Fire control for shore batteries

[thedoctorking]

I am defending a shore bombardment mission. My capital ships have Director fire control, but I just noticed that my coast defense battery only has central firing. You would think that shore batteries, being located on rocks, that are things that don't move, would be more accurate than ships.

[WLRoo]

You would indeed think so, and hypothetically one shore based gun is the equivalent of 3 ship-based guns.

Yet practical examples tend not to bear this out, possibly due to the tendency to use old guns to equip the batteries.

For example, in WW2 both Britain and Germany had batteries in the Dover-Calais area, the Germans to support Sea Lion and the British to counter the German guns. Neither battery had much success in sinking ships.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dover_Strait_coastal_guns

[thedoctorking]

Maybe the shore guns could be simulated in game with older guns (-1 or -2 instead of the shipborne 0s, whatever you as the player swapped out of your cruisers/BBs in the last refit) but their fire control should be the best available. I think there should be much better control over coast defense in the game anyway, with players permitted to design shore defense structures, some techs (shore-based torpedos and missile batteries, for example), and for sure the ability to site them where you think they would be useful. It's really frustrating to pay for a battery and then find it sited somewhere no enemy is ever going to go - inside the excluded zone of a port, for example. Historically, countries built a lot more coast defense batteries than ever appear in the game. I was down in the San Francisco Bay area a few months ago and went for a hike on the Marin Headlands and there were literally dozens of facilities there, ranging from Civil War era forts down by the water's edge to a missile battery up in the hills several miles from the ocean. I'm currently playing GMTs Battle For Normandy, and the Germans have maybe 50 shore batteries scattered around just the Normandy area.

[WLRoo]

On the other hand players siting batteries was banned because they get too good at knowing where they are needed and thereby saturating bombardment and landing sites with defences - imagine trying to press a landing against six 6" batteries and four 4" batteries.

I've suggested a hybrid system - whereby there's a series of fixed sites for batteries, and some are limited in the max calibre they can support.

[thedoctorking]

Why are there a limited set of bombardment and landing areas? I can see the landing sites would be limited to places where there are beaches, but that's a lot of the coast of a bunch of places. For shore bombardment, that could take place pretty much anywhere, though urban areas where critical infrastructure would be located close to the coast would be obvious choices. Presumably, a defender would know to set up shore batteries near those places, like the guns on the Marin Headlands are protecting the entrance to San Francisco Bay, a major urban area with a lot of critical infrastructure. But if you were going to carry out an amphibious invasion of California, you'd have a lot of choices.

I have noticed that when I have a shore bombardment mission against France in my current game (playing as Italy) I am always directed to a spot that is more or less in the Narbonnaise regional park between Perpignan and Béziers - a nice area, but I can't image what they would be shooting at.

The Americans and Brits and Canadians pressed a landing operation in 1944 against something like 50 shore batteries ranging from 4" (105mm) to 8" (207mm). They had hundreds of ships to shoot at the batteries, though, plus enormous amounts of air power. I've never gotten fleets anything like the WW2 situation in any RTW game.

[WLRoo]

I guess it's because of how the mission design is set up, and yes it would be nice to have more locations.

Nearly every time you get a bombardment target, it's a military encampment (you used to be able to right click your own, and it would always seem to be some regiment or other).

Hopefully we can set up more options in the expansion pack, and even more hopefully some of those designs can become new mission templates in the future.

As for fleet sizes, I have managed that...in 2 when I applied a 'historic fleets' save (not really a mod).