Should WG introduce a New Class: Battlecruisers?

[Redwing6]

With the advent of the USS Constellation, a true BC/CC should WG add a Battlecruiser class and reclassify ingame BC/CC's?

[Redwing6]

I contend, that the current "supercruisers" and real life BC/CC's should be included in a CC class of ships. These ships are simply not robust enough (except the WW1 German ships---who are marginally able to) stand in the line of battle. That was never their intended goal. If you look historically, whenever a BC/CC stood against a true BB, they never faired well. (Kongo I'm looking at you). So...if WG were to change the designation of BC/CC ships away from BB and give them their status, fast anti-cruisers that hit hard, it would change the game play of those "bb"s that are mischaracterized as battleships, when they should be in a lighter class. 

[clammboy]

I knew your new around here but bacon is always your friend and required in all polls .

[Ducky_shot]

8 minutes ago, clammboy said:

I knew your new around here but bacon is always your friend and required in all polls .

Which is why I disdain pretty much any poll conducted around here

[warheart1992]

I don't know if they should be a separate class, but large cruisers/supercruisers/BCs should be allowed to picks skills  both from the BB and CA skill trees. Could be limited to some extent of course to prevent making them overly strong.

[ArIskandir]

Why do we need a different ship type? Why can't they fit within the general BB type?

[Helstrem]

1 hour ago, Redwing6 said:

With the advent of the USS Constellation, a true BC/CC should WG add a Battlecruiser class and reclassify ingame BC/CC's?

First make a definition of "battlecruiser" that everybody agrees upon.

Seeing as that has never been done, I won't hold my breath.

Example:

Is Hood a battlecruiser?  If yes, then why isn't Iowa a battlecruiser?  If no, then what is a battlecruiser?

[SgtBeltfed]

I'm of the opinion that "Battlecruisers" should not be a ship type in and of themselves in game.

What people try and call battlecruisers are a diverse collection of ships, spanning several different mutually exclusive roles.

British battlecruisers, built to act as fleet scouts,  tending to the needs of the British Empire, particularly in securing holdings in the far east. Oversized cruisers with battleship caliber guns. Very difficult to place.

German Battlecruisers, built to counter British battlecruisers, and are actually precursors to the fast battleships. They'd made a nice alternate battleship line if it didn't merge with the fast battleships of the main line.

Courageous, Glorious and Furious. Large Light Cruisers, built to support light cruiser squadrons in the Baltic. Could make some interesting mid tier cruisers. Think extreme version of a British Graf Spee.

Lexington class battlecruisers, Support for scout cruiser squadrons, like using a British battlecruiser to do Fisher's Follies job. 

Panzerschiff, Overgunned cruisers produced to showcase German technological prowess, and to tweak the Treaty of Versailles to the maximum. Good as commerce raiders. Graf Spee is already a cruiser in game.

The undersized fast battleships of the late 30's. Built for the fast battleship role, to fight with older battleships and similarly limited new battleships. They're already in the game as battleships.

The various "Super-Cruisers" which are what happens when you remove all treaty restrictions in cruiser design. They would have acted as flagships to cruiser squadrons, and would have eventually replaced the 8" treaty limited heavy cruisers. They do not have battleship caliber guns for when they were built.

Would all of them make nice additions to the  game? Yes.

Putting them in game as a line of "battlecruisers" would get most of the historic ships skipped in favor of getting to the paper ships at the end of the line, meaning they would be a bad investment for WG.

Using them as an interesting source for Premium ships? Certainly. They're a weird collection of ships that would have good appeal the more historically minded players, and would be reasonably priced.

[Navalpride33]

Nope.... "battle-cruisers" are to close to BB specifications.

We dont need confusing "Hybrid" types in the game..

 

[Crucis]

2 hours ago, Redwing6 said:

With the advent of the USS Constellation, a true BC/CC should WG add a Battlecruiser class and reclassify ingame BC/CC's?

Battlecruiser SHIP TYPE, not class.

[Crucis]

1 hour ago, SgtBeltfed said:

The various "Super-Cruisers" which are what happens when you remove all treaty restrictions in cruiser design. They would have acted as flagships to cruiser squadrons, and would have eventually replaced the 8" treaty limited heavy cruisers. They do not have battleship caliber guns for when they were built.

Not really, for a few reasons.

1. Very few nations could afford to build super cruisers in great numbers.  The Alaska class was nearly as costly as the Iowa class BBs.  But nations build cruisers, both heavy and light, to do various jobs, and if you limit the number of cruisers you possess because you try to build a lot of super cruisers, your navy ends up not being able to handle all of those jobs.

2.  Supercruisers were largely build for one of two purposes.  Either to engage enemy merchant shipping or to act as a counter to enemy super cruisers raiding merchant shipping.  Navies didn't particularly need them as AA escorts or as screening units.  Regular heavy and light cruisers to do those jobs quite adequately.  The USN built its Alaskas because we has so many ship yards and money to be able to do so, when other nations didn't have a surplus of yards or money and had to make difficult decisions about what to build with their limited resources.

3. Overall, it seems like the USN didn't go in for merchant shipping raiding using surface ships and seemed to prefer doing it with the USN's submarine fleet.

[Redwing6]

2 hours ago, clammboy said:

I knew your new around here but bacon is always your friend and required in all polls .

Sorry, I'm Jewish, I don't do swine...hence no bacon in the choices. I decided real choices were important. 

[Redwing6]

2 hours ago, ArIskandir said:

Why do we need a different ship type? Why can't they fit within the general BB type?

Because BB's are the tanks here. THey can take damage and shrug it off. BC/CC's can't do that, they can give damage (Tank Destroyer like) but they can't take hits. That was their historic duty. Idiotic admirals thought that because they had line of battle guns, they belonged in the line of battle. The Brits learned the folly of that at Jutland. 

[Redwing6]

52 minutes ago, Navalpride33 said:

Nope.... "battle-cruisers" are to close to BB specifications.

We dont need confusing "Hybrid" types in the game..

 

Then WG needs to remove Ise and Tone from the game immediately!!!!! BC/CC are literally "large cruisers" they have BB caliber guns with CA level armor (excepting the German examples). 

[sourmash]

WG already has BCs in the game. They are generally released as premium BBs. Most premium BBs are BCs.

[ArIskandir]

3 minutes ago, Redwing6 said:

Because BB's are the tanks here. THey can take damage and shrug it off. BC/CC's can't do that, they can give damage (Tank Destroyer like) but they can't take hits. That was their historic duty. Idiotic admirals thought that because they had line of battle guns, they belonged in the line of battle. The Brits learned the folly of that at Jutland. 

Ship types in game are set apart by their captain skill tree and MM slots. Why a BC can't use the BB skill tree and fill a BB slot? What wouldn't work the requires a new skill tree and rules for MM?

[Navalpride33]

2 minutes ago, Redwing6 said:

Then WG needs to remove Ise and Tone from the game immediately!!!!! BC/CC are literally "large cruisers" they have BB caliber guns with CA level armor (excepting the German examples). 

In this game... With no defining "role" to perform...Having a "sub-class" resembling basically a weak BB,

Its pointless.

Its Ill-advised.

Now if we had a role to offer for the sub class to add to the game.. Then I would say define the class and add it to the game... Since to the contrary, it adds nothing to the game...

Niet.

[SgtBeltfed]

8 minutes ago, Crucis said:

Not really, for a few reasons.

1. Very few nations could afford to build super cruisers in great numbers.  The Alaska class was nearly as costly as the Iowa class BBs.  But nations build cruisers, both heavy and light, to do various jobs, and if you limit the number of cruisers you possess because you try to build a lot of super cruisers, your navy ends up not being able to handle all of those jobs.

2.  Supercruisers were largely build for one of two purposes.  Either to engage enemy merchant shipping or to act as a counter to enemy super cruisers raiding merchant shipping.  Navies didn't particularly need them as AA escorts or as screening units.  Regular heavy and light cruisers to do those jobs quite adequately.  The USN built its Alaskas because we has so many ship yards and money to be able to do so, when other nations didn't have a surplus of yards or money and had to make difficult decisions about what to build with their limited resources.

3. Overall, it seems like the USN didn't go in for merchant shipping raiding using surface ships and seemed to prefer doing it with the USN's submarine fleet.

Reality won out over military planning. Barring WWII, the super cruisers would have eventually been used in the role of heavy cruisers, heavy cruisers in the roles of light cruisers, and destroyers were already encroaching on the real light cruisers anyway. This is also the nightmare arms race the British were desperate to avoid.

The US Navy didn't worry about commerce raiding because none of it's planned opponents were really vulnerable to it like the British. Germany had no colonies, and surface raiders would be very short lived against the Japanese as they had a large fleet of cruisers in a relatively small area. Japan was highly vulnerable to submarine warfare because they didn't understand it in the slightest. The United States also wasn't particularly vulnerable to it either, so really didn't build the mass of light cruisers like the Royal Navy to counter it.

[SgtBeltfed]

9 minutes ago, ArIskandir said:

Ship types in game are set apart by their captain skill tree and MM slots. Why a BC can't use the BB skill tree and fill a BB slot? What wouldn't work the requires a new skill tree and rules for MM?

Making new ship types for MM to deal with would just screw things up, there'd be a few limited lines of ships, and they'd be stuck waiting in Que like CV's could back in the RTS days.

Now, for captains skills they could simply add a tabs for a couple hybrids, and just have some ships use the matching hybrid skill tab regardless to whatever they que as. You could do a cruiser/battleshjip hybrid skill tab for ships that need a mix of both skills, a destroyer/cruiser hybrid for the ships that try and straddle that line, ect...

[IfYouSeeKhaos]

No...

Until they do...

& then...only because...

Reasons.

[HazeGrayUnderway]

2 hours ago, Helstrem said:

First make a definition of "battlecruiser" that everybody agrees upon.

Seeing as that has never been done, I won't hold my breath.

Example:

Is Hood a battlecruiser?  If yes, then why isn't Iowa a battlecruiser?  If no, then what is a battlecruiser?

I remember those arguments going all the time since I jumped aboard this game in 2015 Open Beta.

Where would Gneisenau & Scharnhorst line up as?  Hood?  Etc.  That's what the talk was when people were theorizing about them before their releases.

 

What made it fun was that Amagi in Tier VIII is a Battlecruiser... In WoWS she's in the BB lineup.  Japan in the 1920s had an arms race with the USA, intended 2 complimentary classes:  Tosa-class BBs and Amagi-class Battlecruisers.  The US reply was South Dakota-class BBs and Lexington-class Battlecruisers.  But anyways, Amagi has been in the game since launch in Tier VIII as a Battleship.  Years later with WG preparing the release of the German BB Line, there was a lot of arguing around here about Scharnhorst-class being classed as Battleships or Battlecruisers.  Hood is already there as a Battleship, and has been there for ages.

 

[HamptonRoads]

Until the players using battle/super-cruisers make up at least 10% of the population, matchmaking is going to be overtaxed.  The same argument would apply to hybrids and submarines.

[kgh52]

2 hours ago, Helstrem said:

First make a definition of "battlecruiser" that everybody agrees upon.

Seeing as that has never been done, I won't hold my breath.

Example:

Is Hood a battlecruiser?  If yes, then why isn't Iowa a battlecruiser?  If no, then what is a battlecruiser?

The age of battlecruisers ended with WW1. While originally designed as a battlecruiser, the many changes in the HMS Hood had her a fast battleship. I admit we're very close to splitting hairs here. Japan ungraded WW1 battlecruisers to battleships between the wars.

I believe the navies that built battlecruisers were not happy with what they got. The USS Alaska & Guam were both decommissioned with less than 3 years of service. I believe it was 32 months & 29 months of service. A very short time for high-dollar ships.

As far as in-game goes, I don't believe it will make much of a difference either way.

[Helstrem]

1 hour ago, Redwing6 said:

Then WG needs to remove Ise and Tone from the game immediately!!!!! BC/CC are literally "large cruisers" they have BB caliber guns with CA level armor (excepting the German examples). 

No battlecruiser, not even the first ones, had merely CA level armor.  People keep pushing that bullhocky, but it simply isn't true.

[Zaydin]

There really needs to be an option for 'I don't know/don't care'.

The Battlecruiser concept was made obsolete as both propulsion and armor schemes advanced to the point where battleships could have BC level speed without sacrificing armor protection in the process; see also the Iowa-class.