This discussion is probably a bit strange, because I gather the experience is absolutely different depending on the technology variation and distribution, but most of all we aren’t speaking of the time period.
Before 1920, torpedoes are very hardly a threat — well, it could be argued that nothing is hardly a threat before dreadnoughts! A far cry from the 70s I am guessing, where any single torpedo can take out about any ship?
Also I’m a bit confused with the idea of evading torpedoes (I’m picturing Hunt for Red Oktober moments) since in my games, it had always been more about prevention (ie, not moving in straight lines for hours, making sure to have destroyers reckon all the areas around your main force to prevent any surprise) than about reaction, where it’s already too late and the dies are rolling.
I’ve only had it happen once that really seemed unfair. Daylight and clear skies, (so ~25,000 yards spotting distance), start the fight and on the first turn spot an enemy dead ahead inside torpedo range. Ate one before it gave me control of the helm. Maybe that’s an ambush, but then the captain should be cashiered for allowing an enemy destroyer to get that close unnoticed. I don’t think I’d be complaining if it has been stormy or night…
I’m probably using evade when I mean prevent, mostly. Changing headings every turn or two prevents most firing solutions. In the early game though, they’re dumbfire so you can still turn away from them after they’ve been fired.
I’m in 1922 and torpedos have been a significant threat since about 1915 when ranges got above 3,000 yards. Now that destroyers are mounting quad tubes with 6,000+ yard ranges, fights get really dicey once battle lines devolve into a general melee. Maybe I’m too impatient and closing with the enemy too much. Plinking away at long range just doesn’t seem to do much, though, even with 14" guns.
Well, considering the challenges of hitting a ship-sized target with a large-caliber cannon fired from another ship, with both firing platform and target moving and maneuvering, and on the ocean, which rarely cooperates with human endeavors, and at ranges that often result in a shell flight time long enough for both firing and target ships to have moved quite a bit–it’s a wonder any hits get scored in these battles!
Sucks to be that cruiser. Noone ever said naval warfare was fair.
And “dont attack at night” is historically accurate (c.f. Jutland)
In RtW 1 it went something like this:
There’s a window when torpedos are slow and crap.
Then there’s a window when they are lethal.
Then torpedo defences improve and gunnery improves and they are disabling rather than lethal and destroyers tend to die a lot as they try to get close.
Extending the timeline I imagine we have:
Then submarines get good and they avoid the “die a lot” problem.
i remember being really annoyed with world of warships one day, with the thought that 'there’s no way a cruiser could withstand 15" BB fire for any length of time" and went looking for information to back up my thoughts. Surprisingly, ships were often way more survivable than I had thought, and I had read an AAR from a US cruiser that went up against a japanese squadron late in the war - receiving numerous hits, including several from either heavy cruiser or BB guns, and she remained in operation. I wish i could find it now (or even remember the ship’s name), but the level of detail in the report was astounding, including list of damages and the believed caliber of the rounds inflicting such damage.
You’re in this thread, so you probably likely know that already :) But i thought i’d mention it to any others that might not…
Italy has been at war with us for 9 months and is getting absolutely wrecked (we have over 2.5 times their VPs) despite having twice the tonnage of Bs that we do and an additional CL. When will they decide they’ve had enough?
You’re probably already doing it, but see if you can get enough tonnage on station to blockage them. After a couple months, their government will collapse into rebellion and you’ll get a harsh peace deal.
My impression is that peace offers are less likely if the enemy is doing a lot of successful commerce raiding, but I don’t have any real data to back that up. My longest war lasted almost 3 years before the French government fell. By that point, it was just as likely that my government was going to fall from the strikes and unrest.
I don’t know how to blockade. Just assign ships to raiding? I guess I could read the manual…
I am actually under blockade right now according to the UI. I only have one ship assigned to trade protection because they hardly ever sink anything, but maybe I need to change that?
Commerce raiding and blockading are separate. The manual says to blockade, you need 110% of your enemy’s strength in their build area (so the Med for Italy). That will basically stop their marine commerce and crank up their unrest.
I’m less sure about trade protection. I think it reduces the chance for enemy subs to sink your merchants, but the math there is very much a black box to me. (Or black tube, as @abrandt says.)
I would guess that a peace deal is less likely while you’re under blockade, but I don’t actually know if that’s true.
I don’t think there are any subs yet (1891). Only a couple of times have merchants been sunk between turns, and I have to think it’s come from commerce raiders.
As for 110% of their strength, that’s hopeless (for now). They have a large tonnage lead on me, and even when my battleship rolls off the line in like 23 months I still won’t close the gap entirely (although maybe it will stop the blockade).
I get paralyzed by the options in terms of designing ships. Do I just run with what I have until something happens? Do I start making incremental changes, or wait for big technical shifts? If I just sit there, will anyone attack me?
I think if you do this you’ll always be under-gunned, given the long time gap between design and hitting the water. You have to accept that you’re almost always going to be fighting with at least somewhat obsolete technology. The AI ship designer is a good antidote to analysis paralysis.
I almost always start with the AI designer, because I can’t be bothered to figure out how to place the cosmetic details. It does an ok job of ship design although it’s rarely optimal and sometimes gives weird results. (Why would I want destroyers with an aft superimposed turret instead of a fore one?)
As your drydock size and tech is increasing rapidly, a new design is almost always better than the one it’s replacing. 1% savings on machinery doesn’t sound like much, but over the course of say 5 years the cumulative result is several hundred tons weight available for use. I will say that I thought changes were pretty slow from 1890 to 1900 and then took off like a rocket.
If you right-click on one of your most recent ships of a class and open the design, you can see how much weight you now have left with new tech.
If you end up doing modest improvements and small increases in displacement you can end up saving a good chunk of money on the design cost. Doing it this way, it’s almost always worth it to tweak after each round of building the class.
Also consider “open design for rebuild” if you have some ships getting a tad old that you don’t want to just scrap. It’s great for upgrading fire control, or AA, even adding tps sometimes.
