I’ve made it from 1890 to 1936 as the US. I may be done with this run… I’m stronger than anyone else and pulling away as far as I can tell. Barring some upset, I don’t think anyone else can really challenge me.
Next game will be with a weaker country to try to prevent that from happening…
My new B came off the line, and it is of course already obsolete. I’m not even sure it’s as good as the one I already had. I am now building a new CA, which is much bigger than both of my battleships at 8100 tons (they’re 5100 each but have bigger guns). The Italians have a monster that fought in the last war, the Marco Polo at over 9000 tons and with 6 guns of 8 inches (my new guy only has four). The Marco Polo was present in multiple engagements of the war they lost badly. I can only assume the Italians are terrible sailors. Most of my crews are Elite at this point.
Oh, one new thing this game has, @Strollen, is officers. They are not a “quality of life” improvement but another fun little knob to twiddle.
Oh yes, I have been very excited reading about the officiers in the manual.
Not to be a permanent spoilersport, but officers are like goggles.
Really? Nothing?
I’m sure they give you a +/-2% change on some stats, but that is close enough to nothing to qualify IMO. Especially considering how much work it would be to actually manage assignments manually within the pacing of the game.
RTW is fine collecting battle stats and showing them to you, but seemingly doesn’t consider them worth saving. Once you leave the battle window most of it is lost and only a -very- rudimentary and notably incomplete individual ship history remains. Unless I missed it there isn’t even a history like that for officers. All you get is years of service and number of battles.
Makes it really hard to develop Dwarf Fortress like relationships (Which incidentally is the opposite for data collection. DF tracks, saves and makes available the history of individual bruises).
Had a bit of time to play on the weekend - decided to restart as Japan. Got into an early war with Russia but managed to pick apart their battleship fleet with heavy cruisers by avoiding prolonged engagement with the full battle line and instead sinking their cruiser fleet and picking off the B’s in 1’s and 2’s.
I had an international arms treaty forced on me by the politicians that really wrecked my fleet as we had quite a low tonnage limit compared to our opponents. I tried to preserve the longer-building heavier ships to maintain as much firepower as possible. I cut the small ships too short though and ended up drastically short of escorts at the start of the next war (with Russia again).
Their opening move was to take back Sakalin and my main force was terribly positioned with my CA’s welded to my slower pre-dread’s and only my new BC in position to intercept. It’s kind of funny to see the target lines for the entire enemy fleet of three dozen ships converging on one target, but they did well enough to wreck one of the five enemy pre-dreads, sink a few transports and DDs and drive the rest away from their landing site. It was a well-armoured ship, only really classified as BC since it’s unreasonably fast for 1910 and nothing seemed to really hurt it apart from eating the one torpedo and even that was fixed fairly quickly.
Eventually my main fleet could join the battle and at the end I sunk all the Russian transports, a dozen DDs a few CLs, one B sunk and moderate damage to the other 5. Most of my ships were limping back to port but I only lost one CA outright to a turret hit setting off a flash-fire. Though having 80% of my active fleet out for repairs didn’t make the next turn any easier.
Wow, nice work. My engagements have all been super inconclusive as far as ship sinkings. Not a single (war)ship lost on either side during my entire war with Italy.
I found the battles in the 1890’s it really takes quite a lot to sink a ship*. Overall if it was reasonably even weight of fire I would just move in to 3000 yards or so and trust superior gunnery training to land more hits than they got on me. If one enemy ship fell out of line I would get in REALLY close and just pound them with secondaries until they stop moving at all. If I could put a couple of torpedoes into them at this stage to make sure, all the better.
On the other side, if one of my ships took a bad hit I would detach and do everything I could to get them out of the fight. If you eat a torpedo yourself it helps to go under 10 knots to control the flooding.
*: exception being those early DDs and transports. Those fall apart if you sneeze at them.