These ships were given battleship-grade armament to overpower existing armored cruisers and were intended to fight in the battleline with battleships, much as had the two armored cruisers had done in the Battles of the Yellow Sea and Tsushima during the Russo-Japanese War. While more powerful than existing armored cruisers, the appearance of the British in 1908 with their armament of eight guns and speed of rendered these ships obsolete before they were commissioned. They were reclassified as battlecruisers in 1912.