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Some of you might recognize these are the Essex class Lexington, Yorktown, Hornet and Wasp (not necessarily in the correct order).

Where are these ships?? They are not in the OOB, the OOB does not have their air groups...

I know the pacwar hints file states that US CV sunk are replaced by Essex class CV in approx 1 year and I also read that if ships are not sunk they are not replaced, but these weren't "replacement ships" they were on the ways in 1941, and were commissioned in mid-late 1943.

I also read the "limitation" of 12 CV thru 6/44, but that number will barely be reached without the 4 above ships.

They really should have been built (ie programmed into the game) and later ships delayed if the current CV strength is too "high".

What does everyone think?

Too many limitations in the code. It cannot be done. However, most games have sufficient USN CV's sunk that they tend to appear as Essex class ships at the right time. Sometimes you get more (if you lose ALL pre war CV's...)

Originally posted by Mike Santos:
Some of you might recognize these are the Essex class Lexington, Yorktown, Hornet and Wasp (not necessarily in the correct order).

Where are these ships?? They are not in the OOB, the OOB does not have their air groups...

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They can't be in the OOB because the originals might not get sunk. If you put CV16 in the OOB, what do you call it? You can't name it Lex until CV2 is sunk. It is almost certain that CV16 would still have been built had CV2 not been sunk, but who knows? I dont see it as a problem as the US is so dominant by the time the Essex class go active the tide should have turned by then.

Ringbolt

If you put CV16 in the OOB, what do you call it?

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One possibility would be to use the original names of those ships. CV-10 was laid down as Bon Homme Richard, CV-12 as Kearsarge, CV-16 as Cabot, and CV-18 as Oriskany. All those names were later used on other CVs, of course, but Kearsarge and Oriskany were not commissioned until after the war, so we only need to "invent" new names for CVL-28 and CV-31. Perhaps Crown Point, Valley Forge, Wright, or Lake Champlain might be considered?

The production of Essex-class CVs was independent of early war losses. We'd have built them whether we lost all the prewar CVs or none. The losses of 1942 just changed the names of the new ships. The limitation mentioned earlier makes sense in terms of play balance, but not history.

[ September 14, 2001: Message edited by: CynicAl ]</p>

Thanks Tom and Al for your responses.

The fact still remains that a USN player is "robbed" of 4 CV in 1943 that were actually built...

I think that the dates that the Essex class CV got commissioned (regardless of name) should be the the final arbiter of when the new Essex class CVs come in to play (subject to the limitation of 12 CV prior to June 1944, 16 prior to Dec 44, etc.) I think I'll go look up the commissioning dates in one of my references and use that in a future oob variant.
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If you could add in those historical carriers into the oob (and they seem to be saying you can't), then you would have to eliminate the fact that sunk CVs get replaced after a year to compensate for it. You can't both get those carriers AND also get an additional replacement for the ones that are sunk.

For instance, if the Yorktown is sunk early what you are proposing would result in the CV that was historically the Essex class Yorktown showing up as it did in reality plus another replacement after 1 year.

I'm not sure why the original designer chose to have the replacement after one year rule instead of just having the carriers show up as they did historically, but I think we are stuck with it at this point.

Good point. I hadn't thought of that.

This could end up being quite a lot of coding to change - eliminating the twelve-month replacement rule and marrying Essex-class arrivals more uniformly to their commissioning dates, and (maybe?) doing away with the restrictions on numbers of US CVs through 1944... Sounds like the sort of thing we might ask for in WitP, but almost certainly out of the question for PW.