Scrapping Old Ships

[John S]

Does a decision to scrap old ships always lead to loss of prestige? I recently had that happen - when I was pretty much the last player to scrap pre dreadnoughts - and I wondered whether this is a regular penalty or simply a peculiarity of my particular game.

[EvanJones]

You need a number of B/BBs (depending on scenario size), but you are warned if you try to scrap too many.
You can get a prestige ding for failing to cover home areas that are threatened. (The PM tells you how much you need.)
I got hit with a 1-point ding for "failure to cover the coast", owing, I think, to an attritted lategame destroyer fleet.
There may be a "minimum fleet size" factor at work here, but I don't know.

I have never suffered for scrapping, but I cling to the tonnage, with FC upgrades up until BB/BCs with torp prot are built. Many blockades are made or prevented through crappy tonnage.

[John S]

I may have gotten dinged because I scrapped too many at once. As I said, in my game I was the last player to get rid of the pre dreadnoughts and at the time, playing the French, I had plenty of tonnage as well as relatively high prestige (54). I moved to scrap the four oldest B’s and, as I recall, got dinged 2 prestige for each of them, 8 in total. (One was used as target practice and the other three returned very little money, as expected).

May have been a one-off occurrence. I was really wondering whether this was a regular penalty….even under the relatively extreme circumstances in which I scrapped the four oldest B’s. If it’s a regular occurrence, then the serious prestige loss needs to be factored into the decision to scrap.

[WLRoo]

I can't say I've ever seen that before.

I assume there was no warning about having insufficient battleships, and that it didn't affect the tonnage on foreign stations?

[EvanJones]

I am guessing it's a "minimum fleet size" thing. I might try a "scrap everything" experiment and see what happens.

[Jades]

I had something similar happen yesterday when, in an economy drive and trying to reduce tensions a bit, I mothballed all but my most recent Battleships. I then had a message pop up telling me that the Prime Minister (IIRC) was concerned about the strength of the fleet relative to the other Powers. Can't remember off the top of my head whether it was specifically to do with the actual number of active Bs and BBs or total fleet tonnage, should've screenshottted it.

Flipping some of the ships back to AF solved the problem.

When planning a scrappage scheme it might be worth changing the ships you intend to dispose of to Mothballed first, just in case. It's a bit difficult to reverse a fleet reduction once they've been changed into peach cans.

[EvanJones]

Yeah, the Prime Minister is just fine with ships in reserve but he doesn't count ships that are warming up.

For an unknown reason.