Having trouble starting a game and getting on your feet? try reading this!
The beginning, 1890
THE BEGINNING 1890:
Pick a country, generate a fleet for yourself, you will be scrapping all of this when the game starts, Don’t bother trying to use any of this garbage. Japan is fairly easy to start with, and China offers you plenty of garbage to shoot at, early game. We will now go from the left thru the steps to take.
Politics (How Tiresome)
POLITICS: eh, this one doesn’t matter early game. you can increase relations to build an alliance if you want, I find they don’t make much difference. Increasing tension is good for trying to start a war with someone. PEACE TREATY is good for when you want money from your enemy, I find it works well to end wars fast if you need to, although you may be better off starting a new game if you feel you’ve made mistakes.
NAVAL INVASION: Take whats written here with a grain of salt because sometimes I don’t understand why the game prevents you from doing this…
This is used to take over regions controlled by a nation you are at war with.
1. Take a good sized fleet over to an enemy port, 8 Battleships in 2 fleets is a decent start.
2. Open politics, click naval invasion for a country you are at war with, aaaaand If the game allows, you should be able to select a region to invade.
For whatever reason I find you have to attack colonies before you can go to mainland Great Britain for example.
If you have (usually more than double) the required tonnage, (thats the boats you brought with you) generally you have a good chance of taking over a port.
These ports can act as a home away from home to refit or repair ships, making war with more distant countries much easier.
Finances (Did I remember to build a bigger shipyard?)
FINANCES: Down on the bottom you have 3 sliders, crank these to the right. Click on build, crank this slider to the right. You’ll want to check this one on occasion to make sure you haven’t forgotten to keep this going. It is ESSENTIAL for a big battleship strategy, as you won’t be able to build big boats with a small shipyard. Money doesn’t matter, make sure you are at war with someone when you are nearing “bankruptcy” then spam next turn for about 6 months intentionally going broke (autoclicker use is helpful). Boom: you have more money from the government.
Research (Staying ahead of your enemy)
RESEARCH: Start with hull strengthening, big guns, rangefinders. These will get you better hulls, with bigger guns than the other kids on the field, while Rangefinders help with accuracy. Coincidence rangefinders are for close range, Stereoscopic is for longer range duels.
Ship Design (Building, designing, Exporting)
SHIP DESIGN: This is where you build your boats. After a while certain designs become obselete and you can no longer build these hulls. This does not stop you from refitting however, and you will want to update ships frequently to keep them in the fight!!. For the love of god DELETE ALL DESIGNS that are auto generated here. Other countries may choose to buy your ships, and If those countries are allied with you, you may find yourself stuck in missions generated where you have to fight with things that need to be scrapped. What you are going to build later will be far superior to anything found here.
Time in the Pre-Dreadnought Era (Autoclicker recommended)
1892: Ok, chances are absolutely nothing of note happened in this gap, maybe some prompts that offer increased naval budget which you’ll want to pay attention to. Upgrade building capacity again, continue with all 3 upgrades into 1894.
1895-1897 ish: Congratulations. you have dreadnought 1 and as long as you know what you’re doing you can continue refitting these into WW1 era before they kinda get dwarfed. Build 4 of these using single big gun turrets. TWIN TURRETS ARE ****. In my experience other countries near you will be getting unhappy with at least a couple itching for war with you.
Ship Design (Continued)
The boat: ***TWIN TURRETS ARE ♥♥♥♥*** Start with your towers roughly in the middle. throw your boilers on, 1-3, no more. I find 13″ mk2 and mk3 gun is very good for mid range sniping while 4″ gun is great balance of firing rate and damage for smaller ships. Those who use 2″ will wish they had 3″ guns. Other people recommend 12″ gun. experiment as needed. Add in a torpedo gun on the side of your ship, This will help you in the fight as I will point out later on. Crank you ship range to the left, you won’t need long range early game, and you can use this weight for speed increases. ***PLAY WITH YOUR SPEED AFTER BUILDING THE SHIP.***
Hint: 18 Knots is a good place to start and if you can’t hit this try lowering main belt armor slightly. Three 13″ turrets with some 4″ guns on the side and casemates should get you a boat that can achieve this. Get her going as fast as you can!!
The ship pictured above can be designed, built, and on the water by 1897 if you know what you’re doing. (14.9″ mk3 and 4.9″ mk4 not available until future refits)
Armor: (Defense & Weight Balance)
***ARMOR:*** Say what you want, I find most ships no matter what cant take more than 1 or 2 good salvos before your’e dead or useless which is even more annoying. Hit escape, exit to main menu, reload game. Note how far away your enemy was when you got hit EG 5 km, next time stay beyond this range. It’s RNG whether you take hits in a battle and It happpens more from being too close than a bad design. Restarting a fight will do you much better than stressing over this. The Armor tab is important for ship balance and weight offsets, although maxing out main belt armor is a good place to start. Experiment as needed.
Hint: Deck armor is great for increasing accuracy, try increasing this as much as you can.
Refit (Post build update)
Put research into small guns from rangefinder tree. REFIT YOUR SHIPS AFTER COMMISSION
YOU DO NOT NEED TO CONTINUE RESEARCHING DREADNOUGHTS, you are 10 years ahead of everyone already and your only real enemy is torpedos.
HOW TO REFIT: This part of the game caused me much confusion, so I will outline some hints here. 1. go to ship design and click VIEW. This will open up the design area of the game after you’ve selected a design. At the top you’ll see a wrench for refit, this lets you edit your ships. Don’t freak out if your screen is full of red and errors!!! This is caused by updated guns being in an awkward position and all you need to do is adjust things rather than deleting everything. Some turrets may be too big for where you had them, for this I recommend going down 1 gun size, this Is especially good for small guns.
Easy upgrades include researching new armor, Harvey to Krupp for example, will gain you a nice weight loss. An easy refit path is better armor, add 1-2 knots for speed, but ultimately you can use your newfound room to grow on whatever you want.
When you’re done, click SAVE at the top. This will boot you out of the design area and into your ship menu. you’ll see “design” and under that you’ll see “design1” . BRING YOUR SHIPS HOME TO REFIT. When your ships are home click on “design1” and then REFIT at the bottom. SHIPS CAN NOT BE REFITTED IF THEY ARE BEING REPAIRED.
Because you have decent big guns and stereoscopic 1 your 4 ships should do ok.
Fighting your first battle (Ducks on a pond)
FIGHTING YOUR FIRST BATTLES: Chances are if you’re reading this, you’ve already gone into battle a time or two. Maybe you got your *** handed to you a time or two like I did.
If you did the above^^ built 4 dreadnoughts, and got into an unfortunate war for your enemy, you are ready for battle!! send your 4 boats toward an enemy fleet, any enemy fleet. RNG should net you a fight within a couple turns of doing this. Because you have 4 battleships, the game will try to balance what it thinks is equivalent, often giving you 37 ships to shoot at. Don’t fret!! you got this!!
Right, start moving toward “smoke cited” and when you see the first enemy ship, turn left.
Let them come to you. Ideal range early game is about 2-4 km from your enemy with accuracy being much better at point blank range if you can get to individual ships. an easy rule of thumb is as follows: click on your fleet, you’ll see a ring around your first boat in the line. “Torp” shpoould be .9 km or 1.2 km in early game and will increase with time and refits.. use this ring to keep your distance from enemies!! if ships get into this ring, turn away. Pesky Little boats will try and get you,
SHOOT THEM IF THEY START RUSHING TOWARD YOU.
Right, at this point you should be looking at 4 boats, with a large batch of s*** boats for you to shoot at. All you need to do is gently circle your enemy, your ships will do the rest.
On the other end of things, click on an enemy ship and find their torpedo ring. With individual ships you SHOULD get as close to this ring as you can, move away if you are about to enter the ring however. RNG torpedo BS will become annoying but now you know how to deal with early game torps!!
Congrats, you have a decent cheeseball start strategy. PS this is especially fun for Austria Hungary.
