[WAD] ASW Patrol Auto-Setting to Weapons Free

[gpotter511]

All -

An unusual one here: I have noticed that when I create an ASW Patrol mission for one particular side (herein marked "NATO"), the mission comes out of the Mission Editor with ASW ROE set to "Weapons Free".

This, despite the fact that my Side ROE clearly indicates ASW ROE is "Inherited, Tight".

I have attached a stripped-down version of the custom scenario that this is occurring in.

Any suggestions? Is this functioning as intended? Is there some way to prevent/disable this? I am concerned players of a scenario will unintentionally start a shooting war merely by engaging in patrols they assume will not involve weapons release.

Thanks,
Geoff

[Dimitris]

Hello,

IIRC this is a deliberate design choice. There are a few reasons behind this:

* ASW in general (particularly in wartime) is a "shoot first, ask questions later" business, partially because of the stakes involved. A good example of this is that the RN almost depleted its ASW weapon stocks in the Falklands conflict, shooting at underwater contacts that turned out to be mostly fish flocks and whales.

* We've had numerous "my P-3s are never dropping torps on subs"-style "bug reports" from players that had created ASW missions and overlooked that the WCS setting was inherited from the side level (which was typically set to TIGHT). This, combined with the difficulty of getting a hard ID on underwater contacts (this is one of the reasons for the "shoot first" attitude in RL), led to their ASW forces almost never engaging submerged targets, even bonafide threats. So we decided to make the WCS setting for this mission type "aggressive by default".

You can of course always dial it back to more conservative, when you create the mission.

[gpotter511]

Thanks, Dmitris. So, reasonable to expect players to properly tend their ROE in this situation?

Much appreciated!