Ridiculous Surface Combat Result

[mjk428]

ORIGINAL: Miller

@mjk428 - the two DDs lost at Wake were to air attack and coastal batteries - not an Allied ship in sight. Please try to find an IJN warship of DD size or above that was sunk by Allied warships prior to August 42.


As for: "Not that I'm interested in PBEM anyway, but who wants to play against someone that is only satisfied when pummelling the defenseless and then quits as soon as the tables turn?"

What a laughable comment. Any IJN player should expect to see half his fleet sunk by obsolete Britsh and Dutch warships and PT boats and like it or lump it? If I was the IJN player I would quit on the 8th December 41 the way the game stands at the moment.

You're missing the point. Six 5 inch-guns and the remnants of a fighter squadron repulsed an invasion fleet 4 days into the War in the Pacific. I've never gotten results like that in any of my games.

It's an odd standard you've created. How many opportunities were there prior to August '42 for the Allies to sink IJN ships in surface actions? Do you think there was something special about them that made them unsinkable? Because the failed invasion of Wake proves they could be sunk easily enough when fortune turned against them.

[jwilkerson]

ORIGINAL: Iridium

ORIGINAL: jwilkerson

Ok, here's one ... from report submitted by AE player:

Extreme ouchies, how many allied APs are there? Japan would have lost half of it's APs in that battle.[:D]

Yeah that one got my attention.

BTW, we are working on this area. For AE, we did add in what we now call some "wipe out" code. The idea was to enable more drastic results than we saw in stock, where a huge surface force could surprise a large unescorted merchant force unloading and only get 0-4 of the merchants before they got away. For most of the last year, this code has been working fine, but seems like in the last few builds, it got "adjusted" a bit too much in the extreme direction. We are readjusting it, and adding in some more improvements. Results are looking much better so far. We will not be going back to stock, because we are trying to accomplish some specific improvements, but we will be tweaking our improvements to get them to work the way we think they should!

[CV Zuikaku]

What about US Cl gunfire? Are their excellent hit rates are going to be toned down? A single US Cl in Dec '41 can wreck IJN battleships with ease. They just keep being hit with countless salvos- those Cls are scoring hits with ease from 20000 yards, 10000yds or 2000yds- night and day, all weather conditions- what is wrong???

[jwilkerson]

ORIGINAL: CV Zuikaku

What about US Cl gunfire? Are their excellent hit rates are going to be toned down? A single US Cl in Dec '41 can wreck IJN battleships with ease. They just keep being hit with countless salvos- those Cls are scoring hits with ease from 20000 yards, 10000yds or 2000yds- night and day, all weather conditions- what is wrong???

Interestingly these accuracy figures for the guns I've checked are all the same as stock (WITP) - so not sure we will change those - we haven't yet. Somethings change, somethings stay the same.

[CV Zuikaku]

ORIGINAL: jwilkerson

ORIGINAL: CV Zuikaku

What about US Cl gunfire? Are their excellent hit rates are going to be toned down? A single US Cl in Dec '41 can wreck IJN battleships with ease. They just keep being hit with countless salvos- those Cls are scoring hits with ease from 20000 yards, 10000yds or 2000yds- night and day, all weather conditions- what is wrong???

Interestingly these accuracy figures for the guns I've checked are all the same as stock (WITP) - so not sure we will change those - we haven't yet. Somethings change, somethings stay the same.

Don't get me wrong, I like new combat model very much... but... those Cls are nearly impossible to hit, and in 3 engagements they just smashed superior IJN forces at night... just wrecked the hell out of them taking only a few hits. So I sent BBs to hunt them down- they caught the Cl (Boise) on daylight- and she just smashed those BBs from 20000yds with some kind of 6" machinegun fire. And now, I am a bit puzzled, because this happens every time I meet US Cl. they just "machinegun" everything. And they smash BBs from 20000yds at daylight. I can post a save if that happens again... but I'm now somewhat short of BBs, CAs and Cls- all been smashed up or sunk by a few Cls... [:@] [&:]

[jwilkerson]

We're certainly looking at the accuracy ratings ... like 200 for US 5"/38 ... but as I said, these all seem to be matching stock.

Interestingly I went back and tested a bunch of surface battles in stock and compared results to AE ... and even to my surprise the results were much closer than I expected. I had the impression that our results were more different than testing has born out. Sure the "wipe out" code is new, but basic battles between similar sized groups of warships are producing the same range of results.

[Iridium]

ORIGINAL: CV Zuikaku

Don't get me wrong, I like new combat model very much... but... those Cls are nearly impossible to hit, and in 3 engagements they just smashed superior IJN forces at night... just wrecked the hell out of them taking only a few hits. So I sent BBs to hunt them down- they caught the Cl (Boise) on daylight- and she just smashed those BBs from 20000yds with some kind of 6" machinegun fire. And now, I am a bit puzzled, because this happens every time I meet US Cl. they just "machinegun" everything. And they smash BBs from 20000yds at daylight. I can post a save if that happens again... but I'm now somewhat short of BBs, CAs and Cls- all been smashed up or sunk by a few Cls... [:@] [&:]

Well, Boise was designed to be "machinegun" like but I'm thinking even with her very high ROF she hits a wee bit too often. This might be a result of one ship getting shots on all ships that fire on it though. How did Boise kill BBs? Tell me you didn't send some Kongos after her and they engaged at 1000 yards to get MG'd up by Boise at night....[:(]

Kongos have 200mm belt armor which happens to be a Brooklyn's main gun penetration maximum.

[jwilkerson]

In stock we used to call Boise a "BB" herself .. but that was because of her extra (typo provided) armor. At least that aspect has been addressed.

[CV Zuikaku]

Well, I really don't know what is happenning... maybe I just got a very bad luck... but it is strange to me. As I said... that happened every time IJN SC met US Cl... and when 4 IJN CAs are unable to hit Cl at 4000yds and 2000yds at night, while that single Cl is saturating all those CAs with devastating and accurate fire... and that CAs are even not surprised... and it is not year '44 then a big questionmark shows up over my head [;)] But if its just my bad luck, you can just ignore me... maybe I'm not to objective any more after such string of defeats... [:(]

[EUBanana]

ORIGINAL: CV Zuikaku
A single US Cl in Dec '41 can wreck IJN battleships with ease. They just keep being hit with countless salvos- those Cls are scoring hits with ease from 20000 yards, 10000yds or 2000yds- night and day, all weather conditions- what is wrong???

BBs are so screwed in this game. They were in WITP, they still are now.

Please make them better, heavy guns really were not so inaccurate that cruisers dished out more pain. Or there wouldn't be any battleships in history...

[jwilkerson]

Well has as been said, we are tweaking the model for patch 01 ... and the results look good thus far ... I don't think our tweaks will prevent any given result from happening but we could say that we are "norming" things a bit more.

[witpqs]

ORIGINAL: jwilkerson

We're certainly looking at the accuracy ratings ... like 200 for US 5"/38 ... but as I said, these all seem to be matching stock.

Interestingly I went back and tested a bunch of surface battles in stock and compared results to AE ... and even to my surprise the results were much closer than I expected. I had the impression that our results were more different than testing has born out. Sure the "wipe out" code is new, but basic battles between similar sized groups of warships are producing the same range of results.

Is it possible that - in general - 'little guns' are weighted a little to favorably compared to 'big guns'? Whether in ratings or in code I don't know, just speculating.

[jwilkerson]

If you look in the editor - for both WITP and AE you will see that this is true. Accuracy is very much inversely proportional to gun size.

[CV Zuikaku]

ORIGINAL: Iridium

ORIGINAL: CV Zuikaku

Don't get me wrong, I like new combat model very much... but... those Cls are nearly impossible to hit, and in 3 engagements they just smashed superior IJN forces at night... just wrecked the hell out of them taking only a few hits. So I sent BBs to hunt them down- they caught the Cl (Boise) on daylight- and she just smashed those BBs from 20000yds with some kind of 6" machinegun fire. And now, I am a bit puzzled, because this happens every time I meet US Cl. they just "machinegun" everything. And they smash BBs from 20000yds at daylight. I can post a save if that happens again... but I'm now somewhat short of BBs, CAs and Cls- all been smashed up or sunk by a few Cls... [:@] [&:]

Well, Boise was designed to be "machinegun" like but I'm thinking even with her very high ROF she hits a wee bit too often. This might be a result of one ship getting shots on all ships that fire on it though. How did Boise kill BBs? Tell me you didn't send some Kongos after her and they engaged at 1000 yards to get MG'd up by Boise at night....[:(]

Kongos have 200mm belt armor which happens to be a Brooklyn's main gun penetration maximum.

Well I sent Fuso and Yamashiro and Fuso was sunk by dutch CLs. They torpedoed her. Boise did not sunk BBs. Sent Ise and Hyuga after Boise. Boise scored some 30-40 hits (salvos) on every BB. From approx 20000-16000yds. Set them on fire... heavy fires, and wipin out the decks and superstructures from AAs ant secondary/tertiary guns. Those grenades just kept raining down and hitting... while both BBs were unable to score any hits... They'll live, but will be in a repair yards for a year. And I know about Boise's reputation, but this is a bit too much [;)]

[EUBanana]

ORIGINAL: jwilkerson
If you look in the editor - for both WITP and AE you will see that this is true. Accuracy is very much inversely proportional to gun size.

It should almost be the opposite, certainly at anything over pointblank range, anyway. A battleship is a far steadier firing platform than a destroyer is.

I presume rate of fire is handled separately.

[EUBanana]

ORIGINAL: CV Zuikaku
Well I sent Fuso and Yamashiro and Fuso was sunk by dutch CLs.

When the Japs landed at Kuching I sent PoW + Repulse + DDs in. They didn't 'lose' but they didn't do much damage. Emptied the magazines for no real result.

The next day Houston and Boise went in, and wiped out the Japs to the last ship.

Thats pretty crazy. PoW + Repulse have firepower orders of magnitude higher than a couple of cruisers.

Note that these were daylight engagements and I'm not talking about torpedoes, I know those are a great equaliser, but in pure gunnery, cruisers are demonstrably outstripping battleships.

As it is it looks like the most feared surface combat warship is a couple of Allied CAs or CLs out raiding.

[CV Zuikaku]

ORIGINAL: EUBanana

ORIGINAL: CV Zuikaku
Well I sent Fuso and Yamashiro and Fuso was sunk by dutch CLs.

When the Japs landed at Kuching I sent PoW + Repulse + DDs in. They didn't 'lose' but they didn't do much damage. Emptied the magazines for no real result.

The next day Houston and Boise went in, and wiped out the Japs to the last ship.

Thats pretty crazy. PoW + Repulse have firepower orders of magnitude higher than a couple of cruisers.

Note that these were daylight engagements and I'm not talking about torpedoes, I know those are a great equaliser, but in pure gunnery, cruisers are demonstrably outstripping battleships.

BBs were underrated in surface engagements in WITP, but in the AE are nearly useless. Yes, I only had a 2 engagements with my BBs so far- but 4 my BBs were included (with escorts) and 3 were heavily damaged and one sunked... to Cls which were outranged, outnumbered, outgunned... so I'm still asking how and with what allien/d technollogy? [:D]

[herwin]

ORIGINAL: jwilkerson

ORIGINAL: Iridium

ORIGINAL: jwilkerson

Ok, here's one ... from report submitted by AE player:

Extreme ouchies, how many allied APs are there? Japan would have lost half of it's APs in that battle.[:D]

Yeah that one got my attention.

BTW, we are working on this area. For AE, we did add in what we now call some "wipe out" code. The idea was to enable more drastic results than we saw in stock, where a huge surface force could surprise a large unescorted merchant force unloading and only get 0-4 of the merchants before they got away. For most of the last year, this code has been working fine, but seems like in the last few builds, it got "adjusted" a bit too much in the extreme direction. We are readjusting it, and adding in some more improvements. Results are looking much better so far. We will not be going back to stock, because we are trying to accomplish some specific improvements, but we will be tweaking our improvements to get them to work the way we think they should!

I mentioned my paper on how battles are terminated. The original study was an analysis of how to stop the Warsaw Pact on the ground. We discovered that the game with information collection that underlies engagement termination was basically poker! The open source publication was in Erwin HR (1997) The Dynamics of Peer Polities. In: Time, Process and Structured Transformation in Archaeology (van der Leeuw SE, McGlade J, eds), pp 57-96: Routledge. The more unbalanced the sides, the shorter the battle. Also, the decision process applies to both sides, independently of who's attacking or defending. You will get wipe-outs from time to time, but usually due to surprise.

[herwin]

ORIGINAL: CV Zuikaku

What about US Cl gunfire? Are their excellent hit rates are going to be toned down? A single US Cl in Dec '41 can wreck IJN battleships with ease. They just keep being hit with countless salvos- those Cls are scoring hits with ease from 20000 yards, 10000yds or 2000yds- night and day, all weather conditions- what is wrong???

Those heavy light cruisers were designed to operate with the battle line as scouts and to shoot up destroyers when they manoeuvre for a torpedo attack. They had more firepower than a battleship's main battery, but only against light targets.

[juliet7bravo]

ORIGINAL: jwilkerson

If you look in the editor - for both WITP and AE you will see that this is true. Accuracy is very much inversely proportional to gun size.

This might be true in absolute terms if you bolted a 6" and 16" tube side by side to a range bench. In reality, bigger guns are usually associated with better fire control systems (computers, optics (height, width)) and a steadier firing platform which make them more accurate in service. Generally speaking, bigger the ship, the better the fire control. Naval guns are inherently very accurate weapons, but it's all the ancillary fire control equipment that determines how effective/accurate they are at anything other than local mount control.