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35 per post is the limit :) I test it every time! :D

Amazing amount of work in that and not just the luscious graphics. The naming convention, listings etc show amazing attention to detail, research and devising of alt-world orgs and titles!

Thanks as always! I actually ran into the problem that "new" classes didn't have real world counterparts, and so took a few liberties with what shook out. As you can see, the Italians dumped their money into their navy, and it shows. I took a page from current US Navy groupings of "Flights" for some classes. I think it works well since these aren't really new designs, but iterations of the previous ones.

Great pics of the Italian ships as well :)

Thank you! Not many floating out on Shipbucket to draw from. Fortunately, I can make do.

wow some nice ships those Italians have :)

As I mentioned to Bullfilter, they definitely dumped most of their money into the Navy. And what they didn't dump into the ocean, they let fly to Germany to buy aircraft. Or the parts to build aircraft locally (@El Pip ):D
 
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As I mentioned to Bullfilter, they definitely dumped most of their money into the Navy. And what they didn't dump into the ocean, they let fly to Germany to buy aircraft. Or the parts to build aircraft locally (@El Pip ):D
At least some remnant of the Italy we know and love has survived. The battleships still have the catastrophically dangerous and mostly pointless Re.2000 Catapultabile on them, an aircraft that killed far more of it's own crew than the enemy due to it's relentless design flaws and awful assembly. It is therefore properly Fascist-era Italian and I am heartened that it has survived.

I can only hope they manage to catapult launch one of the Re.2000s into an escorting destroyer, a feat they damn near managed in OTL. But that may be too much to hope for.
 
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Italy sent it's East African forces into the Caucasus and expected anything other than disaster?
 
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At least some remnant of the Italy we know and love has survived. The battleships still have the catastrophically dangerous and mostly pointless Re.2000 Catapultabile on them, an aircraft that killed far more of it's own crew than the enemy due to it's relentless design flaws and awful assembly. It is therefore properly Fascist-era Italian and I am heartened that it has survived.

I can only hope they manage to catapult launch one of the Re.2000s into an escorting destroyer, a feat they damn near managed in OTL. But that may be too much to hope for.

Now that I am aware of the incident... it will happen... Got the perfect time for it to do so, as well!

Italy sent it's East African forces into the Caucasus and expected anything other than disaster?

Italy sent nearly all of its forces into the Caucasus... they were doing so well, but then the Soviet Forces showed up!
 
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Sorry for the double post, but the Axis Powerhouse of HUNGARY has been updated to reflect in the OOB chart! SEE IT HERE!
 
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Italy sent nearly all of its forces into the Caucasus... they were doing so well, but then the Soviet Forces showed up!

Now there's the historical Italy we all know and love. Doing so well, until someone else showed up! :p
 
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Sorry for the double post, but the Axis Powerhouse of HUNGARY has been updated to reflect in the OOB chart! SEE IT HERE!
Alas it seems the poor Hungarians have been deprived their own, exceptionally mediocre tanks. They are going to get generic licence produced Panzers aren't they? :(

I just hope some of the unique features of Hungarian tank design survive - like putting a sodding massive circular aerial on top of all the command tanks, so the enemy knows exactly who to shoot first.
 
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Now there's the historical Italy we all know and love. Doing so well, until someone else showed up! :p

Exactly. I think that the Italians suffer some of the most extensive casualties in comparison to their forces' time in contact with the enemy, but I'd have to look into it further. Certainly they're the only Axis forces to lose whole divisions to the enemy so far.

Alas it seems the poor Hungarians have been deprived their own, exceptionally mediocre tanks. They are going to get generic licence produced Panzers aren't they? :(

They are not, actually. Since I didn't take the helm of them for awhile, they don't have their armored brigade, and since I'm working off of a few computers down now, all I have control over are their military forces, and nothing else. They will likely not get their tanks... unless I get more computers.

I just hope some of the unique features of Hungarian tank design survive - like putting a sodding massive circular aerial on top of all the command tanks, so the enemy knows exactly who to shoot first.

I'd imagine their armored cars are similar. Can't be sending those command tracks in without a way to tell who is who!
 
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Italy sent nearly all of its forces into the Caucasus... they were doing so well, but then the Soviet Forces showed up!

Well obviously. Supplying an entire Army group (or two) in a heavily mountainous terrain with little to no infrastructure and a supply chain stretching from Italy, by boat across the Mediterranean Sea to some appropriate port in the Levant, then by truck and horse across half the middle east and into the Caucasus. At that point the quality of your troops really dont matter, you are not gonna be able to fight like that. This is Italy we are talking about, they couldn't even properly supply its troops in North Africa, which is just a stones throw away.
 
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To start off, the Japanese have been updated in the OOB post!

Well obviously. Supplying an entire Army group (or two) in a heavily mountainous terrain with little to no infrastructure and a supply chain stretching from Italy, by boat across the Mediterranean Sea to some appropriate port in the Levant, then by truck and horse across half the middle east and into the Caucasus. At that point the quality of your troops really dont matter, you are not gonna be able to fight like that. This is Italy we are talking about, they couldn't even properly supply its troops in North Africa, which is just a stones throw away.

Well, they had to go through the Bosporus, then to a small port no one's heard of in Georgia called Batumi. At the same time, fanning out and supporting just the one army (four corps? maybe?) even with no mechanized forces was too much. Plus Stalin probably started freaking out about all of his homeland being occupied by those idiot Italians.
 
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Impressive new ship-pron. :) No Yamato class BB then? Some of the CLs look pretty big - are they to scale, as far as you could tell? Good to see some carrier classes in the list, anyway.
 
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Impressive new ship-pron. :) No Yamato class BB then? Some of the CLs look pretty big - are they to scale, as far as you could tell? Good to see some carrier classes in the list, anyway.

Apparently, the AI decided against the traditional Japanese thing of trying to build three super battleships. I rationalized this with the fact that the game lists the CV-VI as the "Shinano"-class, which was supposed to be the third Yamato-class battleship and instead have the "Carrier Faction" win out and had all three of the Yamatos be those glamorous super carriers... and the Japanese just keep building more of them. I might actually build the Yamatos and some other battleships as well as more light cruisers because most of those are fairly long in the tooth at this point.

Everything is to scale. Basically, the first ship that I put in (the Bluchers for the Kriegsmarine, the da Vincis for the Italians and now the Hiryu for the Japanese) sets the ratio, generally of 1280 pixels long. I divide that by the actual length of the ship, which usually gives a ratio of around 1m : 5 pixels, and I tend to round up to lend to the details. I did the same thing with the submarines for the Germans and Italians (I decided against trying to for the Japanese as I had no idea of which ones weren't already level IVs).
 
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Great work Wraith, love it :) The carrier faction definitely went all-out this time around, best of luck to them :)
 
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Well, at least this will stop the naval porn jokes on other AARs. They are erotica at best compared to this.
 
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Great work Wraith, love it :) The carrier faction definitely went all-out this time around, best of luck to them :)

For sure. Once I get the computers back up and running, I'll be definitely working to make sure that there are some appropriate engagements in the future!

Well, at least this will stop the naval porn jokes on other AARs. They are erotica at best compared to this.

There are naval porn jokes in the other AARs? I mean, I enjoy seeing how everyone else makes their OOBs (if they show them at all), and have a bit of pride that mine do look pretty nice, I have to say. I might go back in and redo (redux? @El Pip ) some of my older versions to bring them up to the standard! :cool::confused::D
 
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Luckily the Japanese carriers are getting shorter as they get newer. With luck the next generation will be too short for planes to actually take off from.
DYAEiOu.gif


The IJN habit of covering their ships in ineffective wires is also shown to full effect, keeping the vital Wire-Making Zaibatsu on side with the regime. It must be something like that, no-one else in the world needed anywhere near that many aerials on their ships.

Another excellent bit of work and a heroic effort to make sense of Paradoxian ineptitude/laziness/indifference (or my favourite explanation, all three). :)
 
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No new Japanese Battleships? No Yamato Class? That's a bit sad, and it does take away some of the problems with Japanese shipbuilding strategy. Or maybe, the hulls were laid down, but they'll all be converted to Carriers, and we'll have Yamato and Musashi as super-carriers?
You have SNLFs in the same command structure as IJA forces. (even if they are in their own corps...). You might rename them to Army units, as the IJA also had specialised landing forces, or at least landing craft and the like with which to deliver Infantry to the shore. It's not a big stretch for the IJA to have it's own Marines, who would then not be called SNLF, as that's the name given to the IJN's Marines. Just a suggestion to add some more flavour.

The Japanese ships look great, though I do share @El Pip 's worries about the diminishing length of Japanese Fleet Carriers. It's a somewhat counter-intuitive development, and with hindsight, even if the IJN manages to continue landing it's prop planes on those ever smaller, but more efficient (I hope) carriers, they will definitely be unusable by Jet-planes, unless Japan comes up with a VTOL or SVTOL Jet decades before the Harrier.

All right, all jokes aside, that's a well thought out OOB. Definitely more efficient than the historical one. Going fully historical would mean that you'd have to give the Army ships as well, even light carriers, and that's just silly.

The addition of those various Destroyer classes is interesting in itself, and once again, the ships look great. Did you find all the artwork in the same place, or is it a combination of various sources and google-images searches?

Looking forward to what all that hardware gets up to.
 
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excellent artwork, I'm thinking the shortening of the carriers is due to Japanese aircraft engines getting more powerful thus not needing all that runway to take off :)
 
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Luckily the Japanese carriers are getting shorter as they get newer. With luck the next generation will be too short for planes to actually take off from.
DYAEiOu.gif

Indeed. I'd imagine that (given my explanation that TTL's Soryu-class is really a conversion of the hulls of the Yamato-class) the Hiryu-class was a return to a more "reasonable" carrier size. Unfortunately, HoI3 prevents any of the issues that plagued IJN carriers throughout the war (most importantly, bad damage control and plane spotting) from actually impacting said carriers.

The IJN habit of covering their ships in ineffective wires is also shown to full effect, keeping the vital Wire-Making Zaibatsu on side with the regime. It must be something like that, no-one else in the world needed anywhere near that many aerials on their ships.

Those wires are the bane of my existence when I'm trying to make these. Seriously. I've just painted over a bunch of them, but I want to accurately depict the ships as the artists intended, which just means that I'm spending more time hitting every. single. pixel. with. a paint. command.

Another excellent bit of work and a heroic effort to make sense of Paradoxian ineptitude/laziness/indifference (or my favourite explanation, all three). :)

Thank you. It's times like these that I wonder about the decisions regarding the technology system (which is also a problem in HoI4, honestly). Why did they put the offsets so close together? I figure that it would have been better to space them out more and work in something similar to the upgrade system of HoI4, as the majority of the time (especially with the big ticket items like ships, aircraft and tanks), enhancements were evolutionary rather than revolutionary. Ugh. What I would do if I could get Paradox to allow me into the playground of HoI3's code...

No new Japanese Battleships? No Yamato Class? That's a bit sad, and it does take away some of the problems with Japanese shipbuilding strategy. Or maybe, the hulls were laid down, but they'll all be converted to Carriers, and we'll have Yamato and Musashi as super-carriers?

I had the Carrier faction win out (haven't talked about it specifically in any update, so you haven't missed anything) and the three hulls of the Yamatos were converted to TTL's Soryu-class (because the other half is that Paradox couldn't get their AI nor their naming conventions straight... groan) as that's the only explanation that I have for having CV-Vs and CV-VIs in 1942... I'll probably start the battleships again because the IJN has to realize that theirs are getting too old and need to keep up with the carriers a bit.

You have SNLFs in the same command structure as IJA forces. (even if they are in their own corps...). You might rename them to Army units, as the IJA also had specialised landing forces, or at least landing craft and the like with which to deliver Infantry to the shore. It's not a big stretch for the IJA to have it's own Marines, who would then not be called SNLF, as that's the name given to the IJN's Marines. Just a suggestion to add some more flavour.

This is a limitation of the game, with no ability to make a Naval HQ (aside from coopting the ground forces system), I figure just best to lump them all together and be done with it.

The Japanese ships look great, though I do share @El Pip 's worries about the diminishing length of Japanese Fleet Carriers. It's a somewhat counter-intuitive development, and with hindsight, even if the IJN manages to continue landing it's prop planes on those ever smaller, but more efficient (I hope) carriers, they will definitely be unusable by Jet-planes, unless Japan comes up with a VTOL or SVTOL Jet decades before the Harrier.

This reminds me of the "You Have Two Cows" explanation: You have two cows. You redesign them so they are one-tenth the size of an ordinary cow and produce twenty times the milk. You then create a clever cow cartoon image called ‘Cowkimon’ and market it worldwide.

All right, all jokes aside, that's a well thought out OOB. Definitely more efficient than the historical one. Going fully historical would mean that you'd have to give the Army ships as well, even light carriers, and that's just silly.

My guess is that the size of the Sealift forces assigned to the IJN covers the bulk of those Army vessels! In all of the research that I did, the IJA's "carriers" were more of the CVE rather than the CVL variety, and thus outside of the purview of the game.

The addition of those various Destroyer classes is interesting in itself, and once again, the ships look great. Did you find all the artwork in the same place, or is it a combination of various sources and google-images searches?

One of those things about the Paradox researchers, they really loved to put in random details about ship strengths. Much like the Italian branch, it gives me a venue to account for the majority of those old destroyers that were still on active duty.

Looking forward to what all that hardware gets up to.

As I am looking forward to writing it!

excellent artwork, I'm thinking the shortening of the carriers is due to Japanese aircraft engines getting more powerful thus not needing all that runway to take off :)

Probably. Or they were trying to build a carrier that wasn't previously a battleship design... since the majority of these carriers are (in TTL's explanation, anyways).
 
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All right, all jokes aside, that's a well thought out OOB. Definitely more efficient than the historical one. Going fully historical would mean that you'd have to give the Army ships as well, even light carriers, and that's just silly.

I think those light carriers are actually smaller than the light carriers/CVEs in vanilla HoI3 and as such are not actually modeled. I do think BICE has (or used to have?) a model for those ships though.
 
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