Australia: refit navy

[Shad1902]

Some questions for the vets.

I'm pretty good with armies and planes, but I never really dabbed into the naval stuff.

Let's say I have the basics:
- I know how to design my DD's for different roles (ASW, screens, escort..)
- I know the differences between CL and CA and their roles (CL spotter, CL screen remover...)
- never used CV's, but that's not an issue...

Current situation:

So, currently playing as Australia in historical single-player. It's January 1941 and I've liberated Ethiopia. I leave Libya to the AI as supply is very low in that narrow front and the IA just manages fine.

Vichy-France isn't called into the war yet, so safe for Libya, the african theater is pretty quiet right now. My small army is basically just waiting for Vichy to get into the war.

My Navy:

I've started building my future ASW destroyers for sub-hunting against Japan since 1936 (and I have 12 of them), and also built a more modern CL (1940 hull) for anti-screen duty and a scout plane... but haven't really touched my starting fleet.

I know that my navy will never be a match for Japan or any other major power, but I still use it to raid convoys and making life difficult for Italy.

As the war is currently in a phoney war for me, I thought I might refit those ships.

The starting fleet for Australia is 2 CA and 2 CL (and the CL's are pretty poor). I'll never go and build a BB, so I wonder how I should refit those ships.

Changing the armor or engine is a heavy time cost so I'll not go into this, but I wonder if it would make sense to convert those cruisers into other roles (convert tha CA into CL's or vice versa), or just update them (but keep their CL/CA roles).

I Understand how CL's are pretty good screen removers, while CA's are just poor man's BB's that will lose against other capitals. I see the value of CA's in a BB fleet, but do they make sense as sole capitals ? Should I refit them to CL's and go raiding ?

[Crazed Possum]

If it were me the most I would do is add some AA guns and that's it everything else would take too much time and I would put one or two of them in with a group of destroyers and put them on transport escort. Remember all your ships have a limited range so that group would have their range limited to the ship with the least amount of range so having friendly ports to go to will extend their range.

[Včelí medvídek]

Tbh I would probably not waste resources and time to refit 36 ship in 41 - only the AA as mentioned. License something useful from UK and build it rather.

[Shad1902]

Originally posted by Crazed Possum:

If it were me the most I would do is add some AA guns and that's it everything else would take too much time and I would put one or two of them in with a group of destroyers and put them on transport escort. Remember all your ships have a limited range so that group would have their range limited to the ship with the least amount of range so having friendly ports to go to will extend their range.

thanks !

yes that's what I'm kind of doing right now....except I put them on convoy raiding in the Med. to annoy Italy, as there's nothing really going on right now and I already have my escort DD's.

I know changing the armor and engine is a nono...for the main guns I have mixed feelings of usefulness vs time to upgrade..and the question is even more important if we take "integrated designers" into account with the 25% increased update speed.

Originally posted by Včelí medvídek:

Tbh I would probably not waste resources and time to refit 36 ship in 41 - only the AA as mentioned. License something useful from UK and build it rather.

thanks ! haven't thought about licences as I never used them. That's a great idea !!


Any idea on th CA question ? Are they worth it if I never build BB's ? As far as I understand they're going to have hard time against any capital (BB / BC), and with their medium-battery-heavy-damage guns they're not going to do much against screens (?). I understand that they're getting +40% accuracy if screened correctly, but is that actually helping ?

I'm thinking about refitting them with 3 plane catapults for spotting then.

[glythe]

Other than a few changes you should read through this guy's guide series on the navy:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2573333508&searchtext=navy


There are a few very important key points when he gets to the advanced guide ( yes he has a basic, intermediate and advanced versions of this scroll of text).

Here are some things I learned from his articles:

1. The three most shot at ships by an incredible margin are: Carriers then capitals then convoys. The weighting is heavily skewed so that destroyers almost never get targeted.

2. Ships not getting attacked do not contribute defensive AA fire to the ships that do get attacked.

3. If you do put AA on your destroyers then they have even less chance of being targeted. if they have more than 5 AA this puts them into an even smaller targeting group.

4. Big ships with more AA means far less damage from planes. I assumed this was the case but he did testing to prove it (that math is extremely complicated btw).

5. In other words : do not bother with AA on destroyers unless you are doing it to reach the 5 AA threshold. You might have played a navy game and know that cruisers normally provide AA support for fleets. Well that's not a thing in this game unless we are talking heavy cruisers. On that note the only reason to build heavy cruisers is for MP "cheese" tactics.

6. Ship visibility also translates to an evasion advantage. This means that Germany's default naval doctrine can be powerful if you only use really fast ships.

Some things I already knew:

1. Torpedo bombers are way better for ship targeting than CAS by such a huge margin that CAS should be made only for land battles. This was most likely done for balance reasons and is a smart game design . Without this measure you would just skip torpedo bombers and use dive bombers for land and sea.

2. If you refit ships you should never change the engine/main gun/armor. If manpower becomes an issue you retire old ships. You can refit old subs to give them mine duty in non combat areas. Note you can also use the fake naval supremacy option with old ships.
Feedback gaming made an "update" to this strategy in that you can build bathtub warships with essentially nothing but a main gun and minimal armor to "project" fake supremacy. Manpower is the determining the naval supremacy of a ship now to prevent the sub spam strategy.

3. You can put really old ships in a stack on land invasion support and never plan naval invasions to "fake" naval supremacy. This is like saying I have nukes in conventional warfare; maybe I will use them. The threat exists and therefore must be respected by game mechanics even if you never plan on using those ships.

4. The HoI4 wiki is written by the developers and sometime since Man the Guns came out they changed screening to be 3 ships per Capital not 4 ships per Capital.

5. Convoy escort missions are to prevent submarine attacks not air attacks. Old surface ships can be used to great effect to protect convoys from submarines against the AI becuase subs are hard coded to retreat if destroyers are present (even if they lack depth charges). Furthermore this mission is coded by a 100% value and if you have it or not. This means that the important stat here is quantity not quality.

6. Land based carrier missions are beyond inefficient compared to carrier missions carried out at sea.

7. Do not build Heavy Cruisers in HOI4 if you have the option to build a battleship. Why? The HC will always lose to a BB and both count as a capital ship now.

8. Torpedoes suck. They fire 1/4th as often as regular weapons and do not target carrier/capital ships until screens are no longer offering 100% protection. There are exceptions depending if you are Japan or have a strong Admiral with Lancer in your pocket. A good admiral can change the torps to fire 1/3 as often and Lancer makes the torpedoes have way more penetration.

9. Navy ship speed is essentially an evasion stat. If you have a 30 speed fleet vs a 40 speed fleet the faster fleet has 10% evasion.

10. Let's talk about proper Navy form. The best fleet composition is :
4 carrier (needs 3*4 screens= 12)
4 BB (needs 3*4 screens= 12)
24 screen ships (LC would be better than DD but most people cant afford to do that)

Why? BB screen CV in a 1:1 ratio. In other words if you fight an Italian fleet that has 2 BB +2 CV vs your 2 CV what's the difference? His BB can directly target your CV because they don't have a BB screen. CV can always target everything because planes are "op".

What's the deal with having all those screens? Torpedoes fired by screens only hit screens if you have 100% capital screening. If you have mostly 40+ knot screens then most of those torpedoes will miss.

Originally posted by Shad1902:

The starting fleet for Australia is 2 CA and 2 CL (and the CL's are pretty poor). I'll never go and build a BB, so I wonder how I should refit those ships.

I Understand how CL's are pretty good screen removers, while CA's are just poor man's BB's that will lose against other capitals. I see the value of CA's in a BB fleet, but do they make sense as sole capitals ?

Let me explain to you the Heavy Cruiser Cheese. You make one heavy battery so that the game knows it is in fact not a screen. Then for the rest of the guns you give them light batteries. You can add secondary weapons to deal even more light damage.

What does that do? This makes it so that screen ships can never target that CA while most of that ship's firepower is dedicated to dunking on screens.

The problem is that if you engage a real BB the enemy will block all your shots and easily blow up your CA.

You could cheese the game a bit and make some super slow BB with low production cost. Put them in a British port near the action on strike force. In case of battle the BB might be able to zoom out directly from port and engage heavy targets.

[Shad1902]

Originally posted by glythe:

You could cheese the game a bit and make some super slow BB with low production cost. Put them in a British port near the action on strike force. In case of battle the BB might be able to zoom out directly from port and engage heavy targets.

that doesn't work anymore. You cannot cheese heavy-light-damage-cruisers anymore.

If you put the medium-heavy-guns to make it a CA, you cannot put medium-light-batteries or rapid fire guns anymore.

[Včelí medvídek]

Originally posted by Shad1902:

thanks ! haven't thought about licences as I never used them. That's a great idea !!


Any idea on th CA question ? Are they worth it if I never build BB's ? As far as I understand they're going to have hard time against any capital (BB / BC), and with their medium-battery-heavy-damage guns they're not going to do much against screens (?). I understand that they're getting +40% accuracy if screened correctly, but is that actually helping ?

I'm thinking about refitting them with 3 plane catapults for spotting then.

If not playing some naval heavy major i usually build fleet consisted of BC and CV (or CVL aka converted cruiser) + screens (CLs and DD) as strike force, for rest of purposes (patrol, convoy defense) I use dedicated CLs and DDs.

CA is probably ship type I never use for any purpose. CA role as "battleship" hidden behind screens dont suits me - it is not good enough for that. I understand it was supposed be some meta with crazy unbalanced light damage but to my understanding it is no longer possible and I never cared for such things anyway.

[Shad1902]

Originally posted by Včelí medvídek:

Originally posted by Shad1902:

thanks ! haven't thought about licences as I never used them. That's a great idea !!


Any idea on th CA question ? Are they worth it if I never build BB's ? As far as I understand they're going to have hard time against any capital (BB / BC), and with their medium-battery-heavy-damage guns they're not going to do much against screens (?). I understand that they're getting +40% accuracy if screened correctly, but is that actually helping ?

I'm thinking about refitting them with 3 plane catapults for spotting then.

If not playing some naval heavy major i usually build fleet consisted of BC and CV (or CVL aka converted cruiser) + screens (CLs and DD) as strike force, for rest of purposes (patrol, convoy defense) I use dedicated CLs and DDs.

CA is probably ship type I never use for any purpose. CA role as "battleship" hidden behind screens dont suits me - it is not good enough for that. I understand it was supposed be some meta with crazy unbalanced light damage but to my understanding it is no longer possible and I never cared for such things anyway.

you basically resumed pretty much my considerations.

Note that I don't build CA's, it's about the starting navy and making best use of the floating scrap metal that I have ;)

I don't see the CA as a usable replacement for BB / BC. On the other hand, I don't have any BC / BB's yet (and I will build BC's at best anyway). So the CA basically sits in the second line, but doesn't really have any capabilities as it would loose against a real capital and is still of little use against screens.

So my considerations for my 2 old CA's are:
- convert to CL and use them to smash screens
- keep them as glass cannons in the second line in case I encounter some italian BB / BC (and accept the potential loss)
- convert them to spotting CA's (with 3 spotting planes).

PS: did a quick simulation, and converting them to CL's would cost me 32 days in drydock per ship. that's still pretty cheap. They start with Cruiser armor II, so they would benefit from that armor as a CL.

[Big [REDACTED] Marty]

Originally posted by glythe:

snip

just a few things

the trade interdiction doctrines no longer provide visibility buffs, only raiding efficiency
RIP stealth navy

and

you can no longer make "cheese" heavy cruisers as a medium battery prevents light batteries from being added now, heavy cruisers are cost effective vs BBs, but you'd need alot of them to get that numbers advantage to actually work out

not really a correction but

land based naval missions aren't just inefficient, they are an unfathomably hilarious waste of IC, you will NEVER be able to trade even close to 1/4 cost effectively with land based naval attacks, the large nav patrols cost so much and get cut down like grass in exchange for 1 or 2 ships, but at least the large ones kill ships.... the rest do next to nothing.... and still get cut down like grass...

[Včelí medvídek]

Originally posted by Shad1902:

PS: did a quick simulation, and converting them to CL's would cost me 32 days in drydock per ship. that's still pretty cheap. They start with Cruiser armor II, so they would benefit from that armor as a CL.

That sounds reasonable.

For fight onsolete Italy battleship I would rather invest into new BC.

Thougha also posisble option use CV(L) and than CA can be there mostly just for take enemy fire to 2nd line (If you can not afford both)

[Shad1902]

thanks all for the tips !

I converted them to spotting CA (2 medium batteries, 2 planes, 2 AA)...and to quote some famous russian Boxer (from a movie)... "If they die, they die" ;)

..and if not, they're going to serve as naval support when needed.