Buck Beach
Posts: 1973
Joined: 6/25/2000
From: Upland,CA,USA
Status: offline
|
quote:
ORIGINAL: el cid again
I am addressing the ship repair rate. For Seattle the solution was very easy: move the sink to Tacoma - while the ND HQ stays in Seattle - they don't interact that way. Tacoma had no sink and depended on Seattle to eat its excess production - the reverse is not a big change in how things work. Only down by San Diego do I have to figure out a solution.
For the Philippines - first IRL Gen Homma lost his job for not taking it fast enough. It didn't turn out to be "easy." I find it is easy or hard depending on the enemy - if they run it is too easy - if they fight - Northern Luzon is a bear. I now believe it is better to come in on Manila the back way - and shut down its immense production early. I myself was amazed when I first crested the ridge into Baguio City - after an hour or more climbing ridge line after ridge line with rivers in the valleys - we came out on an immense valley with the only road on the inside curve of a cliff - miles long. Behind the city rose terrace after terrace of rice paddys - and in the Ilagan Valley to the north there were more. Yamashita was NEVER driven out - and one special ops guy was only ordered to surrender decades after the war ended - IJA had left Nakano School agents in place in case be became enemies again. I worked hard to make Luzon a hard nut to crack - in particular working on the coast defense forts - and I am not sure they are yet hard enough. And does the Philippines hold out as long as history for you? Not for me. I think how it goes depends on how both sides move - and that most of the problems are real ones - mountains in the North - malaria in Bataan - major forts in Bataan and Manila. What is not quite right is the Manila supply sink. And now I wonder if we might not move it to Clark?
There is no fixed CD fort there - and a supply sink draws from adjacent hexes. Hmmm - will test - it might get a bit better - that is the Manila effect may be less. But note that in 1945 a brigade sized force of naval infantry investing only the Old City (a walled Spanish fort) turned Manila into the most destroyed city in Asia - and second only to Warsaw in the world. Which says a lot - Manila was only "easy" in 1942 because we did not defend it - had we defended it - it SHOULD have been hard - and also messed up.
The four Luzon bases I have still standing are Lingayen, Clark, Bataan & Manila. I really don't actively engage with ground units so the units at the MAIO start and their orders have gone unchanged. (BTW just another reason why I don't even consider a PBEM as I am not a complete player and definitely terrible in that area). I have since fast forwarded under continuous play to 4/11/1942 and those bases are still well supplied. Bataan and Manila have not been engage on the ground. The other two's ground units have continuously been bombed (often several times a turn) and attacked but they still appear to be in good shape.
The jury is out on ASW model. But it isn't really my model - I am just tweeking Matrix model so it might approach working. I cannot tell if you think it is too unlikely to damage a sub or too likely? As for the Japanese - it is harder for them for two reasons: code defines it so and they generally field a poorer weapons suite. Wether code makes it hard enough is a difficult question to assess.
I am definitely willing to accept that the when the better devices arrive the ASW action will improve. The original model/game/action was absolutely too effective. In the meantime my advance to 4/11/42 shows an additional 25 to 30 percent more allied subs damaged by air (and several additional Japanese so damaged).
One problem is that a GAME is NOT WWII. PLAYERS CHANGE what the subs are asked to do - and the number of chances to attack one depends critically on (a) how many are sent where and (b) how many ASW units are hunting them. The results in a GAME will ALWAYS be proportional to PLAYER actions - and not easily comparable to history. To do that we need statistics - gather the number of ASW units engaging subs - and tell me the numbers. Better still - the classes. Because sending an old sub out (with less durability ) is less likely to work than a new one (with more) - while sending out a DE is more likely to work than a PC - etc. I cannot "calibrate" without a statistical number of gigantic proportions - the ASW weapons per kill is about 1000 - and so we need tens of thousands - or better hundreds of thousands of weapons drops - but that depends on the pattern size - so I need data to get there.
I can tell you the model is flawed re submarines. It is weapon based - not detection / evasion based. Subs want to attack ASW units way too much. They prefer to use guns way too much. Players have way too little control over mission behaviors - which WERE taylored by the situation - or could be. Subs are not even subs - they travel on the surface all the time - unless special things happen. Even with snorkels - which are not part of the model at all. We cannot really fix this - and neither can Matrix - until a fundamental rewrite is done. All we can do is make it better - and getting ASW units not to kill every 5 seconds is part of it.
There may be a flaw in my device names - this may prevent you from seeing the details of what is attacking. Maybe - because I DID see such a device in a message window - once. Maybe we just need to wait long enough for better weapons to make that more common? ONe thing - there won't be any house rules against more than - what was it - four ASW units in a TF? Not any more. I am going to experiment with shorter names to see if that helps us see more messages?
It is also possible we need to multiply accuracy by K = an integer. I work on the assumption 1 = 1 per cent - but it isn't really that - and so we might find the ASW attacks need to be a multiple. On the other hand - that will make the Japanese more effective - not less. I don't favor pretending they didn't put 12 - or 120 DC on a ship - when they did (depending on the case). It is also possible K is less than one - and one long test indicates K might be about one half. Since we do not clearly know what K should be at this point - I am loth to just pull numbers out of the air. I will look at this today - but I don't think we have the data to indicate which way to go? And specific, detailed data helps. Details must include class data - this defines weapons and durability - number of engagements - number of reported "attacking" messages in each attack - etc. And since I put in sensors and snorkels - class data gives us that too. All these things should matter, and I am sure they do matter. The question is - do we have the data close to right? Ball park is the best we can do - because what players do is going to change what the outcomes are. Also because historcal data itself is not perfect: there are many cases where we don't know what happened, and many more where we don't know in detail what happened. The totals are too small - but we don't know by how much? And there are also absolute contradictions in the data. It was decades before we admitted a single torpedo spread of six fish sank a Carrier, a destroyer, and put a BB out of action. We still have people who don't accept a midget scored at PH - and you can see it shooting on film taken at the time. Not only is game data hard to figure out - so is the real data to compare it with.
It would be helpful if you indicated what you think is better than what we have? I am not able to change the relative nation codes - Japanese ships with identical weapons will be worse than American ships and I cannot change the ratio - but is the total number of sinkings and damagings too high or too low? Longer term, it looks like still maybe too high. At game start - it looks too low - but ASW should be awful early in the war.
Japanese ASW is often under rated. They knew exactly what to do - and when they had the right priority - they could do it. Mostly they failed to try - but take a look at the op that went after and killed USS Wahoo - a sub they hated. It shows the things it is usually said "they could not do" and "did not know how to do" is essentially bunk. In a game you may meet a player - or AI - unwilling to form ASW TFs - and to support ASW with ASW air patrols. [Matrix gives you not one ASW armed plane - never mind planes with ASW sensors] But if you meet one who DOES use these things - AND IF you send subs into his ports - you are going to take casualties. It became a truism - stay out of ports - IRL. Too dangerous. Japanese pre war planning for escort ships was not implemented until mid war. The Grand Escort Command was not formed until mid war - and never given eonough assets. They had three different convoy systems (don't be too smug - so did we - the same three- army - navy and civil). Special ASW weapons were not mass produced until too late. Radar was not mass produced until too late. In RHS I try to let you see these matters in the data - strictly historically in two families and with better planning in one family. But you need to play for years to see how they evolved over the course of the war. In many respects - Japanese ASW vessels are very comparable with Allied ones - except not comparable in numbers later in the war. At the start - the Allies ASW is horrible in quantity as well as quality too. Japanese DEs actually enter service before US ones do - and they are an evolutionary product which ended up remarkable similar to each other (120 to 140 DC, ahead throwing weapons, 2 to 4 guns from 3 to 5 inch caliber, radar, similar speed and maneuverability. You cannot get from the data that they were not fundamentally similar, except the US used a larger DC and had a better ahead throwing weapon system (although RN didn't like it much].
Data isn't everythign. US DD only mounted ahead throwing weapons experimentally - and could not score with them until post war.
Not sure why? But it is said it was tactics - and that is not very well modeled here. What I did was insure that USN DD do not have them - while RN DD do have them - because they did. Ironic when you consider RN didn't like Hedgehog - but used it - while USN did like it - but did not use it - on DD. [DE are different - and inverted: RN didn't usually use them with HH, while USN did.] Japan is similar to the USN - it puts ahead throwers on DE - not on DD. Probably it IS tactics - and probably DE are better suited to wierd weapons for use on unseen targets - just because the crew has a clue how to hunt a submarine. Note that no DD is credited with any serious number of subs - it is almost always zero - otherwise one. But USS England - a DE - got six in something like five days. Even when she did not make the first run - it was her run that scored. She knew what to do with HH.
Ideas how to do things better are particularly welcome in this complex subject area. We are experimenting - and guessing - and measuring the results. We are not there yet - probably - unless we are lucky. Even if we are better than any previous form of WITP in this respect- nothing stops us from getting better - so if you have data or ideas - we will consider them.
I haven't much if anything more than I have already provide. I understand data-wise it is practically useless and likely telling you something you were already very well aware of. I don't have the discipline necessary to do the tests and record the results. As to ideas, I sure wish I had some to share.
|
Printable Version
Probable RHS 7.93 - 
But from memory I tried to attack Russian lcu's on non-base hexes and it didn't work ... I'll do some testing too to verify ... 
New Messages
No New Messages
Hot Topic w/ New Messages
Hot Topic w/o New Messages
Locked w/ New Messages
Locked w/o New Messages
Post New Thread