About Europe 1940:
I do think you’re right that submarines don’t have much to do on the Allied side. But that’s historically accurate. Despite the clear competency Allied submarines had in the Pacific, there was just not much for them to do in the European Theater of Operations historically (one of the reasons we don’t hear of their escapades all that much) relative to other units. Personally I prefer historical accuracy even if it renders some units utterly unbuyable (like almost any naval unit for the USSR).
As you correctly pointed out, cruisers are not powerful enough to justify their purchase while destroyers are quite powerful. I don’t understand your complaint about destroyers “taking away” the fodder role from submarines. Maybe that’s the case in Europe, but destroyers historically were the fodder units for surface fleets (at least out of the ones that are in the game, obviously torpedo boats, frigates, etc. are the true fodder units). In the Pacific sumbarines are effective as fodder.
I think battleships and cruisers can stay as they are, as I quite like the reasoning in here that cruisers* and battleships are purposely unbuyable to reflect them growing obsolete during the war. I do think to be historically accurate there should be a mechanism to reflect ships under construction being finished, maybe a one-time discount for a set number of battleships and cruisers, like allowing the US to buy one battleship on turn 7 for 17 IPCs to reflect the Iowas finishing construction, and one cruiser for 10 IPCs to reflect the later Baltimores finishing construction (both representing the fact that part of the “cost” of the ships was already paid for before the game started). We can do a similar thing for Japan, the UK, etc.
Anyhow, I no longer think we should lower the price of cruisers for historical accuracy. For example, a Fletcher class destroyer, which the game uses to represent American destroyers, allegedly cost 6 million USD while the heavy cruiser Portland, used to represent American cruisers, allegedly cost 10 million USD, so cruisers being about 150% of a destroyer’s cost works well.
Thanks for helping me think through my views on cruisers.
*I used to think cruisers didn’t become obsolete until later, but after some further thought I realized they were fast becoming obsolete during and after World War 2. As I wrote in the discussion I linked, the three original uses of cruisers when they were first created were superseded by aircraft and submarines during and after the war. While I still think they served an important role as destroyer squadron commanders, I now imagine those commanding light cruisers are “embedded” within the destroyer unit as each piece represetns a fully independent formation. Heavy cruiser squardons were not much better than battleship squardons, which was why most powers gave up gun armed cruisers soon after the war (and as destroyers have been getting bigger and bigger, all cruisers are rapidly aging and are being succeeded by large destroyers).
