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I'm unsure about their usage. Have zero on smaller ships, have them on BBs or CAs etc.?
Thanks for any opinions.

It is a doctrinal choice.

You can use them to provide anti-light protection for your Battleships, especially in pre-Dreadnought B design where secondary guns are often quite heavy and are also use to shoot at enemy battleships. Because you are limited in primary gun numbers (like Two double turrets), so you need heavy secondary guns to give you more punch. And light defense are the tertiary guns.

In Dreadnought and more advanced design, as you have a lot of primary guns to shoot at enemy heavy (in advanced 3/4 turrets and at least 3 of them), you do not need heavy secondary, and you can use secondary guns to shoot at lighter ships with light caliber, and so you do not really need tertiary guns.

You can also choose to have anti light capability in dedicated ships, such as CL, and specialize more your heavy ships to fight others heavy ships.

Or do both.

Last point, the perfect gun to shoot at light stuff (destroyers, CL) is 3-6 inch guns. Something of good quality.

I also like to use 3 inch DP guns as tertiaries on my ships when aircraft come up to give them some additional heavy AA capabilities.

stormbringer3 wrote: Mon Jun 05, 2023 2:40 pm I'm unsure about their usage. Have zero on smaller ships, have them on BBs or CAs etc.?
Thanks for any opinions.

It's really a matter of doctrine, use them to get more shells at the enemy, ideally for engaging enemy destroyers or as heavy AA guns later on. On early CLs I like spamming as many guns as possible so I might have like 12 primary, 14 secondary, and 14 tertiary guns sized 6", 4", and 3" respectively. On capital ships I mostly add them as an afterthought when I maxed out my secondaries or have just enough tonnage left to add some light guns but not enough to increase armour or speed in any way I care for.

Early game, your fire control is none-existent, so you need as many barrels as you can get - the old "throw enough stuff at the wall for some to stick" approach.
I build quite un-historically large CA/B that will sport 24 secondary and as many tertiary guns as I can cram into them.
Note: Early designs regularly have neither extended belt nor deck, no upper belt and often a narrow belt, making those ships very vulnerable to a "hail of small shells" approach.

Later on, the first dreadnoughts have either wing- and/or various center-line turrets, that negatively impact non-casemated secondary guns, so I put them into, well, casemates. In those cases, I like to have a whole lot of 4" tertiary guns on them, which can still be put into open mounts (and later much more easily upgraded to DP guns).

By the time I have super-firing B and X turrets, tertiary guns are primarily there to be DP guns (secondary battery will usually be 5" guns at that point and it takes a while for 5" DP guns to unlock).

Even later, a 4" DP tertiary battery will supplement my 5" DP secondary guns.

RHoenig wrote: Sun Jun 18, 2023 4:53 am Even later, a 4" DP tertiary battery will supplement my 5" DP secondary guns.

Having multiple HAA batteries can actually reduce your HAA factor. This can be seen in the ship designer. While large batteries can overcome the reduction, it may be more weight efficient to just have a larger secondary battery.

While this is true, it's only true up to a point.
Having, let's say, 6 x 4" DP guns in addition to 18 x 5" DP guns will negatively impact your overall HAA factor, but having something like 16 x 4" in addition to those same 18 x 5" DP guns will increase your HAA factor.

Yes, I love my secondary and tertiary batteries and go all-out with them

Does having secondary AND tertiary batteries reduce your accuracy in anti-ship mode too? I know that having a few tertiary DP guns in addition to DP secondary guns is bad, and you immediately see the effect in the HAA value. But does the same hold in an anti-ship capacity?

My understanding is that multiple calibres within the same 'class' will interfere with accuracy for surface work.

The classes being, I think, the groups listed in the doctrine screen (which doesn't include 2" and 3" guns - not 100% sure on those).

So 9" and 8" guns will interfere with accuracy but not 12" and 9".