Crew experience
Exp (day/night)
Number of Ships Surviving
55/45-------------------------0
70/60-------------------------17
85/75-------------------------101
Ship Class and Nationality (Allied Damage Control ON)
Ship ------------
Number of Ships Surviving-------------
Durability
CV Kaga-----------------------16-------------------------------134
CA Mikuma--------------------44-------------------------------52
DD Akigumo------------------49-------------------------------10
CV Enterprise----------------14-------------------------------79
CA Northampton-------------48-------------------------------35
DD Craven--------------------50-------------------------------6
Total Japan-------------------109
Total US-----------------------112
Captain’s Naval Skill
Naval Skill---
Number of Ships Surviving
20--------------15
50--------------17
80--------------14
Captain’s Leadership Skill
Leadership Skill*---
Number of Ships Surviving
20----------------------7
50----------------------17
80----------------------16**
*The editor field for leadership is just called “skill”
** The only CVs surviving other than the high crew exp cases were 2 times a leadership 80 Kaga
Captain’s Inspiration Skill
Inspiration Skill---
Number of Ships Surviving
20-----------------------21
50-----------------------17
80-----------------------13
Captain’s Admin Skill
Admin Skill---
Number of Ships Surviving
50-------------------17
80-------------------17
The effect of crew experience was obvious and clearly a strong effect. In game terms this would seem to be a disadvantage for the Allies as their ships start with lower experience and it is very hard to “train” your ships.
The effect of Allied Damage Control was not obvious in my test though admittedly the test was not set up for that. I hypothesize that ship survivability is somehow related to durability. The higher durability Japanese ships in this test made up for most of the Allied Damage Control advantage of the lower durability allied ships. The net effect was that the allied ships appeared only slightly more survivable than the Japanese ships (or slightly less so in the case of CVs). This hypothesis is called in to question by the fact that the DDs survived more often than the CAs on both sides. See the table above for Ship Class and Nationality. Note this is only my hypothesis and the test does not confirm or deny this.
Another clear result though is the obvious lessened survivability of the CVs. The only CVs that survived were high crew experience except 2 times a Kaga survived with Captain leadership 80. These 2 exceptions are likely coincidence and in any case are not significant. The reason for this is not clear, only the effect, but I would hypothesize that because fires on a CV are a much more serious danger that the code reflects this with some negative dice roll modifiers. It only makes sense and is another good example of the attention to detail that went in to the development of this game.
The tests for Naval skill and Admin skill do not bear significantly different results. I didn’t check admin 20 because I had used up my 10 ships of each type and was trying to keep the test a bit more manageable.
[A in the figure]The case of Leadership 20 is interesting because it could show a weak correlation between low leadership and survivability. I call this the Captain’s “stupid” penalty. Note he does not get a bonus for being “smart” only a penalty if his leadership is low.
The case of Inspiration is also interesting. It appears to show that a low inspiration Captain is more likely to save his ship than a high inspiration Captain. I’m not sure if the results are statistically significant however and in any case it is only a weak correlation. (Compare to crew experience to see a strong correlation).
As a check on the data I counted the total number of ships surviving per trial and plotted the distribution of this. The data is clearly not Normal and would seem to be randomly distributed between some upper and lower boundaries.
