Armor Schemes and Thickness

[madflava13]

Hello all,
I just bought this game and am already in love. I'm struggling a bit when I design ships however. Choosing between different schemes and armor belt/deck belt/etc. thicknesses. Are there any tips/basic guides to what to choose for each class? I've been letting the AI design the belts and then just tweaking armament, but I'd like to get into the detail more. I'm just playing around as Italy 1920 while I get a handle on everything. Thanks for any pointers.

[alenalenalen3]

Hello all,
I just bought this game and am already in love. I'm struggling a bit when I design ships however. Choosing between different schemes and armor belt/deck belt/etc. thicknesses. Are there any tips/basic guides to what to choose for each class? I've been letting the AI design the belts and then just tweaking armament, but I'd like to get into the detail more. I'm just playing around as Italy 1920 while I get a handle on everything. Thanks for any pointers.

With regards to armor scheme, a simplification would be to use flat deck until sloped deck is developed, and then skip to using all-or-nothing the instant you can. Protected cruisers (Light cruisers before you actually get the tech for light cruisers) have to use their own protected cruiser scheme.

Generally speaking, ships were typically armored to protect their vital areas from their own guns. There are exceptions, of course, such as destroyers and many inter-war cruisers, but if you're looking for a quick rule of thumb this would be it for belt and deck. The main turrets should probably have a bit extra, a shell that punches through the belt and starts letting in water is bad, a shell that punches through the turret and sends the whole ship up in smoke is far worse. You can use the gun data button in the ship designer to see what penetration your main guns have vs. your ship's armor, and if you turn your 18" gun battleship into a 6" gun battleship or whatever for a few seconds you can use the button to see how other sizes do.

Of course, you should be armoring them for the distances you are expecting to fight, rather than trying to build an immunity zone that stretches from 1,000 yards to maximum range. In 1890 you'll always be shooting within spitting distance and you can design a battleship that laughs off most fire at 3,000 yards, but later on that range will be absolute murder from both torpedoes and accurate gunnery. At Tsushima in 1904 both sides started firing somewhere around 7,000-8,000 yards, and at the First Naval Battle of Guadalcanal in 1942 both sides opened fire at about 3,000 yards. Within 40 minutes at Tsushima two of the Russian battleships had fallen out of line, within 40 minutes at Guadalcanal almost half the ships involved were crippled or sinking and both sides were limping home.

Now, the more in-depth answer is that armor depends entirely on what your ship is intended to do. A raiding light cruiser designed to wail on unarmed and unarmored merchantmen and run from everything else really shouldn't have much in the way of armor at all; that weight is needed for engines, fuel, and to cut down on cost. An anti-aircraft light cruiser designed to add more AAA firepower to protect carriers and swat the occasional destroyer can also skimp on armor to a degree, it really isn't feasible to armor smaller ships against the bombs aircraft carry (eventually, it isn't even feasible to armor the larger ones) and you have far bigger problems if a serious gunnery duel develops right next to your floating bombs with flight decks strapped atop them. A light cruiser intended to brawl with other light forces to protect the battleline, however, needs armor to duke it out with destroyers and other light cruisers.

I typically armor my belt and deck for my own guns, then slap on what extra deck I can for ships expected to serve beyond 1920 and 30 on into the age of long-range gunnery and dive-bombers. Turrets get an extra inch or so over the belt, turret tops a half inch or inch over the deck. Prior to All-or-Nothing I try to armor my extended belts against secondary fire (so usually 6" fire for battleships, 3" fire for cruisers), slap 1"-2" of extended deck on ships that can take it to protect against splinters. I haven't reached All-or-nothing yet in RTW 3, so I'm unsure as to how much armor you should use for BE and DE once it's in play, but you can probably heavily skimp on it (in RTW 2 you differentiated AoN from normal flat deck in the design by using 0" of BE and 0" of DE).

Upper belt armor... I've been trying to armor it for secondaries so far, but I've been playing RTW 3 for a much shorter time than I have RTW 1 or 2 so that's largely a gut feeling.

Conning tower... I've seen that some people use this as a place to dump weight, to take the chance that the ship will not get hit in that rare location, and that if it did the armor wouldn't have necessarily been able to stop it. I view it as an easy weakness to protect, and with the addition of officers to the game it's more important than ever. It's rather trivial in weight cost, 12" of conning tower is feasible for an 1890 protected cruiser, let alone a battleship, though I usually don't bother much with them on CL's. I usually up-armor my CT's an inch or so above my turrets for armored cruisers and battleships.

Secondaries heavily depend on what size you are using and where they are located. Secondaries of 7" and larger need to be heavily armored because they are vulnerable to flash-fires just like your main guns. A lot of people, myself included, simply don't use secondaries of that size because the weight needed to adequately protect them just isn't worth it, and that's even before you get into the argument of shell weight vs rate of fire. Secondaries of 6" and smaller are usually armored 1"-2" for a splinter-resistant shielded mount (saves a lot of weight compared to 2.5" and up), or otherwise unarmored. Secondaries in casemates are more vulnerable to weather, but in exchange they act as a poor-man's upper-belt armor.

Other bits and pieces:
Narrow belt saves weight at the cost of increasing the chance shells that would've hit the belt hit the BE, BU, or don't have to worry about armor at all. I view it as pointless, either you're armoring your ship to be able to withstand a certain degree of shellfire or you aren't. Sure, you can't really armor the BE and BU to the degree you do the belt and that's going to be a major weakness pre AoN, but there's no reason to make that worse and early ships aren't going to be able to hit a continent with their main guns anyways. Maybe use it to help cut down on weight for a raider.
Inclined belt makes the armor something like 10% more effective at an increase in monetary cost. Take it while you can to save on weight, but stop using it by the 1940's because it's arguably more of a hinderance than help against long-range shellfire (there's a chance they'll hit the deck or below the belt)
Unit Machinery makes the machinery more resistant to being put out of action. On the one hand more resistant machinery can be the difference between escape and sinking, on the other hand it's rather pointless if your machinery isn't getting damaged. Maybe use it for battlecruisers?
Box magazines saves a third of the weight in exchange for halving the belt and deck in areas that aren't protecting the magazine. Sort of like a second AoN, except this time the poorly armored areas are still part of the ship's citadel and so my feelings are the same as they are towards narrow belt.
Carriers don't need much in the way of belt armor - if they're getting shelled, they're probably going down anyway. Heavy deck armor can help against dive and medium bombers that would otherwise turn the ship into floating pyres and go the way of the Kido Butai, but I remember some discussion in RTW 2 about how the flight deck armor wasn't helping as much as it should, so I don't know useful it is in 3.
If you really want to get technical, you can hop into the almanac to see what guns the AI is using, and use the build in foreign yards option to check the penetration of foreign guns. You might be building a 16" gun battleship, but if the nations you are expecting to fight aren't using anything larger than 14"... well, you can either armor your battleship against 16" shellfire (as much as you can against guns that large) to future-proof it, or you can armor it against the 14" guns your opponents use and spend that weight on something else.
Armor quality increases throughout the game, but especially in the 1890's. I haven't had time for thorough testing, but it's quite likely that a ship designed in 1905 is going to beat the absolute shit out of an identical ship designed in 1890 because of the developments in armor during that period, this is the time when battleships used half as much armor as their predecessors and were still better-protected. Armor quality is decided when a ship design is saved, so if you get one of the 'armor quality increases' techs you should stop ordering any more of your existing CA/B/BC/BB's. You don't have to actually change the design, just open the design and pick a new name to save as a 10% different class so you can get that good Krupp cement.

[madflava13]

This is an incredibly thoughtful and detailed reply, and it's exactly what I was looking for. Thank you!

[varsovie]

It is fitting the 1st post be about armor, there was a lot of it in the old forums. Lot of it is still actual, so you may want to take a look there. I'll link only one thread since it has a graphic or the armor distribution.

https://nws-online.proboards.com/thread ... t+extended

As for schemes, if I remember a sloped deck offers about 10% more penetration resistance than a flat deck (due to the angle). But if you do no fear or care about hits there, you can use flat and save few $.

If it hasn't changed, any armor over 2" offers some splinter protection, and none under. Which is why most players don't bother with a 1" armor than can't stop shells or splinter, but go 0 or 2 and up.

The conning tower is a tricky one. A hit there offers the same penalty as a hit in the (unarmored) bridge, but worse. Usually lowers crew experience (the stars) by 1 or the damage controle ratting by 1 for the duration of the battle, can block ship steering for (I think) up to 10 minutes and yes kill some officers. IMHO slap 2" or 0".

All in all you are free to experiment with your designs, the most important remains to test them in battle.

Oh and don't forget : speed is armor!

[CMagras]

It is fitting the 1st post be about armor, there was a lot of it in the old forums. Lot of it is still actual, so you may want to take a look there. I'll link only one thread since it has a graphic or the armor distribution.

https://nws-online.proboards.com/thread ... t+extended

As for schemes, if I remember a sloped deck offers about 10% more penetration resistance than a flat deck (due to the angle). But if you do no fear or care about hits there, you can use flat and save few $.

If it hasn't changed, any armor over 2" offers some splinter protection, and none under. Which is why most players don't bother with a 1" armor than can't stop shells or splinter, but go 0 or 2 and up.

The conning tower is a tricky one. A hit there offers the same penalty as a hit in the (unarmored) bridge, but worse. Usually lowers crew experience (the stars) by 1 or the damage controle ratting by 1 for the duration of the battle, can block ship steering for (I think) up to 10 minutes and yes kill some officers. IMHO slap 2" or 0".

All in all you are free to experiment with your designs, the most important remains to test them in battle.

Oh and don't forget : speed is armor!

A few corrections to the armor mechanics,
Sloped deck offers (roughly, and very range dependent) around 1.1 times its value, as an additional layer behind the belt. So if you have a 12" belt, and a 5" sloped deck, a shell needs to penetrate the belt, and then (roughly) another 5.5" layer to get into the magazine. In terms of deck protection they're roughly equivalent as far as I know.

Armor always offers splinter protection, I believe 1" offers 50%, 1.5" offers 75%, and 2" offers 100%. Presumably 0.5" offers 25%, but that's only available for flight deck armor.

[Dasein]

Regarding armoured carriers, it seems in RTW3 penetration values have been reduced with respect to RTW2, so armoured flight decks are more useful now.

https://nws-online.proboards.com/thread/6950/cv-armour