First Thoughts (Badly Needed Movement Controls, Fire Allocation Issues)

[Bigjku]

Long time player of Ultimate Generals Civil War.  Finally got this game and am a long time naval enthusiast so its right up my ally.  Has a lot of good stuff but the movement controls, particularly when working with mixed fleets need a lot of work.

Formation Controls

There is a lot that needs to be done here that really is hard to do with the current controls but should be able to be fixed relatively easily.  I suggest the following commands are needed.

• Lead:  This is a command primarily for cruisers that would allow the player to control the fleet through the battleships but would order a cruiser division to take a lead in the specified formation.  This would retain control of the line at the battleship level which is historically accurate and would force the cruisers to comply with the speed of the battle line which is also accurate.
• Screen:  Screen as it is implemented appears to be largely useless in the present build.  The screen adopted is more appropriate to repelling an all sides torpedo boat assault or as an anti-aircraft formation none of which seem to develop.  I think it is the right idea with poor implementation.  I would suggest you have Screen as an option and then have sub options of screen forward, screen rear, screen port, screen starboard.  This would assign the screen to that segment of the battle line (basically the 90 degrees the player ask for, ie 45 degrees each direction off the bow for forward, 45 degrees each direction from the midpoint of the ship starboard) and make the command far more useful for quickly getting ships where you want them.

Movement Controls

• All Ship Turn:  We badly need this command to be out there.  Its a famous movement order (for the German fleet at Jutland of all places) where instead of following the leader to execute a large reversal of direction all ships turn at the same time and the trailing ship becomes the leader and the leader the trailer.  For the purpose of the game it would be a simple button press command that orders this turn either to starboard or port and turns the fleet onto a new direction 180 degrees from the present course and swap leaders.
• Lead Ship Fall Back:  This isn't really something that is ordered but it seems to happen a lot that my lead ship upon taking lots of damage moves out of line and to the rear of the line.  But the way they generally do it is nonsensical.  They turn away from the enemy, engage their engines to move in the opposite direction of their line and circle around to the other side.  A more logical way to do this would be to sheer out of line away from the enemy and reduce speed to allow the rest of the line to pass and then resume place at the rear of the line.

Fire Allocation Issues

• The tendency of the AI to concentrate all fire on the lead ship of a division is historically inaccurate but seems to provide the best results in the game.  I believe this to be a result of a missing factor in the shoot calculations.  The game needs to award large bonuses to ships for being unengaged by an opponent in terms of their shooting accuracy (again look to Jutland, ships that were unengaged due to British mistakes during the battle cruiser action shot much better than those that were being shot at).  This should hopefully coax the AI and player into dividing its fires in a more reasonable manner.  If not I would simply force the AI battleships to generally not double target a ship until everyone is taking fire from at least one opponent.  An engage enemy division option might help with this too if it would automatically match fire across a division.

 

Like the start.  These are just some basic things that I think would make the action much more controllable.

[disc]

The fire allocation issue also involves concentration fire. It would be relatively difficult to figure out which ships in a division were straddling the target if they all fired at once. The shell splashes would be hard to tell apart, unless the guns were of very different caliber (eg 6in vs 12in). Thus, if a group of battleships wanted to target a single enemy, they would need to coordinate their fire, a proposition that requires special training. Otherwise, accuracy would be poor beyond short range.

[Bigjku]

3 minutes ago, disc said:

The fire allocation issue also involves concentration fire. It would be relatively difficult to figure out which ships in a division were straddling the target if they all fired at once. The shell splashes would be hard to tell apart, unless the guns were of very different caliber (eg 6in vs 12in). Thus, if a group of battleships wanted to target a single enemy, they would need to coordinate their fire, a proposition that requires special training. Otherwise, accuracy would be poor beyond short range.

Yes, this is another way to deal with it.  Penalize accuracy for ships pilling in on one target all at once.  Either way the proper historical way things were done was generally to match up against targets up and down the line.

[disc]

That said, navies (especially the Royal Navy) would eventually put a great deal of emphasis on training for concentration fire. This would help to leverage a numbers advantage. This led to tactics like salvo timing, where each ship would fire at pre-arranged intervals, to avoid interference. Shell dyes also would become prominent in the late '30s and early '40s, so the splashes would have distinctive colors. Each ship might have a different color, so they could tell apart their shots. (I suspect dyes would be of little value at night.)

The idea is that it would take time, effort, money, and tech to improve concentration fire.

[Cpt.Hissy]

All good points, thank you!

A couple of little remarks.
All Ship Turn can be done as a "turn mode selection button" (where you also can pick other kinds of turns) and then the division performs all following course change commands in selected way. Will allow all-at-once turns in any direction, for example to rapidly close in or break distance, more or less Tsushima way. (also include different ways of group course change if there are any). Saw this made this way in some other game, what do you think?
non-180 turns will obviously put all ships into (staggered) abreast positions.

Leader Fallback may be actually implemented as you describe in latest patch, but bugged. In my tests since new patch I had behaviour just like you describe several times. But old and well known going in circles still happens much more often, and the second most common behaviour for me is ships bugging out, breaking order and going in random directions / getting stuck in place / deliberately chasing fellow ships for hugs / generally being idiots.

[Bigjku]

55 minutes ago, Cpt.Hissy said:

All good points, thank you!

A couple of little remarks.
All Ship Turn can be done as a "turn mode selection button" (where you also can pick other kinds of turns) and then the division performs all following course change commands in selected way. Will allow all-at-once turns in any direction, for example to rapidly close in or break distance, more or less Tsushima way. (also include different ways of group course change if there are any). Saw this made this way in some other game, what do you think?
non-180 turns will obviously put all ships into (staggered) abreast positions.

Leader Fallback may be actually implemented as you describe in latest patch, but bugged. In my tests since new patch I had behaviour just like you describe several times. But old and well known going in circles still happens much more often, and the second most common behaviour for me is ships bugging out, breaking order and going in random directions / getting stuck in place / deliberately chasing fellow ships for hugs / generally being idiots.

I could see a turn mode button but it could get complicated.  My thought is that by simply having a button that executes a 180 degree turn in or turn away once the game records that as my new base course I can simply then input a new course in the normal way.  So if I am headed dead east (90 degree heading) and I want to do an all point turn to a heading of 300 degrees I simply hit the all ship turn reverse button, then adjust my heading off the new base course of 270 degrees.

Leader fallback is just bugged I think.  I always am checking to see if the ship lost rudder control.

[Cpt.Hissy]

With your option, all that they'll be able do is swap the leader to the tailing ship, do a 180 and try to maintain battle line again in that order, or just do successive turns. Right?
But how often you actually need a sudden turn to full 180, and how often you need something else?
What if, following your example, your enemy just got a bit too close from a heading 0, and you want your entire line to break that distance ASAP, and then return to a heading 90 with old order? Only successive turn then, and getting last ships potentially wrecked?
With my proposal you'll be able to turn them all together to +-180 and abreast and get away, then turn back to a line heading 90 and continue battle. Pretty and smaar move, isn't it?

by the way, i think i've noticed relatively common need to actually turn around, because parts of the enemy fleet are left far behind.
This happens clearly due to AI buggery, and won't / shouldn't be a norm in final version.

also, depring leaders do not loose rudder control, they loose brains, this you can't check ^^

Edited January 9, 2021 by Cpt.Hissy

[Bigjku]

8 hours ago, Cpt.Hissy said:

With your option, all that they'll be able do is swap the leader to the tailing ship, do a 180 and try to maintain battle line again in that order, or just do successive turns. Right?
But how often you actually need a sudden turn to full 180, and how often you need something else?
What if, following your example, your enemy just got a bit too close from a heading 0, and you want your entire line to break that distance ASAP, and then return to a heading 90 with old order? Only successive turn then, and getting last ships potentially wrecked?
With my proposal you'll be able to turn them all together to +-180 and abreast and get away, then turn back to a line heading 90 and continue battle. Pretty and smaar move, isn't it?

by the way, i think i've noticed relatively common need to actually turn around, because parts of the enemy fleet are left far behind.
This happens clearly due to AI buggery, and won't / shouldn't be a norm in final version.

also, depring leaders do not loose rudder control, they loose brains, this you can't check ^^

I am ok with not having that order as its a fairly uncommon order and could could still largely achieve it through what I am proposing in that it is something I know has happened and its something I could reasonably expect ships to execute under the stress of battle.  You are essentially swapping leaders and can then assume a heading (immediately on ordering the turn) on that basis really anywhere in the 180 degree arc in the opposite direction.  Its a reasonable historically documented capability for a large battlefleet.

I am unaware of any large battleship action where the ships were ordered to break lines then reform them in another direction.  I suspect with more than 3 or 4 ships that order would be almost impossible to safely execute.