Vom Auflösung: Scrap both CP Battle Fleets!

[Umeu]

Try this in multiplayer however and you'll see French battleships pound your two value 6 coastal cities and any garrison inside, and possibly Entente landings too. I like all the ideas for making the naval war aspect more interesting and historical, but naval power is actually quite useful as is.

I must disagree, at 4pp per turn upkeep plus 6 ammo per bombardment, I do not believe that this is going to end in favor of the Naval power... I agree, fleets are useful (I am kicking tail in a MP game where I landed a UK force and took Wilhelmshaven an used the Fleet for full supply) but in the end I think that the math shows that disbanding them is more effective... If your opponent doesn't disband them and destroys your 6PP costal cities, you should be taking some expensive inland cities with all the extra ground forces that should be at your disposal. With all the 6 ammo BB bombardments, your opponent will have a very hard time maintaining any sort of ground offensive as well.

Bottom line, some tweaks need to happen for fleets to be truly useful. So far, in MP, it is a gentlemans agreement, or house rule, that makes Naval warfare useful.

well said.

[darkiemond]

realism argument for ship disbanding:

Before WW1 the countries considered the might of the nation is determined by the number of battleships because… no I am not going into details, you all know this I am sure.
During the war, a number of battleships was sunk and none by another battleship.
So, would Germany be better off in real life with less battleships, I bet so. And the same goes for England as well.
However, Germany did build battleships and they were mostly sitting in the harbor and English fleet mostly made sure that german ships were sitting in the harbor.
Battleships didn't really affect the war in reality, and were a huge drain of resources for the countries that built them.

So, if you want to have a nice historical game, CP make sure to park your ships somewhere safe and Entente make sure those ships don't go anywhere.
And everyone should just be paying upkeep so we have a nice historical game, right?

Ohh wait, you want an actual playable naval warfare, huh? (I won't go into how that wouldn't be life like) Make fleets non disbandable, hmm… I guess I'd have to get them killed then. Make ship disbanding not return resources, well, even just not payng thier upkeep is pretty sweet too. Make a larger penalty, even 50% NM penalty isn't such a big deal as long as you are OK in land battles and if you aren't than it's just matter of time anyway.

So, how could anyone blame such omnipotent commander and far seeing general as yourself for disbanding the fleets?
Is it really cheating to make a smarter decision than the one countries made in real life?

Please, don't argue with me about importance of ships during WW1, and merchant protection and I am not even mentioning the subs… this is a useless conversation anyway, was just playing devil's advocate.

Here is what I really think:

It is silly to argue that anything in the game should be a certain way because it has to represent real life because so many thing in game already don't. And you shouldn't expect it anyway.

This is just a game of numbers set in the setting of WW1. And if you argue that ships should be kept due to historical reasons, well then I say that Germany can't defeat France or Russia for exactly the same reasons.
And then you say how the game lets you change the course of history bla bla, so change the course for those dreadnoughts as well then, haha.

And lastly, from gaming perspective current naval system isn't working economically because land based items offer you much more use than naval. Game is just trying to historically accurate, and it isn't fun. Such is the problem of historical games sometimes, you can't have both.

And finally I do have a suggestion: (if you got this far)

option 1 - and I prefer this one
make naval and land economy separate meaning have some 'naval only' PPs generated by coastal cities in addition to regular PPs.
Everyone will build some ships that way and we will get some fun naval battles.

option 2 - make ships cheaper to build and to maintain and make battleships consume only 1 or even no ammunition when bombarding. They'd have to be really really cheap though, and I bet greay beards wouldn't like that either.

And most importantly make AI react to you scrapping your ships by scrapping at least some of theirs and without any penalties or may be even with added benefits.
As far as MP games, I fully expect both sides to scrap everything.

sorry for such a long message, I guess I was just bored.

[Plaid]

Actually you can build more (!) navy in multiplayer as CP and it will be effective because of surprise effect - noone expects you to do so. So you just build one more battleship for both AH and Germany (they have many PPs early in game, when you don't have to pay high upkeep for large army yet) and some cruisers for Germany, then you catch couple of cruisers off guard (noone expects you to have powerful fleet, so they patrol here and there, feeling safe), sink them and here you go - you have naval superiority and free to sink any convoys you want. Each convoy contains 100PP and 10mp, so its probably well worth paying upkeep for this additional ships. CP will strugle, but Entente will struggle even more without their precious convoys.

P.S. Only bombarding units consume ammo, attacking ships or empty cities does not, though if you have less then 6 ammo, battleship will refuse to shoot anyway.

[stockwellpete]

I am on the receiving end of plaid's new idea. I don't know how many PP's I have lost in the game but it must be over 500. While I cannot fault the ingenuity of this plan, again I think it is very unrealistic, just as building loads of airships and planes and pursuing a strategic bombing strategy is also unrealistic. As I have said in my other thread ("More on navies") it takes just ten turns (or 20 weeks) to build a completely new battleship unit, which is meant to represent a battle-fleet (including supporting destroyers and cruisers) when, in reality, it would probably take around 2 years to do this. I have suggested various "tweaks" that might be considered in that thread. Also, it might be worth considering imposing maximums on the number of naval and air units each individual power can have (or at least give players the option at the start to choose historical parameters).

I think plaid will win our game although my Italian and Canadian troops are currently wandering about in south Germany looking for somebody to shoot at. Very weird!

[Umeu]

has the usa joined the allies yet? if so, does the timer on Bulgaria joining the axis turned red?

[Plaid]

has the usa joined the allies yet? if so, does the timer on Bulgaria joining the axis turned red?

Actually Pete managed to rally reasonable combined Entente fleet and sunk my Kriegsmarine, so I had to surrender, because I invested all my resources into that battleships.
By the time of surrender (1916 summer, I believe) USA didn't join, though it was close. Bulgaria joined normally.
Probably if I tryed to move my 2 AH battleships to the Atlantic through Gibraltar I would win that great battle, but I was afraid that they will be caught somewhere on the way and sunk.

[stockwellpete]

It was that Churchill chap in the Admiralty that sorted it all out!! I didn't actually feel like I was winning when Alex surrendered but the convoys were starting to arrive again and I had control (of sorts) over the main routes to the UK and France. The other thing was that I had broken through into southern Germany and captured 4 industrial towns denying the CP's those PP's every turn too. The long-term outlook was much more favourable for the Entente than it was for the CP's.

Perhaps a more modest expansion of the German and A-H navies, by just building submarines, might have proved more successful?

[SSupras]

In my game I scrapped fleet, but my opponent didn't received info about it. Is it intentional that only the player who scraps his fleet can see the event about it?

I think that if morale drops, than it means that publicity knows about it, and when publicity knows, the entire world would know, so the opposing player should get that info too.

[majpalmer]

I agree. I doubt that the Germans could have scrapped the High Seas Fleet without the British finding out.