ORIGINAL: Bullwinkle58
ORIGINAL: PaxMondo
ORIGINAL: Bullwinkle58
[ IJN crews had no fuel to train, they were scraping the barrel for men, their maintenance was horrible, their electronics worse.
Thank you for providing such good support to my statements.
A player can address 3 of your 4 listed variables, the code adapts for the 4th, and so should expect to change the results. Look at C&G's or PzB's AAR. Their situation in no way resembles the historical results. In both cases his forces are largely intact, the allies are at bay, and he has been sucking the life out of the DEI for +18 months.
It would be fair to say that a good many things would be FAR better under those circumstances for IJ than what was actually experienced. Training, manpower, and fuel for example.
My point is, using the historical reference (which is our best reference) you still need to address the events that led to it in a simulation such as AE. As has been pointed out numerous times 4-6 June 42 was pivotal. IF you beleive that (as I do), then you also have to accept that IF it does not happen, then a great number of things will not follow the historical result. If poor ASW was due to lack of training and fuel (which I agree with), and Midway events precipitated that, you then have to conjecture what would have been the outcomes. I beleive that Gary and the dev team have done just that. The allies have almost a 50% advantage in ASW based upon what is above. IMO, that is not a small difference. In fact, as was also presented above, you could make a strong case that the gap should not be so large. Electronics (sonar) in the 40's wasn't that much of a difference maker. ASW was still a "knife" fight, fought at close range. Training and the bigger boom made more difference. Also simply more assets dedicated to ASW.
At least, this is how I see it IMHO.
My comment last night was inartful. Let me try to do better.
I agree that players can get the IJN ahistoric levels of fuel, etc. What I disagree with, or perhaps just am side-arguing, is that nothing the Japanese player can do in the game really can affect the ASW encounter at sea. Yes, they can set up ahistorical ASW hunter-killer groups and patrol in ways they couldn't/didn't do in RL. They can divert shipyard repair points to keep ASW assets at sea when the Japanese economy didn't do that in RL. Fine.
But at the point of the tactical engagement the player has no control. AE is not a tactical game. You simply put an ASW-capable asset in a 40-mile hex with an enemy submarine and stand back. EVERYTHING important to the outcome at that point is not under the player's control. Sensors, weapons effects, crew response, ASW group formation discipline, weather effects, attack interim damage, etc., etc., etc. are all abstracted in the code. And it's those variables--not fuel and shipyards--that would determine outcomes in RL. And the player, despite your earlier assertion which I was reacting to, can't control them. So, the results both I and Mike have seen, while wildly ahistorical, are also not the result of bad play. They're in the code. Enter-the-hex-and-go-get-a-beer time. They aren't because Japanese players benefit from earlier ahistorical events a la Midway. They're because the ASW ratings built into the code and OOB, as JWE expalined, are a sledge-hammer and not a scalpel. More launchers and ammo equals more hits, even if each IJN hit is less damaging than a USN hit because the Type 2 DC is less powerful. That ASW rating rules the roost. And in RL the number of launchers was not even in the top 5 variables leading to attack success or failure. But that's the way the code works. OK, fine, I get it. I accept. At least I know that the 1944-45 ASW war will resemble nothing I know from history no matter what I, as the Allied player, do, or can do. (Outside play in the editor.)
Finally, on the issue of sensors, I disagree with your assertion that they were a minor element. Yes, WWII ASW weapons made ASW a close-in fight. That does not mean that sensors were not determinative. Certainly the Battle of the Atlantic disproved that. Most of the time the first knowledge an IJN escort had that a sub was near was a merchant exploding. Sensor equals Mark I eyeball at that point. For the next few minutes, the ASW commander had a datum that a sub was somewhere inside a circle centered on the target of about 4000 yards' diameter. If it was night, he was pretty sure the sub was surfaced; in daylight he knew. After that sensors come into play. WWII ASW weapons had a PK of tens of yards. (The Hedgehog, if the sub was attacked athwartships, only about 6 yards.) A submerged sub moving at three knots (6000 yds per hour), can increase that circle of uncertaintly rapidly in an hour. A surfaced sub, running at flank, can increase it by 40,000 yards in that same hour. If the escort is not already at battlestations, or is out of position in the formation, the only way the ASW commander has a chance to engage (a very poor chance perhaps if the geometry and his speed advantage are bad) is by having excellent sensors and well-trained operators feeding information to a tracking team in CIC or the bridge, and that team making tactical recommendations to the ASW commander. If any link in that chain fails, the sub gets away without prosecution.
The game, as I conceeeded above, doesn't overtly model any of that. It gives an ASW TF a pretty good chance to detect a sub in a huge, 40-mile hex, a lot of the time. (To be fair, the Allies get this bennie too.) Airborne ASW helps, yes, but again, the plane offers a single datum; the sub displaces a LONG way before the surface assets can arrive. In open ocean, where many of my and Mike's losses occured, there simply isn't any RL way for the prosecutions we saw to have occured. The game is just built that way, however. But, I will say, that despite the Allies' ASW advantages built into the code which get better over time, I've never sunk three IJN subs in a week. I'm just sayin'.
And just to add an honest opinion here, its at the tactical level the limits should come in. No player should be penalized by forcing them into making the same poor strategic decisions the Allies or Japanese made in the war. The player should have full strategic control and act accordingly, however, you should still be limited by game mechanics in the actual number crunching of carrying out your strategies (the tactical level). Because honestly what is the point of playing if you can't do anything different than history...might as well just watch news reels.
Basically what I am saying is even if I choose to form up 100 hunter-killer ASW groups, when the turn plays out, every contact should not have an attack, every attack should not have a hit, and every enemy sub should not be contacted. That is all inner workings stuff and the player should have little control over it beyond forming a good strategy to try to over-come the weaknesses.
