End game Battleship Balance

[TotalRampage]

So I have a question/observation. I was recently doing a custom battle British vs. Japan. Just to warm up 1940's tech was gonna build the biggest battleship I could, But then I noticed that the biggest battleship The Brits could get are the Dreadnought IV and the N3/G3 hulls which top out at 62k displacement. That got me thinking does Britain actually have the smallest size battleship displacement in the game? 

All Displacements are max 

French 93k

Germany 130k

Japan 125k

USA 109k

Spain 69k

Russia 69k

Italy 65k

Austro 90.5k

China 87k

British 62k

Spain and Russia share the same hull but it begs the question of balance late game. Obviously not all of these nations designed ships with high displacements but the problem is that  how are the devs going to balance these hulls out? Britain tops out at 62k but Germany for example has 4 battleship hulls that hit a max of 62k and up. Some hulls will inevitably be shared across nations like how I noticed in Spain and Russia with the modern battleship 69k hull but I thought I'd post this here for the community to brainstorm ideas for the devs or maybe share historical designs for nations they can find of specifically capital ships.

One Idea I had was for if this game has an espionage system (I haven't seen anything confirmed yet)  is that your spies could actually steal hull types that you could then build in your own faction. This would stop specific nations having a hull advantage. But ideally I'd hope us the community could find some examples the devs could look at and see if they want to eventually include into the game!

 

 

Edited June 19, 2020 by TotalRampage

[Reaper Jack]

It should balance itself out with the cost. 

Sure, you could build a 100k ton plus BB, but you have to then build the drydock to build it, and the docking spaces to berth it, and this is on top of the ship already being three times as expensive as a normal Battleship. 

Personally I don't plan on building anything that exceeds 60k tons and might not even go for 18 inch/457mm guns at all, once things are properly implemented there really won't be much point to them except to hunt Battleships, but at that point you're better off using a smaller fleet of the same cost to do that. 

[Cptbarney]

For britain they could take the lion class design proposal and scale her up, for france, maybe jean bart or something like republique, russia maybe a scaled up soyuz and the all of the nations including the ones i haven't mentioned they own generic hulls, but also give quite a few of them.

That way you have more hull choices along with the ability to make one, they should have 3 options for the campaign, Historical/Semi-historical/Alt-history. That way we can play the campaign with varying degrees of realism or choice.

So extra moneh, Huge dock sizes (130k-150k) etc.

[Tycondero]

42 minutes ago, Reaper Jack said:

It should balance itself out with the cost. 

Sure, you could build a 100k ton plus BB, but you have to then build the drydock to build it, and the docking spaces to berth it, and this is on top of the ship already being three times as expensive as a normal Battleship. 

Personally I don't plan on building anything that exceeds 60k tons and might not even go for 18 inch/457mm guns at all, once things are properly implemented there really won't be much point to them except to hunt Battleships, but at that point you're better off using a smaller fleet of the same cost to do that. 

True. In the campaign these things will balance each other out. Also I rather have 50 2000t DDs than 1 100.000t BB.

I do agree with the OP that all nations should have similar end-game displacement options. I find it a bit unfair that some nations (ignoring the finances) cannot even build Super Heavy Battleships, whereas others can. Pretty sure that if two nations would have really also wanted to build massive BBs, Britain and the USA would have been able to do so the most out of all the naval powers. 

Edited June 19, 2020 by Tycondero

[SiWi]

I wouldn't give too much mind over current displacement limits for the top BB's.

[IronKaputt]

10 hours ago, Cptbarney said:

So extra moneh, Huge dock sizes (130k-150k) etc.

As long as material strength allows, I'm in.

[madham82]

13 hours ago, SiWi said:

I wouldn't give too much mind over current displacement limits for the top BB's.

Agreed it's more of a placeholder than balanced right now anyway. 

[TotalRampage]

15 hours ago, Reaper Jack said:

It should balance itself out with the cost. 

Sure, you could build a 100k ton plus BB, but you have to then build the drydock to build it, and the docking spaces to berth it, and this is on top of the ship already being three times as expensive as a normal Battleship. 

Personally I don't plan on building anything that exceeds 60k tons and might not even go for 18 inch/457mm guns at all, once things are properly implemented there really won't be much point to them except to hunt Battleships, but at that point you're better off using a smaller fleet of the same cost to do that. 

That's true. But this being a game I can already max out 2 ships and have them beat 6 without losing one in custom. I know in campaign that it will be expensive but it begs the question of if the player is playing Germany with the highest displacement allowed and doing moderately well half the nations in the game would never be able to Armour up a ship as well as I could so I could just set a personal displacement limit of lets say 80k and most nations in the game would never be able to build a battleship that's that big even if they are economically able to do so i.e. Britain  or Italy which goes to my solution of allowing players and AI nations to steal hull types from other nations as a work around to this issue. 

Edited June 19, 2020 by TotalRampage

[TotalRampage]

14 hours ago, Cptbarney said:

For britain they could take the lion class design proposal and scale her up, for france, maybe jean bart or something like republique, russia maybe a scaled up soyuz and the all of the nations including the ones i haven't mentioned they own generic hulls, but also give quite a few of them.

That way you have more hull choices along with the ability to make one, they should have 3 options for the campaign, Historical/Semi-historical/Alt-history. That way we can play the campaign with varying degrees of realism or choice.

So extra moneh, Huge dock sizes (130k-150k) etc.

I was just a bit worried because lion was only 40k displacement of course you can stretch the hull like the allow us to do in this game but it was designed as a fast battleship. But I do like the idea for a campaign with varying degrees of realism because then we could have an option to essentially make late game hulls a bit more balanced well because everyone has them. 

[TotalRampage]

14 hours ago, Tycondero said:

True. In the campaign these things will balance each other out. Also I rather have 50 2000t DDs than 1 100.000t BB.

I do agree with the OP that all nations should have similar end-game displacement options. I find it a bit unfair that some nations (ignoring the finances) cannot even build Super Heavy Battleships, whereas others can. Pretty sure that if two nations would have really also wanted to build massive BBs, Britain and the USA would have been able to do so the most out of all the naval powers. 

I just wanted to show that atm its an issue even with economic might nations wouldn't be able to build them. Because even Britain a great naval power didn't design that many high displacement bbs because there was frankly not a need. But that just allows nations like Germany to have a hull edge the entire late game because they can build ships that were not constrained by say the Washington treaty. 

[Cptbarney]

8 hours ago, TotalRampage said:

I was just a bit worried because lion was only 40k displacement of course you can stretch the hull like the allow us to do in this game but it was designed as a fast battleship. But I do like the idea for a campaign with varying degrees of realism because then we could have an option to essentially make late game hulls a bit more balanced well because everyone has them. 

Yeah, the options allow for players to essentially go down with hard history, soft history or just mostly fiction (based within the games mechanics and lore of course), you could use miss conquerors hull, not sure how big she would of been if she was ever made or thunderer, but either will do maybe they could make it a bit different from the other preceeding heavy and regular battleships as well.

Also i like muh chonk ships, gib to barneh. 'w'

[madham82]

Think some are reading way too much in to the hulls available at this moment. The missions they have introduced have been driving most of the hulls included (i.e. H-class, Super Yamato, US Super BB, Cruisers needed mission, etc...). It is absolutely not indicative of any campaign restrictions. Notice Britain is left out because beyond the Hood missions, you don't have any mission needing a super BB design. 

[TotalRampage]

2 hours ago, madham82 said:

Think some are reading way too much in to the hulls available at this moment. The missions they have introduced have been driving most of the hulls included (i.e. H-class, Super Yamato, US Super BB, Cruisers needed mission, etc...). It is absolutely not indicative of any campaign restrictions. Notice Britain is left out because beyond the Hood missions, you don't have any mission needing a super BB design. 

So this thread was started before they announced the delay of campaign and when there was much speculation around campaign release with or extremely near the steam release. But if the problem is not addressed (I believe it will be I like these devs a lot as I've made clear) it could create an endgame balance issue past say 1930 when nations will not receive many new hulls partly due to historical introductions of aircraft carriers and the Washington naval treaty.

 

Update:

It also goes with your torpedo balance thread. Nations would be less able to include anti-torpedo measures because of size displacements thus giving an edge to nations who designed and implemented super bb's. Which is why I wanted the espionage system to be included. This was prior to them announcing an only 2 nation campaign initially as a way for nations to stay competitive at any point in the game by some sort of hull stealing mechanic. 

Edited June 20, 2020 by TotalRampage

[Cptbarney]

11 minutes ago, TotalRampage said:

So this thread was started before they announced the delay of campaign and when there was much speculation around campaign release with or extremely near the steam release. But if the problem is not addressed (I believe it will be I like these devs a lot as I've made clear) it could create an endgame balance issue past say 1930 when nations will not receive many new hulls partly due to historical introductions of aircraft carriers and the Washington naval treaty.

 

Update:

It also goes with your torpedo balance thread. Nations would be less able to include anti-torpedo measures because of size displacements thus giving an edge to nations who designed and implemented super bb's. Which is why I wanted the espionage system to be included. This was prior to them announcing an only 2 nation campaign initially as a way for nations to stay competitive at any point in the game by some sort of hull stealing mechanic. 

I wonder if they will add RTW's version where you can build ships in neutral and allied ports effectively taking tech but being able to reverse engineer it, as well as being able to steal designs, plans, fleet and budget info, territories covered etc.

Would add an interesting level of gameplay to the campaign, wouldn't mind seeing all nations get 95k+ tonne super bb's even if they are only restricted to alt-history/semi-historical modes, plus custom and naval academy.

[TotalRampage]

21 minutes ago, Cptbarney said:

I wonder if they will add RTW's version where you can build ships in neutral and allied ports effectively taking tech but being able to reverse engineer it, as well as being able to steal designs, plans, fleet and budget info, territories covered etc.

Would add an interesting level of gameplay to the campaign, wouldn't mind seeing all nations get 95k+ tonne super bb's even if they are only restricted to alt-history/semi-historical modes, plus custom and naval academy.

Ya i'm not worried about the you know historical aspect of this game because its going to end up being ahistorical at the end if the player has a successful campaign. With the non-linear tech tree they announced i'm pretty sure tech stealing in an easy way to solve the issue of hulls. Or like you said allowing the player to lease or have a bb be built for them using that countries tech.  

Edited June 20, 2020 by TotalRampage

[madham82]

2 hours ago, TotalRampage said:

So this thread was started before they announced the delay of campaign and when there was much speculation around campaign release with or extremely near the steam release. But if the problem is not addressed (I believe it will be I like these devs a lot as I've made clear) it could create an endgame balance issue past say 1930 when nations will not receive many new hulls partly due to historical introductions of aircraft carriers and the Washington naval treaty.

 

Update:

It also goes with your torpedo balance thread. Nations would be less able to include anti-torpedo measures because of size displacements thus giving an edge to nations who designed and implemented super bb's. Which is why I wanted the espionage system to be included. This was prior to them announcing an only 2 nation campaign initially as a way for nations to stay competitive at any point in the game by some sort of hull stealing mechanic. 

Yea I guess I was taking things for granted because we are obviously a long way off a full tech/hull tree. We don't even had quad turrets and some hulls (besides the big displacement BBs) are completely missing from some countries. That's why I made the assumption. Another thing is the Washington Treaty, unless we are playing a purely historic campaign (which I'm sure we will have options anyway), restrictions could be completely different. So you can't plan hulls for a treaty that might not be signed in ahistorical campaign. 

Yea good point on the TDS being a factor in displacement limits. I really do hope we have the ability to have other nations build ships for the player's country. Could be a way to cover the costs of various aspects of tech/hulls if we could sell ships to others as well. Lots of possibilities there.