Guide: weights and costs

[Evil4Zerggin]

Armor weight

Base weight

Belt, Belt Extended, Deck, and Deck Extended all have a base weight proportional to the total displacement of the ship.

• Belt: 0.861% per inch thickness, times (1 + Armor Weight (Belt, Belt Extended).
• Belt Extended: 1.023% per inch thickness, times (1 + Armor Weight (Belt, Belt Extended).
• Deck: 2.158% per inch thickness, times (1 + Armor Weight (Deck, Deck Extended).
• Deck Extended: 2.885% per inch thickness, times (1 + Armor Weight (Deck, Deck Extended).

Conning Tower armor has a flat base weight of 45 tons per inch thickness. So the heavier the ship, the more easily it can afford conning tower armor.

Turret armor has a base weight proportional to the weight of the turret (not including barrels and ammunition):

• Turret: 6.5% per inch thickness.
• Turret Top: 12.5% per inch thickness.
• Secondaries: 63% per inch thickness. (oof)

v86 increased the Secondaries multiplier greatly. I don't think it's feasible to armor secondaries at this point.

All weight are also multiplied by (1 + Armor Weight (All Types) modifiers).

Passive modifiers

The following passive modifiers are available from tech:

• -21% All Types
• -24.5% Belt, Belt Extended
• -6% Deck, Deck Extended

There's also -10% to costs (All Types).

Note again that Belt and Deck modifiers stack multiplicatively with All Types, not additively. This applies to cost modifiers as well.

Components

Everything up to Krupp I is nearly a straight upgrade, you may pay slightly more or less per effective thickness but the effective thickness per weight improves drastically.

With Krupp IV you can get a total of -61% to Armor Weight (All Types) when combined with the above tech modifiers. Combined with the +100% strength modifiers, that's just over a 5x effective thickness per weight compared to base.

Going from Krupp I to IV isn't free; at endgame you get about 1.61x thickness per weight in exchange for paying 1.34x the cost per thickness. IMO a good deal most of the time.

Citadel III (Armored Citadel) will improve effective thickness per weight, but the hull weight modifier is quite concerning. Turtleback increases weight too much to come out ahead, and even the deck weight modifier of AoN is probably enough to outweigh the +10% additional armor strength. Citadel components are a hard sell I think, probably better just to slap on more Turret armor if you're worried about detonations. Well, other than some cases of trying for a maximum Resistance stack.

Miscellaneous

The Bulkheads slider weighs between 1% and 11% of the total displacement.

Torpedo belt weighs up to 7.7% of the total displacement.

Both of these are affected by Hull Weight modifiers. 

Edited July 8, 2021 by Evil4Zerggin

[Evil4Zerggin]

Costs

Cost per ton

Most categories of items on the ship have a base cost per ton. These are:

• Hull
• Engine
• Armor
• Torpedo belt
• Fuel
• Bulkheads
• Turrets
• Barrels
• Ammo
• Torpedoes

For these items, doubling the tonnage (including via weight modifiers) will also double the cost. So if you have +100% weight and +100% cost modifiers, the cost quadruples (!) This is one of the reasons I rarely use Auxiliary Engine or Shaft components.

On the other hand, reducing weight is doubly good since it also reduces cost by the same proportion, all other things being equal. So despite its apparent high cost modifier, Krupp IV is actually fantastic.

For armor, "Belt, Belt Extended" and "Deck, Deck Extended" armor cost modifiers stack multiplicatively with "All Types" armor cost modifiers. Furthermore, any cost modifier applied to guns applies to the turret armor as well, stacking multiplicatively with "All Types" armor cost modifiers. Considering gun weight modifiers also apply to turret armor, this can make armoring autoloading guns quite expensive.

Marks, barrels, tubes

Gun barrels increase in weight (and therefore cost) as their Mark increases. However, this increase is quite small and the barrels are only a fraction of the overall turret weight and cost anyways.

Torpedo tubes increase in cost as their Mark increases, and launchers with more tubes are more expensive per ton. I find that 2-3 tubes per launcher is the best balance between efficiency and deck space.

Independent weight and cost

Items not in the above categories have modifiers applied to weight and cost independently, so increasing the weight won't have any automatic effect on the cost. These are:

• Main towers
• Secondary towers
• Funnels
• Barbettes

In principle it's safer to add +weight and/or +cost modifiers to these, since added weight won't compound into the cost. However, towers can be surprisingly expensive with radar. If I'm short on funds, I often find myself taking Radar I instead of Radar II, or using lower-tier towers---especially if they are also more compact.

Edited July 9, 2021 by Evil4Zerggin

[Entropy Avatar]

On 7/2/2021 at 4:35 AM, Evil4Zerggin said:

Belt, Belt Extended, Deck, and Deck Extended all have a base weight proportional to the total displacement of the ship.

 

On 7/2/2021 at 4:35 AM, Evil4Zerggin said:

Turret armor has a base weight proportional to the weight of the turret (not including barrels and ammunition)

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but this seems like a very bad scaling rule? Shouldn't armour weight scale very roughly with the surface area of the ship/turret and not it's displacement? Does this mean that small ships and large ships can afford equally thick armour?

[Evil4Zerggin]

11 hours ago, Entropy Avatar said:

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but this seems like a very bad scaling rule? Shouldn't armour weight scale very roughly with the surface area of the ship/turret and not it's displacement? Does this mean that small ships and large ships can afford equally thick armour?

That's largely correct, I often use CAs with 20"+ belts. It's certainly not very realistic, though in terms of game balance it seems like small ships need all the help they can get.

There are a few factors external to the formula that change this slightly:

• Each ship type has a maximum armor thickness, so even if you could afford to put a 20" belt on a CL, you can't.
• DDs have a large fraction of their weight taken up by the hull, so they have less left for armor, even if it weren't for the 1.5" armor cap.
• Armor for secondaries weighs a much larger fraction of the turret per thickness. Unfortunately, this does mean that the same turret will weigh less as a main turret than as a secondary, and there is still no difference in fraction between secondaries of different sizes.

Edited July 9, 2021 by Evil4Zerggin

[Entropy Avatar]

Thanks for the analysis. I have to say, this reduces my enthusiasm a lot. If the design is wildly off on the base formulas like this, it doesn't seem like any amount of tweaking with caps and parameters will really fix things. It's sort of like adding epicycles to a geocentric model.