Quote:
Originally Posted by Bullethead
In game terms, out to about 5km, there's no penalty. Beyond about 5km, 2 ships can fire on the same target with no problem, but if you use 3 or more, all of them get pretty severe accuracy penalties. There's also an accuracy penalty for being shot at yourself, due to spray and splashes obscuring your view at times.
So at the bottom line, it's usually best to engage as many enemy ships as possible. This keeps your ships from interfering with each other and also makes the most enemies less accurate with their return fire. It's not necessary to give each ship her own target manually. If you select a whole division and give the Target Free order, they will distribute their fire automatically to achieve the above situation.
Note that either way you give firing orders, your ships won't always stay on the same target. Just as in real life, they'll shift targets sometimes, due to things like not being able to see their target, or confusing their target with an adjacent enemy ship.
Now, as to the reasons for this...
In 1916, there wasn't yet a system for combining the fire of multiple ships, so each ship relied on spotter her own splashes. However, due to salvos being about 1 minute apart at 1916 ranges, it was possible for 2 ships to stagger their salvos by about 30 seconds and thus engage the same target without mutual interference.
In the latter part of the war, the RN developed a system to allow divisions of 4 ships to concentrate on the same target. That's what all those range clocks on the masts and bearing scales on the turrets were for. But that's outside the scope of our present games.
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Thanks for the response!
I just finished a scenario directing the German pre-dreads and "Bayern" against the British battlecruiser force, including "Renown" and "Repulse". I assigned individual targets for most of the battle, instead of my old "ganging-up" strategy, and scored a pretty impressive victory (although this was largely due to "Renown" and "Lion" blowing up literally 5 seconds apart).
Will have another go, and see how this works out in a prolonged engagement.
