Confirmed @1.08.8
I had the hang-up at building ships for a period in the 1890s but it dropped out after that. I didn't have to reboot, I just backed out of the campaign adn renetered and it was ready to go without any losses.
1 - First and foremost is fleet maintenance. Costs and maintenance are way too high. I have a 60 some ship fleet as Germany currently, some of which are mothballed and in-being, and even at war there is no way to maintain the costs. I realize this is a quick fix for the 500+ ship navies prowling around the map. But it's so bad I can't even maintain my own navy which is small.
It's not impacting foreign fleets for me, just mine. As Britain, Germany is north of 300 ships in my current campaign with Italy about 200 or so and I quit the last campaign when Germany had 500 ships with one fleet alone having 100-150 or so ships.
I just had a battle in 1916 in my new campaign where my 2 of my 13" dreadnaughts were trapped by a German task group of about 60 ships or so. Mainly just fought the lighter (CA, CL, TB, DD) ships that ran me down as I tried to flee . I lost one and managed to save the other (heavily damaged) as time ran out but sank 25. The Germans had a few dreadnaughts show up (fired a few shots then retreated) and some contemporary destroyers in the fight but most were leftover, never scrapped pre dreadnaughts levels ships.
I have another task group on task group battle ready to go now with 60-80 or so German ships. looking at the tonnage most of them are well outdated against my task group of 20 or so fully modernized ships. As you noted I about went bankrupt just to build and keep my 80 ship or so fleet and I was saved by the war I was hoping would happen for the extra funds. However, I did just find out about maintenance penalties in over capacity ports.
3 - State of war - I don't mind being at war perpetually...
I had just the opposite experience in the earlier campaign I quit, where I couldn't go to war if I wanted to. Everybody else was fighting, I would choose the piss them off choices when offered, but all was forgiven quickly and I was everyone's buddy, event he French.
I would still like them to eventually sort out manual control where when I set it to manual it actually is manual only about than half the time. It gets tiresome watching the squiggly spaghetti course line of death force my ships into torpedoes and collisions that are easily avoidable. You can actually turn and cross a stern IRL.
