abstract vs detailed design
It's very important to recognize that the designers of those historical ships (like Yamato) didn't set out to design an inferior ship - but rather that they had a very different set of priorities than what you probably will have. So?
The discussion about the Iowa vs the NC class ships was a very good point - the NC were close performance wise to the Iowas, but were smaller and far cheaper to produce - that is the classic trade off. You can have the be-all end all battlewagon, as long as you are willing to pay for it.
I suspect that on one hand, you can have all the 'best' options for a ship - heavy AA, giant guns, thick armor, and high speed, BUT that you will have to pay through the nose to have everything at the 'best' level available. So, you will actually have to make a choice on what *kind* of combat power is important to your strategy.
The problem is that you are stuck thinking in terms of HoI2 - where is was never a good idea (IC wise) (excluding carriers and their busted CAGs) to start a new production run of an old model unit. The newest designs were always more efficient IC wise to the older models - you always got more combat power per IC for building a 'new' design.
Now, I think that HoI3 will continue that - I doubt that newer models will give you LESS bang for the buck - however - now you have the choice of specializing your ships for the role you see them in. Assuming an even level of tech, for a given dollar (IC), I suspect that you will either be able to get a ship that is very powerful for a given role, or a 'worse' generalist ship - however the generalist will at least be useful for alot of things. It will all depend on the strategy you are pursuing.
If you are playing the Germans, and want to go surface convoy raiding - and are aware of the threat that aircraft represent. I suspect that you would probably spend your IC on fast ships, with excellent AA, but would pay for it with a relatively weak main battery - and probably indifferent armor - you aren't out looking for the RN to get into a fight with it.
And lets say the RN is going the route of building a 'generalist' fleet - where you get BBs and BCs that have a well-rounded set of guns-AA-speed-armor - their 'heavy' ships can probably never get into range of those fast running surface raiders - but - they would also have very little to FEAR from those raiders. So the RN fleet would exist to exercise a deterrent effect - as long as some old, slow, but powerful BB/BC/CA were tagging along with a convoy - that convoy would be relatively safe from a weak gunned convoy raider.
This system is far better than the HoI2 style - in a system where you can control exactly what your ships DO you can control the effect they have - the only serious deciding factor in naval combat in HoI2 was who had the mostest, biggestest ships - which *really* favors the IC powers (USA).
And the huge delays involven ship contruction add a very interesting dynamic to the whole affair. Naval construction priorities during the war and interwar era were very much an act-react affair, with a huge aspect to monitoring and spying on your competitors. In HoI2 you didn't really need to pay attention to *exactly* what your opponent was building - a battleship was a battleship, so who cares if the US has 10 of them or 12 of them. With 'specific' design - you will certainly care if germany lays down a super fast convoy raider - if you don't get to work on a ship capable of countering it right away (or unless you are building your navy to counter every threat...) you will have some sort of 'lag' where that raider can operate with impunity - potentially letting a couple lone ships cause huge amounts of damage.
-Doc
Several people said that they are skeptical about the new, detailed ship design system. Honestly, I don't really understand why.
The argumentation seems to be that the generic classes of HoI2 let you assume that there are different ships, but they fall all into a few model categories, because no detailed stats were specified, whereas in the new system, everyone will build the best possible, and thus often unhistorical, build.
First of all, in HoI2 you did research five tech components for every ship design, usually containing main armament size etc., so that the models weren't in fact that unspecific than people say they were.
Second, enough people have posted stats in this thread of ships falling in one HoI2 model category, showing that there were sometimes big differences in armament, armor, etc. Despite that, in HoI2 all these ships were absolutely the same. Do you really think this is the better choice?
Finally, you also assume that
a) the AI will always build the best possible ship system, ignoring historical ship types, despite the fact that we already know that for land units the AI will build different, historical divisions. What makes you assume that this will NOT be true for naval units?
b) there IS something like one best build. Johan said several times now that they spend quite some work on the naval system, and assuming that there is only one best build implies that Paradox fails to implement good trade-offs between armor-speed, armor-armament, etc., allowing for more than one feasible build.
I understand that as long as we don't know all the details we can't exclude all these points. I also understand that some of you are very excited about the naval side of the game, and hope for significant improvements (me too). Still, it seems that you are describing the worst case scenario, that for all that we know, is probably very unlikely.
It just seems funny (no, not really funny, maybe just strange) that people complain about generic models in HoI2 for years, and now that Paradox announces that they will implement more details, allowing different ship builds in HoI3, people start to complain about that.
