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ASW attack near Sydney at 92,168

Japanese Ships
SS I-5

Allied Ships
CA Astoria, Torpedo hits 1
DD Russell

SS I-5 launches 4 torpedoes at CA Astoria
DD Russell fails to find sub, continues to search...
DD Russell fails to find sub, continues to search...
DD Russell fails to find sub, continues to search...
DD Russell fails to find sub, continues to search...
DD Russell fails to find sub, continues to search...
Escort abandons search for sub


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Submarine attack near Sydney at 92,168

Japanese Ships
SS I-5

Allied Ships
CA Astoria, Torpedo hits 1, heavy damage
Where did DD Russell go? Why, back to Sydney, of course.

CA Astoria is sighted by SS I-5
SS I-5 launches 4 torpedoes

Later in the turn, I-5 hits Astoria with 2 more in the same spot. She sinks, of course.

Here's my issue with this. I created this as a 2-ship Escort TF. The game engine then reverts the TF to Surface Combat because the damage to Astoria is slight (less than 20 major float/engine each). Russell had 9 System damage.

Is this a problem with 2-ship TFs? When one ship gets damaged past the threshold for forming an escort TF, the code splits the TF automatically into 2 1-ship TFs? Why would it do this, if the other ship is an ASW escort? I have seen IJN Takao-class CAs split into their own TF, but at least they have depth charges so it makes SOME kind of sense.

Why does the game change player-created Escort TFs into some other function, on its own? I understand using that "trick" to save your CV TF leader by switching the mission to escort in order to transfer CVs back into an existing SCTF, and the game then automatically converts it to Air Combat... but why do manually created Escort TFs change to another type, which then seems to lead to this 2-ship TF splitting into 2 single ships thing?

Basically, I think this is completely borked. And horked.

Neither a bug nor working as designed. What, by the way, is horked?

Escort TFs were designed for a specific situation, and work well enough in the situation. A few tweaks might be in order but there are a lot of circumstances that would have to be addressed. It does seem a good idea to have the escort remain with the stricken ship in a two-ship TF, but that is just not in the code.

Just something that rhymes with borked. If anything, it's probably onomatopoeia for "vomited"...

So I guess the lesson here is to use 3-ship TFs. Not really ideal, but...

I think "horked" also means "Fubar".[:D] GP