Yeah, flat cost is the killer here. Also, by the time the ship itself is ready, the war will have already broken out...meaning that you'd probably just send them into action rather than to upgrade some more.
Should the naval tech years be adjusted?
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Unless the new conversion rule of 90% base (and then 50 and 10 with techs) applies to the ship refits as well, it was 20% hull with whatever cost modifiers like AA and armour. hulls 2 and 3 costing 3400 or 3500, means we have 680 or 700 +20% from armour, 816 or 840.
I'd say that only 1, 2, and 3, strictly apply to the battleship tech line. Secondaries can be mounted on cruisers, and you're probably going to be running cruisers in some capacity. Radar is also shared with your other gunships, but also to unlock radios for your tanks and radar for your planes. The prereq's for FCS are also things you're generally going to be researching anyway, because more research speed is usually better than less research speed. AA is in a trickier spot because while the army and air would benefit from more AA, anything past the first step for support arty generally isn't done. You also generally wouldn't be mounting much AA to your BB, outside of your AA barges because of the wonky way that fleet AA functions. Perhaps different people have different priorities with AA though.
But yes, I'll agree that there certainly are a lot of techs involved.
Why is that? I always rush the 1940 AA for my ships because it offers the biggest jump in AA damage (2->3). But what's the wonkiness?
I thought that the opposite was true
That battleships are the first target a plane will go after, so you want to overload them with AA capabilities, while other ships can mostly ignore AA due to the battleships drawing all the fire
This made me realize how great it would be if we could queue upgrades if a ship repair is going to take a certain time without having to babysit it.
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Yes! I'm pretty sure most historical upgrades were typical done when a ship went in for either repair or major service overhaul from wear & tear.
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Well, it's bigger than just 2 to 3, because it's also +10% to +12.5%. So, 4 of the modules goes from 8+40%=11.2 to 12+50%=18. More on the wonkiness later
Lets just ignore the land and carrier based fighters that the enemy bombers should be having to fight through to get your ships. Or that if you don't have green air your navy has no business floating within range of enemy bombers.
The wonkiness is that something like 80% of the AA value being used when you get hit, is based off the ship getting hit itself. The entire rest of the fleet only contributes something like 20%, these ships hardly support each other with AA. Damage dealt to the enemy wings is also influenced to a fairly large degree by how high the AA value on the ship is. both of these factors combine to suggest that you should really be making AA barges to concentrate AA, rather than trying to disperse AA across the fleet. You only need to hit a certain minimum of AA value on the other ships to avoid spiking their weight, and you can generally hit that without much advances in AA tech because of dual purpose guns. And on the barges more AA would technically be better, but it doesn't really help them perform their role in the fleet (magnet enemy planes to themselves) much better.
But that also really precludes the use of BB as actual fighting ships, because CA at least for now are generally way more efficient gunboats. But if we did want to use BB as fighting ships which means they won't be barges, their high HP pool does have a lot of weight so we would either need more barges to try to shift the weight back, or more AA on the battleships. And since we have limited slots because we're actually mounting guns to it, we'd need a better AA tech to get more AA onto the same ship.
I see
Instead of having all battleships be air magnets, just get one or two that are super air magnets and let the rest operate normally
Honestly, one of the best ways to make battleships more useful would bet to make screen AA actually have some use and...well screen the big ships. So you could actually use your big ship's modules on real guns to let them do real damage
Air groups aside, the whole AA interaction is rather unrealistic as well as typically when sailing the capital ships would be screened by their smaller escorts requiring a strike groups to cross through the anti-air envelope of several smaller ships to attack a capital ship. Outside of getting caught completely out of formation trying to reach the center of a naval task force would be near suicide, especially with advances in early-warning radar, radar fire-control and VT fuses.
Only ships that have been scattered or spread out are typically easy targets for air attacks.
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This makes me curious what the rest of your design looks like. On BB2, this is 2gun at best and that sounds underwhelming.
I took a look through the defines, wiki, and my old notes after I wrote this. That is something I should have done before I posted it to make sure I knew what I was saying instead of just going off memory, but at least I'm coming back.
You would need some combination of either 411.5 AA value on a ship, or 5x that (2057.5) in fleet value to cap out on damage reduction. The highest AA value you could even get on a ship is on a super heavy, with 8 AA modules and a DP secondary, which would be 34.5++120%=75.9, before FCS/corps/etc. Which means we would need 22 such AA barges to hit the cap. Suffice to say, I don't think hitting the cap is going to be a realistic goal. Even if we did, cruiser 3 with 6 AA, DP secondary, and DP main gun gets 56 AA at dramatically less cost, much better fleet AA per IC, but they don't act as well as magnets because they don't have the HP pool and aren't capitals.
Going past the 5 needed to avoid increasing your weight (which can be more or less achieve with your slots dedicated to AA and secondaries) up to as far as 20 AA with 4 of the 1940 modules, doesn't really reduce the damage you suffer from air attack all that much either. At it's most extreme (0 fleet AA), it is something like 8% less damage suffered by the 20 AA, which isn't really all that much and it very quickly drops off to 5% with as little as 55 fleet AA, 4% at 95, 3% at 176, etc.
If any of that is to be believed, naval AA sucks.
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Ah, sorry - I was thinking SHBB for some reason. There, you can easily fit 4AA and still have room for 4/2 or 3/3 in main guns/secondaries. That's what I usually go for, thinking how Yamato was refit with like several billion AA guns of all calibres.
Another option would be 3 AA / 4 main / 3 dual-purpose.
Wouldn't either of these options be good enough for an air magnet that can also shoot ships?
Are you going to be waiting for the 1940 AA modules?Well. thank god SHBB is a 1936 tech
You're not going to be fitting this ship in under the treaty though, lol. It's also pretty difficult to fit a super heavy under the 10k limit, you need a coastal designer, a max of 1 gun and you do not have much wiggle room for any other modules after FCS. Japan can cheat with its coastal to fit another gun, but there's no way you can fit 3 guns, even with escalator. Japan could sell its design to italy so they can both have 2 guns, but it costs 5 civs and -55% output to license which is ridiculous. Of course you could always just leave the treaty to be like Germany and build whatever you want.
I also took this opportunity to explore if the conversion changes (the 90/50/10) impact refits, and it doesn't. They did fix the more exploity part of the coastal refit trick, where the change in +% cost only applied to modules/tax of the refit, not the total change in the hull. Which ultimately means that if we are planning to do a refit, we want to push as much of the total cost into the refit as possible, to take advantage of the bonus speed from the refit yard corps spirit (or the british focus) that acts like a cost reduction to hopefully offset the refit tax. We can still put coastal on the base model to make it cheaper/quicker to push out, but it isn't like before where we would make the base model with coastal as expensive as possible and then the refit really only swaps designer. They really should just nerf coastal though.
1gun coastal with engine2 and fcs0 costs 9460, 4gun 4aa1 2sb1 engine2 fcs0 with whatever other company would cost 20628 while the refit costs 9460+12653=22113. 1485 more but the refit corps spirit can help as long as we have less than +89% output, which is going to be the vast majority of the time. I think you cap out at +85 by natural means, you'd need extra decisions or spirits to get past that.
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Unfortunately most were 25mm Type 96 mounts. Which in between slow tracking whether they were hand-cranked or electrically powered and a not brilliant ammo system with 15-round magazines that were emptied and needed replacement constantly made it a rather ineffective AA gun. Not to mention they didn't really upgrade it much during the war.
Only worse gun I can think of was the semi-auto 37mm used on Bismarck although they thankfully made an automatic 37 later on.
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Although interestingly, Shinano was supposed to be equipped with the 10cm/65 Type 98 as her main heavy AA battery rather than the old 12,7cm/40 Type 88 on Yamato before they decided to convert her to a carrier. Whilst still lacking advancements like radar FC or VT fuses it was a big improvement over their earlier guns.Well, 1936 AA it is then for my Yamatos in RP
Japan was also working on a 40mm Bofors copy but that never entered production.