Damage and refit questions

[engineer]

I don't know that it's that bad.  My understanding is that there are two competing factors.  Lower ID numbers get preferential repair, but ships with less durability are easier to repair. 
 
Early in about any campaign game of WPO or WitP, you'll reach a point where Pearl and the US west coast are clogged with ships getting upgrades and repairing battle damage.  My observations are:
 
1)  Ships with ongoing damage (floatation and/or fire) get those dealt with first with substantial improvement almost every turn (if you're in a major port with a yard).
2)  Very heavily damaged ships (sys damage at 75+) often get repair.
3)  Heavily damaged ships (sys damage 50 - 75) less often get repair.
4)  Damaged ships (sys damage 25-49) rarely getting repair, but low ID # ships do better
5)  Lightly damaged ships (sys damage under 20) frustratingly slow and durability factor dominates.  
 
If you would try to do a curve fit of damage versus the population, you almost have a hyperbolic distribution with a very few heavily damaged ships, a few more less heavily damaged ships, and a long tail of ships with 3, 2, or 1 points of system damage.    
 
Recently, I had the PoW and some subs in Melbourne.  PoW was getting a point removed just about every turn and was in the 30's, but then I brought in some AP's with 50-70% sys damage.  The workmen left the PoW and seemed to preferentially work on the AP's.  Once the PoW was the most badly damaged ship again, then she started getting repairs again.
 
The problem with SF as damage repair port is that once you're down to a few points of damage, your capital ships will lose priority against the flood of merchants and tankers.  A truly "gamey" solution to this would be to use the big yards at SF to get the big ships down to 10 or 15% sys damage and then sail down to LA or up to Seattle to finish the repairs. 

[Mike Solli]

ORIGINAL: engineer
A truly "gamey" solution to this would be to use the big yards at SF to get the big ships down to 10 or 15% sys damage and then sail down to LA or up to Seattle to finish the repairs. 

What's so gamey about that?

[engineer]

[blockquote]quote:

ORIGINAL: engineer
A truly "gamey" solution to this would be to use the big yards at SF to get the big ships down to 10 or 15% sys damage and then sail down to LA or up to Seattle to finish the repairs. 
[/blockquote]


What's so gamey about that?

 
Perhaps ahistorical is a better word.  If you go over the USNHS site many of the photos of WW2 ships are archival photo's taken at Mare Island at the end of overhauls documenting the changes performed during the refit.  IRL there was no problem prioritizing the yard work for warships so 100% of the work would take in the yard and the merchant ships would have to make due with whatever was available in the commercial port facilities.  I know that AE will fix at least some of that.    

[John Lansford]

Last night's turns confirmed my fears; the shipyards in SF continued to repair the SC's (now just a few of them with any SYS damage, nearly all at 0 now) while Saratoga and Maryland repaired one point of SYS damage between them.  Undocking the SC TF did not appear to help; they continued to repair damage even while undocked, but I believe this was from port repairs and not shipyard work.

[tabpub]

ORIGINAL: John Lansford

Why am I not surprised (undocked ships not gaining SYS damage)? If that is so it's yet another example of the game performing 180 degrees from what the manual says.

I checked on SF after each turn last night; right now only Maryland (SYS 14 damage) and Saratoga (SYS 31 damage) are disbanded in the port; every other ship has 0 SYS damage.

Meanwhile there are over a dozen SC's with 0-7 SYS damage docked at SF. Over the space of 3-4 turns those SC's reduced their overall SYS damage to 0-3, while Maryland and Saratoga eliminated one SYS point damage between them, and yes, repair points were being used every turn.

I'm fairly convinced that docked TF's will use shipyard repair points, and will reduce their SYS damage below 5 (either through port repair or shipyard repair). The shipyard repair routine appears to be choosing ships from both the docked and disbanded pool of damaged ships, so if you want capital ships definitely repaired you basically have to send them to a port where no transport/cargo convoys stop for supplies or LCU's. That rules out the Allies' best port, San Francisco for repair purposes...

Hmm...'best port'....I prefer LA for merchant shipping origin for that reason; allows SF to work without any worries over fixing things that shouldn't be worked on.
Besides, this 'fact' has been known for sometime now; if you don't want repair yards to work on less desirable ships in a hex, put 'em on P/DNR and undock them....
And a non-moving TF will accrue zero system damage as it is NOT moving; the manual is not 180 degrees off.

[John Lansford]

Except SF is where nearly all your LCU's show up for the Allies, so its either load them there and have the port try and fix your merchant ships, or march them to LA.
 
I believe the manual clearly says that the only way ships can repair those last 5 SYS damage points is if they are disbanded in a port, which is incorrect.  It also says that a docked TF will not add more SYS damage but doesn't come right out and say what happens if a TF is in a port and undocked.

[Mike Solli]

The manual is incorrect more often than not, especially with all the patches over the years.

[rtrapasso]

ORIGINAL: John Lansford

Except SF is where nearly all your LCU's show up for the Allies, so its either load them there and have the port try and fix your merchant ships, or march them to LA.

I believe the manual clearly says that the only way ships can repair those last 5 SYS damage points is if they are disbanded in a port, which is incorrect.  It also says that a docked TF will not add more SYS damage but doesn't come right out and say what happens if a TF is in a port and undocked.

If undocked - the ship is still at sea and generally accumulate damage from sailing around... if docked, ships will repair (esp. if at a repair facility - even though iirc the manual says otherwise)... if DISBANDED they will also repair.

[John Lansford]

ORIGINAL: rtrapasso

If undocked - the ship is still at sea and generally accumulate damage from sailing around... if docked, ships will repair (esp. if at a repair facility - even though iirc the manual says otherwise)... if DISBANDED they will also repair.

Yes, that is what I've concluded as well. It makes the shipyards a lot less effective since they'll grab both docked and disbanded ships to spend repair points on, and any TF that refuels at a port automatically docks. What is odd is you can load/unload a TF without docking it. Pearl Harbor is especially useless for repairs since there are always ships there unloading, loading or refueling from either the combat areas or the WC...

[Dino]

In my experience, SF repair yard is big enough to handle a couple of capital ships, as well as any transiting transports...just as long as you keep all the other damaged ships away.

[John Lansford]

In light of this new repair revelation on my part, I now take all the damaged/worn out subs that show up at Pearl Harbor and put them in a large, undocked TF that just sits there.  The port repair process works on them but the shipyard routine does not, leaving that for the more valuable and damaged ships I've got disbanded.  Same with DD's and AK's; put them in a TF but don't dock it so the port can work on them.  AP's, cruisers and capital ships get spread out among the various WC ports and Pearl Harbor where the AR's are waiting for them.
 
Now, do the specialized repair ships (AS, AD, AGP, etc) work on ships in TF that are not docked?  They ought to if the port repair process works on undocked TF's...

[Mark VII]

As SOP, I send all returning AK's and TK's straight to Vancouver to repair the "moving at sea" sys damage. By Oct 42 there was an average of 100 ships there repairing damage. i would probably get 2-6 ships back each day totally repaired without spending any repair points. Building Vancouver up to a level 9 port helps alot with this proceedure. Even had an AK hit by a sub torp that entered back in May with some 50 sys damage, its now down to 8. Since I had not suffered a "merchant ship disaster", I had plenty of merchies to spare and could afford waiting till they were fully fixed from their travel damage.

[Mark VII]

When I'm trying to repair CVs' or whatever is the priority this week, I move ships, especially DD's and subs to the Lahaina port. Once you feel safe from invasion, build Lahaina port up to level 5, bring in some AD's, AS's or AR's and some "free" progress can be made with sys damage but it is slow progress. That way these other ships are not stealing PH repair points and some damage may be repaired.

ORIGINAL: John Lansford

In light of this new repair revelation on my part, I now take all the damaged/worn out subs that show up at Pearl Harbor and put them in a large, undocked TF that just sits there.  The port repair process works on them but the shipyard routine does not, leaving that for the more valuable and damaged ships I've got disbanded.  Same with DD's and AK's; put them in a TF but don't dock it so the port can work on them.  AP's, cruisers and capital ships get spread out among the various WC ports and Pearl Harbor where the AR's are waiting for them.

Now, do the specialized repair ships (AS, AD, AGP, etc) work on ships in TF that are not docked?  They ought to if the port repair process works on undocked TF's...

[John Lansford]

I find it amusing that the game considers Lahaina as a "port".  IIRC Lahaina was the Pacific Fleet's alternate deepwater anchorage prior to the war starting, and was used because the shallows were hardly present right up to the beach.  What facilities were there were primitive at best, at least in 1941, but there was no way to protect the ships there from sub attack (one of the main reasons they decided on Pearl Harbor despite its one and only narrow entrance).

[engineer]

John Landford original:
I find it amusing that the game considers Lahaina as a "port". 

 
True.  Until the Pearl Harbor channel was straightened in the 1930's the Lahaina Roadstead was planned as the concentration point for the Pacific Fleet with a mine barrage and destroyer patrols planned against Japanese submarine attacks, but such a defense was recognized as problematic even then.  Kahalui on the eastern side of the island was a working port for the pre-war agricultural trade, but even today, I rather see it as a sort of "Level 3" port.  Hana also has a small anchorage.  This rather gets back into the terrain question where places like Lahaina, Eniwetok, Ulithi, etc. offered excellent anchorages but ports involve extensive shore facilities for cargo storage, machine stops, and industrial infrastructure.  In WitP terms, how much do you allow that there was an element of choice that the USA didn't elect to pave over West Maui with support infrastructure and pour millions of tons of reinforced concrete to establish berthing facilities on either side of old Lahaina town? 

[John Lansford]

I'm sure if they had wanted to, turning Lahaina into a functioning port during wartime would have been nothing more than an application of dollars, manpower and dynamite.  Fixing the anchorage into a protected location for ships, OTOH, would have been nearly impossible.

[engineer]

How many free variables go into determining port size?  The size of the anchorage is a clear variable.  The nearby space to accomodate facilities is a variable and is the best reason to cap the port sizes of some of the Pacific atoll anchorages.  You raised protection as a variable. Certainly places like Kagoshima, Anchorage, Sydney, SF, SD, and Seattle are excellent examples of that. However, I've seen photo's of the Pacific Fleet moored at San Pedro when they were based there in the 1930s and it seems no better protected than Lahaina, yet LA is major port. Victoria Harbor at Hong Kong could be easily netted for ASW protection, but at a certain point, the shipping will spill into Lantau Bay and that is wide open to the south like Lahaina.  Tokyo Bay is another place where the approaches have Lahaina sized openings to sea.   

[rtrapasso]

ORIGINAL: John Lansford

I'm sure if they had wanted to, turning Lahaina into a functioning port during wartime would have been nothing more than an application of dollars, manpower and dynamite. Fixing the anchorage into a protected location for ships, OTOH, would have been nearly impossible.

Depends on your definition of protected... it is considered a "sheltered anchorage" since it is sheltered by Maui (to the East) Molokai (North), Lanai (West), and to some extent Molokini and Kahoolawe (small islands to the south). Pouring protective concrete "moles" would have been expensive (to say the least), but there are other possible solutions.

For an idea of what American engineers could do if need be: the entire large airfield in Bermuda was built pretty much out of seabed. There is a lot more readily usable building material present in Maui than there is in Bermuda, however, the water is much deeper at Lahaina roads.

[Cathartes]

I believe the manual clearly says that the only way ships can repair those last 5 SYS damage points is if they are disbanded in a port, which is incorrect.  It also says that a docked TF will not add more SYS damage but doesn't come right out and say what happens if a TF is in a port and undocked.

What's weird in my experience is that I've seen docked ships repair down to 5 sys damage while docked in a port with a repair facility, but they won't repair past/below 5 unless disbanded. Recently a whole mass of PTs steadily repaired while docked at Pearl, but they all stopped at 5 sys damage and froze there for a dozen turns or so.  I then disbanded them and they quickly repaired to completion.

[rtrapasso]

ORIGINAL: Cathartes

I believe the manual clearly says that the only way ships can repair those last 5 SYS damage points is if they are disbanded in a port, which is incorrect. It also says that a docked TF will not add more SYS damage but doesn't come right out and say what happens if a TF is in a port and undocked.

What's weird in my experience is that I've seen docked ships repair down to 5 sys damage while docked in a port with a repair facility, but they won't repair past/below 5 unless disbanded. Recently a whole mass of PTs steadily repaired while docked at Pearl, but they all stopped at 5 sys damage and froze there for a dozen turns or so. I then disbanded them and they quickly repaired to completion.

Strange as it might seem: WITP plays differently on different machines... many people don't get the same experience you just described.