Gentlemen, our first two years at the Ministère de la Marine have gone almost exactly as we had wished. We remain on good terms with the Anglophone nations and Japan, while we stand on the brink of war with Italy. Four capital ships, two light cruisers, and a brace of destroyers all are under construction in our yards. This means that only limited funds are available for new construction right now, and we need to make good use of them to ready ourselves for war.
The world situation
The current international situation
Our current finances
Our current active fleet
Ships under construction
The world navy situation
Italy's ships
Italy's ships, part 2
The most obvious thing to do is to lay down more destroyers. We can only support one more without going into the red, but a single extra DD wouldn't break the bank. The other options are coastal defenses and minesweepers. The staff has prepared a sketch design for an oceanic minesweeper, which costs only half as much as a destroyer. (Corvettes/minesweepers under 600 tons are converted civilian ships, and can't be built in peacetime.)
The minesweeper sketch design
So far, we're by far the laggard with regards to coastal defenses. We have only a handful of batteries, all of relatively small caliber, while most of our opponents have built new, large-caliber batteries. Here are the cost options for said batteries:
| Caliber | Monthly Cost | Build Time |
|---|---|---|
| 4" | 250 | 6 |
| 5" | 333 | 6 |
| 6" | 400 | 6 |
| 7" | 500 | 8 |
| 8" | 750 | 8 |
| 9" | 750 | 10 |
| 10" | 900 | 10 |
| 11" | 1200 | 10 |
| 12" | 1500 | 10 |
The counterintelligence office would also like to propose an increase in its budget, due to several incidents of industrial espionage that have recently come to light.
Monthly narrative:
January:
Stole blueprints for Japanese CA Kasuga. Britain and US laid down a B. Commissions: Germany CA, Britain B, Japan CA, US B, CA. Italy is said to have increased the naval budget.
February:
New docks completed, second batch started. CLs Isly and Alger laid down, CL Chasseloup Laubat finished working up. Breakthrough: Improved hydrostatic valve. CLs laid down by UK, Italy, USA. B ordered by Japan from Italian yard. Commissions: Germany CA, B. Austria-Hungary 2xCA, B. Italy CA. Italian scientists have developed improved hydrostatic valve, Britain increased naval budget.
March:
B Courbet finishes working up. A boom time results in extra tax revenue, which we advise using to strengthen the navy, although this will increase tensions. (In practical terms, the increase in budget is fairly minor.) CAs Jeanne d'Arc, Dupleix and Desaix laid down. Germany, US and UK lay down CLs, Austria-Hungary a CA. Italy orders a B from UK. Japan building 6" battery in Formosa.
April:
B Redoutable commissions (Trident-class, but Trident was delayed) and easily exceeds design speed. US and Italy lay down CLs, Japan orders B from Italian yard, UK lays down B, A-H a CA. AH and UK commission Bs, Italy a CA. Germany is building larger docks.
May:
B Trident commissions. Chaos in Samoa gives us an opportunity to take over, but the plan fails, costing prestige, and sparking tension with Italy. Research: DD of up to 600 tons displacement. US lays down a CL, AH a B, Japan orders a CA from Austria.
June:
A revolution in an African country leaves some of our nationals stranded. We send a strong squadron to demand their return, increasing our budget but sparking tension with Italy, Germany and Austria-Hungary. Italy and US lay down Bs, Japan ordering one from an Italian yard. UK lays down CA. Italy said to have increased naval budget. At this point, I took a break, and asked for more design feedback on the build program.
July:
Design work began on new B and DD classes. Redoubtable finished working up and Devastation commissioned. Stole plans for CA Bacchante. Research: Heavy secondary battery. AH laid down 2 CA, UK a CL. UK and USA each commissioned a CL. Italy is building two coastal batteries, the UK one with recently-increased military spending. DD Mousqueton and Sabre laid down. Most of the battleships and about half of the cruisers and destroyers are moved to the Med to cover Italy.
August:
B Trident finishes working up. UK lays down 5 DD, 1 B, USA 1 CA. US commissions 1 CL. UK building a 7" coastal battery.
September:
Research breakthough: Cockburn safety valve. B Solferino laid down. US, UK laid down CAs. US building 10" coastal battery.
October:
Private shipbuilding expands dock by 1000 tons. B Devastation finishes working up. Austro-Hungarian government changes, and we request a budget increase to counter the potential threat. Germany laid down a CA, US a CL. US commissions a CL. Intelligence shows that someone has stolen industrial secrets from us, but we don't know who. Tensions are now as high with A-H as with Italy. Increased budget allows DDs Sagaie and Coutelas to be laid down.
November:
A cruiser runs aground near a minor nation while on an intelligence-gathering mission. We demand its release and send a squadron, spiking tensions with Italy and Germany. Research breakthrough: improved riveting techniques. Germany and A-H increased naval spending. Germany laid down a B, UK 2 DDs. Japan commissioned CA. Design work on Carquis class DD (slight improvement of Mousqueton, with lighter machinery and hull and increased ammo) begins.
December:
#1902!!1902 Summary:
January:
Exercise conducted. Germany commissioned a CA, US and Germany laid down CLs, Japan a B and a KE, AH a CA. Research into Lyddite bursting charges, Pressure hull.
The exercise itself was a waste, as the commander of the "enemy force" broke off as soon as he sighted my fleet. There were only a few shots exchanged between our cruiser screens.
The results of the exercise, such as they were.
The ships that fought in the exercise battle.
The track map of the exercise.
February:
Docks complete. Stole plans for Italian BB Conte di Cavour. Research: Power rammers, reliable bursting charges. Italy commissions a B, Germany laid down a CL, Japan a B.
WAR HAS BROKEN OUT WITH ITALY!
Several of our battleships met theirs off the sole of the Italian boot. Our fleet is 3 B, 2 CA, 4 CL and a lot of DD. Enemy sighted after 3 hours, looks to be 2 BB, 2 CA. We engaged as best we could, and sunk three destroyers, but were not able to deal meaningful damage to the enemy capital ships. The closest was an attempt to pinch off a CA, but it failed by a narrow margin. Gunnery was not very good overall. The end result is a marginal victory, 251 VP to 130.
General War Situation:
A map showing invasion circles for the Med. Eritrea is out of range, but it's easy to pick up at the negotiating table if we win the war.
So far as we can tell, Italy has no forces outside the Med at the moment, although I expect them to deploy raiding cruisers fairly soon. We currently have 14 destroyers outside of the Med. I've set 10 for Trade Protection and ordered the other four to move in.
The big question is strategy. We can mount an invasion, but it will leave us about 500 in the red at either target. Or we can spend the money on forces to fight, such as more destroyers. They fixed the invasion bug, so it's not a terrible idea, although I'm not sure we have the margin of superiority to carry it off. Sicily is very expensive to capture, to the point that I'm not sure we could ever get it at the negotiating table. (I think it caps you at 6 points, and some stuff is 10 or 12 to take. It's very irritating.) Sardinia doesn't have this problem.
Comments
Can you add a picture of the tension chart?
I do think counterintelligence spending is a good idea, seeing as we just got robbed twice in three months. Is that a separate expenditure or do we just need to increase intelligence spending vs Italy and A-H?
Upgrading our coastal batteries seems like a good use of our savings, but I'm not sure how many, how big, or where to put them. 6-inch guns are cheap, we can put them everywhere and do fine against CLs, but if we want to threaten CAs and Bs that'll get expensive quickly.
Maybe one 10-inch installation apiece in Western and Southern France, and 3 6-inchers in our colonies in the Med?
I took a screenshot, but apparently forgot to upload it. We're orange with Italy and high yellow with Germany and A-H.
Counterintelligence isn't a separate expenditure, and we don't know who stole the stuff. Italy, A-H and Germany are good candidates, but it very well could have been anyone. But intelligence is fairly cheap, so we could easily afford to give all of them the Medium treatment.
A near term battle with Italy would probably benefit most from coastal batteries, plus I expect those to remain useful for a long my time if peace breaks out. I vote for some of those, probably in the med. I also vote for sending a couple cruisers to the Indian ocean. It looks like we are defending with only one CL and that seems to be asking too much from lady luck. Even though they don't appear to have anything there themselves I don't think we can count on that staying true.
For that matter the Indian ocean colonies look to be the logical place to push. If we can take Ethiopia then we will have pushed them to only one sea. I can imagine pushing hard enough there to win a war without requiring a main battle fleet engagement.
I would also be happy to increase intelligence funding. Want to know as much as possible about our likely foes, and may benefit from UK tech if we can remain deniability.
How are short batteries modeled? Are they well fortified enough to take hits from ships for any meaningful amount of time? Do they have some sort of accuracy bonus for not being on a moving ship? Can we get whitehead torpedo batteries like the one that sunk Blucher?
Short answers: 1. IMO not very well. 2. They're not trivial to knock out, but I don't remember the details on their armor. 3. Probably not. I've killed shore batteries that I didn't have a huge firepower advantage over. 4. No, they don't have those.
Insofar as corvettes and minesweepers of 500 tons are ships that can be acquired very quickly in wartime (4 months vs 12, IIRC) by taking over civilian trawlers, and we might be facing a war in the very near future, I think it might be best to lay down a few more destroyers now while building a bit of a cash reserve for minesweeper acquisition as soon as war is destroyed.
If we had a couple of years, buying a dozen cheap 600-ton minesweepers and putting them in reserve would be a good hedge, and something to keep in mind for the next round.
Raising intel spending sounds good.
Based on the manual, it sounds like if you have shore batteries in the same zone as the enemy fleet, they'll periodically get into fights with them. So on the one hand, this is potentially a cost-effective way to reduce the enemy fleet. On the other hand, they won't help with either side of blockades. I'm also guessing that a coastal battery has much less chance than a capital ship of entering a favorably-lopsided engagement.
My guess is it comes down to what we expect our war with Italy to look like. If it's going to be a long standoff between equalish forces in the Med, it's probably worth building some batteries there. But if we expect to impose a blockade fairly early, then coastal guns won't be much use.
The place I'm really interested in them is in Asia, assuming that they help against surprise harbor raids, but that's a matter for another time.
I've edited in the 1902 tension screenshot.
@John
Fair enough.
@ADA
Coastal batteries are decent at keeping ships away from wherever they happen to be. Unfortunately, you have little control over that, so they can end up anywhere in a fairly large area, and they usually aren't that great at actually killing things. Not sure how they'd do in a surprise attack.
@ADA: I don't expect a quick blockade. Adding up the tonnage, we could theoretically do it if we put our entire fleet in the Med, but that's not possible with foreign service requirements. We'll have to sink some of their ships first, and do it before the B's that are currently under construction launch.
So I think it's likely we'll use any batteries we build. My question is mainly how much of our war chest should go into coastal batteries now, and how much we should save for KEs, DDs, and just paying to keep our fleet running in wartime.
Increased spending on intelligence sounds smart, and DDs probably build fast enough that they might be ready for any clash in the Med. Even if they miss the fight I expect we'll need to replace losses...
Do the larger shore batteries also suffer from -1 quality? 6" ought to be enough to ward off light cruisers, and if they send the battle fleet even 12" batteries will be outgunned in a few years. I would rather skimp on the big forts, and buy ships instead.
What is a KE, by the way?
Disregard that last question, I see that it designates a corvette.
I have no clue what the quality of guns for a shore battery is. The game doesn't give that information, although I might be able to dig it out of the save files if it varies with our tech state.
And I've rarely seen wars that conclude in less than a year. So any destroyers we lay down now will almost certainly make it into the fight, but there's a decent chance we can wrap things up before their battleships start to commission, if the build estimates are accurate. At the very least, it looks like we have a bigger edge now than we will in a few years.
How is that useful in RTW’s abstraction of war? The main use I can see would be protecting colonies from invasion if we don’t think our fleet can do it. I don’t really see that being an issue in the coming war. So unless there’s a factor I’m missing, I vote for minimal-to-zero investment in that area for now--and if we must build some, I vote for preference to the Indian Ocean zone.
The actual battles are fought on a tactical level, with lots of ships maneuvering around. Sometimes, you'll find, say, a ship hiding in a harbor under the protection of a coastal battery and have to give it a miss because of said battery. It's not always great, and I really wish you could place coastal batteries like you can airbases, but it's sometimes useful.
For 1902, the staff would like to propose two things. First, we will begin construction of a 6" battery in Tunesia. Second, we would like to conduct a training exercise with most of the fleet in preparation for the war. We estimate this will cost 8,000-9,000, but will greatly aid our fleet in terms of experience.
I forgot that the men on board the ships could actually be useful in some way! What kind of naval commissioner does that make me?
I would be amenable to an exercise. No particular opinion on the shore battery.
How do the training exercises work? Do they just grant you experience points to your crews that give you some sort of flat bonus in combat, or is it more nuanced? It would be nice if exercises allowed you to potentially discover flaws in equipment or tactics that could be corrected, while also running the risk of catastrophic accident. Rest in Peace to the crew of HMS Victoria.
Basically, they let you simulate a battle, which will raise some of the crews from Good to Elite. This helps in combat.
I support both of the staff's suggestions.
(I think naval exercises can also raise tensions, but we're honestly better off starting the war as soon as possible, given our construction lead over Italy.)
Sounds good to me also, especially if we get a good write-up of the exercise.
Should we work out a general war plan? I think there are some questions that are useful to consider in advance.
1) What will our initial deployment be? Do we send everything to the Med except the minimum for colonial tonnage requirements? Which ships should we use to meet those requirements? Do we need to keep anything in Northern Europe?
2) Do we want to send any ships commerce raiding? How many?
3) How aggressive a posture do we want? If those Bs in construction mean time is on the enemy's side, we should probably lean towards seeking engagement and bring willing to take some losses in order to inflict more.
4) Would we consider any invasions? The forums corroborate Bean's poor experiences with that mechanic, but Eritrea seems like it could become quite a sitting duck.
Also, those Giuseppe Garibaldis displace just 12300 tons, but they carry 4 9" guns and go 23 kts--a very impressive line. Can we assume they're short range, cramped quarters, and poorly armored, and a lot less threatening than they seem?
Play has begun with the exercise.
Also, for the invasions, they've patched that, and it works much better now.
Unfortunately, the exercise itself was a colossal waste of money, at least in a tactical sense, thanks to the incompetence of the Admiral picked to lead the “attacking” force. He turned and ran at the first sign of my ships, and I was unable to maintain contact. However, something like a third of our fleet is now Elite and we raised tension with Italy, so it wasn’t a total waste.
Particularly as WAR BROKE OUT WITH ITALY IN MARCH. Monday's update will be there, instead of the end of the year.
Maybe he was following Italian doctrine to make the exercise more realistic?
That's a very good thought, but the Italians fought significantly harder when I encountered them. Well, a bit harder. We didn't come to close range and it was most indecisive, although initial reports indicate that several enemy destroyers were sunk at no loss to us.
The Italians fought pretty seriously in WWI.
It was WWII when they suddenly found themselves fighting for Hitler that the Italian soldiers suddenly lost all enthusiasm. As would I.
They may have fought seriously, but they didn't fight very well, as the Isonzo campaign shows. And in WWII, their Navy certainly showed no particular enthusiasm for fighting, but they actually came closer to their strategic objectives than did the surface fleets of either of the other two Axis powers.
The Isonzo campaign, with nearly a million Italian dead, is certainly not an Italian triumph. My point being that you can't possibly accuse them of cowardice at the time.
Italians being pasta eating surrender monkeys is an artefact of the accounts of WW2, where as I said the Italian soldiers found themselves on the wrong side.
You can theoretically get peace deals with up to 20 points worth of colonies, though anything over 12 is super-rare(it basically requires going full Brest-Litovsk on them, with their forces ruined and their nation collapsing). I got 8 from my last war.
And while the Italians fought much in WW1, they (or at least their leadership) can't be said to have fought seriously. And I don't recall the Italians fighting all that well from 1943-45 either, despite being on the side of light.
@Doctorpat
Agreed. It’s rather impressive just how much blood they poured into those mountains, but only in a very abstract way, and it rapidly turns really tragic. I’m rather surprised that the Italians didn’t get more love during the WWI centennial. It may have just been too much of a meatgrinder for anyone to popularize.
I’m not actually so sure of this. While I absolutely agree that WWII had a right and wrong side, I’m not sure that was obvious to them at the time. Why did the Italians decide that their side was wrong and not fight very hard, while the Germans fought to the bitter end? I’d be interested in a serious study of that question, particularly because they did fight hard in WWI, but it’s going to need to be deeper than “wrong side”. And I’ll definitely agree that the military reputations of the Italians and (even more) the French were unfairly besmirched by WWII.
We probably want to sink some more ships before we start paying any monthly invasion-planning costs. Definitely make sure we have the war chest for when the time comes, though. Maybe it's time for those AMC minesweepers?
And so I understand: is Sicily harder to take via invasion, or just harder to take at the peace table?
@Alsadius
Thanks. I didn't know the limits on that stuff, and I don't think I've ever seen more than 6 or maybe 8 points, even when I'd trounced them pretty thoroughly.
@ADA
AFAIK, the invasion itself isn't any more difficult, but it's a lot harder to get at the negotiating table. I can spit out 200-ton and 500-ton minesweeper designs pretty quickly. (I'm not actually sure if tonnage has anything to do with minesweeping capability, actually.)
Personal bet is that the Germans had discovered that negotiated surrender resulted in getting stomped on during the peace talks, while the Italians hadn't had that experience in WWI.
I'm also against funding an invasion right now. It looks like we can easily afford some DDs and KEs, though.
Intelligence report: The Italian B's under construction look a slightly crappier version of our current ships. Same speed, same main guns, but with triple-turret secondaries (which will have RoF and reliability penalties this early), and 1 inch less belt than Richelieu. Despite that, it somehow displaces about 2000 tons more.
The British and Japanese CA's are... odd. One knot slower than CA-01-I, comparable armor, but there aren't any main guns listed! Our CAs have 9 inch main guns and 6-inch secondaries, they have just the 6-inchers. Which is really confusing, because the picture clearly shows two double turrets.
I suspect that either the game is bugged, or our spies are really bad at their jobs.
I'm pretty sure the Romas have a wide belt. They're very close to the new battleship design we just laid down. I'm not sure if they're overweight, or the inch of belt armor saves enough weight to make up the difference.
Those CAs have most of their 6" guns in casemate mounts with a few in the turrets. The best example would be something like the Omaha CLs IRL. It's fine for killing destroyers and CLs, but not what I would put on a near-capital unit like that.
A while ago I was suggesting a similar design for cruisers, because of the higher quality of our 6" guns. Once we get better fire control and armour the 6" will be outclassed, but at the moment, aren't they still a threat to capital ships? To what extent are our battleships and armoured cruisers protected against 6" AP?
Unfortunately for the early game, it only starts showing penetration figures at 5,000 yds. But 6" armor easily defeats 6" shells at that point. I think 6" shell penetration is more like 2-3" right now. The bigger guns are massively helpful in getting through the armor of, say, one of these cruisers, although the 6" can do quite a bit of damage to the ends and such.
Would it be fair to say that (at this time) 6" guns can slow a battleship down, but are unlikely to either sink it or seriously reduce its return fire?
Datamining shows that 6" gun penetration at 1 kyd vs. 6 kyd has a ratio of 10:7. For 7" and 8" guns it is 4:3.
IMX it is quite difficult to sink BBs with gunfire alone in this era, even with BB-level guns. Generally kills result from a lucky shot hitting an engine and slowing the BB down enough to be either sunk by an extended pounding by an entire fleet, or more expediently, torpedoes.
At least up until now, I thought that the main reason that Dreadnought going all big gun was so revolutionary was that the increase in range that larger calibre guns provide, combined with better fire control, meant that it could defeat pre-dreadnoughts beyond the range of their secondary battery. Mixed batteries have different trajectories, making fire control harder.
It sounds as though there is also a question of the effectiveness of smaller guns even within their range, at least against battleship armour. Presumably this is why battleships have torpedo tubes.
At the moment I'm thinking of using gunfire to suppress the enemy, while a torpedo armed ship closes to destroy them. This is pretty close to my (possibly flawed) idea of how infantry combat works, but probably doesn't quite work as effectively, because unlike infantry, battleships can fall back regardless of terrain, since they carry their own cover.
Am I getting things roughly correct?
My experience matches Evil4Zerggin's. Ships not torpedoed are unlikely to sink, although machinery damage or flooding can slow a ship enough to make torpedoing a virtual certainty.
And thanks for the data on close-range penetration. That will be very useful, and I can say with some certainty that the main belt of these ships can't be penetrated by their own guns even at point-blank range.
@Alexander
That was more or less the logic, combined with torpedoes making close-range engagements too dangerous. But the situation changed under the pre-dreads. Originally, they were great against the older ships, which had heavy waterline belts and not much above that. The problem is that as armor got better, making it easier to armor against QF guns, and QF guns got more common, the plan stopped working. In the Spanish-American War, the QF guns came out looking pretty good. On the other hand, most of the ships engaged were relatively old. In the Russo-Japanese War, not so much.
The big problem is that torpedo attacks are rather unreliable, and you need a big speed advantage to get close enough with the weapons we have. Also, destroyers are pretty vulnerable to the secondary and tertiary batteries on battleships, as evidenced by our sinking three of them in the last action.
Maybe the torpedo ram people were on to something Ü. If you have an expectation that ships can weather gunfire well it makes the fate of the British battlecruisers at Jutland more shocking. Looking back on things in hindsight, the battlecruisers already sound vulnerable due to their thinner armour, so disregarding important safety measures seems shockingly irresponsible. If you think of capital ships as virtually unsinkable, then using the battlecruisers alongside the battleships, and even trying to boost their rate of fire, might sound worth trying, until you see the results...
It's not that they were "virtually unsinkable", but the British did have a strong expectation that they would take a lot of pounding to kill, despite the thin armor. They were mostly right, just not about their cordite safety. Lion and Warspite survived a lot of hits. Post-Jutland they were less certain of a long engagement, and began to invest in better shells. Which might not be a bad area for us to focus on, too.
We have won the war against Italy in only four months! The full report will be up Monday. The question is what we want as spoils. We can have Rhodes and either Libya and Eritrea or Sardinia. Make your choice fast.
So how is territory valued? Which one produces the most tax revenue for the naval budget? Also, does oil become available later on in Libya?
I don't know about taxes, and the game doesn't seem to have that information anywhere in the UI, nor is it online. I took a quite root around the game data files, and didn't come up with anything there, either. Libya does not have oil, and oil fields discovered after 1900 are randomized.
Awesome! I hope we sunk a bunch of their ships so we can maintain an lead.
While we have damaged ships might be a good time to consider retiring some of the older ships in order to free up budget for building some with the newer tech. I realize we haven't teched all that far yet but I still think it's worth considering.
I vote for Rhodes + Sardinia. I assume we'll be fighting Italy again at some point, and I assume we'll be winning, and I suspect that we can get more spoils if they still have some 'small change' type colonies that we can demand on top of the primary prizes.
We lost the battleship Devastation, while sinking one of their battleships and about half a dozen destroyers. But we had several other cases where we did ended up accomplishing our objectives while they didn't, so we ended up winning the war.
@David makes a good point about grabbing the trickier to size Sardinia now and hoping we'll be able too pick up the others later. For me, the biggest factor is - do we want to take their Indian Ocean base? If we do they should find it harder to operate outside the Med. If we leave it for them though, they'll probably have to spread their forces thinner to cover it.
I vote for taking Sardinia so as to leave Italy Eritrea. I don't imagine we'll draw down our India ocean forces significantly anyway, so we might as well make them keep some forces there rather than concentrating against us in the Mediterranean.
Taking a colony is one thing, but taking land that has been Italian for centuries is just inviting burning revanchist hate.
Hmmm, can we seize elements of their fleet instead?
I've heard reports that leaving points unused actually gives a larger boost to national resources than taking possessions, though I have not independently verified this.
Apart from that, I would consider Sardinia the most important: being the closest possession to the Italian mainland, it will have the greatest chance of being a useful harbor for ships to retreat to if necessary, and later, a key forward base for aircraft.
The government has ratified our recommendation to take Sardinia and Rhodes from Italy as part of the peace deal.
@Perrin
The diplomatic system is crude enough that revanchism isn't a thing.