@Imperious:
BC didn’t have the same firepower as BB. These were stronger than cruisers but still having lower caliber guns. If they carried larger guns they would need more weight and become larger and lose speed. Their defense was their speed because armor plating was poor due again to the need to keep the ship lighter so it can catch or out run Cruisers or Battleships.
That’s sort of the theory, but the reality wasn’t that simple. If you compare the very first Dreadnought BB (the Dreadnought) and the Invincible, the first CB (or really CC was the proper US abbreviation back then) it had the same main armament, but the BB had more armor and the CC was longer (because length/width ratio was VITAL to speed) and much more powerful machinery. The Germans tended to go 1 step down (like 1", no more) in armament but theirs were better armored. The Renowns and the Hood had 15" guns: hardly lesser firepower, considering that many navies of the time hadn’t yet gotten beyond 13.5" or 14" guns, and no one would go over 16" for another 15 years (and then the Yamato’s with their 18"-ers would be unique.) So they did sacrifice armor, but not much in the way of firepower.
Later CB’s would be a little lighter in armament, like the Alaska’s and the never-built Japanese B65 or Soviet Kronstadt. Even the Gneisenau with its 11" guns was still in the Dreadnought BB range: the original German dreadnoughts carried 11" guns. They were much more heavily armored than the US CB’s, though, and the Germans always referred to them as BB’s. They’d actually planned to rearm them with 6x15", which would have made them an interesting match-up with the Renowns… and the follow-on O-Class, which might have been even lighter armored and WERE seen as “true CC’s,” would have also been 6x15" But anyway, anything that I know of that has ever been called a “battlecruiser” was within the 11"-16" gun range… while everything I know of in the dreadnought battleship range was… 11"-18" range. Hardly a major difference!
A key point here, though, is that the weight of armament was not the main thing that hurt speed, but the weight of armor, especially since the length to weight ratio was so key: putting the same armor over a longer hull would always mean a heavier ship, to the speed/armor trade-off was kind of a catch-22! Sometimes, but not always, designers played around at the margins of extra weight by reducing the # of guns a little bit or reducing their caliber a little bit, but a BC was always much closer to a BB than to a CA in armament. This is why the Washington Treaty grouped BC’s and BB’s together as “capital ships” and then set a strict limit of 8" guns and 10,000 tons for cruisers, to make sure the “cruiser” and “capital ship” categories didn’t merge together and make the treaty irrelevant before it expired.
If you don’t give the BC a special ability like a speed bonus, the advantage of adding another warship is not adding anything to the game. If anything the only new warship should be escort/jeep/light carriers.
People barely buy cruisers as it is, to have a one hit 4-4- unit or 2 hit 3-3 unit is really like just cutting a pie into more slices. Your not really creating anything new and not adding more to the game
Here you have a point, IL, ASSUMING a d6 system, since the d12 system gives more gradiants. But if you give BC’s and CV’s a speed advantage, then that same speed advantage should also go to cruisers and DD destroyers (though maybe not to DE destroyers if they’re added) …and maybe also to fast BB’s. (The Iowa’s were as fast as any BC!) And on a larger map, like the Golbal 1939 one, perhaps such a speed advantage would be a helpful game-pace improvement, though not having played it yet, I can’t say what it would do to the game-balance issue.
