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Boco
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who was once King for a week.
Jan 2001
time: 00:17
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You're really doing your homework on this one Exile, I like your approach.
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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.
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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. 
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I'll get you spelling Limey-style yet |
There are a numbre of spelling rules we should consider here.
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Case
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The backlash starts here
Feb 2000
time: 15:17
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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  
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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.
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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 
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fairline
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of the wing
Sep 2002
time: 05:17
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quote:
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.
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Exile
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of the Benighted Realms
Sep 2000
time: 23:17
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Merc is referring to the area-target effect of nukes in Civ2 to create an incentive for players to avoid tight grouping of ships.
Up for discussion; The "Line Ahead Rule"
On my reading of the material, it seems that, whether we are discussing either of the battlecruiser groups, or either of the battlefleets, the primary formation used by fleets during this era was the Line Ahead. It was a venerable formation, conceived and perfected during the Age of Sail. In the 20th century, the interrelationship between turret size & weight, engine room spaces below, and armor weight & distribution on steel battleships also tended to group turrets in such a way so that the "broadside" still presented maxium firepower on any given ship (even though this period saw considerable experimentation in turret layout). Jellicoe's fleet was steaming in several lines prior to its arrival on the scene. Everyone steamed in lines.
But how does one make this a workable rule using the Civ2 engine?
And is it even advisable? When daylight failed, the High Seas Fleet broke formation and ran. After all, Line Ahead is just a convention in naval tactics--why shackle inventive players with such unecessary constraints?
Response?
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Boco
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who was once King for a week.
Jan 2001
time: 00:17
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Since you're familiar with board games of yesteryear, you might want to try the old 'optional rules' idea. In the 'rule book' describe some of these 'house-rules' for the grognard. Then before the game, the opponents can agree on which ones to use.
I dug up an ancient S&T article on Dreadnoughts. Here're a few excerpts. Just remember that S&T authors occasionally overemphasized obscure facts.
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The German Dreadnoughts were designed against one enemy - Great Britain. They were intended to operate only in the North Sea. The British ships were designed to operate anywhere in the world and cruise long distances....Every Dreadnought is a compromise, a tradeoff of different elements to make the best ship possible....As a result, the British found themselves emphasizing armament and speed at the expense of protection. The Germans had the opposite emphasis....German Dreadnoughts also had superior compartmentization....The British needed sizable living and refrigeration spaces for long voyages, as well as large coal bunkers for the fuel for overseas operations. |
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Therefore, a German Battlecruiser might have only 7% of its area below the armor deck subdivided into compartments larger than 1100 cubic yards, while a contemporary British BC would have 44% of its area in such large compartments. |
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...the Germans had given more thought to the problems of damage control. Unlike the RN who relied on the ship's XO and regular seamen to deal with damage, each German warship had a specially trained Damage Control Officer who commanded working parties formed especially to contain and minimize damage. They were aided in this by the large pump capacity of German warships, which helped limit flooding if they were hit. |
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British fire control was more highly developed than the Germans. The British had centralized fire control using coincidence rangefinders. This enabled the different turrets on the ship to be coordinated better and with less interference. The Germans used stereoscope RF's and relied on individual turrets to do their own rangefinding.... The methods of 'ranging in' on enemy ships differed as well. The RN favored the use of single spotting rounds. The Germans used their full battery and made it difficult to sustain fire soon after the range was found, but it enabled them to frequently obtain the range, straddle the target ship and start doing damage before the British had the range. To an extent, this reduced the advantage accorded the British by their larger weapons. |
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Both sides suffered from defective armor-piercing shells. The German shells showed poor ability to penetrate armor. The British shells penetrated armor better, but had a tendency not to explode. |
The initial BC phase of Jutland opened at 16,000 yards.
If you haven't already thought of this yourself, perhaps you can simulate poor visibility by decreasing the range of your projectiles.
At a few critical stages in the battle, the wind blew gun and funnel smoke in front of the RF's of only one side. This gave a significant advantage to the opponent. During the initial BC phase, the RN was hampered. Some 3 hours later in the initial BB phase, the HSF was blinded by their own smoke. To simulate this, one sides projectiles could be slightly weakened. This scenario could end up relying a lot on CivSwap!
@Mercatore Uno. Does CivSwap have a randomize option? It'd be useful to make reduced visibility a random event.
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Case
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The backlash starts here
Feb 2000
time: 15:17
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quote:
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? |
Yep, that's about right. However, 'ideal' battles were few and far between. The typical battle in the dreadnaught age was fought at short range due to poor visibility (ie, Jutland and all the battles off Guadacanal) or at extreamly long range as the weaker/less brave side tried to run for saftey (ie, almost all of the British-Italian engagements in the Med in WW2). Most of the 'ideal' fights occured when one side had outsmarted the other and conditions were near perfect.
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Case, no offense to your colleagues, but wouldn't naval history be more interesting than labor stats? |
Yeah, but I get paid significantly more then I was offered at Treasury (and vastly more then I would have gotten at Defence, which I imagine is the natural home of battleship talk in the Australian Public Service).
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Boco
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who was once King for a week.
Jan 2001
time: 00:17
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IIRC, in the old boardgames, visibility checks weren't made so frequently to become a pain.
Okay how are you going to handle this one.
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HMS New Zealand was one of the few big British ships that took part in all three major naval actions in the North Sea. In the Battle of Jutland, fought on 31 May 1916, she flew the flag of Rear-Admiral W. A. Pakenham, and her commanding officer was Captain John Green, who had succeeded Captain Halsey when the latter was promoted to flag rank.
When action was joined with Admiral Hipper's five ships, the New Zealand was fifth in the line of Beatty's six battle-cruisers. Barely twelve minutes after firing had begun, the Indefatigable, astern of the New Zealand, was hit several times in quick succession. Her magazines blew up and the ship vanished in an enormous cloud of flame and smoke, taking with her more than 1000 men. The only two survivors were picked up hours later by a German destroyer. Twenty minutes after the loss of the Indefatigable, a like disaster overwhelmed the Queen Mary. Twelve hundred and fifty-eight men died in one tragic moment, which spared only seventeen of the entire ship's company.
Throughout the battle, Captain Green wore the Maori piu-piu and greenstone tiki given to the ship by an old chieftain at Rotorua in 1913, with the injunction that they were always to be worn by the captain of the New Zealand when she was fighting. Captain Halsey had worn them in action in the Heligoland Bight and at the Dogger Bank. With the gift went a prophecy that the ship would one day be in action and be hit in three places, but her casualties would not be heavy.
At Jutland the New Zealand was hit only on her after turret and there were no casualties. The old Maori chief had been emphatic that the same officers and men would be in the ship in action, and he was right. The outbreak of war had prevented the ship paying off on her due date and many of her original ship's company were still in her at Jutland and later.
Much faith in the Maori mascots was shown by the seamen. More than a year after Jutland, on the last occasion that HMS New Zealand sighted enemy ships and went to action stations, a seaman was seen to mount the ladder to the bridge and take a quick look round. ‘It's all right. He's got them on,’ he was heard to tell his mates on the deck below, thus assuring them that the new captain was wearing the piu-piu and the tiki. |
from Record of HMS New Zealand
Fairline, can you make a RN captain with one of these? Could be a vital wonder! 
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07-04-2004 22:06
Attachment: 
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.
It'll take a few 
*Boco after dusting off texts from classical times.
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