Will ship classes be properly represented

[Cpack]

I like this discussion
For Details I think we have to wait until we really see how things can be modded in, especially as I said how we can teach the AI to do and "understand" things like the Need of variants etc.

Sub-variants of ships like TD's SPART or carrier variants would be cool, but also there, no idea if it works. But this would be priority B after Fixing the main tech tree

 

[linen]

All you ship folk, if you haven't already check out Rule The Waves (probably preaching to the choir here) as it's really great. Also thanks for the info earlier, much appreciated!

 

[dave_r_gilbert]

In my opinion you can skip SHBB's and bring them in the BB line. My intension then would be to include really nation specific values of classes (also for tanks and plane).
This could make the Yamato special again.

But at the moment I have no idea how to make all the values nation specific (not really by company, or at least not only)

I think you could do this by National Spirit.
They are present from the start, and by what the DDs have in them they can contain just about anything.
So if you want Japanese battleships to be bigger, badder, and more expensive - add that to either one of the existing national spirits, or add a custom one.
Same with american ships better at AA, Japanese torpedos, British ASW, and so on.

 

[bcoop1701]

Put another way, Yamato was special because she was just a lot bigger than anything else built at the time. But looking at all these other build plans (Montana, H-44, A-150), it seems to me that Yamato just ushers in a new era of BBs. Montana, while not quite as well armed in main guns, would have had more speed and comparable armor. H-44 would be monstrously huge, representing another step forward in firepower (20 inch guns) and armor, along with A-150 (sometimes called super Yamato).

What I'm getting at is that I'm not sure the game needs a SHBB class itself. Maybe it will just make people feel good, but I would have thought that "armored behemoth" and "fast battleship that rolls with the carriers" could be covered by variants. But having a SHBB ship type might make players happy because of the appeal of Yamato, so I guess it makes sense from a design perspective.

This is why I liked to think of SHBB tech in HOI3 as a "treaty breaker." It represents a likely path BB design would have taken if there were no treaties in place during the 30s.

I agree. I would like to see something like this for a Battleship Tech Tree.

People can debate whether this makes sense or not and of course I have no idea how implementable it is into the programming of the game. Not something I would expect for the vanilla game at this date to be sure.
Edit: My idea is all non-democracies that were historic signees would have the option at game start to sign the 1936 treaty or not with an impact on world tension. If everybody signs on then battleship tech is capped at the 1936 level until 1942 when it unlocks (perhaps with the option to renew but I doubt by 1942 that war would not have broken out.)
As far as being able to skip to the 2nd Gen Post treaty if someone builds a Yamato, that's just based on the historical arms race prior to WW1. As soon as somebody sees one of the treaty killers they are going to want their own that one-ups the other guys. So, If I see Yamato commissioned, I'm not going to design and build an Iowa, I'm going to want a Yamato killer of my own. (This is actually a bit non-historical because nobody in the West had a confident picture of Yamato's true size until after the Battles of Leyte Gulf. I felt that that was a perfect storm of an extraordinary secrecy program by Japan and the fact that the Pacific war started prior to her commissioning so no one saw her in peacetime where one picture from a port visit would have given away her size.) I think more often than not, most nations would not be able to accomplish Japan's deception successfully so I went with immediately unlocking the next stage of research once a Yamato was commissioned.
Note, for the picture, unlocked designs still need to be researched before building.

Technology is not about making things larger but making things more suited. A 1944 tech super heavy battleship would have very advanced armaments and electronics making it more effective then older classes.

I would disagree in the case of battleships. Fire controls and radar and AAA can be retrofitted to older designs so while important it's not what makes a battleship designed in 1944 significantly better than one originally designed in 1936 once the 1936 design is retrofitted (assuming such a concept is in game, which it should be). Battleship evolution is about bigger guns, more armor and possibly more speed.

 

[Axe99]

I like that chart Bcoop, like it a lot .

 

[Secret Master]

I would like to see something like this for a Battleship Tech Tree.

I'm a bit tired today, but I approve.

 

[Beagá]

1944 aircraft and 1944 submarines mean 1944 battleships are pretty much pointless. Unless your name is US, which can build anything I guess. But 99% world isn´t US.

"More armor" good luck then putting armor to defend versus guns, bombs and torpedoes.

Are battleships cool? Hell yeah. But they were inneficient by war´s end.

So instead of that battleship fetish focus on how the submarines and air attack are modelled and how THEY will work by 1944. We will always have Victoria for dreadnaught golden days.

 

[Denkt]

Battleships are useful in 1948 because of sealane control. A submarine or carrier can not stop a enemy fleet, a well supported battleship is pretty much unsinkable and can only really be dislodged by sending in your own battleships. Without these ships it will be extreamly risky to do any large naval invasion.

1944 aircrafts must face 1944 anti air and 1944 submarines must face 1944 anti submarine systems so it is not a one sided war.

 

[Beagá]

Sigh I don´t know why I bother. Anything the battleship can do the carrier will be able to do in 1948 and with more flexibility.

By your POV then we should make full plate armor knights viable in a XIX century game, because "they can be well supported".

 

[Denkt]

Battleships are not really comparable to armored knights, the naval war is all about combined arms in which battleships role could be compared to infantry. Ships are not useless because they can not destroy airfields and carriers are basically just a mobile airfield.

Battleships and most other ship classes became obsolete then effective missiles was developed because at that point there is no longer a reason to build a large ship to fit a large gun on it then a missiles can hit a target even futher away but that development is a bit outside HOI4 time frame.

 

[bcoop1701]

1944 aircraft and 1944 submarines mean 1944 battleships are pretty much pointless. Unless your name is US, which can build anything I guess. But 99% world isn´t US.

"More armor" good luck then putting armor to defend versus guns, bombs and torpedoes.

Are battleships cool? Hell yeah. But they were inneficient by war´s end.

So instead of that battleship fetish focus on how the submarines and air attack are modelled and how THEY will work by 1944. We will always have Victoria for dreadnaught golden days.

I wouldn't say pointless but I'm fully on board with the carriers beat battleships bandwagon. I probably wouldn't choose to build 1944 battleships if I had enough surviving 1936 and 1940 BB's (Even the US historically chose to not build the Montana's to prioritize Essex construction)

But the historical 1944-45 time period may not be the best period to determine the usefulness of battleships because of the overwhelming numerical and technical superiority that was enjoyed by the Allies in that time frame. Musashi and Yamato took a tremendous amount of punishment before they went down showing that large battleships are not easy to kill even with 1944 aircraft bomb and torpedo loads. It took hundreds of aircraft in multiple waves that had total air superiority and could line up their attacks for maximum effect. If the Japanese had been able to maintain anything like partial parity with the production of the US (Impossible in real life of course but in the game, who knows) and give Center Force naval air cover, where the carriers themselves also become targets taking focus away from Mushashi and Yamato then maybe the Yamato's reach the beaches of Leyte and it's a surface battle off Samar between Center Force and Task Force 34 (The US Fast BB battle line) that determines the success of the Philippines invasion.

The 1942 Guadalcanal campaign gives an example of this. Over a series of naval battles (Eastern Solomons, Santa Cruz) where there was rough parity in numbers, the US and Japanese carrier forces essentially fought each other to exhaustion and it was a capital ship duel during Second Guadalcanal that helped seal the campaign for the Americans. And in 1942, both the US and Japanese held back battleship units from the South Pacific possibly due to fuel concerns so if fuel use had not been an issue [like in HOI4 (sigh)], maybe Yamato, Musashi and the Pearl Harbor veterans see use there as well and the battle goes Japan's way.

There are a lot of hypotheticals there. I'm not trying to prove anything, certainly not the superiority of battleships over carriers. Battleships are dependent on carriers to protect them from other carriers. I'm just saying that a game that is more sandbox than historical simulator is probably going to find that battleships can be more important than they historically turned out to be and that it's not jumping the shark to do so.

Also, IMO, despite some noticeable successes, WW2 era submarines are still more of a nuisance weapon than a dire threat to fast moving warships because of their slow underwater speed. At least until the deployment of Type XXI style subs in the late game period. Nuclear power is what really let submarines off the leash. USS Nautilus tore up the fleet exercises she participated in and completely rewrote the book on underwater warfare but that is after the time frame of the game.

 

[Secret Master]

I'd like to point out that in HOI3, the consideration of practicals meant that if you started down the BB path, you did have an incentive to keep going thanks to cheap IC costs and tech costs. I'm not saying it was optimal, but at a certain point, you might just say "Look, we'll just cover the damn things with land based air. We can't afford to start a carrier building program now."

In HOI4, there aren't practicals for ships of any kind. How the tech trees shape up may determine if and when someone decides to change course.

Battleships are useful in 1948 because of sealane control.

Are you defining it differently than I am? How can a carrier be incapable of controlling sea lanes?

"The enemy is sailing into the sea lane."

"Open fire with our 20 inch guns."

"Jolly good, ol' chap. We sank them!"

Versus

"The enemy is sailing into the sea lane."

"Send the CAGs in to sink them."

"Jolly good, ol' chap. We sank them!"

 

[bcoop1701]

Battleships and most other ship classes became obsolete then effective missiles was developed because at that point there is no longer a reason to build a large ship to fit a large gun on it then a missiles can hit a target even futher away but that development is a bit outside HOI4 time frame.

A missile is just a high-tech pilotless aircraft that crashes into it's target instead of dropping a bomb or torpedo right?

 

[Denkt]

A missile is just a high-tech pilotless aircraft that crashes into it's target instead of dropping a bomb or torpedo right?

Sounds like a correct description but being able to use these on even things like submarines and destroyers (well there have been tries with carrier submarines) completely change how naval warfare works.

USA anti air had more trouble to shot down kamikaze aircraft before they hit the ship then they had with aircrafts who used conventional weapons. So I guess the same applies to missiles.

Are you defining it differently than I am? How can a carrier be incapable of controlling sea lanes?

A fleet without battleships can not hold its position against a fleet with battleships. This may not sound like a big deal because the fleet without battleships can retreat but in some situation this is really bad.

The prime example I can think of is naval invasion, convoys are slow so they can not retreat against an advancing enemy fleet so its escort must hold the ground and that is pretty hard to do against battleships if you don't have battleships yourself.

Naturally you can not do naval invasion without strong naval superiority and air superiority in the area. Battleships probably will add alot of naval superiority while aircraft carriers will probably not add much by itself but its aircrafts will definitely add air superiority.

Naturally battleships should need alot of protection both air cover and a strong screen but if you can give them it, then they should be very hard to sink.

USA had so effective countermessures against air attacks that they calculated the japanese would lose 40 aircrafts or something like that to score a single hit. About one third of the aircraft that got in range of the anti air guns was shot down and the number of aircrafts that shot down by fighters was even higher. The aircrafts that did survive would most likely have been so disrupted they would miss the ship. Kamikze who fly directly at the ship would likely continue on the same path even if damaged which is why it had a better hit rate.

After 1942 USA never lost a fleet carrier and had no battleship losses other then Pearl Harbour.

 

[Secret Master]

A fleet without battleships can not hold its position against a fleet with battleships. This may not sound like a big deal because the fleet without battleships can retreat but in some situation this is really bad.

The prime example I can think of is naval invasion, convoys are slow so they can not retreat against an advancing enemy fleet so its escort must hold the ground and that is pretty hard to do against battleships if you don't have battleships yourself.

But the battleships should not be getting in range to shoot at the naval invasion in the first place. It's the reason Samar is such a screw up. I understand why Halsey was lured away, but damn it, Yamato should not have been able to get that close to the invasion in the first damn place without far more air cover shooting her to pieces (like Ten-Go). Had Halsey's ships been in position, Kurita's ships would have been blown to smithereens.

Of course, had Halsey been in position, he would have had battleships, too, but sheesh. Halsey's air power should have killed Yamato that day.

 

[Orlunu]

"More armor" good luck then putting armor to defend versus guns, bombs and torpedoes.

Hmmm. Well, as I've said, there were plates on the 1936 Yamato which could stop a shot from any gun in the world without penetration in '48. The newer battleships were pretty much proof against the AP bombs of the era, and the torpedo belts, whilst the least effective of these, still meant that a lot of torp hits could be needed.

Just look at how "easily" Yamato and Musashi went down to repeated massed attack waves from carriers fielding equipment most of a decade newer than them.

Sigh I don´t know why I bother. Anything the battleship can do the carrier will be able to do in 1948 and with more flexibility.

Fight at night. No, wait, fight in close quarters. No, wait, shore bombardment. No, wait, I'mma get one soon...



The battleship should have been a dead concept by the 1940s, but it wasn't because several major navies, including both the IJN and the USN, doggedly stuck with decrepit guerre d'escadre tactics. The fleet carriers used at the time were fairly ineffective also because of doctrinal failings, but this was covered up by the USN pumping them out by the hundreds. If the US had put those shipbuilding resources into fast BBs instead, they'd be seen in a similar light to the CVs of the Pacific are now.

Big, fat capital ships weren't a good idea at the time. Not "BBs weren't a good idea" or "CVs weren't a good idea", all slow capital ships were silly.

But we shouldn't build tech trees that only let you take the optimal real-life path. This is a game, not a movie.

 

[Beagá]

All of those situations you mentioned can be easily avoided by 1944. It is IMPOSSIBLE for a 1944 task force to be attacked by a battleship unless it´s very poorly led.

That simple.

No one bothered to build new battleships after 1944. Everyone bothered to build submarines and carriers after 1944.

That simple.

Are battleships cool? Yes. Heavy cavalry also was. That doesn´t mean creating a fantasy game to make them viable.

 

[Orlunu]

It is IMPOSSIBLE for a 1944 task force to be attacked by a battleship unless it´s very poorly led.

That simple.

Is this a real post, or am I being meme'd?

No one bothered to build new battleships after 1944.

Not true.

Are battleships cool? Yes. Heavy cavalry also was. That doesn´t mean creating a fantasy game to make them viable.

No, you don't create a fantasy game to make battleships viable. You create a fantasy game to make a game.

Here's a fun proposal: you're only allowed to make the historically correct decisions. Wanna stick with battleship emphasis when the country tilted to carriers? No, we don't mek fantasy gaem. Wanna go with the Northern Expansion doctrine as Japan when they actually ended up going with the Southern Expansion? No, we don't mek fantasy gaem. Wanna use triangular divisions as the Italians in the period they decided to use binary? No, we don't mek fantasy gaem. Wanna send that unit to Nijmegen when it actually went to the Afsluitdijk? No, we don't mek fantasy gaem.
... In fact, fantasy inactivity is fantasy to. Gaem will mek historical changes for you. You can watch. You also can change map mode, if you really want control.

 

[Axe99]

All of those situations you mentioned can be easily avoided by 1944. It is IMPOSSIBLE for a 1944 task force to be attacked by a battleship unless it´s very poorly led.

That simple.

No one bothered to build new battleships after 1944. Everyone bothered to build submarines and carriers after 1944.

That simple.

Are battleships cool? Yes. Heavy cavalry also was. That doesn´t mean creating a fantasy game to make them viable.

I'm with Bcoop on this one. We really don't know what things would have looked like in 1944 with BBs if there was some degree of naval and air parity between the sides strategically. By 1944, you're seeing radar-controlled AA guns and VT fuses, making AA a good deal more effective, and at the end of the day, if you need to take and hold a strategic area of ocean, and you've got rough naval air parity, and you don't have BBs and the other side does, then there's a fair chance you won't be able to do it. Without total air superiority, it's unlikely air forces will be able to sink all (or most) of a fleet (they weren't historically, even with total air superiority, capital ships were generally very hard to sink, and even Prince of Wales and Repulse took multiple waves and AA failures on the day to make that possible), so the only way to ensure control is ships in the water, and if all you've got is CAs, and the other side has BBs, it's not going to end well.

Now, in the Pacific, it's likely a side without BBs could trade space for attrititive time, using it's CAGs to grind down the other sides CAGs and slowly whittle away their fleet, but what if they're unable to finish off the BBs before they've traded so much space that the enemy can mount an effective invasion somewhere? In the case, there's no counter, because they can defend their invasion force with BBs, then it's going to be very, very difficult to dislodge them. On the other hand, if you're attacking with just CVs, and the enemy has BBs and CVs in defence, it limits your options for invasion because CAGs couldn't guarantee the elimination of whole fleets, and they couldn't get in their way the same way a BB can - so any invasion is potentially susceptible to a SAG sailing in and ruining its day (which oh-so-almost happened to the US at Leyte despite overwhelming CV and BB superiority!)

So - for a historical playthrough, I agree, a UK or US that's near as historically successful would have no point at all in building 1944 BBs unless the Soviets looked like they were angling for a strong navy and being aggressive - but in an ahistorical playthrough, where Germany might be allied with the UK, France and Japan, against the US and USSR, and things navally are a good deal more even, I don't think we've got the data to say exactly when they're no longer useful strategically.

 

[Diwtop]

Do a carrier need to be at a port to get resupplied with planes?

Because in a 2nd wave BB`s should be superior against carriers with low plane counter!

How do we get this counter low? Mass Spam light cruiser s?