GWX KC Edition - Depth Charges

[Hooston]

I've had this debate here before. I believe the charges limit is by weapon type, not directly by ship type. However I was convinced by others that the charges were somehow per escort rather than per launcher. I have had escorts run out of charges and I don't think it was as many as 40 per launcher, but I'm not sure. Do you think maybe it is 40 per launcher type - so 40 for all the K launchers plus 40 for all the rails?Also I'm unsure if the number of charges remaining is preserved when you save the game.
It's tricky. The game escorts get all worked up and attack again and again even if they have no ASDIC contact. The ocean is a big place and dropping charges where a target used to be is not really going to cut it. In real life they would restart a methodical search once they lost contact and would not waste charges on a guess unless they wanted to scare a boat into staying deep - for example when giving up the hunt or in really bad ASDIC conditions like those near Murmansk. Real ASW hunts would last for hours, even a whole day for a late war support group. This is not great game play for most people.
There's not much the modders can do about the AI, so they have to do the best they can.

[VikingGrandad]

Originally Posted by Hooston

I've had this debate here before. I believe the charges limit is by weapon type, not directly by ship type. However I was convinced by others that the charges were somehow per escort rather than per launcher. .

Not an area of expertise for me, but from what I can tell, both aspects are correct: each launcher/rack type has a limit (in GWX KC, it seems to be set at 40 DCs for each launcher, and lower amounts for racks) - and thus each ship type has a DC limit according to how many launchers and racks it has been equipped with, e.g. if a specific DE is configured to be equipped with 4 x launchers (and those specific launchers are set at 40 DCs each) and 2 x racks (and those specific rack types are set at 10 DCs each), that DE will have 180 DCs in total.

Historically, I think the multi-purpose DDs generally carried around 30-40 DCs in total, and the specialised ASW DEs were designed to carry many more, around 100-300 per ship, depending on the class and period of the war.

[Shadowblade]

it looks like aggressive sinking of DDs is still good tactic

[Tabris]

So, I preformed some tests. It does seem the "depth charges ALL" library file, and the "ammunition" value for each weapon therein, is what dictates how many bombs a ship carries. I lowered the value for every single weapon to 3, deliberately attracted an escort's attention (if my wife is reading don't take that out of context) and watched has he dropped precisely three bombs from each rack and fired three from each K-gun before running out.

Of note is that escorts do not alter their behavior when out of bombs: They will keep making attack runs on ASDIC contacts, just without dropping anything. To anyone familiar with SH3, this won't be surprising - the enemy will never "give up" and sail away from a contact which they can still detect. In light of the AI's behavior, one could make a convincing argument that restricting their ammo is academic, but since I'd still like the *option* to outlast their attacks in the rare case of it being necessary, I will continue tweaking the balance.

Now, I'm far from confident that I understand this system perfectly. For one or two of the escorts, I think Evarts is one of them, they only have two nodes in the .eqp file for K-guns, but I know for sure they have eight K-guns in the game. I'm not totally sure how the game handles ammunition if the node is duplicated and used more than once.

As others have pointed out, the AI always goes whole-hog whenever it launches an attack. Each K-gun fires once, and the racks will drop four bombs per run, maybe sometimes more, every single time, even if the enemy is just "guessing." 12 is definitely too few bombs in light of this behavior for the racks, BUT, we may be able to take advantage of this behavior to represent the enemy beginning to conserve his ammunition: If the racks run out first, after, say, 6-10 attacks, but the enemy still has ammunition left for the K-guns, he'll keep using those but each attack will include fewer bombs. For all I know, this is precisely the intended behavior behind giving them 40 bombs per slot: 40 means 10-12 attack runs with the racks, but 40 attack runs with the projectors (or I guess 20 attacks in the case of the Y-gun). The problem is, 10 attack runs means 80 bombs with the racks alone! So there has to be a comfortable middle ground somewhere here.

[Kpt. Lehmann]

@Tabris, just to say so 'out loud,' even when an ASW vessel is out of depth charges and continues running about overhead.... keeping you submerged means that he is still doing his job. The convoy still gets away.

Also, to Hooston, Mowgli and other interested parties. When I stated that as part of the solution to stock SH3 ASW vessels blowing their own sterns off with depth charges, and loosening the old SH3 stock laser guided DC's, I mentioned part of what I did was to increase the DC blast radius. That was inadvertent. What I did was to reduce the DC blast radius. Those changes (that I made back during the development of GWX 2.0 in 2007 or 2008 IIRC) largely put a stop to ASW vessels trying to sink themselves.

However, the smaller blast radius is intense. Depth charging sessions are longer in average duration than stock SH3, but delivered damage when sustained, I think is about the same. There's more to depth charge bombardments in GWX, but I don't want to give away too many spoilers and ruin immersion for players.