Reaper Jack

Agreed. Frankly we should be essentially limited to 40,000 ton designs all the way to 1920, as only then did we start to see capital ships get bigger. 1890 Limit should be about 12k-15k tons. 1900 should be about 20k. 1910 should be 25k. 1915 should be 30k. 1920 should be 40k. 1930 should be 45-50k. 1940 is where the limits go out the window. But the prohibitive cost of building a drydock to even build something on Yamato's scale ought to be a huge headache, let alone something that goes higher than 80k tons.

Alaska's are not cruisers any more than the Hood was a cruiser. For the exact same reasons. The USA called them Large Cruisers so they could get the budget through by pretending they were not capital ships, and a cruiser is not a capital ship. The Stalingrad (Can tell you've picked that up from WoWS as no Russian class of supercruiser/battlecruiser was called thus, it was the Kronstadt class) never had her armor fitted, and little more than the keel and lower hull was complete, like all Russian capital ships of that time period, the USSR's failure to produce functional armor meant they were the ultimate in vanity projects, and were ships that could never have been completed, so starting them was pointless, in that sense they are not different to the Montanas, i.e. pure speculation. Additionally these ships at full load would have weighed upwards of 42,000 tons, which is absolutely Battlecruiser territory. Yes the idea of the Battlecruiser was dead by the mid 40's, however in function and role both the Alaskas and Russian fantasies were Battlecruisers, they are in no way, shape or form even close to being regular cruisers.

Components, especially engines, weigh too much while armour weighs too little at the moment. Guns seem to be in a good place weight wise. I don't know where you got that Iowa number from though, it's far too low. The Iowas weighed 58,000-60,000 tons at full load (the game uses full load weight.)

Captain, we've been outfitted with the new super cannons! Excellent Jerry! Now we just need to work on firing them faster than once a week!

Yeah agreed. The one thing I have found that is very realistic so far, is that I made a Battleship with 406mm main guns, but only six, and went heavier on the armor, about a 380mm belt and 170mm deck, not pushing reality too far, and the game put me against two 356mm armed BB's. At 11-14km I had a complete immunity zone, and once I reached that zone, maintaining distance at 13km meant I could bounce shells all day long. Sadly both enemy BB's had 450mm belts so I was struggling to pen back, but the fact the immunity zone was something I could do was much appreciated.

I'm assuming that's how the research system will work already, you have to develop a new gun/turret before even considering putting it onto a ship, so newer calibers would get more expensive to start as time goes on, but if you spend too much time trying to research everything, you'll fall behind tech level wise.

An actual pic from the same battle. Battlecruiser Derfflinger pulling up alongside to the stricken British battleship Jupiter with the intent to give her a coup de grace salvo, Captain stated his intention to remain at the scene and rescue enemy sailors once the ship has gone down.

Not sure if this the best place to post this but here goes anyway. I had to fight possibly the tankiest enemy ship ever today!

There are a number of ways to handle the supply side, but the real problem is your industry. Going back to the French, the reason the Richelieus took so long to build was because they had to dredge entirely new ports and drydocks to hold them, and they had to build entirely new factories to make the new 380mm guns as there was no infrastructure for them, that tooling process alone is costly and time consuming. Once it is set up the costs go down, but getting it set up is a pain, hence why navies stuck to one caliber as much as they could. Interwar Germany faced the same problem with Krupp very often modifying existing artillery for both naval and land units (The FlaK 88 is a perfect example of this, the original version is of WW1 vintage) so retooling was as easy as possible to produce the new weapons.

Regarding the carrier discussion, I want them in game personally, as designable units for a few reasons. 1 - Aircraft Carriers did not come into their own until the 40's had already started, Taranto, Pearl Harbour and the sinking of the Bismarck were the first real successes they had achieved (and Bismarck was luck along with the German Fire Control being too modern to deal with stringbags.) The aircraft themselves were simply not that capable before 1939, either unable to carry heavy payloads, too short ranged, poor navigation systems, or not being modern enough as the Army Air Force of most nations took priority. By 1940 in game, the Campaign will be in it's final five to ten years of sixty, so having powerful-ish Carriers at that point is not a problem. 2 - Navies devoted resources to researching and building Carriers long before WW2, with the first successful ship-borne flights taking place in WW1, just as with subs, the budget and time spent on this ought to be simulated in game. 3 - Subsidiary Carrier Doctrine. This was the dominant Naval Theory for Carriers before WW2, that they would partake in a 'Subsidiary' or Support role, acting with their air arm as scouts and ASW units, prior to the large Carrier Battles of WW2, this would be easy and quite fun to implement in game, using biplanes to find enemy fleets and provide intelligence. On that same note, I really would like to see Cruiser/Battleship catapult aircraft as well. 4 - Finally, and this is the most important point for me. Ships have AA. Right now we do not have to worry about AA or AA Fire Control on our ships at all, and as with point 3, we do not have to worry about Catapult Aircraft systems either, now while AA is not heavy, developing good AA is costly, and Catapult Systems and Aviation hangers were heavy, right now this is again not simulated in game, so ships are, broadly speaking, not as accurate as they could be. (On an aesthetic note, ships with no AA tears at my poor naval purist soul, they look so bare and naked!) I'm sure there are other reasons as well, but the Carrier is not something that can be ignored in a Naval game that takes part during the early part of their history, same as subs, which I would personally also like to see as design-able as well, though they should not be present in fleet actions. A system similar to Atlantic Fleet would be fine for them in my opinion.

What sort of logistics will we see, or do you want to see, regarding gun caliber in the campaign? In real life this was a huge headache for the varying admiralties, with a severe reluctance to move away from guns of certain sizes because the infrastructure to build both the weapons, their shells, and their replacement parts was already in place. This is most notable with the French in the Interwar period, where some of their head naval staff were already complaining about having to supply 3 different ammo types to their capital ships (for the old dreadnoughts, the Dunkerques and the Richelieus respectively) and as such resisted upgunning the new Alsace designs to the 406mm variant that was proposed. In other navies, such as the Kriegsmarine, the 150mm gun present on any German ship fired the same shell, with that particular gun being shared between at least six different classes (Bismarck, Scharnhorst, Deutschland, Leipzig, K Class and the 1936A Mob DD's) which was in part due to keeping their supply system as simple as possible. How will this be simulated in the campaign? I would very much like to see this as it was a major reason for secondary batteries in particular as to why they rarely exceeded 152mm guns, as there is little point in designing, building, and supplying a new weapon system that will only see service on a handful of mounts on one or two ships of the same class, it's simply not efficient.

This too, I made a fleet of 2 BC, 2 CA, 2 CL in custom battles yesterday, trying to simulate two German 'Raiding Squadrons' that what still on their way to the Atlantic, together so far, being intercepted by a British Patrol Fleet (3 CA, 3 CL, 6 DD) and the BC I designed myself (better Scharnhorsts basically) and they could pull 34 knots, but the CA's could do 26 knots only, had no torps, 8 guns but also had ludicrous armor (270mm belt) while the 2 CL could only make 24 knots, had no torpedoes and additionally had 70mm armor at the most, and were destroyed almost instantly because of it. The biggest problem with friendly AI designs I've found so far is they are either very slow (and therefore easy to hit) or their engine efficiency is...abysmal. Wounded Beast gave me a BC that could pull 40 knots...but had one funnel of the oldest, worst type only. It took it 45 minutes to hit top speed.

The opposite is also true however, and I've found that for most BB missions you cannot afford to not have the biggest guns as even something like 381mm weapons are just inadequate to do any real damage to AI ships that have 35 knot speed and 450+mm of armor.

The cruiser had a belt thickness of 324mm of Krupp IV armor. The game displays the base thickness in the armor section and tells you the type under the components list. Even if we assume the irl Des Moines has 150mm of Krupp IV equivalent, that's still only about 320mm or so in raw steel/iron values. This ship had the equivalent of battleship grade armor (324mm is about the same thickness as a Scharnhorst belt at it's thickest, again with the same armor grade of what is Krupp IV in game on a ship that when I reconstructed it weighed 10k tons. That just is not possible.) As I said before, the armor does not weigh enough compared to irl. If the Algerie's 120mm belt weighs 1500 tons than there is no way in hell a 324mm belt on another heavy cruiser weighs in at a third of that. Again, armor in game does not weigh enough.

So uh...can I ask just HOW the AI managed those armor values on 11k tons while also doing 31 knots? AND having some top end components? -EDIT- So built it myself to make sure the AI wasn't cheating, went with minimum range and bulkheads to give as much free weight as possible. Not only was the ship possible, I had a THOUSAND tons SPARE. This does not seem balanced in the slightest. The heaviest cruiser belt in history was the Des Moines' class at 152mm. And they weighed in at almost 20k tons. So my take from this is very simply that armor values for cruisers do not represent historical weight (which is something I have noticed before but never to this bad a degree) and the level 5 torpedo belt also does not seem to weigh enough. The torpedo belt weight was 850 tons while the armor belt weight was barely 500. Compare this to irl, say the Algerie, widely known as having the best of both the torpedo and armor belts among heavy cruisers in 1939. The Algerie by comparison,has a torpedo belt weight of over 1000 tons and an armor belt weight of 1500 tons at 120mm thickness. That's almost double what the in game weight was for a belt 3 times as thick while the torpedo belt was also very light. The thing also had a maintenance cost of 4000 a month, which was by far the lowest I've seen of any class' design that I've made so far. The hull (Italian Heavy Cruiser I) stats it's on are also very good compared to other nations CA's (it only has less stability while being better in all other stats) and has a base maintenance of 1,500/month. Compare this to say, German Heavy Cruiser I, which as I said only has better stability and worse everything else, but has a base maintenance of 14,000/month. This does not matter right now but if we are going to see the campaign soon this needs to be fixed (unless German flavor is to be prohibitively expensive to run any ships?) @Nick Thomadis Can we expect this to be addressed in the future?

Indeed. When Repulse was sunk by Japanese torpedo bombers for example, the Captain gave absolutely exemplary skill towards keeping his ship turning and avoiding torpedoes, right to the very end, the only reason she even took them (on the final run no less) was because she was dropped from both sides of the ship at the same time. Up until then, on all previous runs she had avoided every drop, and the Japanese pilots afterwards said they were very impressed by a ship that size being captained so well.

All gun sizes hit the Destroyers with fair effectiveness, battleship grade guns actually fared worst, but this is likely more due to volume of fire. The cruisers were going 30-32 knots while my Destroyers were doing 40 knots, so speed had nothing to do with why they took more hits.

I held my destroyers at 14km distance from the enemy, 1.5km in front of my cruisers screening for them, outside of their own torpedo range (12.7) and they were not only spotted but getting regularly hit by 229mm shells when those same shells couldn't hit my cruisers for toffee. At present it's bad enough that there's little point even having them. If I can't even screen with them there's no point building them except as ASW dummies, when aside from that their role is completed far better by CL's. I'm glad Nick said they would be looking into it, as DD'd receiving 3-5 times the number of shell hits of heavy and battlecruisers at the same range is just plain wrong.

Destroyers seem to be incredibly easy to hit compared to all other ships. Tested in custom battle; at the same range of 15km my CL landed 1 hit on the enemy CL, but landed 6 hits on the enemy DD's. My CA landed 1 hit on the CL and 8 hits on the DD's and my BC landed 0 hits on the CL and 4 hits on the DD's (1 main, 3 secondary.) This does not make sense as the DD's were both smaller and faster and in smoke while the CL was not, so the odds should be stacked against me, but instead I hit them much more often. My own DD's in that same custom battle were also hit 12 times while my CL, CA and BC were only hit 3 times between all of them, by holding the range at 14km.

Correct me if I am wrong here, but didn't diesel also give a longer effective range? (Either due to better efficiency per HP or the fact that things broke less on the Deutschlands?)

Largest ships that used pure diesel power that I can recall off the top of my head are the Deutschland class Panzerschiffe. Compared to WW2 Germany's later Turbine designs they were very, very reliable (at least, again, by comparison to other Kriegsmarine ships that did have turbines.) To the extent that Engineering Officers who had crewed both a Deutschland and a Hipper hated being on the Hipper despite the better overall speeds and handling. I'm not sure how reliability could be represented in game however, cheaper running costs perhaps?

In South America, Argentina and Brazil deserve their own spots. Chile less so as their dreadnought (Latorre?) was the only major warship they ever had, while Argentina and Brazil had numerous cruisers and destroyers as well, with Argentina even having modern Treaty Heavy Cruisers built for them by Italy. In Europe, Greece, Sweden and the Netherlands all deserve their own player controlled spots as well. Greece would present a very difficult campaign setting where your maximum displacement was severely limited but you had few commitments, they would be all about how to bog down other navies with a small ship doctrine. The Netherlands was one of precious few nations outside of the Great Powers to design and consider true capital ships, and Dutch politicians sought to recapture the Nether;and's naval glory days during the in game time period. Sweden produced a unique and most importantly, modern navy through the WW1, interwar and WW2 period that like Greece's, was small, but in Sweden's case entirely home built and actually powerful enough to prevent invasion of their country (declassified German documents have proven this) and introduces the coastal battleship concept to the game, something I've always wanted to be able to test in UA:D; Sweden also had the industrial capacity to produce heavier units had they chosen to go that route, though they did not irl. (also, re-unifying Scandinavia and the Low Countries for Sweden and the Netherlands would be a fun early game mission and would give you enough industry to compete with the other Great naval powers in game.) I do also think however, that almost all nations that had merchants and light escorts/light destroyers should be represented as at least AI's, for your navies to gain experience during times of minor wars and to represent the naval war effort versus smaller naval powers that were still forces to be reckoned with on land (like Poland or Yugoslavia) and also to prevent the game being just about warring the other Great Powers. This would also be fun I think, if one of these minor navies actually manged to strike a valiant blow to your fleet in some way, making your prestige take a bigger hit that it would by losing to say, the UK. There are dozens of countries like this, with not enough ships or capacity to really be player nations but still enough to be represented.

A tooltip to see exact distribution is I feel, badly needed. I had an enemy BB today, 51,000 tons. EIGHTEEN 356mm (14 inch) guns and a 400mm armor value all while hauling ass at 32 knots and maximum bulkheads, unless this ship had no citadel, no barbette armor and no anti flood I see no way it could exist. It had about 30 secondary barrels as well. And was shrugging off belt hits by my own 381mm guns at 12-20km. If it doesn't have a proper citadel or anti flooding or anything like that, I would expect every actual hit on it to be catastrophic after it does get through all that rmor, that would be the balancing factor. I've also noticed that main gun turrets are incredibly difficult to disable under alpha 5. (At least capital turrets are.)

As for saying crew morale/fatigue should not be modeled, all navies had crews that at some point or other decided that abandoning ship was the best course of action. I mean heck, all four IJN CV's at Midway were scuttled afterbecoming operational losses. Even the frankly fanatical Japanese turned around at a point and said 'our crews lives are more worthwhile than trying to keep the ships under control.' Combat isn't a video game or some walk in the park, it is brutal in every aspect of the word, seeing your fellow men dying around you, potentially in very gruesome ways, seeing your officers shouting that repairs need to be made, the ships is liable to sink or be destroyed otherwise etc. That will affect the average joe poor sod that's manning these vessels. Since the game is aiming to be realistic, it absolutely should be modeled.

This does put a smile on my face.