surface engagement

akulas · Post by **akulas** » Sun Sep 21, 2003 11:29 am

so why does/did my allied surface tf(s) not engage...sat in the same hex with the enemy (retire/no retire, react/no react)...the only way i got them to even get a shot off was to bombard! did it several turns...day and night...in the open, non-shallow ocean...ijn tf spotted...all that jazz. (why, one wonders did the ai continue to stay in the same hex even?) not that it matters, but if i don't see that this was my error, then i'll be dumping this game pronto. i regret even spending time on it, just hoping that it would get better with the patches...not buying another either. patch 2.3, btw. found a few very odd things, read BUGS, regarding i would suppose array programming goofs...can live with those, but this was just plain way to silly for me to stomach. [hey i thought that it was like the old "war in the pacific" board game...i mean, hexes and all...very, very disappointed overall after playing for about a week.] not a rant, just hoping that it was my fault before this game gets recycled.

Bodhi · Post by **Bodhi** » Sun Sep 21, 2003 1:04 pm

If it is found to be you, do you get thrown in the recycle bin?

PzB74 · Post by **PzB74** » Sun Sep 21, 2003 1:28 pm

Don't see any reason for you to dump the game!

When this happens to me I blame it on 'unknown factors'....
The commander didn't receive updates about the enemies whereabouts and therefore wasn't able to engage in surface combat. Radio silence had been declared, fog or a local rain squalls hid the enemy etc.

You don't command the surface TF - that's the TF commanders job.
When you issue instructions to him he will try to follow them, but it isn't guaranteed that he will succeed.

Most often there will be a battle when 2 TF's spend the night together in the same hex... I think it's realistic that things doesn't always go as planned. In real life there are always one or more 'screw_up' factors' involved! :p

DJAndrews · Post by **DJAndrews** » Sun Sep 21, 2003 3:34 pm

What you describe is unusual unless the TF is messed up in some way (eg. out of fuel, ammo, docked, etc.) but it can happen. Remember that at the game scale the hex is 30 miles wide. This is why some TFs will miss mines, subs and other TFs in the same hex, on occassion.

denisonh · Post by **denisonh** » Sun Sep 21, 2003 7:37 pm

Whoa, Nellie.

akulas, send me the game file and I will take a look. I have played extensively and am rather proficient with surface forces.
I will give you a free diagnosis.

send to hd86@earthlink.net. Just send the turn prior, if you have it(If PBEM the game file prior and the turn replay)

regards, HD

Shaggy · Post by **Shaggy** » Sun Sep 21, 2003 11:28 pm

PzB wrote: When this happens to me I blame it on 'unknown factors'....
The commander didn't receive updates about the enemies whereabouts and therefore wasn't able to engage in surface combat. Radio silence had been declared, fog or a local rain squalls hid the enemy etc.

I agree. One of the things I like about this game is the unpredictable things that go wrong.

A recent "What the #&%^& were you thinking" moment I had was a carrier raid. There were several IJN surface TFs coming in and out of Rabal. I sent a carrier TF into range. There were two IJN TFs, 1 in Rabal and 1 at sea, both had DDs & CAs. 1 group of torp bombers, with no fighter escort, went after the IJN TF in Rabal. The IJN CAP massacered them. All the other dive and torp bombers, along with all the fighter escort, went after the TF at sea, where there was no CAP

So what happened? Did the fighters that were to escort the torp bombers get lost? Did the torp commander decide to go off on his own and disobey orders? Was there a missunderstanding of the orders? Was there too much rum in my TF commanders coffee?

No, what happened is the AI crunched some numbers and sent 8 unescorted torp bombers to Rabal. Just like the AI crunched some numbers and didnt give you your surface engagement. The AI is imperfect. But work with that, its more fun to think of the other reasons I gave and the reasons PzB gave. The humans fighting WW2 were imperfect also.

akulas · Post by **akulas** » Mon Sep 22, 2003 12:54 am

guys...well, it seems that this may be "just the way it is" as far as this game goes...thanks especially for the offer to analyze data. (didn't save any files, i just quit while giving a middle-finger salute.) guess i'll try "one more time" to see if this (mostly) enjoyable game balances out as still worthwhile. hope that it continues to hold good value for others as it evidently does for those who responded. must add, however, that it is openly hard to accept the things weird with this game (such as allied air transport moving japanese units) as being some kind of reality-flavoured FUBAR. thanks again.

Shaggy · Post by **Shaggy** » Mon Sep 22, 2003 1:36 am

akulas wrote: must add, however, that it is openly hard to accept the things weird with this game (such as allied air transport moving japanese units) as being some kind of reality-flavoured FUBAR. thanks again.

No that is a bug. I thought Id read it was fixed with one of the patches. I havnt had it happen but maybe it still does. Your right though, that couldnt be seen as a realistic human error.

akulas · Post by **akulas** » Mon Sep 22, 2003 10:53 am

well some other things have been so crazy as to almost be entertaining...my "last try" game (in progress) had a zero/nill/null air unit loaded on the lex...pictured as a bomber and described as a fighter...it got mutated from a torpedo unit i was tranferring...sheesh. it would seem...and i'm only guessing...that this happens when a unit fails transit for some reason, the program logic (read BUG) uses the lowest or "cell zero" value in an array or data table. in "real life" i used to see lots of those type problems in junior/unseasoned programmers. not a slam, just an observation.

ctid98 · Post by **ctid98** » Mon Sep 22, 2003 6:01 pm

Another more obvious reason your surface TF didn't want to engage would be because of the commander you had leading it. An aggressive and competent commander will gladly take on a superior force where as if you have a very careful officer that doesn't want to risk his ships he won't be so willing to engage. Imagine you have both commanders, yours and the enemies who are both on the shy side and you suddenly find yourselves dancing around the hex.

Put someone there with some balls and you'll soon find yourself heading after the enemy. Hope this helps.

PzB74 · Post by **PzB74** » Mon Sep 22, 2003 6:25 pm

ctid98 wrote:Another more obvious reason your surface TF didn't want to engage would be because of the commander you had leading it. An aggressive and competent commander will gladly take on a superior force where as if you have a very careful officer that doesn't want to risk his ships he won't be so willing to engage. Imagine you have both commanders, yours and the enemies who are both on the shy side and you suddenly find yourselves dancing around the hex.

Put someone there with some balls and you'll soon find yourself heading after the enemy. Hope this helps.

WELL, I sent Tanaka in on a surface combat mission to Gavigamana. 2 enemy transport TF's were spotted and my TF stayed a whole day without getting into combat.... So sometimes another 'explanation' must be found.

Blaimed it on bad communications

CommC · Post by **CommC** » Wed Sep 24, 2003 7:17 am

Someone please correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought the code was written such that surface TF intercepts were essentially impossible, i.e. two enemy TFs passing even in the same hex will not engage. There is no mission for a surface TF called "surface attack" .... or "naval attack".

The game (UV) was written that way because few to no surface battles occured historically between surface forces in open water. If you want to attack parked enemy transports trying to off-load an invasion force, you must conduct a "bombardment" mission and hope that your bombardment force engages the transports and escorting surface combat TFs that might be in the same hex before the bombardment.

CommC · Post by **CommC** » Wed Sep 24, 2003 7:28 am

Also, the icon you see for an enemy surface TF in a hex, does not mean there is a surface TF there, it means that was the hex where a sighting of a surface TF occurred during the last turn time period. By the time the next turn starts up again, the TF may have long since moved on, but you just see the icon representing the past sighting. Its not a concrete info that the enemy TF is actually there. Even if the TF is there, the hex is 30 miles across, well beyond the 16 miles or so visibility range at sea (and thats in good weather) the two TFs may well pass each other, never seeing one another.

Anyway, in UV, there is no such thing as a naval surface intercept. Wasn't progammed, and didn't really happen historically.

mogami · Post by **mogami** » Wed Sep 24, 2003 7:52 am

Hi, If there was an enemy icon in same hex as his TF then there was an enemy TF in the hex. However it might have been a submarine.

When 2 opposing surface type TF's end movement in the same hex and at least one of them has an offensive mission combat should take place. If not it is a bug.
Without a save (the order phase before this occurs) The bug can not be located and fixed.

2 TF's that pass through the same hex but do not end movement together will not fight.

What kind of machine (processer and memory) is producing these results?
make sure you close all TSR's and other programs before running UV. The program runs out of memory on turns where a lot of action take place on some machines (and crashes or produces strange results) If you have a turn or event you are suspect of. Reload game. Make sure only UV is running and run the turn over. (Normal turns will repeat exactly, memory or other problems can produce new results when fixed)

DJAndrews · Post by **DJAndrews** » Wed Sep 24, 2003 6:02 pm

Hi Mogami, am I understanding you correctly in you last reply... that re-running a saved turn will produce exactly the same result? This has not been my experience at all. I've run the same saved file a half dozen times and gotten different results each time I ran it. The results are similar, but different ships are attacked, different damages occur, etc. In experiments, I've seen results that vary from one side winding to the other side winning given the same input. Is this just an artifact of my machine and setup?

Just had a thought. Perhaps I get different results each time because I'm experimenting against the AI. The AI's orders may not be generated prior to my save. This could account for the differing results.

mogami · Post by **mogami** » Wed Sep 24, 2003 6:26 pm

Hi, DJ. The seed numbers that produce results are generated for the entire game on turn 1. So if everything remains the same then the turn should produce the same results. If something is being lost/jumbled because of memory then when it is used in a rerun the results will change.
I don't think the AI will issue the exact same orders if turns are rerun where it has this chance. If you are getting changes from files that have no new input to them then I think something is not working correctly.

Please do not take everything I say as gospel. I am not a programmer I am going by what I understand to be the case. This issue first surfaced as a result of replays (file 001) The replay should match exactly what the Japanese player saw during turn execution. Often this was not the case. (The replay often showed wildly different turn results.) The testers came to refer to this as "being out of sync" Some of the causes were different versions of the program, and one or the other machine having problems running the program (in the case of my machine, when I added memory I began having fewer 'out of sync' replays) I think a few operating systems also had their own set of problems.

I have had quite a few turns sent to me over the past 18 months that were from PBEM games where some of these strange results had taken place. When I ran the turn on my machine it produced a totaly new result. (Usally more in line with what the players sending the files expected) So while I can not clearly define all the things that can produce a 'bug' result I think a portion of them are not program related but machine related.

DJAndrews · Post by **DJAndrews** » Thu Sep 25, 2003 1:06 am

Hi Mogami, thanx for the information. I use a memory resident program running in the background to constantly free up RAM as it gets used for temporary storage. This speeds up the game processing a lot, but it may be what is causing the problem with the changeable results (based on what you've suggested). I haven't played a PBEM game yet and was thinking of trying it, but it would seem pointless until I get my machine to be able to reproduce results.

akulas · Post by **akulas** » Thu Sep 25, 2003 9:06 am

just to clarify...(1) the task force commanders [more that one in the same hex mutltiple times] had great big balls, (2) the ijn was composed of lots of surface ships including carriers, (3) odd that the "bombard" [why open water?] worked, (4) if the hexes are some 30-odd whatever miles then the ships in total involved were at least one-per-square-whatever, (5) if the rules are accurate...daylight surface engagements are possible. as for other theories on why the surface engagements didn't happen (including the computer???)...i'm trying to hold back on just how silly that whole thing was. say...on these bogus air units...anybody try to disband one? (be ready to have the game crash hard...XP and 98SE.)

mogami · Post by **mogami** » Thu Sep 25, 2003 9:16 am

Hi, There should have been a battle. It was a bug that prevented it. But without a save it can not be debugged.
Most of my early crash to desk tops were memory related. (I can't prove that but they stopped occuring after I installed more memory)

frank1970 · Post by **frank1970** » Thu Sep 25, 2003 10:39 am

akulas wrote:just to clarify...(1) the task force commanders [more that one in the same hex mutltiple times] had great big balls, (2) the ijn was composed of lots of surface ships including carriers, (3) odd that the "bombard" [why open water?] worked, (4) if the hexes are some 30-odd whatever miles then the ships in total involved were at least one-per-square-whatever, (5) if the rules are accurate...daylight surface engagements are possible. as for other theories on why the surface engagements didn't happen (including the computer???)...i'm trying to hold back on just how silly that whole thing was. say...on these bogus air units...anybody try to disband one? (be ready to have the game crash hard...XP and 98SE.)

Can one create a Bombardementforce with carriers??

surface engagement

surface engagement

thanks to most of you.

Icon

AI

thanks for the comments/ideas/suggestions...some clarifications...

it was a bug