This is really just a modest proposal, but it's dawned on me that Battleships don't really do much but provide a Nuclear proof damage buffer for your higher Naval Ships during attacks and enabling lower nations to run blockades on each other.

I suggest that given the seeming 2% rule for Destroyers and Submarines boosting their weapon system, that Battleships would compliment Landing Ships with a 1:1 ratio with ground support damage. In other words, for every Battleship you have with Landing Ship partner, ground battle damage is increased an additional 1%.

It would look like this under the Vessel's Abilities column in the FAQ :

Provides 1% Ground Battle damage boost up to 20 ships, requires an equal number of Landing Ships. Can create and break Blockades. Invulnerable to nuclear attacks. Provides fleet support.

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Added suggested enhancement to the Cruiser and Frigate. (With approval from moderator team.)

It is well known that Cruisers and Frigates are as useless as the Battleships without the benefit of being nuclear proof. Excluding their attack bonuses to higher ships, (Which only helps Naval Attacks and nothing else.) they only serve to bulk up your NS and run/break blockades.

My first suggestion is for Cruisers, Cruisers (Modern ones at that) are known to dominate the local airspace with their AEGIS type systems and gamut of missiles. The change is quite simple, as Cruisers will act as a reverse Anti-Air Defense Network.

When put into Battle Support mode, Cruisers will provide a +2% Battle Odds in Offensive Air Attacks up to 10 ships. This will help partially overcome a defenders AADM along with allowing a superior naval nation but inferior air force nation to break through the inverse type of nation. (They lack the FAB, Construction, Air Force Resources or the Space Program.) This will not increase the damage done, but give the attacker a better chance of having a successful attack.

My second suggestion concerns Frigates, they historically served as picket ships and sub-hunters. (As shown in their bonus against enemy subs.) The addition for them is to fullfill their function as picket ships that they will gain the ability of +2% Battle Odds during Offensive or Defensive Naval Attacks up to 10 ships. They will not be required to be in Battle Support mode to give this bonus to the nation's navy.

I feel that these additions will serve to increase the value of these ships in combat and give reason to buy them back in wartime when many navies suffer nuclear losses.

approved for discussion

I found a use for battleships, actually.. breaking blockades against your nation when your infra has fallen too much to buy any other blockade breakers. Battleships are cheap to purchase as well. I personally don't think any additions are needed.

I already addressed that, Battleships only really serve a purpose to low infra nations, otherwise they simply act as nuclear proof buffer ships for your Cruisers and Frigates.

Given their historical use as fixed shored bombardment weapons, this is a perfect example of a slight tweak that should be implemented right away.

This idea has my support, for what it's worth. It seems simple enough to me.

Why is that a bad thing? They are, after all, low-tier ships equal in cost to Landing Ships and Corvettes (But they have a higher upkeep). They don't give a bonus to attacks like Landing ships, but they can break blockades and blockade other nations as well as survive nukes. I honestly don't see the need for a low-tier ship to do much more. If anything, Corvettes, Cruisers and Frigates need something extra, not Battleships. Those three ship types are only useful for naval attacks, which is slightly disappointing.

Those ships have bonuses to attacking ships ranked higher then they are. The Battleship has absolutely nothing, it's a nuke proof picket ship and not befitting what Battleships could really do. Once you get Destroyers and Submarines, Battleships are quaint, useless ships that happen to be immune to nuclear attacks.

A small bonus to ground attack would be in keeping with their historical mission.

I've seen the New Jersey lob 16" shells inland. Dead on target every time and would pulverize a concrete 4 story building into powder in a single shot or blow huge chunks out of mountainsides with a broadside. I simply couldn't imagine the damage 5 or more of them would do to a city if they sat offshore for a day. Put 10 offshore Manhattan for a week and not even the indians would return the beads and trinkets to get it back.

While outmoded in the ship-to-ship role and hideously expensive to maintain they are simply unmatched in the ground support role. I'd rather one of those in range to assist than a whole flight deck of Hornets waiting for my call.

Hmm....sounds somewhat familiar...

The partially modernized Iowas were fearsome in the Gulf War, if they had been fully modernized, they would of been able to wipe out entire opposing fleets single handedly. Fun fact, to do so, would be cheaper then to construct a new Ticonderoga-class Missile Cruiser.

Just because the navy is so fully invested into the carrier concept doesn't mean the battleship is obsolete as a concept. Sure, those older Iowas were mothballed, but that's because they had too many unautomated systems that required the personnel needs that detracted from the carrier needs. While the navy will crow they have all they need to support near shore operations that doesn't mean they do that job as well as they could. Naval artillery is the most accurate there is, bar none. Furthermore you can't shoot down a 16 inch shell with a Stinger like you can a Hornet. That shell also carries the explosive power of more than anything a Hornet could carry. Nor does that cannon have to fly back to the carrier to reload.

Other surface ships could fill the role of the battleship if they ever bothered to outfit a ship properly. Seen the cannon turrets on a destroyer or cruiser lately? One lousy small gun up front to make it official.

The battleship concept isn't outmoded. It's just that the current battleships themselves are too old. Most modern nations are steering their forces to "limited war" tools and don't want to invest in massed forces technology or equipment. The Army has been trying to escape from the main battle tank concept since the 80's because they want to fly their forces into a battle zone. Droids, UMV's, smart soldiers, SpecOps, planes, and airforces. All things that let generals point limited resources with a push button while they make their tee time on a Maryland golf course. They abhore the idea of mass war and don't support it with planning and equipment. And if the Americans don't make these mass war naval machines then no one will. All the other serious powers with lots of men under arms are on the Eurasian landmass. They don't need to ship firepower over by sea. They will just roll their artillery up on rail cars.

But this isn't Earth we war on here. This is Bob! In Bob we roll out millions of soldiers and tanks as far as they eye can see. On Bob we send 100,000 to their deaths so fast it would make an old Soviet commissar shudder from the brutality. How many virtual Stalingrads did we have in the last month? A couple thousand perhaps? We do mass war on Bob. Battleships are prime for mass war landing assaults. On Bob we would certainly dust off old Iowa plans to design new ones that matched our amazing technology and fearless masses of troops wading ashore.

The armchair admirals on Wiki and the politicos that call themselves admirals at the Pentagon have a vested interest in the battleship concept dying. It makes them look good they don't have to grind ashore the hard way. But any Marine who ever had an Iowa class covering their backside will tell you he'd rather have the naval fire support channel on his radio than a carrier air boss on the line.

Battleships helping ground support makes sense in the real world and even more on Bob.

Anything to improve the BB's

Sounds good, gives the battleships a niche of their own

Battleships are meant to be versatile. They can make and break blockades, and are nuclear immune. There is no need to change them. They do plenty for their price and do not need anything else.

I support this, but I am biased cause I think battleships should be back in the US lineup

But what they are good at on Bob isn't really true in RL. Blockade breakers tend to be fast and maneuverable. Battleships are big lumbering behemoths that would do poorly in that role.

As for "nuclear immune" that's really just a Bob concept as irradiating a hundred thousand tons of steel doesn't sound like my idea safe shielding. But in any case, that concept would apply more to ships with more enclosed features and fewer personnel. Since the Bob battleship is clearly modeled on the old Iowa or earlier styles, given its price and power, you have ships that are clearly human resource intensive and a very open plan design. All that steel belting is around the hull and not the superstructure while most of your senior management resides. In a nuclear blast the "safe" people would be the lower deck and engineering personal who would be trapped in a hull that is slowly cooking them.

Now if you wanted to say these Bob battleships are more modernized to be good blockade breakers and nuclear resistant then we are talking a whole new class of ships that would have no peers other than submarines or carriers on the wet battleground and would certainly not be relegated so low on our buy list.

Nothing about the current Bob battleship model makes any sense.

If you read admins comments when it was implemented, that was intended.

Neutron Flux is fun for dieing slowly!




We had to fight for even the nuclear proof rule, a horrible way to treat a legendary class of ship that's still practically unstoppable unless you hit it directly with a nuclear strike. (Or literally tons and tons of conventional weapons.)

Easily solved by giving the the blockade breaking capability to corvettes and giving the 1% land bonus to the battleships. If he's worried about their being too many ships with ground attack bonuses then simply decrease the number of allowable landing ships and increase the allowable number of corvettes.

Imo, there should also be another class of ships as well. The Tender is a minimally armed supply vessel designed to support all naval combatants. Give it the strength of one in actual attack value and a 1% bonus to the entire fleet for defensive purposes for up to 20 ships. This will increase the number of "fodder" ships and help resist fleet beatdowns.

I'm totally open to reducing the bonus to 10 ships for both the Battleship and Landing Ship, keeping in line with the 20% bonus.

Sorry for the double post, but added suggested enhancement to the Cruiser and Frigate. (With approval from moderator team.)
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It is well known that Cruisers and Frigates are as useless as the Battleships without the benefit of being nuclear proof. Excluding their attack bonuses to higher ships, (Which only helps Naval Attacks and nothing else.) they only serve to bulk up your NS and run/break blockades.

My first suggestion is for Cruisers, Cruisers (Modern ones at that) are known to dominate the local airspace with their AEGIS type systems and gamut of missiles. The change is quite simple, as Cruisers will act as a reverse Anti-Air Defense Network.

When put into Battle Support mode, Cruisers will provide a +2% Battle Odds in Offensive Air Attacks up to 10 ships. This will help partially overcome a defenders AADM along with allowing a superior naval nation but inferior air force nation to break through the inverse type of nation. (They lack the FAB, Construction, Air Force Resources or the Space Program.) This will not increase the damage done, but give the attacker a better chance of having a successful attack.

My second suggestion concerns Frigates, they historically served as picket ships and sub-hunters. (As shown in their bonus against enemy subs.) The addition for them is to fullfill their function as picket ships that they will gain the ability of +2% Battle Odds during Offensive or Defensive Naval Attacks up to 10 ships. They will not be required to be in Battle Support mode to give this bonus to the nation's navy.

I feel that these additions will serve to increase the value of these ships in combat and give reason to buy them back in wartime when many navies suffer nuclear losses.

You might consider adding an edit to your opening post fully listing the entire Navy lineup under this new system of yours and the suggestions mentioned by others that you favor.

Okay, doing that now.

I like these changes, but for Battleships I do not think it is necessary :\

The main change I think that should be made is nuke damage to ships be removed or limited to one of each ship as it doesn't make sense still for a nuclear missile to take out a large amount of infrastructure, military, and navy all at the same time.

Navy really is at a good place imo, it provides an advantage for a well prepared defender but not one which is indestructible, nor overpowered.

Well, my suggestions are not all or nothing, I feel that any of these suggestions would be an improvement to the Navy system.

If we were using fictitious names and configurations unique to Bob I would agree, but both the navy and airforce in CN are modeled on Earth counterparts and really should mirror the relative strengths and features of those counterparts.

If that's the case then battleships should just be removed outright since they really aren't serviced anymore.

This argument was just made extensively on the last page.

Try reading what I quoted before you take my statement out of context.

Ok, so do that instead. It's a game and if the game needs only 3 or 6 or 40 different units for its battle system then fine. We all use the same tank right? We just are allowed to keep piling on the aftermarket tech to make those same tanks more destructive.

But if we are going to use RL references in such detail then we should actually honor the references.


Truly, we could end the bickering about naval and air units by simply moving to fictitious game units. There are enormous reserves of fantasy and engineering artist renderings of war platforms that never existed in RL that could be used for display and their attributes filled in by simple step strength numbers. Bob is not Earth. We can have Bob weapons of war and still crush our respective nations into powder just fine. Sounds like a good idea for a new suggestion thread, right?

There are probably artist members of CN who would be willing to create some simple graphics for the game units, if that suggestion were taken.

Personally, I see no problems with the current makeup of the navy system.

Other than the fact that it uses real life individual references without even remotely honoring those references?

I think this is a good idea but you should increase the benefits of it to say +3.

CN =/= RL

KISS for the win in a political simulator.
Now if some sort of tactics were involved, I may be more interested.

Thanks for precisely making my point. If you bring in RL then don't be surprised when people expect people to follow the RL references.

A completely fantasy system would be the actual KISS method here. Far less headache than trying to balance the game units against their RL counterparts.

When Admin made the official Navy proposal thread it turned into a 20 page quest to balance it, mostly caused by comparisons to RL references, and it still didn't come close.

If he had simply made make-believe ship titles he could have simply assigned attributes based solely on game mechanics.

What do you mean not used any more? 3 of the 4 remaining IOWA class battle ships are in fact still on the US navies list of active ships.

The Wisconsin while a Museum has it's engines started and all of it's systems tested every quarter by the US navy. It also has been pulled out of retirement for both Persian Gulf Wars.

The Iowa is also being used as a museum and is also still on the USN's active ship roster.

The New Jersey is the most modernized of the 3 ships and was used in both Persian Gulf Wars as well as many other operations including the bombing of Lebanon after the troop barracks was bombed.

there is NO other ship out there that can match the fire power of an IOWA class battle ship in a head to head fight. even as far as that goes I'd personally put my money on it in a 4 on 1 fight against moder cruisers and frigates.

I'm going to ignore the RL parts of the thread.

The suggestions in the OP are good, except the Frigate one (you improve odds by having more ships already, that's not a special ability ). If the battleship is given extra abilities though it should be made more expensive (maybe about twice the cost, its cost is out of line with its upkeep compared to other ships already).

This is quite true, but I feel that the Frigates need something to make them worth buying, since they are the quickest to be wiped out by nuclear attacks since they have the lowest numbers for a non-nuclear proof ship.

Hence, I feel the meager additional increase in battle odds is a good addition, even with full ships it just functions like a naval Pentagon. (Which statistically speaking is only a +5% chance to win anyway.)

if you really want to make a change worth something in CN navy, allow people to launch CMs and airstrikes at the navy instead of just at the land.

No, because then a Defender's Navy is worthless.

oh ry'leh? I reject your hollow assertions. This is a game of equals. If you can do it to them, then they can do it to you. Subs would have a greater meaning, and it would actually allow you to have some type of an impact on someone else's navy. As it is right now in an even fight you can't do anything against the opposing naval forces that matter (at least not without nukes), because the largest amount of losses from a combined 3 naval attacks I've seen are 6 ships. If you can buy back 8, then you can actually gain per day.

Present people with a choice and see what happens. Being allowed to attack the navy instead of the land with planes would be a cost/choice opportunity. You can attack their navy and maybe get blown out of the sky, maybe take out some ships. Your opponent, on the other hand, leaves your navy alone and goes after your infra. He loses more ships and you lose more infra. It's a choice. It's also more realistic. Perhaps if you went this way you could either have planes defend regardless or just allow the planes from aircraft carriers to defend. Either way it is more interesting and more true to life. It also presents more options and can make war more nuanced.

We should just scrap the RL model in our navy and build a complete fictional one that does exactly what we want it to.

No arguments then about outside constraints and we get exactly what we desire.

I believe in a 1-on-1 battle where the enemy is able to quad you first, then they will always have the advantage due to the daily buy limits and the fact ships are either kept or destroyed: no inbetween status allowed.

Maybe in the perfect world of 1-on-1 fights with no blitz quad the defender is equal, but 99.99999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999% of CN battles are everything but that.

Actually I've sent 9 to the bottom in a triple naval attack, but be that as it may...

Battleships in the modern era are at best weapons platforms that are completely dependent on local air superiority to live. When they lack air support and they become spotted from the air by a properly equipped air squadron, they are heavily damaged and often sunk. 14-18 inch guns are useless in that scenario and the amount to flak they can throw skyward, while impressive, isn't enough to save them.

This is why aircraft carriers rule the modern ocean.

All that said, we see scenario after scenario played out from World War II on where battleships are used very effectively for shore bombardment. Rather than as the OP suggests, making their use for support of ground combat totally dependent upon the presence of Landing Ships, I would rather see the description for them be as follows:



This recognizes their versatility as weapons platforms (modified US battleships in the 1980s were turned into massive cruise missile platforms and were used extensively during the Gulf War, in addition to throwing 16 inch shells downrange), without breaking the existing game mechanics or being overly complex.

If you choose to be in a small alliance, or none at all and cannot muster the necessary defense so that you are on equal wartime footing, then that is your own strategic choice. I prefer to think of what makes things work in a balanced world. If you wish to try and tilt things to the poor and disadvantaged, then you are merely weakening the game overall and making it less interesting.

To the point at hand, I don't care too much about the battleship issue or not. Most world powers have rejected the battleship concept in order to focus on the power projection of aircraft carriers, subs, and agile missile cruisers. We don't necessarily have to mirror that here in CN. If you do want to make battleships more powerful, I'd be willing to support a power increase from 5 to 6 (or whatever the current level is at).

I disagree. There is no guarantee that you will have an unsuccessful defense, and since you can't be nuked for 24 hours (dumb rule IMO, but that's a topic for another thread), you can probably buy back well enough. People are limited to three naval actions per day. If this is an alliance-wide war, then unless you are horrifically outnumbered (in which case no system rules would save you), you aren't going to have 9 naval actions against you, maybe 3-4, in which case your assertion fails. However, less ships for you is also less ships for them (because you are also attacking them).

The ships that you lose anyway are only the small fry most of the time. Nukes never take out anything interesting. I was in a 2-3 war (me in the two), and I killed more navy than they did by a significant margin. It still took me a LONG time to whittle them down. Even with nukes, I couldn't get one enemy down to anything exciting in the damages range. Everything above battleships are nigh invulnerable now. The real navy pounding only works in a protracted battle, as it takes longer than 1 full week to reduce a navy to any appreciable level. In a protracted battle you're all screwed long term, so it doesn't matter. I will likely never get to see someone's navy die first hand.

I have, but typically because they didn't take building a navy seriously and in that case I've wiped them quickly from the sea and start into blockading them. Effects of blockade are pretty nasty because they are cumulative and many people simply stop collecting and living off warchests for the duration of a fight.

In traditional naval warfare (meaning prior to WW II), navies typically shed small vessels much faster, so that much of the current system is realistic. You are correct however in that a "Battle of Midway scenario" is impossible under the current system of mechanics. One way to fix this would be to make the damage results based on the presence of carriers (more carriers means an increased chance that nuclear invulnerable vessels would be sunk) and subs (ditto).

Admin would need to play with how to implement this and do so VERY carefully. Remember, the number of ships we have in game is an abstracted number. When I say I have 6 carriers, it would probably be more like 60 "in real life". The US currently maintains something like 12 carriers, but that's because it simply doesn't want to maintain more, not that it couldn't build and maintain 3-4 (or more) times that many. A result that meant that you just 3 lost carriers and nothing else, would be seen frankly, as a very badly broken game mechanic. Remember, the Japanese lost 4 carriers at Midway, not all the carriers in their fleet.