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I had always assumed that a Captain with a high Naval rating would increase the success of damage control. Thus I used lots of time and precious PP to put the best Captains available in command – especially for critical ships. Not able to confirm/deny this via existing information on the forums I set up the test.

Like most things, you don’t really find what you went looking for but instead find some other surprises along the way. I’ll post the summary results first, followed by the test details, and finally the detailed results. Input from the community is welcome particularly as I am not an expert in statistical analysis. I have had some training in this area but I know there are some experts in the community here.

The summary results: in short, the skills of the Captain do not have an effect on damage control.

1. Experience of the ship’s crew has a HUGE impact on damage control saving the ship.
2. Carriers are less likely to survive the same amount of damage than either CAs or DDs. This is probably intentionally modeled in the game to account for avgas and aircraft ordinance and their unhelpful assistance with damage control.
3. Damage control success is quite randomized.
4. Naval skill of the ship’s Captain has no impact on damage control success.
5. Leadership skill of the ship’s Captain has no positive impact on damage control success however there may be a “stupid” penalty if the leadership is very low.
6. Inspiration skill of the ship’s Captain does not have a significant effect. There may be an extremely weak inverse effect but this is not conclusive.
7. High Admin skill of the ship’s Captain does not have any impact on damage control success.

For the test I used an edited Scenario 1 played in head-to-head mode. I modified the Dec7 starting positions to include 30 crippled ships on both sides. Allied damage control option was set to ON. I used 10 each of Kaga, Mikuma, Akigumo, Enterprise, Northampton, and Craven giving me a set of CVs, CAs, and DDs for each side. Each ship had to steam 30 hexes to safety at a major port. This was Yokohama for the Japanese and Pearl Harbor for the Americans.

The ships were by themselves in escort task forces and set to cruise speed. A note about this: I noted several times a task force would reset itself to mission speed. I don’t know what the trigger for this was. My guess based on the anecdotal evidence is that sometimes the check to place a crippled ship in an escort task force fires even when that ship is already in an escort task force. When this happens the speed setting changes from cruise to mission speed.

Each ship was given starting damage of: 50 fire, 50 system, 40 float (20 major), and 20 engine (10 major). The control group had a day experience of 70 and a night experience of 60 and a Captain with a rating of 50 in every attribute. I took all the planes off of the CVs and CAs in case that made any difference.

I then ran the head-to-head turns until each ship was either safely disbanded in port or sunk. The most ships sank on Dec 8 or 9. The key was, not surprisingly, if the fires could be put out completely. The survivors would disband in port around Dec 15 except for one case of the intrepid Kaga4 in trial 17. Kaga4 inched along at 1 knot for the last 15 hexes. At one point she was at 95 float damage but made port on Jan 1 with 89 float. Her crew had taken casualties down to 59 day 50 night experience (from 70/60). Her yard estimate was 1.5 years. Just one of those fun little episodes within the overall game that make it so fun to watch.

In total I ran 20 trials. I tried to make the damage so that around 50% of the ships would survive and therefore I could see the effects of the variable changes. However I overdid it a bit and only around 25% of the ships survived. It was better to err on this side. In my first attempt with lower damage settings about 80% of the ships were surviving so I thought it would be difficult to discern the effects of the variable changes and abandoned that test set.

Crew experience
Exp (day/night) Number of Ships Surviving
55/45-------------------------0
70/60-------------------------17
85/75-------------------------101

Ship Class and Nationality (Allied Damage Control ON)
Ship ------------Number of Ships Surviving-------------Durability
CV Kaga-----------------------16-------------------------------134
CA Mikuma--------------------44-------------------------------52
DD Akigumo------------------49-------------------------------10
CV Enterprise----------------14-------------------------------79
CA Northampton-------------48-------------------------------35
DD Craven--------------------50-------------------------------6
Total Japan-------------------109
Total US-----------------------112

Captain’s Naval Skill
Naval Skill--- Number of Ships Surviving
20--------------15
50--------------17
80--------------14

Captain’s Leadership Skill
Leadership Skill*---Number of Ships Surviving
20----------------------7
50----------------------17
80----------------------16**
*The editor field for leadership is just called “skill”
** The only CVs surviving other than the high crew exp cases were 2 times a leadership 80 Kaga

Captain’s Inspiration Skill
Inspiration Skill---Number of Ships Surviving
20-----------------------21
50-----------------------17
80-----------------------13

Captain’s Admin Skill
Admin Skill---Number of Ships Surviving
50-------------------17
80-------------------17

The effect of crew experience was obvious and clearly a strong effect. In game terms this would seem to be a disadvantage for the Allies as their ships start with lower experience and it is very hard to “train” your ships.

The effect of Allied Damage Control was not obvious in my test though admittedly the test was not set up for that. I hypothesize that ship survivability is somehow related to durability. The higher durability Japanese ships in this test made up for most of the Allied Damage Control advantage of the lower durability allied ships. The net effect was that the allied ships appeared only slightly more survivable than the Japanese ships (or slightly less so in the case of CVs). This hypothesis is called in to question by the fact that the DDs survived more often than the CAs on both sides. See the table above for Ship Class and Nationality. Note this is only my hypothesis and the test does not confirm or deny this.

Another clear result though is the obvious lessened survivability of the CVs. The only CVs that survived were high crew experience except 2 times a Kaga survived with Captain leadership 80. These 2 exceptions are likely coincidence and in any case are not significant. The reason for this is not clear, only the effect, but I would hypothesize that because fires on a CV are a much more serious danger that the code reflects this with some negative dice roll modifiers. It only makes sense and is another good example of the attention to detail that went in to the development of this game.

The tests for Naval skill and Admin skill do not bear significantly different results. I didn’t check admin 20 because I had used up my 10 ships of each type and was trying to keep the test a bit more manageable.

[A in the figure]The case of Leadership 20 is interesting because it could show a weak correlation between low leadership and survivability. I call this the Captain’s “stupid” penalty. Note he does not get a bonus for being “smart” only a penalty if his leadership is low.

The case of Inspiration is also interesting. It appears to show that a low inspiration Captain is more likely to save his ship than a high inspiration Captain. I’m not sure if the results are statistically significant however and in any case it is only a weak correlation. (Compare to crew experience to see a strong correlation).

As a check on the data I counted the total number of ships surviving per trial and plotted the distribution of this. The data is clearly not Normal and would seem to be randomly distributed between some upper and lower boundaries.

Good work. Interesting results.

Excellent tests.  Thanks for sharing.

It does raise some more questions.

The fact that crew experience means for than Captains rating makes sense to me. It is the crew actually doing the work. I can see a better Captain increasing crew skills but at any given time it is the experience of the crew that matters most. Of course flooding the forward and aft magazines at the same time might be blamed on the Captain (USS Nevada).

I am currently reading "Attack on Pearl Harbor" and the account of how the BB Nevada sank is pretty interesting. Only one torpedo hit and seven GP bombs should not have sunk the ship.

Thanks for the well laid out information.[&o]

Of course it is a matter of saving the crew versus saving the ship. If both magazines were in imminent danger, than flooding both and sinking the ship is certainly preferable to going kaboom. At least with the sinking due to magazine flooding, you might save the crew since they will have time to abandon ship. If the ships goes kaboom, few if any survive.

One more reason to train all those American Initial warships.

ORIGINAL: topeverest

One more reason to train all those American Initial warships.

+1

Yep, gotta keep'em at sea ...

This was a very informative study. My sincere thanks to Insano for the work and the very clear graphs with accompanying details of the tests.

It got me to thinking about the next logical thing to test....
How do you get the crew's experience to the 70+ level quickly.

What Captain's stats most readily (if at all) affect the gain in experience for his crew?

ORIGINAL: seydlitz
How do you get the crew's experience to the 70+ level quickly?

Yeah, training will only get you to ~50. After that it takes combat and I've only seen very small increases after a LOT of combat.

ORIGINAL: seydlitz
What Captain's stats most readily (if at all) affect the gain in experience for his crew?

Thought I saw somewhere leadership was the stat for this ...

Fact, that Allies damage control is no better, than Japanese is interesting.
Also influence of experience seems to be most important. Commander statistics influence seems strange. 10% is kinda out of statistical error, so maybe it works actually this way?

Anyway, I think fires could skewed the results. After battles there could be usually fire in teens, but it will be put down in 1-2 turns. At 50 it gets pretty random, and causes additional damages. So test would give clearer results wihout any fire.

Also, drop in crew experience, because of casualities is great feature. Maybe that is why ships gets experience so slow? During battle there is so much casualities, that gained experience is only slightly bigger, than loss?