What's the best ship designs for each task for the Navy (2024)

Herr B. said:

That's a surprise for me. I've taken my numbers from this tutorial I've watched a while ago.

Click to expand...

There are a couple of issues I see with that video, though it is mostly correct.

Herr B. said:

but in my Kaiserreich-Germany games (were Germany starts with a buff navy), I frequently saw screening < 100% with 4 - 5 screens per capital.

Click to expand...

This could be attributed to the mod, that might change the screen ratios, change the penalty positioning has on screening, or changes the various sources of penalties to be higher. I don't know the specifics of what that mod does, so I can't really comment on that.

In vanilla, you if you managed to get 0 positioning through whatever combination of factors, you would end up with -50% attacks, and -50% screening efficiency (and some AA/sub visibility penalties), which means you would need double the amount of screens per cap to keep the same screening percentage. The most common penalty you'll see (outside of terrain and weather) is going to be the larger fleet penalty, which caps out at -50% when you're at 3x or greater their size. This means that if we only consider the larger fleet penalty, being at 50% positioning is -25% attacks and -25% screening efficiency, which means you would need only 33% more screening ships. Since the base is 3 screens per cap, 4 would be a safer number until we start to factor in losses.

A 'noob trap' of sorts in this regard is having a massively larger fleet in total, but breaking it up into smaller groups that would each individually try to reinforce into the battle. This is a trap, because each reinforcing ship is going to drop your positioning (to the max of -50%), and depending on the number of ships reinforcing and having a larger fleet this could hit 0% positioning very quickly, for no particular reason which is a massive debuff to your fleet. This is why the doomstack meta exists, to aviod that reinforcing penalty and to get all of your guns firing at the same targets to sink their sooner and taking less damage yourself.

Another penalty is based on the presense of enemy carriers and their airpower in comparison to yours, which seems to be 20%.

Herr B. said:

Do you use (in terms of actively building) anything else than a heavy cruiser for a capital ship? Or are battlecruisers/-ships just not worth it? Do you use carriers for your strike force?

Click to expand...

Herr B. said:

I always thought that battlecruisers were nice for stacking enourmous heavy attack (together with nice piercing), but if heavy guns are not worth it, it seems a bit pointless.

Click to expand...

I don't go out of my way to build any more heavy ships, they just aren't efficient. Yes, they can stack huge amounts of heavy attack, but heavy attack often isn't what you're looking for, and you have to pay such a huge tax per attack to get the armour and piercing you aren't getting any practical use out of. What heavy ships I start with will often be converted into AA platforms.

As for carriers, if I have them I'll throw them in. I don't particular go out of my way to develop them though.

Anaraxes said:

Could you go into more detail? I was under the impression that all screens had to do to add to screening efficiency was simply to exist in the TF. Stats didn't matter for that one number, just the ratio of ship types. So, all DDs/CLs would be equally good at screening the capitals in this sense.

Click to expand...

I said that because gun based DD/CL are often going to have worse profiles than their roach counterparts, so they will perform worse as a 'screen' whose job is to simply eat shots. Therefore, you will want more of them to have the same total screening potential. Additionally, if you are thinking of these ships as adding capability for attacks by mounting guns and such on them, you might trick yourself into wanting more of them anyway because you want more of whatever attack they provide, when gun attacks are often actually better sourced elsewhere.