Meganavies

[Shaqfu]

I was just playing a game as Japan with vip 0.3 and started to notice that the UK was building both pre-dreadnoughts and then dreadnoughts at a ridiculous and completely ahistorical pace. They had around 300 PDNs which they built in a period of about ~6 years. As soon as they had the ability to build DNs I literally saw a change of +90 between my glances at the naval comparison ledger, this couldn't have been more than a year or 2 at most. I also saw France was doing something similar, having around 70 DNs. While I had the ability to keep pace as I had the same industrial capacity of the UK it just became ridiculous as I had to keep ordering more and more ships.

Has anyone else seen this? I remember seeing this in vanilla as well.

Has there been any discussion about greatly increasing the costs of these classes of ships? Historically, building these classes of ships was a huge undertaking for a nation and the UK only had 29 DNs at the beginning of WW1 and germany had 17.

As a side note, VIP is an amazing mod and my first experiences have been very positive.

 

[unmerged(139928)]

Was the UK at war? They generally maintain their MW navy until they get into a war, when they start producing like crazy;

 

[unmerged(75409)]

I noticed the same thing, the big ships are too cheap. I think with resources required and cash they come to about ~25,000 pounds cost which means Britain or the USA can afford to build several of them each month. It is a bit crazy, maybe some of the late game stuff should be scaled by cost so that not just manpower will be the problem in building it... or maybe also add leadership cost to unbrigaded capital ships from Dreadnoughts onwards?

 

[JohnnyDepressio]

I don't think leadership is such a problem for a late game great power...

The costs for the capital ships should just be raised. probably the abilitys of these ships should be raised to so we come closer to the importance ot every single of these ships. I think especially the support costs should be raised so it would become really expensive to mantain a big fleet of dreadnoughts.

 

[unmerged(42621)]

I've tried to tackle this problem in different ways. First, AI apparently doesn't pay supply costs so raising them doesn't help. I haven't tried that myself though. I have used different multipliers in money and resource costs all the way up to ten, but even that didn't seem to reduce the size of the navies very much.

Now I'm playing a game where I have modified the AI files of major powers by reducing the preferred navy size numbers but it's too early to say if that has any effect. Maybe not because the new ship type inventions trigger the naval race AI which sets the preferred navy size to -1 which means that the AI builds as many ships as it can. Perhaps that AI file should be modified also.

 

[Andrelvis]

One major problem is that you can simply put the naval maintenance to minimum and have no significant bad effects.

 

[unmerged(75409)]

Well, yes, you do have a bad effect: If the AI dows you and you have had your slider at zero, then your fleets need weeks to get into shape. More if you have many ships and no naval bases. A fleet of 19-strength ships gets blown out of the water real quick unless you are the UK in 1910 and the enemy is an unciv.

 

[Andrelvis]

That's why I said significant

In the case of the AI dowing, you need just the few weeks to get your navy back in shape, whereas you'll never suffer from that problem if it's you who is dowing them. It's not nearly enough of a penalty for paying so much less.

 

[pustak]

I've been thinking about this issue myself lately, trying to come up with a way to limit numbers of dreadnoughts to reasonably historic levels.

At the moment only 10 Hulls are required to build a dreadnought -- why not use this resource as a limiting factor? We could either increase the number needed for each ship substantially, decrease the output of each Hulls factory, or some balanced combination of the two. Think of it this way: if we take the figure above of 29 dreadnoughts for the UK at the start of WWI, and consider that HMS Dreadnought was laid down in 1905 that gives us 29 ships over 9 years, or a bit better than 3 per year. Now consider that Britain had the most extensive naval industry in the world during this period. I think it's fair to call that 2 levels of Hulls factorys in Vicky terms. By that reasoning we see each Hulls factory supplying approximately 1.5 ships worth of materials each year, or 15 Hulls at the current rate. I'm not at home, and don't have access to my computer, but I imagine that current yearly production at Hulls factories is significantly more than that.

If we're striving for the historical rarity of these ships needed to make each one important and worthwhile I think we ought to focus on limiting the ability to amass the needed materials to build one. I imagine that an added bonus of very limited Hulls production would be that they would all but disappear from the world market, which would ensure that only highly industrialized nations were building dreadnoughts, as was the case.

Thoughts?

 

[unmerged(42621)]

Increasing the number of hulls needed for each ship could work, but the increase has to be pretty drastic because in one game I changed the number of hulls needed for one ship to 40 (the current need is only 4) and UK still managed to build over one hundred dreadnoughts.

Speaking of reducing the factory output, I'm not sure if it's possible, AFAIK you can only increase the amount of input needed which of course can do the same thing we are aiming at.

 

[Talquin]

keep in mind that VIP/Ricky allows you to make a very unbalanced economy. if i skip making everything but steel/chemicals/hulls you could make the requirement 100 hulls and the AI or the player will still be able to pump out a large number of ships.