Ship mines too rare?

[Shark7]

All I will say is that mine production is getting a 300-400% boost on my machine. May release that, with a few other fun changes (Like...my G5Ns!), as a mod at some point.

[BrucePowers]

ORIGINAL: Shark7

All I will say is that mine production is getting a 300-400% boost on my machine. May release that, with a few other fun changes (Like...my G5Ns!), as a mod at some point.

That's the way to handle this issue.

[Feltan]

ORIGINAL: BrucePowers

Bill just told you you can use the editor to change mine production to whatever you want. You do not have to wait for a patch. Try it out, play with it, run a couple of test scenarios. You guys get to choose. The editor is there so you can do with your game whatever you want.

Bruce,

True. That is a solution if you are going to play against the AI. However, PBEM opponents are not going to want to do this -- and that is where you are going to need them.

For me, I just find it odd that the game carefully and lovingly models just about every crate that took off into the wild blue yonder -- but for a capability of great import (both in the war and in the game) the game gives it short shrift. It is an incongruency that detracts from the overall impresson one gets of great effort to get everything else right.

Regards,
Feltan

[Shark7]

ORIGINAL: Feltan

ORIGINAL: BrucePowers

Bill just told you you can use the editor to change mine production to whatever you want. You do not have to wait for a patch. Try it out, play with it, run a couple of test scenarios. You guys get to choose. The editor is there so you can do with your game whatever you want.

Bruce,

True. That is a solution if you are going to play against the AI. However, PBEM opponents are not going to want to do this -- and that is where you are going to need them.

For me, I just find it odd that the game carefully and lovingly models just about every crate that took off into the wild blue yonder -- but for a capability of great import (both in the war and in the game) the game gives it short shrift. It is an incongruency that detracts from the overall impresson one gets of great effort to get everything else right.

Regards,
Feltan

If you are lucky, you might be able to talk your opponant into playing your modded game. A lot of us are pretty easy going and would give it a go I'm sure.

[bradfordkay]

ORIGINAL: Shark7

ORIGINAL: Feltan

ORIGINAL: BrucePowers

Bill just told you you can use the editor to change mine production to whatever you want. You do not have to wait for a patch. Try it out, play with it, run a couple of test scenarios. You guys get to choose. The editor is there so you can do with your game whatever you want.

Bruce,

True. That is a solution if you are going to play against the AI. However, PBEM opponents are not going to want to do this -- and that is where you are going to need them.

For me, I just find it odd that the game carefully and lovingly models just about every crate that took off into the wild blue yonder -- but for a capability of great import (both in the war and in the game) the game gives it short shrift. It is an incongruency that detracts from the overall impresson one gets of great effort to get everything else right.

Regards,
Feltan

If you are lucky, you might be able to talk your opponant into playing your modded game. A lot of us are pretty easy going and would give it a go I'm sure.

The only problem is that you have to really know and trust the opponent who created the mod. I have been reticent to use mods created by my opponent since I was fourteen years old. A friend and I were going to play Avalon Hill's Jutland and he wanted to add the German merchant raiders. I figured that couldn't really hurt so I said sure. Imagine my surprise when I saw that he had given the SeeAdler a stronger broadside than HMS Agincourt! (His reason was "surprise"! He didn't like the argument that surprise won't help the shells penetrate armor.)

[Shark7]

ORIGINAL: bradfordkay

ORIGINAL: Shark7

ORIGINAL: Feltan




Bruce,

True. That is a solution if you are going to play against the AI. However, PBEM opponents are not going to want to do this -- and that is where you are going to need them.

For me, I just find it odd that the game carefully and lovingly models just about every crate that took off into the wild blue yonder -- but for a capability of great import (both in the war and in the game) the game gives it short shrift. It is an incongruency that detracts from the overall impresson one gets of great effort to get everything else right.

Regards,
Feltan

If you are lucky, you might be able to talk your opponant into playing your modded game. A lot of us are pretty easy going and would give it a go I'm sure.

The only problem is that you have to really know and trust the opponent who created the mod. I have been reticent to use mods created by my opponent since I was fourteen years old. A friend and I were going to play Avalon Hill's Jutland and he wanted to add the German merchant raiders. I figured that couldn't really hurt so I said sure. Imagine my surprise when I saw that he had given the SeeAdler a stronger broadside than HMS Agincourt! (His reason was "surprise"! He didn't like the argument that surprise won't help the shells penetrate armor.)

I would never ask an opponant to play a mod unless I first gave him/her time to actually examine the mod themselves to ensure things like that don't happen. I personally want to do the mines and G5N in a mod, but I would not start a game until my opponant is satisfied that I kept it realistic.

[String]

TBH, after seeing the results of an atoll landing which had 7000+ mines on it, i agree with the current settings.

[castor troy]

ORIGINAL: Cap Mandrake

ORIGINAL: JWE

Way over 70% of all the mines laid in the Pacific were laid in areas where game engine does not allow mines to be laid.

The game attempts to be as historical as possible, in those areas IN WHICH IT CAN.

In those areas in which it cannot, due to engine limitations, it must rely on a more simplistic approach. It is all well and good to hop on a high historical horse, but if the game cannot replicate every single historical factor, especially the most significant ones, then all of the historicity arguments become fun, informative, humorous, but in the main, irrelevant.

Please also not that, in accord with engine driven mine warfare, you get over 18,000 'free' mines, that are auto-generated at turn start, that can be maintained by intelligently deployed ACMs.

That is a good point. There is no doubt that something needed to be done re. "Mines in the Pacific". How many times have you seen 10,000 mines protecting a 1/2 mile wide coral atoll sitting on top of a seamount where the water drops off to 5,000 ft 200 yds offhsore?

one thing to consider is that 15.000 mines in WITP did nothing... those combat reports where you see dozens of ships hit or sunk by mines are very very rare. 15.000 mines in my thousands of PBEM turns usually account of a dozen ships hit, perhaps one sunk...

you don´t just have to change the number of mines, you also have to change the routines...

[Shark7]

ORIGINAL: castor troy

ORIGINAL: Cap Mandrake

ORIGINAL: JWE

Way over 70% of all the mines laid in the Pacific were laid in areas where game engine does not allow mines to be laid.

The game attempts to be as historical as possible, in those areas IN WHICH IT CAN.

In those areas in which it cannot, due to engine limitations, it must rely on a more simplistic approach. It is all well and good to hop on a high historical horse, but if the game cannot replicate every single historical factor, especially the most significant ones, then all of the historicity arguments become fun, informative, humorous, but in the main, irrelevant.

Please also not that, in accord with engine driven mine warfare, you get over 18,000 'free' mines, that are auto-generated at turn start, that can be maintained by intelligently deployed ACMs.

That is a good point. There is no doubt that something needed to be done re. "Mines in the Pacific". How many times have you seen 10,000 mines protecting a 1/2 mile wide coral atoll sitting on top of a seamount where the water drops off to 5,000 ft 200 yds offhsore?

one thing to consider is that 15.000 mines in WITP did nothing... those combat reports where you see dozens of ships hit or sunk by mines are very very rare. 15.000 mines in my thousands of PBEM turns usually account of a dozen ships hit, perhaps one sunk...

you don´t just have to change the number of mines, you also have to change the routines...

You're right. The most ships I ever had sunk by a minefield was 4. The biggest problem was it taking 2 weeks to clear the field.

[Feltan]

ORIGINAL: String

TBH, after seeing the results of an atoll landing which had 7000+ mines on it, i agree with the current settings.

As I stated previously, the solution for that is to make the water in an atol hex deep ocean. Minefields will decay as if in the open ocean.

Regards,
Feltan

[Jim D Burns]

Found this source http://www.history.navy.mil/download/pacific.pdf which gives some data on mines.

Here's the relevant text:


Aerial Mining
The offensive mine-laying campaign waged
against Japan was little publicized but the results
were highly successful. At least 649,736
tons of shipping were sunk and another 1,377,-
780 tons damaged, of which 378,827 were still
out of use at the end of the war. The total sunk
and damaged represented one quarter of the prewar
strength of the Japanese merchant marine.
In addition 9 destroyers, 4 submarines, and 36
auxiliary craft went down as the result of mine
explosions; and 2 battleships, 2 escort carriers.
8 cruisers, 29 destroyers or destroyer escorts, a
submarine, and 18 other combatant vessels were
damaged, In the course of the war 25,000
mines were laid, 21,389 or 85 percent by aircraft.
From a total of 4,760 sorties, only 55
mine-laying planes failed to return.

Not an insignificant threat at all I'd say.

Jim

[Jim D Burns]

ORIGINAL: Jim D Burns
Found this source http://www.history.navy.mil/download/pacific.pdf

Just garnered some new knowledge from this great read:

In the invasion of the Marianas and later operations,
Navy Liberators flew along the flanks and
in advance of the carrier force, shooting down
enemy search planes. Prior to the landings in
the Philippines they knocked off Japanese picket
boats east of Formosa.

From experiments that amounted to altering 50 percent
of the Liberator’s internal arrangements,
the Navy developed the Privateer. In 1944 and
1945, planes of these 2 types flew 15,000 patrols
and destroyed 504 of the 937 Japanese aircraft
encountered, against a loss of 18. During the
same period, Mariner and Coronado flying boats
on similar missions shot down 24 enemy planes
and lost 3.

I had no idea the naval patrol PB4Y Liberators were used so effectively to mask incoming invasion fleets. Kind of a long ranger fighter/bomber used against Japanese patrol assets, apparently to great effect.

Jim

[emorbius44]

Plenty of times over the past 4 or 5 years, which is why we did what we did. It's not realistic.

I can understand that but going to the other extreme doesn't seem very realistic either. If the game generates 18000 mines at the beginning of the game then based on the scenario production rate it would have taken around a decade to deploy them before the war (and that doesn't even factor in attrition.) I haven't gone over all the orders of battle but in WITP I think there were around 40 mine layers in the imperial navy and it wouldn't make sense for them to build 40 of these ships and then produce only 190 mines a month in wartime. Mines aren't really any more elaborate then depth charges which are available in unlimited quantities in the game (subject to supply points.) One of the points of a game like AE is to explore the "what if" possibilities. I understand that having 10,000 mines around truk lagoon might be mega overkill but the scenario production rate seems skimpily unrealistic and is rather a mechanism to keep players from taking a course of action in the game rather then a reflection of what would have been available had the Japanese decided to use them. Personally I'd like to just find out how many they built, and were deployable after wastage and maintaining existing defensive fields, and make that number the scenario production rate. If there are 8,000 mines and a player wants to put them around Okinawa then so be it. In AE the player is the supreme commander.
I haven't been able to find specific Japanese production figures but spending a lot of time googling around it seems the U.S. deployed around 25,000 mines in the Pacific War where as the production rate of the scenario is only about 60% of that figure.

Bob

[JWE]

To go back to the very original question; it is because mines do not have sufficient pentacles, in their database definitions, to keep the evil spirits away.

[Terminus]

I repeat, it's not realistic.

In the first 14 months of the war, the IJN laid about 700 mines offensively. About 300 or so were laid by the IJN's four minelaying submarines. There are no figures for how many were laid defensively, but for the sake of argument, let's say four defensive mines for every one offensive.

That's 3500 mines laid over the course of 14 months, in every active Japanese theatre, by all means available to them. We've all seen the horrors of stock where tens of thousands of mines were laid at ONE base over a matter of weeks, by ONE side.

It could never, ever happen that way. Also, the Japs did diddly-squat with their surface mine-layers. Absolutely diddly-squat. They used them to transport troops and escort convoys, and that was it.

I'd personally prefer it if the game auto-generated a lot fewer mines.

[JWE]

Dude, I agree with you completely, but this is Jorma Kaukonen 1966 kinda stuff. I mean, where the heck these folks been sleeping?

[jwilkerson]

I think "mines in the Pacific" is more of a "could have been" than a "was" on the Japanese side in the early war period. Towards the end however, things got serious. The "Ryuku Barrier" was a real Oceanic mine barrier - not do-able in either WITP or AE. But turning each successive Allied invasion target into a 3000-7000 mine hornets nest - was not much done - and certainly not in the early going - in stock it is possible to do this - and somehow I wind up getting the "credit" for the darth of mines in AE - though actually my proposal of mine "production" started at higher levels and grew substantially higher towards the late war.

I spoke with Paul Webber, the only "Mine Warfare - Subject Matter Expert" I know - he did not like our approach of limiting by production - but instead thought we should have some kind of "planning lead time". So maybe you spend X-heavy industry points - or Y-Supply points and then wait 1, 3, 6 months depending on the size and then you get a pile of mines to use. By the time Paul and I had this conversation, the AE design was fairly well fixed, but it is an interesting idea.

Certainly it might be worth increasing the mines in the game - especially towards the end of the war - but that would require a code change I suspect - to get a variable production rate. Maybe we can figure out another way.

[pompack]

At least according to Kaigun (Evans & Peattie), the function of those minelayers was to lay an offensive minefield in the open ocean as a prelude to The Decisive Battle. With this doctrine, the Japanese needed a number of fast minelayers but only enough mines to load them once since there could be only one Decisive Battle

After all, there was no need for more mines to load up and do it again since that would mean that the first Decisive Battle was really the Indecisive Battle [:D]

In fact by the time the war actually started they had changed their implimentation of the open-ocean minefield by substituting the midget submarines for the mines; the concept was that by using smart, kinda-mobile mines they had a better chance of crippling the US battleline before the battle started.

[EwingNJ]

I have no idea of the coding involved in this rather "simplistic" [;)] game. But as to variable production could you have Mine X with a production figure of Y from 1/12/41 to, say, 1/1/45. Then you can have Mine X(45) that starts prodcution in 1/1/45 at a higher rate. Same device specs though.

[JWE]

ORIGINAL: EwingNJ
I have no idea of the coding involved in this rather "simplistic" [;)] game. But as to variable production could you have Mine X with a production figure of Y from 1/12/41 to, say, 1/1/45. Then you can have Mine X(45) that starts prodcution in 1/1/45 at a higher rate. Same device specs though.

Oh, this is getting ludicrous. I will no longer look at or respond to anything that has 'mines' in it.