Non-target-side weapons don't fire....?

[professional.xmaz]

When I run a cruiser through a line of enemy ships, only one broadside fires, at the assigned target.  If the assigned target is on the port side, and there are other ships on the starboard side, the guns are silent on that side.

why? 

Edited May 11, 2020 by professional.xmaz

[madham82]

Fire control is separate for main and secondaries, but they can only engage one target each at a time. So if you have a designated target on port side, guns only fire on that side. They won't fire at "targets of opportunity". 

Edited May 11, 2020 by madham82

[professional.xmaz]

Is this the planned functionality for release? 

Edited May 11, 2020 by professional.xmaz

[madham82]

Doubtful, since few captains in their right mind would sail directly into an enemy formation and allow the enemy to fire on both sides of their ship. Not to mention trying this with torpedo armed opponents. Dreadnought era combat means sailing broadside (one side to the enemy) to bring all your turreted firepower to bear on the enemy. 

[Norbert Sattler]

Of course there are exceptions... like a certain person you might have heard about called Horatio Nelson.
Granted, that was in the age of sails, but even then it was considered borderline insane to do what he did.

Anyway, while you can only assign one primary, one secondary and one torpedo target yourself, I have seen my ships sometimes split the fire even further, in that particular case my battleship fired it's 152 mm secondaries at a destroyer, it's 203 mm at a heavy cruiser and it's main guns at an enemy battleship.... though I specifically ordered the main guns to do that, while the secondaries chose their own target after the one I set them on sank.

But to have the port and starport guns of the same kind fire at different targets simultaneously is impossible at the moment. Though I'd love if they added that. When you are swarmed by smaller ships having all your secondaries fire is not only sensible, but must look so awesome. ^^

Though it's not necessarily a case of both port and starport guns firing. Casemate guns often have a rather limited arc, so the backmounted might not be able to hit a target that is at a 45° angle to your front. In that case it'd also make sense of those casemates would then fire at the other ship further back in the enemy formation, instead of doing nothing.

Of course a toggle switch to allow or forbid fire-at-will for guns that can't currently hit their assigned targets might be handy to preserve ammunition. But with the way how accurarcy seems to currently be global over all guns of the same kind on a ship, that might not be all that easy to implement without working over the entire targeting system (depending on just how it really works under the hood - maybe each gun is in fact assessed individually, and we just don't see it because the stats only show a single value for all guns of a kind).

Edited May 11, 2020 by Norbert Sattler

[professional.xmaz]

if a naval warship has idle guns and a target in range they won't fire at it because 'we shouldn't be here anyway, this isn't realistic?'

 i've already been in multiple scenarios in this game where this is handcuffing us.  For instance, the included mission where you have an ironclad against the two turreted union ships.  Or should I just sit there and let them crush me from one side, without using all my guns?  And as you said, what if my dreadnought gets flanked by two groups of torpedo boats,? 

Tbh looking to hear from a dev here 

Edited May 11, 2020 by professional.xmaz

[madham82]

1 hour ago, Norbert Sattler said:

Of course there are exceptions... like a certain person you might have heard about called Horatio Nelson.
Granted, that was in the age of sails, but even then it was considered borderline insane to do what he did.

Anyway, while you can only assign one primary, one secondary and one torpedo target yourself, I have seen my ships sometimes split the fire even further, in that particular case my battleship fired it's 152 mm secondaries at a destroyer, it's 203 mm at a heavy cruiser and it's main guns at an enemy battleship.... though I specifically ordered the main guns to do that, while the secondaries chose their own target after the one I set them on sank.

But to have the port and starport guns of the same kind fire at different targets simultaneously is impossible at the moment. Though I'd love if they added that. When you are swarmed by smaller ships having all your secondaries fire is not only sensible, but must look so awesome. ^^

Though it's not necessarily a case of both port and starport guns firing. Casemate guns often have a rather limited arc, so the backmounted might not be able to hit a target that is at a 45° angle to your front. In that case it'd also make sense of those casemates would then fire at the other ship further back in the enemy formation, instead of doing nothing.

Of course a toggle switch to allow or forbid fire-at-will for guns that can't currently hit their assigned targets might be handy to preserve ammunition. But with the way how accurarcy seems to currently be global over all guns of the same kind on a ship, that might not be all that easy to implement without working over the entire targeting system (depending on just how it really works under the hood - maybe each gun is in fact assessed individually, and we just don't see it because the stats only show a single value for all guns of a kind).

LOL figured someone would bring up Nelson, and you are correct. During that time frame it would work since guns don't rely on central fire control, and they had equal armaments on both sides.  

As for during this time frame, the effectiveness of individual guns firing at anything they can see is questionable. They would need a fire director to accurately hit something. Typically a ship would have a main and secondary fire director for it's main armament, and one on each side for the secondary armament. So while this could allow it to fire on targets on both sides, again the tactics come in to play. If you have allowed the enemy to surround you with ships, you are doing something wrong or are on a suicide mission. Maybe I am being too structured in my naval tactics, but I just don't see it adding value to the game to allow at this point. But that is just me, others may feel differently, like the OP. 

There have been several bugs with mixed main armaments and secondaries having a mind of their own and shooting at different targets. Not sure it has been fixed yet.   

[madham82]

And then Nick goes and posts this LOL, so that issue will be fixed soon!

 

[disc]

I think that the ability to fire to both sides simultaneously would add some value. It would be nice in "bad" tactical situations, like when one's T has been crossed and targets are on both port and starboard. Maybe there could be a penalty to accuracy or something similar.

[Nick Thomadis]

1 hour ago, madham82 said:

And then Nick goes and posts this LOL, so that issue will be fixed soon!

 

This was unrelated, the bug that was addressed was making big caliber side guns to be considered "secondaries" in manual fire control, something reported multiple times in previous patches.
The guns will still be grouped in a separate fire control system and will not fire on both sides independently (like old cannon ships).

We will try to offer a feature to make secondary guns fire control deeper, but we cannot promise anything, since we focus on campaign and crew for next patches.

[Norbert Sattler]

I'm glad that bug gets fixed. Because this bug could lead to wing turrets and centerline turrets being seperated.
You could have for example 2 centerline double 14" and two wing-mounted 14" doubles... the very same guns and turrets and one would be the main battery, while the other would be counted as a secondary battery.

Now they only need to fix that such a uniform centerline + wing turret setup would count all the same guns together for ladder-shooting and salvo fire. And same for mixing double and tripple turrets of the same kind together, like Pensacola & co.

@madham82 While the thing about the fire director is certainly true for WW1 and later, as far as I can tell it would appear that the pre-dreadnought secondary guns aimed mostly via the MK1 eyeball, so them firing at whatever is in front of them would make sense, especially with the highly limited firing arcs some of their casemates have.
If you try to fend off a torpedo boat that needs to close to 1 km to launch it's torpedo, I don't think any captain would forbid his ship crew from firing at it, just because the guns on the other side of the ship are already shooting at another torpedo boat. The reason such pincer-moves were barely (or at all) employed by torpedo boats was exactly because it would mean there are all the more guns for the target to defent itself with, instead of having to spread a single broadside over all attacking boats, or concentrating at one at a time thus giving a better chance to get at least some torpedoes into the target.
But in the game as it is right now, a torpedo boat pincer attack is a really good idea, since the target can only defend against one side at a time and if it takes down it's current target, you get a few precious extra seconds because even the guns on your side of the target were pointed as far toward the other boat they couldn't hit as they could.

There's also the scenario I mentioned with the 45° front and 45° to aft targets. There you could use your main rangefinder on the forward and the secondary rangefinder on the rearward target.

Also many ships had rangefinders integrated in at least part of their turrets as backups should the central firecontrol (or the communication lines to it) be destroyed. That's the box-like "ears" sticking out from the side of something like a 3x203mm turret. While those would be less effective than the central firecontroll, they would still be theoretically fully capable of engaging their own targets, albeit with less accuracy due to the lower viewpoint, which meant vision limited by superstructure and other turrets, more potential obstruction from smoke and fires and barely - if any - ability to see beyond the horizon (not that secondary guns are likely to have that range anyway).

[madham82]

13 hours ago, Nick Thomadis said:

This was unrelated, the bug that was addressed was making big caliber side guns to be considered "secondaries" in manual fire control, something reported multiple times in previous patches.
The guns will still be grouped in a separate fire control system and will not fire on both sides independently (like old cannon ships).

We will try to offer a feature to make secondary guns fire control deeper, but we cannot promise anything, since we focus on campaign and crew for next patches.

Yep that was the fix I was implying, not allowing the guns to fire on both sides. 

7 hours ago, Norbert Sattler said:

 

@madham82 While the thing about the fire director is certainly true for WW1 and later, as far as I can tell it would appear that the pre-dreadnought secondary guns aimed mostly via the MK1 eyeball, so them firing at whatever is in front of them would make sense, especially with the highly limited firing arcs some of their casemates have.
If you try to fend off a torpedo boat that needs to close to 1 km to launch it's torpedo, I don't think any captain would forbid his ship crew from firing at it, just because the guns on the other side of the ship are already shooting at another torpedo boat. The reason such pincer-moves were barely (or at all) employed by torpedo boats was exactly because it would mean there are all the more guns for the target to defent itself with, instead of having to spread a single broadside over all attacking boats, or concentrating at one at a time thus giving a better chance to get at least some torpedoes into the target.
But in the game as it is right now, a torpedo boat pincer attack is a really good idea, since the target can only defend against one side at a time and if it takes down it's current target, you get a few precious extra seconds because even the guns on your side of the target were pointed as far toward the other boat they couldn't hit as they could.

There's also the scenario I mentioned with the 45° front and 45° to aft targets. There you could use your main rangefinder on the forward and the secondary rangefinder on the rearward target.

Also many ships had rangefinders integrated in at least part of their turrets as backups should the central firecontrol (or the communication lines to it) be destroyed. That's the box-like "ears" sticking out from the side of something like a 3x203mm turret. While those would be less effective than the central firecontroll, they would still be theoretically fully capable of engaging their own targets, albeit with less accuracy due to the lower viewpoint, which meant vision limited by superstructure and other turrets, more potential obstruction from smoke and fires and barely - if any - ability to see beyond the horizon (not that secondary guns are likely to have that range anyway).

You are correct about the pre-dreadnought era. However I would say Tsushima showed how ineffective those types of guns really were, leading to the Dreadnought and eventual major reduction in those type of armament setups. Once they started getting paired with fire directors, they became somewhat useful again. But therein lies a debate about how effective they really are against their intended targets, DDs, TBs, and CLs. 

To implement logic to allow local gun control, there would need to be a serious hit to their accuracy added as well. Right now in the game, they aren't very useful against fast ships except when those ships are within very close range. So now we are talking almost no chance to hit anything moving at speed under local control. With torpedo balancing as it is, there's no reason to close to that kind of range (except in pre-dreadnought time frames). 

As for your the tactics you mentioned, the 45 degree bow/stern I can see being viable, but really only in cases where you are engaging a small number of ships. If their formation is spread out in a long line, then it could be countered more effectively but splitting fire between the lead and trailing ships. The pincer, that's really the one I don't see happening unless someone makes bad choices. Thinking of how the battles work now, you would have close the distance from where the ships spawn, get some of your forces to pass them, then close the pincer. Unless you outnumber them, have a massive speed advantage, or the AI is just dumb I don't see it working it out. The AI is likely to prioritize whichever group is closest, and it has a frequent habit of running if being dealt unfavorable damage. In this case whichever group is closest it will turn stern to and run. If your other group get closer, it will turn stern to that one and run. Either way, the chance of completing the pincer is low when your force starts in a single spot. Now if the campaign allows multiple fleets to converge in battle, the pincer becomes more viable. 

Like I said earlier, it's not that I don't think it isn't realistic. It just doesn't seem like it would add value based on how the battles take place and the effectiveness of secondaries in game now. I think we all agree if implemented, there needs to be penalties to accuracy. 

[Latur Husky]

16 hours ago, Nick Thomadis said:

[...]

We will try to offer a feature to make secondary guns fire control deeper, but we cannot promise anything, since we focus on campaign and crew for next patches.

You haven't released A6 yet, and you're already giving us spoilers of A7 xP So kind of you.

I look forward to see crew management and most importantly campaign, it will definitely spice things up.

 

Anyway, it would be actually pretty useful to see secondaries to fire at multiple targets if they can't hit main target.

Edited May 12, 2020 by Latur Husky

[professional.xmaz]

@Nick Thomadis thank you for the info, i'm hoping you guys can add this feature! 

[Cyan_PL]

IMO, this feature  is a must. At present, I do not see the point for clever maneuvering, as whatever my ships do, I will not use more than just one 'side' of them. I racall playing some naval sim I in the 90's (forgot the title), where you would assign a primary and a secondary target to a ship as a whole, not to its batteries. All guns that could fire at the primary target would do so, while those that could not (range, angle etc) would fire at the secondary - nice and simple