Great thread Voight
I've just played a couple of ENG games, and found the naval balance pretty good. Even carriers are reasonable (although there's room to buff them a little bit late-war - although how to do this without adjusting the overall balance between NAVs and ships is tricky).
After this game, I'm going to get back into the modding, and the things that really stood out for me were less balance, and more:
- AI build priorities (something I can hopefully do something about)
- The ship designer more broadly (my plans here are far more than vanilla would go for, but the way the ship designer works leads to odd and somewhat implausible ship designs, overly-fast vessels, and lacks plausibility in terms of the 'ship design decisions' that are made)
- AI use of ships - it's much, much better than it used to be, but there's still a tendency for fleets to ignore the intel they have on enemy forces and throw away ships in small groups (because they don't have larger). At the start of the war, the AI sometimes does a good job concentrating its fleet, but once it's been attrited a bit, it throws an awful lot of ships away.
- Subs vs Escorts feel pretty good - but there are an awful lot of modifiers floating about, and I haven't looked at all the extremes.
- Appropriately screened fleets do a _lot_ of torpedo damage. I haven't tested it yet, but when I do, I'll be looking at dialling this back some (more broadly, given the length of naval battles, a torpedo volley every four hours suggests ships are full of the things). I'm just playing in a broadly historical way, but I would imagine it would be quite feasible to beast through enemy fleets with a good CL/DD mix.
- I'm yet to test, but in relation to the above, I suspect capital ships aren't as effective against screens as they should be. That could be off though - there are a lot of moving parts in naval battles.
Other issues which I think would warrant looking at are:
- The reporting on naval battles is full of bugs. I'm playing ironman so it's not a great setup for reproducible saves, but I've heard reference of the convoys not being added up in naval battle reports (it's always shown as 1 convoy sunk, even if multiple), and there are issues with the totals in the "ships sunk" info not actually matching ships sunk (again, which have been around for ages). Given that it's possible to have 5-10 naval battles going simultaneously, I'd think it was important that the feedback to players is accurate so they know what's going on.
- It's easier to get naval XP when not at war, with ships on training, than it is at war. I don't think this is moddable, but hopefully at some point there'll be a "basic trickle of XP" for ship's that are on a mission that expends fuel. As it is, in my current game I got most of my naval XP from non-combat training, despite wiping out the German and Italian Fleets.
Which is realistic. Germany only really had decent subs, while it's overall navy was old and not modern. Even it's subs lagged behind ASW, by mid-war.
Japan and Italy largely neglected armor and artillery.
Britain neglected army and armor.
In practice, there were only 3 big naval players in WW2, and 2 potential, that were crippled, France, by defeat, and Italy by astounding lack of fuel, among other reasons.
You're a bit harsh on Germany's navy here - they had some issues with their other ships, but Germany's overall navy was actually quite modern (they'd lost the vast majority of their old navy at the end of WW1, and the bits they'd been allowed to keep were so old that they generally (and sensibly!) didn't put them harm's way (although the ship that opened WW2 is a notable exception). They had quite advanced turbines, best-in-the-world marine diesels, as-good-as-anyone-else naval armour, good guns, and actually lead the world in naval radar for a brief period pre-war (but didn't capitalise on their technical developments, and didn't get the cavity magnetron until they found one from a crashed British bomber). Their ship design wasn't (on average) quite as good as the "big three", but it was still decent, with some outstanding elements. Also, their sub designs, while they were slower to move to the Type XXI than optimal, were very influential in the development of modern submarines post-war, and their torpedo designs were also quite influential.
Britain's neglect of its armour wasn't near as much as suggested either, but Paul Ketcham's got that covered. They developed many designs, and built quite a few types - my impression is that their issue with armour was more one of doctrine than lack of effort. Britain also had the 40mm Bofors (best 'light-ish' AA of the period) in its army in 1937, well before most other armies, and also (as far as I'm aware, but I'm a long way from an expert on this) had pretty good artillery designs. Its army didn't look like the German army, but again I'd argue that was doctrine, not effort.
