Light Cruiser Guide - Ultimate Admiral Dreadnoughts Tutorial

6 in gun is love....6 in gun is life All hail the daka ships!!!

I see there being three distinct phases of a UAD campaign: Predreadnought, Dreadnought, and Modern. In the Predreadnought era, I used light cruisers as torpedo boat leaders. It backs up the torpedo boat squadrons I deploy in choke points on the campaign map. I will usually use the Semi Armored Cruiser hulls with seven-inch guns since they can hit and sink armored cruisers if you're careful and have the speed to run away from enemy battleships if the torpedo boats fail. Then I use the traditional light cruiser hulls as an anti-torpedo boat and destroyer screen in my main battle fleets, which was your build. I have figured out that if you place the square barbette on ships, you can get almost any of the small barbettes to create a super firing design. The Dreadnought era primarily consisted of light scout cruisers or the same older Predreadnought designs. Older flawless ships get sent out for colonial duty and are constantly upgraded to provide a challenge in late-game when the AI struggles with tech. Scout Cruisers are fast but flimsy, so I avoid them except for Battle Cruiser escorts trying to hold out for the modern stuff for the main battle fleets. In the modern era, the old pre-dreadnought designs really show their age, but I still keep a few of the ones that have had storied careers around, and I convert them into colonial mine layers. I shift the old scout cruisers I built during the Dreadnought era to colonial duties. What I build here is really dependent on my economy. If my economy can support it, I build dedicated commerce raiders/mine layers light cruisers and keep them in port with some DD mine layers to help them. They are really efficient at generating convoy missions. Otherwise, they are strictly there to support my main task forces as destroyer interceptors.

to be fair i dont think i had any problem sinking destroyers with my battleships special if they had trained crew and good tech

Thanks for this guide, and hope series of guides. The game is evolving and does change so having up to date information super handy. Thanks!

Light Cruisers are probably my favourite ship, once you get past the early hulls.

Video idea: built a mortar barge make a light cruiser with the largest gun you can fit and the shortest barrel possible

By the 1910s, my light cruisers had taken on the role of being a heavy destroyer, my most efficient design sporting 5 single-barrel 7 in guns and two pairs of torpedo launchers, making it formidable against everything from convoys to battleships. Ended up being so effective, I just pumped them out for 20 years and kept modernizing the design. The other design that worked well was having 4 pairs of large torpedo racks and some minor guns so that the ship could swoop in, launch 16+ torps at a line of enemy battleships, use the other side, and dip out fast.

As you said you're color-blind in the past, just a tip: in section display there is a defferent shade of red indicating where your citadel and it's armour actually is on the ship, so depending on citadel level it's armour can actually protect different areas of the ship, therefore inner decks and belts do not cover the entire area of main belt and deck but rather cascade down on one another towards the most critical components.

I would disagree on your choice of torps. The largest torps have their advantages, however, on a Light Cruiser, I would rather have more torps, which means 20", or less. I would also tend to use 7.5" guns, in double turrets. Depending on where your tech is at, you can fit 8 to 20 guns, which, at least by my experience, seems to work well. Note: I also highly recommend role play. Decide in advance how your nation will proceed. As the Dual Monarchy, I have gone quad, triple, and dual mounts for guns. It does change how your playthrough goes. You can also decide, in advance, more speed less armor, less fire power, the combinations here are very expansive in the game. Will you be the Admiral that makes the Jeune Ecole work? It adds, at least for me, an enormous amount of fun.

Early game, I agree, CL's are your best defense against destroyers and I build similarly to your 1910 ship. But by the 1930's, against the AI who don't know how to swarm properly, BB's, BC's and CA's can fend off DD's easy enough. My 1930-40's CL's tend to be surface raiders or recon/escort ships, the latter I don't think you hit on. CL's usually have the highest recon stat amongst the different ship classes and having a few in a task force, particularly before you have RDF/RADAR researched, can help you get favorable encounters. Maybe not much of increase, but I noticed it helped when I had a task force parked off an enemy coast and I'd seem to get a couple more Convoy Raids or Ambushes than usual. It was particularly noticeable in with CL's acting as DD task force leaders and set to "invade." While you touch on it as something useful against larger navies, I think it is worth it to have a dedicated minelayer ship in certain regions. In the Mediterranean, Red, South China, and Indonesian Seas there is plentiful choke points where a sufficiently large minefield can get in some free damage on enemy ships. Until you get Minelayer V or higher submarine, CL is your best bet for a minelayer. It can create bigger fields and don't have to give up as much as a destroyer to mount them.

I don't find I need light cruisers for the anti-destroyer work to protect battleships you described... Granted I tend to heavily over gun my BBs secondary batteries because I don't want them to come under that threat and be caught without an escort to help them due to combat attrition... But I do tend to build light cruisers in the style of the first one still, but with a little smaller in size for the purpose of acting as heavier surface combatants in colonial territories, specifically in areas that might not have the best port capacity. Although later on I tend to try and up the 4" guns to 6" guns, and increase the volume of torpedos... Meanwhile most of my late game light cruisers are just... Torpedo shotguns that can speed in, fire off large spreads of fish, turn and leave while laying smoke. With a modest main battery of 6" guns, and enough 3" high velocity guns to cripple a destroyer in short order, or burn anything of equal or greater size to the waterline with the combination while trying to get the torpedos off.

If your battleships have problems with destroyers and CLs it just means you need more guns.

i like 7.9 inch cls with 3.9 in secondary's with the right ammo types they can deal with everything ch and below i find smaller guns often struggle to pen at range early game late game i find the extra range to be very helpful also found maxing out armor really helps as it becomes immune-resistant to destroyer guns i also find relatively early game cls are good because the can keep up with the latter dreadnaughts and make great escort ships mid game they seem to struggle more as after twin guns get all the tech bonuses and cls often take a while to get twin guns

good guide, but there's a 10 minutes blank segment at the end of the video

Late period 4" guns are my minimum caliber vs. DDs. Preferably 4.5". 5" is better.

Hi

Hmm. With you generally not using light cruisers, are you a good one to talk? :D

Thumbnail looks like a BB.

R

This game purports to be a historical wargame yet has exactly zero basis in any form of history resembling reality. No ship on Earth cost 10M dollars in 1901 and yet in this game destroyers cost millions and millions of dollars. Economies dont work at all. They just slap you with idioticly fixed rates based on starting country and then penalize you inexplicably regardless of how big or powerful your navy and country becomea ignoring massive territorial gains. Playing Spain I conquer Russia, Japan, Italy, China and karge swaths of Africa and Europe and yet my economy magically remains smaller than France who has been beaten into submission. Oh, and dont get me started about the Devs refusal to provide anything resembling a contact report we can actually use. 2 years this game has been out and yet its still basically an arcade game that wont tell you where the enemy is even though you can supposedly see smoke...in one of 8 directions. Autopilot wont work functionally so youre just running around blindly following ridiculously useless contact reports. They do this so you waste time sitting there as your ships chase around ghosts they cant catch so that their time in game numbers stay high to fool people into believing its a popular game. In reality you either waste hours chasing a few destroyers you often cant catch or leave it up to random autoengagements that you may lose because 'rng' BS. Land armies arent based on anything real or that you can impact. China has 300 troops. Really? China. 300. Are you effing kidding? A steam engine uograde for a destroyer costs me $1.5M in 1902? Really? I ahould be able to buy an entire flotilla of them for that. They havent addressed any of these issues and never will. They just dont care. They got your money. Oh, but you can make cool looking ships though.