Mission: Kara sea search Feed back.

[SeaQueen]

Originally Posted by XabbaRus

Ah but there is a way to get round the password protection

You are a TRUE munchkin.

I have a few cold war subs in various stages. There are some good ones in SCX but they can't be used

Lets see what I can do.

BTW, as an aside, while I was at work, I saw your post on a 3d graphics site with a Yankee SSBN shooting a missile. We're trying to give our model cool 3d graphics (gotta keep up with the competition and all that). I thought it was cool because I was thinking, "Ah... small world..."

[Bellman]

Enjoyed my tour in Kara but time for some shore leave as my 'appendages' have turned purple !

The beefed up Typhoon support and northern starting positions for the 688 have added interest,

Why given the tactic assignments I seem to discover the Typhoon first between me and its support,
escapes me. Given the odds this should'nt happen. But I like to infiltrate the defenders first and then,
should a scrap be unavoidable, the Typhoons evasion adds fuirther challenge. Perhaps one answer,
given the N & S. 688 starters is to Group, but given a certain predictability I would prefer a trigger/script
which created the Reds starting positions directly related to the 688s starting position boxes/randomisations.

If ice coverage was'nt so uniform then the channels/pools would provide some scope fot those pesky
fishing boats. Judiciously placed to avoid frustrating red herring excursions.

I hope this mission will provoke ideas for some littoral water scenarios. In the meantime ice is 'cool' !

[SeaQueen]

Originally Posted by Bellman

Why given the tactic assignments I seem to discover the Typhoon first between me and its support, escapes me.

The Typhoon can fight back. I've gotten shot by it a couple of times. When I first put the scenario togther, I just made something simple that I would enjoy, but figured nobody else would because of the length of time necessary to complete it. I'm shocked that it's been as popular as it is.

Perhaps one answer, given the N & S. 688 starters is to Group, but given a certain predictability I would prefer a trigger/script
which created the Reds starting positions directly related to the 688s starting position boxes/randomisations.

That would imply the red force had some knowledge of which direction you were coming from. That's probably realistic given the geography, but I didn't want to make, say, a barrier search followed by an area clearence problem. I wanted to make a simple scenario where I could play with different search tactics and shoot some torpedoes once I found the bad guys.

If ice coverage was'nt so uniform then the channels/pools would
provide some scope fot those pesky fishing boats.

I'm putting together a more complicated Strategic ASW scenario. This one is in the Barents Sea, where ice coverage is not so heavy. I'm not sure how I'm going to handle neutral traffic at this point. I'm just trying to get sonobuoy fields to work right. It's fun, though, because there's a SOSUS datum and an MPA to hand off the contact to your submarine.

Besides, in the Kara Sea Scenario, you really don't want too many red herrings. You could be hunting for the SSBN for a very very long time. It doesn't need anything more.

I hope this mission will provoke ideas for some littoral water scenarios. In the meantime ice is 'cool' !

I have actually resolved to stay away from contemporary scenarios. I don't want anyone to look at it and say, "that looks a little too much like blah blah blah..." and get me in trouble. It's much safer to come up with hypothetical historical scenarios from out of the Cold War that illustrate a principle that might or might not still be applicable today.

The Kara Sea scenario, is just an area clearence problem. I can change the location, change the environment, change the neutral shipping, change the time of day, change the escorts, etc. and the essentials of the problem would remain the same. It'd just be little details.

I'll let other people hypothesize about future conflicts.

[Bellman]

Just teasing about 'littoral'.

You have wet my appetite - I'm not a great one for adding ice to anything but had found some nice locations
in the Sea of Okhotsk and yes snap to N of Arkhangelsk, bordering Barents.

Pre Kara I had knocked out a couple of unpublished MP scenarios but I was'nt, and am not yet, entirely
satisfied with them. However, you have sparked my interest to defrost them.

I shall look forward to your 'Strategic ASW scenario'

[SeaQueen]

Originally Posted by Bellman

I shall look forward to your 'Strategic ASW scenario'

Well... ya know... chasing a boomer during the Cold War is an easy spark for a mission idea. It puts that fate of the free world in your hands, ya know? There's also lots of good public domain sources that can give one a feel for the types of issues involved and the kinds of things one might expect.

Ice... opened water... they're all fun. Each environment has its own challenges.

[Kazuaki Shimazaki II]

Originally Posted by SeaQueen

I fixed the goal so that you could get 100% of the points.

I changed the distribution governing the American SSN's starting position. It shouldn't effect anything, but it will give you a chance to see a little more of the arctic.

I made the Soviet SSN exclusively an AI because it seems like not many people were willing to play this as a MP scenario. It really is best played in more than one sitting. The last time I played it, it took just under 20 hours from the starting time to killing the SSBN. The escort was still there. It's also harder from the American perspective, I think.

I want to be the exception. At least give me the frigging password to your scenario so I can change that one value.

I changed it so that the SSBN's escort would be an early model AKULA some fraction of the time, and a VICTOR III some other fraction of the time. The early AKULAs were basically just SIERRAs but made of steel instead of titanium, so I figured it'd make it a little more "period." The DW database really isn't well suited to Cold War scenarios, unfortunately, but we do what we can.

Actually, I'd argue it is better to leave it as an Improved Akula I (I assume that's what it was before). If you are in the Cold War, there will be relatively few 688I variants (is TB-23 even out yet?), and mostly Flight II and Flight Is which are noisier. At least it'd be better balanced, with both sides having a better boat. And you can play the Improved Akula.

And I password protected it, so that munchkins can't play with an SSN 21 in 1988. :-)

Gimme password. Please! Come on, don't spoil the fun. The scenario is just as good for 2005 instead of Cold War.

[SeaQueen]

Originally Posted by Kazuaki Shimazaki II

I want to be the exception. At least give me the frigging password to your scenario so I can change that one value.

I'll put out the Russianized version, how about that?

Actually, I'd argue it is better to leave it as an Improved Akula I (I assume that's what it was before). If you are in the Cold War, there will be relatively few 688I variants (is TB-23 even out yet?), and mostly Flight II and Flight Is which are noisier. At least it'd be better balanced, with both sides having a better boat. And you can play the Improved Akula.

I'm not convinced it's unbalanced now. Depending on who you find first, or the relative positions of the different submarines, once you find the bad guys, it can get really shooty really fast. There's just a long period building up to that.

[Kazuaki Shimazaki II]

Originally Posted by SeaQueen

I'll put out the Russianized version, how about that?

Oh good. That will be a real challenge hunting Ohios (as of LWAMI, they are about 10 PSL or 20dB quieter)... fun...

[LuftWolf]

Actually, I'd argue it is better to leave it as an Improved Akula I (I assume that's what it was before). If you are in the Cold War, there will be relatively few 688I variants (is TB-23 even out yet?), and mostly Flight II and Flight Is which are noisier. At least it'd be better balanced, with both sides having a better boat. And you can play the Improved Akula.
...
Oh good. That will be a real challenge hunting Ohios (as of LWAMI, they are about 10 PSL or 20dB quieter)... fun...

SQ doesn't use mods, so this is not a convincing argument.

BTW, SQ why oh why don't you use LWAMI? I figure you'd be one to jump at it, unless you have professional reasons for not using amateur mods... like you have a BETTER database than ours perhaps?

In any case, your mission designing skills are perfectly suited to maximizing the kind of finesse elements (or not so "finesse"... like effective sonar for AI platforms) put into LWAMI for use by the mission designers. It's a real shame you don't make missions with the modded version of the game in mind!

[SeaQueen]

Originally Posted by LuftWolf

[
BTW, SQ why oh why don't you use LWAMI? I figure you'd be one to jump at it, unless you have professional reasons for not using amateur mods... like you have a BETTER database than ours perhaps?

Actually, I don't. I also avoid making scenarios that have to do with contemporary topics unless I can point to a newspaper article, for example, which inspired it. I don't want anything I do to be "too close" to something I might have seen. You guys might be surprised at how much out there is public domain, though, if you just know where to look.

In any case, your mission designing skills are perfectly suited to maximizing the kind of finesse elements (or not so "finesse"... like effective sonar for AI platforms) put into LWAMI for use by the mission designers. It's a real shame you don't make missions with the modded version of the game in mind!

Honestly, my feeling is that the database shouldn't matter all that much. The principle around which I designed the Kara Sea mission remains the same regardless. Different databases might change the detection ranges, and therefore the pace of things somewhat, but the essential tactical decisions one must make remain the same. That's what wargaming is all about, to me.

My biggest problems with the sim have less to do with the database and more to do with more fundamental issues. SSPs for example, still look bizarre.

One shouldn't focus too much on trying to make a "realistic" database in publically available wargames. Given the limitations of the sonar and radar models, all of the second guessing of specific numbers probably doesn't buy you much.

Speaking from experience, I think the stock DW gives results that look just fine to me. I don't look at them and think, "that's all wrong!" I'm more annoyed by things like the presense of strong thermoclines in the arctic, or the lack of a useful exploitation of doppler shift.

Databases don't really change the "realism" (if such a thing exists at all) of the game play all that much, particularly if the scenarios people construct are typically contrived anyway. In real life, sometimes I think the real design specifications are just picked out of the air by a subject matter expert because his answer is, "I don't know." Either that, or they are arrived at by tests in a laboratory somewhere which might or might not have anything to do with what happens when the systems are actually employed. Who knows what the "real" value is?

I was talking to a guy yesterday who was telling me that when they were teaching him tactics at the Naval War College, they used stock Harpoon, with none of the mods out there. They weren't out at the time. The point was to teach people to make the best decisions and to illustrate general principles, and teach you how to solve problems. It makes you THINK like a sea captain, or a TACCO. THAT makes sense to me.

All of this dickering over a few dB here and there just makes my head hurt.

[Molon Labe]

There's a lot more to the DB than noise levels...

Anyways, I played Kara Sea a few days ago, unmodded, and had detection ranges greater than 40nm. It didn't take me nearly as long as expected, but it was still a good scenario. Probably up there with the top SCX missions.

[LuftWolf]

Realism is really not the point of LWAMI... it's realism is the sense that it makes the sim work as well as it can... well, at least better than the stock.

The thing is, the more I understood about the stock database, the more I came to see it as a massive anchor that really weighs down the sim, preventing it from performing well enough to be enjoyable, to me anyway.

If it weren't possible to improve the performance of stock game, I would have played the stock missions and stopped playing the game... the AI is simply non-existant in SP, and the balance is totally wrong for sustainable MP.

Think of the Sim as being an engine that is greatly in need of an oil change.

[SeaQueen]

Originally Posted by LuftWolf

The thing is, the more I understood about the stock database, the more I came to see it as a massive anchor that really weighs down the sim, preventing it from performing well enough to be enjoyable, to me anyway.

How so? To me, it's always been explained as a "realism" patch, which struck me as questionable.

If it weren't possible to improve the performance of stock game, I would have played the stock missions and stopped playing the game... the AI is simply non-existant in SP, and the balance is totally wrong for sustainable MP.

How does the database improve the AI?

My experience with the AI has been that it's actually about equivilent to the average 14 year old playing the game in many respects. For example, if you program it to "Attack" it tends to shoot early with a questionable firing solution. Actually, in that respect it's superior. It's much better at TMA than most kids.

If you program it to "Evade" it is more likely to shoot a passive torpedo if you get too close and tends to prefer sneaking away.

Balance on a platform level isn't something I worry about a whole lot in MP. If people come up with contrived scenarios, then altering the platforms to make it more "balanced" is just adding layers of contrivence.

Think of the Sim as being an engine that is greatly in need of an oil change.

That's possible, but without knowing more about the internals of the model, I can't make a judgement about that.

[LuftWolf]

The stock database is, to put it simply, a horrorshow.

1) AI platforms do not have effective sonar, all are set as very weak. Most platforms' sonars are limited to 7-14nm hardcapped range... modern SSN's have a 60 degree forward baffle in which they are completely deaf.

2) Some platforms have missions priorities set in such a way that they will not do what they are supposed to do

3) SubAtkSub and SubAvoidWeap doctrines in particular are very weak in terms of producing aggressive performance. AEGIS (CIWSAttack doctrine) performance is virtually non-existant.

4) The relative sound vs. speed and over all sound level has been tweaked to give a much larger range of detections on platforms... the stock database has a standard ~10db addition to noise for d/e subs at flank and a ~20db increase to noise for nukes at flank (including SSBN's).

5) All torpedoes use the same seeker with range 4500m.

6) The game engine has a bug that allows aircraft to track submarines FOREVER once they have them on MAD or dipping sonar (capability added in the Mod), that we were able to work around using doctrines... this means that airplatforms are using permanent show truth data on all contacts they detect. Should I go on?

Oh yeah, one more I almost forget about now...

7) Torpedoes do not explode on launched countermeasures in LWAMI.

I will never make another mod that has the word "realism" in the title... that's just a hook to be honest, a legacy from when the mod simply switched the 65cm and 53cm to represent more proper Russian weapons, added the TB-23 to the 688i, and introduced underwater missile launch transients.

In any case, the readme is very thorough... I guess if that doesn't make you want to try the mod then there is pretty much nothing else to say.

http://www.subsim.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=49705

PS In rereading your last post, I think you are missing something... but I can't quite put my finger on what it is... I think you genuinely don't believe than an amateur can make genuine improvements to a product such as DW. Well then, try us.

That's possible, but without knowing more about the internals of the model, I can't make a judgement about that.

PPS Everyone using the advanced capabilities of DW really needs to become proficient using DWedit to reference the database.

[LuftWolf]

I think another thing to keep in mind, in reading your last post again...

You talk of programming the AI to do this and that at the mission level... well based on what I have heard, when using LWAMI, mission designers can largely set the platforms up in certain locations and they will behave intelligently on their own, for the most part.

The reason you have to program attacks and things like that for the stock game, is that AI platforms are so deaf, they will never trip the threshold for attack until they are with in a few nm of most playable contacts.