1.2.1 [3d5f] Carrier Stacking Penalty does not apply

[Ascender]

Description: The penalty which should apply to the total number of carrier-launched aircraft when employing >4 carriers in a naval combat does nothing.

DLC's: None relevant
Mods: None

Reproduction Steps:
1. Unpack and launch the attached save game. It involves an engagement of 8 U.S. carriers in an unmodded game (other than providing additional carriers) against a Japanese fleet.

2. Go to the Naval Battle. 2 Carriers are engaged, 6 are on the way. When the 6 carriers join the battle, they still launch their maximum complement of aircraft. 55 Divebombers are from the Ranger ONLY. The total aircraft complement on these carrierse is 370 aircraft, 157 CV fighters, 158 CV naval bombers and 55 CV divebombers. This number gets diminished neither through total aircraft launched or sortie efficiency. The aircraft from the Ranger demonstrate this nicely.

I have tested this further by changing the value in the defines file "00_defines.lua". I changed this value from 0.2 to 0.0 (to remove the penalty) and it showed neither a change in aircraft launched, sortie efficiency or in the actual damage they were doing during the naval battles. This leads me to believe that while it shows an icon with text indicating only 20% of the aircraft can be launched in the case of the test save here, it does not actually work and launches 100% of the aircraft regardless.

The relevant values in 00_defines.lua are:
CARRIER_STACK_PENALTY
CARRIER_STACK_PENALTY_EFFECT

 

[Alex_brunius]

The way it used to work last time I tested it was that even if all Aircraft "launch" the ones above stacking don't do strikes on the enemy ( or shoot down enemy airplanes ).

So they are displayed as active planes, but don't actually do anything when you look at the log.

Can you doublecheck if this is the case here too?

 

[Ascender]

Ran some tests on this and I cannot really seem to find much of a difference between what is supposedly 20% traffic and what is 100% traffic. The biggest variations I can see in the damage aircraft do is according to the local random weather conditions.

In addition it seems to suffer from overflow of sorts. I tried applying 4x24% penalty (should result in 96% penalty and 4% traffic) and it gave me 24% traffic as a figure ingame. Similarly I applied what should be a 250% (or 200%, I don't remember exactly) penalty and it gave me a 50% penalty as info. However, none of these supposed applied penalties seemed to affect how much damage these aircraft were actually doing, with the 24% and 100% traffic numbers giving very similar damages.