I still think hard range limits on beams were a mistake. I think that is a big contributor to the speed+range = automatic win issue. This was also a thing in the dreadnought era, where they realized that being faster and longer ranged was basically all they needed, assuming they could get their crews and admirals to actually correctly prosecute that (ie the old 'speed is our armor' saying with the royal navy, followed of course by their retard admirals closing the distance anyways at jutland and taking a bunch of casualties).
Read some details of Jutland some time.
Beatty probably was moderatly incompetent but no one made the mistakes you suggest. His mistaked were awful signalling which is bad in a scouting force and enouraging bad ammo handling as well as poor gunnery training. British BC force had the worst accuracy, the Battle line and 5th Battle Squadron had better accuracy than the Germans.
Summary 2 BC with the Battlecruiser fleet were lost largely due to poor ammo handling procedures, the Germans had made the same mistakes but blind luck at Dogger Bank ennabled one of their ships to survice a hit which revealed the issue. Invincible may have had the same problem or may just have sufferred from being the 1st BC built and having weak armour. The Germans were really , really lucky had british AP shells been functioning as designed they would have lost at least 3 possibly up to 5 more Battleships and Battlecruisers and sufferred both a strategic and tactical defeat instead of a tactical victory and strategic defeat. The day after Jutland the Grand Fleet had a larger Margin of superiority in operational capital ships than on the day and notably the German commanders were well aware they had escaped being crushed by the skin of their teeth and never dared seek a battle again. Until 1918 when the fleet (snsibly)mutinied rather than die for the honour of the flag
Your reply seems like coping to me, which I think reduces the amount of overall useful information available. Indeed the Germans did not seek further engagement after that battle, they even went on to lose the whole war as everyone knows, don't deflect if you are actually right. The RN closed the distance to the point that the Germans were getting penetrating hits, despite to my memory having generally superior guns that aught to have enabled them to hold the range open and take almost no damage whatsoever. I seem to recall they provided justification for this in their records, it doesn't really matter, ass covering is a universal factor. My personal take is that there wasn't enough damage happening fast enough, and a hunger for glory drove a decision to close the distance in the hopes of getting more hits and more kills.
My original point was mainly that range + speed (and, in fact, relatively limited armor to facilitate more speed) is actually a fairly old theory and isn't some crazy video gamey invention that only exists in aurora, it was actual doctrine for real navies, and in my opinion probably would have generally worked had it been followed more consistently.
It is worth noting that there is a lot more than just speed and range that goes into a naval battle. Reconnaissance, communications, fire control, rate of fire, gunnery, armo(u)r, and the ever-present bad weather also play key roles, and to my recollection all were present in varying degrees during Jutland. I think it suffices to say that regardless of how one feels about the conduct of battle by the admirals involved (and there is certainly much to harp on), the actual battle was quite complex and a lot more went into it than "closing the distance".
I think that there should just be no range limit. For instance, perhaps there could be hit probabilities at different ranges (sortof like how missiles have hit chances expressed vs speed in a nicely formatted list that is easy to understand), and that hit probability falls off with distance on an inverse curve. Improving your equipment improves the curve, but there is no actual 'range', there is just increased hit probability. There would, for instance, be a fixed distance at which your to-hit modifier for distance is 40%, or 5%.
Ships past a certain ridiculous distance probably shouldnt show up in fire control so that you dont fire on them accidentally, but I do think that in general if someone is shooting at you then you should be able to at least try to shoot back and have some non-zero percent chance of hitting.
This misses my point, which is that having a falloff like this is
effectively the same as having hard limits on range. Neglecting BFCs for the sake of discussion, say that instead of a hard limits of 30,000 km my 10cm railguns have 100% accuracy at 30,000 km, 25% at 60,000 km, 6% at 90,000 km, and so on so that by about 135,000 km or so the hit rate is under 1%. Suppose my opponent has 10cm lasers at the same tech level, with 100% accuracy at 90,000 km and, following the same rule, 25% accuracy at 180,000 km. If the laser ships have equal or greater speed to my railgun ships, they can still sit at 180,000 km range or some similar value and enjoy their 25% hit rate while my railguns struggle to score even 1% hits. This is not substantially different from the situation with hard range limits, it's just a bit
fuzzier. I actually prefer having hard limits just because it makes the game mechanics clear and straightforward, so I don't see a reason to muddy the mechanics for 99% the same effects.