Transport Capacity leads to Auto-lose in every Campaign

[Captain Jack]

Dear Devs,

this in not working. As soon as you drop below abeut 70% transport capacity, you will have an insane financial penalty, that will kill your campaign in just a few turns.

Even if you spend not a single $, you will have about -300.000$ .. per turn !

It does not matter, if you are a brilliant tactician and naval engineer. As soon as your enemies have destroyed enough of your transorts, the game is over.

Unfortunately there is absolutely NOTHING that you can do to prevent the transport losses, especially if you own provinces scattered around the world.

Please remove that crazy transport capacity penalty, it just destroys the game completely.

[Wrayday]

So when you start taking losses to your transports you cannot defend cut all funding so you are actually losing transports. This hurts but it will deny the enemy free victory points that will do far greater damage.

Also. Don't expand to useless islands out in the Pacific.... keep your Empire contained as much as possible.

This game uses broken brain logic and will just keep spawning transports in areas of enemy activity to feed them.

[hurepoix]

Originally posted by Wrayday:

So when you start taking losses to your transports you cannot defend cut all funding so you are actually losing transports. This hurts but it will deny the enemy free victory points that will do far greater damage.

It is a bit like counter tax fraud by removing taxes. It will make you even poorer.

The keys are : plan your wars and master your expansion. Dont try to fight the problem, prevent it. At least make it less violent.

2) send your own raider at your ennemies. It had to suffer more than you.

[redhongkong]

try to play smaller nation like china japan italy AH on ur first few campaign. where u dont have to defend globally

[berekhat]

The transport losses issue obviously needs work, or to be scraped altogether. My 1900 -1908 Italy campaign has just finished because I just can't afford 300 000 000 TR losses per turn. I am not at war with anybody, and haven't been since I wiped out Every. Single. Spanish. Warship before they would ask for a peace treaty. So it's not like there are a few holdouts sinking all my Tuna boats while I'm not looking.

I like all the advice in the thread, however It's not going to work if the TR loss counter only goes up, and never reduces even when at peace.

[hurepoix]

There is a difference between spend money for trnsport maintenance/rebuild and loose transports. Transports always cost money, but overall bring back you more.
In time of peace your transport % will raise, at least if you have push the trigger (I always push t at 200%). If your capacity had been enterly destroyed during the war, count about 2 years to recover from 0 to 200%. Point that under 100% your gdp can stagnate or even descease. That means you can be caught in a dangerous spiral if you dont anticipate the problem.

[bobamurphy]

Originally posted by Captain Jack:

Well, i play my homeland Germany and after finishing Spain and China i took over their provences. Then the USA decided to challenge me. After some initial losses against these stupid large AI fleets with 7000 torpedo boats and destroyers, the german superior battleship design blasted these hobbits out of the water at range.

That did me no favor, i win every battle now, but lose the campain just because of that insane transport capacity penalty.

It is simply impossible to protect all transports or to replenish them.

China and Spain? One is an exposed trade route the other is a very long very exposed trade route.
Maybe its not the "crazy"trade route thing and rather it's the very exposed trade route thing

[MasterFool]

Originally posted by hurepoix:

@Sword_of_Light Do you start in 1890 ? I m curious about what can be a rapid response cruiser in 1897.

Light Cruisers work best as interceptors in 1897. They chew up TB's by the bucket full and can outrun everything larger than they are. I have CLI's by 1896 but they don't hit their zenith until Scout Cruisers come into play, then they are the penultimate interceptors as they have great speed and ASW capability. My defensive interceptors have larger forward gun suites and my offensive anti-transport ships have larger rear gun suites because they are either the chaser or the ship being chased if they get into an engagement.

You have to have a good transport defensive ship pool (protect) and offensive anti-transport ship pool (invade). If you don't, you'd better have an awesome diplomatic corps that can bring a war to an end before disaster strikes.

[Hidden Gunman]

I'm not dissing anyone's views, but from Day 1 a large pool of cl and eventually DDs spread around is a solid mitigation.

[MasterFool]

I'm fully with you there HG. I make protect ships a priority from the start of the game. I make BB's go to the bottom of the list since they are so vulnerable to TB's at the 1890 start. My heavy ships at start are always CA's and they tend to be 'light' CA's at that, but I'll also put about 2-3 Heavy CA's out there as first builds once the tech supports them.

[Captain Jack]

Unfortunately 1.7 did not solve this issue.

- as soon, as your transport capacity drops below around 70% your campaign is done
- the penalty for being below 70% is more Dollars, than you have as naval budget altogether (an insane joke)
- so you run auto bancrupt, as soon as this happens
- there is absolutely nothing you can do to prevent that, as your enemies will slaughter your transports everywhere
- you can not replace your transports, even at 200% transport budget. They will kill 4 times the ammount of transports per turn of what you will be able to replace

For me a showstopper. I left that great game because of that.

[gigamelon1981]

I had the same problem. If I'm allowed to drop my 2 cents.
If you're playing China or Japan, you're bound to go to the west. Because there's nothing in the East. The territory income is much bigger in the west. So went sporadically is kinda inevitable.
If you're trying careful expansion, it is right on the book. But you're wasting time.
At the time you have a firm hold on the east, western countries has already too big for you to confront.
How to secure your seas, now this is the question.

Zero, i want to give you my thoughts how the transport sunk.
Not saying I'm right about this, just my speculation. And so far it is coherent with my experiments.
You read the report, let's say, you're losing at Indonesian sea.
Means, you don't have sufficient tonnage of surface ship docked at any port connected to the said sea. i.e. Batavia, Soerabaja.

And how your transport sunk?
Enemy Task Force (TF) passing your sea.
There's submarine activity on that sea.

First, do not war with multiple nations.
Even if you're in control at a certain sea, you went war with more than one, there's a chance you still out weighted by enemy tonnage simply passing your sea, and still losing transports.

Two, build a cheap CL, put them on the port, and task them to sea control. Do not let them out from the port ! Except you want to intercept a straggle.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3397474360
What you're seeing is a 3 mast cruiser. 1890 ish hull design.
I retrofitted, keep building her upto 1950.
1.7.0.0 One major thing I like from this update is you can build super old hulls.
What i want you to see is the maintenance cost of the CL. And the building time.
Also, at olden time, your hull is crap. Your targeting systems are crap.
Your funnels produces too much smoke. Your engines are weak and vibrates.
What you can improve is your pitch and roll value.
Solely focus on that at early year.

Three is optional but this is kinda your least effort if you can't afford to build even a cruiser. Build a coastal minelayer submarine at every port.
It will regard your territory as being active, more likely for them to push inland for land invasion. Also providing passive mine net to damage anything passing.

[chiyen]

Protect your TR. If your TR capacity is below 120%, you are in serious trouble already. Stop the bleeding immediately when it is going to reach the 120% line.

There are some momentums, so you cannot stop the war losses instantly when you decide to do so (like doing peace talks... with many nations)

--
[Solution]

Make tons of TB / DD, not just a few bunches of large ships.

- CL isn't the choice, since it generally cannot / shouldn't park in ports with capacity less than 2,000 tons, and there are a lot of regions be filled with them.

- and... SPEED IS LIFE. a DD can safe run away when it "intercepts" enemy fleets. With almost no loss... if you didn't get one-shotted by the first few volleys, if the starting distance is questionably close.


This game relies on some "random" patrol / encounters to intercept enemy ships in sea regions. If enemy vassals are not interrupted, they will go for your TR.

[gigamelon1981]

Originally posted by chiyen:

Protect your TR. If your TR capacity is below 100%, you are in serious trouble already.

Make tons of TB / DD, not just a few bunches of large ships.

(CL isn't the choice, since it cannot park in ports with capacity less than 2,000 tons, and there are a lot of regions be filled with them).

This game relies on some "random" patrol / encounters to intercept enemy ships in sea regions. If enemy vassals are not interrupted, they will go for your TR.

I don't think it is work that way.
I sent my fleet on the sea, crossing the enemy path.
There are still transport loss.
IF there's no fleet to intercept, i.e, they're too fast when passing your sea region within a turn. You're losing transport.
The better idea is to put them on port. So the game still calculate them if the enemy passing your sea faster than 1 turn. Some seas are in different shapes. Indonesian sea is easily passed from hindian to the the south china sea. Then you're losing transports from 3 sea region.

The reason cannot putting CL to a small port is absurd. You can put them to any available port then scatter. DD has higher maintenance cost for what they offer. Not to mention their puny tonnage. And you just need to guard one of the connecting port, not every port, to a connected sea. Just pick one with the larger port.
3K port capacity is everywhere, even at pacific and micronesia.

[Sword_of_Light]

So, weirdly enough, I went the TB route with Great Britain (1890 start, random enemies, manual fleet building, Legendary difficulty) - to the point that I'd built 298 by the time I decided they'd hit obsolescence (I use a spreadsheet and assign hull numbers when I build ships). It was basically an experiment to see if I could protect -everything-.

And, at the same time, started building fast...er light cruisers (faster than my initial fleet standard of 18kts - I think the first CR (Light Cruiser, Response) class could go about 20.5kts) in 1890 both as early scouts for fleet actions and as reaction forces for key colonial territories like Gibraltar and Singapore.

Maintaining peace early on allowed me to build up these forces, and build up my economy so that I was able to gradually increase all the sliders up, including transport. That meant that by the late nineteen-teens when I went to war with Italy, all three sliders could be set at max without loosing profitability.

The TB do not do anything against the piracy. They're the pirates. I've lost six of the total built, at a significant cost to both Japan (average tech) and Italy (very advanced) - once you get torpedoes worth the name, and engines that can power up the TB (the third and final hull has been upgraded to 37kts), they can be extremely effective. The key is to make them gun boats rather than torpedo boats. The last upgrade of the largest hull featured a single triple-tube 20" torpedo launcher, a 4.9" long-barrel mount, and 4 1.1" guns in pairs along the side of the ship.

I've sunk numerous Italian transports, several destroyers and light cruisers, and a CA.

And one final trick. I have probably a dozen ports that hold a pair of these CR as interceptors, intended to hunt enemy raiders and subs. I've also started building - as soon as I got turbine steam engines - what I'm calling CAF - Heavy Cruiser, Fast. While not able to keep up with the faster CR cruisers, the CAF is not built to maintain the overall speed of a fleet, like my standard CA build, but to move fast for a CA. These I put in large, distant ports - Gibraltar, Singapore, I think there's one in Kingston - with 4 CR as escorts. Because I've learned in Legendary, the AI can build sufficiently strong enemies that a pair of CL just wont cut it.

[Stealth IA]

Originally posted by Captain Jack:

Dear Devs,

this in not working. As soon as you drop below abeut 70% transport capacity, you will have an insane financial penalty, that will kill your campaign in just a few turns.

Even if you spend not a single $, you will have about -300.000$ .. per turn !

It does not matter, if you are a brilliant tactician and naval engineer. As soon as your enemies have destroyed enough of your transorts, the game is over.

Unfortunately there is absolutely NOTHING that you can do to prevent the transport losses, especially if you own provinces scattered around the world.

Please remove that crazy transport capacity penalty, it just destroys the game completely.

as main player of german imperium in legendary

1 Wars must be short before the economy collapses

2 Putting destroyers in colonial ports reduces losses a little.

3 When you win, ask for peace before your tr drops below 100

4 It is not a game of world domination, Overextending a war causes you to lose more in the future than your immediate gains.