Matrix Games Forums

ORIGINAL: JohnDillworth

I think it pretty obvious that Michael and the "disbanded" dev team are working on this and have been for a few weeks already. Those are some very sharp guys and have been able to address other issues that have come up before (torpedoes, E class, AA guns, .... Need I say more? I have the utmost confidence that they will have something in the beta in a few more weeks to address this if it is humanly possible.

Well Torpedoes seem to work but E class is still mind bogglingly over powered and AA does not work properly. Shipboard AA has never worked. The allied 5/38" DP, radar controlled, proximity fused guns that were the backbone of the Allied ships AA defense just does not work. Never has. I also take exception to the continuing comment that "the code can't be fixed" . As former developer and now manager of large software systems the code can always be fixed, perhaps not cheaply, but it can always be fixed.

John,

The fix for both AA and E class is in DaBabes. Its done. You should fire up the scenario and see. I have incorporated into my mod and am VERY pleased with the work that John and the rest of the team did.

Whether it ever arrives in the official scenarios will greatly depend upon if there is another data patch and we all know the hassles (and uproar) that those create. However, there is a fix that needs to be acknowledged. I know that doesn't help players who only play "official" scenarios, but it isn't accurate to say that the issue hasn't been addressed. The fix just hasn't been released.

ORIGINAL: LoBaron

No, definitely not. [:)]

@Walloc: You´re right, I exaggerated percentage. No need to go into a historical discussion, if you find a better analogy to compare
the situation feel free.

As for the Italian General...well I guess we both know where the difference between my comment and his statement lies. [;)]

Hi Lobaron,

Wasnt me that introduced a historical situasion as basis for my arguement. The problem isnt the % but that the arguement comes from flawed logic. That the germans could have focused on the 8th AF and won with the losses for the US would have been brutal bordering to desatrous. It implies they had a high % of their planes else where that they could have drawn in. Im just pointing out that the remaining % of german figther airforce on the easthern front, or else where for that matter wasnt particular high so they alrdy did what u wanted them to do. So expecting a different result comming from the remaining 10-20%. I dont see it wouldnt have changed the overall result that much. Not that i can know for certain.

Kind regards,

Rasmus

ORIGINAL: Chickenboy

I'll cover you on the way out...

BANZAI!!!

ORIGINAL: PaxMondo
BANZAI!!!!

(IJFB warcry for those of you NOT familiar with it. [:D] )

<removes himself from this morass of AFB's [;)] )

Thanks!!!!

John,

The fix for both AA and E class is in DaBabes. Its done. You should fire up the scenario and see. I have incorporated into my mod and am VERY pleased with the work that John and the rest of the team did.

Whether it ever arrives in the official scenarios will greatly depend upon if there is another data patch and we all know the hassles (and uproar) that those create. However, there is a fix that needs to be acknowledged. I know that doesn't help players who only play "official" scenarios, but it isn't accurate to say that the issue hasn't been addressed. The fix just hasn't been released.

Will do, just fired up a game against the AI so it will probably be 1/2 year of playing time before I see a difference. BTW is it still OK to apply the beta patches or does that muddy the DaBabes waters?

ORIGINAL: JohnDillworth

Will do, just fired up a game against the AI so it will probably be 1/2 year of playing time before I see a difference. BTW is it still OK to apply the beta patches or does that muddy the DaBabes waters?

I'm running the latest beta just fine. Should be no issue as the beta is the exe and DaBabes is the data.

BTW, if it only takes you a half year to get into '43, I'm impressed. Takes me FAR longer! [;)] E's don't start appearing until about 4/43. You'll see the AA changes right away though. DP's work better and AA overall seems more real and certainly better balanced.

GJ: sorry for the highjack. I really am exiting now! [:D][:D][:D]

Pax, u don 't need to apologise nor to go away! You are more thEn welcome here!

Ok guys, given that this problem won't be fixed today nor tomorrow ( considering the consequences),
What do u think would be a fair HR that will be able to " by pass" the CAP issue? What will let us carry on our match?

ORIGINAL: GreyJoy

Pax, u don 't need to apologise nor to go away! You are more thEn welcome here!

Ok guys, given that this problem won't be fixed today nor tomorrow ( considering the consequences),
What do u think would be a fair HR that will be able to " by pass" the CAP issue? What will let us carry on our match?

You need an HR related to the size of a potential airstrike. You do not necessarily need a HR to limit the CAP size as the engine currently limits the effective cap size. You need a "dynamic rule" as currently it is quite hard to really estimate how large a strike can be and how much escorts you need to cause problems. You might need to increase the numbers if CAP is impenetrable or decrease it if you still have a problem with to much planes bypassing the CAP.

Basically:

- Limit the size of a strike package during one phase (morning/afternoon) for a given target to around 250 - 300 planes total (might be a little bit higher or lower). You can do a strike in the morning and a strike in the evening.
- Limit the size of escorts to a reasonable percentage of around 40-50%. This is important to have a chance to protect ships against airstrikes. If you do a strike with 260 escorts filled with green pilots and 40 TB with top notch high skilled guys you still can bring them through without a scratch and score 20 torpedo hits.

The rule applies for any attacked target for a phase. You still can hit an airfield with 250 planes in the morning and 250 planes in the evening. It is the responsibility of the acting player to limit his strike sizes. And it is not "easy" to do so.

You have to take into account potential strike link up and coordinated strikes especially for naval strikes. It is a challenge for both of you to correctly execute such strikes.

You basically do not need to limit the CAP size but you can limit it if you want. The numbers (250-300) are an assumption by me, they might be a little bit higher but not much.

I'm intrigued, perhaps I missed this completely - not unusual I have to admit - but how does one set strikes so they happen in a specific phase? I have always assumed they just 'happened'?

Now where did I put my dunces' cap?

Roger

ORIGINAL: Roger Neilson II

I'm intrigued, perhaps I missed this completely - not unusual I have to admit - but how does one set strikes so they happen in a specific phase? I have always assumed they just 'happened'?

Now where did I put my dunces' cap?

Roger

Not it is not easy to do so. Thats why i wrote "responsibility of the acting player". It is possible if you do a naval strike for example and a secondary mission an airfield attack. Then if no naval strike is conducted the airfield attack is done. But it is "tricky" and depends on luck. So if someone knows a 100% way to separate the strikes it is ok, as soon as they join up you have again a problem.

Ok guys, given that this problem won't be fixed today nor tomorrow ( considering the consequences),
What do u think would be a fair HR that will be able to " by pass" the CAP issue? What will let us carry on our match?

"No air strike shall contain more than 400 planes. No CAP shall contain more than 400 planes."
Lots of smaller strikes I guess

My two cents about the leak CAP issue. Of cause the code needs some polish, but as develop team indicated, a "easy fix" probably brings more undesired ramification. Generally speaking, leak CAP(though needs some further tweak) is at least better than the uber CAP of WitP, when an invincible KB steamrolled everything in early game, and an invincible TF58 steamrolled everything in late game.

Secondly, it is a rule of thumb of pacific war that one should always keep carrier away from major enemy airbase. Leak CAP issue may exacerbated the punishment of who against it, however it still works fairly well in accordance of reality.

ORIGINAL: jay102

My two cents about the leak CAP issue. Of cause the code needs some polish, but as develop team indicated, a "easy fix" probably brings more undesired ramification. Generally speaking, leak CAP(though needs some further tweak) is at least better than the uber CAP of WitP, when an invincible KB steamrolled everything in early game, and an invincible TF58 steamrolled everything in late game.

Secondly, it is a rule of thumb of pacific war that one should always keep carrier away from major enemy airbase. Leak CAP issue may exacerbated the punishment of who against it, however it still works fairly well in accordance of reality.

While leaky CAP is a good invention as there will always be some leakiness the CAP problem is not leaky. Basically against an opponent which knows the rules you have not just an Fleet problem. Instead you have a generic problems.

Depending on the speed of you game most players will run into that potential problem during the marinas invasion and/or Philippines invasion. You need your carriers to invade if you do not want to use ultra-cheesy tactics.

Either both sides exploit it which leads to a multiset of problems or you just create a sufficient HR to deal with it.

I am not sure how a player can absolutely control the size of his strikes other than to a) limit himself to one raid per area with up to the max # of planes, or b) fly more than the max but at separate targets (nav strike would count as a target, I guess).  Limiting a player's options (especially nav strike) isn't the best choice, but as long as it was even, I guess it might work.  You'd probably need some sort of CAP limit as well.

Another way to help control the size of strikes (but not guarantee against a large strike) might be to employ voluntary stacking limits, particularly at larger air bases.  Since one of the recommendations to "coordinate" strikes is to limit the number of airbases you stage from, it seems that spreading out your planes, especially your bombers, would decrease your chances at coordinated strikes and limit the size of an individual strike.  There's probably still the chance that all the dice rolls would line up and a massive strike would launch, but hopefully that would be rare.

Of course, someone would have to do a fair bit of testing to see what stacking limits for large bases works best at keeping strikes small enough that the model can sort of handle them.

Mike

I concur that some sort of stacking limit on air groups may be the only real way to accomplish this goal. You will still have some problems just cruising past the numerous Japanese bases on Honshu, but that may be somewhat realistic.

Think about how stacking limits will impact both players' defense against airfield and strategic bombing attacks (i.e. A limit of "no more than X groups per airfield may be too simple as it is legit to stack interceptors over key industrial sites). Thus, perhaps the stacking limit should only pertain to escorts set for long range and strike aircraft groups.

In the end, only a code fix can truly solve this. IMHO if possible they should remove any hard cap on passes (or make it so large as to be effectively infinite) and key number of passes to units of time available before the strike is over the target. This may or may not be possible given the code, but there appears to be some "time to target" mechanic, so I'm hopeful it's possible.

I suggest a stacking limit for operational groups in any given hex ("operational" meaning "not set entirely for training"). Say, 12 groups for a level 9 A/F and 18 for a level 10 A/F. One Air HQ can still allow bonus groups.

When discussing code fixes, I encourage people to remember that some very large raids were launched historically (google 'thousand plane raid' and ignore the movie results). They may not have been efficient, but they were certainly possible... at least for the allies. I'd like to see a land-based offshoot of the CV TF coordination penalty, myself: above so many planes, you have high odds of your raid breaking up and arriving over the target piecemeal (modified by various factors including nationality, A/F size, date, etc.).

ORIGINAL: Gridley380

I suggest a stacking limit for operational groups in any given hex ("operational" meaning "not set entirely for training"). Say, 12 groups for a level 9 A/F and 18 for a level 10 A/F. One Air HQ can still allow bonus groups.

When discussing code fixes, I encourage people to remember that some very large raids were launched historically (google 'thousand plane raid' and ignore the movie results). They may not have been efficient, but they were certainly possible... at least for the allies. I'd like to see a land-based offshoot of the CV TF coordination penalty, myself: above so many planes, you have high odds of your raid breaking up and arriving over the target piecemeal (modified by various factors including nationality, A/F size, date, etc.).

It sounds to me like these are good solutions, particularly the latter. If strikes aren't putting 800 planes into one package, you don't have so many escorts to soak up the capped CAP firing passes. A simple change to reduce the massive, well-coordinated strike formations we're seeing here and in other late-game AARs.

I think some of the suggested fixes will work a hardship on the defender.&nbsp; Under some of these proposed HRs, the defender will be able to base only a finite number at a particular base.&nbsp; The enemy, on the other hand, may be able to target huge strikes from multiple airfields against the single airfield, which will suffer due to the reduced defensive capacity.
&nbsp;
For example, GreyJoy would be limited to a finite number of CAP at Hakodate, while Rader would be able to target Hakodate from multiple large bases thus overwhelming the defenses.&nbsp; GJ can try to address the situation by using other fields for LRCAP, but that is less effective, uncertain, and results in higher fatigue, losses, and&nbsp;aircraft in need of repair.

Took me 9 days, but I finally read all 220 pages of this AAR. Now I find that it's completely halted because of some flaw/bug/whatever... man what a let down! Hopefully it gets remedied soon so you guys can go back to entertaining the rest of us.

CR, I agree and thus suggest that a distinction be made between interceptors and strike groups. That said, in the end only a code fix of some kind will really clear this up because of limited player control over naval strike missions and even co-ordination of airfield and ground attacks.

I agree that there is some danger. The hope with stacking limits would be that the raids come small(er) and broken up, so that they do not overwhelm the hard-coded CAP limit (particularly for # of escort).

I think it would work better if the limits were by number of planes (and maybe track multi-engine bombers, torpedo/dive bombers and fighters separately) rather than by simple number of air units to avoid confusion of airunit size, etc.

I think it would be absolutely critical to do some play testing to make sure that the dispersal actually does cause raids to fragment and that CAP can handle the fragmentation without too much diminishing effectiveness. Playtesting should occur using both sides on offense/defense to hopefully limit any bias against one side or the other.

Mike