Long Term suggestions: Ammunition.

[SiWi]

Hallo,

One word in advance: i don't put it into the "December suggestion" since I want to discuss this particular feature "own its own" and I recognize that it would be a quite the long term goal.

With that out of the way, lets go on:

The way ammo works right now, made sense in a game where you design a ship class and nothing else.

Aka you build a ship and design the ammo for it and base your ship design partly on it.

Which of course also means that new ammo would mean you sometimes would have to redesign the ship. Now there might sometimes have been cases where guns for example had to change because of new ammo, but overall I think the practice is a bit silly.

No one can tell me that, because the 30K ton BB has 1T too much because of its ammunition, a nation wouldn't simply ditch the couple of rounds too much and move on. Now to some extend we can simulate this with "reduce" shells, but that is a bit rough. If we would have slighter for example we could be more precise and simple accept that after a refit, the new ship would have 98% of the ammo its suppose to have, instead of redesigning everything because the new ammo is slightly heavier.

 

But that is only one aspects, why I would change ammo.

Another one is logistic: right now all ships get their ammo to 100% after the battle. Ammo I might add, turns into any kind of round. Be it AP or HE. What I would like is not only to have to supply ports with ammo so that they can supply the ships in port (some perhaps necessary for training), but also to allow player to "design" the shells. It doesn't need to be too fancy, but you could allwo the player to design a HE and a AP shell, base on the explosive and the propellants researched.

Lets give an example:

You are the UK in the 1910. You have two types on ammo created an AP shell that uses White powder and TNT 1 and a HE shell that uses Cornite 1 and Picirid Acid.

Now you develop TNT2. Instead of retrofitting the ships or building new ones, you would create a new ammo type using TNT 2.

Now you also wouldn't simply have this ammo everywhere, but would first need to produce it and deliver to your ports.

Easy enough on your home ports, but what about your colonies? Do they also receive the new ammo fast? Do you prioritize some colonies over others? I think this would make for interesting decision making. 

You also maybe could influence how much of each ammo type you carry on a ship type. Maybe you want to have a "cheap" standard ammunition, that you use against weaker enemies and some expensive rounds should you encounter "real" enemies. You may have 80% of your cheap ammo types and 20% of the good stuff. Or if you are at war with a strong enemy, you may decide to abandon the cheap ammo on that front, while in a war against a weak nation you still would use it to save cost.

 

Now what do you think?

Interesting to the gameplay or overly complicated?

Should it work differently?

Should ammo stay the way it is?

[Littorio]

4 hours ago, SiWi said:

No one can tell me that, because the 30K ton BB has 1T too much because of its ammunition, a nation wouldn't simply ditch the couple of rounds too much and move on. Now to some extend we can simulate this with "reduce" shells, but that is a bit rough. If we would have slighter for example we could be more precise and simple accept that after a refit, the new ship would have 98% of the ammo its suppose to have, instead of redesigning everything because the new ammo is slightly heavier.

This is to me the most important part of what your are saying. However, granullar control over shell amounts would basically do away with the Reduced/Normal/Extra shells design component, and I fear the devs would be reluctant to do this. I feel they would expect people to start complaining about micromanaging shell amounts...

I'm not against reloading being an operational factor at all. Full auto-reloading seems a bit gamey right now, but we should remember this is turn-based and each turn is a month. I think one ship would be absolutely fully restocked in a month lol. So ultimately the only place it truly becomes an operational concern would be IF a squadron was forced to fight a second battle (or more) in the same turn, say if they were ambushed on the way home. Right now, I don't think that is possible. So we will have to wait for campaign improvements where we make task groups and can visually see and assign them to areas. Then we can revisit this. The same applies to FUEL as well, something obviously a real-life logistical concern for naval operations.

Designing shells and whatnot seems like a loooong step far, which shouldn't be considered at all at the present given how basic things are. Producing shells and shipping them means the game needs some kind of "factory" component that players can have control of, as well as a distribution mechanism to move them to ports. This could quickly snowball and get very complex. I wouldn't see the devs wanting to even think about this for 1 year+ perhaps...

Edited December 29, 2021 by Littorio

[SiWi]

For the micro Management aspect I would suggest a "auto fill up" button, that simply loads the ship as much possible with the selected ammo.

 

It is fair to point out that battles always have an month between them for a ship (except that one time where an enemy ship had two missions in one turn and only had a crew in one of the two...). 

I was however more thinking among the lines, that while Kiel, Bremen ect. have always the ammo for your ships, I suspect that some back water on the Bismarck Inlands do not have always the ammo to restock your ships fully. So I was basically thinking about supply line when we get more of the world.

 

"Designing" is a big word. I was just thinking about doing what you now do (aka picking a propellant and Picking an explosive) but basically do it for the fleet.

It is true thou that it would entail a lot of more logistics and management, which some people would like and some dislike. And of course it wouldn't be a priority at the moment or even midterm.

[Littorio]

52 minutes ago, SiWi said:

For the micro Management aspect I would suggest a "auto fill up" button, that simply loads the ship as much possible with the selected ammo.

 

It is fair to point out that battles always have an month between them for a ship (except that one time where an enemy ship had two missions in one turn and only had a crew in one of the two...). 

I was however more thinking among the lines, that while Kiel, Bremen ect. have always the ammo for your ships, I suspect that some back water on the Bismarck Inlands do not have always the ammo to restock your ships fully. So I was basically thinking about supply line when we get more of the world.

 

"Designing" is a big word. I was just thinking about doing what you now do (aka picking a propellant and Picking an explosive) but basically do it for the fleet.

It is true thou that it would entail a lot of more logistics and management, which some people would like and some dislike. And of course it wouldn't be a priority at the moment or even midterm.

Yes there are some good ideas here to examine later, and they shouldn't be forgotten, but I think it is just too early to start talking about this much, not when there are much more integral aspects of the game to be developed. Once we have weather and night visuals, proper task forces, patrol sectors, and eventually improved spotting, I would happy to talk about logistics, such as ammunition. Of course, any discussion on logistics would be much larger than just ammo, and should include fuel (coal/oil), manpower (maybe naval academies and/or recruitment depots), etc. Plus, when they add admirals and other officers, who knows what that will do. Some might have logistical abilities.