Next Naval Update?

[Usable Username]

I have Posted a Suggestion thread up titled 'Navy - Efficient Balance Changes for a More Dynamic System' based on the learnings from this discussion thread.

Please head over and upvote the thread so we can get a more dynamic hoi4 Navy experience.

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An effort to implement as small a change for a large, positive impact on Hoi4 Navy as it stands.

Proposed Changes:

1. Introduce a new column in naval engagements for cruisers in-between destroyers and capitals, similar to what was done to carriers a while back.

2. Allow destroyers to screen for cruisers at a rate of 1-1 or 2-1. and apply a lesser screening bonus to accuracy in the cruiser column of ~10-20% that gives destroyers an opportunity to provide a supporting buff without making them a necessity for every fleet comp. Use cruiser column + destroyer column to provide screening to capitals.

3. Set both gun types to fire on all ranges. Weigh the gun types to each include cruisers as a high priority (column 1 and 2 high priority for lights, 2+ high priority for heavies), (optional extra) weight the gun types to bleed a small portion of shots towards their less then ideal targets, i.e. lights target capitals sometimes, Heavy guns have a small chance to target DD sometimes. Use Cruiser column + Capital Column to screen for Carriers + Transport column.

4. Upgrade light armour ratings to sit above their respectively tiered guns to reduce the effectiveness of light batteries when compared to heavy batteries at killing cruisers. Use devspective to set this number in such a way so that within reason, heavy cruisers become more efficient at killing heavily equipped cruisers, while at the very light and fast end of cruiser design, light guns can remain the most efficient. Tie a one off heavy damage accuracy buff to medium guns to balance. (Similar check to capital or not)

5. Consider proportional adjustments to destroyers and secondary batteries in line with the % armour increase.

6. Enjoy fielding a wider variety of fleet compositions that will each have advantages and disadvantages in different matchups and conditions.

Bonus: Hopefully all of these changes have been done before and dont employ anything particularly complex or new in the back end. Maby Gui exempted?? Sad to be proven wrong, but not surprised if i am.

The discussion continues....

Regards

Usable Username

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Edit: added medium gun accuracy buff for balance as required.

Edit: updated light gun targeting.

Please note i have updated my first from its orgional to summarise the first 3 pages of posts.

Origional First post below.
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Problem - navy armour is useless for heavy cruisers and not particularly useful elsewhere as the speed increase for not using it is often better then using it. Leading metta of l1 DD and light gun CA essentially capitalises on this and effectively makes any updated heavy gun redundant. bb and shbb especially.

Solution:

Can we please consider giving light cruiser batteries/light batteries in general the ability to engage the second naval row at a scaling rate to screening efficiency maxing out say 20%? Perhaps the inverse rate to heavy guns? This could also provide a buff to BB as they would have a ?realistic? effect of taking some small gun attention for the fleet.

Consider adding a 5-15% damage reduction as soon as the armour beats the piercing, then add scaling as is on top. I.e.

And importantly add a small scaled damage reduction for guns that do pierce the enemies armour. I.e. l2 guns on L1 armour still gives a 10-20% reduction reduced to 0 with l3 guns. with cmdr and doctrine buffs moving this around.

Or/and .consider adding a heavy cruiser armour set.

Essentially an armour buff that is more scaled and not as powerful as the old 90% upfront reduction. Gives value to armour over a wider variety of situations.

Simple changes should reset the arms race and make a larger variety of fleet compesitions available.

Kind Regards

UsableUsername

P.s. can we please consider giving early BB like the Kongo class a historically appropriate set of secondary batteries? 16 152mm guns are currently reflected as 3.0 light attack.... heavy secondary mod?

 

[Usable Username]

So past assuming the new cruiser-layer, and with the goal of making the CA target cruisers, and wanting to have as few deviations from current as possible. We can keep heavy guns at 2 range, which lets the CA shoot other cruisers, but stops BB from shooting other BB. We could increase range to 3 for heavy guns which lets the BB shoot other BB, but then our CA are also going to be tempted to shoot BB, or if we weight heavy attack for cruisers, the BB are going to be weighted to shoot cruisers.

Giving CA medium attack would allow the CA to shoot cruisers and we can put heavy attack at 3 range and weight the capitals, so BB shoot other BB. I don't know what the "cost" of adding another attack type is going to end up being, but this seems to be the best option.

I am just a little sceptical about setting up those hard boundaries for range's again incase we provide another sort of super efficient 'step' like is currently being used by the LC-CA meta. I covered off concerns earlier about bc becoming the next equivalent but it wouldn't help if we make them auto immune to every heavy cruiser just because they brought some roach dd.

Similarly while I completely agree that CA need to target cruisers. I really don't have any problem with bb/bc being an equally high priority for them. They would still apply a reliable 60-80% of damage against lower tier bb armour. And maby even pen early BC armour.

If we set that up through more complicated targeting weightings, it will have a smoother more natural damage spread. If it applied a weighting to each available ship to target, it should still hold true that if I don't have many BB compared to cruisers in my fleet, then you wont be sending much of your heavy attack against my BB.

To illustrate my point, if we hard cap heavy guns on ca so they can't shoot past the cruiser line, we would be giving the minimal armour bc a massive increase in cost efficiency, and encouraging the use of 'roach' screens of some kind or another. Say roach LC

If you run the same demo with bc also taking fire weighted similar to the roach LC. It looses that exploity like element to it. And the results would probably be a more desirable/balanced outcome.

 

[Corpse Fool]

I am just a little sceptical about setting up those hard boundaries for range's again incase we provide another sort of super efficient 'step' like is currently being used by the LC-CA meta. I covered off concerns earlier about bc becoming the next equivalent but it wouldn't help if we make them auto immune to every heavy cruiser just because they brought some roach dd.

Which is why I said...

I think we are now at the point of trying to work around fleet compositions (amounts of types of ships) and what sorts of screen bonuses the cruiser/capital/carrier lines should be getting. Once we have the assumptions about the composition and screen bonuses, we can make up ship templates and tune the values of each module to form the whole.

We should soon start thinking about what sorts of things we want the players the players to be doing. If we want historically sized fleets with historically accurate compositions of the fleet and layouts of the ships, lets build the mechanics and balance the stats such that doing that thing will provide a benefit. Lets find a way to encourage players to do those things, without being overly stifling of their creativity.

We have to start making decisions, locking in certain mechanics like cruiser layer and gun ranges, and then working within those new parameters to bring about the desired result.

Similarly while I completely agree that CA need to target cruisers. I really don't have any problem with bb/bc being an equally high priority for them.

If the CA uses new medium attacks, we can change their range and preference to whatever we end up want. they are most likely going to be the only ship class which uses that type of attack, the changes are isolated. The concern is that if we leave CA with heavy attack, we are linking the targeting priorities for both the cruisers and the capitals, and we most likely want the capitals to be heavily prioritizing other capitals. Either that, or we are going to end up making a bunch of secret, hidden mechanics that make it difficult for players to just look at the things and understand how each piece is supposed to fit together. I am firmly against hiding information from players, and would prefer to avoid having to make exceptions to rules as possible.

Decision time, no particular order.

Is the range of heavy attack going to be 2 or 3?
Are the CA going to be medium or heavy attack, and what range would the medium attack have?
(where and panzerschiffe and coastal defense cruisers going to fit into this, because currently they can mount the BB guns)
What is the model fleet composition going to look like? 4 CV, 4 Cap, 4 cruiser, 24 DD?
What sort of ways can we enforce that particular model? (positioning reduction on fleets above a certain size will help avoid single group doom stacks)
Based on the ship counts in the assumed model, what are the chances you would want each ship in each layer, to attack whatever ship in whatever layer, using a particular weapon? BB/BC being 45/45/10 for cap/cruiser/screen? Cruisers being 40/40/20 for cap/cruiser screen?

I think that is enough for now. I know basically nothing about actual, historical naval stuff and that is why I'm not answering any of those questions myself. So I'm going to hand it over to people that might in hopes of them just giving me a goal to work towards.

 

[Usable Username]

We should soon start thinking about what sorts of things we want the players the players to be doing. If we want historically sized fleets with historically accurate compositions of the fleet and layouts of the ships, lets build the mechanics and balance the stats such that doing that thing will provide a benefit. Lets find a way to encourage players to do those things, without being overly stifling of their creativity.

Happy to get the ball rolling.

That the most cost efficient way of using each ship should be as follows. (Ignoring subs for now)

part 1.
DD<CL<CA<BB<SHBB<CV

Part 2
DD + small lightly equipped CL > CA + BB + SHBB. (Remember I'm talking efficiency here)

And effective screening can mitigate this edge by lowering incoming torps and providing a small accuracy buff.

Part 3
Enough of a difference in cruisers so that there is a working scale within them such that we get. Quick LC<heavy LC< lighter CA < Heavier CA < Quicker CL again.

Again stressing I'm talking cost efficiency, not 1 to 1 matchups.

Ond for reference when I say light LC I'm talking no armour, visibility reductions where able, maby 1 early gun and a secondary with some torps. Sort of an oversized DD. Heavy LC say a Brooklyn +

Carriers remain scary in every situation but are countered to varying extents by - land based air cover, other carriers running fighters, AA mods on ships, night time and bad weather.

Q:does anyone have anything they would like to say about that generalised progression? Because it is important that we agree on an end point before going back to detail.

On detail. I have posted my recommended changes at the start of this thread. and that includes strong feelings to have everything hit everything, and reduce targeting where you want by using ammo weightings and screening steps.

I would add that while I think strongly that light armour should be more valuable and that screening accuracy be lessened, especially for the cruiser screen to enable viable formations without it. I am aware that heavy guns will probably still need better calibrating on top or medium damage introduced to get to the desired progressions outlined above.

I vote for one off heavy damage accuracy%+ to be tied to the medium gun module as the simplest fix. (Same style check that is currently being used to define a CL as a capital). And make it apparent that it gets applied.

That is all I would ask for up front and I would leave the exact proportions of how to achieve that progression up to the developers.

Rebalance to subs, carriers and aerial navy attack as later priorities. Maby just add cruiser armour to carriers to balance.

Also I realise I'm mixing my my designations and apologise.

 

[balmung60]

Or/and .consider adding a heavy cruiser armour set.

Problem is, heavy cruisers really weren't any better armored than light cruisers, save perhaps for the Baltimore class. And fundamentally, no cruiser was really protected against heavy cruiser guns, and even protection from light cruiser guns was marginal.

One gap in the ship lineup is large/supercruisers or "cruiser-killers" or whatever you wish to call them. Yes, there are battlecruisers in-game and yes, it's essentially a reinvention of the original battlecruiser concept, but what battlecruisers were by the time was more like a proto-fast battleship and the last battlecruisers had much the same armament as their battleship cousins, while these cruiser-killers did not. There was a whole generation ships designed to run down heavy cruisers, resist eight or nine inch guns and no more, and armed with 11 to 13 inch guns. The best known of these is the American Alaska class, but Japan and the Netherlands also designed such ships, and arguably the French Dunkerques kind of stumbled into the concept while trying to be some sort of light battleship.

What I'd do with this is make heavy cruisers screens rather than capitals and add large cruisers (or whatever term is ultimately preferred) as the lightest capital ships, starting with a 1940 model and maybe also having a 1944 model.

 

[Usable Username]

Problem is, heavy cruisers really weren't any better armored than light cruisers, save perhaps for the Baltimore class. And fundamentally, no cruiser was really protected against heavy cruiser guns, and even protection from light cruiser guns was marginal.

One gap in the ship lineup is large/supercruisers or "cruiser-killers" or whatever you wish to call them. Yes, there are battlecruisers in-game and yes, it's essentially a reinvention of the original battlecruiser concept, but what battlecruisers were by the time was more like a proto-fast battleship and the last battlecruisers had much the same armament as their battleship cousins, while these cruiser-killers did not. There was a whole generation ships designed to run down heavy cruisers, resist eight or nine inch guns and no more, and armed with 11 to 13 inch guns. The best known of these is the American Alaska class, but Japan and the Netherlands also designed such ships, and arguably the French Dunkerques kind of stumbled into the concept while trying to be some sort of light battleship.

What I'd do with this is make heavy cruisers screens rather than capitals and add large cruisers (or whatever term is ultimately preferred) as the lightest capital ships, starting with a 1940 model and maybe also having a 1944 model.

Thanks for contributing balmung, that quote your using is from a little early on in the discussion and we have largely moved on from that idea.

Do you have an opinion to help inform on how the proposed changes listed at the beginning or the conversations directly above would fare?

On your heavy+ cruisers, all for being able to represent as many ships as possible, but if there isn't going to be a significant variation in gameplay compared to say a Lightly equipped BC with extra secondaries, i would rather prioritise this for down the track.

Need to fix up the current state of things before we can go getting new toys.

 

[balmung60]

Ultimately, what killed battleships wasn't cruisers or destroyers, it was aircraft and submarines

And on occasion, other battleships (Yamashiro, Kirishima, Bismarck, Scharnhorst).

 

[balmung60]

Thanks for contributing balmung, that quote your using is from a little early on in the discussion and we have largely moved on from that idea.

Do you have an opinion to help inform on how the proposed changes listed at the beginning or the conversations directly above would fare?

On your heavy+ cruisers, all for being able to represent as many ships as possible, but if there isn't going to be a significant variation in gameplay compared to say a Lightly equipped BC with extra secondaries, i would rather prioritise this for down the track.

Need to fix up the current state of things before we can go getting new toys.

I believe there was talk by some users of splitting the screen line into cruisers and destroyers for the purpose of targeting. The primary role and targeting of CB guns would be the cruiser line. Assuming that in this case, there would be a new category of medium attack/piercing that primarily targets cruisers, heavy cruisers and large cruisers would both do medium attack, and yes, large cruisers would be much better at it. However, you can't just prepare for naval war by building CBs because they're 1940 tech, so especially in the early war, you're stuck with CAs for medium attack. This also makes the historical case of winning the naval war before CBs can get their chance to shine quite likely.

Also CBs taking the place of lightly-equipped BCs or current naked CAs would be in line with the actual stated purpose of CBs, and thus not nearly as bizarre a use of their hulls as light attack optimized heavy cruisers and battlecruisers.

 

[Paul.Ketcham]

I believe there was talk by some users of splitting the screen line into cruisers and destroyers for the purpose of targeting. The primary role and targeting of CB guns would be the cruiser line. Assuming that in this case, there would be a new category of medium attack/piercing that primarily targets cruisers, heavy cruisers and large cruisers would both do medium attack, and yes, large cruisers would be much better at it. However, you can't just prepare for naval war by building CBs because they're 1940 tech, so especially in the early war, you're stuck with CAs for medium attack. This also makes the historical case of winning the naval war before CBs can get their chance to shine quite likely.

Also CBs taking the place of lightly-equipped BCs or current naked CAs would be in line with the actual stated purpose of CBs, and thus not nearly as bizarre a use of their hulls as light attack optimized heavy cruisers and battlecruisers.

The one big danger here is that the "super-cruiser" or CB ultimately mirrors the original concept of the battlecruiser, and by Jutland it was pretty obvious that if someone sailed out with a battlecruiser its opponent would engage it with either another battlecruiser, or a battleship (the 5th battle squadron of Queen Elizabeth-class sailed in the British scouting force with the BCs). If their targeting ignores capital ships, then you either have a scenario where they get killed by an unopposed enemy capital ship (and waste their main battery), or where potentially two capital ships ignore each other entirely (i.e. an Alaska and a Stalingrad). Typically, ships shoot at the ship that's most threatening to them, rather than the one their guns are intended to defeat.

If you had an Alaska-class and a Renown-class or Scharnhorst-class get into a fight, the Alaska would still engage the capital ships rather than cruisers. In the Dunkerque's case, it was actually designed to be able to take on the Scharnhorst and Conte di Cavour classes. Unlike a heavy cruiser, supercruisers have the gunpower to actually threaten them at range, and a realistic chance at sinking them. Plus, it gets confusing when you recall that 12 battleships still have armor in the 8-10 inch range (Minas Gerais, Rivadavia, Almirante Latorre, España, Marat, and Courbet classes).

The most realistic choice for heavy-gunned cruisers would be to treat them as interchangeable with similar-hulled ships (pocket battleships target like CAs, super-cruisers target like BCs), while the most simple in-game method would be to have the gun determine target (with a possible class addition for CB/ACRs to represent "armored cruisers", or cruisers armed with BB-size heavy guns).

 

[Paul.Ketcham]

I am just a little sceptical about setting up those hard boundaries for range's again incase we provide another sort of super efficient 'step' like is currently being used by the LC-CA meta. I covered off concerns earlier about bc becoming the next equivalent but it wouldn't help if we make them auto immune to every heavy cruiser just because they brought some roach dd.

Similarly while I completely agree that CA need to target cruisers. I really don't have any problem with bb/bc being an equally high priority for them. They would still apply a reliable 60-80% of damage against lower tier bb armour. And maby even pen early BC armour.

There are two things to think about when it comes to screens targeting capital ships:

1.) If piercing works properly, it isn't effective. Even a heavy cruiser has something around 6 inches of max penetration at 15km (on a flat surface, not angled) with a 1.7kg bursting charge (US figures), compared to a 14-inch gun with 16 inches of max penetration at 15km (flat surface) and a 10.4kg bursting charge. Or, in other words, a CA can at-best poke some holes in poorly-armored extended protection or superstructure mounts (or lightly-protected mountings like AA guns), and that has the best firepower of any small-caliber guns you can build.

2.) From a historical perspective, most screens would only be in-range of capital ships if they were very close, which implies the screen efficiency has fallen (i.e. 1st Battle of Guadalcanal, where a Japanese BC ended up engaged by US destroyer gunfire at 1km range because both admirals were afraid to shoot at mysterious targets in the night until they were on top of each other). In order for these ships to do any damage, they also have to get close (even a destroyer 5-inch gun can pierce the armor of a battlecruiser at close enough ranges to deal damage, but we're talking about the kind of ranges where torpedoes don't have time to arm and capital ship secondaries can't lower enough to target them back).

 

[Usable Username]

(where and panzerschiffe and coastal defense cruisers going to fit into this, because currently they can mount the BB guns)
What is the model fleet composition going to look like? 4 CV, 4 Cap, 4 cruiser, 24 DD?
What sort of ways can we enforce that particular model? (positioning reduction on fleets above a certain size will help avoid single group doom stacks)
Based on the ship counts in the assumed model, what are the chances you would want each ship in each layer, to attack whatever ship in whatever layer, using a particular weapon? BB/BC being 45/45/10 for cap/cruiser/screen? Cruisers being 40/40/20 for cap/cruiser screen?

Filling in some of the bits I didn't put my position down on.

On coastal defense, my votes on capital as they fit a bit of a clunky role that would require screens and prevent them from screening others, the guns matching BB I feel also makes it their natural home I reckon.

Model fleet comp - not sure, hopefully enough variation after the changes to make it all less standard. Screening bonuses are in effect our 'combo move' so I suppose id like to see a the bare minimum for picking up all the bonuses look something like.

3DD 3C 1 BB 1CV.

But if say I saw someone doing something like that with all CA. I would be able to put together a torpedo based destroyer fleet with some fast CL and come off better by shooting down the screen and torpedoing the heavier ships. Aka how the current metta would translate.

But it should be completely viable for the next person to go... gotta counter a torpedo swarm. I'll put out 10 moderate speed LC and a CV or two. Cv will get the same screening bonus. And although the cruisers won't get theirs, you still wind up with a better counter by investing those DD points into more cruisers, etc. Sky would be the limit. Want go all BB? 3DD to each BB, power to you, should do well against slow cruiser formations and those fleets with lower BB counts.

To enable this sort of dynamic we should just need to keep the cruiser screening buff rather low and the ratio at 1-1.

On doomstacks, the enemy fleet size penalty is the way this is currently controlled. Personally I don't think messing with this end is the way to fix it. I would rather provide an incentive for people to want to fan their forces out more. No ideas on this yet.

1.) If piercing works properly, it isn't effective. Even a heavy cruiser has something around 6 inches of max penetration at 15km (on a flat surface, not angled) with a 1.7kg bursting charge (US figures), compared to a 14-inch gun with 16 inches of max penetration at 15km (flat surface) and a 10.4kg bursting charge. Or, in other words, a CA can at-best poke some holes in poorly-armored extended protection or superstructure mounts (or lightly-protected mountings like AA guns), and that has the best firepower of any small-caliber guns you can build.

Edit: got these numbers wrong first time, still a problem.

I think we may have a problem with medium gun piercing. At tec lvl 2 against 1936 BB armor, DD scale against armour to apply 17% light cruiser around 34% and mediums 96.5%!.

96.5% will be way be gamebreakingly high as we have effectively made medium guns for cost efficient by cutting down their screen requirements. Thankfully medium gun piercing can be changed in isolation, or we consider a general armour buff for capitals same as we have discussed with cruisers, where the standard is to only apply ~80% agains like technology. But there will be a fair bit of balancing involved in that, torpedoes included.

Not ready to take a position on that one yet.

With all my posts guys, please make sure anyone whose reading all of my posts takes the time to point out any flaws they can see in what I'm writing up if able. Ideally just before you propose a possible solution. Best thing anyone can do in this thread is change an opinion.

 

[balmung60]

the Dunkerque's case, it was actually designed to be able to take on the Scharnhorst

Other way around - Scharnhorst was a direct response to Dunkerque, which was a response to the panzerschiffe. That Germany didn't have an acceptable gun ready for a ship meant to counter Dunkerque was part of why they had such thick armor. Countering the high-power 13-inch guns with armor rather than equivalent firepower resulted in Scharnhorst and Gneisenau being strange ships that prioritized speed and defense over firepower in a way nothing else ever really did (and yes, Germany wanted to eventually drop 15-inch guns in, but that never happened).

The one big danger here is that the "super-cruiser" or CB ultimately mirrors the original concept of the battlecruiser, and by Jutland it was pretty obvious that if someone sailed out with a battlecruiser its opponent would engage it with either another battlecruiser, or a battleship (the 5th battle squadron of Queen Elizabeth-class sailed in the British scouting force with the BCs).

There's a major counter point to that, however - Jutland-era battlecruisers tended to have the exact same guns as their battleship counterparts, just fewer of them. No large cruiser design had comparable main guns to their immediate battleship counterparts. In an era when even the most badly undergunned battleships were being built with 14-inch guns and normal countries were looking at 15 or 16-inch guns, large cruisers tended to hover around 12 inches. A WWI battlecruiser could hurt an enemy battleship at the same range as a battleship that was its contemporary. WWII large cruisers, both realized and planned, could not effectively engage a contemporary battleship like that.

Plus, it gets confusing when you recall that 12 battleships still have armor in the 8-10 inch range (Minas Gerais, Rivadavia, Almirante Latorre, España, Marat, and Courbet classes).

Yeah, 30 or 40 years of development will leave you behind like that.

The most realistic choice for heavy-gunned cruisers would be to treat them as interchangeable with similar-hulled ships (pocket battleships target like CAs, super-cruisers target like BCs), while the most simple in-game method would be to have the gun determine target (with a possible class addition for CB/ACRs to represent "armored cruisers", or cruisers armed with BB-size heavy guns).

I mean, as you pointed out, I'd expect pretty much any ship to focus its fire on the most threatening ship if it's in range, but making CBs target like other capitals just runs them directly into the current problem with CA batteries - you have a gun type that wants to target ships whose armor it's always going to fail to penetrate. In that case the best gameplay use case I could think of to try to push CBs into would then be to muck around with their fuel consumption and detection/visibility to encourage using them as the heaviest ships for patrol fleets and they would hope to end an engagement with enemy screens (and any opposing CBs) before the strike force and its actual battleships could arrive.

 

[Usable Username]

On doomstacks, the enemy fleet size penalty is the way this is currently controlled. Personally I don't think messing with this end is the way to fix it. I would rather provide an incentive for people to want to fan their forces out more. No ideas on this yet.

Quick note on doomstacks, could potentially discourage it further by making it less cost efficient. I.e. allow for ship detection values to feed into a positioning buff, make the requirements increase as fleet size increases.

History wise I'm pretty sure float planes weren't usually coming and going mid fight, but it would also pick up line of sight and radar figures.

Noting its outside of our origional targeted scope.

 

[Paul.Ketcham]

Other way around - Scharnhorst was a direct response to Dunkerque, which was a response to the panzerschiffe. That Germany didn't have an acceptable gun ready for a ship meant to counter Dunkerque was part of why they had such thick armor. Countering the high-power 13-inch guns with armor rather than equivalent firepower resulted in Scharnhorst and Gneisenau being strange ships that prioritized speed and defense over firepower in a way nothing else ever really did (and yes, Germany wanted to eventually drop 15-inch guns in, but that never happened).


There's a major counter point to that, however - Jutland-era battlecruisers tended to have the exact same guns as their battleship counterparts, just fewer of them. No large cruiser design had comparable main guns to their immediate battleship counterparts. In an era when even the most badly undergunned battleships were being built with 14-inch guns and normal countries were looking at 15 or 16-inch guns, large cruisers tended to hover around 12 inches. A WWI battlecruiser could hurt an enemy battleship at the same range as a battleship that was its contemporary. WWII large cruisers, both realized and planned, could not effectively engage a contemporary battleship like that.


Yeah, 30 or 40 years of development will leave you behind like that.


I mean, as you pointed out, I'd expect pretty much any ship to focus its fire on the most threatening ship if it's in range, but making CBs target like other capitals just runs them directly into the current problem with CA batteries - you have a gun type that wants to target ships whose armor it's always going to fail to penetrate. In that case the best gameplay use case I could think of to try to push CBs into would then be to muck around with their fuel consumption and detection/visibility to encourage using them as the heaviest ships for patrol fleets and they would hope to end an engagement with enemy screens (and any opposing CBs) before the strike force and its actual battleships could arrive.

For the first point, that's technically true from the German perspective, but the French still had time to redesign the Dunkerques in response as they were mid-production, and chose not to (they redesigned them something like 4 times while building); later, the Italian battleship reworks pushed them to increase the armor on Strasbourg (as the guns were being bored out, so they were 12.8 inch rather than 11-inch guns). Scharnhorst's weird design choices were also influenced by their WWI design philosophy (14-inches was standard BB armor in WWI) and emphasis on raiding (less than 30 knots would potentially get them killed by fast BBs or battlecruisers). The guns were mostly just logistically-convenient, since they wanted 15-inch guns but the 11-inch guns were available immediately from cancelled panzerschiffe.

For the second point, the key difference here is capabilities. A heavy cruiser with 8-inch guns and limited armor is simply dead when facing a battlecruiser, while a battlecruiser with some armor and 11/12-inch guns is still able to pierce the armor reliably of a battleship if it gets closer (and can inflict critical hits like knocking out radar or fire control, or jamming turret rings, more easily). Its a mismatch, but at least a feasible one. By comparison, the opposing side's cruisers can't realistically hurt the battlecruisers without approaching to point-blank range or using torpedoes, so the logical counter is battleships.

The other, and arguably decisive problem, is that battlecruisers may be designed to kill cruisers, but battleships and battlecruisers will both try to kill them back, thus the equation falls back on itself. What your guns are best designed to do has no impact on what the enemy guns do, and its historically-disastrous to ignore someone shooting at you (or tactically, to leave a capital ship unengaged in the first place). While some room would exist if you outnumbered an opponent's capital ships with supercruisers, I'd still expect 3 Alaskas to focus fire on a Bismarck rather than just leaving one sacrificial lamb to die while the other two killed less-dangerous ships.

For the third point, my issue is that those ships have the same in-game guns, and shouldn't follow different mechanics, nor should those battleships ignore enemy capital ships in combat.

For the last point, while I can't exactly prove it, I've played the NRM2 mod enough that I've seen battlecruisers and heavy cruisers (without overpowered light batteries) fight against battleships and win; damage accumulation from these guns adds up even in the face of heavy armor. They're not ideal for that, but that's kind of the point.

Battlecruisers were deliberately undersized capital ships that chose lower cost or higher speed rather than the defensive focus of battleships to emphasize their alternative cruiser-killing role, but that leaves them vulnerable to properly designed battleships (and the historic Alaska class is a really good example of that: its not significantly cheaper than an Iowa with vastly-superior armor and firepower, but its also twice the cost of a Baltimore-class CA). Cruiser-killers are a design compromise as a rule, largely due to the fact that battleships had their cost balloon completely out of control between 1906 and 1945.

 

[Usable Username]

Also... in the interest of not having to redesign the user interface, carriers and transports could be tied to the same column as BB so we are back down to 3. Then just a new indicator on the far upper right showing the carrier/transport screening percentage. When it's high enough, those classes get to start a retreat move to get outside of the battle and sit in the reserve pool, when it drops to low they reappear in the column.

Let carriers launch fighters from off screen. (don't they already get this from the first strike mechanic?)

New change is that carriers are now invulnerable while screenings good, counter balance it by ramping the targeting priority for light and heavy guns, they get hit when they are exposed. Maby balance with a %restrictor similar to the one that allows torpedoes through.

Should be able to let hostile aircraft still target them somehow. Don't subs get a chance to hit retreated targets already? Maby something like that could be... port..ed across?

Save time on designing a new interface, make carriers more historical.

Just editing to clarify that my preference is still for 4 columns, but if some dev is reading this and getting put off by the workload in modifying the interface. I'd rather get around it with a change like this, then get nothing at all.

 

[Paul.Ketcham]

Also... in the interest of not having to redesign the user interface, carriers and transports could be tied to the same column as BB so we are back down to 3. Then just a new indicator on the far upper right showing the carrier/transport screening percentage. When it's high enough, those classes get to start a retreat move to get outside of the battle and sit in the reserve pool, when it drops to low they reappear in the column.

Let carriers launch fighters from off screen. (don't they already get this from the first strike mechanic?)

New change is that carriers are now invulnerable while screenings good, counter balance it by ramping the targeting priority for light and heavy guns, they get hit when they are exposed. Maby balance with a %restrictor similar to the one that allows torpedoes through.

Should be able to let hostile aircraft still target them somehow. Don't subs get a chance to hit retreated targets already? Maby something like that could be... port..ed across?

Save time on designing a new interface, make carriers more historical.

This brings up the question of what is the most important information brought up on the three lines of battle in the fleet screen. Right now, the rear line is utility ships (Carriers/Transports), which are supposed to avoid battle, followed by the battle line (capital ships shooting past the screen line, but directly in combat), and lastly the screen line (ships on the outside of a fleet or the front of a task force, keeping submarines and destroyers away from the rear two lines).

If you only have three lines, then based on the mechanics I'd rather keep the torpedo-emphasis of the current screen line intact and leave cruisers in the screen line visually, and keep the mechanics invisible (as long as they're labeled in the designer, and on ship tooltips). Instead, use color-codes or extra markings on ships to highlight which ships are associated with the separate screen types (carrier-screen from heavy guns, capital-screen from torpedoes, and cruiser-screen from torpedoes). That way, the front-line ships are still in front, while the rear-line ships are still in the rear.

Technically if the whole system was overhauled, carriers wouldn't normally be in the battle at all; they'd be in a separate detached task force off-battle, which is theoretically already possible but only with a level of micromanagement that's beyond reasonable expectations (if you manually send carriers to support a battle, they won't necessarily enter but their aircraft will still sortie).

With regard to submarines hitting retreating ships, that's supposed to be in-game, but I'm not sure how well it works (it was definitely one of the advertised features in the dev diaries for MtG).

 

[Corpse Fool]

Happy to get the ball rolling.

That the most cost efficient way of using each ship should be as follows. (Ignoring subs for now)

part 1.
DD<CL<CA<BB<SHBB<CV

Part 2
DD + small lightly equipped CL > CA + BB + SHBB. (Remember I'm talking efficiency here)

And effective screening can mitigate this edge by lowering incoming torps and providing a small accuracy buff.

Part 3
Enough of a difference in cruisers so that there is a working scale within them such that we get. Quick LC<heavy LC< lighter CA < Heavier CA < Quicker CL again.

Again stressing I'm talking cost efficiency, not 1 to 1 matchups.

Ond for reference when I say light LC I'm talking no armour, visibility reductions where able, maby 1 early gun and a secondary with some torps. Sort of an oversized DD. Heavy LC say a Brooklyn +

Carriers remain scary in every situation but are countered to varying extents by - land based air cover, other carriers running fighters, AA mods on ships, night time and bad weather.

Q:does anyone have anything they would like to say about that generalised progression? Because it is important that we agree on an end point before going back to detail.

On detail. I have posted my recommended changes at the start of this thread. and that includes strong feelings to have everything hit everything, and reduce targeting where you want by using ammo weightings and screening steps.

I would add that while I think strongly that light armour should be more valuable and that screening accuracy be lessened, especially for the cruiser screen to enable viable formations without it. I am aware that heavy guns will probably still need better calibrating on top or medium damage introduced to get to the desired progressions outlined above.

I vote for one off heavy damage accuracy%+ to be tied to the medium gun module as the simplest fix. (Same style check that is currently being used to define a CL as a capital). And make it apparent that it gets applied.

That is all I would ask for up front and I would leave the exact proportions of how to achieve that progression up to the developers.

Rebalance to subs, carriers and aerial navy attack as later priorities. Maby just add cruiser armour to carriers to balance.

Also I realise I'm mixing my my designations and apologise.

This is not what I wanted. I told you what I wanted.

I guess one thing is that DD/screens with torpedoes are still going to be a pretty sizable threat to cruisers and capitals, provided you can drop the screening efficiency. So that while CA can be good for sinking other cruisers with medium attack, and BC/BB can be good at sinking other captials with heavy attack, stacking enough light attack to wipe their screens and sending the steel fish might still be the go-to.

 

[Usable Username]

This is not what I wanted. I told you what I wanted.

I guess one thing is that DD/screens with torpedoes are still going to be a pretty sizable threat to cruisers and capitals, provided you can drop the screening efficiency. So that while CA can be good for sinking other cruisers with medium attack, and BC/BB can be good at sinking other captials with heavy attack, stacking enough light attack to wipe their screens and sending the steel fish might still be the go-to.

You'll have to elaborate for me there corpse.

Thought I was just locking in my position on final changes for others to disagree/agree.

Try and finalise the discussions to date.

 

[balmung60]

The guns were mostly just logistically-convenient, since they wanted 15-inch guns but the 11-inch guns were available immediately from cancelled panzerschiffe.

They were actually slightly different guns with longer barrels than those for the panzerschiffe. The 15 inch gun design simply wasn't ready yet.

For the second point, the key difference here is capabilities. A heavy cruiser with 8-inch guns and limited armor is simply dead when facing a battlecruiser, while a battlecruiser with some armor and 11/12-inch guns is still able to pierce the armor reliably of a battleship if it gets closer (and can inflict critical hits like knocking out radar or fire control, or jamming turret rings, more easily). Its a mismatch, but at least a feasible one. By comparison, the opposing side's cruisers can't realistically hurt the battlecruisers without approaching to point-blank range or using torpedoes, so the logical counter is battleships.

I'm pretty sure heavy cruisers could do about the same to the belts belts of ships like the Renowns, Kongos, Dunkerques, and Alaskas as those could in turn do to a full-size battleship (okay, so ignore the Renowns in BC/CB vs BB because unlike CBs, BCs like Renown have the exact same guns as their contemporary BBs). Which is to say they could do it, but under favorable circumstances and close range, rather than doing so more or less at will (which sounds like what failing to beat your enemy's armor value is mostly meant to represent mechanically since its a scaled penalty rather than a pass/fail like land). And don't get me wrong, some of those guns were pretty dang powerful - Dunkerque's 13-inch rifles were more powerful (in terms of armor penetration) than KGV's 14-inch rifles - but they're still distinctly less powerful than the 15 and 16 inch rifles of the modern battleships that were their contemporaries. You're not wrong that CBs would shoot other capital ships, but so would all the ships we consider screens if they got the chance.

Battlecruisers were deliberately undersized capital ships that chose lower cost or higher speed rather than the defensive focus of battleships to emphasize their alternative cruiser-killing role, but that leaves them vulnerable to properly designed battleships

This is a common trope, but it wasn't really the case except for the first few battlecruisers (and that's still a stretch). WWI-era battlecruisers were every bit as large as true battleships and generally sacrificed some armor and one turret for speed. After the war, you even got to battlecruisers that were arguably fast battleships as Hood sacrificed neither armor nor firepower relative to her contemporary battleships and completely turns the "deliberately undersized" angle on its head by being the largest warship anywhere in the world until Bismarck very slightly out-displaced her. Hell, from day one, Invincible had nearly the displacement of Dreadnought. Battlecruisers were arguably never any sort of smaller capital ship and always a matter of different ways of allocating weight in a ship the same size as an actual battleship. Which again gets into the difference between a CB and a BC - CBs were actually envisioned as deliberately undersized capital ships (roughly 25,000-30,000 tons vs BBs being 35,000-45,000 tons and quickly preparing to balloon past that as the naval treaties were thrown out (remember both America and the USSR were looking at 65,000 ton battleships and Japan actually did it) and it's precisely this ballooning of battleship size that creates a niche for CBs that didn't really exist when BCs were first envisioned), especially in the case of ships like the Dutch Design 1047, which they knew was never going to be able to be the size of a real battleship, but would be able to run down heavy cruisers and be able to make full-size capital ships think twice, even if they couldn't hope to engage them as an equal and would probably lose if forced to actually fight a true battleship or battlecruiser, and again similarly the Dunkerques which were specifically intended as undersized capital ships in a way no American, Japanese, British, or German battlecruiser ever really was. CBs were mostly, however, meant as a response to Germany's panzerschiffe and a suspected generation of post-treaty heavy cruisers that pretty much never materialized outside of the United States because nobody else really kept building new heavy cruisers during the war. These new heavy cruisers were expected to be much larger and better protected than treaty cruisers because the limitations of the naval treaties basically forced all heavy cruisers to be minimally armored because 10,000 tons (maybe up to 12,000 tons if you were really good at cheating) simply isn't enough for a cruiser with 8-inch guns to be both fast enough to function in a fleet and reasonably protected against 6-inch guns, much less 8-inch guns, hence the huge increase in displacement by the Baltimore class. Essentially, CBs are intended to counter ships that were never actually built, except for by the one country that actually built CBs, but ships they were meant to counter match the armor if not gun profile of meta light cruisers and arguably of what CAs would look like if they were screens instead of capitals.

Again, to make CBs work with identical targeting to BBs, they'd basically need to be suited to joining the patrol fleet and hope to win before a battleship strike fleet could join the battle.

 

[Paul.Ketcham]

This is a common trope, but it wasn't really the case except for the first few battlecruisers (and that's still a stretch). WWI-era battlecruisers were every bit as large as true battleships and generally sacrificed some armor and one turret for speed. After the war, you even got to battlecruisers that were arguably fast battleships as Hood sacrificed neither armor nor firepower relative to her contemporary battleships and completely turns the "deliberately undersized" angle on its head by being the largest warship anywhere in the world until Bismarck very slightly out-displaced her. Hell, from day one, Invincible had nearly the displacement of Dreadnought. Battlecruisers were arguably never any sort of smaller capital ship and always a matter of different ways of allocating weight in a ship the same size as an actual battleship. Which again gets into the difference between a CB and a BC - CBs were actually envisioned as deliberately undersized capital ships (roughly 25,000-30,000 tons vs BBs being 35,000-45,000 tons and quickly preparing to balloon past that as the naval treaties were thrown out (remember both America and the USSR were looking at 65,000 ton battleships and Japan actually did it) and it's precisely this ballooning of battleship size that creates a niche for CBs that didn't really exist when BCs were first envisioned), especially in the case of ships like the Dutch Design 1047, which they knew was never going to be able to be the size of a real battleship, but would be able to run down heavy cruisers and be able to make full-size capital ships think twice, even if they couldn't hope to engage them as an equal and would probably lose if forced to actually fight a true battleship or battlecruiser, and again similarly the Dunkerques which were specifically intended as undersized capital ships in a way no American, Japanese, British, or German battlecruiser ever really was. CBs were mostly, however, meant as a response to Germany's panzerschiffe and a suspected generation of post-treaty heavy cruisers that pretty much never materialized outside of the United States because nobody else really kept building new heavy cruisers during the war. These new heavy cruisers were expected to be much larger and better protected than treaty cruisers because the limitations of the naval treaties basically forced all heavy cruisers to be minimally armored because 10,000 tons (maybe up to 12,000 tons if you were really good at cheating) simply isn't enough for a cruiser with 8-inch guns to be both fast enough to function in a fleet and reasonably protected against 6-inch guns, much less 8-inch guns, hence the huge increase in displacement by the Baltimore class. Essentially, CBs are intended to counter ships that were never actually built, except for by the one country that actually built CBs, but ships they were meant to counter match the armor if not gun profile of meta light cruisers and arguably of what CAs would look like if they were screens instead of capitals.

To clarify here, Interwar/WWII battlecruisers were undersized, WWI battlecruisers traded combat power for speed. I definitely wouldn't argue that Derfflinger or Invincible was designed "undersized."

The starting detail here for me is that dreadnoughts are as different from fast battleships as battlecruisers are; when comparing BCs to BBs, its important to have the timeframe of design down, because a battleship like the South Carolina class is in the same size range as large pre-dreadnoughts, and most WWI BBs were built in the 20,000-ton size range (unlike WWII/Interwar BBs, which tended towards much heavier displacement).
I chop off the timeline after 1916, because most nations were heading towards fast battleships with their battlecruisers by the end of WWI (Hood, Yorck, Amagi), and the first and last battlecruiser of the interwar period, the Dunkerque, was mostly produced small due to a combination of treaty limitations (Britain wanted them down to something like 23,000 tons standard displacement, which I believe they negotiated up) and still ended up fairly similar to their older dreadnoughts.

If you ignore the WWI period, battlecruiser designs can safely be split into two categories: BCs in name only like the G-3 class, and poorly-armored capital ships like the Renown, Kongo, Dunkerque, and proposed supercruisers (CBs). The former are just battleships. The latter, by comparison, are distinctly light battleships (with some being physically smaller, while others are the same size but really fast).

Now, to decide whether supercruisers belong in the battle-line fighting battleships or the cruiser line fighting cruisers, the key basically is this: are they closer in capabilities to battleships, or heavy cruisers? If you compare the Alaska-class to an Iowa-class or other state-of-the-art battleship, you're obviously going to see them as much smaller and less capable, versus a state-of-the-art heavy cruiser like the Baltimore seeming statistically similar. But even with these ships, you run into the massive disparity in firepower: (shell weight / burst charge / penetration at around 15km on a flat surface)

Baltimore-class 8-inch guns: 152kg / 2.3kg / 8-inches​

Alaska-class 12-inch guns: 517kg / 7.9kg / 15-inches​

New Mexico-class 14-inch guns: 680kg / 10.4kg / 16-inches​

Iowa-class 16-inch guns: 1225kg / 18.6kg / 22-inches​

This is the part where I still see the capabilities of a 12-inch gun as being much closer to a 16-inch gun than an 8-inch gun, and that's while ignoring that many outdated battleships are actually matched or even outperformed by these sort of supercruiser guns. While an 8-inch gun can penetrate at very short ranges, a 12-inch gun can do so at much greater range, and with much greater impact.

Considering that they *can* threaten capital ships like the Iowa, its a lot easier to hurt something less-armored like the Courbet or Marat (let alone a battlecruiser), and their guns outperform many early battleships in the first place. As a result, I can't see a scenario where a task force of CBs end up fighting battlecruisers or battleships and WOULDN'T engage them, either in self-defense or just because any admiral worth his salt targets the biggest ships with his biggest guns.

 

[Corpse Fool]

You'll have to elaborate for me there corpse.

Thought I was just locking in my position on final changes for others to disagree/agree.

Try and finalise the discussions to date.

Decision time, no particular order.

Is the range of heavy attack going to be 2 or 3?
Are the CA going to be medium or heavy attack, and what range would the medium attack have?
(where and panzerschiffe and coastal defense cruisers going to fit into this, because currently they can mount the BB guns)
What is the model fleet composition going to look like? 4 CV, 4 Cap, 4 cruiser, 24 DD?
What sort of ways can we enforce that particular model? (positioning reduction on fleets above a certain size will help avoid single group doom stacks)
Based on the ship counts in the assumed model, what are the chances you would want each ship in each layer, to attack whatever ship in whatever layer, using a particular weapon? BB/BC being 45/45/10 for cap/cruiser/screen? Cruisers being 40/40/20 for cap/cruiser screen?

You commented on basically none of that.