I've tested stuff like this several times. 6x screens for the CA seems a bit excessive, especially when the BB has less than that. But whenever the IC was roughly equivalent, the CA fleet sunk the BB fleet.
Tidbits on CAs and naked BBs.
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Sry, this is a bit out of context, and definetely not meant personally in anyway, sudpud, and I have no doubt that your contribution is a valuable observation, but:
Your example showed in my pinion the basic flaw(s) of the whole system - the taskforces aka fleets are much to big(!).
70 ships - how should they line up? At least twothird should completely out of view, not even mentioning firing range. Which would meant that the rest get under concentrated attack, but this would be already the second concern. Make the fleets smaller as historical. 8-12 ships. Maybe 15.
sry for OT
No problem. The reason these are common is because positioning doesn’t matter enough, and CA-DD spam is the most effective navy per ic, period. Which is what I’d like to change. Make heavy ships have value, and you won’t have such super high ship numbers.
That being said - you be surprised how close ships within a task force operate, sometimes within 3-500 yards in battle(or less). If you look at the battle of surigao straight, there were quite a few ships in the American task force.
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My only problem with this is that a full carrier force wants at least 32 ships. 4 carriers, 4 caps, 24 screens, to fully screen before penalties.
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It’s size means it’s going to have positioning penalties, my point was really about how this change would make CA-DD fleets no longer the best anymore per ic(which I think you got).
I didn't see this part at first, it must have been added in later.
Not really a fan that we're changing a lot of different things all at once with your fleet comp and trying to compare them. Changed the screen ratio, changed the types of screens involved, when the only change we should really be looking at right now is replacing some CA with BB. Gamers are min-maxers though, I'd imagine that we'd sooner replace all CA with BB rather than try to mix the two. Because if the enemy has at least some BB of their own, the intent is that our CA are going to disappear in short order. Much like the air force being all-in where if you didn't invest enough to establish dominance you have just thrown away what you did invest, what would the point of building the CA be if they just get Hood'd.
By my count, the DD+CA fleet using tier 2 hulls/engines/guns (except radar fcs which is max on CL/CA, tier 1 dd and CA gun battery) with the same CA configuration mentioned earlier and 2 torpedoes on the DD is going to cost 106k IC. If the +BB fleet used similar styles of ships for DD, CL (swap CA gun for CL gun) and CA, that totals up to 77800 IC. Using your original total cost of 85k, there is only 7200 IC left in which to fit your 2 battleships, which is impossible. Even if we take the torpedoes off your 24 destroyers (because we don't need them to sink the capitals anymore), that is +5760 IC, 12960 IC which can barely fit one ship, let alone two. If we use a similar goal of 106k, there is 28200 IC left to fit the 2 battleships, 14100 IC each. If you wanted to use just a straight +50% to cost for the whole thing, that leaves each BB with only being able to use 9400 current-cost IC. The basic hull+engine and the +20% from armour is 6720 IC, which leaves us with 2680 IC for guns. Each heavy gun battery costs 1500 IC at minimum, so we can only really have 1 of those, and some assortment of smaller guns and FCS.
So I guess my question is what where the designs you were actually using, to get the costs you did.
Which brings us to your new armour mechanics.
We're going to have to give every ship a minimum armour value, because you aren't supposed to divide by 0. We're also going to have to cap this modifier somewhere, because 55 piercing of super heavy guns, minus an assumed minimum of 1 is 54, and the square of that is going to be 2916x the damage. That is absolutely ridiculous, and means that a single super heavy battery is going to basically delete anything it hits and isn't another super heavy (that has 55 armour itself). Even BB3 armour at 40 is suffering 225x damage unless it has armour boosts, and it owuld need at least +37.5% defense/armour (fairly easily achieved) to actually be suffering a reasonable amount of damage from these new heavy guns.
My predictions are that CLs are still going to be terrible screens, and people are quickly going to just rush super heavy BB if they wanted capitals, because any other capital is just going to get deleted.
It's not exactly a major issue, DDs wouldn't go directly into the battle line anyway but as screens around the bigger ships, 10 CAs with 60 DDs peppered around them would still be manageable.
I was doing napkin math with 500 ic for roach dd, 4500 for cl, 6500 for ca and 10k for bb (didn't figure in +50%). I think most of the non-bbs you're describing are probably overbuilt. I've been playing with coastal fleet designer a lot, so I agree, my calcs were probably low. My figures are probably off, but not that important. I was merely trying to illustrate a point that LACA +DD would no longer be the most efficient fleet.
Yes, an armor value of 1 or .1 would be required. I have not stated that I have the balance determined. I'm talking about general mechanics changes.
In your example, do you think something hit by an 18" shell with no armor shouldn't immediately go down? I do. But fine, we can cap it at 50x.
In you other example, you're not understanding the formula. You divide the piercing by the armor, you don't subtract. (55/40) ^2 would be the calculation, for a boost of 3.1x over base damage. An 18" shell is not something anyone wants to take. If that's too powerful, we can nerf the exponent to 1.5, or whatever.
Again, remember that I've said all damage would be modified by fleet speed / enemy fleet speed. So SHBBs will get a damage reduction as well. This speed mechanic will make ship designs less gun heavy, and promote a cat and mouse between your ships design and the enemy's. Right now, ship speed isn't that important.
And finally, sure you could rush a SHBB, but with the 50% IC increase. How fast can you build one? It's all you'll ever produce, and it take CV damage just like before. Lots of eggs in a single basket.
This entire exercise is to promote realism(ie the value of BBs and the weakness of CAs to them), which is utterly lacking in the current mechanics.
Yep, I messed that up. Thanks for pointing that out. But still, the SHBB throwing 3x damage against the BB does not lend itself to BB being worthwhile. A minimum-build SHBB can be as low as 10k-ish IC, Fascists can actually sneak one under the treaty limits if they cheat. Or you can use coastal on it, which would be kinda funny.
Coastal designer is only Japan, UK, and USA (and the china's and sweden, but lets just ignore those). USA and UK start with DD2 unlocked, so they are forced to use DD3 if they wanted designer, while Japan could use roach DD2 (and share them with axis). Pure roach (no torpedoes) for DD3 is going to be 592.5 IC. DD2 is going to be 532.5. I do not suggest dropping engine, but even if you did that changes the costs to 547.5 and 510. These are still higher than 500 per ship, and dropped-engine is counter-productive for roach DD. They might cost less, but they aren't dodging as many shots, and shots absorbed per IC is basically the only stat that roach DD are going to care about. For all of literally 12.5 IC on the DD2, your basic profile goes from about 27.7~ to 25.5. Against light guns with an accuracy of 40 and considering you square the result, that is about 4.8% chance for the low engine compared to 4% for the top engine. 0.0464 shots per IC for the top engine, compared to 0.0407.
Using coastal on the DD that I picked does lower the cost of the total fleet, 49000 from 10 CA (at 4900 each), and if we're japan for coastal on DD2 and still using 2x tier 2 torpedoes on the DD (the DD do need torpedoes, they are crucial to the build) 712.5 per ship. x60, 42750. Add them both together, and we get back are almost 92k, a bit cheaper than you originally predicted, largely because my CA are cheaper than yours.
4500 for a CL is about right, 6500 for CA seems to be too much. You can't get a coastal designer on cruiser 2's, you'd have to be moving up to 3's to do that. I used cruiser hull 2, engine 2, max FCS and radar (radar that isn't 3/4 can be ignored, and lower level FCS is going to be cheaper), 3 dual purpose secondaries, and either 3 tier 2 light cruiser batteries for the CL, or 2 lights and a bottom tier medium for the CA. The only difference is the one gun battery, which is ultimately just +475 IC (and +1 steel) off what the CL has, at 4425, so the CA is 4900. If you had loads of spare steel you could step up to CL3 batteries instead of CL2 like I used, and that only costs +50 IC on the CA or +75 on the CL for +2 or 3 attacks (before mods), but it really spikes your steel cost from 2 to 5 for the CL, or from 3 to 5 for the CA.
I'm not really seeing how you can get the CA to cost 6500, unless you armoured it and the armour isn't going to help. Even if you gave it top tier armour and doubled it through various modifiers, the SHBB is still dealing 5.25x damage, which reduces their ~200 HP down to about 38. A 2 battery SHBB is going to 1-shot these, and a single battery is going to effectively cripple them, the armour is ultimately just making them more expensive and slowing them down for no particular reason. So there isn't really a point to putting armour on it. Using the AA slot alone isn't going to make up 1600 IC, you'd have to be putting a lot more, big gun turrets on the CA which I also find to be counter productive. The CA already has enough LA to 1-shot DD, which is ultimately the goal. Having more than that is a waste, and especially if the CA turrets are now adding light attack instead of heavy, that base is covered. There is no reason to make the ship more expensive and slower, unless you were shuffling turrets so you could get the same amount of light attack, just with more AA value. I'd need to look into that angle more deeply, and it isn't really worth the effort. naval AA sucks, either take carriers with fighters or land based fighters.
SHBB aren't -that- much slower than other BB where I think that the fleet-speed comparison would reduce their damage output enough to matter in the face of the proposed armour mechanics. If the enemy are using the same ships, there would presumably be no difference in fleet speed anyway. Heavy 2 hull and super heavy hull have the same basic speed and access to the same engines. The super heavy armour does slow them down more and their guns are heavier than most of the other BB guns, and the SHBB can mount more modules that could slow them down even further. Max speed of super heavy with engine 2 is going to be 30.4, while the BB can have 33.6. At their absolute slowest with the same engine it would be 13.44 for the super heavy, an impressive 5 main guns, 4 secondaries and an AA, while BB2 has 17.92, 5 max tier heavy batteries, 1 dual purpose and 1 AA.
BB2 is going to have a max of 425.5 HP. Even if we're dealing 75% of the damage because the SHBB fleet is slower, and accounting for the damage increase which I'm getting is about +90%, we end up with +42% damage. 5 guns is a basic 90, so we end up with 127.8 damage per volley, which is 4 hits to sink the BB, ignoring ammunition, fire control upgrades, FCS, and radar boosts to attacks, as well as admiral skills/traits, high command, ship XP, and whatever else. Conversely, even using top tier BB guns and being able to deal +34% damage from speed, the armour comparison means we only deal 86% the damage for only +15% total, or if we're still squaring the armour, 74%, for a total of 99% the damage. Each battery is 16, 5 batteries is 80 damage base, x1.15 is 92. SHBB has 770 HP, so it will take 9 hits to sink the SHBB, 10 if we're still squaring armour. Both of these ships are so slow that even torpedoes have the full hit rate. SHBB costs 22822.5 IC, BB2 costs 17382.75. the SHBB only costs +32% more, which doesn't really make the difference when it takes more than double the amount of shots for the BB to sink the SHBB, and the SHBB also has more AA and LA.
The longevity of the SHBB is a pretty big part of this. CA was spammed because the only thing they were really vulnerable to was heavy attack, and heavy attack was too expensive and too inaccurate to get enough of it that you could sink the CA before the CA sunk your screens and then the DD torpedoed the capitals. SHBB with only 2 batteries that can 1-shot the CA only costs around 20k IC, even after we account for a +50% on top of everything, and 5 DD to screen them using 550 IC per DD is 23k per "package". CA is about 5k, and using 700 IC DD at the same 5x ratio, 8500 IC per capital "package". We could almost get 3 such CA packages compared to each SHBB package. I don't think there is enough advantage for the CA in this scenario for 3 of them to chew through 3-4 screens (roach DD are super-dodgy) before the SHBB gets lucky and asplodes the CA. With the capitals gone, pick off the dd at your leisure.
Using coastal on the DD that I picked does lower the cost of the total fleet, 49000 from 10 CA (at 4900 each), and if we're japan for coastal on DD2 and still using 2x tier 2 torpedoes on the DD (the DD do need torpedoes, they are crucial to the build) 712.5 per ship. x60, 42750. Add them both together, and we get back are almost 92k, a bit cheaper than you originally predicted, largely because my CA are cheaper than yours.
4500 for a CL is about right, 6500 for CA seems to be too much. You can't get a coastal designer on cruiser 2's, you'd have to be moving up to 3's to do that. I used cruiser hull 2, engine 2, max FCS and radar (radar that isn't 3/4 can be ignored, and lower level FCS is going to be cheaper), 3 dual purpose secondaries, and either 3 tier 2 light cruiser batteries for the CL, or 2 lights and a bottom tier medium for the CA. The only difference is the one gun battery, which is ultimately just +475 IC (and +1 steel) off what the CL has, at 4425, so the CA is 4900. If you had loads of spare steel you could step up to CL3 batteries instead of CL2 like I used, and that only costs +50 IC on the CA or +75 on the CL for +2 or 3 attacks (before mods), but it really spikes your steel cost from 2 to 5 for the CL, or from 3 to 5 for the CA.
I'm not really seeing how you can get the CA to cost 6500, unless you armoured it and the armour isn't going to help. Even if you gave it top tier armour and doubled it through various modifiers, the SHBB is still dealing 5.25x damage, which reduces their ~200 HP down to about 38. A 2 battery SHBB is going to 1-shot these, and a single battery is going to effectively cripple them, the armour is ultimately just making them more expensive and slowing them down for no particular reason. So there isn't really a point to putting armour on it. Using the AA slot alone isn't going to make up 1600 IC, you'd have to be putting a lot more, big gun turrets on the CA which I also find to be counter productive. The CA already has enough LA to 1-shot DD, which is ultimately the goal. Having more than that is a waste, and especially if the CA turrets are now adding light attack instead of heavy, that base is covered. There is no reason to make the ship more expensive and slower, unless you were shuffling turrets so you could get the same amount of light attack, just with more AA value. I'd need to look into that angle more deeply, and it isn't really worth the effort. naval AA sucks, either take carriers with fighters or land based fighters.
SHBB aren't -that- much slower than other BB where I think that the fleet-speed comparison would reduce their damage output enough to matter in the face of the proposed armour mechanics. If the enemy are using the same ships, there would presumably be no difference in fleet speed anyway. Heavy 2 hull and super heavy hull have the same basic speed and access to the same engines. The super heavy armour does slow them down more and their guns are heavier than most of the other BB guns, and the SHBB can mount more modules that could slow them down even further. Max speed of super heavy with engine 2 is going to be 30.4, while the BB can have 33.6. At their absolute slowest with the same engine it would be 13.44 for the super heavy, an impressive 5 main guns, 4 secondaries and an AA, while BB2 has 17.92, 5 max tier heavy batteries, 1 dual purpose and 1 AA.
BB2 is going to have a max of 425.5 HP. Even if we're dealing 75% of the damage because the SHBB fleet is slower, and accounting for the damage increase which I'm getting is about +90%, we end up with +42% damage. 5 guns is a basic 90, so we end up with 127.8 damage per volley, which is 4 hits to sink the BB, ignoring ammunition, fire control upgrades, FCS, and radar boosts to attacks, as well as admiral skills/traits, high command, ship XP, and whatever else. Conversely, even using top tier BB guns and being able to deal +34% damage from speed, the armour comparison means we only deal 86% the damage for only +15% total, or if we're still squaring the armour, 74%, for a total of 99% the damage. Each battery is 16, 5 batteries is 80 damage base, x1.15 is 92. SHBB has 770 HP, so it will take 9 hits to sink the SHBB, 10 if we're still squaring armour. Both of these ships are so slow that even torpedoes have the full hit rate. SHBB costs 22822.5 IC, BB2 costs 17382.75. the SHBB only costs +32% more, which doesn't really make the difference when it takes more than double the amount of shots for the BB to sink the SHBB, and the SHBB also has more AA and LA.
The longevity of the SHBB is a pretty big part of this. CA was spammed because the only thing they were really vulnerable to was heavy attack, and heavy attack was too expensive and too inaccurate to get enough of it that you could sink the CA before the CA sunk your screens and then the DD torpedoed the capitals. SHBB with only 2 batteries that can 1-shot the CA only costs around 20k IC, even after we account for a +50% on top of everything, and 5 DD to screen them using 550 IC per DD is 23k per "package". CA is about 5k, and using 700 IC DD at the same 5x ratio, 8500 IC per capital "package". We could almost get 3 such CA packages compared to each SHBB package. I don't think there is enough advantage for the CA in this scenario for 3 of them to chew through 3-4 screens (roach DD are super-dodgy) before the SHBB gets lucky and asplodes the CA. With the capitals gone, pick off the dd at your leisure.
And since gamers like to min-max and often polarize themselves to one extreme or another, I imagine we would ultimately just be replacing the LACA spam with SHBB spam. I don't think that really solves your problem of wanting mixed-fleets to be more viable.
With coastal, 2-gun +6 DPSB and tier 2 engine is going to cost 20k, including this +50%. Putting 10 yards on it like you mentioned earlier, at 2.5 per yard and +50% output total from stability, trade, and industry tech, about 550 days, a year and a half.
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CA are weak to BB. BB can one-shot CA, if they really wanted to. In a 1-1, the BB is going to win every time. But 1v1 isn't really worth considering, we have to think about the fleet as a whole. In which case the crux of the issue is the cost of the CA. If you really wanted to hurt CA, then hurt the CA. Make its CA guns more expensive and consume more resources, or make it such that the CA has to be armoured to be a CA.
SHBB's with 1936 engines are SLOW. Like i said, speed is going to matter since it boosts attack. SHBB will be good in these mechanics, just as they were in real-life. They take fantastic amounts of resources to produce, and a navy that rushes them will neglect the rest of its fleet. Also, no one starts with those industry boosts to production, and few have that much stability. Even cheating on the treaties does not allow you to fully outfit a SHBB, plus you will want to refit it with AA, DP, and Radar, so at best, you have 2 ready to go for Europe at war as the UK. Doing this is going to require buying chromium, building docks, doing extra research into naval techs, and actually investing in your navy. That sounds like fun, actually. Make the navy game interesting.
You still haven't addressed the speed mechanic, and again - this is a lot of eggs in one basket. Any you better not sail it under red air.
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You don't need to, all you need is the hull laid down and you can refit modules onto the ship after it is launched and restrictions are lifted. This is why your navy research order is always hulls, then modules, and then upgrades. So you can lay down naked hulls with whatever engine/armour you want, refit whatever modules onto them you didn't have unlocked when you started production but wanted (like DPSB), and then get the upgrades like ammunition, damage control and fire control just in time for the war, were you have made maximum use of your time to present the strongest force.
They take the same amount of resources per yard as a max tech BB does. With the SHBB, you also basically only need to research 1 thing, just the hull which is only 127 days away. For the BB you have to get the armour and the guns, max tech armour is a '40 tech, and the guns are '44, while the SHBB techs are '36 and vastly superior. I'm not sure how that means you'll be neglecting the rest of your fleet, when it takes less research, the same resources, and you'll no doubt be putting the same yards to your capitals anyway. If you wanted more than 2 regular BB, you'd be assigning more yards to them. 3 SHBB would only mean 4 regular BB, of the particular designs I mentioned earlier, at least. And those weren't good designs, so just let me know what you would actually be wanting to build.
So bump it up to 2 years, I was just giving you a benchmark. Having or not having those boosts aren't really going to affect how many ships you can get out either way.
I included the speed mechanic as the straight percentage between the fleets. The slower fleet has reduced damage and suffers increased damage. I included that when I compared 5 gun SHBB to 5 gun BB, and the regular BB still needs more than twice as many volleys to hit the SHBB, while their cheapness only allows them to get 1/3 as many ships. I know it was a wall of text and it might have been difficult to find it in there, but it is there. The armour and penetration advantage that the SHBB has is absolutely massive. I've even been allowing the BB to have top tier armour and guns, which they would not realistically be able to access which minimized the advantage the SHBB had over the regular BB. Do you want me to do more comparisons with a wider variety of tech?
And yet putting all of those eggs in that one basket seems to actually be the best way to protect those eggs. You're not going to have just one basket anyway, I'm sure you would have multiple ships. You mention UK having at least 2.
It'd go about as well for the SHBB as it would for any fleet that doesn't have green air or carrier fighters.
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I couldn't sleep so I made spreadsheets instead. I compared a bunch of '36 heavy hulls with engine 2, and all different combinations of homogenous gun tier and count, and different levels of armour against SHBB with engine 2 and its different gun counts. No other equipment on either ship. I used your armour mechanics, (piercing/armour)^2, and the speed which was friendly/enemy. I didn't use any designers or admirals or ship XP, this is all basically just theoretical ship building right now to test the mechanics and to guide us forward with balance changes we would have to make if these mechanics were accepted.
Here is the google sheet. It is hard to read because I was kinda all over the place and I tend to write things in codes that only make sense to me at the particular time I wrote them. The first two sheets don't really matter though they do have intersting information, focus on the BB2/E2 Comparison.
The BB2 and the SHBB seemed to prefer to be mounted with 4 gun batteries, it offered the best balance between cost, speed, and raw firepower. SHBB could get away with 3 or maybe even 2 guns depending on the specific configuration of the enemy ship, so you can start there and then refit on some guns later as the enemy develops.
The SHBB having more penetration and armour, and more basic firepower was able to at basically all levels provide significantly more damage per IC than the BB with any tier and amount of guns. The BB2 had a lowest cost per heavy attack of 235 IC, using 4 tier 4 guns against a SHBB with 5 guns to slow it down. A 5 gun SHBB shooting at a 4 gun BB2 is only spending 68, 53, or 88 IC per attack, depending on the tier of armour the BB2 was using. That 5gun SHBB cost ~20k IC before the +50% you mention, and it'll 2-shot the BB2. The BB2 costs 14160 IC and would need 13 hits to sink the SHBB. These comparisons seem to heavily favour the SHBB.
All of the profiles of "usable" ships ended up being above 80, accuracy was the same all around. TI doctrine is also basically a waste if you wanted protection against heavy attack, the profiles are pretty terrible when you're mounting 3+ guns. You'd have to stack a bunch of other modifiers like bold/concealment expert on your admiral, and raiding designer though I suggest coastal to save time/resources ( or just have more ships)
I think armour/piercing is being weighted too heavily because it is squared. I've also ignored the combination of factors that could end up doing as much as doubling armour values, which makes having piercing extremely important.
The speed mechanics don't really have that big of an impact. Maybe square those too if you wanted to bring them more into the center stage, but as you could see the from speed comparison page (which is using a BB1, which is pretty slow) the differences in speed aren't really all that big most of the time, even squaring them won't make a huge difference. except in edge cases where we got a zoomy boat with 1 gun facing off against a super heavy laden down with all of the guns on earth, but those aren't really what we're looking for, I'd imagine.
Of course, other things we could shift around here are the amount of piercing/armour the different modules have, the speed modifiers of the modules, the attacks the modules offer, and just the IC and resource costs. But those are things that we could change to bring the simulation more in line with what you want, without having to add fancy new mechanics.
Here is the google sheet. It is hard to read because I was kinda all over the place and I tend to write things in codes that only make sense to me at the particular time I wrote them. The first two sheets don't really matter though they do have intersting information, focus on the BB2/E2 Comparison.
The BB2 and the SHBB seemed to prefer to be mounted with 4 gun batteries, it offered the best balance between cost, speed, and raw firepower. SHBB could get away with 3 or maybe even 2 guns depending on the specific configuration of the enemy ship, so you can start there and then refit on some guns later as the enemy develops.
The SHBB having more penetration and armour, and more basic firepower was able to at basically all levels provide significantly more damage per IC than the BB with any tier and amount of guns. The BB2 had a lowest cost per heavy attack of 235 IC, using 4 tier 4 guns against a SHBB with 5 guns to slow it down. A 5 gun SHBB shooting at a 4 gun BB2 is only spending 68, 53, or 88 IC per attack, depending on the tier of armour the BB2 was using. That 5gun SHBB cost ~20k IC before the +50% you mention, and it'll 2-shot the BB2. The BB2 costs 14160 IC and would need 13 hits to sink the SHBB. These comparisons seem to heavily favour the SHBB.
All of the profiles of "usable" ships ended up being above 80, accuracy was the same all around. TI doctrine is also basically a waste if you wanted protection against heavy attack, the profiles are pretty terrible when you're mounting 3+ guns. You'd have to stack a bunch of other modifiers like bold/concealment expert on your admiral, and raiding designer though I suggest coastal to save time/resources ( or just have more ships)
I think armour/piercing is being weighted too heavily because it is squared. I've also ignored the combination of factors that could end up doing as much as doubling armour values, which makes having piercing extremely important.
The speed mechanics don't really have that big of an impact. Maybe square those too if you wanted to bring them more into the center stage, but as you could see the from speed comparison page (which is using a BB1, which is pretty slow) the differences in speed aren't really all that big most of the time, even squaring them won't make a huge difference. except in edge cases where we got a zoomy boat with 1 gun facing off against a super heavy laden down with all of the guns on earth, but those aren't really what we're looking for, I'd imagine.
Of course, other things we could shift around here are the amount of piercing/armour the different modules have, the speed modifiers of the modules, the attacks the modules offer, and just the IC and resource costs. But those are things that we could change to bring the simulation more in line with what you want, without having to add fancy new mechanics.
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Far too slow in fact compared to the only existing real life example, the Yamato-class at 27 kts. Same goes for other cancelled designs such as Sovetsky Soyuz or the H-class series at 28 and 30 respectively. They also lack the option to mount smaller guns as few designs even opted for something as extreme as 18 in guns.
That is a flat out wrong assumption. If you compare the maximum range of for example the US Navy 8"/55 Mk 15 and 6"/47 Mk 16 is just around 4000 yards or around 3 km at around 27 or 23,8 km maximum each. Then the question is wether or not your radar system and fire control can pinpoint a relatively small target at such a long range or fire accurately at such a range. It would be far outside of your optimal fire range to say the least.
Either way, both the longest confirmed CA and CL hits are scored by the Italians at 22km by one of the Zara-class, probably Fiume and 21km for a CL by Raimondo Montecuccoli.
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Thanks for looking in to this and spending the time to build the spreadsheets. I think your analysis misses a few things. First, coastal fleet designer is a must for the SHBB in order to build it in any length of time. This drops armor to 40.
2nd, you're using the cheapest ship in terms of attack per ic, and saying it's 2 shot. What about a more survivable ship? Like an atlantic fleet designed '40 BC with 2 Gun3 and BC armor 3? Along with concealment expert and trade interdiction? Its hit profile is below 80 already.
This ship goes 37 knots. Your 4gun SHBB goes 20ish. My damage is 1.85. It's almost like i had 4 gun 3.
I get you're trying to make a quick and simple analysis, but I don't think we've explored all the optons. Some balancing and reduction on the exponent might be necessary, sure.
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I can’t make sense of your first point, but an 8” shell carries more explosive and can penetrate more armor at distance than a 6” shell. CAs are also typically heavier built with better fire control equipment.
If you think CAs were built to fight BBs or BCs...I’m not sure what to tell you.
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Yes but what about it? You also have less guns and fire far slower. My point is by this point in history the 6" gun had overtaken the 8" gun as the superior universal weapon. The advantage of an 8" prior to monsters like Des Moines at this point are minimal since a treat era heavy cruiser has too little armor, and even with heavier armor out of control fires and damage to superstructure such as range finders will cripple a heavy cruiser statistically faster than they will do the same to a large light cruiser. As such treating them any differently than screens is flat out wrong, they were expensive prestige and vanity projects, little else.
As for fire control, if you have a look around actually you'll see that both are typically equipped with the best equipment available at the time they're built and often modernized to carry better radar or fire control as the war went on.
As for heavier built, you do know a number of these are litterally built on essentially the same hull right? USS Wichita, modified Brooklyn-class hull. Seydlitz and Lützon (the last two Admiral Hippers) were planned originally to be finished with 4x3 150mm guns making them light cruisers per definition. Most differences between a modern CL and CA at the time of the war is marginal.
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Not entirely true, your change to allowing 10 yards on the ships is allowing you to get them out faster than vanilla, even if they technically cost more IC. The combination allows you to get the same ship out in 75% of the time. Without coastal in vanilla, the 4 gun mentioned here that costs 18125 IC, with the the assumed +50% yard output only takes 967 days. just over 2.5 years. Using the combination of +50% flat cost and 10 yards, it would take 725 days, or just under 2 years. This will be rough for UK, France, Germany, and Italy which go to war in '39 and need their navy to be ready for that time, but Japan and USA usually wait a little longer before needing to have their navy ready.
Using coastal doesn't really save that much time, because the armour is already adding such a massive IC cost which the designer only served to offset. the cost of the 4 gun drops to 14500 (only 80% of what it would be) and would take 774 days in vanilla, or 580 with +50% cost and 10 yards.
44, actually. Which is still higher than what the BB would have at a max of 40, and matches bb3 gun piercing (after ammunition). The 4, tier 4 guns BB had a cost of 14160 which is very similar to the cost of the coastal ship, so it has similar time to build. The BB now has a more favourable armour modifier and basic amount of attacks in the comparison, but I doubt this can account for the piercing/armour advantage that the SHBB still has, especially when they now cost basically the same, there is very little advantage per ic, this is basically just raw attacks comparison now.
It'll have 44 piercing, 36.3 armour, 36.3 heavy attack, and 39.2 knots. 460 HP. It'll cost 9675 IC before other additions. With 17.92 visibility The visibility and speed combine to give a profile of ~45.7, if we /80 it and square that this BC is only taking about 1/3 the shots that the SHBB would.
The armour multi's are a bit lower than 53% for the BC firing at the SHBB, 44 piercing against 60.5 armour (boosted by TI doctrine), and the SHBB shooting back is 55/36.3 (30 base, x1.1 designer, x1.1 doctrine), a bit higher than 2.29x
Speed is going to depend on how many guns the SHBB has. Using the same ones that were used in the other comparison, BC gets +29%, +44%, +63%, +88%, or +123%, while the SHBB has the inverse of that, 77.5%, 69%, 61%, 53%, 44.5%.
This gives the BC 24.81831, 27.70416, 31.35957, 36.16932, or 42.90297 damage per attack, depending on the speed of the SHBB. With 770 HP on the SHBB, this means you need 31, 28, 25, 22, or 18 shots to sink the SHBB.
SHBB shoots back with 31.9455, 56.8836, 75.4326, 87.3864, or 91.7145 damage per hit. BC having 460 hits, and dodging 2/3 of the attacks means we need spend 44, 25, 19, 16, or 16 attacks to sink the BC.
Using the 4 gun SHBB, we need 16 attacks while you would need 22, so you need +37.5% more attack rolls. Cost comparison of the 4 gun SHBB being 18125, and your BC being 9675 means you get almost double the attack rolls the SHBB would. Using TI and concealment expert won't give a 4 gun E2 SHBB a good enough profile to dodge more shots.
The armour multi's are a bit lower than 53% for the BC firing at the SHBB, 44 piercing against 60.5 armour (boosted by TI doctrine), and the SHBB shooting back is 55/36.3 (30 base, x1.1 designer, x1.1 doctrine), a bit higher than 2.29x
Speed is going to depend on how many guns the SHBB has. Using the same ones that were used in the other comparison, BC gets +29%, +44%, +63%, +88%, or +123%, while the SHBB has the inverse of that, 77.5%, 69%, 61%, 53%, 44.5%.
This gives the BC 24.81831, 27.70416, 31.35957, 36.16932, or 42.90297 damage per attack, depending on the speed of the SHBB. With 770 HP on the SHBB, this means you need 31, 28, 25, 22, or 18 shots to sink the SHBB.
SHBB shoots back with 31.9455, 56.8836, 75.4326, 87.3864, or 91.7145 damage per hit. BC having 460 hits, and dodging 2/3 of the attacks means we need spend 44, 25, 19, 16, or 16 attacks to sink the BC.
Using the 4 gun SHBB, we need 16 attacks while you would need 22, so you need +37.5% more attack rolls. Cost comparison of the 4 gun SHBB being 18125, and your BC being 9675 means you get almost double the attack rolls the SHBB would. Using TI and concealment expert won't give a 4 gun E2 SHBB a good enough profile to dodge more shots.
Advantage goes to the BC you described, largely because TI and concealment expert aren't helping the SHBB get shot any less, lol. Putting E3 on the SHBB would help a lot. It would raise 4 gun speed from 20.8, up to 24.75, which would improve its profile enough to only get hit by ~83% of shots, which reduces the advantage the BC has in terms of the speed multipliers, and the extra shots needed to score enough hits. From 3x hits we go down to 2.5x, and the speed multi's are +58% for the BC (instead of +88) and 63% for the SHBB (instead of 53).
That would change the hits-to-kill to 26 against 12. So now the BC needs 2.16x the hits. Cost of the SHBB goes up 500, 18625 compared to the same 9675, the SHBB is now more favourable, and we didn't have to research '40 armour and guns, just a '40 (and '36) hull, or use a design company, and we are still ignoring the lions share of admiral traits and skills which can pretty massively boost armour to upwards of double.
It was neither quick nor simple, and yes there are other things that are going to shake things up. Give me conditions, and I'll crunch the numbers.
One thing that I noticed here when target profiles and speed come into play, is that I'm not really sure what your speed modifier is supposed to represent that the target profiles and such wouldn't already be abstracting.
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Well i tested it and i can confirm that setting it to -200 does not heal ships, but i dont know how big of an impact it has on piercing vs armor because the AI doesnt upgrade their fleets properly.
But assuming it does work, then 40 piercing vs 50 armor would scale to 40% damage being retained instead of 80%?
The problem is that the meta (as i understand it) is currently cheap DD shields with fake CAs with 1 medium battery (to qualify as a capital and get the capital ship targetting bonus) and loads of light cruiser batteries to clear the enemy screens.
If CAs with medium batteries could clear screens effectively, then what would be the point of building CLs?
I think too much importance is placed on clearing screens ASAP, once you clear screens, the enemy force will immediately start to disengage and you can go nuts with all your torps and guns. Im not even sure if ships shoot back when disengaging.