smoothpop

i started a french 1900 campaign last night and the first engagement was just wrong on so many levels. it was a convoy defence with British allied fleet. 27 TR to defend, french fleet 4 BB 8 CL, british fleet 3 CA 5 CL, German Fleet 5 BB 7 CA 5 CL 12 DD 7 TB. first issue was the divisioning, all the TR were in 1-3 ship divisions that clogged the entire bar, i couldnt even expand to see specific ship cards and the allocation was irrational more below, the attach detach buttons completely unresponsive for every selected division. im assuming they were all related. second issue was deployment. my force excluding TR consisted of 3 columns, middle was the 3 british CA leading the 4BB with the outer 2 columns being the light cruisers which wouldve been fine but for two issues first the divisions were completely irrational eg one CL division being 1st and 6th position ships of the starboard and 4th of the port columns. and second was the fact that a 7 DD division started between the port CL and the centre columns with 3 of them being within 400m of 2 of my BBs. needless to say i lost the manoeuvrability of 2 BBs as a result which had consequences later. the DDs got dispatched quickly and then through concentrated firepower and the enemy AI issuing suicide charges of individual ships into the mass of mine, the battle progressed to me having sunk their entire fleet bar 4 CAs that never showed their faces and a single heavily crippled TB with a cloaking device for only the loss of a single CL but most of my ships badly damaged. for some reason throughout the entire battle i was unable to issue orders to sail to somewhere except to my BB division, all the others were just following even when i tried to issue orders, they changed heading but immediately returned to "follow" BB division. the issue came when i wanted to hunt down the fleeing CAs and the TB. the TB was close enough to limit my game speed to 5x but i had only 3 CL that wernt engine damaged and very slow and all of them were just sitting still "following" a crippled BB and refused to change orders. not wanting to waste an hour watching a timer tick down, i assumed i had done enough to win even though the victory conditions were "protect TR" and "sink 100% of enemy ships" so i left the battle early and this is where the real joke happened. when i exited the battle the summary screen clearly showed i had most of my ships badly damaged but alive except the 1 CL and the AI had everything in Black except 4 CA in green and 1 TB in red but when i returned to the campaign map the results were completely different, id apparently lost 3 BBs 4 CAs and all bar one of my light cruisers and somehow the germas had resurected all bar one of their BBs 2 CAs and 1 TB ..... that was an alt f4 moment right there, how can it make such a massive mismatch between the match results and the campaign results?

I think it depends on how you contextualise it. for me i dominated both my 1910 campaign with 8 battlecruiser at 27kts 16",7",6.7" belt (M,F,R) and 6",5",5" Deck (M,F,R) armed with 4x2 13" and 6x2 6". later campaigns i just used some variant of the super cruiser with usually 3x3 11" guns 30kts and 14"+ of belt. its kinda easy to build OP ships against the AI.

ahh thanks for the feedback, i had suspected the compartmentalising had been what was to blame but i didnt realise the accuracy worked like that so that will make some changes in the future. i got 9 out of 10 in my last attemp but i ran out of time. i just used 6 slow dds with 10 centerline 2" gunswith heavy liddite HE rounds and it was much more effective than the 5" spam id done previously. but ill wait til its patched and see how it goes then

ive been struggling to sink torpedo boats whenever i encounter them. had a lot of goes in the BB vs TB before i won it and that was down to luck in the end. now however im struggling in the DD vs TB mission ive tried spamming cheap DDs with lots of 2" and 3" guns to having more advanced 5" equiped DDs and torp spammers but i just cant put them down. the CAs put each destroyer down in a single hit no matter how i build them. its really depressing to watch 5 DDs with 5 of the most accurate 5" guns each spend 25 minutes pummeling a stationary TB at 1.5 KM and do less than 20% structure and zero flooding. what the hell is going on here? why are TB so bloody tough? is it the fact they always have max bulkheads? how do you get round them being impossible to hit?