Vive la France: Let's Play Rule the Waves 2

There are abstract land campaign events that add to one side or another’s war score (and unrest perhaps?) but you never conquer a home territory and most of the score is from naval events (like blockade).

Not done reading the OP/thread, but I want to chime in with a hearty sweet!

As you were commander.

We return with another two-year stretch. (Or, at least, hopefully two years. I have company coming over on Saturday, which is my usual play-the-game day. We’ll see how far I get.)

Goals for this entry include designing a battlecruiser (circa early 1905), keeping the naval budget more or less balanced, rebuilding our older battleships to use better fire control, and pushing for moderate tensions with Italy and/or Austria-Hungary to permit us to build more ships.

June 1904

To start with, I place a few ships into reserve fleet status, which cuts their upkeep in half but reduces their maximum crew quality to ‘Fair’. (Ordinarily, the maximum is ‘Good’. I don’t recall offhand if specialized training increases the maximum to ‘Elite’.) Given that I don’t expect any wars in the immediate future, we can afford to.

Another Francisque-class destroyer comes off the ways, completing our initial buy of seven. I could scrap some of the Fauconneaus, but destroyer upkeep is so cheap that it’s hardly worth the effort.

Finally, I start the rebuild process for the La Républiques, updating them from central rangefinding to central firing. The history of battleship fire control is the history of centralizing more parts of the process. Central rangefinding moves the rangefinding away from the individual guns and to a central position, which can be elevated above the guns’ smoke and also made more delicate and (therefore) more precise.


Believe it or not, this photograph is of a ship firing using smokeless powder. Clearly ‘smoke less’, not ‘smokeless’.

Central firing moves the triggering of the guns to a central location, which helps eliminate errors in timing.

Finally, director firing lays the guns automatically—the turret crew no longer controls azimuth and elevation.

August 1904

001-gbr-intel

July passes quietly. The British are still building pre-dreadnoughts—and pre-dreadnoughts which will be a much greater liability in the future naval era than our Tridents.

Italy, too, is refitting its battleships with central firing.

October 1904

The first La République completes her refit.

At the same time, the first design studies on the Duquesne-class battlecruiser begin.

Tallying the votes across all the places where this AAR is running, German-style battlecruisers won the day. This 24-knot ship mounts six 11" guns, a secondary battery of 6" guns (+1 quality), and a tertiary battery of 2" guns (+1 quality). (A gun of +1 quality is approximately equivalent in range and penetration to a 0-quality gun with a caliber one inch larger.) She has a 10" armored belt, and tips the scales at a hair over 18,000 tons.

In other news…

I was flipping through the almanac to see where we’re going to land in the dreadnought race (second to get one under construction, it looks like!), and found that the Austrians call this a battleship. We have to have a war with them.

January 1905

We elect to refit the Tridents with central firing before they even come down the ways, which saves us a rebuild cycle on them.

February 1905

The first Duquesne’s keel is laid. She should be ready in early 1908.

The lack of any budget-increasing events has been a bit of a bummer. I’m considering mothballing some of the light cruiser force to free up some more money. As it is, we’re building one Trident, one Chauteaurenault, one of the new Isly light cruisers, and one Duquesne, and still losing money. Ideally, I’d be able to rebuild a La République with better fire control while still keeping up on the dreadnought program.

Advanced gunnery training is a stretch goal, but the budget is too tight to permit it right now.

March 1905

Given that our light cruiser fleet is still enormous compared to everyone except for Great Britain, I decide that putting a few in mothballs (it’ll take about a year to bring them back to combat strength) is acceptable to keep the battleships rolling. Especially now that we’re building replacement fleet light cruisers, keeping all the Tages at 100% operational capacity isn’t as important.

April 1905

A new government wants to cut arms expenditure. I protest loudly and receive a small bump in the naval budget. There are now three La Républiques rebuilding at the same time. (Also, it’s a little cheaper than it appears at first—you don’t pay regular maintenance on ships under rebuild.)

June 1905

Nothing bad can possibly come of this. We stand behind our ally and reap the budgetary rewards.

Upside: we can afford the refit on the rest of the La Républiques. Downside: tensions are up with Germany, who we really can’t fight on even terms.

September 1905

Thinking they’re being helpful, the government votes to increase naval spending given tensions with Germany, which… raises tensions with Germany.

October 1905

The French public raises 50 million francs for a battleship. We lay down one Duquesne because our last pre-dreadnought Trident completes, and one Duquesne with the funds the public so helpfully collected for us.

Six-gun ships are nice, but I’d like to push to eight soon.

November 1905

Thanks to our dreadnought-building program, Britain is forced to raise spending to keep its navy preeminent.

December 1905

The Americans sell us the rights to steam turbine technology, which we’ll take, thank you very much.

Propulsion is one place where Rule the Waves elides a little bit of detail. Steam turbines, in the game, represent a simple decrease in the weight of a ship’s machinery. This is a bit of a simplification.

Shipboard steam propulsion starts with evaporators. Salt, as you’re probably aware, is corrosive, and salt and steam are worse than either in isolation. Marine boilers and condensers demand fresh water, so steamships have to produce fresh water from the materials at hand—heat and seawater. Evaporators distill seawater to fresh water, which is then fed into the boilers.

Boilers do what they say on the tin, turning fuel (in this era, coal or oil) and fresh water into high-pressure steam. The volume of steam a ship’s boilers produce determines how fast it can turn its engines.

In our early-20th-century timeframe of interest, there were two types of engine of note. The first is the multiple-expansion engine, most frequently the triple-expansion type. Steam flows into three cylinders of increasing size, driving a piston in each cylinder. Increasing the size of the cylinder at each step means that each cylinder generates substantially similar force—as the steam flows through the engine, its pressure goes down, so giving it a larger area to act on counters that effect.

The second type is the steam turbine, demonstrated in dramatic fashion by the Turbinia, which showed up at the Navy Review during Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, and proceeded to outrun the fastest vessels the Royal Navy could send to chase it down. From this beginning, turbines eventually made it into most of the world’s warships by about 1910. (At the end of this tangent, I actually back up my assertion that the elision of detail is important.) Like all turbines, steam turbines are essentially pinwheels writ large—blow through it, or force high-pressure steam through it, and it rotates.

Finally, after steam passes through the engine, it arrives at the condensers, which turn it back into fresh water for recycling through the system again. Reusing water means that the evaporators don’t have to work as hard (although ‘not as hard’ still translates to ‘tons per hour’, in this context). When condensers break, steam-powered ships are unable to generate as much steam (since they have to wait for the evaporators, rather than using water they already have), which slows them down.

Anyway, all that to say that the US Navy, in the early days of steam turbines, waffled between turbines and the older triple-expansion engines. Why? Because turbines are only very efficient near full power, and triple-expansion engines, though larger and bulkier, can run at cruise power much more effectively. As late as USS Oklahoma (laid down 1910, commissioned 1916), the Navy built ships with triple-expansion engines, because for they had better range for a given weight of fuel, and we Americans didn’t build fast battleships until the North Carolina-class in the late 30s. Other American ships (and other shipbuilding nations) experimented with a smaller cruise turbine, which would push the ship at cruise speed when running at full power.

In Rule the Waves 2, you don’t get the choice. You just pick a fuel type and an engine focus (from Speed, Reliability, or neither).

February 1906

An uprising in China presents us with the chance to reduce tensions with Germany, which we gratefully take.

May 1906

Germany takes advantage of our softness and sends a force to occupy Angola, which produces very little of note.

Two-Year Report: Diplomacy

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Aside from the aforementioned tensions with Germany, things are quiet enough. Italy is making noise again, and building a few more battleships to boot.

Two-Year Report: The Fleet

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Speaking of which, the fleet report! We’re currently operating at a deficit of 1,553 kilofrancs, but the first batch of ships will finish before we run dry (a new light cruiser and the first Duquesne).

Right now, we look pretty good in the Mediterranean Throwdown Power Rankings. We have a small edge over Italy right now in battleships, and given that our battlecruisers are armored well enough to stand in the line of battle, we’ll maintain that edge even given the predreadnoughts they’re still building.

We’re behind in armored cruisers, as ever, but the battlecruisers are, in part, intended to fix that.

Our huge superiority in light cruisers gives us advantages in the commerce raiding game—we can detach a bunch of them to go sink merchants without much fear of losing them or falling behind our chosen opponents in attached-to-the-fleet strength. Ditto destroyers; they’re a great way to fill the trade protection quota while corvettes build. On the downside, we’re a little behind now on submarines. Should we think about building more?

That said, I think there might be room in the schedule and the budget for an updated Chateaurenault class. The Gueydons, which are filling the larger part of our foreign obligations, are expensive to maintain, especially away from home waters. A class of foreign station light cruisers, with medium or long range and equipped for colonial service (the latter makes a ship count for 150% its tonnage when determining how much you have vs. how much you need on a foreign station), would fill the gap nicely. We could mothball or even scrap a Gueydon or two, and put the savings into more shipbuilding.

Another option might be to put some money toward a class of coastal monitors—ships with, say, a pair of large-caliber turreted guns, low speed and short range, and a ton of armor. With some of those, we could limit the ability of foes to blockade our North Atlantic or Mediterranean coasts without diverting units from the main fleet.

Of course, there’s also room for a class of proper battleship-style dreadnoughts—something with 22-knot speed, a bit more armor, and 8 or 10 guns. (The only reason the Duquesnes are six-gun ships is because we don’t have the technology yet to put more than three turrets on a ship such that all of them can fire at a broadside enemy. There are two technologies that allow that: 4+ centerline turrets, and cross-deck firing for wing turrets.) These three Duquesnes will likely be the only three, as well, given that we have steam turbine technology now, and that leads to large weight savings at higher speeds.

Of course, if we wanted to stick with a six-gun ship, we also just developed 14", quality -1 naval guns, which would go nicely on a dreadnought, or perhaps on those aforementioned coastal monitors.

Meta

I won’t be able to do my usual weekend play-through, so next week’s update might slip a bit, or perhaps cover less time.

I like the efficiency of long range light cruisers for foreign service, so I vote for that. i have no idea if it is wise but coastal monitors sound great and impractical!

As always, I vote for more battleships!

And submarines. Submarines are cool too.

Well, ya ask and ya get. Whaddya want?

The kind of event that increases tensions with wimpy enemies we can beat!

https://twitter.com/simonharley/status/1217893210573373440?s=21 I’ve never seen this before - some actual pre-dreadnought footage of the main guns being fired. As the tweeter notes, you can see how rapid the evolution in terms of fire control and protection was…

Spectacular! And in a number of ways. The amount of violence such a big gun brings, and the fact that they’re just sitting and strutting there in their flat caps looking like the world’s smartest looking sailors. The sighting being done by a dude with a mounted binoculars sitting on a wooden cafe chair. Haha!

And then the raw fact such old imagery reaches us through the ages. Whoa has the world changed since those days.

@PreachyPreach, thanks for that link!

June 1906

We uncover an Italian spy, pushing the issue for some extra budget.

July 1906

Britain is working hard to win the new dreadnought race. In addition to their one completed dreadnought, they have four more under construction, along with two battlecruisers.

August 1906

Tensiosn with Germany continue to decrease. I think we might have turned the corner on that crisis.

September 1906

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A new technology allows us to plausibly design eight- or ten-gun battleships even with our current three-centerline-turret limitation.

Improved engine technology and doctrinal allowances for 700-ton destroyers let us design our best class yet, with two guns, four torpedo tubes, and 31-knot speed.

October 1906

A historical friend of ours comes calling. We say ‘oui’, and I think this calls for pushing for another war with Italy.

November 1906

Speaking of which…

War breaks out. The first battle is a cruiser action where darkness and poor weather guarantee the fleets pass one another in the night.

In addition to the three Duquesne battlecruisers, one Isly light cruiser, and five Pistolet destroyers on the ways, I queue up six corvettes and two armed merchant cruisers equipped with mines, to help take the pressure off of the fleet.

December 1906

Two days before Christmas, three French light cruisers (an Isly and two Tages) supported by a destroyer flotilla embark on a raid on coastal shipping. They’ll arrive south of La Spezia near dusk, doglegging a bit south to hopefully avoid any patrolling Italian ships.

At 2 p.m., the French squadron sights the northern end of Corsica and turns east.

Just after 4 p.m., the squadron sights one ship moving west-northwest at warship speeds, and turns northwest in pursuit. Another appears on the horizon to the northeast.

At 4:30 p.m., Isly’s crew spots a line of three ships due north of the squadron, probably armored cruisers. The enemy line turns toward the French squadron just as the sun dips below the horizon, and the French ships elect to make a daring run toward the Italian coast, hoping to search out and sink a coastal merchant or two during the night.

The decision pays off, as the French squadron runs across two transports in quick succession, sinking them both. Isly and Lalande combine to take down the first one, while a torpedo from Isly sinks the second, as its crew flees in small boats.

The job done, the French squadron rings up flank speed and dashes for the Riviera. A major victory for France nets us 968 victory points.

January 1907

On the 28th, two Italian cruisers come across a French Atlantic convoy, facing off against Linois (a Tage-class light cruiser) and a pair of Fauconneaus. The weather is clear, but it’s 4:41 p.m., so the Italian squadron has a limited time during which it can press its attack without attracting torpedo fire in reply.

Confused night fighting sees the loss of both destroyers, but Linois survives and drives off the armored cruisers before they can sink very many freighters. In ship losses, the Italians are the clear victors, but because so much of the convoy survived, it goes in the books as a minor French victory.

February 1907

The Italians put out peace feelers, amusingly. I instruct the government to put the screws to them, and negotiations stall.

After a quiet first few months, French raiders come through in a big way, sinking eleven merchants to the Italians’ 2.

On the 25th, two French light cruisers and a squadron of the newer Francisque destroyers chance upon an Italian convoy southeast of Malta, and sink four transports before fleeing in the face of a superior Italian escort. The objective being six transports, it goes down as a French loss. I disagree, but what are you going to do?

March 1907

This month, it’s a convoy defense. Isly and a pair of Tage-class light cruisers drive off an attack from a similar Italian force. They probably could have defeated the Italians outright, but crews aboard our destroyers misidentified one of their light cruisers as an armored cruiser.

April 1907

Troude, a Tage-class cruiser, rather embarrassingly fails to destroy a bombardment target in Eritrea despite emptying her entire magazine into it.

May 1907

On the 11th, the Italians launch a raid on our coastal facilities. The fleet sorties.

The Battle of Nice

Visibility is good, the weather is pleasant, and we’re in that part of the year where the days are the longest. It’s looking good for something decisive.

5:21 a.m.

The French fleet sights the Italian fleet to the west, and turns to engage.

6:00 a.m.

Together, the Italian fleet turns away from the French. We give chase.

6:44 a.m.

Sighting the Italian armored cruisers to the north, we ditch the battleships for now, on the theory that a stern chase is a long chase, and we have the speed to catch the cruisers against the French coast.

4:57 p.m.

It works. Although the Italian battle line escapes more or less unscathed, three Italian armored cruisers now dot the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea. The only French loss is the light cruiser Lalande, torpedoed by an enemy submarine as we steam back to port.

I’m going to recommend zooming in a bit on this one. It’s a busy picture. I’ve put some numbers on it to guide you through the battle.

At 1), the French fleet spots the Italian, and turns to go broadside to broadside. The sharp turn indicates when the Italians began to run.

At 2), the French fleet turns north after the enemy armored cruisers, and at 3), we drive them up against the coast.

West of 3), the Italian cruisers scatter. We pursue a pair of them up to 4), heavily damaging two of them. One, an Amalfi-class, is dead in the water, and destroyers torpedo it until it sinks. Another, also an Amalfi-class, slinks away up the coast, harangued by light forces until I recall them to screen the battle line.

They get recalled because the fleet spots one more Italian cruiser at 5), this one a slower Carlo Alberto type. One or two heavy hits slow it further, so that the battle line can fully catch up. Eventually, the vastly heavier weight of gunfire tells, and it slips beneath the waves at around 13:00.

From that point to 6), the fleet stands to the northwest, in pursuit of the Amalfi which escaped back at 4), coming across it and engaging it further. The brief French turn southwest, near 6), corresponds to the brief Italian sally at 7). After they lose heart, we resume our chase of the Amalfi, ultimately sinking it just before the minefields at Genoa.

It counts as a major victory, which earns us +1 prestige.

June 1907

The Italian navy declines battle over a large French convoy in the Mediterranean, and has no forces in the Indian Ocean to defend against a coastal raid conducted by a French cruiser squadron.

July 1907

An Italian submarine torpedoes the light cruiser Lavosier, a Chateaurenault. Two Italian light cruisers attack a French convoy, opposed by a pair of Tages and five destroyers. Though the French squadron took heavier damage than the Italian one did, the convoy escapes unscathed.

The first Duquesne-class battlecruiser enters service. It’ll need a month or two to finish working up before we can send it to the Mediterranean.

Design studies on the first French dreadnought battleship are finished now. In thirty months, Devastation will come down the ways.

August 1907

Getting vengeance for Lavosier is our submarine Euler, which torpedoes and sinks the Italian light cruiser Nino Bixio.

On the morning of the 27th, three Tage-class cruisers and a screen of six destroyers set out for the Italian coast, in search of coastal shipping. The weather is breezy and overcast, but visibility is good.

They sink a pair of ships merchants, managing to evade a pair of patrolling Italian armored cruisers by a daring run nearer the coast.

September 1907

The Austrians are building a very obsolete armored cruiser.

The French and Italian fleets collide near Nice, very briefly, before twilight intervenes. During the attempted pursuit, Fronde, a Francisque-class destroyer, strikes a mine and sinks. The fleet quickly abandons the chase, and the Italians notch a very marginal victory.

October 1907

The Italians have an interesting semi-dreadnought in the works, approximately similar to our Tridents, if a bit slower and much more heavily armed.

Duquesne and Jean Bart (the latter another Isly light cruiser) finish working up, and will be heading to the Mediterranean for a November arrival. Or, as I think about it, they will instead stay in northern Europe on trade protection duty, where they might run across some of the Italian armored cruisers raiding our shipping in that region.

Three Tage-class cruisers raid the Italian coast, this time destroying two merchantmen while fleeing from an Italian fleet headed by one of their 22-knot Amalfi-class armored cruisers. (Sure am glad our ships are fast!)

November 1907

At around 2 p.m. on the 8th, under cloudy skies and a moderate breeze out of the southwest, scouting units of la Marine Nationale spot an unknown vessel sailing toward Nice. The fleet turns that direction.

3:28 p.m.

The Italian fleet, predictably, is running to the west. This time, we have a few hours of daylight, so the battle line pours on some speed and tries to get downwind of the Italians, so as to avoid having to shoot with smoke in our eyes.

4:36 p.m.

The Italian battle line comes into view, twelve miles to the east-northeast, heading northwest. We’ll see if we can’t bag a few of these cruisers again; it doesn’t look like the battleships are going to stick around to play.

4:57 p.m.

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This Carlo Alberto may be a decent armored cruiser. It is not, however, a match for three battleships.

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At this range, even our inept gunners can hardly miss.

5:29 p.m.

The Italian battle line returns as twilight settles in. Soon it’ll be dark; perhaps we’ll be able to run down the Amalfi-class cruiser in front of us.

5:57 p.m.

Night falls. The French fleet takes a northward turn, with an eye toward catching some of the enemies in close and setting the destroyers on them.

7:15 p.m.

The opposite happens; Magenta and La République eat a torpedo a piece. Adroit damage control keeps them afloat, limping back to Nice for patching up.

This battle was a bit simpler, and doesn’t need the explanatory numbering. You can se how the French fleet generally kept to the north of the Italian cruisers, and how, to my surprise, the Italian battleships were south of our ships for much of the action, only turning across our bow at about 3:00 p.m. When I first caught sight of them, it was toward the end of that maneuver.

November 1907, cont’d.

The victory point totals stand at 12,096 for the good guys to 4,438 for the Italians.

December 1907

On the 22nd, the Italians attack a French convoy. I had hoped that Duquesne, dispatched to the Mediterranean in pursuit of the Italian armored cruisers formerly of the North Atlantic, would play a role, but alas, she does not. Instead, three La Républiques take to the sea. It turns into a running gun battle that lasts until nightfall—three French battleships (then two, after Friedland took a hit which damaged her engines) against four Italian, plus two Italian armored cruisers.

Surprisingly, the French ships acquitted themselves well—all three battleships took light damage, inflicting light damage in return on two battleships, and medium damage on the two Italian cruisers.

Intelligence indicates that the next-generation German dreadnought has 16" belt armor—impressive, and four inches thicker than our upcoming Devastation. A quick look at Britain’s dreadnoughts suggests that Germany is an outlier in the direction of heavier protection.

January 1908

The Italians put out peace feelers again. The Navy recommends that we squeeze them as hard as we can, and…

020-peace
Unfortunately, the ‘considerable war reparations’ appear to be for flavor.


Large territorial gains, though…

Unlike the last one, this war bears fruit. While Sardinia would have been a sweet apple to pluck, I decide instead to build a belt of bases around Italy (and, for that matter, Austria).

Finally, with an eye toward retiring some of the Gueydons and mothballing others until such time as naval aircraft are invented, I start on an overseas-service light cruiser design.

March 1908

Shipyards lay down the first Pascal, and our second battlecruiser enters service, with the third due next month.

April 1908

Germany’s aggressive naval program prompts an event which forces us to lose face or raise tensions. I elect for the former, dropping our prestige from 25 to 24.

May 1908

Another pair of Pistolets enters service, bringing the total to six. The shipyards enter their postwar slumber, building a pair of light cruisers (an Isly class, named Lavosier after one of the ships we lost in the war, and Pascal), and Devastation.

I don’t have time for the full update—it’s currently 9:44 p.m. on Wednesday, so I need to wrap up and get all the images ready.

Two-Year Report: Diplomacy

Mes amis, we bask in the glory of three new colonies, and a Mediterranean increasingly blanketed by the tricolor flag.

Two-Year Report: Finances

We’re at that point now where the fleet we have costs enough to maintain so that the fleet we want is hard to build. Our recently-peacetime monthly budget is 13,071 funds, of which 6,720 funds are eaten up by maintenance, 1,568 by research, and 200 by intelligence. That leaves us around 4,500 to spend on construction, which is not quite two dreadnoughts.

Some ships will probably have to be mothballed or retired going forward, and the Gueydons overseas are prime candidates. As soon as the new Pascals start to roll off the ways, the Gueydons deployed overseas will start coming home, to be stored away for later use or scrapped altogether.

Other candidates include some of our light cruisers—we still have the second-largest light cruiser fleet in the world, behind Britain, although (as I’ve mentioned before) our light cruisers pull some of the same duties that armored cruisers do in other navies.

Two-Year Report: The Fleet

We’re in good shape compared to our Mediterranean peers. We have three dreadnought-style ships in service (all Duquesne battlecruisers) and one dreadnought battleship under construction. Italy and Austria both have dreadnought battleships under construction, one a piece. Another option, one I haven’t used much in previous Rule the Waves games, is the reserve fleet option, which halves maintenance costs for ships without much long-term penalty.

Anyway, I have two questions for the gallery:

  1. Should we make use of the reserve fleet? If so, what should we reserve? One or two battleships? Older light cruisers? Old destroyers? Some combination?
  2. What should our shipyards focus on? Dreadnought battleships (i.e. 22-knot ships which don’t compromise on armor or guns, to the extent possible), or battlecruisers (i.e., 24±knot ships with respectable armor and fewer or smaller guns, as needed to attain the above)?

Thanks! Very much enjoying the AAR.

My understanding is that you only get monetary reparations in proportion to colony points that you decide not to seize as part of the peace deal. So it’s a tradeoff between better economic performance in the long term versus establishing presence and bases (which can be an economic drain).

Are those the strains of Les Marseilles that I hear? Vive la France!

I vote, of course, for battleships.

Definitely use the reserve fleet. You can save a ridiculous amount of money. If tensions start to increase, you can always pull then out of reserve. Especially if you will have new ships join before the next war, you might even consider putting older battleships in mothballs (or send them to the breakers). How effective are your starting battleships going to be in 4 more years?

Though if you trim down too much, you might take a prestige hit from appearing too weak, even if a small modern navy is more effective than a bloated and decrepit one.

June 1908

We have the chance to establish a protectorate in Iceland, but it doesn’t go well, and a local warlord takes over.

(That’s the fun thing about random events, the randomness.)

The two Mediterranean Gueydons go into the reserve fleet, along with the older Tages and Fauconneaus. Our starting ships are beginning to get the (O) next to their name which indicates that they are obsolete and, more to the point, old—I don’t recall, but that may have reliability-in-battle implications.

July 1908

Tourville and Dunkerque, the other two Duquesne-class battlecruisers, finish their working up and make their way to the Mediterranean.

September 1908

Expanding private shipbuilding and industry yields efficiencies for the Navy, which means another Pascal laid down to replace another Gueydon.

October 1908

Spies get a hold of the blueprints for Italy’s dreadnought.

It’s at least on par with our Devastation class. Similar broadside—the Devastation can bring all eight guns to bear on one target, while the Andrea Doria can’t, and has slightly heavier armor, but the Andrea Doria is a little faster.

November 1908

Tensions are rising steadily with Germany. (It isn’t even my doing—tensions can go up without events.)

On the plus side, our next class of battleship will look almost conventional.

002-4-turrets

I lay down another two submarines. We’re falling behind somewhat in that realm, but because our interests are mainly close to home, the cheap coastal boats will suffice for as long as we care to invest in submarines.

March 1909

Germany is clearly pushing for a war with us, which doesn’t bode well. It’s apt to be a strongly commerce-raid-y war on our part. Big fleet actions won’t go well.

Per a reader suggestion, I put the finishing touches on a battlecruiser to mount those new 15" guns.


Trying something new as far as drawing ship designs goes.

Later note: I just realized I forgot conning tower armor on the Lyon. I guess that’ll be a one-off. Costly mistake.

July 1909

The keel of the first Lyon is laid. Devastation is looking like a one-off, especially since we just developed improved 12" guns. Perhaps a 10-gun ship will follow.

September 1909

Don’t look now, but tensions with Austria-Hungary are rising. Fingers altogether crossed.

January 1910

Catching flak for not deploying enough in Northern Europe to counter German aggression (tensions ahve been rising again), I begrudgingly move the battlecruisers up that way.

April 1910

We’re on the brink of war with Germany, but a new dreadnought design is on the way:


Note the 10-guns-in-4-turrets arrangement. These are quality-0 12" guns, with a range of about 17,000 yards—better than the 15" -1 guns on the Lyon/Lille-class, if also less punchy.

I redid the Lyon class with conning tower armor; future ships will be part of the Lille class.

Two-Year Reports

Not much has changed since last time, with the exception of budget (we can just about afford a Redoubtable, a Lille, and the Lyon currently under construction, along with a light ship or two), and high tensions with Germany.

n11mRVZ

We are still allied with Great Britain, on the one hand; on the other hand, Britain was worth a whopping 100 victory points in the last war. Maybe they’ll be more useful against Germany.

They were historically. Aren’t you a bit early kicking that one off?

July 1910

Tensions still run about as high as they can possibly run with Germany without a war, when an unwelcome event pops up.

We can ignore the Navy Minister, but that’ll ding our prestige and budget badly. We can commit to building half as many destroyers, but that commits us to a potentially-silly course of action without any funding to make up for it.

So, I take the deal. I’ll build a few destroyers as a tip of the hat to the naval minister, and will take the ding in prestige when he gets mad about my lack of 15 destroyers at once—unless we go to war with Germany first, which resets the clock altogether.

August 1910

A discount Lyon? How can I say no, even if the conning tower armor is missing? The Lille-class will be there if I want one later.

The naval minister changes his mind.


The yards are humming, but not with eight cruisers.

At least we’re putting the money to better use.

September 1910

I don’t recall if this event raises tensions with other nations, but we’re about to find out. The chance to beat up on Austria-Hungary is too sweet to ignore.

It doesn’t raise tensions with Germany, but also doesn’t get us near a war with Austria-Hungary, either. Since Germany is looking like our most likely dance partner, let’s take a look at their Jane’s Fighting Ships page.

… interesting. Unless I miss my guess…

… Germany’s ‘dreadnoughts’ aren’t, or at least, they aren’t on the grounds of armament. That’s an absurd amount of belt armor, though.

Their other heavy units are pretty ordinary. Their 23-knot armored cruisers are a little faster than the Mediterranean average, but they would still be easy prey for our original Duquesne-class battlecruisers (24-knot speed, 11" guns, armor against same). The size of their pre-dreadnought battle line is a bit concerning, though.

December 1910

No, we can’t guarantee a victory. It hurts our prestige, but increases the budget. With the extra cash, I lay down another Redoubtable-class dreadnought, this one to be called Marengo.

009

French engineers have developed a 16" naval gun, which we won’t really be able to mount in anything for a little while yet.

January 1911

I’ve never been at such a high-tension fever pitch for so long without a war starting. The money is nice. The brinksmanship is tense.

Italy has a 27,000-ton battlecruiser under construction, which is worryingly large. Our heaviest ship to date is 23,600 tons.

One of the nice things about playing Rule the Waves 2 in AAR fashion is that there’s less of a tendency to rush. Because I have to write things down, I have more of an incentive to take my time.

February 1911

I take the expected prestige hit from failing to build eight cruisers at once, leaving me… exactly where I was before the request, except with a bigger budget.

March 1911

We develop oil-fired boilers, which is all well and good, except we don’t have access to oil.

April 1911

Our steadfast allies the British want to buy some shell technology off of us. I happily sign off on it; it’ll buy us another month or two at our fever pitch of shipbuilding. There are currently two battleships and two battlecruisers in the yard, two each of the Redoubtables and Lyons, along with a light cruiser and three destroyers.

May 1911

Wonder of wonders, tensions with Germany are slightly reduced.

French naval architects have hit upon the idea of superfiring forward turrets as well, which is apt to yield a very traditional-looking 10- or 12-gun dreadnought (two turrets forward, one superfiring; two turrets aft, one superfiring) when the money is there, in ten or twelve months.

June 1911

Italy’s new light cruiser is now the Mediterranean’s fastest. I believe our ships are a match for it, though, given that our fleet-service cruisers have quality-1 6" guns—more or less equivalent to standard 7" guns.

011

Word of German experiments with airships has reached France, and not to be outdone, we begin to look into the idea.

July 1911

Continued problems in the shipyards have delayed a number of our vessels—in particular, the two Lyons have not been trouble-free ships, each delayed by a month. (Since costs in Rule the Waves are per month rather than overall, delayed ships end up costing us more.)

October 1911

Rising tensions between Germany and Great Britain rattle an otherwise calm autumn. War has not yet been declared, but it’s very close.

February 1912

013

Well, it was a good run of peace, but now it’s time to turn the dogs of war loose once again.

The first month’s battle is an inconclusive destroyer action just north of the English Channel. Outnumbered, the French force manages to stay at the edge of the German ships’ range until dark, at which point it retreats into port at Dunkerque. Two old Fauconneau-class destroyers take damage, but neither sinks.

(Looks like @schurem called the kicking-off-early part.)

War Planning

What with it being Trademarked Football Game Sunday this week and a beer-brewing day Saturday, I don’t expect to have the time to get too deep into this war before I would have to write the update, so I think the thing to do here is to cut this entry short and sound out the naval staff (i.e., you, the readers) on how this war should be prosecuted.

20,000 Yards: Forces and Shipyard Plans

At present, we have five units of note building:

  • Redoubtable and Marengo, 23-knot, 23,600-ton battleships with 12.5" belts, 10 12" guns, and 10 6" secondary guns, arriving in 12 and 17 months, respectively.
  • Lyon and Marseilles, 25-knot, 22,000-ton battlecruisers with 12" belts, 6 15" guns, and 12 4" secondaries, arriving in 2 and 10 months, respectively.
  • Cassard, a Pascal-class light cruiser, also due in 2 months.

In addition to those, there are eight trawlers in the yards being armed, to run down submarines and serve as cheap trade protection.

Compared to the Germans, we have more full-on dreadnoughts (one), but they have three of what I’d call super-pre-dreadnoughts, with 16" belt armor and 4 13" guns, and one presumably more modern dreadnought under construction, due 1914. Our battlecruiser force is superior to theirs. We’ll have five battlecruisers, two of them armed with 15" guns, before they have a single one (theirs are due 1914 and 1915).

In sum, our dreadnought force is superior (one battleship plus two building, three battlecruisers plus two building), even though we only have second-line ships in service at present. Our first-line ships (by the standard of 1912) will be ready before theirs.

In predreadnoughts, the Germans have a massive edge in numbers (19 to our 8), but even our old La Républiques are superior to all but their latest ships.

The German armored cruiser force is quite large (13 ships to our 5), and their two most recent ones (built 1908 and 1909) feature 10" guns and 24-knot speed (but very light armor). Otherwise, nothing to write home about. Our Gueydons, though old, can outrun everything but the two recent ships.

In light cruisers, we have the edge in numbers (18 to 12) and in modernity. The best German light cruisers are likely better than our best ships, however, and many of our light cruisers are overseas fulfilling colonial requirements. Further, the Germans are engaged in building a number of light cruisers at present.

In destroyers, the Germans have an edge in numbers (42 to 30). Quality is a toss-up. In submarines, the Germans have an edge.

In general, we’re a bit behind on quantity, and even or ahead on quality. The question here is, what should we focus on? Large ships, and try to nibble away at the Germans where possible? Fast ships, and destroy their commerce and their raiders while avoiding risky fleet actions? Submarines and destroyers, and try to torpedo them into submission?

10,000 Yards: Deployments and Roles

At present, even with the larger part of our fleet stationed in the Northern Europe zone, the German fleet has us blockaded, which will sap our victory points over time. Given how little Great Britain contributed to the last war, I don’t think we can count on them all that much to pitch in.

I’ve taken the liberty of engaging in a a relatively robust raiding campaign out of the gate. Two of the reactivated Gueydons, one Tage, and all four Chateaurenaults have been dispatched to the far corners of the German colonial empire, where they will snatch up merchants left unprotected by the German fleet. Raiders and submarines will earn us easy victory points, which may help make up for the fleet battles we may be avoiding.

Should we focus further on raiding, or keep the fleet closer to home and hope for some even battles?

Should we turn the battlecruisers loose as raiders and raider-hunters, or keep the battlecruisers with the fleet?

Broadside-to-Broadside: Battles and Tactics

As was the case with Italy, our ships are generally faster than their German equivalents. Technology has come far enough now, though, that our older light cruisers and predreadnoughts are slower than some of the ships they might run across in battle.

Given that conditional superiority, the clear choice is to fight this war much like the last ones, engaging only when success is reasonably assured and running from the other fights (or avoiding them altogether). If you have any other ideas, however, I’m all ears.

Status

The above more or less suffices, but for a quick budget report:

The monthly wartime budget is 24,908, of which 11,569 goes to maintenance and 12,828 goes to construction.

Research and intelligence bring us to a monthly deficit of 1,732, with 4,022 in the bank. Two ships coming out of the yards in the next few months will put us back in the black before we run out of money.

What about the British?

They were worth, I believe, 100 victory points out of about 12,000 in the last war. I suppose we’ll see if they’re worth more in the North Sea.

Can you link up with British forces? If so using the battlecruisers as raiders and linking up with the Brits for fleet engagements sounds intriguing.

I’d keep the battle cruisers close to home, and let the small fry do the raiding. But then, it’s mostly about not losing, is it? Good luck!

Assuming you can’t co-ordinate with the Brits, I’d send everything sensible out raiding. You need a source of VPs to stem the costs of avoiding any disadvantageous fleet actions.
That is of course assuming your raiders can outrun anything they can’t outfight. Probably tell them not to get trapped in the Skagerrak.