Naval Evasion

[mcaryf1]

I see that in AOD naval units do not have an evasion factor whilst they did in Al's Brute Force scenarios in Gold. I guess that the AOD implementation was a team activity with several contributors. I am interested to understand whether evasion was considered and if so what was the thinking behind the exclusion as naval evasion seemed a good innovation to me to simulate the uncertainties of naval combat.

Regards

Mike

[Big Al]

Evasion represents armor, speed, and surprise. Simulating naval combat in WW2 is tough. I noticed in GOLD navies were getting sunk way too fast so I started testing out ranges of evasion and what works to keep it exciting. We all worked on perfecting it, Hubert and Bill and myself.

In Solomons 42 you will find the USA carriers have slightly higher evasion that Jap CVs due to fire control and better ships.

I found a healthy level of anxiety when I just couldn't sink X ship due to evasion.

I believe it was implemented in the WW1 game

[SeaMonkey]

What! No evasion for AoD naval units? :eek:Shame .......shame.... on the development team!:mad:

[Hubert Cater]

Hi Mike,

For AoD Al did most of the original campaign design with the exception of 1939 World At War which was a collabrative initiative using a custom map designed by one of our Beta testers, Lars-Holger.

The OOBs and combat target data for 1939 World At War was built upon the similar campaign from Global/GOLD which would explain the lack of naval evasion as we didn't have it in those earlier maps either.

But as Al mentioned you can find naval evasion in the other campaigns that he worked on... hope this helps

Hubert

[mcaryf1]

Thanks for the answers - I have only really played with the AOD 1939 campaign so far. Obviously I do favour naval evasion and I also like each country's units to have their own characteristics so I applaud Al's damage control differentiation.

Just as an aside I have read that the Japanese originally thought that their sailors typically smaller stature than Americans would give them an advantage in that they could cram more decks into a similar space than the US Navy by making the deck ceilings lower. However, it turned out that less headroom made damage control more difficult.

There is one other general question I would raise under this topic. My reading of your combat resolution formulae is that the amount of damage a defender does to its attacker depends on the defender's ctv ratings but not those of the attacker. Thus would it be right if either a BB or a CA or a DD all with the same supply and morale and other factors were attacking a DD then the DD would theoretically do the same damage utilising the same randomisation element to whichever of the 3 ship types was actually attacking it? My point being might evasion be the only method of recognising that more heavily armoured ships such as BBs should suffer less from the defensive fire of a DD than, say, a cruisers or other DDs might?

Regards

Mike

[Hubert Cater]

Hi Mike,

Yes some very good points and something for us to consider for SC3

Hubert

[mcaryf1]

Hi Hubert

Thank you for confirming my thought about the determination of damage between unit types. I think the combat calculations have had some changes since the manual gave the formulae as you have introduced a mechanism to check if both units have been upgraded and reduced the damage if they have. Thus your combat evaluation routine is already doing something to compare the actual units rather than just taking the attack value in one case and the defence value in the other to determine each units losses. I think that land unit combat will need to be considered in this light now that you have essentially 3 units - army, corps and division all being similar types of force differing essentially in notional size. I know this is not the model you have used because the MPP cost would differ by more but let us just say for relative size Div = 1, Corps = 2 and Army = 4. A combat resulting in a loss of one strength point for an army essentially should be equivalent to a loss of 4 strength points for a Division but as I understand it the combat resolution will give the same resulting value whichever unit type the enemy was fighting. A quick fix would be to make the reinforcement cost for the "larger" units proportionately less but in the longer term SC3 will ideally need a combat formula that also evaluates the differences in combatants' ctvs rather than just their absolute values.

Regards

Mike