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Old 09-22-20, 12:32 PM   #1
cheeky_kaleun
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Default Campaign game - Bombardment and Patrol

Hello fellow Jutlanders

I hope there are some of you out there who are getting as much joy out of resurrecting this awesome game as I am. A major issue, though, is the manual is very general and provides little detail on important matters.

For example, what is the effect of bombardment? A lot of my ships on area patrols are getting torpedoed by German subs (I've got my own back, with almost the entire Royal Navy sub force on continuous, series patrols around Wilshemshaven getting at least one hit on the High Seas dreadnoughts ever time they put to sea).

I was thinking maybe I should send the Grand Fleet and Battlecruiser fleets into the German lair and bombard Heligoland submarine base to damage their sub capability, as it seems in Jutland there is no way to counter submarines otherwise. I've shorn the Grand Fleet and Battlecruiser Squadron of all their escorts that have short range so the two fleets are long-ranged and can sail anywhere in the North Sea with long-staying power. What can I do with it?

As I've indicated in previous posts, I've managed to sink the entire German battlecruiser force for the loss of three Queen Elizabeths. When I had the Grand Fleet minus 1st Battle Squadron (i.e. about 16 dreadnoughts) that were limited to 18 knots, while 17 dreadnoughts of the High Seas Fleet were bearing down on me, I sent all my escorts (destroyers, light cruisers and seven King Edward VII pre-dreads) to turn 18 degrees and charge the High Seas Fleet. They managed to sink three dreadnoughts. My submarines have also inflicted damage every time they leave port, and the HSF seems to be limited to about 16 knots atm.

The Scouting Force is now down to three light cruisers, including the Wiesbaden (that I'm absolutely determined to destroy), otherwise I sunk all their battlecruisers and escorts, about 40 ships in total.

Admiral Tyrwhit is leading a new force, the 1st Blockade Group, which has four destroyer squadrons each led by a light cruiser, and in the centre, a striking force of four light cruisers, and they sunk 16 German PT boats in a battle off the coast of Holland (and also many German destroyers in night actions around Wilhemshaven / Jade / Heligoland etc, but are currently recuperating in port after several ships hit mines when I went on a raiding expedition to try to destroy German minelayers.

So, what does bombardment do? Can I inflict damage on the centre of German sub operations, and on the subs themselves, by Bombarding Heligoland? And when I select area patrol, the number (from 1 to 200), what does this signify? Miles? Map "squares"? What?
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Old 09-22-20, 03:49 PM   #2
Randomizer
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When you attempt a bombardment you are likely to encounter the dreaded "Teleportation" bug, which renders the campaigns unplayable in my opinion.

If the enemy has an opposing force in the objective "hex", the game generally runs into a feedback loop that is extremely difficult to get out of. Usually there will be light forces there which will fleet from your bombardment force as they are likely to be vastly inferior.

This just happened to me an a High Seas Fleet campaign and it caused me to scrap the campaign completely. What happened was this:

Four battlecruisers and Blucher of Scouting Group 1 with Scouting Group 2 sail for a dawn bombardment/mine-laying sortie to Yarmouth on January 28th 1915.

At about 1000 and on reaching a position 29 km east of Yarmouth, a battle triggers with the British 3rd Destroyer Flotilla, light cruiser HMS Arethusa and six or seven destroyers. These promptly turn and flee and I try to close the coast to begin the bombardment. The British move out of visual range and the battle ends at 1035.

Upon returning to the Campaign screen at 1035, another battle triggers with both forces teleported back to their 1000 positions, 29 km east of Yarmouth. British flee, Germans close the coast and actually get into firing range. Battle ends at 1120.

Less than one-minute on the campaign screen and a new battle triggers. Again both forces have been teleported back to the 1000 positions but now this action ends at 1205.

Lather, rinse repeat. Eventually after five times and over four game-hours I finally managed to disengage with no bombardment conducted or mines laid. Essentially my force was stuck in the same spot, 29km east of Yarmouth for more than four hours while any British reinforcements got to advance some 64 nm (115 km in game terms).

Jutland is damaged in so many ways but the teleport bug, also present in Distant Guns, completely breaks the campaign engine. If you read the posts on this issue you will find that as far as the developers are concerned, this is a rare (it's not) and inconvenient issue that's "hard to fix". But have fun because they never bothered to find a fix.

-C
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Old 12-22-20, 06:45 PM   #3
cheeky_kaleun
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Randomizer View Post
When you attempt a bombardment you are likely to encounter the dreaded "Teleportation" bug, which renders the campaigns unplayable in my opinion.
-C
I have encountered that bug, not as badly as you have, but on occasion it can be quite annoying (as also your ships reappear on the campaign map some distance from their original locations). But I'm willing to stick with it, because I think if enough people buy it, and the community gets large enough, they'll be able to afford to re-hire programmers and the like to fix these issues and expand the game, maybe even create a World War 2 game.

They have a good underlying product, no-one else has created a game about WW1 naval warfare that is this good, both in 'eye candy' and in mechanics/strategy/tactics, etc. But they need money, they need an influx of cash to get the game up to spec. There are still questions to which I can find no answers;

(1) What do sea-plane carriers do? Do they extend the 'vision' of the fleet? If I use them as an aviation patrol, do they show more than I'd otherwise see?

(2) When selecting area patrol, what do the numbers 1 to 100 signify? Tiles? Miles? I can put a unit on 15 and yet it seems to be sailing up the Jade into Wilhelmshaven harbour

(3) Please provide a way to attack or counter submarines because it's just ridiculous, particularly when that German mine-laying sub unit sets up in Oostende and mine-lays the entire mouth to the English channel, and one cannot do anything about it except countermine (I laid thousands upon thousands of mines around Zeebrugge and Rotterdam, for about 5 weeks, sortie after sortie, literally over 5,000 mines laid) and all I managed was to sink a single one of those mine-laying German subs.
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Old 12-23-20, 04:20 PM   #4
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Bombardment awards you victory points...same as sinking merchants...,the light forces problem is an issue at that point.If you chose to command battleyourself than it can be time wasting,since you just plow your ships forward and wait for enemy to get out of range,if you select autoresolve,the acompaniying dds (yours) tend to get off from main fleet and engage the light forces (and dying since german dds tend to be outgunned by english).But there is fun to be had in this game.

I finished the campaign in Disntant Guns with russians,and it was one of my cherished game experiences.

It is shame that this game doesn't updatet,with new textures and mechanics to deal with problems like that one described above.They already have stuff under the hood.
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Old 12-23-20, 06:51 PM   #5
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Quote:
(1) What do sea-plane carriers do? Do they extend the 'vision' of the fleet? If I use them as an aviation patrol, do they show more than I'd otherwise see?
Nothing that I have been able to determine.
Quote:
(2) When selecting area patrol, what do the numbers 1 to 100 signify? Tiles? Miles? I can put a unit on 15 and yet it seems to be sailing up the Jade into Wilhelmshaven harbour
Hours until the patrolling ship/squadron needs to return to base.
Quote:
(3) Please provide a way to attack or counter submarines because it's just ridiculous,
Nothing. But this is not as ahistorical as it may seem since without ASDIC or ship mounted hydrophones surface ships pretty much needed to catch a sub on the surface to kill it with guns or ramming. Depth charges were introduced in 1917 and were huge while generally dropped blindly near the swirl created by the diving boat. Few DD carried more than a half-dozen and most just one or two. Mines, ramming and gunfire were the causes of most U-Boat losses in the Great War.

Given the body of brilliant modders out there, imagine what the games might look like today had the idiots running Stormpowered made them as moddable as SH3/SH4.

I find the numerous unfixed issues suck virtually all of the enjoyment out of the campaigns and for the most part, also from the individual battles.

-C
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Old 12-29-20, 03:40 PM   #6
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The issue that Randomizer mentions about fighting multiple battles in the same campaign map square over and over can be avoided by doing the following after each battle:

"Another very important thing is to hit P to pause the game whenever a battle ends, before going back to the campaign. That way, the campaign will also be paused when you get back to it. Once back on the campaign map, give your TF new sailing orders to go in a different direction than it was previously ordered to go, before restarting the game clock. This really helps avoid running into the same forces again and again."

I can't remember where I got that information from so I cannot credit the right person, but I believe someone posted it on the old Stormpowered forum a few years ago.

That method does work as I use it in my current Distant Guns campaign.

Last edited by WallysWorld; 12-29-20 at 03:49 PM.
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Old 12-31-20, 01:29 PM   #7
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Randomizer View Post
Hours until the patrolling ship/squadron needs to return to base.
-C
That's if you set a unit to patrol while out of base, say, you send your D and E-class submarines to sail in front of Wilhelmshaven, they can patrol for over 200 hours, whereas the short-range craft might have 48 hours. You are ordering them to patrol the selected tile or square for the specified hours.

But if you select area patrol from when the unit is in base, it's not linked to hours. I can let them patrol for weeks, or more, on end, without touching it. "Area patrol" seems to have some other mechanism, I'm certain it relates to distance but can't work out what the measurement is (miles, tiles/squares, etc)
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Old 12-31-20, 06:13 PM   #8
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Radius in squares. A value of Zero represents the target square alone.

-C
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Old 01-22-21, 08:48 PM   #9
cheeky_kaleun
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Randomizer View Post
Radius in squares. A value of Zero represents the target square alone.

-C
Awesome, thanks Randomizer, really appreciate that.

There is one way to kill subs and that's with mines, I managed to destroy one German sub for the investment of thousands of mines (they set up at Oostende, I mined the Dover Strait and channel entrance where they kept seeming to torpedo my ships sailing through for trade or patrolling from Portsmouth, etc)

I'm hoping that submarines patrolling a square could also sink other submarines (given they travelled on the surface most of the time, and also around 1914-1915 they started giving RN subs deck guns)

It would really still be appreciated if they could do something with those seaplane carriers, maybe given them extended vision of the squares around them or something, I don't know. Otherwise it just seems like waste, this game has so much potential and holds up well even today, it just needs a little investment in cash and time, programmers, etc.

Looking through the data files they also have geo-data for the Black Sea and Baltic Sea so it's clear they intended to expand into that region like they did for Falklands and Coronel, but it just stalled.. I wish someone would make an investment in the game to expand it, fix any major bugs, and give it full functionality.
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Old 01-23-21, 01:23 AM   #10
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Quote:
Originally Posted by cheeky_kaleun View Post
So, what does bombardment do?
The developers said that bombardment is intended to have a political effect (primarily for the German side). Namely, to induce the Grand Fleet to divide its units to protect coastal towns, thereby playing into Hipper/Scheer's hands.

In WWI the bombardment of Whitby/Scarborough/Hartlepool caused a public outcry (as you may know). The British public was angry that battleship squadrons were not divided to protect each coastal town & stop these hit and run raids. Especially since British tax payers had spent huge sums of money on the Dreadnought fleet.

The Admiralty (correctly) resisted public pressure - arguing that one squadron of British battleships could be lured out and crushed by the High Seas Fleet, until the whole Royal navy had been "defeated in detail".

Historically the Grand Fleet resisted this political pressure and won the war. In the game, if you bombard enough towns enough times, the Admiralty will divide its forces and you may run into small squadrons of battleships - easily destroyed if you sortie with the whole HSF.

At least that was their intention (can't remember where the devs posted this, but there you have it). As you point out, there are issues with the game, and I don't know if this feature is properly implemented. If it is, it's quite neat!

Last edited by iambecomelife; 01-23-21 at 06:01 AM.
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