Quote:
Originally Posted by propbeanie
The battles are not very accurately modeled, and for several reasons, not the least of which is that it is a bother of nth degree to get even close to the ship level, much less accurate ship representations. I have no idea how many different types of vessels there were in each of the navies in WW2, but I do know that even with FotRSU, that you don't even see 10% of what was there as far as "Classes" go. Then there's the shear number involved in the battles. The game chokes sometimes on one airplane and four ships, so imagine if you've got something with hundreds of planes and hundreds of ships. lurker_hlb3 tried to be reasonably accurate with his RSRDC (Run Silent Run Deep Campaign), but had to make "compromises" with the available ships and numbers used. One of the big things is that if you get within 20km of a spawn site, the entire group will not spawn, so you might be short a few dozen vessels / planes from the scenario if you're in the "wrong" place. On top of all of that, the opponents and their associated AI do not "perform" battles very well. The airplanes won't even shoot at each other... All that said, it's still grand fun, and I couldn't care less about "historical accuracy"...  |
Very interesting, thanks Beanie!
I'll be honest, I'm a bit disappointed to have my observations confirmed: the game is not a historical war game, so much as a "sub simulator" based on WWII. I come from the hard-core "spreadsheet" paper-&-chit historical war game school of thought, so naturally that is my implicit expectation.
But yeah, I can totally appreciate how difficult it would be to make this particular game bridge from "shooter" scale (with all the quality it currently achieves representing that scale) all the way to the "strategy" scale. And yes, it is great fun just how it is.
But I think if a team really set out to get this engine to span that "divide" it could be done.
So RSRDC does more along this line than FOTRSU does eh? Sounds like I should get an RSRDC install going with MultiSH.
ADDIT: as far as the "number of ships" I don't think SH4 is too far off, at least based on my "War in the Pacific Admiral's Edition" knowledge base. Until Leyte Gulf, my undertanding is that, the numbers of ships and planes in the air at any given moment rarely got into the ~20 ships & 200 planes ballpark. These battles were very dynamic things so it is difficult to generalize but . . . take for example the
Battle of Sunda Strait I was looking up the other day (when I was trying to meet up for that battle in the strait between Java and Sumatra in a recent career playthrough)
Quote:
Strength
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
American:
1 heavy cruiser
Australian:
1 light cruiser
Dutch:
1 destroyer
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Japanese
1 light carrier
1 seaplane carrier
5 cruisers
12 destroyers
1 minelayer
58 troopships
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Casualties and losses
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
1 heavy cruiser sunk
1 light cruiser sunk
1 destroyer sunk
1071 killed
675 POWs[3]
---------
1 minelayer sunk,
4 troopships sunk or grounded,[3]
1 cruiser damaged,
10 killed,
37 wounded[4]
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Anecdotally, that is a pretty typical "battle." Some were bigger, some were smaller and bigger ones tended to happen more as time went along (leaving aside Pearl Harbor which was a lot of airplanes in the air at one time, though not really that many ships being attacked).
I'd have to go back and consult the exact chronicles, but even Midway . . . any given engagement during those four days of running battles? Maybe 8 or 12 ships in a task force being attacked by 30 or at most 40 aircraft and defended by 20 or 30 at any given time?