The cursed TF

[acepedro45]

I just got through a puzzling carrier battle...well, I should say, the AI just had a carrier battle with my 3 "possums."

None of my planes flew a mission and my three carriers were slaughtered. Would a more experienced hand mind looking over the settings on the smouldering wreckage of the japanese fleet and helping me figure out what went wrong? Before the Lexington and Hornet consign the flattops to the deep with a follow-up, that is.

Before this disaster, I had 23% of sorties left, although I can't figure out when the the 77% went for the life of me. To my knowledge, no strikes had even flown since I pulled into port last time and filled up to 100%.

Some background: earlier in the game this same TF had the unbelievably bad luck of getting caught in a surface intercept in the middle of the ocean. No matter, I thought confidently, since we were more or less evenly matched in force. The AI had two CAs, a Cl, and about 4 destroyers. I had more destroyers, two CAs of my own and a CL, plus massive superiority in night fighting and also the dreaded long lance. Somehow, I managed to lose 2 destroyers and a CA sunk outright, with only superficial damage to his ships. I gritted my teeth and consoled myself with the fact that morning would bring a red dawn to the US raiders. They were in range, albeit my hex was cloudy in the morning, and my spotters found them. No strikes were launched in the afternoon, although we were both in clear hexes. As flabbergasted as I was at the time, it seems that should have been my first clue something was terribly wrong with the settings.


Anyways, if someone is willing to look over my saved game, I'd really appreciate it. Is there a way to post it on the forum or do you guys just email it to one another?

In addition, true or false: the only effect of the "max react" setting is to move the tfone hex closer to an enemy carrier TFwhen one is detected and in the specified range. I.e., even if max react is set on zero, planes should still fly out and destroy the enemy where he is found? At the time of this calamity I was attempting to position myself 5 hexes away from the enemy carriers, within the radius of my planes but far out of devastator range.

Thanks

[rogueusmc]

Things to check:

1. Had you hit a base before you engaged the ships?

2. Were your escorts assigned a target base maybe?

3. Were the range setting for you air groups set to where the OPFOR was in range?

4. Morale and fatigue looked good?

5. Op points for your ships (are they set to refuel or anything?)

Just a few places to start.

[Mike Solli]

Do you have more planes than pilots in each of the daitai? That will cause then not to fly.

You may just have had terrible luck. It happens. When I was learning the game, I had the entire KB find 2 US carriers and the US carriers sank 3 of the Japanese CVs. It happens. This was against the AI too.[:'(]

[niceguy2005]

I'm probably not experienced enough to review your settings, but a few questions which might point you in the right direction are:

1. Did you have planes performing naval search and actually spot his carriers?
2. Did your CAP fly?
3. Did your TF do anything unusual like refuel that might have eaten up TF op points?
4. Were your carriers over loaded with planes?
5. Was it very bad weather conditions? i don't know that this would prevent your sorties, but it might.

Are you playing very hard? The AI cheats big time on very hard - I think enemy planes actually fire photon torpedos.

[acepedro45]

I am certain everything was fine for your points 1-4.


From what I understand, I had refueled my destroyers during the "night" phase since they were a bit low. But it only took 250 ops points to do this so it should have been finished by morning, when my carriers did nothing (except shoot their AAA guns furiously at the swarms of Dauntless SBDs). Also, if my original post wasn't clear, the carrier engagement took place about a week after the surface battle, not immediately. Other than a mild curiosity about why I came off so badly during the night surface battle and the misfortuneof being intercepted by a bombardment TF in the middle of the ocean, it wasn't all that important. More troublesome was the lack of a carrier strike against those same cruisers the next morning and later when my planes again did not fly against the American CVs.

I appreciate the help in trying to master this complex game though!

[acepedro45]

Mike,

photon torpedoes...haha.

No, the difficulty was historical.

I had about 22 planes in each group and 19 (more or less) pilots. Every group was short at least one. Does that matter? The CAP flew fine and performed well, even though there were more Zeroes than pilots.

niceguy:

1. Spotted them fine with land based Emilies 10% of my bombers should have been looking too.

2. The CAP flew and made a fine show of it.

3. We refueled a little at night for 250 ops points but the way I understood it was that 1000 op points = 12 hours. so I should have been ready by morning.

4. The carriers did not have too many planes.

5. The weather was fine.

I have another question: if there is bad weather in your hex, it means that you can't fly, but also that no one can fly against you right?

Appreciate it

[ADavidB]

I have another question: if there is bad weather in your hex, it means that you can't fly, but also that no one can fly against you right?

No - unfortunately, you can be "socked in" and your opponent can still fly in and wipe the floor with you. No one understands the rationale behind this, but it is how things go.

Fundamentally, you should never attempt a carrier battle except when you have:

- Full fuel
- Full pilots
- Full sorties
- Rested pilots
- High morale pilots
- High skill air group leaders
- High skill admiral in charge of your TF

The AI maximizes all of those things and more that you can't control, therefore the AI will often smack you badly in carrier battles.

Good luck -

Dave Baranyi

[ADavidB]

Anyways, if someone is willing to look over my saved game, I'd really appreciate it. Is there a way to post it on the forum or do you guys just email it to one another?

If no one else offers, I'll look at your save later this evening. Email it to me at anthony.baranyi@sympatico.ca .

Dave Baranyi

[niceguy2005]

ORIGINAL: acepedro45

I have another question: if there is bad weather in your hex, it means that you can't fly, but also that no one can fly against you right?

Appreciate it

I would have to check the rule on this, but I think precip, or heavy precip just means that planes may not fly, not that they won't, but don't quote me on that.

It can be just really bad luck too. Maybe you need to get some Japanese priests to exercise the demons off the ships. [X(]

[ChezDaJez]

I had about 22 planes in each group and 19 (more or less) pilots. Every group was short at least one. Does that matter? The CAP flew fine and performed well, even though there were more Zeroes than pilots.

If your air groups are short of pilots, there is an excellent chance that they will not fly or fly with much fewer aircraft. It only takes being short one pilot for this to happen under v1.6.

I'm not sure if this has been addressed by any of the later patches.

Chez

[tsimmonds]

Some background: earlier in the game this same TF had the unbelievably bad luck of getting caught in a surface intercept in the middle of the ocean. No matter, I thought confidently, since we were more or less evenly matched in force. The AI had two CAs, a Cl, and about 4 destroyers. I had more destroyers, two CAs of my own and a CL, plus massive superiority in night fighting and also the dreaded long lance. Somehow, I managed to lose 2 destroyers and a CA sunk outright, with only superficial damage to his ships.

Ships in a CVTF are assumed to be screening the valuable CVs, and not to be looking for a surface action. Any ships not in an SCTF will be heavily penalized in a surface action. A CVTF should ideally be accompanied at all times by an SCTF.

I gritted my teeth and consoled myself with the fact that morning would bring a red dawn to the US raiders. They were in range, albeit my hex was cloudy in the morning, and my spotters found them. No strikes were launched in the afternoon, although we were both in clear hexes. As flabbergasted as I was at the time, it seems that should have been my first clue something was terribly wrong with the settings.

Surface actions cost the participants many op points. The CVs, having participated in surface combat, probably had no op points remaining to conduct air operations.

[acepedro45]

Irrelevant, even before you posted I was wondering if something like what you said was modeled in the combat engine...just like the battle of Samar, the escorts would put themselves in compromising positions to protect the flattops.

Dave, I think the problem was that I refueled the night before, but I appreciate the offer to look over my save.

Anybody out there have any explanation of the ops points system?

The reason I thought it would be fine to top off my escorts the night before the carrier engagement (which I saw coming) is the following explanation from the manual:

"Refueling, both in port or at sea, takes time and may slow down or prevent the TF from moving during the 12-hour period which in which the refueling occurs."

"Operation Points (or OPs) reflect the time spent refueling, replenishing ammo, and loading and unloading of cargo. These actions reduce the movement of a TF during a Resolution Phase. During an Orders Phase, if a TF refuels or is ordered to load troops, the TF information Screen will reflect the amount of time already used in Operations Points. Every TF has 1000 Operation Points in each 12 hour Resolution Phase. Thus, if a TF refuels and the display shows a ship has used 300 Operations Points, 30% of the 12 hours has been expended."

I took this to mean that my ships wouldn't move as fast during the night (which was fine, I had them positioned exactly where I wanted them to ambush the Yanks). I thought that the morning would bring a second phase in which I hadn't used any OPs at all. Did I misinterpret something?

[rogueusmc]

I just play it safe and not let them refuel in possibly hostile waters.

[michaelm75au]

Yes. It has been fixed in the 1.7x patches.
Michael

ORIGINAL: ChezDaJez

If your air groups are short of pilots, there is an excellent chance that they will not fly or fly with much fewer aircraft. It only takes being short one pilot for this to happen under v1.6.

I'm not sure if this has been addressed by any of the later patches.

Chez

[rtrapasso]

ORIGINAL: michaelm

Yes. It has been fixed in the 1.7x patches.
Michael

ORIGINAL: ChezDaJez

If your air groups are short of pilots, there is an excellent chance that they will not fly or fly with much fewer aircraft. It only takes being short one pilot for this to happen under v1.6.

I'm not sure if this has been addressed by any of the later patches.

Chez

It was also "fixed" in previous patches, iirc.[8|] I think only time will tell if it is really fixed or not.

EDIT: This applies to not just carrier squadrons, apparently. It's a real pain when your CAP decides to sit out a round of fighting at a critical juncture.

[niceguy2005]

ORIGINAL: acepedro45


Anybody out there have any explanation of the ops points system?

The reason I thought it would be fine to top off my escorts the night before the carrier engagement (which I saw coming) is the following explanation from the manual:

"Refueling, both in port or at sea, takes time and may slow down or prevent the TF from moving during the 12-hour period which in which the refueling occurs."

"Operation Points (or OPs) reflect the time spent refueling, replenishing ammo, and loading and unloading of cargo. These actions reduce the movement of a TF during a Resolution Phase. During an Orders Phase, if a TF refuels or is ordered to load troops, the TF information Screen will reflect the amount of time already used in Operations Points. Every TF has 1000 Operation Points in each 12 hour Resolution Phase. Thus, if a TF refuels and the display shows a ship has used 300 Operations Points, 30% of the 12 hours has been expended."

I took this to mean that my ships wouldn't move as fast during the night (which was fine, I had them positioned exactly where I wanted them to ambush the Yanks). I thought that the morning would bring a second phase in which I hadn't used any OPs at all. Did I misinterpret something?

I am not certain of how the system works exactly, but you are right that if you used only 250 op points, your fleet should be able to do other things. The next question is what other things did it do? We know that you launched CAP. Did the TF also move? My guess is that although you only spent a few op points on refueling, that was enough to put you over the top on being able to lauch a strike.

[Tom Hunter]

I suspect your planes did not fly because the number of pilots was less than the number of planes.

One key difference between a very experienced player and an inexperienced player is the very experienced guys spend a substantial amount of time reviewing their CV TFs before combat, and often watch them closely all the time.

If I think there is ANY chance of combat I check all the squadrons to make sure they have pilots.

I try very hard to be sure that fuel is topped off when there is no chance of combat, so that the ships are ready to go when the time comes, and not wasting ops points on the critical day.

I run CVs with very low damage so that they are harder to spot and more likely to launch if they take bomb damage.

CV battles often come down to your readyness on a particular day. I am always amazed at the people who allow that readyness to run down for no really good reason.

Hopefully you have a save from a day or two before the turn and you can re-run things with better settings to see what happened.

[Skyros]

I thought I read somewhere that if CVTF are running around at full speed that it would diminish the chance for launching. Is this true? I guess it would eat up op points.

[acepedro45]

I did some experimenting playing both sides to see if I could figure out what went wrong. I am pretty sure the problem was that I did not have enough pilots to fill out the squads. I am just now starting to learn the Japanese side after a few goes as the Yanks, so I was trying to fill the carriers gradually with experienced pilots as they became available from the pool. (This was the long coral sea scenario, #4 I think, where there are not enough trained pilot replacements to fill out your carrier airgroups).

The lesson learned was "Don't do that again." By accepting aircraft replacements but not untrained pilots, you apparently clutter your carrier decks with pilotless planes and make sure that your planes fly in reduced numbers, if at all. I am wondering which is the best choice:

1. Not accept plane replacements for every squadron, only accepting replacements for squads that you can fill up with trained pilots, leaving you less than a full complement of planes on board but no green pilots, or

2. Accept aircraft and pilot replacements because more planes can't hurt even if they are crewed by guys experienced in the 30-40 range.

Any thoughts? Does it depend on the situation?

Another question that I still haven't been able to puzzle out is the OPs. I haven't managed to duplicate that on the test runs yet to my satisfaction. Like niceguy said, I only used 250 points, and in my mind, I used them during the night phase. I didn't move anyplace, just sat there and waited for the Americans to run into my trap. If, as the manual says, there are 1000 ops in each 12 hour phase, and I used 250 the night before, my guys still had nine hours to shoot the shit and do sudoku puzzles all night before the sun even came up (250/1000 = 3 hrs / 12 hrs). Shouldn't I have had a full thousand ops points in the morning, ready to launch CAPs, strikes and whatever else I felt like doing, just as a normal day?

[acepedro45]

Slightly off topic,

This was not my first debacle at sea in WITP. Most of them time I have been able to figure out what went wrong and take a lesson from it, but the progress is slow. The game is unbelievably complex and the documentation is...well, a bit lacking. (My favorite part of the manaul is when it takes 4 pages to show bases with troops, then ships, then A/C, then each possible combination).


People in this forum seem to have a much more in-depth understanding of the game mechanics, and most of them credit their UV games as a primer to WITP. I have never played UV, but would it be worth my while to read the manual from UV to aid WITP play?