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Post by generalvikus on Jun 16, 2023 6:26:16 GMT -6
In my first campaign of RTW3, playing as Germany on maximum fleet size with minor tech variation, I've so far made it from 1890 to 1911, and have just introduced directors. I have been impressed in my most recent fleet exercises by the relative value of my standard pre-dreadnoughts - 4x 11", 22 x 6" guns - as against more modern dreadnoughts, the first of which were laid dowin in late 1903 and commissioned in early 1906. My exercises have revolved around testing smaller fleets of dreadnoughts against a larger fleet of predreadnoughts of roughly equal cost. Getting a reasonable impression of a ship's relative value is not easy with fleet exercises - the skill differential between the AI and the player is very great, even when, as in my most recent outing, I deliberately played dumb. Nevertheless, I was surprised by the result: overcast, visual range 20,000 yards, with a strong breeze, the weather gage on the friendly side, and a whole day of shooting - in other words, very favourable conditions for the dreadnoughts by North Sea standards. The average crew quality of the dreadnoughts was -0.25, whereas the predreadnoughts were considerably worse at -0.68.
Technologies are as follows: Fire Control 14 (including directors;) AP 9; all predreads were armed with Q-2 11" guns and Q-1 6" (except for 4 probably regrettable experiments with 12 Q0 8".) 5 out of 16 dreadnoughts had Q-1 11" guns, and the rest had Q0 12" guns. Penetration of current generation 12" guns is 10" at 10k yards.
The battle range was generally from 15 - 8k yards. One out of 16 friendly ships was destroyed by gunfire - burned down, naturally - against two out of 22 enemy ships sunk by gunfire alone; one of those was a flash fire kicked off by - of all things - an 11" HE hit on a 2" turret roof, and the other one was burned. Two additional enemy pre-dreadnoughts, receiving 5 and 6 heavy hits each, were also hit by torpedoes and so their sinking was probably mostly down to that. A cursory analysis of the data reveals few heavy penetrating hits - none, it seems, were fatal or major causes of death.
Now for some caveats: crew quality on both sides was worse than average wartime quality, which may have favoured the predreadnoughts; and closing the range a little more might have produced a considerably better result, considering that two surviving enemy ships were heavily damaged, while all surviving dreadnoughts were undamaged or lightly damaged. As it was, as soon as we got a little under 10,000 yards of the enemy, friendly 12" hits were drowned out by enemy 6 inchers, encouraging me to pull back. My pre-dreadnoughts may be particularly well adapted to face dreadnoughts, as all of them had 11" of Armor on both the belt and the BE.
Although it's impossible to tell due to the opacity of armour quality, I'm guessing that the major deficiency with the dreadnoughts is armour penetration; they scored 177 heavy hits to 56, but were usually firing AP at ranges where it couldn't make a difference, despite being pretty well broadside - to - broadside with the enemy.
So, firstly, I have no idea how typical my technology is, given that it's my first playthrough and I turned on minor tech variation. Is level 9 AP roughly typical of 1910? Either way, I would like to know what you all think of the dreadnought - predreadnought transition. When do dreadnoughts become superior, in terms of cost efficiency, to standard pre-dreadnoughts? When do the latter become obsolete? Finally, what ammo allocations and usage doctrines do you prefer at various times? I am beginning to believe that the heavy guns should be firing HE above 10k yards into the 1910s, but I have no idea what 'short' 'medium' and 'long' ranges are supposed to represent in the doctrine screen. Does anyone know what the ranges are? Do they change over time? One of the things that Ultimate Admiral certainly does better than RTW is giving necessary information to the player. That certainly hasn't changed between RTW1 and RTW3.
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Post by generalvikus on Jun 16, 2023 6:29:49 GMT -6
An additional note: I certainly didn't go into these exercises expecting to fight at 10k+ yards, but felt compelled by the torpedoes - currently with a range of 8k yards - and, most of all, the hail of 6" fire I received when I got any closer. If I've learned nothing else from my recent experience, it's to retain the 6" battery well into the dreadnought age.
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Post by metesky on Jun 17, 2023 13:23:31 GMT -6
Thank for your testing and analysis. It is impressive how exactly your experiment followed real life doctrine in the 1912-16 period. The British pre ww1 thought the German HSF would try to close rapidly then turn, form line ahead and fight at medium range (~ 8,000 yds) to use their 6" secondary batteries and loose a volley of long range torpedoes. After experiments with rapid independent fire at 8,000-10000 yds Jellicoe decided on your solution: "in weather of good visibility, the range should be between 15,000 and 10,000 yards; the latter being reached as the enemy’s fire is overcome; in the early stages of action I do not desire to close the range much inside 14,000 yards." (Grand Fleet Battle Orders, Dec 1915)
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Post by director on Jun 17, 2023 16:03:17 GMT -6
I once ran a RtW2 game in which I stuck to the semi-dreadnought style while everyone else was building dreadnoughts. What I found was that improvements in fire control let dreadnoughts engage at longer ranges, where my heavy secondaries either couldn't reach or couldn't score hits. Had I been able to focus my research on developing a secondary director, the volume of secondary fire might have been useful. As it was... not. I had to scrap pretty much the entire semi-dreadnought fleet and try to play catchup.
Before the battle of Tsushima, the expectation was that battle had to open at close ranges, where fire control better than the Mark 1 Eyeball was mostly not needed. Tsushima showed that hits could be made at longer ranges than anyone had expected, and this set off a scramble in major navies to get a range advantage. The original promise of Dreadnought (or the Cuniberti design that underlay it) was that a heavy battery of identical guns would simplify fall of shot and allow reasonably accurate fire control (for which you need 8 or at minimum 6 guns). A conventional pre-dreadnought simply was not able to get the same ratio of hits out of 4 guns that a dreadnought could with 8. However, even dreadnoughts were not particularly good at long-range gunnery until improvements in fire control came along. Those tended to be fitted to the most advanced ships, IE the dreadnoughts and not the battleships, for financial reasons.
I suspect that a battleship can be effective against a dreadnought if the dreadnought is tied to battleships of its own, or does not have the speed and fire control superiority needed to hold the range open.
And - of course - underlying all of it was the expectation that a dreadnought could be manned and maintained on half the money, thus replacing two battleships. Until someone else started building them - which, clearly, the RN 'forgot' to tell their government. So there was more behind building dreadnought than just military power, but ultimately the reason was accurate firepower at longer range than the enemy could effectively reply.
When do dreadnoughts become superior, in terms of cost efficiency, to standard pre-dreadnoughts?
Once I have the ability to build 6 or 8-gun dreadnoughts, I start doing so. I hold off building battlecruisers until I can get a big-enough hull for heavy armament, reasonable armor and at least 27 knots speed. That means I usually have a superiority of numbers in BBs and an inferiority in BCs, but I can work with that.
When do the latter become obsolete?
I move from standard battleships to semi-dreadnoughts as soon as possible and I tend to keep my capital ships for 20 years or thereabouts. As long as a semi is capable of 20 to 21 knots, it can operate with dreadnoughts. Even an old, slow battleship can be a useful deterrent in a secondary theater, as long as you don't take on a pack of modern cruisers. I've used armored cruisers to cripple and sink a standard battleship.
Finally, what ammo allocations and usage doctrines do you prefer at various times? I am beginning to believe that the heavy guns should be firing HE above 10k yards into the 1910s, but I have no idea what 'short' 'medium' and 'long' ranges are supposed to represent in the doctrine screen. Does anyone know what the ranges are? Do they change over time?
I also prefer to use HE at longer ranges, particularly so when it is a cruiser or DD firing at a capital ship. A ship afire is a mission kill, as is a ship with its funnels or uptakes damaged. Guns to wound and separate from the herd, torpedoes to kill the wounded - that's my thinking.
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Post by ludovic on Jun 17, 2023 17:12:43 GMT -6
Even an old, slow battleship can be a useful deterrent in a secondary theater, as long as you don't take on a pack of modern cruisers. I've used armored cruisers to cripple and sink a standard battleship. I sometimes fantasize about how many pre-dreadnoughts a 1940s 3*4 8"Q+1 autoloaded CA could take on.
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Post by cormallen on Jun 18, 2023 0:28:24 GMT -6
Regardless of the relative cost effectiveness of Dreadnought vs Pre/Semi-Dreadnought types I suspect the Battle Generators kink for "balanced battles" will get in the way of this being a working strategy?
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Post by generalvikus on Jun 18, 2023 3:55:55 GMT -6
Regardless of the relative cost effectiveness of Dreadnought vs Pre/Semi-Dreadnought types I suspect the Battle Generators kink for "balanced battles" will get in the way of this being a working strategy? I have a lot more experience to report now, having fought 16 months of war with Britain in 1912 - 13. Fleet actions were fought in June, July, September, and October 1912, and January, May, and June 1913, in addition to smaller capital ship actions in August and November 1912, and March 1913. Between those actions, six German and twenty British capital ships have so far been sunk, including four German dreadnoughts, two German predreadnoughts, seven British dreadnoughts, and thirteen British predreadnoughts. In the average fleet action, the German battle line consisted of at most 50% dreadnoughts, though usually less, and the effective line speed was limited to 12 knots, as the minimum speed of the originally 16 knot predreadnoughts degraded to 14 knots. On the whole, the battles have been very indecisive despite the aggression of the British fleet, because at least half of my divisions have invariably spawned stacked on top of and phased inside one another, invariably causing a huge traffic jam and sometimes a black hole at the start of each battle. Furthermore, signalling errors have been so constant that it has been quite impossible for me to even maintain a completely straight line with no course changes for any length of time, even when in later battles I have mostly proceeded at 10 knots, giving a 40% speed margin to the slowest ships to allow the line to reform. It's only now, after long experience, that I have decided to give up on AI control of battle divisions. I wonder (and hope) if the game is giving me so many signalling errors because of the huge size of my fleet - over 30 battleships in most outings - as I read recently that at least one British admiral of the pre-war era thought that controlling more than 16 battleships would be impossible. Under these conditions, gunfire has been quite ineffective, and torpedoes have shown themselves to be the dominant weapon. All German capital losses have resulted from torpedo hits, usually at the head of the overhauled battle line. On the other hand, it is impossible to blame either the slow speed of our battle line or the ineffectiveness of gunfire for our failure to sink more than a few British capital ships per action, because our fleet has always been so disrupted by the traffic jam or black hole at the start of the battle, and so disrupted thereafter by constant signalling errors destroying the line, that its average speed has been reduced to about 70% of the theoretical line speed, and the potential for concentrated firepower has been largely wasted. In spite of this caveat, the ineffectiveness of AP fire, and the relative effectiveness of HE, still managed to shock me on at least one occasion, when three of my battleships (edit: battlecruisers!) engaged their three British opposite numbers. The German battlecruisers sported 11" guns with 11" armor on the belt and 12 on the turrets; the British vessels had 12 inch guns, with 5.5" on the belt and 6" on the turrets. The battle was fought at around 10,000 yards, at which range the German guns could theoretically pen the British belt and turrets twice over, but only two out of 24 enemy turrets were destroyed, and very few belt penetrations were recorded, although the Germans expended almost all of their 130 rounds per gun - 70% AP and 30% HE - over a whole day of shooting. The single British BC which was destroyed was burned down, and since two of the German ships nearly suffered the same fate, I considered it basically a draw. This was quite an unpleasant surprise, since my strategy going into the war had been to rely on these 11" BCs to make short work of their lightly armoured opponents and then contribute to the battle line, and as such laid down only BCs in the years immediately before the war. For their part, the only serious damage to German battleships has been invariably the result of either structure damage - often fires - or torpedo hits. To the best of my recollection, not a single German capital unit has been put down by enemy AP fire, alone or predominantly. Since the British ships have lighter armour and have usually scored half as many heavy hits or fewer than we have in each engagement, they generally came off worse from our AP fire, but not much worse. Generally, I think that decisive results are very difficult to achieve in this era, and it's largely down to the ability of ships to move and shoot through one another in seething, incoherent masses when withdrawing. This makes it hard to get close enough to deal a lot of damage to the majority of enemy ships without becoming seriously exposed to torpedo attack from a few enemy ships positioned ahead of the pursuing formation. With that said, I find myself increasingly dissatisfied with the German philosophy of dreadnought design, which I attempted to emulate in this game - assuming that my AP techs are not atypical. Unfortunately, despite spending several months on very high priority, I know that I am at least behind the British in HE tech, which has contributed to the disappointing effects of our gunfire. Nevertheless, I can only consider the 11" Q0 BCs to be a failure; if their AP shells couldn't make an impression on the tin can British BCs, they're unlikely to contribute their money's worth in our battle line. That even the most modern predreadnoughts are stuck with Q-2 11" guns certainly doesn't help our prospects - but considering the abysmal performance of the Q0 11" BCs, and the only marginally better nominal penetration of the 12" Q0 guns on all our dreadnoughts, I have rather little faith in the effectiveness of even our most modern battleships.
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Post by dorn on Jun 18, 2023 4:35:44 GMT -6
Regardless of the relative cost effectiveness of Dreadnought vs Pre/Semi-Dreadnought types I suspect the Battle Generators kink for "balanced battles" will get in the way of this being a working strategy? Yes, this is premise of battle generator as no sane Admiral will seek battle outnumbered. There are some battles that one side has superiority but the most one should be balanced. There is a reason why there was only one Jutland, that there were not many clashes with large forces in Europe in ww2 even if Germany and Italy had substantional number of battleships, that there were very little number of teue carrier battles and after certain date it was mostly one side battles etc.
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Post by director on Jun 18, 2023 4:43:40 GMT -6
German and British BC design philosophy wasn't actually that different. Excepting the first two classes of British BCs (the Invincibles and Indefatigables), once Germany launched Von Der Tann the two sides took roughly parallel lines. The British ships were armored to resist German 11" and 12" guns and the Germans were armored to resist British 12" and 13.5" guns, with the British going for higher displacement because of a requirement for a speed advantage. The German ships were generally better sub-divided, but the British were able to keep to the sea for extended periods instead of bunking the crews on shore, so... a tactical edge for Germany and an operational edge for Britain.
As to your battle results - yeah, it is impossible to take away any meaningful data from ships spawning atop one another or from dreadnoughts forced to move at 12 knots. The advantages of the all-big-gun design are really only apparent when they are free to move at 20 knots or so, and have central or director fire control. I believe you are absolutely correct in pointing out the importance of maintaining a battle line, even if you have to give ground to do it.
In RtW, I doubt that any nation will give you the privilege of engaging their Bs with your BBs and BCs... I have had that happen when I concentrated against an enemy rear, and the Bs get in some licks but generally do not fare well.
I would say that my impulse is always to engage with BBs alone rather than add B's or semi-B's to the mix. The exception would be, if I have B's that can make BB speed, in which case, why not bring them to the party. (Please note this is the same reasoning for adding the German B's to the line at Jutland, and that was nearly a disaster because the Bs were not quite as fast).
Using the Alnavco Seapower II naval miniatures rules, I once put a Des Moines class CA (9x8" autoloaders) up against HMS Dreadnought. The results were mixed - if the cruiser got within 10k yards before opening fire (fog, heavy rain or night conditions) then the BB got shot to pieces. But on a sunny day where the range was longer, Des Moines had a hard time getting close enough to be effective. One or two 12" shells could cripple her.
I used the same rules to simulate an all-out attack on a Murmansk convoy and, as the Allies, had the shock of seeing Tirpitz, Scharnhorst, Admiral Scheer and Lutzow come out of the mist, 10k yards from... two County class and two US heavy cruisers. As I remember, I lost three CAs but Tirpitz and Scharnhorst were wrecked topsides and the Germans turned back. (Too bad... waiting a bit farther out were a KGV and a North Carolina).
So yeah, nobody is immune from a mission-kill and an 8" shell can do some damage even to a BB (See also: USS South Dakota at Guadalcanal, Round Two).
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Post by dorn on Jun 18, 2023 4:43:50 GMT -6
generalvikusYou can see that without fatal explosions in battle of Jutland Germany was able to achieve nothing. You can see from hits that penetrating hits in bow and aft even if not destroying anything important can jeopardise ship if there is substantial number of them. Battleships and battlecruisers are large and able to withstand several punishment by just sheer size.
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Post by director on Jun 18, 2023 5:04:26 GMT -6
dorn - I think we should bear in mind that, at Jutland, the Germans were crippled from the start by British anticipation of their actions (partly by signals intelligence, partly by thorough preparation and skill). Had a different admiral than Jellicoe been in charge, or had Britain not had real-time knowledge of when the Germans were putting to sea, the High Seas Fleet might well have smashed up a detachment as they planned. Under the circumstances, and given Jellicoe's impeccable deployment, the High Seas Fleet showed great ability in getting out of the trap relatively unscathed. If British commanders had shown more professionalism (Beatty) or more initiative (just about everyone in the night action) then a clear British victory could have been gained. That said, factually you are correct... just as I could say that without radar, the US ships at Cape Esperance achieved nothing, or that without bombs, the Luftwaffe in the Blitz achieved nothing. The fact is that the explosions happened in battle and not in harbor (pace HMS Vanguard) and that the German navy indisputably had something to do with it, and therefore should and do get the credit. I agree with you on the importance of what seem to be relatively minor hits outside the armor protection - secondary hits to the bridge, fire control, steering or fuel can also have outsized effects.
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Post by cormallen on Jun 18, 2023 5:07:40 GMT -6
Regardless of the relative cost effectiveness of Dreadnought vs Pre/Semi-Dreadnought types I suspect the Battle Generators kink for "balanced battles" will get in the way of this being a working strategy? Yes, this is premise of battle generator as no sane Admiral will seek battle outnumbered. There are some battles that one side has superiority but the most one should be balanced. There is a reason why there was only one Jutland, that there were not many clashes with large forces in Europe in ww2 even if Germany and Italy had substantional number of battleships, that there were very little number of teue carrier battles and after certain date it was mostly one side battles etc. Oh, I don't generally mind it myself but balancing Dreadnoughts vs Pre-Dreadnoughts at anything like equal numbers is not terribly reasonable. Contemporary opinion judged it at two or three to one but I don't see the BG giving many 8 BB vs 20+ B fights in game?
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Post by generalvikus on Jun 18, 2023 5:27:56 GMT -6
Yes, this is premise of battle generator as no sane Admiral will seek battle outnumbered. There are some battles that one side has superiority but the most one should be balanced. There is a reason why there was only one Jutland, that there were not many clashes with large forces in Europe in ww2 even if Germany and Italy had substantional number of battleships, that there were very little number of teue carrier battles and after certain date it was mostly one side battles etc. Oh, I don't generally mind it myself but balancing Dreadnoughts vs Pre-Dreadnoughts at anything like equal numbers is not terribly reasonable. Contemporary opinion judged it at two or three to one but I don't see the BG giving many 8 BB vs 20+ B fights in game? Either way, the point that no admiral would seek to fight outnumbered is only half of the equation; concentration is the most basic principle of naval warfare. As such, the choice is not between fighting outnumbered or fighting even; it is between fighting and not fighting at all. If the enemy has twice as many battleships as you have, you can choose not to fight them, but you can't just choose to fight only half of his battlefleet: at best, that would be a consequence of good fortune or effective planning which brings all of one's own fleet into contact with a fraction of the enemy's, but reciprocal action inevitably leads the outnumbered side to be outnumbered in battle most of the time, because the enemy gets a vote. The fact that the battle generator leans towards more or less evenly matched battle-fleets therefore has no factual justification. Likewise, in smaller engagements, the historical tendency was for different forces to encounter one another, varying more or less randomly in size, and thus unequal engagements were normal, with the superior force having the advantage on average - as a matter of probability rather than anybody's choice. In short, the fact that the inferior side does not want to fight outnumbered may induce the inferior side to be cautious and thereby influence the number of engagements, but hardly the balance of forces within those engagement which do occur. Any bias in the battle generator cannot be justified on any grounds other than to make the game more entertaining, and I strongly suspect that the vast majority of players of this particular game would find more entertainment in a realistic war than an evenly matched duel.
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Post by generalvikus on Jun 18, 2023 5:57:39 GMT -6
German and British BC design philosophy wasn't actually that different. Excepting the first two classes of British BCs (the Invincibles and Indefatigables), once Germany launched Von Der Tann the two sides took roughly parallel lines. The British ships were armored to resist German 11" and 12" guns and the Germans were armored to resist British 12" and 13.5" guns, with the British going for higher displacement because of a requirement for a speed advantage. The German ships were generally better sub-divided, but the British were able to keep to the sea for extended periods instead of bunking the crews on shore, so... a tactical edge for Germany and an operational edge for Britain. As to your battle results - yeah, it is impossible to take away any meaningful data from ships spawning atop one another or from dreadnoughts forced to move at 12 knots. The advantages of the all-big-gun design are really only apparent when they are free to move at 20 knots or so, and have central or director fire control. I believe you are absolutely correct in pointing out the importance of maintaining a battle line, even if you have to give ground to do it. In RtW, I doubt that any nation will give you the privilege of engaging their Bs with your BBs and BCs... I have had that happen when I concentrated against an enemy rear, and the Bs get in some licks but generally do not fare well. I would say that my impulse is always to engage with BBs alone rather than add B's or semi-B's to the mix. The exception would be, if I have B's that can make BB speed, in which case, why not bring them to the party. (Please note this is the same reasoning for adding the German B's to the line at Jutland, and that was nearly a disaster because the Bs were not quite as fast). I do have director fire control on all battleships - I acquired it in 1911, before the war began - and, for that matter, several succeeding fire control techs. The British also seem to have directors on at least the large majority of their capital ships, and just about every capital ship on either side has an elite crew. Each of the fleet battles so far has seen hundreds of hits, although those figures are extremely skewed by foundering stragglers getting blasted by an entire line as it passes by (as of yet I haven't attempted to control the fire of every battle division.) I disagree, however, that the advantages of the dreadnought are only evident once they reach a certain absolute speed. As far as I know, pre-dreadnoughts of a given year can be made to go just as fast as dreadnoughts of the same vintage - I have three 20 knot predreadnoughts myself - so speed has nothing to do with the relative value of dreadnoughts and predreadnoughts per se, but only the advantages of newer ships over older ones. The relative value of either type is determined by their effective gun power alone. As you may have gathered from my pre-war exercises, I was looking for the earliest opportunity which technology afforded to do away with my predreadnoughts, which were themselves outnumbered by their British counterparts, and bring only a 20 knot BB fleet to get ahead of the enemy, engage only the front of their line, and defeat them in detail. Obviously, the AI's incompetence at keeping a battle line together lends itself to this strategy. However, I was dissuaded from doing so first of all by the results of the exercises, which revealed that the combat value of the dreadnoughts was hardly greater than the predreadnoughts, and secondly by the simple fact that if I left out the predreadnoughts, it would take me far too long to break the enemy blockade. Experience has borne out this assessment - with 20 enemy battleships and only 6 friendly vessels down, and a capital ship engagement of some description practically every month for 16 months, I'm still blockaded, and unrest is climbing. I mentioned the BC action in particular precisely because there were no excuses for bad performance there - no possibility for a traffic jam, and only one division of consequence on either side, so signalling errors were not a factor; the weather was fine, numbers were even (the British 3BCs, 4CAs, 3CLs, and 16DDs to my 3BCs and 5DDs, but as it turned out, the supporting ships played almost no role in the battle, achieving few gun and no torpedo hits on either side.) The fact was that my theoretical advantage in relative penetration did not count; nobody on either side was sunk by penetrating hits; structural damage accounted for the only loss on either side, and it was very nearly a victory for the British as they dealt more damage overall, although not quite sufficiently concentrated enough to achieve a kill. Either way, I left the battle with two BCs out of action for months; they lost one and the rest were back in action. Despite being theoretically able to penetrate the British belt and turret armour twice over, we destroyed 2 enemy turrets out of 24 (how many were temporarily out of action due to hits at one time or another is another matter) and the British belt armor largely held up, as throughout the battle one side was always pursuing the other. After analysing the results, I decided that in the next engagement, I would make more of an effort to stay broadside - on to the enemy in order to try and get through their armour - I did not do so on this occasion, first on account of my desire to pursue and close with the enemy, and then (when my ammo was nearly expended, my DDs lost contact, my flagship was on fire, and the British had their much larger force still intact, I was running for my life.) None of this detracts from the fact that I find my 'German' style BCs to be unsatisfactory - in fact, something of a let-down. Their nominal advantage in relative penetration is of much less value than I expected, even though they fought at the approximate ranges I had intended against the enemies they were designed to fight. At the end of the day, they were built (instead of more battleships) because I thought they would cut through the tin can BCs and the older CAs, and then contribute to the battle line. Even if they succeed at the former task, judging by the results of their most recent outing, they seem unlikely to make much of an impression on the enemy battle fleet. More battleships may have been a better purchase - but the nominal penetration of their 12" guns is barely better, so my inference from this action is that both my Q0 11" and Q0 12" guns are ultimately inadequate, to say nothing of the Q-2 11" peashooters on all of the predreadnoughts.
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Post by ludovic on Jun 18, 2023 6:02:42 GMT -6
Likewise, in smaller engagements, the historical tendency was for different forces to encounter one another, varying more or less randomly in size, and thus unequal engagements were normal, with the superior force having the advantage on average - as a matter of probability rather than anybody's choice. In short, the fact that the inferior side does not want to fight outnumbered may induce the inferior side to be cautious and thereby influence the number of engagements, but hardly the balance of forces within those engagement which do occur. Any bias in the battle generator cannot be justified on any grounds other than to make the game more entertaining, and I strongly suspect that the vast majority of players of this particular game would find more entertainment in a realistic war than an evenly matched duel. I think it would indeed be less entertaining to me if the variance in smaller battles were higher but only because the AI seems to know when to just hightail it back to port without engaging, so it would look like the AI always had a material advantage even when their fleet as a whole was outnumbered. If the blockade rules had more shades of grey instead of blockaded/not blockaded, there could be a doctrinal selection for concentration of smaller forces (as opposed to the main fleet which would much more rarely be dispersed.) If you selected concentrated then you'd be more likely to bring a concentrated force to a small engagement but your blockade value would decrease because you'd have less coverage area for patrolling or defending the seas. But since the blockade is binary, then you'd be able to just pick the exact amount of concentration that would still leave you with a full blockade, which isn't really a hard decision. (As opposed to being tempted into concentrating your forces a bit more in exchange for a slightly larger amount of ships running the blockade.)
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