Will aircraft carriers be added to the game?

[LeBoiteux]

3 hours ago, DarkTerren said:

The first strike from a seaplane carrier against a land target as well as a sea target took place in September 1914 when the Imperial Japanese Navy carrier Wakamiya conducted ship-launched air raids from Kiaochow Bay during the Battle of Tsingtao in China.

...with lovely early-WWI seaplanes, some Maurice Farman MF.11 Shorthorn, for reco and light bombing 🙂 :

 

 

Edited November 6, 2019 by LeBoiteux

[DarkTerren]

16 minutes ago, LeBoiteux said:

...with lovely early-WWI seaplanes, some Maurice Farman MF.11 Shorthorn, for reco and light bombing 🙂 :

 

 

And they still got the job done and dropped bombs The aircraft carrier HMS Furious, with seven Sopwith Camels on the flight deck en route to the Tondern raid, the first ever aircraft carrier strike

Edited November 6, 2019 by DarkTerren

[LeBoiteux]

someone seemingly likes first times 🙂

there are lots of 'first times'...

[Commodore Sandurz]

On 11/4/2019 at 7:20 AM, sRuLe said:

Yorcktown max is 82 planes, Essex - 85 planes, Enterprise - 80.... okay Midway 95 planes and at least 40 of them is, Hellcats or Bearcats, and only the rest are TBD Devastators(payload max 700kg) or SBD Dauntless(payload max 1080kg). What a Hellcat payload is? Oh dear... 1025kg same as Bearcat, Mark7 16" shell - 1200kg,Yamato's 18,1" shell even heavier - 1460kg.

Essex could carry 100 but that includes a couple of spares; most sources ignore the spares so they get 90ish "active" (usually listed as 36 fighters, 36 dive bombers and 18 torpedo bombers) but there were around 10 others carried, mostly spares. Hence my statement "upwards of 100". Of course the Midway class could carry significantly more, I was thinking Essex because it was the most common.

But let's look at the details of those shells and payloads, in particular the bursting charges:

Iowa AP Mark 8: 18.55 kg

Yamato APC Type 91: 33.85 kg

TBF/SB2C AP Mark 1: 109 kg (3.2 times the Yamato AP shell / 5.9 times the Iowa AP shell)

TBF/SB2C Mark 13: 270 kg (8 times the Yamato AP shell / 14.5 times the Iowa AP shell, plus it's guaranteed damage below the waterline on a hit)

Oh dear indeed! Even Yamato's shell bursting charge is less than a third that of an armour piercing bomb, not to mention the torpedo is in another league of damage-dealing. So much for the "very little firepower" claim on the carrier airgroup. And all of that is not even factoring in that the aircraft can deliver that firepower to a target at a much, much greater distance.

 

On 11/4/2019 at 7:20 AM, sRuLe said:

Max plane in flight operation for a carrier, 42. From which just a half is strike force what means 20 tons max against 22 tons of guaranteed steel from BB. Hit accuracy rate - 11,8% against 18% of an BB's heavy armament.

Christian already covered your hit rate claims but I'll add that if you have to put your battleship within range of the enemy battleship's guns then that's an additional risk that a carrier doesn't have to take. Historically carriers demonstrated that their aircraft had sufficient firepower and reach to mission kill or sink battleships while said battleships could not respond against the carriers. So why close in with battleships when you can engage from a safe distance using aircraft (which were much cheaper and faster to repair or replace)?

 

On 11/4/2019 at 7:20 AM, sRuLe said:

ARE YOU SERIOUS?

The fact that you have still not responded to any of the points I raised in our discussion on page 4, except now this one, which wasn't even part of my response to you, says everything about who is serious in this discussion.

Edited November 6, 2019 by Commodore Sandurz

[DarkTerren]

You seem to forget you not fireing just 1 shell from a battleship iowa was fireing 9 shells on a broadside how many can be fired in the same amount of time it takes a plane to get to the target and back to rearm

[DarkTerren]

1 hour ago, LeBoiteux said:

someone seemingly likes first times 🙂

there are lots of 'first times'...

Always have to start somewhere  lol

[Commodore Sandurz]

2 hours ago, DarkTerren said:

You seem to forget you not fireing just 1 shell from a battleship iowa was fireing 9 shells on a broadside how many can be fired in the same amount of time it takes a plane to get to the target and back to rearm

Well I'd hope it's not just one plane being sent... And those planes will likely have the opportunity to get back, rearm and return to neutralize the target (if they didn't on the first strike), before the comparatively plodding Iowa can get into gun range.

[DarkTerren]

32 minutes ago, Commodore Sandurz said:

Well I'd hope it's not just one plane being sent... And those planes will likely have the opportunity to get back, rearm and return to neutralize the target (if they didn't on the first strike), before the comparatively plodding Iowa can get into gun range.

if both are in range you were comparaing the weight of shells to bombs and torps.

you guys were bascily trying to compare an alpha dealing ship to a dps ship

lets also not forget you can shoot down a shell so you would also have less planes making it to the attack and less plane for the next

Edited November 6, 2019 by DarkTerren

[Illya von Einzbern]

To be honest....
CVs are the least of our concerns....
A data miner prove to me that it is possible to achieve 49% hit chance on opening strike at 29km.
I asked proof of this and i could not believe that it was possible. All the current game techs and researched.

 

some things needs to be bit more balanced and CVs would be nice balancer to this enemy fleets predicament.
I don't know how some are capable to do this.
This is actually really nice. Gives me some ideas for late game ship designs  

[Merc_]

5 hours ago, Illya von Einzbern said:

To be honest....
CVs are the least of our concerns....
A data miner prove to me that it is possible to achieve 49% hit chance on opening strike at 29km.
I asked proof of this and i could not believe that it was possible. All the current game techs and researched.

 

some things needs to be bit more balanced and CVs would be nice balancer to this enemy fleets predicament.
I don't know how some are capable to do this.
This is actually really nice. Gives me some ideas for late game ship designs  

could just be with debug tool enabled 

[Steeltrap]

9 hours ago, Illya von Einzbern said:

To be honest....
CVs are the least of our concerns....
A data miner prove to me that it is possible to achieve 49% hit chance on opening strike at 29km.
I asked proof of this and i could not believe that it was possible. All the current game techs and researched.

some things needs to be bit more balanced and CVs would be nice balancer to this enemy fleets predicament.
I don't know how some are capable to do this.
This is actually really nice. Gives me some ideas for late game ship designs  

I've made the comment elsewhere that the long range accuracy and performances of the big guns on "The Modern BB" are frankly ridiculous and would have ONE ship more or less make relatively modern previous ships almost irrelevant.

Which, as you've suggested, is kind of ironic as one might argue that's what CVs soon did, making everything else subordinate to them in the majority of cases.

Either these things will come along so late in the piece, or take so many resources to build and maintain, or both, that they're likely to have little time and thus effect in the campaign.

Plus it's still Alpha so perhaps devs themselves are still "ladder aiming" with balance, lol.

[Illya von Einzbern]

well getting good balance is ladder shooting  

[Whomst'd've]

Wow this topic really blew up!

I feel aircraft threats at the very least should be added to the game during the correct time period, because in war ship design, dealing with aircraft became a very important part of the process (just low at the Iowa class AA gun wise). Seeing a Yamato superstructure covered with anti-surface weapons just reminds me of the old French pre-dreadnoughts with their insane amount of variation in gun calibers.   

[Hardlec]

Considering that the Iowas were still in service in Desert Storm and that they made major contributions to Desert Storm, I'd say rumors of the obsolescence of the BB were premature.  

Two factors contributed to the phase out of the BB.

1:  You could fly off the air wing of a carrier's old aircraft and fly on an air wing of new aircraft and have, in essence, a new carrier.  The USS Enterprise had her whole carrier wing replaced at least 3 times.  The planes she carried in 1990 were science fiction in 1960.  CVs were much easier to upgrade.  This made a big difference.

2:  The Navies of the world found that more ships, even with less capability, were better than fewer ships with greater capability.  Only carriers are big "Capital Ships" because you need a honkin' big ships to land aircraft.  

The combination of a carrier for Air Cover and a heavily armed and armored Battleship was a tactical problem no navy in the world could overcome in 1980.  Except for the USN. The politicians (i.e. parasites upon humanity)  kept thinking "either-or"  when they should have considered "both-and."  A very large portion of humanity lives and works within 20 miles of an ocean.  If Aberdeen were tasked with building a 16 inch, or maybe an 18 inch gun, in 2000 built for maximum range and conventional explosive payload, I can envision a range of  50 miles (about 80km)  which would be a threat to an even greater portion of the world.  A single 16 inch HE shell would send any frigate to Davy Jones Locker.  

The issue isn't whether or not Battleships are excellent weapons platforms, but whether the cost outweighs the benefits.  In a game, that's a lesson the players need to learn the hard way.  (Would Japan have done better with 7x10,000 ton heavy cruisers, each cruiser carrying 4x4 tube torpedo launchers with 3 reloads each?  Torpedoes that out-ranged the big guns and were undetectable until they went "BOOM?' ) Japan had the best torpedo technology in the world until the Missouri anchored in Tokyo Bay.  As a player, I get to test that theory.  (I've seen some of the You-tube videos of the impact of a massive torpedo volley.  The CA-Ts would launch a salvo of 112 torpedoes.  Ouchies.)

I'm quite happy with  aeroplanes as dubious, fragile and unreliable kites, which they were for a couple of decades, and letting the players decide to invest money to develop them.  Or not.  No planes at all suits me fine, too.

[RAMJB]

Obsolescence of the battleship had little to do with it's actual firepower capability. It had to do with outworldly demands on building and running costs, not to mention tremendous crew numbers required to run the ship, which were completely unjustified for a surface unit that was no longer decisive on it's own in the presence of air power, and more specifically, aircraft carriers. 

Simply said, they weren't cost effective anymore, nor they had the kind of prestige attached to them that they usually enjoyed - on that end the Carrier also beat the battleship by the end of WW2. 

 

24 minutes ago, Hardlec said:

As a player, I get to test that theory.  (I've seen some of the You-tube videos of the impact of a massive torpedo volley.  The CA-Ts would launch a salvo of 112 torpedoes.  Ouchies.)

They also would be quite literally sailing explosive hazards. Several japanese cruisers were destroyed because their deck-mounted torpedo launchers were hit and the warheads exploded. That those torpedoes ran on pure oxygen didn't help with the fire hazards either. They were immensely powerful weapons for the time, but they also were a double edged sword. I don't want to imagine the feeling of being part of a crew of a cruiser with dozens of launchers of those torpedoes when subjected to enemy fire, knowing that even a lowly 4'' hit in the wrong spot (of which there are A LOT in such a ship) will cause something comparable to a chained series of eruptions. No, thank you.



As for carriers go: No. Or rather, not yet. Or better yet, not in this iteration. Rule the Waves did it very well. A first installment of the game purely focused on surface units, and a properly designed campaign to design and use them in long games. And once that was perfected up to the point that it worked like silk, THEN a second installment of the game adding air power to the equation. Which wasn't a very smooth thing at the beginning, they needed a lot of feedback and work to get more or less right.

Going all in wanting everything thrown in from the get go is not good. Even more when the development team is limited, and even more because this game is several times more complex than RUle the Waves, because of it's 3D designer and battles. It's going to be a hell of a job to get everything right, and working appropiately just on the surface ships. Leave the aircraft alone until the time the baseline works as it should, there are dozens of different hulls, superstructures, etc to be used in the designer for each class, and the campaign is released, worked on, adjusted and works well enough.

Then it'll be the time to throw more things into the mix. In the meantime, please don't throw even more complication into what's already a tremendously complex recipe to get right. One thing at a time.

Edited December 12, 2019 by RAMJB

[captinjoehenry]

Personally while I enjoy carries I'd rather them not be in the game for the simple reason that I am a massive fan of battleships and I really want to see modern BBs and other gun armed fleet units slug it out.  Adding carriers to the mix largely negates this and carries are only really notably impactful in the last few years of this game and would take a lot of resources to add in any concrete way due to how complex air to air and air to surface is if you want it to be realistic compared to just surface to surface action.

So end of the day I think the game will be more fun without carriers even if it isn't realistic

 

As a side note from my time playing RTW2 carriers somehow ended up seeming to be rather worthless against large BB fleets.  They were largely unable to harm super BBs and mostly just added annoying extraneous info with minimal impact while being a bitch to control or manage as heavy AAA batteries could pretty reliably shoot quite a few of them down.

[Hardlec]

It's 2020.  I take an Alaska class BC hull (30,000 tons.)  I give it gas turbine engines, keeping its speed for less weight.  I use new composites and some kevlar with about the same layout for passive protection.  It has significantly more passive protection than anything except a supercarrier.  The main batteries are replaced with massive VLS and an enormous stock of missiles.  I replace the twin 5"38 caliber turrets with single 5" automatic dual purpose guns.  I replace the AA mounts with CWIS and laser mounts, although I have somewhat fewer of these.  The Alaska and most USN ships in the Pacific strapped AA mounts anywhere they would physically fit.  It has two complete AEGIS systems, because its primary role is to be the flagship for a task force.  It will protect the ships in the task force, and provide a relatively calm place from which to command.

I build a second class of ships, replacing the "B" and "C" missile batteries with quad 16" guns which can attack ships but are optimised for shore bombardment.  This ship is designed to support shore assaults and for artillery support for ground troops.

The navy has the budget to build a BC-M (missile) for each carrier and 2 BC-G (gun.) These would be perceived as provocative by many other countries.   Politicians (who are almost by definition ignorant) will argue that the same thing, except for the big guns and armor, can be done by spending the money on more existing frigates.   The one criteria that dooms these ships:  They are solutions without a problem.

The ships would be nothing more that my fantasy, but, if seriously considered they are realistic battlecruisers.  

As to adding Aircraft:  I'd have a game with no aircraft and a second game with aircraft.  If players buy both, they can be linked.

[WelshZeCorgi]

I would love it if you got to design and fight cv's. I imagine it would be doable, implementing the "naval air battle" as just you commanding the strike force (or not if they don't find their target, or even attack friendlies due to misidentification.) And you can also command carriers when they're under attack, dodging torpedo and dive bombers while what CAP you have try to defend the fleet. 

[Captain_Sir_Loughton_Peto]

I think yes but in UAD 2. 

[ston5883]

I wouldn't want to see the larger CVs in game but I might be ok with the smaller escort CVs. Something with a smaller compliment of aircraft that isn't going to be able to send wave after wave or even large squadrons.They already said ASW would be handled outside of the battle screen and be based off of your training and ASW weapons. I see a problem with this as far as aircraft are concerned. If I built a ship to be an AA platform, (and you know there are those of us who are going to do it) it will be useless in any surface engagement I come across. I'll constantly be telling them to turn and run while the other ships fight the battle. So I must build a boat I never get to use, have to maintain, and is nothing more than a filler just to boost my AA. At least with the ASW DDs I can slap some torpedoes on it and have something of a viable threat to the enemy. And yes I'm thinking more early pre war stuff that is well before the dual purpose guns that most like to think of. 

[jeffQC2]

In my opinion, i think CV's should be implemented one way or the other in Ultimate Admiral.

The main reason for this being that it would add a very interesting design aspect to any ship: AA capabilities. You can decide during the design to favor naval secondaries, dual use AA or dedicated AA firepower. Knowing to properly balance would dictate the effectiveness of a ship against aircrafts.

The way i see it, there is two main ways they could implement it:

1. A abstract campaign asset, similar to submarines. CV's themselves would be absent from the actual battle, but you could have aircrafts joining in the battle. Depending on the capabilities of the CV and the aircrafts, they could join later or sooner and be called to attack specific ships. When they drop their payload, they bingo back to their CV. 

2. A ship directly controllable and present on the battlefield. This would be a better, though more complex implementation, since CV's could directly be attacked and sunk by other ships.

Obviously the main concern would be how to balance CV's against other ships. After all, CV's were the very thing that made Battleships obsolete and revamped the way naval warfare behaved in the future.

I don't think it would be a big issue to be honest. It all goes down to if they properly balance it, which would be quite feasible.

For example:

Pros: CV's can deal a significant ordeal of firepower over great distances and be a very meaningful threat by itself. The largests could have multiples squadrons in the air and could control possibly dozens of aircrafts being able to strike multiples targets and at least cause some damage and also being used to spot enemy ships.

 

Cons: CV's by themselves would be very vulnerable, usually lacking armor and guns in favor of hangars, repair workshops, AA guns and engines. They would also have a limited amount aircraft, so you could have enough planes shot down (Especially against strong AA ships, more so in tight fleets) that the CV is basically useless in the end or after multiples battles without going back to base. They would be expensive and research intensive to obtain. Launching and retrieving airplanes would take a lot of time, so CV's couldn't bring in support in a battle at the beginning, having to arm, fuel and launch her aircrafts first, plus, it would some time to retrieve, rearm, refuel and re-launch aircrafts, leaving the CV vulnerable and unable to offer support. Any meaningful amount of AA will reduce the accuracy and effectiveness of the air attacks, even if the aircrafts are not destroyed. Seriously damaged aircrafts couldn't be reused in the same battle. Land-based air forces could also be used to either attack or support fleets.

There is a lot of possibilities with this.

And also, i always was fascinated by the huge amounts of tracer flying in the sky by AA. I want to see this in this game too.

[Latur Husky]

With a proper balance of price and upkeep that would work as a good limiter of the amount of CV's that player can have, they'll be a great addition to the game IMO. And it wouldn't require them to be crippled as they are in other games. Truth is they were a game changer and without any doubt they were far superior to anything else, but that's natural way of how things had to be lol... Crying about CV's being overpowered is pointless as war was never intended to be gentleman's duel lol.

[WelshZeCorgi]

I mean, there were still ship to ship battles in WW2, just much less often and also very risky, requiring nighttime operations and intelligence deception.

[FFire31]

I personnally believe that's not possible to create a game that cover the 30s 40s, without implementing carriers. I'm not even talking about floatplanes.

One very important thing to consider as game designer, is, that us, humans, know history. And historically during WW2 carriers prevail over BB. But, most of WW2 ships and doctrines were designed during the 20s and 30s. At that moment no one could predict that air power should be able one day to have a major influence on naval warfare and capital ships designs.
That's why every nations, even those who believe in CV, keep building BB.

So there's imho two way to design that (in term of tech balances, campaign wise)

- stick to historical reality : carriers gets their real performance. So, if I'm not role playing, I should stop any research and investment in BB and use everything I got to build carriers and their support ships as soon as planes performances improve enough to carry ordnances.

- randomize tech performance, ahistorical : As the chief admiral, I will have to gamble on some tech and try to build as many different ships as possible with experimentals devices until I'm sure one is better than another.

The last option is my favorite. Ok the ships will not perform the same way they did historically, but, I'll had to do hard choices. And that the essence of a good gameplay. Both are not exclusive and the player could choose between them before starting the campaign.