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Arglebargle III posted:I didn't expect them to send 21 pre dreadnought battleships! The Russian AI is handling this very differently than the americans. Hilariously, this is sort of exactly what happened in real life.
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Nov 21, 2015 04:02
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Wait till he realizes that russia has core holdings in northeast asia. (vladivostok is part of the russian core and has 400 base points. ENJOY)
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Nov 21, 2015 04:15
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Goon morale is plummeting! The Diet enacts emergency cat picture legislation.
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Nov 21, 2015 04:54
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AtomikKrab posted:You should also consider making some max weight CLs with 8 inch batteries and 7 inch secondaries. Relatively cheap and able to do some damage to the enemies screen. There's no point to building these as CLs. Specify CA and you can actually put armor to resist tiny guns on them, while still not pushing the tonnage past 8000. They still get put into all the same battles.
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Nov 21, 2015 07:09
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 The Japanese  Even the three-legged cat may scream. Let's hope we get a full scale engagement soon.
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Nov 21, 2015 07:31
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Riso posted:I still don't get BC. I can't really speak to real life because RL BC designs were dumb as poo poo. But having played this game to completion a half dozen times, here's my take on the BC: - The biggest point of the BC is not tactical but strategic. They end the CA (and CL) era. A single BC will sink CA after CA after CA during a war. Far from being just bigger CA, they actually obsolete CA strategically, restricting her use to the colonies where a BC is too valuable to deploy. I still build some CA, because you still need fleet scouts and a few hulls to stick on Raid to force the enemy to terms once their capital ships have been crushed in a fleet battle. But you can't really operate a CA in an area where enemy BC are patrolling. - That means that while guerre de course with cruisers rules the day in 1900 in a really big way, by 1915 its viability as a doctrine decreases and you have to commit to it with hordes of 2100 ton CL and submarines, or don't bother at all. - There's massive variation in BC design. Fisher-style BC with no armor are definitely only CA hunters. Take them into a fleet fight and they will pop. However, you can optimize them down to very low tonnage, making them almost as affordable as cruisers. - Fast-battleship style BCs, the monsters that out-tonnage your BBs and are just as armored but go 26 or 27 knots instead of 22, will take a big poo poo on BBs in a fleet battle. That's because you can skirt them around the outskirts and don't have to engage the entire battleline at once. As a bonus, they wreck utterly Fisher-style BCs. I will note that the game doesn't let you design them with more than 12" armor past 1920 or so (they're classed BB), which sucks because you totally can design them with more armor earlier in the game. I had an engagement in my most recent Japan game where I intercepted a brand new enemy BC with 12x 15" guns with two of my own obsolete ones with 9x 13"s. However, I had designed with 12" of belt armor and even more turret, while the AI had designed with 8.5" of both belt and turret armor. Ten seconds into the battle, the enemy BC was hit in the rear turret and blew the gently caress up.
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Nov 21, 2015 10:45
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TheDemon posted:There's no point to building these as CLs. Specify CA and you can actually put armor to resist tiny guns on them, while still not pushing the tonnage past 8000. They still get put into all the same battles. Speed, though it might be the way I build them, can you show me a design?
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Nov 21, 2015 17:10
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It'd be interesting to see how this game models an engagement between dreadnought battleships and pre-dreadnoughts. I can't recall any historical examples of such a fight, but one presumes it would be fairly one-sided. I'm not sure that this game adequately represents how much of an improvement the new armour types were over the old. As I recall, an inch of Krupp cemented armour was worth more than double its thickness in wrought iron. There's a good chart to this effect in Warrior to Dreadnought, but I don't have my copy with me at the moment. Certainly it's worth better than a 1% weight reduction! Improvements from iron to Harvey to Krupp to cemented were something like 25-30% each, as I recall.
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Nov 21, 2015 17:37
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David Corbett posted:It'd be interesting to see how this game models an engagement between dreadnought battleships and pre-dreadnoughts. I can't recall any historical examples of such a fight, but one presumes it would be fairly one-sided. It's less one-sided than you think, around 1910, because armor piercing shell technology has not advance that far from the old battleships day. Still the advantage in the dreadnoughts weight of Fire will batter the old battleships to death eventually if they are evenly matched in tonnage. By 1920 armor piercing technology has advanced so much since the old ships armor schemes were laid out they explode and sink almost as soon as dreadnoughts open up on them.
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Nov 21, 2015 17:43
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David Corbett posted:I can't recall any historical examples of such a fight, but one presumes it would be fairly one-sided. Pommern would agree. Goeben shot at some Russian pre-dreads, fairly inconclusively.
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Nov 21, 2015 17:43
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The main thing about pre dreadnoughts in the world war one era is not that they die instantly but that they're irrelevant. Their volume of long-range fire and their speed is just insufficient to be tactically significant in the dreadnoughts fleet action. We'll see this in the coming updates, the Russians can bring 21 pre dreadnought battleships to a fight and they might as well have stayed home for all the effect they have on the outcome.
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Nov 21, 2015 18:06
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1912 "Her crew were brave, and even with death staring them in the face kept to their posts, ready to handle their useless guns..." -- Lieutenant Otto Weddigen   Okay when I said the Russian fleet slightly outweighed ours I may not have looked too carefully at the pre-dreadnoughts.  She has 19 pre-dreadnoughts, plus two building. We have nine left. Even if we had the old Kashima and the French pre-dreadnought battlecruisers we'd be outweighed 2-to-1. Good thing these things are obsolete or we'd really be in trouble. Activating the old battleships ends the blockade as abruptly as it started. They are not yet ready for war, but they never will be, really. The floating coffins are halfway in the war and that's halfway too far for me.   The Russians have their first casualties of the war.  We are running out of money.  We are running out of money.  I have been instructed to avoid small battles of this kind -- SOMETHING HAS GONE WRONG. I THOUGHT I CLICKED DECLINE Izumo will be helpless if we run into that Russian battlecruiser. I keep her close to the battle squadron.  Half our modern fleet is here, along with some old ships and green crews. This is exactly the sort of thing I wasn't supposed to do.  Now it's night. This is the worst idea. I head back to Nagasaki.  Heavy rain keeps the Russian raiding force from finding anything. We lose a destroyer to a mine anyway. (RNG!  ) The Japanese people are hungry for good news as ever. I wonder what they would do if they knew the navy was four months from bankruptcy?    The Russians get VPs for sinking an old light cruiser. We do not get VPs for sinking a Russian heavy cruiser. (Another problem with the game. In 1914 when U-9 sank three British heavy cruisers in a single afternoon it was a national scandal. The ships had been ordered withdrawn the previous week because of their vulnerability to U-boats, but the orders had not yet been carried out.) I cancel the raids. We are giving up VPs for no reason with the Russian battlecruisers in the area.  As ever, the Army has failed to do anything with the six months of sea supremacy we had, and now it's over. Fighting in Korea is intense but inconclusive.  I cannot fight this war at the current budget. (We can't afford the training, activated battleships, and accelerated construction all at once.)  The Russians are making life difficult.  We have money now!  I reverse my stance from the last war. The government and people must stay the course! The navy will not fail them, but we need time. The three Iwami class super-dreadnoughts have all been launched. The first is eight months from completion. (Launching a battleship, that is completing the hull, is only about a third of the total work. The superstructure was completed floating in the harbor and the turrets got in by massive cranes while the drydock was freed up for laying another keel.)  A large battle is developing! I order the fleet out.  ... two cruisers. Hirado is the only player ship. The armored cruiser Azuma is somewhere around here under AI control.  Hirado is instantly engaged and in with the convoy. It is night and Azuma is not in company.  Two shots and two misses, now both tubes are reloading.  Hirado is doubled by the Russians and is taking too much damage. I turn to disengage, but it's too late. Dawn breaks. Her engines are damaged and she cannot get away.   Sinking is certain now.  Because Azuma is a support ship, we cannot get control of her no matter that all player forces are sunk. (Getting tossed into a night action locally outnumbered is a nasty surprise. Most of the Japanese points value are in Azuma, but the game apparently doesn't care that Azuma wasn't around for the contact it through me into at minute 0.)  We get a look at this Irumzud class that's been causing trouble.  Azuma is here. We cannot get control. (Yes, the AI is fighting this battle.  ) The way the game is set up, I can't even see what's going on. I was only able to see her appear because Hirado hadn't finished sinking. We can read Azuma's ship card but that's it.  Time ticks by. (I hate the way the game handles support ships.)  Wireless reports from Azuma are good. (The AI is better at my job than I am. Just kidding, Azuma should have no trouble with a couple of light cruisers if she can shoot straight.) Azuma scores the first wartime torpedo hit of the IJN. I can see from the little picture that she's fighting both sides!  Azuma breaks contact. I doubt a couple merchantmen were worth a modern light cruiser.  Russia wins that one unsurprisingly.   The civilians feel a squeeze.  I begin to decline battles looking for that fleet action. However the Emperor may get mad at us for this.  Fleet battle!  The scouting division -- we will need to keep these ships safe from the Russian battlecruiser, Izmail.  The fleet steaming in line ahead. Hatsuse is the flagship.  The scouts have already made contact. Hatsuse signals for 21 knots. We try to draw the action closer to Nagasaki.  The enemy fleet is in sight!  The cruisers "flee" towards our battle line at 16 knots.  The battleships make contact!   Hatsuse's engines are not turning fast enough. (This is another unrealistic thing about the game; post-turbine ships should not have bearing trouble.)  The dreadnoughts are in action! Fire discipline is good, each ship engages a different target. (The AI can be annoying about this. Leaving ships unengaged and overlapping fire are both bad.)  The conditions are not good for fire control. The high breeze is chopping up the sea and smoke is blowing down the range towards the Russians.  We find the range at the same instant!  We have a positional advantage with the way the lines have shaken out. Our cruisers turn to cross the battleships' bows.  The rear is in action too!  Shooting is going well.   The enemy dreadnoughts are under-gunned. They may have the advantage in hulls but I believe we carry more big guns despite it.  Not all of the Russian dreadnoughts are so old and small. The destroyers go in for an attack on the enemy flagship. The enemy pre-dreadnoughts have been left behind.   Sagami takes another hit to her submerged torpedo tube door! What are the odds?! I signal her to disengage. I send Azuma to break the enemy line again!  The Russian fleet is finally in view. It is massive. Torpedoes are in the water!  Sagami refuses to detach, despite taking on 200 tons of water per minute.  The Russian line is disrupted again, and our shooting is better than theirs. Borodino narrowly avoids a torpedo.  Another Russian battlecruiser has joined Izmail; it's not just poor signal intelligence. If they just come over here to get shot at perhaps we can kill them both. Sagami is half-flooded. She finally responds to signals to detach and head for home. What a contrast our fleets make. (This is the point at which, if I were playing on Vice Admiral mode, the slaughter would commence. I could send in destroyers and launch all their torpedoes at that tightly-packed mess. However, in Admiral mode destroyer attacks are up the AI on both sides. If we can get close enough destroyers set on screen will dash in and try to launch. Azuma's destroyers have already done this once but Borodino turned hard and escaped the hit.)  Sagami refuses to detach! While I admire her courage, I do not want this battle "lost" because of bad luck, poor damage control, and disobedience. (Sometimes detached ships will re-attach to their squadron if they can keep up, even if you ordered them home. It's annoying but occasionally a ship's damage control is better than you expect and it can be a good thing.) With the whole Russian fleet convulsed in one huge complex maneuver, I get some free shots at the old battleships. Hopefully their luck will be as bad as Sagami's. (This is less good than you might think, because a confused mess like this makes your own ships constantly switch targets. They have to find the range for each target, making these kinds of free potshots a little less attractive. Again, this is unrealistic. In real life the gunners would just find where the enemy fleet is turning in succession, their turning point, and then rain shells down on that point in the expectation that ships will be moving though that spot.)  The thundering goes on. We have now been shooting for two hours.  Sagami is three hours from Sasebo harbor and not yet out of danger. Japanese shooting has been superior for the last hour. The range has run out to 8.5 miles. The squadron is not firing according to target doctrine. Target assignments must have been confused by the Russians' big chaotic turn. (At Dogger Bank, Tiger engaged the wrong ship and misidentified Lion's shell splashes as her own. She fired 3,000 yards over without recognizing it for more than 40 minutes.) Katori has been shooting well all day; she's the only one of our battleships to have a hit rate better than 1%.  Hatsuse's deck is nearly denuded of secondary guns now. *missed some shots here, Jeopardy! was on. Tournament of Champions.*  Sagami is out of danger, as long as the weather does not get worse.  What's this?! A Russian dreadnought seems to have lost power. Torpedoes! Settsu takes a waterline hit, but thanks to better armor technology she is not flooding.  The stricken Russian dreadnought is an opportunity too good to pass up. I turn to run through their disintegrating battle line! The spirit of Nelson is alive today!  Sagami's watertight bulkheads give way! Sea floods more compartents. (Sagami! You had one job: don't sink!)  Tri Ierarhagets moving. Too late I think!  Hatsuse is badly damaged leading that maneuever. I will have to disengage now; it is up to the destroyers!  Kashima is hit by a torpedo. It should be manageable. (Tri Ierarha got moving just in time; ten more minutes and I would have been in position for a torpedo attack on her and the pre-dreadnoughts milling around confused behind her. As it was she got in position for her escorts to attack us just before I broke the line.) Hatsuse's superstructure is a twisted wreck, but her flooding is under control. With one of my five most powerful units crippled, I need to head home. (Ships with bad superstructure damage, fires, or lists shoot much slower as their crew runs around dragging the wounded below, fixing damage, and clearing wreckage away from the turrets.)  I turn north before heading east to let the destroyers lead Tri Ierarha and launch torpedoes. I don't see any hits. (This is the second Vice Admiral's mode bloodbath of the battle. Limited to a crippled battleship's speed the destroyers never get close enough for the AI destroyers to decide to charge.) The Russians seem happy to disengage as well.  I try one last torpedo attack on the Russian pre-dreadnoughts. Even a single hit will send one to the bottom.  But the destroyers turn away! Our ships have chosen dishonor! (Again, on Admiral's mode the destroyers are out of my control. I don't know why they refused to follow Azuma this time. They performed well last attack.)  Hatsuse has a small leak that she cannot come at, but it should be nothing.  The fleet comes back into Sasebo in slightly less grand style. (Despite an impressive performance early, most ships still had hit rates less than 1%. With the tactical situation going so well I would have liked to see a lot more damage on the disorganized Russian fleet.)  Nightfall sees the fleet picking up its moorings.  Our shooting was not good enough. (Neither side sank anything, apparently the game decided our damage was worse than theirs. It seems we can once again blame Sagami's glass jaw for losing a fight that should have been even.)  Training is complete one month later... (gently caress)  With most of the fleet in repairs, I refuse battle until... unexpected fleet battle. (I was hoping for one of these but not with three of the dreadoughts in drydock!)  A strange fleet. Two dreadnoughts, old battleships, and light cruisers in the line. Let's get them home before they hurt themselves.  Most of the fleet is in port, but some have lost their minds. (This is a really annoying problem with Admiral mode; ships that need to make a turn to come into port will just sail off all over the place when their leading division disappears. You can't get control until arcane parameters have been met, and even then they like to wander off. I'm still not allowed to control those light cruisers at the top of the screen, which seem to be on their way to Korea.)  The Russians run into a couple of minesweepers in the night.  With so many battleships damaged we're blockaded again. Russia is having trouble at home though. I put down a large order of submarines. It is August.  Directors! This will be tricky to manage, but if we can refit our fleet faster than the Russians we will have a decisive advantage... All our dreadnoughts now have expert crews, and sending them ashore for a few months to return to unfamiliar controls will negate that advantage. On the other hand, crews can be worked up again, while directors are forever.  The new super-dreadnoughts will be done in four months as well, coincidentally. (Around 1910, anything that was bigger and badder than Dreadnought was called a super-dreadnought in the British press. Eventually, as tonnage climbed well past Dreadnought's 18,000, through 26,000 and beyond 30,000, the term fell away and by the 1930s everyone was just calling them battleships again.) I jam everything into refit. The prospect of the Russians finishing director refits before us is intolerable. I calculate that with the dreadnoughts in dock we will be giving up between 600 and 900 VP to blockades in the coming months. This is less than the value of a single pre-dreadnought, but can the civilians stand it?  The fleet will be ready for action with three new dreadnoughts and director fire control in four months.  Until then the Russians will maintain the blockade with their 21 pre-dreadnoughts.  The civilians are nervous, but I shake my fist in their faces and yell about dreadnought battles in the spring!  The first month of refits shows that we have overburdened the shipbuilding industry. Delays are rampant. (That undeveloped industry modifier again?)   The next class of battleships will need to go down soon, and they will be a truly mature design.  The Russians offer battle, but all our ships are in dock.  Russia has received one new battleship and laid down one battleship. Germany has Directors. Does Russia?  This never ends well. We throw him in the darkest cell we can find! (This really never ends well. In true World War One fashion letting the revolutionaries go free almost always comes back to bite you.)  High-explosive armor-piercing shells are complete. These will be useful for the battlecruisers in their quest to eat up everything on the sea like an aardvark in an anthill -- if we ever get the money to build more.  Aki is badly delayed. Will she miss the big day? (Ironically Dreadnought missed Jutland, because she was standing in for a pre-dreadnought in the Channel patrol squadron while it was repaired. Her big guns would never fire a shot in anger.)  The docks in December 1912. Arglebargle III fucked around with this message at 01:04 on Nov 22, 2015 |
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Nov 21, 2015 22:45
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Hopefully, director firing will solve the ongoing problem of unfortunate Japanese aim.
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Nov 22, 2015 00:47
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I've sent in the revolutionary half a dozen times and although about half of them I gained some unrest too, the enemy government always collapsed before mine did. The trick is to only use him when your own unrest is low and you know your enemy has some. The moment the war ends the revolutionary goes away, so he's more of a finisher than anything.
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Nov 22, 2015 00:59
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This poo poo is getting good. So, what's the big deal with directors and why is it worth sacrificing crew experience to get them installed asap? Will they double our hit rate to a massive 2% average?David Corbett posted:Hopefully, director firing will solve the ongoing problem of unfortunate Japanese aim. To be fair, historically and game-wise, I'm under the impression that our shooting is somewhere between average and good for the period.
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Nov 22, 2015 01:06
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TheDemon posted:I've sent in the revolutionary half a dozen times and although about half of them I gained some unrest too, the enemy government always collapsed before mine did. The trick is to only use him when your own unrest is low and you know your enemy has some. This. Now the good thing is, russia has a blockade disadvantage, their ships are only worth 70% of normal blockade strength. (GB is worth 110%)
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Nov 22, 2015 01:28
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They are a pretty massive improvement. From here on, we can expect our ships to actually HIT the enemy. Cowardly destroyers are literally the worst thing in Admiral mode. Can you not order Flotilla attacks in Admiral mode?
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Nov 22, 2015 01:45
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Veloxyll posted:Cowardly destroyers are literally the worst thing in Admiral mode. Can you not order Flotilla attacks in Admiral mode? Is the creator planning on patching/changing that? Or at least putting features like that in a sequel, along with countries that fight wars with powers other than you? He'd have to start from scratch tho, from what I understand.
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Nov 22, 2015 01:49
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Arglebargle III posted:*missed some shots here, Jeopardy! was on. Tournament of Champions.* Well, at least you know what's important. Alex Jacob crushed this ToC though, even Trebek said as much. Had a huge lead after the first game that could only be overcome with great luck by Matt Jackson. After he bet it all on the Daily Double and missed it, it was all but over for him. Still, it was an exciting ToC to watch.
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Nov 22, 2015 04:22
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Arglebargle III posted:
Doesn't a smaller number mean a larger battle? I know size 2 coastal bombardment doesn't usually have battleships for me, and size 1 almost always does.
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Nov 22, 2015 04:37
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That's correct. Size 1 battles typically are battleship engagements but don't mean the entire fleet. Size 0 is putting everything at sea.
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Nov 22, 2015 04:40
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TheDemon posted:That's correct. Size 1 battles typically are battleship engagements but don't mean the entire fleet. Size 0 is putting everything at sea. So, boats are like shotgun shells?
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Nov 22, 2015 04:47
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This is one of those things where I really should have reread the manual before doing an informative LP.
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Nov 22, 2015 05:20
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The Merry Marauder posted:Pommern would agree. Pommern got hit by a torpedo, not gunfire. Dreadnoughts did engage in battle with Pre-dreads, mostly German vs Russian - the Battle of the Gulf of Riga had Posen and Nassau shooting at the Russian Slava. Then later, the battle of moon sound had German battlecruisers and battleships fire up and then sink the same Slava with another pre-dread surviving.
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Nov 22, 2015 05:54
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I'm going to go ahead and guess that since battleships turned out to be supremely useless for anything other than looking stunningly impressive and bombarding shore targets, that the actual combat ability of a dreadnaught vs pre-dreadnaught, was pretty much the same and depended mostly on speed and tactical advantage and whether or not you had a crew who could land more than 1/100 of the shots at range. Since everyone did everything in their power to not get their precious penis stand-ins put in danger, they severely underperformed during the brief window of time where they could have shined any way.
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Nov 22, 2015 06:22
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You can guess that all you like, but it's quite wrong.Saint Celestine posted:Pommern got hit by a torpedo, not gunfire. No, he was sunk by torpedoes, but hit by 12" fire previously.
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Nov 22, 2015 06:28
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Pvt.Scott posted:I'm going to go ahead and guess that since battleships turned out to be supremely useless for anything other than looking stunningly impressive and bombarding shore targets, that the actual combat ability of a dreadnaught vs pre-dreadnaught, was pretty much the same and depended mostly on speed and tactical advantage and whether or not you had a crew who could land more than 1/100 of the shots at range. Since everyone did everything in their power to not get their precious penis stand-ins put in danger, they severely underperformed during the brief window of time where they could have shined any way. Well you are in for a treat by 1925 then. Turns out 15 inch guns firing 3000 pound shells are fantastically destructive once you figure out how to point them. Also if you asked the German high command what the biggest contribution to the war was right after World War one, many of them would tell you that it was the blockade. The blockade was enforced by eight obsolete light cruisers. The only reason that was possible was the 28 battleships cruising around Scotland that would sink the German fleet if it came out to get those little cruisers. The 100 days offensive was impressive but if you just read Germans writing about the war many will say they were starved into surrender. So yeah, late 19th and early 20th century battleships were a bit ridiculous, especially with 70 years of dominance making the Royal Navy's war fighting organization atrophy into a joke. But late model directors and especially radar directors turned 1920s and 1930s battleships into some of the scariest artillery batteries in the world. By 1925 we'll be fielding floating 380 millimeter artillery batteries hooked up to fire control computers. There's been a lot of action in the game so commentary has taken the place of some information, but I should really put an effort full post about directors in the next update. The director system is a real game changer for the Dreadnought battleship. Central firing is little more than a switch that fires salvos better. The director system is a semi-automated fire control computer that eventually takes humans out of the aiming process entirely. As directors improve traversing turrets, raising guns, firing the guns, will all be taken away from human control and automated. By 1930 humans are reduced to pointing the range finding equipment at the target, the computer does the rest. By 1945 the American Navy will be fighting over the horizon at night, just pointing a radar beam at the target and letting the automated fire control shoot at it. By the 1950 advanced radar directors would be achieving hit rates over 90%. Arglebargle III fucked around with this message at 07:00 on Nov 22, 2015 |
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Nov 22, 2015 06:51
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Fleets themselves were and are obviously important, but the dreadnaughts seem to have had a psychological impact more than anything else, rather than any sort of pivotal battlefield moment. Germany wasn't kept lean by Britain having some new super-battleships, they were kept lean by Britain having a world spanning fleet with tons of fast little ships that could murder Germany's shipping. All the big boats did was provide an excuse for both sides to never actually have a battle! When fate decided it was tired of their poo poo and mashed the two fleets together at Jutland, those big ships performed sub-par at best. I've only been getting into this pre/post-wwi naval poo poo recently thanks to SA threads like this, but with hindsight, it sounds like the stupidest waste of men and materiel ever, and I love it. At least, as you point out, their giant guns will actually be ably to accurately pummel a target zone in 30 years!
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Nov 22, 2015 08:26
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Pvt.Scott posted:Fleets themselves were and are obviously important, but the dreadnaughts seem to have had a psychological impact more than anything else, rather than any sort of pivotal battlefield moment. Germany wasn't kept lean by Britain having some new super-battleships, they were kept lean by Britain having a world spanning fleet with tons of fast little ships that could murder Germany's shipping. All the big boats did was provide an excuse for both sides to never actually have a battle! When fate decided it was tired of their poo poo and mashed the two fleets together at Jutland, those big ships performed sub-par at best. I've only been getting into this pre/post-wwi naval poo poo recently thanks to SA threads like this, but with hindsight, it sounds like the stupidest waste of men and materiel ever, and I love it. At least, as you point out, their giant guns will actually be ably to accurately pummel a target zone in 30 years! The British battle line was in no uncertain terms their control over the sea. Germany's unwillingness to engage them and the caution with which they made their few attempts are successes of the British battle line, and that gave the fast ships the ability to damage that shipping without getting murdered by German battleships and battlecruisers. A lot of why Jutland wasn't a bloodbath is the effort of the Germans to disengage and make following them risky. A battle line that takes breaking a crucial blockade off the table is no less successful than a nuclear deterrent that takes land war off the table even if neither fire a shot.
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Nov 22, 2015 08:40
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xthetenth posted:The British battle line was in no uncertain terms their control over the sea. Germany's unwillingness to engage them and the caution with which they made their few attempts are successes of the British battle line, and that gave the fast ships the ability to damage that shipping without getting murdered by German battleships and battlecruisers. A lot of why Jutland wasn't a bloodbath is the effort of the Germans to disengage and make following them risky. A battle line that takes breaking a crucial blockade off the table is no less successful than a nuclear deterrent that takes land war off the table even if neither fire a shot. The trouble is, that doesn't lead to not fighting, that leads to not fighting in the area where the enemy has overwhelming force. Instead of building a fleet to oppose the battle line, we got U-boats enforcing a blockade of their own. Instead of land wars with the threat of nuclear obliteration, we got proxy wars, insurgents, guerilla actions, police actions and KGB versus CIA trying to out-dirty each other.
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Nov 22, 2015 14:17
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You know, I'm curious now. I'm gonna try and keep building B-style ships the whole game and see how it goes. Obviously improved over time with better guns and such, but see if it works at all or how the game deals with that.
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Nov 22, 2015 15:05
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Pvt.Scott posted:Fleets themselves were and are obviously important, but the dreadnaughts seem to have had a psychological impact more than anything else, rather than any sort of pivotal battlefield moment. Germany wasn't kept lean by Britain having some new super-battleships, they were kept lean by Britain having a world spanning fleet with tons of fast little ships that could murder Germany's shipping. All the big boats did was provide an excuse for both sides to never actually have a battle! When fate decided it was tired of their poo poo and mashed the two fleets together at Jutland, those big ships performed sub-par at best. I've only been getting into this pre/post-wwi naval poo poo recently thanks to SA threads like this, but with hindsight, it sounds like the stupidest waste of men and materiel ever, and I love it. At least, as you point out, their giant guns will actually be ably to accurately pummel a target zone in 30 years! I'm not following your logic. You seem to be missing the core concept of an arms race. Yes dreadnoughts are wastefully large for any mission other than killing battleships. But battleships existed. The Battle of the Falklands is particularly instructive for what happens when dreadnoughts run into pre dreadnoughts. It was more of a leisurely slaughter than a battle. As I said the North Sea blockade was actually enforced by 8 obsolete light cruisers stopping and searching neutral traffic. The only thing stopping the 18 dreadnoughts of the German fleet from sailing out and sinking those light cruisers was the 26 British dreadnoughts. It's not like battleships didn't exist before this though, like if you think somehow they just came up with the idea of battleships for dreadnoughts. The British fleet had 36 pre dreadnought battleships when Dreadnought launched. They really were inaccurate, slow, fragile. The dreadnoughts are an improvement in every way. So I don't know what you mean by sub par. As for waste of life, 2500 people died at Jutland. Do you know any other things that were happening in 1916 besides the Battle of Jutland? Churchill actually got into this with the Dardanelles campaign, when the Navy complained it would take too many losses. You're talking about a few thousand people maybe, in contrast to the July offensive that's ludicrous to talk about a few thousand casualties as wasteful if it ends of War. And many Germans would tell you the blockade ended the war. If not for the blockade it's doubtful America would have even entered the war, although that's not what I'm talking about.
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Nov 22, 2015 16:31
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ProfessorCurly posted:You know, I'm curious now. I'm gonna try and keep building B-style ships the whole game and see how it goes. Obviously improved over time with better guns and such, but see if it works at all or how the game deals with that. If you only build battleships you'll lose every battle by default on account of not being able to field the shiptypes the battle is asking for.
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Nov 22, 2015 17:20
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I assume they just meant Bs instead of BBs and BCs. Still, I think the tonnage and calibur limits are going to hurt later on. But Dreadnaughts and their successors with fire control were effective. Not necessarily at shooting accurately, maybe, but they still did mostly what they were intended to. Of course, submarines, and later dive bombers and carriers would obsolete them. That doesn't mean they weren't useful tools for the military though.
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Nov 22, 2015 18:36
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An arms race only leads to long periods of waste while one or both sides look for ways around it. American generals have admitted that they wouldn't deploy nukes today because they have much better tools to accomplish their goals. Germany would have been better served developing uboats, torpedo ships and advanced mines with the budget they wasted on Willy's dumb show boats. That didn't happen because those things aren't sexy or exciting or impressive looking. Just because politicians were willing to sacrifice millions of men on pointless offensives in the trenches doesn't mean that getting a thousand plus men killed per mostly pointless tin can is acceptable. I have a hard time understanding the rationale behind people willingly murdering one another sometimes because I have lived a life of relative peace. Britain was continuing their fleet policies that had been in place for centuries, I understand that. It was a mixed decision because they went untested for a substantial length of time encompassing huge changes in technology. When did the Falklands happen? The 70s? I would hope pre-dreadnaughts were useless by that point in time. This is uneducated opinion though, rather than any sort of studied take on things. I'm going to admit I am far out of my depth and sit back and hopefully learn more interesting things!
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Nov 22, 2015 20:34
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Pvt.Scott posted:When did the Falklands happen? The 70s? I would hope pre-dreadnaughts were useless by that point in time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Falkland_Islands
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Nov 22, 2015 20:44
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Oh, the one without the jets. That makes way more sense. 
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Nov 22, 2015 20:58
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1913 "Thereafter our main squadron, forcing the enemy in a southerly direction, fired on him in a leisurely manner whenever his ships could be discerned through the smoke and fog" -- Admiral Togo  The battleships start coming back to the fleet. Unfortunately, many of her crewmen have been drafted for the trenches in Korea.  Penetrators get better.  The fleet in January.   We're not coming out.  Oh wait, we are? The rain makes it impossible for the Russians to find us.  The Russians are revolting!  The shipyards continue to complain of delays. I hadn't considered that the battleships were keeping the way open for steel deliveries for the battleships.   Soon...  No! The civilians will ruin everything!   The battleships are out! This is a large coastal raid.  The new super-dreadnoughts are here, with the latest fire control technology. The director fire control system is at its heart a mechanical computer. Human operators feed range, bearing, and speed data into their fire control stations, and the director spits out a continually-updated firing solution. In early models, this information would be relayed by humans to the turrets, but the directors were quickly hooked up to electronic indicators in the turrets themselves. All human operators had to do was point the guns where the director readout told them to. As directors advanced, pitch and roll compensation was built in, and the director was wired into the central firing circuit. In improved directors, humans are taken out of the firing loop: the operator merely flips a switch indicating that he is ready to fire, and the computer fires the guns electrically when the pitch and roll brings the guns on target. Eventually the computer would be connected directly to the turret traverse and gun raising motors, leaving humans to operate only the loading cycle. Later models would be able to hold multiple firing solutions and seamlessly direct fire at multiple targets. Here is a US Navy training video from 1953, describing the inner mechanical components of and human interaction with the director system. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1i-dnAH9Y4 Historically the director firing system took some getting used to and was just barely ready for the 1915 and 1916 battles in the North Sea. Tiger's shooting was poor at both Dogger Bank and Jutland, although Beatty's poor operational supervision of his fleet (and difficult home life) were probably to blame for that. However the director finally brought battleships' hit rates above 2%, which had been their previous best. There is no data on wartime hit rates from the interwar period (obviously) but by 1941 battleships were sinking each other within 15 minutes of contact.  The Russian battlecruisers appear outside Port Arthur. If we can only draw them into the battle line, perhaps we can sink them with a few salvos.  The battlecruisers turn and run as soon as they sight the main fleet. There's little we can do. Port Arthur is right there.  The Russian battle line appears to the east! We are between them and their home port. The Japanese line rushes to join battle! (Sort of, Dalny is northwest and they might make it if they wanted to run.)  We turn to parallel their battle line and start hammering each other! The range is about 16,000 yards. At this distance the enemy ships are hazy toy boats on the horizon, surrounded by mute waterspouts. Spotters count more than 40 seconds from flashes on the enemy line to shell splashes around the fleet. Izumo is cut off from the main line! She closes for a torpedo attack. If we can disrupt the Russian line perhaps we can cut out the pre-dreadnoughts or fight them in detail.  Kashima takes a hit in her tops. (The control tops were unarmored by necessity; it was impossible to put a heavy armored tub at the top of the masts for stability and weight reasons.)  The Russian line is forced to turn towards ours, leaving the two heavy dreadnoughts in front out of formation! Mikhail Kutuzov and Tri Ierarha are the biggest Russian ships, and I'm almost certain of their identities. Tri Ierarha was just commissioned a few months ago and was a class leader. The Russian fleet is crossing their own T! Izuma's squadron has launched torpedoes at Mikhail Kutuzov.  Our shooting is good! Tri Ierarha has already been hit a dozen times and is on fire.  As the range closes the gun duel becomes intense. Secondary batteries open up and now the line is a roiling mass of fire and smoke.  The destroyers dash out to attack!   Our torpedo drills perhaps leave something to be desired.   The battleships continue to rain shells on the isolated Russian flagship and her sister. (Though they are technically different classes the ships are visually indistinguishable.)  Shooting is excellent at this close range.  The Russian flagship is absorbing a surprising number of shells without external signs of damage. Her superstructure must be in a sorry state, but she has not slowed and her turrets are still firing furiously.  The range is very close now, and the whole Japanese dreadnought squadron pours shells into the Russians lead division! The trailing Russian dreadnoughts are reversing course in a mad attempt to dodge torpedoes!  Satsuma's port side turret burns out in a terrific gush of flame! Her turret crew manages to flood the magazine and she keeps shooting. Most of the 80 turret crew are killed instantly by the cordite flash fire. Those few who make it to the infirmary die quickly. (Turret flash fires produce injuries reminiscent of nuclear fireballs: third degree flash burns on 90+% of the body. The skin swells and sloughs horribly; only an unlucky few last more than an hour.) The din of battle is so loud that Lion's bridge officers did not notice the midship turret exploding at Jutland. The flash fire was so violent that it wrenched off the turret top like a giant can opener. It was not until five minutes later, when the only walking survivor climbed to the bridge and reported that P turret was out of action, that the bridge crew turned around to see that the turret a few yards behind them was a smoking wreck. Major Francis Harvey, P turret commander, won a posthumous Victoria Cross for crawling over to the damage control station and flooding the magazine before expiring. (Wikipedia says he ordered the flooding, but Castles of Steel quotes a survivor saying that he personally crawled to the controls despite two crushed legs.)  There is bravery on the Russian side too: an enemy destroyer swerved into the path of a torpedo meant for a battleship.  The Russian battle line is disintegrating as they turn this way and that to avoid torpedoes. The lead division is nearly beyond help.  One of the old six-gun dreadnoughts is hit by a torpedo!  The Russian lead division is smothered in the yellow puff of shellbursts.  Some of the battleships are still not shooting as well as I'd like, but none of them has a hit rate under 1% this time.  Tri Ierarha has got her fire out. The Japanese dreadnoughts have battered her extremely. The main body of the Russian fleet is far behind, trading ranging shots with the pre-dreadnoughts.  The Japanese fleet commits a maneuver error!  The Russian flagship tries to escape the pounding. After her!  Kashima and Satsuma turn to present their broadsides at 8,000 yards. Time to finish them!  The Russian flagship is still firing! Tri Ierarha is hulked, she is no longer firing but is not yet sinking. (Hit reports without the * mean the shell did not penetrate. Deflecting a 13" shell at 8000 yards is a satisfactory performance. Our AP technology is probably better than the Russians'.)  I believe the torpedoed dreadnought is slowing the Russian main division down. I run down to re-engage them and prevent them from saving the flagship!  Mikhail Kutuzov is running south. She may yet escape as our fleet re-engages the Russians. Tri Ierarha turns out of line and back towards the approaching Japanese dreadnoughts.  The cruiser Azuma has got all the way down there somehow. She is assigned to Izumo's squadron, a good ten miles northwest of her current position. (I'd been getting messages that Azuma was in trouble for some time, but was focused on killing the crippled Russian dreads and couldn't find the cruiser. I have no idea how she got all the way over there; maybe she failed to follow Izumo's line-breaking maneuver over an hour ago? Explains why I couldn't find her.)  I wireless Azuma to break off but it's probably too late. (I don't really care about 1899 armored cruisers but still, it's free VP for the enemy that I don't want them to get.)  Tri Ierarha is stopped and the destroyers close in for the kill. Kutuzov is still, improbably, able to flee. We gave her quite the thrashing.    Tri Ierarha is finished, and another Russian dreadnought gets a torpedo!  Our shooting is better than theirs, but the battle is nearly three hours old. We are running low on shells.  I continue to pursue the Russian flagship. Get back here Makarov! The spacing is convenient for shooting at the Russian main body as we pass.  Die! DIE DAMMIT!  BB Yamashiro is hit by a friendly torpedo. 122 flooding is manageable. The new class has good underwater protection. The destroyer crew will need good underwater protection when I have them drowned.  Satsuma is nearly wrecked to the waterline and her rudder is jammed. Kutuzov is a hell of a crack ship to keep up her firing with so much damage.  I follow her into the turn; this will probably force the Russians to turn away and give Satsuma time to fix her steering gear. I would like to straighten out and blast Kutuzov to death, finally, but the sharp turn makes it hard to train the guns. (We don't have synthetic fire control computers yet, so own-ship turning puts a big penalty on gunnery despite the new directors.)  Yamashiro nearly has her flooding under control. We've certainly killed one Russian dreadnought but two of our dreadnoughts have taken severe damage. We're also running low on ammunition, and the Russian main body probably isn't. I don't want to get stuck in a situation where we can't respond to Russian fire. (Remember, unengaged ships shoot better.) Our crews will be better next time. I decide to turn for home. (You can see that Kashima's forward turret is out of ammunition in this shot.)  Satsuma is back under control. We are deep in the Beihai; I have to get to the north and east to get home.  Shooting continues as we try to extricate ourselves from the great enclosed sea.  Azuma didn't make it home after all.   The Russians are following! I start to turn around to re-engage their swiss-cheesed and torpedoed dreadnoughts but a quick check of the fleet's ammunition makes me turn away again. Shooting is good but we are down to 5-10% for most ships.  (Another Vice Admiral's mode crushing victory that doesn't happen. On another difficulty setting it would be pretty trivial to run the destroyers into their damaged ships and score three or four kills.)  Satsuma is the most wrecked and shooting the slowest.  I take a longing look back. Mikhail Kutuzov is nowhere to be seen, probably limping home far to the west. If only we had more shells!  But we have sunk one of the biggest, newest ships in the Russian fleet, and lost only an obsolete cruiser and a destroyer. I am getting all my battleships home and they are not. With the Aki finishing trials soon the blockade is decisively broken.    Wait, wha? Mikasa has hit a mine and sinks on the way back! (This is a random event. The RNG really hates me.  ) This transforms the battle from a major victory to a minor victory and hands Russia more than 2,000 victory points.This is not only more frustrating luck, it's a good illustration of why I wanted to leave the old battleships in mothballs. Not only are they expensive to operate, they're tactically useless and easily sunk. They are much more a liability than an asset now. Had a dreadnought hit a mine its underwater protection would have afforded it a good chance to get home. But 1899 ships have no underwater protection. If it weren't for the strategic necessity of tonnage to break the Russian pre-dreadnought blockade, I would have happily left those ships tied up for the whole war. The Russian dreadnoughts absorbed terrific punishment without sinking. You wouldn't know it from the battle results but we scored four torpedo hits, broke up the enemy fleet, and had two hours of one-sided shooting, and only sank one battleship. I was sure Mikhail Kutuzov would go down but she did not. In retrospect, maybe I should have stuck around longer to turn a victory into a crushing Trafalgar-like victory. But it's equally possible that I would have started to run out of ammunition while still closely engaged, got torpedoed again (maybe even by a friendly destroyer) and maybe lost Satsuma or Yamashiro. Losing Mikasa to the RNG really stings.  For once the dockyards are empty. On getting home I lay down two monstrous new super-dreadnoughts, appropriately named Hyuga. (Uh oh...)  The moment of crisis is past; I give back some of the emergency money to the civilian government.   The Russian navy is running from fleet battles! We'll thump 'em again and again, and what's more they know it!  The Japanese people have felt the squeeze. Confident in the knowledge that we have delivered one hammer blow to the Russians and are likely to land another in the near future, I give up more money.  Oh, well then.   Perhaps the hawks are not always right, but political concerns are tricky. The Navy finds itself aligned with the Army and the Conservatives for the first time since before the American War.  Matsushima goes on patrol and bites off more than she can chew.  Ha! That's 50% of the Russian BC force. Once again, we don't get victory points for sub victories.  Perhaps these are more than just expensive toys. (We're past the 50% mark in the campaign now, so submarines get a new picture.)  (This improved armor will go great in our new class of battleships after I have to scrap Hyuga for her armor defects.  ) Russia has the director! My choice last autumn is vindicated; we have enjoyed a narrow window of advantage and had we delayed we might have been left behind.  What? No! We haven't lost a major action! The situation in Korea is stable! The blockade has been broken! The decisive battles are going our way! Why did the civilians accept a Russian peace at this stage? The Japanese navy has been... stabbed in the back! STABBED IN THE BACK! (I've never seen a nation get forced out due to unrest get such a lenient peace. Maybe because we were about 4,000 VPs behind? But I've never seen VPs matter much in unrest wins. We just turned the corner! We were so close to winning! Technically we sort of won, but it's a hollow victory because we didn't get anything out of it as far as I can see.)  Russia's big ships are crowding the yards in Vladivostok! We had nothing to fear!  Tsukuba was two months from completion when the civilians ended the war! It is December 1913. For the first time the Army and Navy are united: the civilian leadership is intolerable! Arglebargle III fucked around with this message at 22:21 on Nov 22, 2015 |
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Nov 22, 2015 21:00
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Wow. Has literally anything gone better than expected in this game?
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Nov 22, 2015 21:09
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Arglebargle III posted:
Do you actually have AON yet? I'm noticing no BE and DE armour there. Only reason I ask is if you build ships like I do, having the autodesigner make a 'base' ship and then adjust from there because I can't be assed to draw out all the lines of a decent looking superstructure, I've noticed sometimes the autodesigner gives you no extended armour *before* you actually have AON researched. Which can lead to some rather sinkable heavy ships....
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Nov 22, 2015 21:47
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