Air / Naval combat in TOAW IV

[golden delicious]

In our ongoing match of Fall Grau, Jeremy and I noticed that destroyers are more or less totally invulnerable to attacks from heavy bombers. Even without fighter cover, destroyers do not take any damage when targeted by literally hundreds of B-17s. Now, the B-17 doesn't have a special anti-shipping flag, but various heavy bombers were used widely in an anti-shipping role in the war, and it's guaranteed that they could sink destroyers- it took me two minutes to find an example and I'm sure there are many others. Conversely, the B-17s were able to hurt battleships fairly well (though perhaps not as well as I would like)

I had a play around and I think the culprit is likely to be the very high "Agility" rating provided for the destroyer equipment line in the default database. I don't see a way to edit this directly, but swapping the "light naval" for a "medium naval" flag reduced the rating. When I ran my tests again, sure enough, the destroyers start taking hits- though the results are still pretty pathetic.

I guess I have a series of questions here:
1) Has anyone else had this issue and what did you do to resolve it?
2) Is there a way to directly edit these stats on the equipment line or is it only possible by changing the flavour of naval flag which is set?
3) If I do change the naval flags, what other implications will there be? Note that I'm not interested in ship to ship combat, at least in this scenario

The result I want is (pause for effect) what we had in TOAW III, where naval units had only a limited ability to defend themselves against determined air attack if caught without fighter cover.

[sPzAbt653]

Be advised that I have no idea about any of this technical stuff, but I remembered reading something about it so I looked for it and found this:

Naval Attrition Divider
(1-1000) – This is the same as the normal Attrition Divider but applies to naval combat only. The normal Attrition Divider does not affect naval combat. A setting of 10 is neutral. A setting of 5 doubles shots. A setting of 20 halves shots, etc. Note that it also scales naval combat supply costs.


19.4.2. Step 2: Determine the Number of Shots/Attacking Planes
Note that this is where the Naval Attrition Divider is applied – scaling the number of shots.

Number of attacking planes = Assigned x (2 x Proficiency + Readiness + Supply) / 4 / (Naval Attrition Divider/10)

Fractions from this are evaluated as the percent chance of one more plane. Each resulting plane attacks individually and is evaluated for hit/miss, penetration/damage individually. This is done for each type of plane in the unit.


Note there is also now an .nqp file in addition to our normal .eqp file. I have not ever looked at this file but it seems that naval values in IV can be modified. A naval person would have to respond on this.

[golden delicious]

Note there is also now an .nqp file in addition to our normal .eqp file. I have not ever looked at this file but it seems that naval values in IV can be modified. A naval person would have to respond on this.

OK this in particular is extremely helpful. This file seems to store the secondary characteristics which come with "Light Naval" etc. This led me to the relevant section of "What's New", which explains that extra lines can be added and how to leverage them in the scenario. The manual says the .nqp file is no longer required since its contents are embedded in the scenario- but I don't see a way to edit them directly from the editor so I'll stick with the file.

This means I can tweak the agility figures as much as I want to get the relative loss rates for different warship types, then use the Attrition Divider to scale up and down the overall loss rate accordingly. Much more testing needed- but I'm no longer in the dark.

[Curtis Lemay]

Note that agility ratings are halved when in an anchorage.

Also, note that I also edited agilities in my Pearl Harbor scenario - since everything was in port and at peace. BBs were given agilities of 1.

Note that this was only possible because this scenario only covered the sneak attack. If it was a campaign, those BBs would have been permanently hamstrung by those ratings.