Ship cannot be identified as any legal ship type

[thedoctorking]

This guy's design went through fine with 16" guns and improved director. During the four months that we were waiting for the design to be completed, we discovered 17"/0 guns and Advanced Director. So I opened the design for reconstruction, reduced the guns in the A turret to 3, jumped the director up, and presto, the system can't identify a ship type. When I reduced the speed to 23, it said it was a B.

I have all-forward design tech.

illegal ship design.jpg (1.02 MiB) Viewed 900 times

[thedoctorking]

The issue appears to be the 17" guns. If I leave it at 16" and give it the improved director the game doesn't have any problems with it.

Reiterating: the whole idea of limiting the player's choice of ship types is very strange and offputting. At least the game should make the rules violation clear (say, if a proposed BB design is being rejected, the game should say "BBs must have X armor, X guns, X speed").

[WLRoo]

It's not the calibre, it's the number of main battery guns and turrets.

The complicated requirement is 3 (or more) Q-1 (or better) guns in 3 (or more) turrets.

The simpler requirement is 8 guns in 2 turrets.

The second requirement probably does want tweaking to either 5 or 6 (or more) guns of Q-1 (or better) in 2 turrets.

Edit: I have since realise it's most likely the Dunkerque/Richelieu layout

[thedoctorking]

Yeah, you're right. When I just jumped it up to 17" but left the two forward turrets with four guns each it liked it.

Larger point still stands. This is a ridiculous rule and the devs should jettison it and let you call your ships whatever class you want. And base the selection of ships for a combat on the actual qualities of the ship - armor, guns, speed, tonnage - and not some arbitrary and poorly-documented set of rules that appear to change regularly without warning.

[WLRoo]

The rules are there for the AI more than the player.

Otherwise you'd have players trying the '18" Light Cruiser' like Fisher did with HMS Furious whilst the AI is stuck building 8,000-10,000t 6" CLs, which would be significantly outmatched.

Some of them probably do need tweaking, and a more comprehensive list would help when trying to work out where the error is.

Freeform building will definitely not be allowed, though.

[mrchuck]

The example given by wlroo pretty much highlights the problem--Outrageous, Uproarious and Spurious DID get built, and while they were in the main bad designs that didn't work all that well, they went into service nonetheless.

Similarly with the pocket battleships. In game terms these would be BCs but in reality they were neither that nor CAs, falling into and I quote from somewhere or other 'the forbidden zone which the framers of the Treaty had laboured so hard to avoid'. So not a legal ship type at the time--but built and reasonably successful for all that, when handled properly.

Perhaps some latitude to do this could be covered by an Event instead? Or a national characteristic of 'Innovative' which would allow one or two weirdo designs from time to time? This might need some slight but not impossibly difficult AI tweaks to determine how to use/oppose them. As was indeed the case...

Just a thought.

[thedoctorking]

What is wrong with having the AI just look at the characteristics of the ship when determining how to use it?

In one game, I got 7" level 1 guns while I still had 6" 0's, so I decided to build some 7" CLs. Nope, even though your ships are 7000 tons, 2" belt armor, go 30 kn, you still have to call them armored cruisers and we will match them against ships twice their size with four times the armor and 10" guns.

If you build a ship with 18" guns and 12" armor belt and so forth, the game should be able to figure out that they should be matched with other big gun heavy armor ships and not against 7000 ton ships with 2" armor and 7" guns regardless of the fact that you call your ship CLs and for some inexplicable reason the other guys call theirs CAs.

[WLRoo]

So you think CPU cycles should be used for the AI to analyse every ship in a fleet of, say, 50, in order to assess what they are and how they should be used?

As opposed to right now where it can simply look at a flag on each design and say 'OK, that's 3 BBs, 2 BCs and 5 CLs with 10 DDs' and it's sorted in a fraction of a second.

[mrchuck]

I'm inclined to agree with WLROO on this, at least as the problem is stated.

However...there is always a however...this decision doesn't need to be made on the fly for each and every battle. Rather than simply reject an unconventional design, the devs could let people have a bit of fun with this.

It would be done at design time as part of the process initiated by hitting SAVE. Rather than rejecting a design, you could perhaps see this:

'Our analysts have determined that this vessel will be classed as an X. Proceed?'

I would think that in cases where the ship parameters are ambiguous, the stance should be to put it in the next heavier class, not the lighter one. You look at armour and guns only, instead of all the aspects, and if EITHER exceeds the relevant limits, stick the thing in the applicable class. After that, the player is on their own.

So your 7" CL will be classed as a CA whether you like it or not. Your 'light battlecruisers' would go into the 6th BC Division for Jutland 1918, and heaven help you. Deutschland class would be battlecruisers, not CAs. If you design a dreadnought which is fast, heavily armoured, and very lightly gunned (e.g. 7 thru 10" CA guns), it's a BC or even BB if the armour is thick enough. If you rejig Deutschland to have 2x single 11" and 35kts, it's a BC regardless of displacement.

This should discourage excessive gamey-ness, and also be reasonably straightforward to implement. But it might also make things a bit more interesting.

The reason ship designs were in practice bounded by pretty conventional and widely-accepted constraints everywhere, is the problem of tactical utility of any design tending towards the extreme of one of firepower, protection and mobility at the expense of one or two of the others. Very often, this was found to be pretty close to nil, and sometimes found the hard way. Still the case today, even if 'protection' now means EW, ECM and defensive systems rather than big lumps of steel.

RTW is a game though, so why not mix it up a little?

[thedoctorking]

Weirdest thing about this: started a new game as Italy. Lo! and Behold! I have CLs with...8" main armament. Wait a second, aren't they supposed to be CAs? Is this something about 8" as opposed to 7"? The 8"armament in question, before you ask, is 8(-1), not legacy -2s or -3s.

[WLRoo]

If a CL uses the Protected Cruiser scheme they can, I believe, have up to 8" guns in two twin turrets or 13" guns in single turrets (and may be limited to only one of those, never built one to test due to the 4-gun requirement).

Only when you use the Light Cruiser armour scheme are you actually limited to 6" guns.

[mrchuck]

Definitely true, seen this many times, but protected cruiser scheme only. This appears to have very relaxed rules, the tradeoff being it's not very good. If you're interested in the possibilities, check them out--quite weird and wonderful.

Bear in mind though that there are tonnage limits on ROF etc. due to being overgunned. But you can potentially get very large ordnance indeed onto quite a small boat.

Also seen a 2400t Chinese KE class with 1x 10" for that matter, but these turned out to be pretty useless in battle when I faced them as JA.

[thedoctorking]

It's great to have this resource in the forums but I think it would be better if all this stuff were documented somewhere and ideally available to players as a popup during the ship design process. Even if the game would say "this ship can't be a CL because it has Light Cruiser armor scheme but guns >6".

[WLRoo]

Somewhere like the manual? Which isn't quite correct but does tell you that Light Cruisers require:

Displacement larger than 2000 and less than 8000. Speed must be more than 16 knots and main gun calibre cannot be larger than 6 inches. (Exception: Protected cruisers can have guns in single mountings up to 8 inches). The maximum displacement of a light cruiser will increase later in the game. In most of the game light cruisers must have armour, but in the late game with research of the missile cruiser technology, you can build light cruisers without armour