Naval combat and fighting bigger navies.

[TalyonUngol]

Alright, so I've started to fall in love with Navies lately, when I was up against a 1944-6 America as Japan in a Multiplayer. It was an AI USA and it was Me, France and Persia in the same faction all fighting America. We split our roles for France being the land warriors, Persia being more of giving us steel and such, and Japan doing the navy. I had my Mushashi sink ten ships and I was like WOAH! I was super happy to see that. Well, now I want to try and take this to a smaller navy country like Germany. So when going up against UK who has more ships, is there a way for a superior fleet in terms of composition and build to actually win or is this a numbers game where more ships wins?

I like my super heavy BB's very much and I always make two for every country I do and have them in seperate strike fleets to sink ships. 1-2 carriers per strike fleet as well and a mixture of CA's, CL's and DD's. Well, as Japan its easy to build up a navy and smack down your enemies since you -start- with a navy but what about Germany that has to build up it? Would a smaller fleet of like 1 SHBB, 1 CV, 2-3 CA's, 4-6 CL's 10-20 DD's do well against America and the UK or would they not do so well?

Im trying to learn the navy better when it comes to smaller countries so sorry about the long post. Just thought some backgrounf was helpful!

 

[KDEstroy]

SHBB's are actually not very cost efficient. The meta is mostly battlecruisers, light cruisers, destroyers, and subs. Naval battles mostly come down to screen attrition, if all of your screen ships die, your big ships have to retreat or get cut down by torpedoes. Capital ships support screen ships, not the other way around.

SHBB's are overkill as the AI almost never builds new capital ships after 1940, and a 44 BC is practically invincible to everything except bombers and torpedoes.

 

[FLUX2226]

Glad to see another superheavy BB enthusiast :>

In terms of minimum cost and maximum payout: Spam sub 3s, spam naval bombers, lay mines, and the AI will be at your mercy. A properly designed surface fleet is for the most part just flavor, as much as it pains me to say this - because I love the navy system, and I LOVE my superheavy BBs.
Having said that, against the AI there's not really a wrong naval way. They might be able to build 7/2 or 14/4 divisions but AI ship designs are just bonkers. As long as you build up-to-date ships and retrofit old ones with better modules (just don't retrofit engines and armor, this is extremely expensive for some reason) and you don't pull off some negative IQ fleet composition or ship designs, you should have the upper hand in the long run.

So far I only played one game as a naval-focused fascist Germany (with two superheavy BBs, among other things). It was a good while ago tho' so I don't remember that much unfortunately. But even if you focus on a surface navy I wouldn't recommend the Plan Z focus branch - flipping the nordic countries is very difficult and the landing craft research bonus from the Norway focus didn't even work for me. And you need to build some dockyards obviously. The more you have, the faster you will overtake the UK. I think I had over 40 dockyards by the time the war started.


I don't know how experienced you are in terms of navy so I will just spit all my knowledge, and if someone happens to correct me and I learn something from it, even better.

If anything, superheavy BBs are fun. And since Germany isn't restricted by the naval treaty you can have two well equipped floating fortresses ready by late 1939 without problems (don't forget the Atlantic designer when researching the hull!). As long as they are screened and protected against planes (either by fighter cover or AA), their firepower and resilience will execute the outdated capital ships of the UK even if you're outnumbered in terms of capitals. Sure, you can achieve the same result with less investment by building more naval bombers or by focusing on ship torpedos, but if you like superheavy BBs (like I do), the satisfaction is worth the cost-
I think I had 4 main battery turrets on each of them, based on the actual H-class battleship designs. The remaining slots filled with secondaries and some AA. Most expensive ship I've ever built, but to quote Zagara from Starcraft 2: "He only needs one." - and I got two of them! haha hms hood go boom

CVs are an option but not necessary as Germany if you plan on defeating the UK before Pearl Harbor happens. Surface battles will be fought exclusively in the sea zones between you and the UK where there's plenty of opportunity for land-based air support. If you plan on dueling it out with the US you will certainly benefit from CVs, but you obviously don't need to have them ready by 1939.

CAs... just no. Heavy attack focused CAs are worthless as they can't properly damage screens and can't pen BCs/BBs, light attack focused ones (just a single CA battery to push them into the capital row where they are protected from enemy screens) only work against navies without capital ships. But if you still build them for immersion, don't add any armor. It won't stop a large shell anyway and without it your CAs can at least dodge a bit better.

For screens, my CLs are usually focused on light attacks and having enough armor to brush off enemy light attacks, while DDs are my torpedo ships. If you're behind schedule with your DD production (definitely not because we built super-expensive capital ships or something :> ), put some torpedos on your CLs instead and just spam the most cost-effective cannon fodder DD you can build: Pick the hull that offers the highest HP per production cost, the cheapest gun and the best engine (more speed = more dodging). No other modules, except for AA if you won't have fighter cover - damage gets spread more or less evenly among all screens so in terms of screening, having a lot of cheap DDs is preferable to having a few expensive ones (more combined HP = less DDs lost = better screening).

For the overall fleet composition: Remember the screening ratio. 1 CV needs 1 capital, and 1 CV or capital needs 3 screens. So your minimum CV strike force would be 1 CV, 1 capital, 6 screens. In terms of screen composition I don't have a strict scheme, usually I spread all of my combat CLs among my strike forces and fill the rest with DDs to reach 100% screening - and adding a few extra DDs on top to compensate for potential losses. Just don't get too ambitious, having too many screens gives penalties to screening efficiency. Depending on your designs you should end up with 1 CL to 3 or more DDs if I have the same number of dockyards assigned to each production line.

The effectiveness of your AA depends on the total AA value in battle - so even if capital ships are the main targets for planes, just adding AA to your capitals won't do the trick. If you plan on staying without fighter cover, all ships must carry the burden of at least some AA.

 

[Caeric]

In general I wouldn't recommend going over 2-3 at most gun modules. The speed cost is simply too great and you will usually cripple the enemy nearly as fast whilst being harder to catch. Remember that your task force is only as fast as the slowest ship in it, even if you have fast screens that can go 35+ knots, if your capital ships are stuck trudging along at 20 knots then so is the rest of the fleet.

When fighting as numerically inferior to your opponent, using the higher speed of more modern capital ships can be used to your advantage as if you have enough Intel and spotting your fleet can simply withdraw from any doomstacks the Royal Navy or USN send at you as the AI tends to inevitably do. Same goes for using Raiding Fleet Designer and the Trade Interdiction doctrine to increase this advantage further. For some reason surface visibility seems to act as an evasion stat further reducing any damage you take and most seem to agree it even outweighs more armor in general.

As for what builds I go for I generally opt for 2-3 guns the highest armor module for the class. And 3-4 dual purpose secondary guns to help kill off screens faster in addition to providing AA. As a general rule though I rarely ever make a ship slower than 27 knots when I do not outnumber the enemy.

All this said though I really wish PDX would reevaluate some naval problems. Currently it seems in terms of weight cost a firepower a single gun battery module actually corresponds to almost 2 turrets, and if you try to imitate a real design you will end up vastly slower than the actual ship unless you remove half the guns. Visual representation may need to change to better reflect this.
Heavy cruisers in general need to be reevaluated, they are not capital ships, at best they were used as flagships for leading smaller squadrons or for small navies in general, their guns are supposed to be optimised for fighting enemy cruisers and thus giving them heavy attack and piercing is rather counterproductive.

 

[FLUX2226]

Heavy cruisers in general need to be reevaluated, they are not capital ships, at best they were used as flagships for leading smaller squadrons or for small navies in general, their guns are supposed to be optimised for fighting enemy cruisers and thus giving them heavy attack and piercing is rather counterproductive.

Something I'd like to see would be CA batteries giving both light and heavy attack so they can fight both CAs and screens. Keep them as capital ships (so smaller nations with limited naval production can still get a Pride of the Fleet or shore bombardement) but make BCs/BBs target their own counterparts more often than CAs, while CAs prioritize enemy CAs and then screens instead of larger ships they can't pen.

With this, CAs would be decent support capitals since they can effectively fight off enemy CAs and screens while your bigger ships draw most of the enemy big guns' attention, and are still protected by your screens.

 

[Dalnar]

I fail to see why light cruisers can be build with 10 naval yards and heavy cruisers only with 5, considering the main difference is not in tonnage of ships but their guns.

 

[Caeric]

Something I'd like to see would be CA batteries giving both light and heavy attack so they can fight both CAs and screens. Keep them as capital ships (so smaller nations with limited naval production can still get a Pride of the Fleet or shore bombardement) but make BCs/BBs target their own counterparts more often than CAs, while CAs prioritize enemy CAs and then screens instead of larger ships they can't pen.
With this, CAs would be decent support capitals since they can effectively fight off enemy CAs and screens while your bigger ships draw most of the enemy big guns' attention, and are still protected by your screens.

Not a bad idea, although specifically they wouldn't need heavy attack to damage enemy CAs as they lack sufficient armor anyway. A better solution would maybe be to change targetting priorities to have guns focus on like for like and a checklist for which to prioritise next. (To give an example, BB/BC priotise enemy BB/BC then CA, then screens etc. with their main guns, CA focus enemy CA, then CL then DD etc. for all classes). Technically limiting shore bombardment to only CA's or bigger is a very arbitrary limitation as CL's also frequently participated to great effect during landings in the Pacific for example. Whilst they provide a smaller payload they generally made up for it with larger broadside weight and a faster rate of fire. (For the same tonnage as 3x3 CA guns you could usually fit a CL with 4x3 6" guns).

I fail to see why light cruisers can be build with 10 naval yards and heavy cruisers only with 5, considering the main difference is not in tonnage of ships but their guns.

Another reason as part of them being shoehorned into being pseudo-capitals ships by PDX when in reality their role wasn't any different. They were simply restricted to keep the naval arms race to simply start on the cruiser front instead after the moratorium on capital ships and tonnage limitations, although to be fair this merely resulted in bigger and bigger light cruisers becoming the focus instead

 

[Feeblezak]

I fail to see why light cruisers can be build with 10 naval yards and heavy cruisers only with 5, considering the main difference is not in tonnage of ships but their guns.

Because Paradox considers heavy cruisers to be capital ships. Why? Who knows.

 

[Orbs]

I have this thread bookmarked because it's got so much good Navy info (and also is exactly what you're interested in doing as Navy Germany).

Navy Germany

I want to reach global sea dominance as Germany in a somewhat historical setting. That means engaging the royal navy in an open fight and winning big. What do I need? I was thinking about: 4 1936 CVs with 50% FTR, 50% NAV and 4 1936 BBs...

forum.paradoxplaza.com

As Italy I defeated both the French and British navies by following the advice in those lovely posts. Of course I didn't sail up to Dover and say "here I am let's go", instead I waged a guerilla campaign in the Med with my stack and started picking them off on my terms, in green air (green air is important), right off the coast of Rome, then off the coast of Sicily, and so on until I controlled the Med. Once I had the Med I could concentrate on the ground war in Africa, which got me the Suez, and then I took Gibralter, and then everyone was in trouble

TLDR: light guns on CL and Destroyers