A battleship can be built in 240 days with very basic technology.

[Denkt]

I can't post screenshot from the twitch stream today but I did make some calculation.

A battleship cost 14400 "output", a dockyard seems to make 4 output per day.

14400/4 = 3600 days, so 10 years with one dockyard.
3600/15 = 240 days, so 240 days with 15 dockyards.

And these numbers can get even lower with increased production technologies.

 

[semaphore]

The biggest question, imho, is still, what would the battleship need for repairs?

 

[GsusNSV]

I will take over the screenshots.
Naval factorie output sems to be 2,75 per day. GB starts with only 21 oil so a battleship with 15 dockyards will bind 75% of your oil for almost a year.

 

[Amur_Tiger]

I will take over the screenshots.
Naval factorie output sems to be 2,75 per day. GB starts with only 21 oil so a battleship with 15 dockyards will bind 75% of your oil for almost a year.

So slowing it down to a more realistic pace that's about 3 battleships in parallel, with only enough oil to get to a 4th built in parallel before you're constrained by oil.

In real life here's a list of ships laid down in 1937:

5x King George V Class Battleships
4x Illustrious/Indominable Class Fleet Carriers
6x Dido light cruisers
14x Assorted destroyers

I'm not sure if GB will have ways to deal with the oil constraint shown there as I'm not in the beta but given the degree of that constraint compared to the real capabilities of the non-wartime British economy I'm certainly a bit concerned.

 

[GsusNSV]

As GB you will have more chances to trade for oil, which in return makes it a very important strategy for Germany to sink this convoys.
Also you could build synthetic factorys wich will give you oil and rubber.

 

[Vidkjaer]

I will take over the screenshots.
Naval factorie output sems to be 2,75 per day. GB starts with only 21 oil so a battleship with 15 dockyards will bind 75% of your oil for almost a year.

@podcat Bug spotted - The tooltip text should read "Dockyards" instead of "Military Factories" or something else so it is not confused with military factories for equipment.
At 07:04 in this video

 

[Denkt]

I did see wrong. Each dockyard have 5 production but how much the produce depend on your max efficiency. With basic tech it would be 50% which mean each of your dockyards will produce 2.5 production each day which would mean with 15 dockyards it would take 384 days to build a battleship however this will be reduced quite quickly.

 

[adam_grif]

Do you set up a production line and build battleships until ???, or do you commission a specific number of ships? At least for capitals, I think it definitely needs to be the latter, while it's probably ok for frigates or convoys to have a "3 / month" or "2 / week" type production lines.

I'd also prefer if you couldn't just make a battleship go faster by throwing infinite factories at it (I know it's not really infinite I'm exaggerating). Like there could be a maximum number of dockyards attached to its production, to represent bottlenecks on its time. There might be techs you could unlock that allow you to put more dockyards on one ship at a time.

I reckon naval production and naval stuff will be the focus of an expansion DLC down the line.

 

[Vidkjaer]

Do you set up a production line and build battleships until ???, or do you commission a specific number of ships? At least for capitals, I think it definitely needs to be the latter, while it's probably ok for frigates or convoys to have a "3 / month" or "2 / week" type production lines.

I'd also prefer if you couldn't just make a battleship go faster by throwing infinite factories at it (I know it's not really infinite I'm exaggerating). Like there could be a maximum number of dockyards attached to its production, to represent bottlenecks on its time. There might be techs you could unlock that allow you to put more dockyards on one ship at a time.

I reckon naval production and naval stuff will be the focus of an expansion DLC down the line.

There is a maximum of 15 dockyards.

 

[Denkt]

You can at the most have 15 dockyards on a ship. However if you are unable to produce ships quickly you will be unable to make use of the 1944 tech ships and the naval game probably would need major rebalance as it is balanced around the ability to quickly build capital ships.

 

[Axe99]

Sounds a bit quick to me (384 days is still greased lightning for a BB - hell, it's greased lightning for a CL!) but I guess (hope?) we'll be able to mod the max number of factories available to a naval production line so we're not having silly results like that. Cheers for the info Denkt and the screenies G-sus, haven't had a chance to watch the HoI4 vid yet (just dropping in here while waiting for something) but looking forward to it!

 

[Kadanz]

Sounds a bit quick to me (384 days is still greased lightning for a BB - hell, it's greased lightning for a CL!) but I guess (hope?) we'll be able to mod the max number of factories available to a naval production line so we're not having silly results like that. Cheers for the info Denkt and the screenies G-sus, haven't had a chance to watch the HoI4 vid yet (just dropping in here while waiting for something) but looking forward to it!

My assumption is that it's most likely done for gameplay reasons. The time span for the game is like what? 9-10 years? For that reason I think it's a valid design decision to be able to produce ships somewhat faster.

 

[jamesd]

Whether its 240 or 384 days for a battleship its still far too fast. The KGV class battleships mentioned above as having been laid down in 1937 were commissioned in 1940-1942. That's a build time of 3-5 years. The Dreadnought prior to WW1 took more than 12 months to build and was considered to have been constructed in record time and it was a much smaller ship than the KGV's. Maybe there should be a limit of 10 dockyards assigned to any particular ship of cruiser or greater size?

 

[Amur_Tiger]

Whether its 240 or 384 days for a battleship its still far too fast. The KGV class battleships mentioned above as having been laid down in 1937 were commissioned in 1940-1942. That's a build time of 3-5 years. The Dreadnought prior to WW1 took more than 12 months to build and was considered to have been constructed in record time and it was a much smaller ship than the KGV's. Maybe there should be a limit of 10 dockyards assigned to any particular ship of cruiser or greater size?

I think that this fundamentally is because of the ability to dump a lot of construction power into a single ship, not because the overall capacity of the UK wasn't that much or greater. After all the KGVs weren't the only things laid down in 1937, there were 4 fleet carriers as well and all these and the KGVs would be launched by the end of 1940. This amounts to a fleet carrier/battleship every 140 days. Really I think there should be limits to the amount of 'serial production' power you can throw into anything and that efforts to put a whole lot of Naval production into KGVs for example should require a lot of parallel builds as this tended to be exactly how things panned out, massive overall production for the nation, but divided up between a lot of ships. Even smaller ships faced these sorts of constraints, a small J class destroyer ( also laid down in 1937 because why not ) wouldn't be launched for a year.

PS I prefer to use launching dates to get a gauge of production as this tended to be when you were using your exclusively naval factories ( drydocks ) and when you could be best assured that all effort was being made to complete the ship to clear up the dock. War and peacetime priorities would often leave some ships being built at a very slow rate because they weren't considered high priority or scrapped entirely, refer to the story of the Lion class as a reference.

 

[Sleight of Hand]

I think 18 months would be a good default time, which could be improved with modifiers.

 

[jamesd]

I think that this fundamentally is because of the ability to dump a lot of construction power into a single ship, not because the overall capacity of the UK wasn't that much or greater. After all the KGVs weren't the only things laid down in 1937, there were 4 fleet carriers as well and all these and the KGVs would be launched by the end of 1940. This amounts to a fleet carrier/battleship every 140 days. Really I think there should be limits to the amount of 'serial production' power you can throw into anything and that efforts to put a whole lot of Naval production into KGVs for example should require a lot of parallel builds as this tended to be exactly how things panned out, massive overall production for the nation, but divided up between a lot of ships. Even smaller ships faced these sorts of constraints, a small J class destroyer ( also laid down in 1937 because why not ) wouldn't be launched for a year.

PS I prefer to use launching dates to get a gauge of production as this tended to be when you were using your exclusively naval factories ( drydocks ) and when you could be best assured that all effort was being made to complete the ship to clear up the dock. War and peacetime priorities would often leave some ships being built at a very slow rate because they weren't considered high priority or scrapped entirely, refer to the story of the Lion class as a reference.

That's right - its about the number of large slipways available. If you have 6 slipways you can construct 6 battleships simultaneously, but you can't construct 1 battleship in 1/6th the time it should take. My original thinking when hearing about HOI4's factory system was that each factory would be assigned to a production line. Maybe that would be a good idea for naval production - the naval factories in each state work together to produce ships and can't be combined with naval factories in other states.

 

[Amur_Tiger]

I think 18 months would be a good default time, which could be improved with modifiers.

I'd be more inclined towards 24 months standard with 20 months being reachable with the commitment of 'max resources' which in a naval context wouldn't be that much, say 4 factories?

Instead of having serial production of a single order improve efficiency make efficiency based on how many ships of that type are past your point in production, shaving off another 4 months of construction time if some naval factory somewhere had to already get past the 60% mark, representing the growing comfort of builders with the design and the 'trailblazer' effect of the first shipyard to build a particular type having solutions to certain construction challenges.

Much of this is just to underscore that certainly for capital ships it wasn't common to lay down another ship of that type in the slipway you just cleared.

 

[Axe99]

Looking at the BBs, time from laid down to launch (noting that ships often took more than half a year to be complete after launch), during the time period (apologies if I do any of the maths in my head wrong):

- King George V class, five ships, shortest 25 and a half months, longest 34 months.
- Vanguard class, one ship, 38 months (although they were in no hurry on this one).
- North Carolina class, two ships, shortest 23 and a half months, longest 31.5 months.
- South Dakota class, four ships, shortest 23 months, longest 26 months.
- Iowa class, four ships (completed), 26 months, longest 37 months.
- Yamato class, two ships, shortest 31 months, longest 33 months.
- Bismarck class, two ships, shortest 29.5 months, longest 31.5 months.
- Richelieu class, one ship (completed 'normally', the other two were interrupted by WW2), 38 months.

Edit: Source Conway's All the World's Fighting Ships, 1922-46.

As Kadanz says, nothing wrong with having BB production on steroids for gameplay purposes, but I reckon I'll be modding in the max naval factories available for a production line to give me something closer to these times.

My assumption is that it's most likely done for gameplay reasons. The time span for the game is like what? 9-10 years? For that reason I think it's a valid design decision to be able to produce ships somewhat faster.

Aye, I've got nothing wrong with it as a gameplay decision, but HoI3 (and 2) coped fine with longer BB/CV build times, it just means players have to plan ahead a bit . Not suggesting they should change it for the base game, but it sounds like something that would be easy to mod (I daresay it would be one or two global variables, although that's a very wet-finger-in-the-air guess at this stage) for those of us that like things a bit more plausible.

 

[FOARP]

It really isn't worth getting excited about the figures given for a game that still hasn't finished being balanced yet. Pretty much all the numbers you see in the video are likely subject to change.

 

[KiwiNoob]

You're assuming that ships in a production line are built in series. A single production line could have several ships in construction at a time just at different stages of construction. The end result is 1 finished approx. every x days.