Moderators: wdolson, MOD_War-in-the-Pacific-Admirals-Edition
ORIGINAL: Zemke_4
APs were hardly ever sunk during the war and should not be in the game. I also agree that the landing troops should suffer much more than the ships.
Another improvement would be to allow an order for a TF to do multi-day bombardments, currently it is a one shot deal and the bombardment TF sails away.
ORIGINAL: usersatch
I think sinking APs to represent sinking LC/Higgins boats is not accurate, because the APs are taken completely out of the transport chain from the West Coast to wherever. If there were task forces of LCs running troops across the Pacific, then I could see the parallels. I've lost damn near 20 APs at Mili and Ponape alone, with the joyous Saipan looming in the near future. I think CinCPac would have a real issue with losing the transport capacity of two divisions at two piss-ant islands.
Would it be possible to have LCs added in to the mix without the huge micro-management effort normally required? Perhaps, each AP and AK has an option to "load" them like they do troops. When you are loading your troops at base, you also load landing craft. So you dont have to form a TF with 99 LC--it's automaticly done in the background of the game--limited by the LC resources you have available at that port. Your amphib TF pulls up off shore, and the troops hit the beach at a rate of how many ever LCs you have previously loaded. Now, the LCs get hammered, as in real life, and the APs stay relatively safe, as in real life.
BTW-how DID they get the small LCs to the battle? Were they towed behind the APs or were they carried in other ships?
Nevermind, answered my question here:
http://www.ussrankin.com/id34.htm
ORIGINAL: bradfordkay
Wiki says that no US APs were lost to shore batteries in WW2, for what it is worth.
ORIGINAL: Jim D Burns
ORIGINAL: bradfordkay
Wiki says that no US APs were lost to shore batteries in WW2, for what it is worth.
The same is true for LST's, I don't think any were lost to hostile fire in the war. They were not allowed to move into shore until the beach was secured, but in game they get shredded every time.
Jim
ORIGINAL: Don Bowen
When designing the Amphibious Invasion process for AE, we went to the trouble of looking up the line of departure distance for several major invasions in the Pacific. The AE functions will generate transport ranges (from shore) well within these historical ranges. Transport locations and line-of-departure would of course be set for the shortest reasonable run in for the landing craft.
ORIGINAL: Nikademus
I would mention that part of the reason, a big part, that no AP's were lost was because the Allies chose their locations with care and brought an overwhelming weight of support along with them. They tended to avoid assaulting places with heavy CD defenses.
ORIGINAL: Don Bowen
To answer a couple of questions:
The Line of Departure is randomly selected within the range of historical distances. We checked a number of the major amphibious invasions in the Pacific and tallyed up the line of departure data that we could find. A patern developed and we set up a random distance calculator to approximate it. Quite an interesting thread on it in the development forum.
I suspect that higher than historical losses are largely caused by non-historical invasions. I would cite lack of proper preparation, too weak amphibious TFs, improper ships for the job, and target locations that are either over developed by the opponent or a difficult historical choice.
It is entirely possible that additional tuning might be required. However, it is the process in AE (and other games that I know of) to use some sort of random to generate different results each time the game is played. Randoms also give the "benefit" of a chance of unusual outcomes - the outnumbered winning, etc. Simply put, it's a bitch to tune random events. Besides, the amphibious invasion routines are just meant to emulate the process, not duplicate history to the finest detail.
I'm no expert on this subject but it seems to me that, historically, there was a distinction between coastal defence guns and beach defence guns; I don't know if this is modelled in the game. The former were intended to engage ships far out to sea and for this purpose required complicated range-finding and gun laying equipment. (In occupied Europe they were controlled by the German Navy; the Army was responsible for the beach defence guns.) True coastal defence batteries were usually sited to protect naval bases, major ports and strategic waterways from seaborne attack; for this reason, amphibious forces usually avoided such places like the plague! (Imagine if the Allies had tried to launch a direct assault on Le Havre, for example.
) In WitP the hexes are 40nm across, so an attacker could be some distance from the base and still be in the same hex. I still think the CD gun effects in the game are about right, however, in that they discourage invasions of major enemy bases without adequate preparation.
