Are Number of Warships Realistic in Stock Game?

[Armistead]

Originally Posted by tater

Also, as it was we sank virtually everything. Nothing a player could do would have a terribly macroscopic effect on the war except perhaps the sinking of certain critical warships very early in the conflict. Locally they'd certainly send ASW assets to areas they had spotted subs (later in the war, particularly, read Thunder Below for good examples).

Regardless, the devs clearly thought about this, but it never got turned on. There are names for ships in class that are not used by the engine at all. Sinking warships, at the very least should result in 1 fewer of that type. Ideally the engine would then have used that to possibly alter random occurrences of that ship type. Ie: 2xYamato class. On a campaign pull for a random BB (or superBB), if a group has chances for 2, there should never be more than one if one has already been sunk. But it doesn't work that way, sadly.

I think they just settled for a balance. Even with harder AI settings it's still rather easy to wipe out a TF with one sub. For instance, I can take out five carriers in one patrol early war, next patrol do basically the same. The issue is a player could have great effect on the war, sinking numerous capital ships the first year. The way the game is, one sub could basically win the war in one year. Realistically if I took out 8 capital ships in a few patrols, it should effect the overall plans and campaigns of the enemy. I don't see that the AI could ever generate properly based on what a human may do against it.

Still, I think we can make a better campaign mod. Most mods lack the proper ASW response. I corrected this by adding more sub killer groups and many roaming assets around ports and shipping lanes and tweaking the contact time and range. In places like Formosa, I can hardly escape after an attack, as planes and escorts come a looking and hunt for several hours. One aspect of Travs mod I liked was certain planes would shadow your sub from long range, not attacking, but calling in assets as long as you remain on the surface.