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.
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).