Destroyers.

[stormbringer3]

It seems to me that they are OP. The AI builds tons of them and you must follow suit. Flotilla attacks sink a lot of Capital Ships. I don't remember that being historically accurate. IMO they should be toned down. In later years a battle will have a lot of individual destroyers scurrying around really adding to the unit count and screen clutter. An idea that I have is to make a destroyer unit represent multiple ships.
I'm really enjoying this game and look forward to its' further development.

[WLRoo]

I suffered a lot from torpedo attacks when I first started playing. Gradually, I learned to anticipate them and how to avoid or reduce the damage inflicted.

However, if you watch carefully, you'll spot the DDs launching their run. A hard turn away from the axis of the attack will often deny them their launch.

Alternately, wait until you see the enemy DDs turn sharply away - this is usually an indication they have launched torpedoes - and again, turn sharply away from the direction of the attackers.

Also, keeping on course for more than 3-5 minutes when enemies are within torpedo range is an invitation for them to try and launch at you.

[stormbringer3]

Thanks for the excellent post about the tactics to use. My post was mostly about the Destroyer concept in this game.

[EwaldvonKleist]

I believe that the "destroyer problem" is caused by two factors:
1) The available role settings and the AI's handling of them is bad to dysfunctional. Therefore, your capital ships do not have the historically available protection from DD attacks unless you command all your light divisions manually, since your own light forces are not doing their job to screen heavy forces in bad weather and to counterattack enemy divisions attempting a torpedo run.

2) Gunnery accuracy feels a bit underpowered in general during the 1920s and 1930s, so mid range gunnery against DDs often does not have a good chance to stop the DD.
In addition, DDs keep their small target status simply because they are a DD, even as they grow from a 300t boat to a ship with the displacement of a small light cruiser. But their hit points and damage control grows a lot, so while secondaries give good defence against a DD in 1900, a 1930DD will often successfully launch the torpedos even if targeted by a BBdiv secondary broadside.


I have considered building specialized knife fighting range CLs to fight DDs without suffering from the quick accuracy drop of long range gunnery, but I don't particularly enjoy the micromanagement required to use them successfully, since you also have to constantly evade the enemy torpedoes and guns with such light forces.
So my strategy is simply to stay out of the blue circle (I equip all my ships with torpedoes so I always have a blue circle torpedo range indicator) while building 4*4 or even 4*5 torpedo monsters myself.

[Xxzard]

I believe destroyers as a unit, and specifically destroyers modeled as an individual ship, are fine (outside the AI/formation issues I will get to later). I feel the threat of torpedoes is real and historically accurate - gun battles will almost always be fought just outside of torpedo range for the time period. I don't think destroyers are OP per se because while they can kill capital ships in some circumstances (crippled, surprised in low visibility conditions, surrounded), outside of those circumstances they will fail. I agree with WLRoo that the threat can be managed by careful play (although it's certainly frustrating at times), and the player can equally exploit torpedo attacks to great results. A capital formation with reasonable speed and secondary batteries should be able to defend itself if it turns away from the destroyer attack in time. A torpedo attack launched from behind fleeing ships has very low chances of success. Add in screening ships and the risk to the capitals should be minimal if they turn away. Torpedoes are a zoning weapon. A destroyer charge should force the opposing capitals to turn away - this is exactly what happened at Jutland. Now in the 30s and 40s torpedoes do gain enough range to be a threat even in daylight long range engagements, but we should keep in mind the cost of the destroyers has increased significantly.

On EwaldvonKleist's points, on point 2, it is definitely hard to hit a destroyer beyond 10000 yards in the game. It's almost a certainty a destroyer attack will get close enough to launch in 1930 even if the defense scores a few hits. Again though, this should just force the capital formation to turn/turn away.

Point 1 is the most significant issue for me. DDs and CLs just don't quite screen the way they should when left to their own devices (AI control) on screening or supporting roles and full human control is too much micromanagement for me. I usually end up with a blob of DDs way too densely packed (sometimes getting hit by near misses) around the capital line and trailing slightly behind it, when I would like a more well organized screening line well out in front and to the sides, ready to engage enemy light forces. Meanwhile the flotilla attack button works, but is very much an all or nothing thing. Sometimes flotilla attack sends the screen in an unexpected direction, and sometimes the attack is a bit more suicidal than I would like. Destroyers with 15k yards torpedoes trying to close to 5k yards, etc. It's one of those mechanics where I wish there was a gradation in the attack order, one for 'skirmish' and one for 'press the attack'. However, I totally understand the difficulty inherent here with the game mechanics - there are too many buttons already and good AI formations are really hard to get working across the variety of situations that could be encountered.

[EwaldvonKleist]

Re 2, another problem is that ROF of secondaries seems way lower than historically.

Secondaries seem to fire 1-2 salvos per minute, when IRL they would start to fire at maximum ROF to defend against destroyers at close range.