Fixed Wing ASW - Utterly Confused

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Fixed Wing ASW - Utterly Confused - 2/7/2014 9:26:36 PM

flying penguin

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Joined: 1/30/2014
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Hi Guys,

Firstly, even as a definite non-naval grog, I'm loving this game. I'm so far out of my depth it's unreal, but loving it all the same

And I'm reassured to see such active post-release development already :)

So far, the main thing that stumps me (admittedly it's one of many

) is ASW ops, especially how to use fixed wing assets efficiently. I was playing the "Advanced ASW Exercise" scenario, where you have a Nimrod with a mix of passive and active sonobouys, so I plotted a course through my exercise area and it dutifully unloaded a trail of passive sonobouys. All good so far. Except for a few points:

1. Despite having RoE set to not engage non-hostiles, I unwillingly hit far more Cod than submarines despite having not ordered an attack. Does the Shooting Ambiguity have any impact on whether unidentified contacts are engaged? My air assets spent most of their time automatically charging towards new contacts baying for blood.

2. Is there any way to force the dropping of a sonobouy in a location e.g. to fill in a gap in the pattern or to put an active bouy next to a possible contact detected by a passive sonobouy?

3. What controls the type of sonobouy dropped? Despite having two types on board, only passive bouys were ever droped, whilst a Nimrod plonked down later in the mission editor only dropped active ones, I couldn't discern any obvious relationship between EMCON settings and the type dropped.

After emptying the English channel of Cod, I did eventually manage to find the subs, although not before loosing a Frigate to a barrage of missiles launched from Lyme bay, right where I'd been desperately trying to drop more sonobouys but without success....

I'm sure I'm just missing something simple, but any help appreciated :)

Cheers,

Jamie (p.s. my apologies in advance, this is probably the first of many stupid questions

)

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RE: Fixed Wing ASW - Utterly Confused - 2/7/2014 10:26:07 PM

Pukeko

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Joined: 1/15/2014
From: New Zealand
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1. Did you check the RoE (button in the mission editor) for the ASW mission (I assume you set a mission up to do this)? This can be different to what you have set for the whole scenario. My guess is that Shooting Ambiguity does not affect what you are referring to (although I could be wrong). I am more interested in what Engage opportunity targets does as its not in the manual. BTW, in this scenario I also had all units on the mission charge in once a unidentified target was found. I found having ASW missions that are a lot smaller is more useful (from that stand point and from the stand point that the entire area could not be covered before sonar buoys start running out of power and disappear from the map). Some keyboard shortcuts I found useful:
N Mark Neutral
H Mark Hostile
F Mark Friendly

2. You can use the following keyboard keys:
[ Drop Passive SB above layer
] Drop Active SB above layer
shift-[ Drop Passive SB below layer
shift-] Drop Active SB below layer

3. This I am not sure about - but it could be related to mission EMCON settings if you are not changing them.

(in reply to flying penguin)

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RE: Fixed Wing ASW - Utterly Confused - 2/8/2014 1:36:22 AM

IWS

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re: 2.
On a related note, shift-D manually toggles dipping sonar in the latest builds.

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Post #: 3

RE: Fixed Wing ASW - Utterly Confused - 2/8/2014 7:56:50 PM

flying penguin

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Joined: 1/30/2014
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Thanks for the help, I've just re-run the scenarios and I can see the default RoE setting for ASW missions is to engage non-hostiles, which explains the prolific fish-murdering.

Re: sonobouys, that will get most of the result I want, with a little bit of micromanaging, so thanks :) I'd love to see a way to order the dropping of sonobouys at arbitrary locations, without having to manually hit the fire button at the right moment, so here's hoping for a future build

Cheers,

Jamie

< Message edited by flying penguin -- 2/8/2014 9:11:05 PM >

(in reply to IWS)

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RE: Fixed Wing ASW - Utterly Confused - 2/8/2014 8:11:11 PM

flying penguin

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Joined: 1/30/2014
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Seems I spoke too soon, it seems my helicopters and my Nimrod all still charge headlong at the first fish contact. I've confirmed that the mission RoE, side doctrine and unit RoE have engage non-hostiles set to No and they still charge in. Is this the designed behaviour?

I've got my Nimrod back on course by unselecting "ignore plotted course when attacking", but I can't seem to get it to disengage and when I turn on targeting vectors it's still targeting the fish... Edit: and it seems to have stopped dropping sonobouys...

< Message edited by flying penguin -- 2/8/2014 9:13:45 PM >

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RE: Fixed Wing ASW - Utterly Confused - 2/8/2014 8:56:31 PM

Dimitris

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Units on patrol will still intercept unknown contacts to classify/identify them,even if they are prevented to engage them.

Does your side actually know the contact is a flock of fish or is this something that you intrinsicly know?

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RE: Fixed Wing ASW - Utterly Confused - 2/8/2014 9:07:25 PM

flying penguin

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That explains it, sort of. The incident in question was when a dipping sonar on a Sea King picked up a single non moving contact. I'm pretty sure it's a fish but haven't confirmed, but either way, rather than have the Sea King continue to attempt to confirm the contact, I have all six aircraft swarming the location and no way to tell them to back off and let the Sea King investigate without flagging it as friendly and having everyone ignore it. Units automatically re-engage if I tell them to dis-engage, which is unhelpful.

Either I'm missing something, or possibly disengage should really should mean disengage (at least for unconfirmed targets), which it doesn't in this situation, as my bodges to get people back on course seem to leave them unable to resume patrol properly. Or perhaps an "investigate contact" order?

Hope that makes sense.

Cheers,

Jamie

< Message edited by flying penguin -- 2/8/2014 10:10:22 PM >

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RE: Fixed Wing ASW - Utterly Confused - 2/8/2014 9:17:23 PM

DROregon

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Joined: 1/19/2002
From: Oregon
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My experience is that all units (in your case aircraft) on the same patrol vector toward the unclassified target. Also, even when fishes or whales are classified as biologic, units still track until I manually classify as friendly. Biologics are not automatically friendly.

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RE: Fixed Wing ASW - Utterly Confused - 2/8/2014 9:38:33 PM

Pukeko

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From: New Zealand
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I have the same experience. But I wonder if it is better to not divert all units, but only send the closest unit to investigate and if necessary shoot at the new contact. 9 times out of 10 the detecting unit can identify and kill the target before other friendly units can get half way to the contact.

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RE: Fixed Wing ASW - Utterly Confused - 2/8/2014 9:44:44 PM

flying penguin

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I think that would probably be, if not the best, one of the possible solutions. At the moment I've got 4 unidentified contacts, 3 subs in mission (so at least one contact is biologic), and no good way to get my 6 aircraft to divide their labour rather than all hounding the first detected contact.

But you still need a way to re-assign investigators for the cases where (for example) a helicopter may be slightly further out than a fixed wing asset, but you want to use the fixed wing asset to continue laying sonobouys over the mission area rather than stopping to hunt a single unidentified target that may or may not be hostile.

Cheers,

Jamie

(in reply to Pukeko)

Post #: 10

RE: Fixed Wing ASW - Utterly Confused - 2/9/2014 6:05:40 AM

Russian Heel

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I think a good solution is to make 1 ASW patrol mission per a/c. If you have 6 a/c, divide your patrol area into 6 sectors with missions and one a/c assigned to each mission/sector and uncheck investigate contacts outside of patrol area. If they ID a possible contact inside their assigned sector you won't have the other 5 immediately stop everything they are doing and converge on the contact 1 a/c is investigating. If you need help you can manually shift assets to the contact, it's easy to do this by checking the investigate contacts outside patrol area box.

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RE: Fixed Wing ASW - Utterly Confused - 2/9/2014 7:09:12 AM

RoryAndersonCDT

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quote:

ORIGINAL: Russian Heel

I think a good solution is to make 1 ASW patrol mission per a/c. If you have 6 a/c, divide your patrol area into 6 sectors with missions and one a/c assigned to each mission/sector and uncheck investigate contacts outside of patrol area. If they ID a possible contact inside their assigned sector you won't have the other 5 immediately stop everything they are doing and converge on the contact 1 a/c is investigating. If you need help you can manually shift assets to the contact, it's easy to do this by checking the investigate contacts outside patrol area box.

This is what I do for multiplayer matches; My missions are set up based on 'how many units do I want to respond to a contact in their zone'.

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RE: Fixed Wing ASW - Utterly Confused - 7/7/2014 8:57:19 AM

stepcz

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Sorry to revive an old topic, but I've been struggling with that mission yesterday. I'm a new player with very little experience in this game. I've played Dangerous waters a lot back in the days so I have some basic idea how things should work, I've read the manual, but still don't know how to finish this.

I need advice how to distinguish biologicals from subs? Aren't sonar operators supposed to distinguish those? I guess flock of tuna fish does not have 50Hz band etc? And once I even got a MAD hit off something that later proved to be another school of tuna...

In the end I've killed at least 10 fish schools only to have 3 of my frigs (and one unhappy civilian) sunk by completely undetected submarines...

Edit: thinking about this, I might have actually detected at least some of the subs in the course of the mission but mistook them for another fish and marked them as neutrals...

< Message edited by stepcz -- 7/7/2014 10:01:20 AM >

(in reply to flying penguin)

Post #: 13