Naval warfare - sub attacks a bit unrealistic?

[soetekouwd]

Hi,

I thouroughly enjoy this came. However, when it comes to naval battles I feel a bit let down, sometimes even a bit agitated because the message "damage evaded" happens a bit too often.

I can understand that when similar class ships attack each other, such as battleships, that the possibility of damage evasion is present. Battles were fought with big guns over great distances, without sophisticated targetting equipment.

However, when I attack battleships with submarines, even with class 5 (!), that message still occurs very very frequently?!

I think that it is a bit unrealistic due to 2reasons:

1. Submarines back then had to get real close to fire off torpedoes. Torpedoes back then were not as developed in terms of range as today's versions.

2. Those battleships/dreadnoughts of that time were slow ships, hardly capable of agile evasive manoeuvres. Especially when torpedoes are fired, as mentioned above, at close range!

Similarly the odds of evading damage for battle cruisers can be higher than those for the battleships due to the fact that these ships are faster, but should still be lower than compared to destroyers.

Does anyone agree with this observation and can (via the editor?) changes be made to these odds?

Regards,

Dirk

[Ant]

I'm just playing through my first campaign game at the moment and I've been getting the impression that submarines are a bit overpowered to be honest.

They should be little more than convoy raiders with minimal combat ability and yet my large surface forces lose a lot of strength to them. It seems a bit unrealistic to me. Why bother having battleships, cruisers and dreadnoughts when you can just churn out submarines.

[Wolfpack]

I'd like to see some changes made to the whole naval system . It's too hard to kill things. I think fleets should be maxed out at a lower strength or have their firepower increased. As it is, you can have a massive fleet battle, and have everyone limp home. It definitely needs to be more deadly to have fleet actions. I had one battlecruiser surrounded with two destroyers, one battlecruiser, one dreadnought, and one pre-dreadnought battleship. He was at an 8 strength to start, and an entire fleet only managed to knock him down to one. That seems a bit ridiculous.

As it is, there's not a ton of risk in fleet actions because chances are, you'll only lose maybe one or two units even if you get overwhelmed. It should be a very risky proposition. There's a reason Fisher (Or was it Churchill?) said that the only man who could lose the war in an afternoon was Jellicoe. There's also a reason that the Kaiser didn't want his fleet going too far out to sea, because it was a huge risk...in this system...eh, not so much really.

I've found subs to be pretty much useless against surface ships unless the ship stumbles into them, which is about how it should be. Once they're fully upgraded, they're a bit better, but by then, the enemy should have good ASW levels. I usually use my subs about like the Germans wanted to do, and hide them behind enemy forces so when they try to retreat from a fleet battle for repairs, the subs have a good chance of finishing them off.

[Jail Bird]

I'm just playing through my first campaign game at the moment and I've been getting the impression that submarines are a bit overpowered to be honest.

They should be little more than convoy raiders with minimal combat ability and yet my large surface forces lose a lot of strength to them. It seems a bit unrealistic to me. Why bother having battleships, cruisers and dreadnoughts when you can just churn out submarines.

I agree with this, it is unrealistic to have subs that can almost always impact a large surface vessel's damage level. I am not buying into the notion that because subs must get close to the targets they should always see optimum results. To be honest torpedo technology was in it's infancy. Add to that they were powered with compressed air which left a tell tale wake. I also feel that subs were very very temperamental during WWI and the operational scope was affected by mechanical issues way more then may be formatted here. Additionally most every capital ship had a bevy of escort vessels to insure it's safety and attack targets well before they had a chance to engage the inner circle of the group. If it was up to me subs would be primarily relegated to commerce raiding and would not be able to engage capital ships on the high seas with any degree of successes. As a nice trade off maybe a sub or group of subs could be able to attack "fleets" within a harbor at great "risk" for a chance of high return.

[CSS]

In the Great War, the U-boat war was much more accurately portreyed , than in SC Global warfare. The torpedo technology and aiming , and fire control was almost exactly the same at the start of and early phases of WWII. Only mid and late War did the very substancialy change. With the exception of The Cressy,Aboukir, and the Hague, U-Boat were truely more commerce raiders, and they sank merchants overwelmingly with their deck gun, not torpedoes. Pierrie De Le Arnauld who was Germany's greatest U-boat ace of the war almost exclusivly used his deck gun, not torpedoes!

[worg64]

The naval war is something we have discussed a lot lately with several people in the forum including Hubert and Bill involved.

it seems the naval war is what most people are not 100% content with

as it works at the moment but that said I think the game balance works nice

but it is rather a feeling on how the ship battles work at moment that feel odd for most people.

There has been some suggestions and ideas and I think the game designers are looking at it, but it is hard to get the naval war as logic and realistic in this game versus real life with the current naval combat rules.

maybe a idea would be to shift the current specifik types of specifik ship types to taskforces units consisting of differnt types of ships depending on role.

Instead of calling the units Battleships, cruisers, destroyers, subs, carriers one instead started and bought specifik taskforces depending on role.

raider unit, escorting unit, convoy escort, battle force, seek and destroy force something like that?

Then it would not feel as strange when a sub attacked and killed a Battleship or vice versa but rather a battleforce crippled a raider force.

The text dive could easily be substitued with escaped. A seek and destroy unit could then have a higher chance of intercept and find raid units for example

where a convoy escort prevented convoy attcks in their area of controll (same as now where a ship is close to a sub but maybe a ZOC of 2 or 3)

[Jail Bird]

The torpedo technology and aiming , and fire control was almost exactly the same at the start of and early phases of WWII.

Good point on the deck guns. That said the alcohol fuel engine left a telltale trail of bubbles on its way to its target, these engines were considered obsolete by the time the G7e (which was electrically driven) torpedo came into service before WWII. Boats did go to sea with torpedoes using BOTH engines early on but by 1940 the steam driven ones were considered obsolete. The detonators (faulty as they were) used in G7e were much different then the contact detonators used in WWI. They were had a magnetic detonator that was designed to travel under the keel of a ship and then detonate. This delivers a devastating explosion breaking the back of the ship. The only reason they were not universally successful was that the detonators were faulty and or set incorrectly. The WWI torpedoes were of the contact detonator design and were only marginally effective. They were mechanically reliable and designed for the torpedo to explode on impact with the side of the ship. Often the ship was left disabled with a gaping hole as it's "back" or keel was not broken. It is interesting to note that even in WWII the contact detonators were faulty as they were re-designed and not tested properly. My point is Submarine technology and moreover torpedo technology was much different from war to war. I stand by my point that a torpedo was not much more then an "experimental" weapon that was only coming into age during WWI. The magnetic detonator made the torpedo the devastating weapon it was. Although it was not perfected until the middle of the war (neither side got it right) it was there and dynamics and physics of sinking large ships with them was doctrine

[Wolfpack]

maybe a idea would be to shift the current specifik types of specifik ship types to taskforces units consisting of differnt types of ships depending on role.

Instead of calling the units Battleships, cruisers, destroyers, subs, carriers one instead started and bought specifik taskforces depending on role.

raider unit, escorting unit, convoy escort, battle force, seek and destroy force something like that?

Then it would not feel as strange when a sub attacked and killed a Battleship or vice versa but rather a battleforce crippled a raider force.

The text dive could easily be substitued with escaped. A seek and destroy unit could then have a higher chance of intercept and find raid units for example

where a convoy escort prevented convoy attcks in their area of controll (same as now where a ship is close to a sub but maybe a ZOC of 2 or 3)

Changing the names doesn't do anything about how the game plays though, and though the land part of the game is excellent (I think this engine works better for WWI than WWII honestly, it's great), the naval war is merely adequate. I'm not sure how to fix it, but I do know there's not nearly enough risk involved with fleet actions, since it takes a quarter of your navy to sink one BC or BB unless you get a lucky hit or a surprise attack.

I know in previous titles, it was impossible to put in national differences, but is that possible yet? Because the naval portion could seriously use a bit of that too. It's more subjective with land units, but very clear cut with the navies, at least in the big ships:

KM: Advantage in armor and gunnery

RN: Advantages in speed and firepower

[soetekouwd]

It seems to me that everybody agrees that U-boats were especially effective against merchant shipping.

Opinions on effectiveness against warships are however divided. On the internet I found a list of all allied war ships sunk or damaged by subs. This list includes some 14 battleships (see uboat.net for interesting facts). Believe me when I say that it wasn't the deck guns that did the damage :-). Also note that especially in the early war years most capital war ships were sunk!

Whether or not we can agree to what it was really like in WW1, the factors that influence such reality in the game are a) the odds of hitting a ship and the damage done. If there is a way to customise these factors to anybody's liking, then the discussion is solved. Correct?

[Bill101]

Hi Soetekouwd

The chance of evading damage can be edited by ship type and by nation in the editor.

If you open up a campaign and go to:

-Campaign

- Edit Country Data

- click on Edit Combat Target Data.

Here you can change the settings of the naval units, e.g. the evasion in land or naval combat, their attack and defense values, action points.

Bill