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Maritime Aircraft


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I notice that Maritime Aircraft cannot be set to raid convoys. Was this a policy decision or is it just too hard to implement it?

Previously I used bombers as maritime recce and it seemed reasonable that they would also be raiders.

Regards

Mike

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Maritime Patrol is basically a strat bomber equipped specifically to deal with submarines. There were about 800 of these in the Atlantic by the end of the war from Greenland to USA to Africa. Their guts were mostly electronic equipment for detecting subs.

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Hi Al

I guess Maritime Patrol also relates to the Pacific where float planes were often used. My comment about airships as raiders was meant to mean that they would have probably attacked merchant ships in WW1 if they had encountered one but clearly an airship would not have been an ideal design for the task.

In the context of medium bombers also being able to raid, actually the Dauntless sank more Axis shipping than any other Allied plane and the Stuka was used against convoys so perhaps any type of plane other than a fighter should be capable of raiding.

I notice by the way that the anti-sub tech gives Maritime Patrol a defence value against subs although I have not tried whether a sub can actually attack a plane in a coastal tile. Another anomaly with Maritme Patrol planes is that their long distance upgrade is 15% whereas strategic bombers are only 5%. In fact a long distance upgrade to a strat bomber should be horrendously expensive as it sometimes meant going to 4 engines rather than 2 and the fuel cost of the strat bomber going further would be just as significant a cost factor.

Regards

Mike

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Yes, Stukas were used to sink enemy merchant/naval shipping early in the war and later in Russia, but I think most of the serious Nazi raiding against the British Lend lease convoys to Russia was done by medium bombers like the He 111 and more often the Ju 88. Of course I'm only addressing the Germans here.

I'm not as familiar with the Pacific and American Dauntless divebombing attacks on Japanese merchant ships, but I seem to recall the bulk of the Japanese merchant shipping being sunk by U.S. submarines and medium bombers like the B-25 and B-26. So I think Hubert's current decision to generally limit the aerial maritime raiding business to medium and heavy bombers seems historically accurate.

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Hi Jackson8

You make some reasonable arguments about the actual use of TAC bombers, which I will cover below, but you did not really address the original point of the post which related to Maritime Aircraft. I am thinking here of the Condor in the German context. Strategic Command deals quite heavily in abstraction with respect to convoys. The Condor and other Axis patrol aircraft could attack merchant shipping themselves but also acted as scouts for U Boats and other aircraft operating against the Arctic route so they contributed to the effectiveness of general raiding against convoys thus should have a raid value of their own.

With respect to TAC bombers it does partly depend on what you think that type of plane is. In the case of the Allies it would probably include Fighter Bombers of various types. Certainly in the late stages of the war these decimated Axis cargo shipping in the Baltic which is represented to some extent in the game by convoys from Sweden. You agreed that Stukas played a part in the initial stages, they were also active against Allied supply convoys to Malta. I think it would be reasonable to assume that if TAC type planes were within range of an active convoy route then it ought to be possible to deploy them as raiders against that convoy. Thus it would be historically accurate to give TAC planes a raid capability but they would be less often used in that role because of their range limitations.

Regards

Mike

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This is one of the major issues with designing a global WWII game and why not many people try it :(

In the PTO, TAC was limited to ground support roles and would occassionaly attack shipping. This is due to short ranges of most of these planes, like the Sally for Japan. Medium bombers were the real ship killers in that theater. Planes like the Nells, Bettys for Japan. Both had long ranges and could carry torpedos. In the ETO, TAC was more often used because of the much shorter ranges involved so there was no real reason to use Mediums for anti-ship duties.

So abstractions must be made in order to simplify the code and have the AI use it the best it can. So looking for historical behavior in a game scaled like AoD is not going to work. What the game is trying to do is provide the correct 'feel' of how the world acted during this timeframe versus detailed historical accuracy. If you want that you need to find a different game :(

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Hi Numdydar

It is not historical accuracy that is of interest to me but historical possibility. For historical accuracy it would be necessary to say that Japanese naval doctrine did not include attacking merchant shipping as a priority so IJN subs should not have a raid capability. My own interest is historical possibility so I like to see what might have happened if the various powers adopted different strategies and tactics but within the bounds of their historic capabilities. This is why I point out game constraints such as the lack of raid capability in some aircraft types which do not represent an actual restriction that the powers faced.

There are some situations which are difficult to model with respect to historical possibility such as amphibious warfare. I do not like the current costing of 30% every time a unit converts to amphibious because the actual model should be that once a certain amount of amphibious shipping capability had been built it should not cost so much to deploy it on different occasions. However the game mechanic cannot currently restrict the in use amphibious capability so making every use arbitrarily expensive is an attempt to match the historic capacity constraint. I hope in SC3 the historic possibility will be more appropriately modelled for raiding, amphibious and various other aspects. In my opinion the goal for games like SC set in specific eras is to match the capabilities and potential not always the historic events although naturally many similar events will occur.

Regards

Mike

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I couldn,t have said it better so myself, Mike. Hopefully a lot of other SC'ers share our game philosophy.

I do hope SC3's amphibious model represents this real life event more appropriately and it seems there will be a transport mode able to transit to amphibious operations before an attack. Sounds like a good question for the Matrix forum to see if we could get a little more insight into the mechanics.

And Mike, why have you not been a poster over at Matrix? Now is the opportune moment to present many of your great ideas.:)

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Hi SeaMonkey

I have looked at the other places but it is a case of so much to do - so little time to do it in! I guess Hubert etc read what I post here so that is some input to SC3 but what I post about mainly relates to how the game currently works e.g. the implementation of raiding so it seems most appropriate to post here when it is more about AOD.

At present I am trying to get my 1942 scenario for AOD ready to publish and I am using that as a test bed for all my ideas not just naval ones. It includes my Seaways system to improve naval mobility but its major feature is the introduction of evasion in land combat to provide proper differentiation between different sized land units. It is going to take a lot of testing to fine tune land evasion so my 1942 scenario is some way off, however, the Seaways part already seems to work well to me.

I would have liked to publish Seaways just as a straight variant of AOD 1939 - it includes sets of loops between all the oceans going right round the world and a few country specific options so naval TFs can actually travel historic distances in appropriate timescales but still be subject to interception. However I have put publishing that on hold untill 1.02 is published but then there might be a 1.03....

As I said too little time....

Regards

Mike

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Hi Numdydar

It is not historical accuracy that is of interest to me but historical possibility. For historical accuracy it would be necessary to say that Japanese naval doctrine did not include attacking merchant shipping as a priority so IJN subs should not have a raid capability. My own interest is historical possibility so I like to see what might have happened if the various powers adopted different strategies and tactics but within the bounds of their historic capabilities. This is why I point out game constraints such as the lack of raid capability in some aircraft types which do not represent an actual restriction that the powers faced.

There are some situations which are difficult to model with respect to historical possibility such as amphibious warfare. I do not like the current costing of 30% every time a unit converts to amphibious because the actual model should be that once a certain amount of amphibious shipping capability had been built it should not cost so much to deploy it on different occasions. However the game mechanic cannot currently restrict the in use amphibious capability so making every use arbitrarily expensive is an attempt to match the historic capacity constraint. I hope in SC3 the historic possibility will be more appropriately modelled for raiding, amphibious and various other aspects. In my opinion the goal for games like SC set in specific eras is to match the capabilities and potential not always the historic events although naturally many similar events will occur.

Regards

Mike

Actually, there was never an official Japanese sub doctrine that restricted what the subs could shoot at. There were lots of Allied merchant ships sunk by Japanese subs.

During the war, IJN submarines did sink about 1 million tons (GRT) of merchant shipping (184 ships) in the Pacific

Of course the smaller number of Japanese as compared to the Germans and Allies, plus the larger vastness of the Pacific also helped this number to be small. Plus Japan used them as scouts versus anti-merchant duty. This was why they tended to be able to sink more warships than merchants as they were scouting. So they had just as much chance to find a waeship as a merchant. But 90% of the time they found nothing at all. Which is why they were so ineffective. Not because they could not shoot a torp because it was 'only' a merchant.

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Hi Numdydar

I did not say that the IJN would not shoot at an MS if it encountered one but rather that deployment for raiding lines of communications was not a priority for them. The only major action they undertook against Merchant Shipping was the Indian Ocean Raid but that was coupled with an attempt to lure the Royal Navy into a fleet action so could be seen as part of that objective rather than commerce raiding.

There is a good article on IJN Strategic doctrine at the link below but as it is quite long I will give 3 quotes from it to summarise the flavour:

Our navy has lost the war by ‘battling’ instead of ‘warring.’”

Commander Chihaya Masataka, IJN[47]

Staff Officer

1949

New technology and tactical capabilities were restricted to improving the existing doctrine. The use of submarines against enemy lines of communication was ignored, despite the success of Germany during the First World War.

Conclusion: The Japanese way of war envisioned by Akiyama, validated at Tsushima, codified by Sato, and instilled in the IJN by the Naval Staff College, was an amalgamation of Western and Eastern thought combined with the samurai traditions of Japan. By ignoring the complete lessons of the outsiders, the IJN created a doctrine that was limited to a single mode of war. Absent was the basis of Mahan’s strategy that “Control of Maritime commerce through command of the sea is the primary function of navies.”[

http://www.militaryhistoryonline.com/wwii/articles/strategiccultureijn1.aspx

Regards

Mike

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