Worth upgrading old battleships?
- Thread starter Laffertytig
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For SP, don't bother. The upgrade cost is quite high, and battleships aren't efficient investments compared to cruisers and submarines.
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Depends on what you plan on upgrading. Adding seconday guns is not that expensive and improves the ships alot. Main guns, armor or engines while tempting is not really worth the effort, unless the ship is already great, except for that one flaw. Firecontrol and Radar is real easy and should be included in any upgrade done, but not worth doing by themselves.
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In general, you should never refit armor, the cost is exorbitant. In particular, heavy ships should probably never be refit. You have to pay a minimum fraction of the ship's full IC cost to do a refit of any kind, so it always takes forever regardless of what changes you make. If the devs ever get around to making capital ships good at something, we can have this conversation again.
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MIN_NAVAL_EQUIPMENT_CONVERSION_IC_COST_FACTOR = 0.2, -- Minimum fraction of an equipment type's base industry capacity cost to use when converting a naval equipment, such as through ship refitting.- 2
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Upgrading radar or fire control is cheap and quick. Small guns like AA aren't too bad. They can help improve the effectiveness of the old ship, though there's always the opportunity cost of not building more small ships, convoys, or subs with those shipyards. You might just relegate the old girl to shore bombardment or anti-cruiser duty.
Armor, engines, or heavy guns will take a very long time, possibly rivalling the time to build a whole new ship (in which case you obviously just lay down the all new ship, as you wind up with two ships that way) So, you've really got to ask yourself whether you can (a) live without the ship for that length of time, and (b) still expect to need an improved model two years away --especially given that you've just decided you don't need even that battleship right now anyway. If the big decision in the naval war is still up in the air, you might not want to spare the current ships of the line and make it even more questionable. If you do have the situation well in hand, then you probably expect the enemy fleet to start dwindling rapidly as your advantage snowballs. So there won't be anything you need to counter unless you think the enemy has a significant building program of their own underway.
And then, if you're playing the UK or US in SP, you might just make everything the best and shiniest you can just for the sake of pride in your mighty, unrivalled navy. You'll probably still win even if that's a theoretical waste of resources, so why not have fun?
Armor, engines, or heavy guns will take a very long time, possibly rivalling the time to build a whole new ship (in which case you obviously just lay down the all new ship, as you wind up with two ships that way) So, you've really got to ask yourself whether you can (a) live without the ship for that length of time, and (b) still expect to need an improved model two years away --especially given that you've just decided you don't need even that battleship right now anyway. If the big decision in the naval war is still up in the air, you might not want to spare the current ships of the line and make it even more questionable. If you do have the situation well in hand, then you probably expect the enemy fleet to start dwindling rapidly as your advantage snowballs. So there won't be anything you need to counter unless you think the enemy has a significant building program of their own underway.
And then, if you're playing the UK or US in SP, you might just make everything the best and shiniest you can just for the sake of pride in your mighty, unrivalled navy. You'll probably still win even if that's a theoretical waste of resources, so why not have fun?
Don't upgrade amour or engine, way too expensive. You can put a radar or AA gun if needed though.
You can add Dual Purpose Guns and 1940 FCS do upgrade your Light Attack and AA quite a bit on your BBs. If you add AAs in the empty slots which can't take DP secondaries you can add even more AA defense, which helps alot of sponging carrier and landbased bombers.
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As UK, you get a national spirit that speed this up, which makes it worth it IMO. Modern secondary guns can do quite decent damage to screens, which is the most important IMO. Also fire control, AA and radar are very cheap.
The best use of refitting though is converting old subs, (and sometimes destroyers) to minelayers.
Converting old cruisers and BBs to carriers can also be situationally useful if you don't want to invest lots of research and production as some countries. Just make sure you keep the original engine or the cost becomes huge.
The best use of refitting though is converting old subs, (and sometimes destroyers) to minelayers.
Converting old cruisers and BBs to carriers can also be situationally useful if you don't want to invest lots of research and production as some countries. Just make sure you keep the original engine or the cost becomes huge.
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Swapping engine to a carrier variant actually works here, especially for cruisers (battleships will make about 30kts anyway with engine 1, so there's little need) - additional costs that make engine swapping ridiculous are only applied if you change to the engine of the same type (either upgrade or downgrade), luckily converted carriers have two.
I usually upgrade fire control, aa, radar and secondaries. If I have float plane I swap it out for aa/dual purpose since other ships do the spotting.
Upgrading DP + FC3 + radar III (IV) is the most IC-efficient way of adding light + heavy attack, better than building new.
Especially as the bottleneck is usually screens.
IMHO worth it in 1942 if you already have dp+radar+fc3 techs and only refit each ship once.
Especially as the bottleneck is usually screens.
IMHO worth it in 1942 if you already have dp+radar+fc3 techs and only refit each ship once.
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In the present state of the game, spending NIC on anything but submarines is an enormous waste. From a purely optimization perspective, decommission everything but your subs and spam subs. RPwise that's atrocious, so do what feels right.
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The unreasonable effectiveness of submarines
I played the standard German game, except for delaying the start of the war by half a year in order to build up a force of ~60 1940 subs with snorkels. Off the coast of Portugal, 12 brave subs without any support from the air managed to take...
The last time that I played with a massive sub fleet I experienced a nasty side effect which has soured my view regarding them. As Axis Sweden I ended up with about 100 subs raiding the Atlantic around 1941 to 1943 (can't remember the exact year). This ended up whipping out all of the US (and others) convoys. This might sound like a good thing, avoiding a D-Day. However, no D-Day meant that they didn't loose troops in failed landings, allowing them to build up a huge army to defend their homeland. It made capitulating them much tougher than it should have been. I know that there are ways around this (e.g. winning before the US joins), but it's just my personal prejudice against subs. That and surface fleets are just more fun to build and manage.In the present state of the game, spending NIC on anything but submarines is an enormous waste. From a purely optimization perspective, decommission everything but your subs and spam subs. RPwise that's atrocious, so do what feels right.
The unreasonable effectiveness of submarines
I played the standard German game, except for delaying the start of the war by half a year in order to build up a force of ~60 1940 subs with snorkels. Off the coast of Portugal, 12 brave subs without any support from the air managed to take...
If I'm doing well on the rest of the fleet, I often make them into carriers. Sometimes I also do the same with early cruisers. They're not great carriers, but they're nice for padding out carrier components of fleets if you can't also provide a full complement of modern carriers.
Also, it's the only refit you can do to ships of foreign origins, such as from Case Anton or integrating subjects, so if you get a bunch of old British or Italian or French battleships, what else are you going to do with them?
Also, it's the only refit you can do to ships of foreign origins, such as from Case Anton or integrating subjects, so if you get a bunch of old British or Italian or French battleships, what else are you going to do with them?
You could just... Not get north atlantic supremacy until a d-day has happened. Then sink all the convoys, obliterating supply. Then wash, rinse, and repeat until they're all out of manpower.
I mean you command the boats. Just don't prevent d-day. You chose to do that.
As I said, there are ways around it.
Also, by the time that I realized what I had done, it was a little late as the UK had already capitulated, so they had no real suitable place to launch an invasion from.