ORIGINAL: Ian R
Interesting feature, but really you need to reduce the number of reinforcement ships in stock scenarios to match.
Having said that, I have always been, and remain, an adherent of the original Grigsby modelling of this, which goes all the way back to Pacwar v1.0 in 1992. If anything, the 500 odd days delay in WitP was too long, and GG should have retained the 34 week period from Pacwar (or perhaps something in between). I wrote a long post in another forum explaining why, pasted below.
Suffice to say that I think the label 'respawned' is childish, and deprecatory of what GG set out to do (very elegantly, IMHO) to model the US wartime system of accelerating, suspending, or cancelling more-than-adequate already funded building programmes as circumstances warranted. It was not a case of miraculously & instantaneously producing a slipway, and laying a keel, as one mis-informed poster on this forum once asserted in the course of criticising this game mechanism back in the original WitP days. The irony of this is that by disabling the GG replacement mechanism, and including all the war built ships as reinforcements - including those arriving on accelerated delivery dates - you may well, subject to losses, end up with an accelerated US building programme that exceeds the historical.
You guys do know that 11 of the 14 Essex class carriers operational during the war had already been voted by the US Congress into funded building plans (starting with CV9 in 1938), and contracted by September 1940, right?
The Naval Expansion Act of 1938 authorized another 40,000 tons of carriers. This only permitted building the Hornet (CV-8) and the Essex. It was decided to build the Hornet as another Yorktown to get it into service faster. Further money was allocated after 1938 so the Navy was able to order the first three Essex class at the same time in 1940. It took two years to finalize the design of the Essex class. The Two Ocean Naval Act appropriated funds for 10 more Essexes which were ordered in 1940 and 1941. The last two were ordered just after Pearl Harbor. So the US started 1942 with 13 Essex class on order.
Congress appropriated funds for 19 more Essex class in 1942. 10 were ordered in 1942, 3 in `943 and the rest in 1944. The war ended before any construction was done on the 1944 ships and they were canceled at war's end. Only two of the carriers ordered in 1942 saw service. One of the 1941 ordered carriers (the Boxer) was completed too late to see action.
Between the carrier and fast battleship program, that maxxed out the capital ship building yards for the entire war. Two Iowas were launched incomplete and never completed to free up space for building Essexes. Gary Grigsby is one of the top wargame designers in the world, but his opinion the US could have expanded capacity to replace losses was dead wrong. It looked to an outsider like the US did that to replace 1942 losses, but in reality the carriers named after early was losses were ships already under construction when the original was lost and were renamed on the slipway. CV-12 (Hornet) has "Kearsarge" embedded in the keel to this day.
With smaller ships, the build time was shorter, so renaming while under construction wasn't as common, though 4 Baltimores were renamed under construction because of sunk ships. Light cruisers and destroyers named after ships lost early in WW II were usually renamed before construction began or the new name was included in a new order batch. The US didn't build any more ships than they had originally planned to replace losses, they just renamed ships that would have been built as something else.
Kind of a long winded "me too"
Bill