Matrix Games Forums

I am defending a shore bombardment mission. My capital ships have Director fire control, but I just noticed that my coast defense battery only has central firing. You would think that shore batteries, being located on rocks, that are things that don't move, would be more accurate than ships.

You would indeed think so, and hypothetically one shore based gun is the equivalent of 3 ship-based guns.

Yet practical examples tend not to bear this out, possibly due to the tendency to use old guns to equip the batteries.

For example, in WW2 both Britain and Germany had batteries in the Dover-Calais area, the Germans to support Sea Lion and the British to counter the German guns. Neither battery had much success in sinking ships.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dover_Strait_coastal_guns

Maybe the shore guns could be simulated in game with older guns (-1 or -2 instead of the shipborne 0s, whatever you as the player swapped out of your cruisers/BBs in the last refit) but their fire control should be the best available. I think there should be much better control over coast defense in the game anyway, with players permitted to design shore defense structures, some techs (shore-based torpedos and missile batteries, for example), and for sure the ability to site them where you think they would be useful. It's really frustrating to pay for a battery and then find it sited somewhere no enemy is ever going to go - inside the excluded zone of a port, for example. Historically, countries built a lot more coast defense batteries than ever appear in the game. I was down in the San Francisco Bay area a few months ago and went for a hike on the Marin Headlands and there were literally dozens of facilities there, ranging from Civil War era forts down by the water's edge to a missile battery up in the hills several miles from the ocean. I'm currently playing GMTs Battle For Normandy, and the Germans have maybe 50 shore batteries scattered around just the Normandy area.

On the other hand players siting batteries was banned because they get too good at knowing where they are needed and thereby saturating bombardment and landing sites with defences - imagine trying to press a landing against six 6" batteries and four 4" batteries.

I've suggested a hybrid system - whereby there's a series of fixed sites for batteries, and some are limited in the max calibre they can support.