Calling All Ship Graphic Designers!

[fairline]

More off topic than on

Originally posted by Case
I consider both classes to have been qualified failures: the KGVs were slow and woefully undergunned and the Nelson and Rodney were great as monitors but much too slow and cumbersome to be effective battleships.

I forgot the KGV's only had 14" guns, although I thought I had read these were as effective as the QE's 15" guns. They could make 28kts though, I think, which was only 1kt slower than Bismarck. True enough about Nelson and Rodney; it would be interesting to see how they would have turned out had they not been compromised by the London (or was it Washington?) Naval Agreement.

Yeah, a few. However, all the true battleship geeks
hang out at www.warships1.com

I'll check it out!

Don't knock it - I was offered a high paying job at the Australian Treasury partially on the basis of my ability to credibly talk battleship-speak and my recomendation of Patrick O'Brian's books to the very senior person who interviewed me

[skipper]

For informations about the German High Sea Fleet or Hochseeflotte

http://www.german-navy.de/hochseeflotte/index.html

[Exile]

Great looking units, Skip. I've seen some of your stuff around.

Yep, the German naval site is perfect for isolating ship classes, and this is the site that I actually used when doing it. I just wish there was a similarly thorough Royal Navy site.

[Boco]

You're really doing your homework on this one Exile, I like your approach.

3.) Intrigueing, but I'm using the subarine ability only for the torpedos (so far . . .)

In your scheme, do they have to be mutually exclusive? It'd be slick to have a few periscopes of German and British allied civs. They could look identical. Establishing nationality could be made tricky. Plus you could have dummy periscopes as well.

I still think air recce could be neat if it was hamstrung to represent historical limitations. Very few units, limited mobility, 1 square spotting only...

I wonder if you could use the share maps option of the dip dialogs to simulate the limited communication between the HSF & GF with their respective air and undersea services.

If you wanted long inevitable battles, you'd have max df, hp and fp=0. You'd need good gfx for that one. So, the smoke might work. If it's released last, it could top the stack and hide the ship underneath. Regardless, mass smoke could force shells to waste mfs going around it to get to other targets, or simply use up a shell to 'disperse' it.

Another subtlety that's probably beyond Civ2 is command control. Ships sailed in lines because it was a manageable formation in the age of flag communications. Here, a player will likely sail abreast to create continuous impenetrable lines. Even so, I'll bet there'll be some creative ballistics in this game. The person who solves this conundrum should earn a virtual pat on the back.

I hafta opine that unstackable terrain is a good idea. Otherwise, players would probably move stacks of 20 ships around the map.

Is the scale somewhere around 3,000 yds a square?

The KGV was marginally better than the QE in speed and armo(u)r. AFAIK, the 14"/45 outranged the 15"/42, but the higher mass of the 15" shell started showing better penetration at ranges of <16,000 yds. However, given the ~25 year gap in completion dates, there should have been a much more significant qualitative advantage for the KGV. Guess the Washington Treaty did its work ... on the British.

Don't knock it - I was offered a high paying job at the Australian Treasury partially on the basis of my ability to credibly talk battleship-speak and my recomendation of Patrick O'Brian's books to the very senior person who interviewed me

You must be in heaven during coffee breaks.

I'll get you spelling Limey-style yet

There are a numbre of spelling rules we should consider here.

[skipper]

Hmmm, I checked my worldwar one links - maybe these are helpfull:


Deployment of German Naval Forces, 1914


http://miniatures.de/html/ger/1914-k...he-marine.html

Royal Navy


http://www.homestead.com/nelson1/BRI...TTLESHIPS.html

Naval history

http://www.naval-history.net/WW1CampaignsNorthSea.htm


Good Navy site from Poland


http://www.warship.get.net.pl/Gallery_main.html


BTW - great project

[Exile]

Consternation . . . .

One troubling aspect of trying to make a strategic game act like a tactical game is that in civ2, tactical naval units don't take into account momentum.

At this scale, in this scen, units have "magical" movement. A twenty-five thousand ton battleship does not move 8 squares south . . . and then suddenly move 8 squares directly north. lol. A ship has to slow and turn. Very tight turns by very large ships are possible. Take a good look at some of the photos from WWII of ships in the Pacific theatre steering to avoid aerial attacks. Even very big ships can turn tight circles. But they will list and a battleship cannot list 10 degrees and still bring guns to bear.

Does anyone else besides me remember an old game called "CA"? It was a very well done tactical naval warfare game. In this game, ships were required to move a specified number of hexes in a straight line before they could turn. Speed was also a factor. Slower speed = tighter turn radii.

I'm trying to think of some simple way to replicate this with a house rule.

[Case]

Originally posted by Exile
One troubling aspect of trying to make a strategic game act like a tactical game is that in civ2, tactical naval units don't take into account momentum.

I'm trying to think of some simple way to replicate this with a house rule

This is almost certainly too complex to be workable, but you could give every ship an aicraft type unit called a 'course predictor'. After moving the ship, the player then has to send the unit ahead of the ship, and move to within, say, 3 squares of it on the next turn. This would allow the other player to observe where their oponent is heading while preventing any sudden changes in direction.

It is rather complex though

Originally posted by Boco
The KGV was marginally better than the QE in speed and armo(u)r. AFAIK, the 14"/45 outranged the 15"/42, but the higher mass of the 15" shell started showing better penetration at ranges of <16,000 yds. However, given the ~25 year gap in completion dates, there should have been a much more significant qualitative advantage for the KGV. Guess the Washington Treaty did its work ... on the British.

Yeah, that pretty sums up my views. The British should have been producing ships like the Vanguard in the 30s and 40s, and not the KGVs.

You must be in heaven during coffee breaks.

I actually ended up taking a job at the Department of Employment. During coffee breaks we talk about labour market statistics and insult our minister

[Boco]

CA! I haven't dusted that one off in decades. They did a pretty good job of hexifying the tactical naval wargame. Perhaps, that momentum rule could work if both players agree to it. My first wargame (and all-night playing session) was AH's Jutland. Never finished another game of that monster.

I've read that ~12-15,000 yards was considered the ideal range for engagement. Shorter ranges risked torp attacks and heavy damage. Longer ranges were usually a waste of ammunition. Exile, Case, Fairline you have any info on that?

Case, no offense to your colleagues, but wouldn't naval history be more interesting than labor stats?

[fairline]

Originally posted by Boco
I've read that ~12-15,000 yards was considered the ideal range for engagement. Shorter ranges risked torp attacks and heavy damage. Longer ranges were usually a waste of ammunition. Exile, Case, Fairline you have any info on that?
)

Not sure if the guy up the mast could see that far to call the fall of shot, at least in the RN. Didn't the Germans have far better optical range-finding in WW1 and consequently more accurate gunnery? Reading the account of the initial engagement between Beatty and the German CBs, the Germans opened up at 8nm and scored hits on Lion, Princess Royal and Tiger, while the British reply missed the Germans by 1nm!

I think a lot of the time during the Jutland engagement the big ships were pounding away at each other at ludicrously short ranges, largely because of poor visibilty. IIRC several British ships failed to engage the HSF when the battlecruisers made their death-ride and the Germans ultimately escaped, purely because they failed to identify their would-be targets.

There wasn't that much difference between the armour and armament of a WW1 BB and the WW2 equivalent, but there was an enormous gulf in terms of spotting, signalling and gun-control.

[fairline]

Phenix: I'm going to make a start on the gfx this weekend. Have you chosen a set of sea graphics yet, as this will have a bearing on what I decide to do with the ships?

[Exile]

I can't see any reason to change the oceanic graphic, except to eliminate the resouces. Is there something I'm missing? I can't imagine it'll have any bearing on your graphics, Gareth.

[Mercator]

How about the use of nukes, by the way? Pollution is not an issue at sea, so they'd just be missiles that hit 9 tiles rather than 1. That could be an extra incentive (in addition to unstackable terrain), for the players to keep their ships spread out rather than lumped together.

The only problem is that nukes have a 100% success rate.

[GePap]

ON 0 HP- I once gave a defensive unit a really high HP, and 0 FP, not thinking it would matter. What I found was that while the battle went on for a while, the attacker suffered no damage at all. So 0 HP workss in terms of having a unit that will eat up movement without danger of damage to the attacker.

[GePap]

What would nukes represent? Neither side had any weapons guaranteed to take out an enemy ship in one shot.

[Mercator]

Originally posted by Exile
I can't imagine it'll have any bearing on your graphics, Gareth.

For the waves around the bow, I imagine. They'd need to be at least close to the ocean color you choose.

Originally posted by GePap
ON 0 HP [...]

You mean 0 FP, right? And I already said that earlier.