Suggestions for Fleet Organisation enhancements

[mrchuck]

Yet another list...

Having now played with Fleet Organisation a fair bit, I think it could definitely be improved. I like setting up divisions and it definitely does help in battles, in that you're less likely to have a configured division slowed down by an old clunker that got thrown in randomly.

Can this be displayed on a per-Area basis as well? It is typical in real fleets for the regional commands to be segregated even though the current setup gives you the overview. It'd be good to have both, with an option to break the overview by region. The FO tab displays the location of the division, but doesn't sort by it which would be easier to read.

I would like to be able to view Atlantic Fleet, Baltic Fleet, Med Fleet and so on separately.

Make FS a 'division' too to make them easier to spot and manage especially if there are lots (e.g. GB). Provide an option to rotate ships on FS back to a home area with a right click, and to remove from division and add to FS if you need to keep up the tonnage. Managing ships on FS atm is a pain of varying sizes depending on who you're playing as.

When setting division roles, it'd be really good if the editor could remember what was last set if all you want is to change is e.g. 'Support' to 'Screen' and leave the assignment the same. Or if you want to keep the role and just change the parent division.

Highlight DD divisions which are less than 5 ships to make it quicker to assign reinforcements.

Provide an option to sort divisions by ship type. This can be more or less achieved with 'Ships in Service' except that SiS shows you non-divisional ships like KEs and AVs which clutters things. FO does not seem to sort when you click on a column.

Once I have steam turbines, I generally rebuild my CAs and a lot of the time they end up as BCs in the 1900-1915 period due to very heavy primary guns. However they do not get removed from CA divisions automatically. Same goes for rebuilding old destroyers to KEs. Kind of annoying to have to go back and fix this by hand. Some smarts here would be nice.

I have to say I found the old division editor more readable but I can't put my finger on how exactly.

[MaximKI]

Thanks for the feedback! We'll consider some of these for future improvements.

[mrchuck]

One small update to this. I have found, more or less by accident, that the game does a better job of managing DD divisions that I do.

So I've modified how I use FO:
--put everything bigger than a DD into a division as before, with associated roles and lead assignments
--Just leave the DDs as a resource pool and let RTW allocate them.

This makes it more fiddly to strategically move things--before you just moved the lead division, and everything subordinate would be moved automatically. With this scheme, you need to 'Move ship/s' manually to shift the DDs around. But this is a small drawback compared to the simplification of other management, e.g. keeping DDs divs up to strength after losses, which starts to get tedious when you have more than a handful of destroyers, some of which might be needed for TP and so on.

One benefit I like about doing it this way, is that if you do have send DDs to trade protection, the oldest and least capable ones will always be at the top of the list, and they are ones I can most easily spare for this purpose. And you don't have to worry about possibly emptying a division in the process.

[WLRoo]

On the other hand, permanent DD divisions can gain experience which I understand reduces the risk of the divisions misunderstanding orders, missing turns etc.; and may increase their efficiency in combat.

Permanent divisions also have the benefit that you can ensure your better/more suitable Captains are leading (e.g. Average Aggressive/Torpedo Expert).

[mrchuck]

I'm trying a compromise solution, which is to assign the DDs to divisions but not subordinate them to anything and leave them as Independent.

This seems to work reasonably well.

[mrchuck]

Been thinking about a better way of doing Fleet Organisation after playing USA for a while. With this one, as with GB, you will at some point need to deal with global commitments out of various bases/areas. At the moment this is quite fiddly and difficult to maintain.

Would it be possible in a future release to use the Ships in Area display to provide a drag-and-drop interface to assign ships to divisions within an area, rather than the cumbersome spreadsheet used at the moment?

This could work in conjunction with ship movement as already implemented. You work out what forces you want in a particular area, e.g. Pacific Fleet, Atlantic Fleet, Caribbean etc, and the then organise them from there.

Seems to me this would better model how this sort of thing was actually done.