Ok, checked things out and must say, no. Looked at stock, too. Not exactly sure what part of it is "hard to deal with", the offensive part or defensive part.ORIGINAL: vettim89
Which explains why the Saipain Naval fortress is so hard to deal with in game?
As to defense, Saipan Fortress has no intrinsic fort number for the LCU, and none of the CD guns have any armor value. Saipan Base starts with fort=4 but I'll bet the little termites are digging furiously the whole game long. So it's not much different from any other LCU in concrete bunkers. But there is a great big caveat, here.
As to offense, it has 21 naval guns from 5" to 6" (no real big deal), 4 short 8" guns (absolute pigs), and 4 3" DPs. Doesn't look ugly at all. Except ... there is a nice big benefit (chance to hit) for LCUs of Type=11 (Coastal Defense Unit) and Suffix=115 (Fortress). Probably why Fortress was added as a Suffix, yeah? Think the idea was to model all the range markers, directors, long-base rangefinders, etc., of a real, live, honest to gosh, long term, established fortress. And yes, Saipan is a 115 Fortress.
So there's no reason why Saipan's LCUs would be overly resistant to Naval (or Air) Bombardment (except for the caveat); at least not any more so than any other LCU. But there is a good reason for Saipan's 'Fortress' LCU to deal out a nasty bit of punishment.
The Caveat:
Think we found why Naval Bombardment seems to be anemic, and often ineffective. Juggling six different routines, to be certain, but looks like there’s a data inconsistency with the code numerical requirements. The code, frankly, is fabulous in this area: it treats suppression, disruption, all the right things. But the input numeric spread required to let the routine play, doesn’t quite conform to the data spread, defined for certain data fields, seen in bombarding naval vessels. Most of the data burp is a vestige from WiTP. The code was tweaked in wonderful ways, but somehow the implications didn’t port through to the data guys; thus …
