 knots, essentially upgunned CAs) and later only build BCs with a small number of big guns, using my speed to keep the enemy at a range where I can plink away with impunity before closing in for the kill with torpedoes once their ships have been crippled by heavy guns. My BCs are often along the lines of 6x18” guns or something, fairly light and cheap for their level of firepower but very vulnerable if I slack off.
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