High Seas Fleet raiding

[EUBanana]

I tried to find the thread this was first mooted, but can't find it, so new thread!

Out of curiosity at the mooted tactic I tried a hotseat game to see the effects of setting the entire High Seas Fleet (and Austrian fleet) to raiding in the Atlantic. The entire French/British navy was set to patrol the Atlantic meanwhile.

The answer is, it blows the Royal Navy away in good order. I don't know if I was lucky on the two turns I tried it out on, but the only RN ship to manage to engage was their BC squadron (promptly roasted for its troubles) and a PD which got hammered by the German DNs.

In exchange around 6 British transports got toasted each turn.



...I'm curious what the mechanics for raiding are - I woulda thought raiding with a whole fleet would just mean a fleet engagement a la Jutland, in which the Germans would likely come off the worst, but it doesn't seem to work like that. I usually tried raiding with a few ships before, a BC or a CA on its own, but that doesn't seem to be the best approach - raiding with the entire fleet certainly seems to get results though!


It does strike me as rather inappropriate/unbalanced, though. Maybe I was just lucky and happened to be gambling and winning? In any case, even if the High Seas Fleet is eventually caught and pounded, its going to be catastrophic for Britain if these results are normal for the strategy.

[Shawkhan]

...This tactic modified somewhat, is what many of us playing the CP player are currently doing to both starve the British out of the war and to make the seas safe for German transports. This drastically reduces British production and ahistorically increases German production. In effect, it is a gamebreaker against an Entente AI. Your experiment is disturbing as you achieved the same effect as a human player for the Entente.
...Hopefully, this problem will be addressed in a forthcomiing patch.

[James Ward]

What happens if the entire British fleet is on patrol in the North Sea? Do the transports and raiders just ignore them and get through?

[Lascar]

ORIGINAL: EUBanana

I tried to find the thread this was first mooted, but can't find it, so new thread!

Out of curiosity at the mooted tactic I tried a hotseat game to see the effects of setting the entire High Seas Fleet (and Austrian fleet) to raiding in the Atlantic. The entire French/British navy was set to patrol the Atlantic meanwhile.

How can the Austrian fleet get past Gibraltar? Come to think of it, can the TE even base ships at Gibraltar; I don't recall seeing it on the list of available ports.

[SMK-at-work]

I suspect the problem is most easily solved by not allowing DN's and PD's to raid.
 
My understanding is that successful raiding depends mainly upon speed, as does catching of them......so allied battleships on patrol don't get into contact with raiders due to lack of speed - even if the raiders are themselves only PD's and DN's with the same speed.
 
this means the allied BC's (2 max) and CA's are the only ships that can catch raiders, and since half the raiders are DN's and PD's the allied ships get hammered due to superior firepower.
 
 

[SteveD64]

I was under the impression that only Bc's and Ca's were allowed to raid?   FYI I've never tried to raid with Dn's.

I've learned something new everyday it seems.

and by "allowed" I mean effective.

Maybe only Bc's and under should be allowed to go on raiding missions?

[Lascar]

ORIGINAL: CLEVELAND

I was under the impression that only Bc's and Ca's were allowed to raid? FYI I've never tried to raid with Dn's.

I've learned something new everyday it seems.

and by "allowed" I mean effective.

Maybe only Bc's and under should be allowed to go on raiding missions?

I agree, although CAs probably also be allowed to raid.

[SMK-at-work]

CA = armoured cruisers, so they come into Clevelands definition of being "under" BC's so being allwoed to raid - his definition is just the obverse of mine - I said PD's and DN's should not be allowed to raid, he says BC's, CA's and DD's should be allowed to....although I think perhaps DD's should not be allwoed to either as it's not really their job. 

[Joel Rauber]

Certainly PD's shouldn't be allowed to raid. I have mixed feelings regarding the DN's.



On a side night I'm finding the AI German subs to not be as effective as people have been suggesting against my Brit DD's and Transports. So I think we want to be careful about changing those rules I think until we get more data.


EUBanana, can you run a hotseat with CP raiders into the North Atlantic and lots of British Patroling the North Sea, I recall as a CP player against the TE AI having several raiders getting quite roughed up in the North Sea on their way to the N. Atlantic. Patrol the Western Med with the French in the hotseat.

[EUBanana]

Ah, the Austrians were raiding in Western Med, not the N.Atlantic.  [:D]

I tried one turn with the RN fleet in its entirety patrolling in the North Sea, with the Germans set to raid the Atlantic.  i dumped RN transports in the north sea/atlantic as targets.  The RN did manage to intercept the High Seas Fleet in greater strength than in my first test, but still not in enough strength to avoid ending up worse off in the engagement (one German DN took 9 hits, one RN BC took 11 hits, 3 transports sunk, 3 more damaged - I actually think the transports were lucky!).  The Atlantic ended up controlled by the Germans.  [:D]

I'm not sure what the mechanic is but at a guess it looks like there must be some interception roll made to stop raiders, and if the raiders are in serious force then those few who make the interception promptly get nailed.

Its a bit fiddly to test unfortunately given you can only do it on strategic turns.

I've had pretty dismal results with raiders being used in the (IMO) historical manner, sending out lone cruisers or battlecruisers, when it seems to me that limited attempts like that should be the way to use them.

But yeah.  Its definitely not the AI not sending ships out to sea which is the problem I think.  Granted you might get caught and hammered but in exchange for wrecking Britain's transport fleet and dishing out 1:1 damage on RN ships, I think thats probably a price worth paying.

Presuming that ship speed is a factor in raiding, perhaps ship speed should have a larger impact on success/failure with raiders, as well as perhaps the number of raiding ships?  I woulda thought a DN with speed 2 should have no chance at raiding compared with a battlecruiser or CA.  On the other hand, I think a lone BC should perhaps be more effective than it currently is.  I know when I send out a lone BC it promptly gets sunk 75% of the time.  Perhaps tweaking the impact of speed would have both effects?

(As an aside, I'm not actually sure how viable raiding with surface ships is, IRL it seemed pretty high risk with limited reward.  A few notable successes like Emden, but even Emden was hunted down and destroyed fairly speedily.   In 1939/1940 German raiders, while a headache for the Admiralty, and while achieving some success - Graf Spee sunk a lot of merchants,for example - pretty much without fail didnt make it back home).

[SMK-at-work]

The Bismark was supposed to raid surface shipping, and hte Konigsberg that exscapped from the Falklands had a serious impact.

Also the Gneisenau and Scharnhorst got out into the Atlantic in 1941 and sank 200,000+ tons IIRC - it was their success that inspired the idea to sortie the Bismark.  Disguised merchant ships such as the Atlantis, Wolfe & Seeadler sank a few hundred thousand tons in WW1 & WW2 also.

[EUBanana]

Mmm, alright.  Then raiding sounds like good stuff.

Still...  surely something needs doing about DNs raiding.

[Shawkhan]

...Since all the ship units are multiple ship units already, I think restricting the raiding mission to a single ship per sea zone would be the simplest solution to the problem.