Fires

[Nikademus]

Question/comment about fire levels. They are either being handled in a different way from Grigsby games in the past that i am familiar with or else the numerical values must be radically different.

In games past, in general, any ship that suffered from 10-15 "Fire levels" or more had a serious situation on it's hand and one would have to hope that they had a high damage control rating as the higher the FL, the greater the chance of additional fire levels being acumilated.

In the old Carrier Force/Carrier Strike games.....any ship that had 20+ fire levels was in serious trouble and rarely was able to extinquish such a massive blaze or prevent it from piling up additional damages.

So when i had my first taste of "massive fire levels" courtasy of an ammo storage explosion on one ship and a fuel explosion on another, and then saw the intimidating fire level indicated the next turn (40 for one......53!!!!! for the other), i automatically assumed that these two ships were toast....destined to burn uncontrollably till they either sank, were scuttled or blew up.

I ended up being quite suprised when both ships managed to put the fires out. More suprised since they were Japanese and did not benefit from the US damage control bonus.

So far i hav'nt seen any ship surcomb to fire....all have been reduced and put out (though add'l damages have been suffered)

So i guess my first question is......in UV what really constitutes a serious fire level? 50, 60 , 70 Fire levels? Its nice to see that even heavy fire damage can be beaten as opposed to 'always' being fatal so i'm not saying the routine is totally screwy, but the way it is now it does seem to make fire levels a much less worrisome threat than say floatation damage

Also, at what point are carrier ops prohibited due to the efforts to fight fires and prevent mag explosions or airplane detonations?
Last night i was able to conduct air ops off the carrier Zuikaku even though it had a fire level of 25!! That seemed a bit far fetched to me though i was'nt complaining at the time :p What about floatation levels or System damage. I dont recall seeing this in the manual but i havn't been able to print it yet so apologies if its in there.

Speaking of said floatation level damage....Kudos on the code in that dept.......MUCH improved over previous games done by Mr Grigsby and company. Progressive flooding effects have always been a weak point there, especially in the tactical games such as Warship, Carrier Force and Carrier Strike. Often i could sail home even with 90% floatation damage, confident that no more would acumulate even though there was supposed to be a 'routine' that checked for add'l flooding. Here, if a warship suffers heavy FL damage, especially over 70%.....watch out! even the Americans cant breathe easy. I had the Saratoga eventually go down after taking five torps giving her 77% flood damage after the attack. Though the crew fought bravely, and managed to reduce it at a couple points, eventually the effects of progressive flooding tipped it to 100% and she went down. Much more realistic than games past. The 1 day turns stretch this battle out a bit long but thats unavoidable, at least its there though and i was really pleased to see that even though it was my carrier going down. No more "Pacific War" type situations where ships can take 12+ torpedoes and still stay afloat simply because the overall damage rating hadn't reached 100% :rolleyes:

[Supervisor]

Last night i was able to conduct air ops off the carrier Zuikaku even though it had a fire level of 25!! That seemed a bit far fetched to me though i was'nt complaining at the time What about floatation levels or System damage.

It says that flight ops are only allowed until the combined system & floatation is greater than 50 (pg. 111).

[Nikademus]

50!

wow.....not your father's fire level in this game. :p

[ratster]

It could just be a case of randomness, I had the Yorktown take 1 torpedo and 1 bomb hit and sink the same turn, conversly the Shokaku took 7 bomb and 3 torpedo hits and made it back to Truk(then Japan).

Really, unless odd results like this happen dozens of times in successive games, I believe it's to early to make it suspect. I assume the beta-testers would have caught this sort of thing(if it was not working properly).

[Jason629]

Old paradigms are being broken down left and right........I cant tell you how many unconcious assumptions I am having to take out of my thought processes.

[brisd]

Those combat reports can definitely be off. While it took two hits to sink the Yorktown (bad luck for sure, she is a tough ship), the IJN probably got a report of three torps and five bomb hits. Same with the reports you get for the damage you do to themt. I will be keeping an eye on the battle damage reports in my games to come. Those of us that can sift through the fog of war will be most successful in these games.