Operation Olympic

[nanni]

I tried a couple times this "what if" scenario, playing the Allies, but it's frustrating. Before having the land units sail to their landing beaches, I went on the air unit display and put every one of my air units, except the bombers, on "air superiority", as a precaution against the kamikaze.
However, when the land units then started their passages to shore, they were one after another systematically "evaporated", presumably by kamikaze.
Is this realistic? By the fall of 1944 the Allies had undisputably command of the air in the Pacific, and Olympic was supposed to take place in November 1945. The kamikaze did an awful lot of damage in the last year of the war, but still, through a lot of effort, the Allies succeded in containing them. But from the mayhem they cause in this scenario, it would seem like Allied air superiority was just wishful thinking.
Any ideas?

[Lobster]

The Japanese had reserved 5500 suicide aircraft, 1300 suicide subs of all types and a number of 'piloted bombs' to cause as much damage to the American forces before and during the landings on Kyushu focusing on troop and equipment transports. The plan called for initial attacks on U.S. carriers, followed by continuous night and day air assaults on amphibious forces as they approached.

Imperial Army divisions were positioned to meet any forces that reached shore, fighting to the last man. Civilians were armed with bamboo spears to attack American forces with. They were supposed to jump off cliffs instead of surrendering.

War games conducted by the Japanese high command thought they could eliminate a third of the American forces while they were still at sea.

I would imagine the American naval forces would be massive and the carriers and transports would remain far enough at sea to take care of the vast majority of Japanese aircraft before they reached the invasion forces. Okinawa and Iwo Jima would have looked like a side show. Iwo and Okinawa put U.S. long range fighters (P-51) in range to support the invasion force. Not sure how the suicide subs would have fared.

In reference to your scenario landings. Highly unlikely the Japanese could have prevented landings. But the U.S. expected up to 4 million U.S. casualties. The Soviets would have fared much better and likely would have occupied all of the northern islands and much of the main island since the lions share of Japanese forces were located to face the Americans. Japan would have become another Korea.

[golden delicious]

I tried a couple times this "what if" scenario, playing the Allies, but it's frustrating. Before having the land units sail to their landing beaches, I went on the air unit display and put every one of my air units, except the bombers, on "air superiority", as a precaution against the kamikaze.
However, when the land units then started their passages to shore, they were one after another systematically "evaporated", presumably by kamikaze.
Is this realistic? By the fall of 1944 the Allies had undisputably command of the air in the Pacific, and Olympic was supposed to take place in November 1945. The kamikaze did an awful lot of damage in the last year of the war, but still, through a lot of effort, the Allies succeded in containing them. But from the mayhem they cause in this scenario, it would seem like Allied air superiority was just wishful thinking.
Any ideas?

Hm. It may be you need to stack your embarked land units with friendly destroyers etc. Unescorted embarked land units are very vulnerable.

To your comment about realism, yes clearly there would have been lots of losses from kamikaze. But whole units evaporating? No.

EDIT: I opened the scenario. No, this is not kamikazes, this is Japanese coast artillery. You can mitigate this somewhat by escorting your embarked units as indicated above, HOWEVER, I would suggest that like a lot of scenarios this one, which was written by my old friend John Boomershine for an older version of TOAW, was never tested for even five minutes before releasing it in TOAW IV, and is hopelessly broken in the current version, as the coastal artillery is hopelessly overpowered. In the original release, the artillery would not have fired until the Japanese player's turn, giving the Allies plenty of time to get ashore.

[nanni]

Good idea. I'll try escorting. But yes, the game uses the word "evaporated" when a unit is eliminated.

[golden delicious]

Good idea. I'll try escorting. But yes, the game uses the word "evaporated" when a unit is eliminated.

See my Edit to the comment above. You might be out of luck entirely with this scenario. Even quite small coast artillery emplacements seem to be able to outfight battleships (hey maybe this new feature wasn't really tested at all when it was added?).

The only possibility might be to go into the editor and move all the coast artillery units to mobile status, this might prevent them firing on the Allied turn.

[Telumar]

EDIT: I opened the scenario. No, this is not kamikazes, this is Japanese coast artillery. You can mitigate this somewhat by escorting your embarked units as indicated above, HOWEVER, I would suggest that like a lot of scenarios this one, which was written by my old friend John Boomershine for an older version of TOAW, was never tested for even five minutes before releasing it in TOAW IV, and is hopelessly broken in the current version, as the coastal artillery is hopelessly overpowered. In the original release, the artillery would not have fired until the Japanese player's turn, giving the Allies plenty of time to get ashore.

The coast artillery in the scenario is deployed in Mobile mode btw. That came as a surprise to me as, like you, I assumed they would be set to a supporting mode (D, E, F, T). Well..

Bombing them massively by air before moving units into their range could help as they lose guns, readiness and might even go into reorg if you are lucky.

I set the Attrition Divider to 30 and the Naval Attrition Divider to 35 and also unchecked the anti-shipping flag with the 150mm Fixed Gun the sce uses for all coastal artillery. This remedied the situation a bit but not enough that you can say it feels realistic, although the Pac War is one area of WW2 i am not well literate so my judgement might not be too sound. Well, i was able to get units ashore although they took severe losses still, but only few evaps.

Design wise I think there are still some things that can be done to adjust further, like lower the proficiency of the coastal artillery units, try an even higher setting for the Naval Attrition Divider, play with the equiment editor and maybe lower AP strength or shell weight of the coastal guns. Edit: Set the Naval Critical Hit Scalar below 10 is also a tool one can play with.

HOWEVER, I would suggest that like a lot of scenarios this one, which was written by my old friend John Boomershine for an older version of TOAW, was never tested for even five minutes before releasing it in TOAW IV, and is hopelessly broken in the current version,

I am so with you in this. I have no understanding for this, especially as it took me maybe 15 minutes to look at the sce, to set the values I described and to conduct a first, although superficial test.

[golden delicious]

Bombing them massively by air before moving units into their range could help as they lose guns, readiness and might even go into reorg if you are lucky.

Tested it. The units are chock full of infantry equipment. It doesn't make a dent.

I would suggest stripping the actual coast guns out to a separate unit from the supporting equipment. If you do this, then when a naval unit enters range the battleships should annihilate the artillery quite easily since there are no other targets. This won't help unescorted embarked units, though. This on top of your other suggestions, particularly limiting the unit quality of the coast artillery, may help. It's also worth noting that, prior to D-Day, a lot of the serious gun positions were taken out in advance by various means and the assumption that they would all be there ready to blaze away at the transports is unreasonable.

I am so with you in this. I have no understanding for this, especially as it took me maybe 15 minutes to look at the sce, to set the values I described and to conduct a first, although superficial test.

I think that in traditional programming, a lot of testing is often skipped "I can see that the code works in this limited environment, according to the spec I wrote. Therefore this module is complete". AI development is flushing this out and revealing the need for proper end to end testing. [/foreshadowing]

[cathar1244]

For the scenario in question, given the limitations of the TOAW engine, perhaps the US forces should start on shore, with variable losses determined by the event engine.

[Telumar]

For the scenario in question, given the limitations of the TOAW engine, perhaps the US forces should start on shore, with variable losses determined by the event engine.

Also true. Or start off-beach that is in the sea hexes next to the invasion sites.

My (and I think also Ben's) issue however is more with the fact that legacy scenarios haven't been tested against new features. Technically the feature (new naval combat) works, but without scenario and situation specific adjustments, the results are "off-script". My point is that this was with the vanilla release of IV which players needed to pay for, not a (free) patch. Hence I would have expected a bit more thoroughness. But I wasn't around at that time and do not know who made decisions and why so there might have been a reason for this, I don't know.

The scenarios with naval combat elements that have been specifically designed for IV - I think most of them, if not all, by Bob - seem to work fine however.

So there are still limitations with the engine, though I think if done and tested carefully one could get results that are historically plausible. I *think*. Never tried it though

[sPzAbt653]

Here's an old thread:
https://forums.matrixgames.com/viewtopi ... 1#p4206641

Pertaining to this current thread, from the changelist:
Reset the Naval Attrition Divider from the Default setting of 10 to 100. See 16.24 in the Manual for effects.

I don't think this solves the issue of naval units being intercepted every round and in every hex moved into, but we do need to execute amphibious assaults carefully. I usually have to try the first couple turns several times before finally gaining a tenuous foothold somewhere

[Telumar]

My (and I think also Ben's) issue however is more with the fact that legacy scenarios haven't been tested against new features. Technically the feature (new naval combat) works, but without scenario and situation specific adjustments, the results are "off-script". My point is that this was with the vanilla release of IV which players needed to pay for, not a (free) patch. Hence I would have expected a bit more thoroughness. But I wasn't around at that time and do not know who made decisions and why so there might have been a reason for this, I don't know.

I should note that Bob is aware of this and has set according Naval Attrition Divider values for legacy scenarios: https://forums.matrixgames.com/viewtopi ... 3#p5236113

[Telumar]

Here's an old thread:
https://forums.matrixgames.com/viewtopi ... 1#p4206641

Pertaining to this current thread, from the changelist:
Reset the Naval Attrition Divider from the Default setting of 10 to 100. See 16.24 in the Manual for effects.

I don't think this solves the issue of naval units being intercepted every round and in every hex moved into, but we do need to execute amphibious assaults carefully. I usually have to try the first couple turns several times before finally gaining a tenuous foothold somewhere

Nice

I took the liberty to add a few more changes / adjustments to your version:

-Set Attrition Divider to 14
-Unchecked the Anti-Shipping flag with the 150mm Fixed Gun (Main Japanese coastal artillery gun in the sce) <- this really helps
-Added Supply points to the US amphibious forces staging areas (in the old versions they would retain the unsupplied status during the Japanese turn 1 which from what I saw most of the times lead to their total annihilation during the Jap counterattacks in turn 1. Being supplied now they are more resilient)

[sPzAbt653]

-Added Supply points to the US amphibious forces staging areas (in the old versions they would retain the unsupplied status during the Japanese turn 1 which from what I saw most of the times lead to their total annihilation during the Jap counterattacks in turn 1. Being supplied now they are more resilient)

That's a good idea, I should do that also.

[golden delicious]

The scenarios with naval combat elements that have been specifically designed for IV - I think most of them, if not all, by Bob - seem to work fine however.

The thing is, they don't have "naval combat elements"; they're naval scenarios, some of which have land elements. This is because the time/map scale combinations that work for naval warfare are very different from the ones which work for land warfare. A naval system to complement the land system would need to be more like the air system (which works great), with ships located in more static locations and running sea interdiction missions mid-turn.

[Telumar]

The scenarios with naval combat elements that have been specifically designed for IV - I think most of them, if not all, by Bob - seem to work fine however.

The thing is, they don't have "naval combat elements"; they're naval scenarios, some of which have land elements. This is because the time/map scale combinations that work for naval warfare are very different from the ones which work for land warfare. A naval system to complement the land system would need to be more like the air system (which works great), with ships located in more static locations and running sea interdiction missions mid-turn.

Now as you point it out this way, yes. They have scales like 25 km/6 hour turns and similar. Good point, I see.

I can report however that in Anzio 2km it works reasonably well, This is three-four dozen dedicated anti-shipping aircraft plus some lone coastal batteries versus two dozen DDs and Cruisers under strong fighter cover. Of course I had to deviate from standard values there too by setting the Naval Attrition Divider to 120 and using a .nqp file.

[Curtis Lemay]

Be sure to read section 19.6 in the manual, ending with this:

"Both of these formulae pose a tactic for the
phasing player: bring the entire fleet to be moved
through the interdictor’s range into its detection
before moving through. The more in-range targets
detected the less interdiction there will be per
individual move."

[Curtis Lemay]

The scenarios with naval combat elements that have been specifically designed for IV - I think most of them, if not all, by Bob - seem to work fine however.

The thing is, they don't have "naval combat elements"; they're naval scenarios, some of which have land elements. This is because the time/map scale combinations that work for naval warfare are very different from the ones which work for land warfare. A naval system to complement the land system would need to be more like the air system (which works great), with ships located in more static locations and running sea interdiction missions mid-turn.

One of the neat things in the update is the ability to vary the turn interval by event. So an invasion scenario could have a very short turn interval on D-Day, then increasing progressively to full turn intervals once past the beaches.

[golden delicious]

Be sure to read section 19.6 in the manual, ending with this:

"Both of these formulae pose a tactic for the
phasing player: bring the entire fleet to be moved
through the interdictor’s range into its detection
before moving through. The more in-range targets
detected the less interdiction there will be per
individual move."

This is moot because, in this scenario, a battery of 150mm coast guns seems to be able to duke it out quite happily with a battle group. As implemented, the coast gun reaction mechanic requires coast guns to be broken out to a separate unit in every scenario otherwise the infantry in the unit will soak up the phasing player's fire, giving the coast guns a huge advantage.

[Curtis Lemay]

Be sure to read section 19.6 in the manual, ending with this:

"Both of these formulae pose a tactic for the
phasing player: bring the entire fleet to be moved
through the interdictor’s range into its detection
before moving through. The more in-range targets
detected the less interdiction there will be per
individual move."

This is moot because, in this scenario, a battery of 150mm coast guns seems to be able to duke it out quite happily with a battle group. As implemented, the coast gun reaction mechanic requires coast guns to be broken out to a separate unit in every scenario otherwise the infantry in the unit will soak up the phasing player's fire, giving the coast guns a huge advantage.

From 19.6:

"Chance of surface interdiction per in-range surface
interdictor:

Target Value of Moving Unit or Stack / Target Value of
all detected in-range Units.

Note that if the moving stack is the only one detected,
then the chance of interdiction is 100%. Also, if
there are 100 friendly ships and 100 enemy ships in
spotting range, the chance of interdiction will be 1%
per ship, averaging 1 interdiction per moving enemy
ship – it pairs off both side’s ships (on average)."

So...if only one target is in range, it's automatically going to be interdicted. If it is one of dozens of targets in range, it has a chance to get through.

[cathar1244]

One equipment note ( in terms of values shown in the equipment file ), is that fixed gun equipment ( like the Japanese 150mm pieces ) has a defense strength of 10.

I expect this impacts the combat results against those guns. 10 might be okay in this case, but that fixed gun definition could be intended to represent fortified positions. The photos I've seen of Japanese installations for these guns were fairly open, a concrete foundation with no significant protection for the guns.