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I don't say this - I say they stay in service exactly as they were built and fight alongside the newer units coming off the assembly lines.
I'm not saying that certain things should not be able to be upgraded in a ship - just that taking a WWI battleship and upgrading it to the equivalent of a Bismark class ship is virtually impossible, and would probably be harder than just building a Bismark class ship from the keel up. The same goes for taking a PKwI and making it the equivalent of a Panther by constant upgrades of armor and guns (though this should be impossible).
The game abstracts the upgrade process for land units because they can be upgraded a tank at a time. The brigade that the tanks are part of can continue to fight because they can be done this way.
The naval unit though is something that can't be done this way. To really refit a ship, it needs to have its fighting capability dropped to zero for a really long period of time to be able to retro-fit it with larger guns, or whatever you want. Also, this retro-fitting is limited not just by what you want to upgrade on it, but also the engineering of the rest of the ship to be able to handle it.
Yes, you should be able to put a better fire control or radar or AA on ships - or fit a ship with torpedo capability. These things should require a much shorter stay in drydock than some of the major changes people want to do. Just because your engineers have figured out how to make an 18" naval turret/cannon does not mean that that cannon is able to fit on a 1920s era battleship hull. Just because you have researched a powerful engine does not mean that the areas in the engine room of all your ships can fit it. The amount of work that goes into upgrading these ships that cost so much to make in the first place is staggering, as the few cases where ships were upgraded has shown.
In game terms, I would not mind having ships upgradeable to a point - but the following would definitely have to be in effect for it to happen:
A) The ship would have to be taken completely out of commission for the duration - no sudden upgrades of the ship while it's out doing a naval bombardment and has been sinking shipping all over the globe.
B) Insane time requirements based on how much you are upgrading.
C) A limit on the amount that the base ship can be upgraded. If you have a 1918 class ship, don't expect it to become a modern day ship through upgrades. Perhaps have a 'base' ship (i.e. your ship on file would have as stats :BASE: Hull 1918 Guns 1918 Engines 1918, etc. Have each category only upgradeable various amounts (i.e., a hull may only be one or two techs, guns 2 or 3, radar unlimited, etc.)
D) Multiple research fields need to be present for the upgrade to be available. You want to upgrade the guns? The hull also needs the research to be upgraded. You want to upgrade the hull? The engines need to be modified to be able to keep you at the same speed. There are a lot of things that need to be balanced to make an effective fighting vessel.
A CAG should be upgradeable on a CV as long as the deck of the CV is long enough to be able to handle the take offs and landing requirements of the planes. At some point, you're going to have planes that won't be able to land or take off from the shorter decked early carriers.
Agree that it is abstracted, but will put it to you that there are attrition losses as well being replaced with the newer equipment. Yes, in a perfect situation, would love to see how many of what kind of tank is available to each brigade and watch as the numbers begin to flow and have options as to what to do with the outdated machines being replaced. However, as you said, that game doesn't exist (yet). The abstraction that we have here is about as close as you're going to get... However:
How about this?
Have a system where as armored units are upgraded, a portion of the raw materials is added back to the pool (so that we at least get the scrapped material back with which to build more upgraded models).
That would at least abstract the 'scrapping' of the older models that are replaced. Would love to have something in place, like I said, where you could, as you upgrade more and more brigades, be able to take a percentage of those upgraded vehicles and be able to send them to allies as lend-lease, etc. or send some of them to really backward countries to be broken down for blueprints so they can advance as well in those techs.
Though - with the abstracted model, is that already built into the decreased cost in IC days of the brigade's worth of tanks or whatever? Yes, some of it is the lessened training, but did they just save us some micromanaging by not letting us see the materials that are coming back into the system as a separate step and just giving us the 'net' of the transaction in those lowered IC costs?
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I can't speak to ship upgrading. However, for land units, especially tanks, I can. Small improvements might be done in the field. For the most part, any small additions would be done when the unit is pulled out of the line to regroup/rest. For large upgrades, this would be accomplished when a large unit (division) is pulled out of the line for major refit/integrate large numbers of replacements/reequip with new same or improved equipment. It works very poorly to try to do this while in contact. Org and morale would suffer greatly. Good units are good because of exhaustive training with good equipment.
Well, if you want to you can think that the Panzer Division withdraws one company at a time for retraining and upgrade. Combining it with a needed rest from the combat zone, it wouldn't really reduce fighting strength much in the meanwhile.
Coincidentally, this is also how it was sometimes handled. And sometimes the crews were asked to learn the new tanks in a week due to time and enemy pressure not allowing otherwise (not optimal, but hey, it's war).
Hope that helps you feel better about how it works in the game
If so then they weren't upgraded AT ALL. Then why you're fine with tank divisions being upgraded but not ships, when in reality the contrary has happened ? With the brigade system, you can build new tank brigades and attach them to pre-existing armored divisions with older tank brigades exactly as happened in reality, why then should we be able to upgrade tank divisions, instead ?
Says who ?
Can you guys demonstrate what you're all claiming or simply talking of thin air ? I'm far from being the expert here, but even a simple reasoning will bring to my attention that most of the listed examples of warships upgraded in the interwar period were italian. Since you are claiming that this process is very expensive, even IMMENSE in expenditures compared to building a new ship, you are implying that Italy was IMMENSELY richer than USA, UK, Germany and others. In my uninformed opinion it is quite the opposite: taking a preexisting frame and changing parts is far less expensive, especially in terms of material resources used, since the parts removed are recycled.
Now one could (but none actually did, so I'm gonna do it for them
) object that the difference between armored units, air wings and ships is that ships -exception made for destroyers and subs- are single units hence upgrading them means taking them off duty, whereas an armored division or an air wing will have reserves that can be used in turns as replacements to upgrade the whole division with time; so it is strategically harder to upgrade a warship compared to, say, an armored division. However this mechanism is already in place, since correct me if I'm wrong, but to upgrade the upgradable parts of a ship, this ship must be in port. So I really se no reason whatsoever why this would be impossible to do. And even assuming that it is true that building a new ship is less expensive than upgrading an existing one, this still isn't impossible to do, so why not let it be done with proper costs in time and resources (IC days) ?
Well, game mechanics don't stop the ship leaving the port when the upgrades are half way done, and that is bit problematic.
Nobody here, except you, is saying that rebuilding a ship is "IMMENSELY more" expensive than building a new one. What I'm saying is that it's comparable in price. As in, "it costs roughly the same amount of money".
As for my evidence, just look at the construction times. Roughly the same, yes? Which means you're paying your skilled shipyard workers for the same length of time, regardless of whether they're renovating an old ship or building a new one. Yes, you'll save money on raw materials by re-using the old ship's hull, but the labour costs are going to be the same either way.
As for why it's Italy and Japan who rebuilt their old ships - easy. They were the two aggressive, militaristic and expansionist powers in the late 20s/early 30s, but both of them were bound by the Washington Naval Treaties. They weren't allowed to build new battleships; so in order to make their navy more powerful, the only option was to rebuild their old warships to make them stronger than their potential rivals.
"Despite all this, the resource and industrial savings in the process were immense in comparison to building entire ships from scratch"
This in my book means that it would cost more to upgrade than to build from scratch. When you put together the terms immense and in comparison, the first one which normally means very big, becomes very BIGGER, due to the use of the term comparison. There is little room for interpretation here...
Nope, it doesn't mean it at all. In fact, the construction or upgrade times say nothing on the workforce employed, so this stat is pretty much meaningless.
Let me poit out that during fascism the cost of the workforce was ludicrous compared to the cost of resources. Even in non fascist countries, you can't dismiss the resource cost as if it's just an side annoyance.
1) Italy wasn't respecting that pact anyways
2) the modernized ships weren't stronger than the potential rivals
3) last but obviously not least, AFAIK the treaty didn't forbid construction of new ships, but it regarded the totals of capital ships for each country.
You're making a mistake in your English. "Savings" means "stuff you don't pay." If I saw a shirt for 150 $ and then bought the same shirt for 30$ my "savings" are 120$.
The above quote is agreeing with your point.
The quote should read. "Despite all of this, the amount of resources and industry that didn't get used was immense in comparison to building ships from scratch.
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Uh... the SAVINGS were immense. Not the costs. That sentence means the opposite of the meaning you gave it.
Please show me any high tech construction process where labour costs didn't account for the vast majority of the total budget. Not to mention the opportunity cost to the shipyard of tying up their major capital resource - the building slip -for an average of four years.
1) Yes, actually, Italy certainly was respecting the Washington Treaty. They kept strictly to its terms - more strictly than the Japanese, in fact. They didn't ratify the London Treaty of 1930, though, which might be what you're thinking of; but that was an argument over destroyers, not battleships.
2. True, they weren't - their broadside was too weak. But that wasn't the intention when they were modernised; they were supposed to be equal to the French battleships.
3. Actually, the treaty allowed Italy to build up to three new battleships within its limits. They chose to build two and modernise their existing four instead, thinking that would give them a much more powerful fleet.
No, actually, here in the States we would say if you paid $120 for a shirt then found it on sale for $30 that you''d lost your shirt! :rofl:
The idea being that you lost money, not saved it, because you paid way too much the first time and were ripped off.
the game mechanics also don't stop the research AI from researching naval technology even when such an improved ship will never be build or never be build in time to function.
Yeah I know what savings mean. However I assumed he just left out a part of the sentence but rereading it I just missinterpreted everything
First of all, the construction of battleships isn't high tech. Second in high tech construction human labor has actually even less cost compared to machinery and materials, so I'm a bitt puzzled with your point. Third, for Italy during Fascism, "any and all" would be the answer to your question. Fourth those ships had an important past for Italy and we know how right-wing regimes tend to promote past glories, therefore the upgrading of those battleships had meanings beyond the pure strategical ones for Italy.
Perhaps you're all missing the main point ? In the mids 1930, WW1 ships would be useless. They would be dismantled or sunk or parked somewhere, certainly none would have wasted the manpower and ammunition to keep them operative knowing that they couldn't compete. Hence the choice is between building a ship from scratch or upgrading one. Apparently the costs in time are the same (but we can't really know for sure... let's assume it though), the result is not quite but almost the same (in the game though there isn't such a level of detail, so in the game the result would be exactly the same), so there is no opportunity cost for the shipyard. Besides I'm pretty sure the industrial costs are lower, not to mention the resource ones.
Certainly because you say so ? Certainly because you can quote a source ? Why have Italy and Japan been called "belligerant" in the earlier post speaking of this treaty ? Because they were known to not quite respect this kind of international pacts, heh... it's not like they were known to be belligerant because they thought to build battleships, since UK and USA had even bigger plans.
Italy was developing a new class of BBs (Littorio) during that time, and they intended to build 4 BBs of this class.
Because AFAIK the treaty was about total tonnage, not about ships built. They could have chosen a completely different path. Or otherwise you can link me to your sources ?
make ships upgradeable with that negative effects!
1-longer upgrade times
2-when upgraded lose all organization of ship
upgrade not the same way with change the parts it can be change the ship with new one but not forget above effects
1-longer upgrade times
2-when upgraded lose all organization of ship
upgrade not the same way with change the parts it can be change the ship with new one but not forget above effects
What you suggests that upgrade the Fuso to Nagato, Revenge to King George V, New York to Iowa Which is absurd.
Conway's All The World's Fighting Ships 1922-1946, Conway Maritime Press 1980, R Chesnau (ed).
Battleships of the World, Greenhill Books 1997, R Greger.