Let's Play Rule the Waves: Triggered by the Britons, Bored by the Japanese Edition
I love British tabloids. I'm not joking, I love them
We open the update with a new BB being completed. And we are now up to FIVE against the Japanese. A respectable force.
The Japs beg for peace, even giving us some minor colonies. They don't have minor colonies, we can now manage the budget as the Gangut is off the docks, and the Unrest level is 0, meaning the Peoples of Russia are supporting this righteous war.
The Japanese start to pay the price for their lack of initiative. We get a string of coastal bombardment missions, and the Japs are powerless to stop us. We gain hundreds of VP while their ports and coastal defences burn under the unopposed, relentless fire of our capital ships.
As a test ad proof-of-concept, I design a new CL class, the Izumrud. Honestly, I don't know if it's a great idea to build more of them. The vast majority of the enemy Navies have a rather big amount of Battlecruisers, and against them CLs would be dead iron. I save it as an idea, as it's a nice design. 12 8 inches guns, 30 knots, mines and torpedoes....
I'll order some extra DD with the budget we have now. Can't have enough DDs, and we can retire the obsolete ones if we need. The Vidni M class is the same as the old 1500 tons Vidni class, but with a Director as Fire Control. We order four.
One of our aging CLs has problems. We should retire them. We are the only ones left with pre-Dread battleships in our roster, even the Germans retired their freshly built ones. But They have still their uses as blockading ships.....
We catch a raider!
The Novik gets an old Japanese CL. This time we will be more careful, we can't afford being torpedoed again and losing the prey.
I'm still happy with the Mercury class. They have an outdated armour design, sure, but their 8 inches guns and speed is enough to fight reliably CLs designed years later. As we can see, the Japanese CL is taking damage and most of its turrets are disabled.
Just after, the CL catches fire. I guess this is the end.
Yep. And a Jap raider is down!
Our subs sink a Japanese CA. I'll need to check, I remember the Jap CAs being monsters....if we sank one of their 12k+ tons designs it's a huge victory. That we won't see.
Another cruiser action. This time, at night. This time, Captain Kalin manages to be on site. A chance to use our Battlecruisers!
BATTLECRUISER DUEL
THE RELENTLESS CRUELTY OF THE ASIANS VERSUS THE DRUNKER RAMBLINGS OF RUSSIANS LEAD BY A SWEDE
We disable one of their forward turrets.
After a badly managed turn, the Tsukuba gets mauled by our guns. Keep up, Swede.
YEAH! Two turrets down! Their output is 33% of ours. This battle is ours. Battlecruiser duels are short by definition: like in tank battles, the first one to get a good shot in wins, considering that BCs are less armoured than BBs and their guns are devastating.
Game over, man. Game over.
The Tsukuba sinks soon after. 49 heavy hits, a massacre. VICTORY! The Kalinin II managed a great 11,46% hit percentage, an excellent result (to compare, the Tsukuba managed to get barely 3% of their hits).
The first "good" victory in this war. We gain Prestige and 5k VP. And it was almost exciting!
I check the Almanac. After a year of war against Japan, we have little to fear, it seems. We have roughly ten times their victory points
and the Japanese are holed in their ports, fearing our might.
I notice that Germany is on a rebuilding spree, building THREE new Battleships. The US is also heavily reinforcing their fleet. This cannot stand.
Time for a study about our BB capabilities.
Our 42k tons are more than adequate. Truth be told, I think we should scrap the thought of updating our CL fleet, and let the role of
raiders to the subs. Sub Tech is now mature, and they are cheap and effective, even if rather random.
The basis of our new BB will be, as usual, the past class: the turret positioning has proven fairly effective, as we saw in the BC clash.
One of our aides had this peculiar idea, of a "fast battleship". He proposed something with the same firepower of a Gangut class, so base on
our 16 inches guns in triple mounts, with an increase in armour (thanks to the workd of our research bureaus) BUT instead of getting more
turrets or more armour, employing the new tonnage for speed.
The Kutuzov could reach the speed of 27 knots, making it very fast compared to our other capital ships (that are built on a philosophy of a
roughly 23 knots battlefleet).
Well, someone has to be the tech leader. We give the okay to the project.
Building a SINGLE one costs 5 millions Tsar Bucks par month. I hope I did not make an huge mistake. All in all, it will be ready at best for our
last conflict, if we get to war around 1925 or 1926.
The Gangut finishes working up. We will send it to the Pacific Fleet soon.
Shell dyes unlocked. Good.
We are given command of the Kalinin II during a coastal raid near Korea. A big amount of Japanese ships have been sighted in the area,
and we are to cover Battle Division 6 (two of our BBs, the Madagaskar II and the Aleksandr III) if they get a contact with the Japs.
After more than half of the battle spent covering the Sixth division and scouting around, we dare to get near the coast of Japan to hunt for
something. At 11:00 PM, we find a Japanese minesweeper of the Kongo Maru class. When we manage to identify it, nine 12 inches guns reduce it to
scrap in less than two minutes.
Bored to death, we choose to bomb the coastal fortifications near Sasebo (
yes, you can bomb coastal forts in RTW, and they are good targets if you don't have anything else to waste your shots on). While we travel to get in range, we spot another unidentified ship.
It's a small merchantman, that tried to break the blockade in the night, but failed to get back soon enough. I feel almost bad in sinking it.
Victory, meh.
We pick up the survivors and bomb the enemy positions. The Japanese will win this war by boring us to death.
Or not. Before I can end the battle, the Sixth division report enemy contact. Time to rush back to the korean coast. With our luck, it will be
a couple of DDs.
Before we can intercept, the BBs destroy whatever they have found and we are given the order to get back.
"Marginal Victory".
We reach September. The Japanese keep refusing us battle, our generals refuse to advance on Korea, Formosa is a dream, and no one does anything.
Lucky us at least our BCs enjoy some action. The Quintus and the Kalinin are hunting. Let's see what we find.
Another worthy prey, the Kongo, one of the more up-to-date Jap BCs. It has bigger guns compared to our own, but whatevs, 2vs1 it's a
already decided battle.
Not that the Japs die without fighting. The Kongo manages to destroy one turret from the Kalinin, a very good shot.
Valiant but useless. Soon all the main turrets of the Kongo are offline or destroyed. It's just a matter of time.
Aaaand it's over. 73 Heavy hits, 70 medium hits? Another massacre. Our ships kept their 10% precision, very very good.
Great. The Japanese are slowly bleeding to death. They still have their two BBs, but they no longer have a fleet to cover them with.
The Britons are slowly losing their tech lead. Their new BB is inferior to our Kutuzov. Was goddamn TIME. I can notice, however, that the Illustrious
will be ready in three months. Our ship, in thirty. We are still two-three years behind the British ;_;
The Japs lose one of their best raiders, a Armoured Merchant Cruiser, thanks to our subs. I lost the screenshot, sadly.
Yet, the irony is not lost on me. A AMC, the trap ship par excellence, sank by a sub.
A Japanese mine gets one of our DDs. This war is beyond boring.
The Japanese are starting to hurt. The convoys aren't coming, their economy is getting shredded....
Enough! The Tsar can end this better than we can. Let's see what we gain.
We manage to get South Korea. Our soldiers and administrators are hailed by the people.
At least, I guess. Most of the soldiers can't understand thing about those guys. Better than the Japanese, I guess?
This war was an example of what Coxwaggle called a "Mahanian doctrine" I guess. The Japanese were so inferiore that they dared not to risk their good surface ships in a hopeless battle, we blockaded them and slowly bleed their cruiser and battlecruiser fleet to death.
The minus of that is that it is kinda boring. The only "fair" battle was the BC duel we had soon.
Next update, we'll have to endure the post-war cuts and start scrapping some Bs. We can manage at least another beautiful war if we play our cards well. It's time to teach the Britons or the Americans a lesson, and ensure our ascendancy?
In the early game small calibre guns are certainly worthwhile on pre-dreadnoughts, due to the limited amount of large calibre guns they have, and because shell technology is insufficient to penetrate the average thickness of most pre-dreadnought battleships. The Battle of Tsushima showed that the majority of damage came from the 6 inch secondary batteries firing massive amounts of HE shells.
Secondaries also help a lot against the dreaded Torpedo runs (if your screens manage to be subpar). Furthermore, good secondaries can manage to get the job done if you dare to risk and close the range: Quality 1 8 inch guns penetrate 11 inch of armour at range 5000 and 6 inches at 12000, a rather respectable result and good enough to shred cruisers and in close range even Battlecruisers.
The second Japanese BC we got was sank by a combination of heavy hits and medium hits, for example.
But I'm not the expert here!
