ORIGINAL: Bullwinkle58
ORIGINAL: dave sindel
Thanks for doing this testing Moose. And for posting the results and analysis. Had to have been time-consuming. Is it something MichaelM should look at do you think?
I don't think it's necessarily broken, but I also don't think there's any good place to go to understand the mechanism. I searched a number of ways on the topic and got lots of hits, but other than the Don Bowen posts I pasted nothing from a dev. Not saying there aren't any more, but I didn't find them.
Alfred's new manual ought to cover this I would think. So many Allied players have never seen 1945 that it's not a top subject here in the forum. But I know from AI games that it's a really important mechanism in the late game if you do get there.
There are more than 20 relevant posts from Don Bowen and JWE/Symon when I stopped counting plus 2 from michaelm. The best posts were made on:
Don Bowen
- 4 Aug 2009
- 18 Aug 2009
- 3 April 2011
JWE
- 29 Mar 2009
- 12 Sept 2009
- 8 July 2010
Both in this and in particular the other thread there has been some very erroneous statements made. I was going to continue with my recent policy of not bothering to waste my time giving the correct answer but as Bullwinkle has gone to this effort I have partly relented.
1. On what I have seen disclosed, I am not convinced there is a bug with the at sea rearming code
per se. It seems to be behaving in general accordance with how the devs have explained it in the past. There is some key data not presented which would make this clearer and which I touch upon below.
2. If the undisclosed data is not what I think it is, there is a possibility that a bug exists with bombardment task forces and that bug was introduced (or perhaps "awakened") with the change made in an early patch which introduced min distance/escorts not bombard etc aimed at conserving anti-aircraft ammo (which covers dedicated AA weapons and DP guns).
3. OP is a key factor in the process. Contrary to what some say, both the dispensing and receiving ships expend OP. The rate of expenditure is never completely visible to the player (one needs access to the code) and no dev has ever disclosed any OP expenditure rate for any action which consumes OP.
4. Contrary to what others have said in the other thread, small weapons have never been replenished first before the big guns. Look at the weapon system of any ship class and you will always find the "big" weapon system in weapon slot #1 and the descending weapon slots are occupied in order by decreasing "big" weapon systems. The rearming code first looks at slot #1 and proceeds downwards. (this is where the possibility arises of a bug associated with the bombardment change).
5. Much inaccuracy was also posted in the other thread re size of tenders required. There are two checks:
(a) Threshold check
Does the tender have on board supply points greater than or equal to the Rearm Cost of the "biggest" weapon (IOW the first weapon slot which needs ammo).
If threshold check is passed, then all weapons including the "biggest", are rearmed.
If threshold check is failed, then proceed to next "biggest" (as per weapon slot). Note there is no backtracking involved and again the bombardment TF change comes into play.
(b) Cost check
A successful threshold check then proceeds to both consume on board tender supply points (see point 6 below) as weapons are rearmed and in turn makes passing the threshold check more difficult subsequently as the tender will now have less supply points on board.
6. The rearm cost is detailed in the manual. For naval guns it is 2x the effect value. Thus the 16in/50 Mkk7 of the Iowa class has a rearm cost of 5400. They therefore need an AE/AKE with a cargo capacity of 5400 and have on board 5400 supply points. Once the tender has rearmed any weapon on an Iowa class, it will have dipped below the threshold check (see point 7) and cannot rearm the rifles of any other Iowa.
7. The amount of supply points consumed in rearming (there is a 2013 post from me on this) is:
[(Rearm Cost)(Number of Guns)(Ammo per Gun)]/2000
So if all 9 rifles on an Iowa expend 2 shells, and no other weapon system fires, the consumption is
(5400)(9)(2)/2000 = 48.6 supply points. Rounded up to 49, the tender will dip from holding 5400 supply points down to 5351 supply points (and hence failing the threshold check subsequently)
8. Just as OP expenditure rates have never been disclosed, the order in which ships within a TF are checked for rearming has also never been disclosed.
9. Refueling always gets done before rearming. In fact a port with zero fuel points is intended to not allow rearming. The recoding effort to alter that was not considered to be warranted.
Alfred
