Some points of discussion

[elmo3]

Doesn't the game have fog of war with regard to reporting hits and even sinkings?

[The Warden]

ORIGINAL: Adam Parker

Related to this is the extreme vulnerability that I'm finding, of my US ships/CV's in the 1942 scenarios. I haven't seen any evidence of superior US damage control. Things just sink quickly and the brilliant bomb/torp aim of the Jap AI isn't helping! [X(][:)]

After getting some results that seemed odd to me I opened up the Wake scenario in the editor and checked the fire control and damage control ratings of the American and Japanese carriers. It turns out that the Japanese carriers actually had BETTER fire control ratings and identical damage control ratings. Is this really historically accurate?

[Massattack]

ORIGINAL: elmo3

Doesn't the game have fog of war with regard to reporting hits and even sinkings?

In "options" you can choose to have "accurate combat results" ticked if you want to remove FOW for hits and sinkings. Sighting reports are also subject to FOW.

Regards

[Nugget]

ORIGINAL: Adam Parker

Hi Nugget, one issue affecting this will also be that we don't know where the bomb's/torps have hit and therefore can't gauge the criticality of them in terms of survivability. Did they graze the destroyers? Did they impact areas that could be water tightened etc?

Related to this is the extreme vulnerability that I'm finding, of my US ships/CV's in the 1942 scenarios. I haven't seen any evidence of superior US damage control. Things just sink quickly and the brilliant bomb/torp aim of the Jap AI isn't helping! [X(][:)]

How have you fared playing vs a US AI in the scenarios you've experienced this dilemma? Is the US AI less able to cripple your Jap TG's as well? I've yet to try playing as the IJN.

Its true you don't know where the bombs and torps have hit, however considering how small a destroyer is this shouldn't make that much of a difference, espcially when it comes to torpedoes. The very nature of a torpedoes lends itself to great damage to any ship as they are designed to strike below the armour belt, of which a destroyer doesn't have any anyway!

The good news about all this was that I have played as the IJN and I've noticed the same results, USN ships are easily put down (early in the war anyway) and IJN ships are decidedly harder. However the more I play, which unfortunately isn't as often as I would like, the more results are balancing themselves out.

I've only tried the IJN in a handful of the early war scenarios and I've found it extremely easy to win with them. But then again I've found it easy to win as the USN later in the war too. Its a very good balance of challenges throughout the game. Its when you swap them around that it becomes fun! I still haven't managed better than a draw as the USN in the Battle of the Coral Sea yet!

[Nugget]

ORIGINAL: The Warden

After getting some results that seemed odd to me I opened up the Wake scenario in the editor and checked the fire control and damage control ratings of the American and Japanese carriers. It turns out that the Japanese carriers actually had BETTER fire control ratings and identical damage control ratings. Is this really historically accurate?

I believe at the start of the war this would have been accurate however this changed rapidly as the Americans very quickly learnt from their mistakes and it didn't take them long to have some of best damage control and fire prevention systems of the war.

[CapnDarwin]

Nugget,
 
A lot of the game is good luck, timing, placement of units (or more to the point using the weather as cover), and searching in the right areas. I just finished playing my first time as the Americans at Coral Sea and took a decisive victory by heavily damaging one main IJN carrier forcing it to retire early in the fight, then sinking the other main carrier 2 days later. Only the Shoho got away clean. My carriers never saw an IJN scout (that I'm aware of). I was also able to harrass other minor groups with land based air. I try to be really careful and defensive as the US force and counter punch when a group is sighted. I sacrifice torpedo attacks to get in dive bombers at range to keep my location secret as long as possible.
 
All in all a fun game! [:)]

[Staggerwing]

In the USN, every sailor is trained in damage control, but not so in the IJN - so when damage control teams are decimated in an attack the Japanese ships are in deep kimchee whereas the USN vessels have a decent chance.

I was under the impression that this service-wide phenomenon of all sailors being
trained as firemen first regardless of actual job was the result of what happened
on the USS Forrestal in 1967 (when John McCain's A-4 was struck by an malfunctioning
rocket while loaded up with bombs on the flightdeck). More than a hundred personnel were
killed IIRC.

[Prince of Eckmühl]

A couple of points about damage in the game:

U.S. carriers go down more often than their Japanese counterparts because they take more hits. While they should be able to absorb more punishment because they were better built and had superior damage control capability, so long as about fifty-percent of IJN ordnance is finding its mark, the American carriers will suffer horribly. And I think that this is realistic. The way for the U.S. player to limit the scope of the catastrophe is to disperse his carriers as much as possible.

My only beef in this regard is that such a low percentage of U.S. VB an VS score hits. I believe that the dive-bomber aircrew are under-rated. These weren't kids fresh out of flight school. "Training" with the fleet had been vigorous in the six months before and after Pearl Harbor. If the hit percentage went up, the sinkings of IJN carriers would go up proportionately. Even in this, however, I'd like to do more analysis of the combat results, USN VB and VS attacking carriers, before stating this overemphatically.

What I would raise holy-hell about at this point, however, is the tendency of both sides carrier a/c to go after escorts. Even this is a tangle, though, because it's not always completely clear what's happening. For instance, did that flight attack a destroyer (which were darn near impossible to hit, btw) knowing full well that they were essentially wasting an opportunity to damage or destroy a critical enemy asset, or because the leader thought that all the carriers in the TG were already neutralized? Obviously, it makes a big difference, but because the inner workings of the CaW are so much a mystery to us, as is frequently the case with these games, we never really know.

PoE (aka ivanmoe)

[bradfordkay]

ORIGINAL: Staggerwing

In the USN, every sailor is trained in damage control, but not so in the IJN - so when damage control teams are decimated in an attack the Japanese ships are in deep kimchee whereas the USN vessels have a decent chance.

I was under the impression that this service-wide phenomenon of all sailors being
trained as firemen first regardless of actual job was the result of what happened
on the USS Forrestal in 1967 (when John McCain's A-4 was struck by an malfunctioning
rocket while loaded up with bombs on the flightdeck). More than a hundred personnel were
killed IIRC.

I got this information from Shattered Sword (p277).

"First, the total number of damage-control personnel on board a JApanese vessel was drastically lower than on a comparable US warship. Whereas in 1942 a US carrier could effectively number almost every one of its nonaviation staff as being able to contribute to damage-control efforts in some capacity, a Japanese carrier might only have between 350 and 400 men trained out of a creww of 1500-2000."

It is possible that Parshall and Tully mistook modern USN methods for those used in 1942, I think that is unlikely considering the level of research they performed in the creation of their work.

I think that after the Forrestal incident the USN increased the amount of damage-control training its sailors received, but that in WW2 every able bodied seaman did receive a fair amount of such training.

[Gregor_SSG]

The US learned its lessons about damage control the hard way, but it did learn them. Progress could be uneven, a war damage report on the loss of the Hornet states that although the fires started by the attacks were eventually extinguished, they were fed by excess clothing, upholstered furniture and the like, which should already have been removed. However the same report considered that overall damage control and salvage efforts on the Hornet were improved over those employed when the Yorktown was lost.

In this, as in so many other areas, the Japanese preferred to ignore the lessons of history, and paid the price.

Gregor

[NimitsTexan]

ORIGINAL: Prince of Eckmühl

A couple of points about damage in the game:

U.S. carriers go down more often than their Japanese counterparts because they take more hits. While they should be able to absorb more punishment because they were better built and had superior damage control capability, so long as about fifty-percent of IJN ordnance is finding its mark, the American carriers will suffer horribly. And I think that this is realistic. The way for the U.S. player to limit the scope of the catastrophe is to disperse his carriers as much as possible.

My only beef in this regard is that such a low percentage of U.S. VB an VS score hits. I believe that the dive-bomber aircrew are under-rated. These weren't kids fresh out of flight school. "Training" with the fleet had been vigorous in the six months before and after Pearl Harbor. If the hit percentage went up, the sinkings of IJN carriers would go up proportionately. Even in this, however, I'd like to do more analysis of the combat results, USN VB and VS attacking carriers, before stating this overemphatically.

What I would raise holy-hell about at this point, however, is the tendency of both sides carrier a/c to go after escorts. Even this is a tangle, though, because it's not always completely clear what's happening. For instance, did that flight attack a destroyer (which were darn near impossible to hit, btw) knowing full well that they were essentially wasting an opportunity to damage or destroy a critical enemy asset, or because the leader thought that all the carriers in the TG were already neutralized? Obviously, it makes a big difference, but because the inner workings of the CaW are so much a mystery to us, as is frequently the case with these games, we never really know.

PoE (aka ivanmoe)

Maybe formally, but everything I have read would tend to back up the idea that in practice, at least everybody on the US ships knew enough to help out.

This would have been a great question to ask my grandfather (a petty officer on the USS Walker 1943-1945), if he had not passed away last year.

[GoodGuy]

ORIGINAL: NimitsTexan

This would have been a great question to ask my grandfather (a petty officer on the USS Walker 1943-1945), if he had not passed away last year.

Are you talking about the destroyer USS Walker (DD-517)?

http://history.navy.mil/danfs/w2/walker-ii.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Walker_%28DD-163%29

I guess he could tell quite a few stories.