[WIP] Less Cargo Traffic- More Coastal Fishing Boats

[nvdrifter]

Work In Progress

Less Merchant Traffic- More Coastal Fishing Boats

I am currently making a campaign mod where there will be less merchant traffic, but there will be much, much more coastal fishing boats and Sanpans. I feel that there are just too many merchant ships cruising around in the vanilla campaign game. It just doesn't feel very realistic to me. Right now the campaign feels like an arcade shooting gallery. I am also considering increasing the possibility of small, escorted enemy convoys.

[Der Teddy Bar]

Great news :up:

[nvdrifter]

Great news :up:
Hey Teddy, it's good to know you're still around. :arrgh!:

[CCIP]

Great, another one of those things I'd try to do myself later on, looks like you're getting there yourself.

Just what we need! Especially in terms of merchants - these are just too easy to catch. It feels like the Japanese merchant fleet is several times its actual size in the game right now.

[nvdrifter]

Great, another one of those things I'd try to do myself later on, looks like you're getting there yourself.

Just what we need! Especially in terms of merchants - these are just too easy to catch. It feels like the Japanese merchant fleet is several times its actual size in the game right now.
I haven't messed with convoy spawns yet... but right now I am reducing single merchant spawns by nearly half. If that still doesn't feel right, I might try to reduce them down to 35%.

[CCIP]

Yea, well, recalling similar SHIII mods, I recall that (with a few special exceptions), mods like RUb used a reduction to 40% and even 20% of original single traffic. So I'm not at all surprised if you go to 35% with it.

Convoys will need a going-over later on, too. I patrolled at their point of origin off Japan for a while, and they're definitely excessive.

I'm going to try and pick up the touted "Japanese Merchant Marine in WWII" book here for reference, see what the comparative size of it should be. If someone points to research/realism again (:p), I think we can even come up with a pretty good estimate for the number of ships that should be at sea at any given time.

Does bring up the issue of "what the heck are we gonna do/sink in 1945?", though! I think a drastic reduction in merchant numbers should probably be accompanied by some modding to give more special tasks to subs...

...anyway, I think I'm going too far with the daydreaming here, too early for that! :dead:

[PeriscopeDepth]

Thanks, look forward to this one.

PD

[NephilimNexus]

Yes, I think the problem is that the ships are randomly spawned in without any regards to historial numbers actually built/used.

There was a similar problem with a really old SSI game about the Atlantic naval war between Germany and Britain. By the time the campaign was over I had sunk every RN battleship ever made - twice! Even after being sunk the game would just spit out a new one.

Maybe game designers think that's just a "minor detail" but gamers, especially when playing historical sims, like to think that they are making a difference. That's what sucked about SH2 so much - it was so totally scripted that it didn't matter if you sunk zero ships or the entire RN, the next mission was the same, the ending was the same, etc etc.

Frankly, if someone goes out in the first month and sends three BBs and a dozen CVs to the ocean floor then two things should happen. One, they shouldn't run into another fifteen capital ships on their next sortie out. Two, it should have some kind of impact on the war.

Case in point, the scripted invasion of Borneo in the first mission, followed by the loss of Wake Island. I got that message via PAC News and then ran into a pair of unescorted transport ships within a couple hours of game-time, right off the north coast of the island. Two liners, one old, one modern, jackpot! This must be their invasion force, or at least a good chunk of it, I think. I send them both to the bottom of the ocean before they can reach Borneo.

Result? None. It's scripted that the island falls to Nippon at a certain date & time and there is nothing the player can do to prevent it. It doesn't matter if you mod/hack your game up to where you can sink two hundred ships in twenty minutes - nothing you do has any effect on the war! Furthermore, you sink the Yamato one day and the game may very well just spawn another one to send out the very next day.

This "minor detail" is very much a game breaker for many of us. :down:

[CCIP]

Well let's not go too far. For one, I think it's naive to assume that a single sub would really be able to change the course of a war. I like the feeling of being 'just a pawn'; indeed while I think there are subs who made remarkable sinkings, no single sub really changed the outcome of a war.

I'm not sure whether SHIV addressed unique warships or not, but I don't know if it's THAT important. Plus it's irrelevant to this current mod's purpose.

As far as random spawning - yes, but it spawns them at certain probabilities and rates. If a ship spawns on average once a week or twice a week or once every two weeks affects the overall numbers in the theatre. It's possible to estimate, roughly, how many ships will be at sea at any given time based on that, and precisely how many ships (on average) leave ports every so often. You can further fine-tune it to have pretty good results.

[Immacolata]

Its the Doom syndrome. I killed the end of level baddie so I won right?

I agree that the pawn in a big game is the proper feeling. I like it that the calendar day decides whether Im going to run into something interesting or not :)

I don't mind if I get to sink a few too many Yamatos during my career. As long as I don't run into too many. It IS a game afterall, and I'd rather have the chance to stalk my prey and sink some tonnage than realism.

That being said, yes, knocking off singular merchants is a bit on the easy side in stock SHIV. I look forward to see your new mod.

[tater]

The basic assumptions would revolve around the total number of true seagoing merchants over a certain tonnage, then the numbers of coasters, luggers, sea trucks (after '42), junks (the in-game "sampans" are junks), etc.

In December '41, the japanese had ~6.3 million tons of merchant shipping. 2.2 Mtons belonged (were commandeered by) to the IJA, 1.6 Mtons to the IJN (again, comandeered), and 2.6 Mtons of civilian tonnage. Parillo says "Of the over 700 frieghters in the (japanese) merchant marine in 1940, nearly 300 were capable of at least 12 knots, and 236 were products of the preceeding decade." That 236 figure refers to the subsidy program to build hulls of at least 4000 tons that could make at least 13.5 knots.

He also says that right before the war, the Army commandeered 519 merchant and passenger vessels. The IJN comandeered 482 merchantmen, 75% of which were freighters or combined passenger-cargo ships, with tankers (270 ktons), whalers (94k tons) and small craft making up the remainder. So we know the breakdown of IJA vs IJN vs civilian ships.

Given the small size of things like whale killer boats, it might be safe to call the total number of ships at 750. The average for the army ships taken comes out at ~4200 tons each. justr about right. For the IJN it's 3300 tons each (1.2M/.75*482). So the numbers work out somewhat well.

750 ships, and they need to be in constant use. At this point you need to make assumptions about the time to load/unload them, perhaps a week on each end? Assuming a typical 2000 nm trip, that's 6.9 days at 12 knots. Load 1 week, 1 week travel, unload 1 week, 1 week travel. That's 1 round trip every 4 weeks per ship. Half the 750 would be in port at any given time, 1/2 at sea. Dropping loading/unloading to 3.5 days would result in a 3 week RT cycle for the 6750 ships. This means that at any given time there would be from 375 to 500 merchant ships at sea, mostly on their own. Quite a lot, really.

Note that convoys were the amazing exception before 1944, not the rule. Expect lone merchants, not escorted convoys, even small ones in 1942. You might see a few frieghters together in '42 and '43, but mainly unescorted. The "escorts" would instead be patroling the sea lanes instead of sticking with any particular ship. In 1944, they finally made 10-20 ship convoys. In '43 there were a few 10 ship convoys. Before that, a handful of convoys and lone shipping.

Starting in '43, due to shipping losses from subs as well as air assets (can you say 5th AF :D ), they started the program to build the so called "wooden sea trucks" of 150-300 tons. The idea was once again the anti-convoy---distributed shipping, expect to lose a few, but spread them around instead of putting them together and protecting them. They came to their senses long after it was too late, in 1944.

tater

[castorp345]

great post tater!
thanks for the info!!
(as to whether it gets used or not is another matter... :p)

[tater]

Related to the mod WIP, do you just have control of the %s of ships doing X, Y, and Z, or can you also control where ships appear? How about warships? Are they always random encounters,m and can the loactions/routes be put in as well?

As for the notion that a single player couldn't change the war, I tend to agree, but that is not always the case. A single sub sinking, or even famaging a CV at Coral Sea would still have convinced the japanese to abandon the invasion of Port Moresby assuming they knew US CVs were in the area. Also, the total number of warships of each broad class is a smallish number for the IJN. In an Atlantic sim, the allied shipping losses are not important because we (the US) could simply build more shipping of all types than the germans coupld possibly sink. The US was a virtual endless stream of shipping. The US built more merchant tonnage in the 1st half of '43 than Japan built---in total. We made nearly 800 DDs and DEs. Kill a dozen, has zero effect on the war. Not the case with Japan. Every loss, particularly tankers, was important.

[nvdrifter]

Related to the mod WIP, do you just have control of the %s of ships doing X, Y, and Z, or can you also control where ships appear? How about warships? Are they always random encounters,m and can the loactions/routes be put in as well?

Where and what percentage chance can both be modded. Whether escorted or not can also be modded. Warships seem to be set up the same as merchants... on routes at certain times.. or on routes randomly. But there are also specific warship campaign files, too. It's a big project with huge amounts of information in the files that I just really can't do alone. Maybe someone else can start work on it. I've got my hands full at the moment with other mods and can't really work on this one right now.

But thanks for that great post. Good info. :up:

[tater]

I'm a total noob at modding this, but I'm willing to poke around and try to make sense of it. Is there a FAQ someplace that describes the various files, and what the values mean?

tater

[nvdrifter]

I'm a total noob at modding this, but I'm willing to poke around and try to make sense of it. Is there a FAQ someplace that describes the various files, and what the values mean?

tater

Not that I know of. Look in the \Data\Campaigns\Campaign folder. They are all text files and easy to mod. Good luck. :up:

[Galanti]

I'm not sure whether SHIV addressed unique warships or not, but I don't know if it's THAT important. Plus it's irrelevant to this current mod's purpose.

Somewhere, in 'Roster' perhaps, there are config files for each class, listing the members of that class., ie. Yamato.cfg has Yamato and Musashi. So the data is there, whether it is used by the game is another matter.

I of course, would like to see specific ship names for important warships I've sunk, but I agree it's not terribly important at the moment.

However, it would be nice to see vastly reduced sightings of major units as the war progress, to simulate the decline of the IJN.

[Sailor Steve]

Dang! This sim is going to be modded beyond all recognition before I even get to play it!:rotfl: :up:

CCIP, that "pawns" speech is the best I've ever heard that put. My job is to sink enemy ships and survive.

Galanti, those very kinds of "ship name" mods have long since been added to SH3. I think it's just a matter of time before your wish comes true. How much time, I can't say, but it is definitely doable.

[Jace11]

Check the Quick Mission Against All Odds: use external view to cycle through the japanese fishing boats, several have no textures and appear black in game. This is cause they are missing from the Japan Roster folder, I fixed this for this mission by copying US roster files for FishingBoat FishingBoat2 and PCTrawler (change US to JP in theside the files), but I don't know if these missing ships have somehow made it into the campaign layers.

[Galanti]

Dang! This sim is going to be modded beyond all recognition before I even get to play it!:rotfl: :up:

CCIP, that "pawns" speech is the best I've ever heard that put. My job is to sink enemy ships and survive.

Galanti, those very kinds of "ship name" mods have long since been added to SH3. I think it's just a matter of time before your wish comes true. How much time, I can't say, but it is definitely doable.

Well, guess what, they're there! I just checked my big old logbook in port yesterday, and it had specific shipnames for each maru I put under. I'm impressed, however there is a blank space missing between the name and the service abbreviation, so it reads something like IJNAtago (as an example).

[Ducimus]

Miight I add, that there might be an overabundance of task forces as well as merchant traffic. Last night i had in my periscope, "a" battleship Yamato. My gut feeling is, it wasn't "the" Yamato, ya know what i mean?

[tater]

I agree about the TFs. As for the merchies, I think there is an overabundance of merchant convoys early in the war, and the coasters, sea trucks, luggers, etc should start appearing en masse in maybe late '43, particularly in the SWPA where larger ships became untenible due to the 5th AF.

[ReallyDedPoet]

Nice:up::up: