Few Large Naval Groups vs Many smaller groups?

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As U.K., is it better to have a few naval battle groups of 24 or several battle groups of 9? If facing a group of subs, is it better to have a group of just 9 destroyers or a group that consists of several battleships, several cruisers, and 9 destroyers? Does it hurt to have the extra ships in the fleet when going against subs?

 

[unmerged(3902)]

So far as I can determine, if there's a penalty for having, say, 50 ships in a stack, its more than offset by the advantage you bring to the table of ... having 50 ships in a stack.

In other words, a 50 ship stack beats 5 10 ship stacks without breaking a sweat.

In fact, a 30 ship stack beats 10 10 ship stacks pretty handily as well.

The AI in particular, has a fascination with breaking its navy apart into little task forces and scattering them around the map so you can destroy them.

And before you get rolling that historically that's how navies got used: it isn't.

Something north of 70% of the British fleet spent WW I sitting in Scapa flow oppisate the German High seas fleet. The British admiralty knew that sending, say, half the home fleet to the mediterranean would expose the remaining forces in home waters to an unwinnable battle.

Historical naval strategy, from the Greco-Persian wars, to Trafalgar, to Jutland, to Leyte gulf, has been one of *concentration* not of dispersal.

 

[Soren The Wild]

To have a few big stacks of ships or a lot smaller ones depend on your playing style. There´s pro´s and con´s for both styles, personally I prefer the latter.
As for subhunting I believe it´s best to have destroyer only groups since battleships can´t attack subs and cruisers have a lower sub attack rating than destroyers.

 

[Jon Shafer]

I see large 20+ stacks of UK boats all the time.

The fact that sometimes they like to round the horn of Africa doesn't make it shine in the greatest light though.

 

[unmerged(3902)]

Originally posted by Soren The Wild
To have a few big stacks of ships or a lot smaller ones depend on your playing style. There´s pro´s and con´s for both styles, personally I prefer the latter.

You know, I used to believe this, but then I discovered the dark power of the mongo stack.

Let me put 30 ships on one stack, and then you can deploy 100 ships in 10 stacks of 10 units and we can fight it out.

Lots of little stacks just isn't viable unless you're A) playing the AI which does the same thing or B) playing a human that does the same thing.

Against somebody who uses the mongo stack strategy, the only counter is to hit his big stack with your own bigger stack.

 

[Jon Shafer]

Scapa Flow anyone?

If planes could 0wnz0r boats better (and the AI make use of that fact), then it wouldn't be the same. There's a reason the battleship was no longer the king of the waves...

 

[Soren The Wild]

Originally posted by pcasey
You know, I used to believe this, but then I discovered the dark power of the mongo stack.

Let me put 30 ships on one stack, and then you can deploy 100 ships in 10 stacks of 10 units and we can fight it out.

Lots of little stacks just isn't viable unless you're A) playing the AI which does the same thing or B) playing a human that does the same thing.

Against somebody who uses the mongo stack strategy, the only counter is to hit his big stack with your own bigger stack.

Lol, please don´t sink me. I can´t swim!

seriously, I only play SP but I guess your right about the mongo stack if not playing the AI.

 

[unmerged(3902)]

I think we're ultimately seeing a failure of the combat system in which you pay no penalty for, and labor under no limit of, the total number of units you can stack in any geographic area.

Its not just at sea either, you see the same thing in the air war or on land.

One really big stack of troops in one province, backed by a single division in each other border province ends up being the near optimal land deployment, especially against an opponent who distributes his forces in a broad front strategy. Your uber stack can just chew up his army, one province and fraction at a time.

One really big stack of 24 bombers and fighters ends up being far more useful than 4 stacks of six. It suffers proportionately less damage to ground fire, fights off intercepting fighters better, and does more damage to boot.

The problem is most apparent in the naval world, of course, becasue there's really no penalty for *not* having ships in, say, the north sea. Meaning if you want to put your entire navy in one big stack and sail it off to fight the japanese, there's no single italian cruiser running around "conquering" the ocean.

Until HOI introduces some form of either a stacking limit or reintroduces the old EU 2 attrition model, the issue is going to persist, and introducing either of those will result in a *huge* effective nerf of the USSR which will no longer be able to count on outnumbering the germans at the point of decision.

 

[KungMarkatta]

I always like the WiF (5th ed) approach to this:

Kinda hard to explain since it was 6-7 years since I played it but... it worked something like this:

(1.) If 3 ships were fighting 3 ships and both players rolled a 3 on a d6 then maybe one ship in each fleet where damaged.

(2.) If 3 ships where fighting 12 ships and both players rolled 3 on a d6 then the player with 3 ships had 2 of them sunk, that player with the small fleet though (who also rolled a 3) did NOT just damage one ship as in example (1.) but maybe sank one and damaged one enemy ship.

That means that a large fleet will pack a better punch but it is at the same time a little more vulnerable to damage.

Dont know why they made it like this but I can only think of 2 reasons, (a) they wanted to encourage the use of small fleets or (b) there is some historical/statistic proof of the matter (ie lets say more ships makes more targets or something?).

 

[unmerged(3902)]

Originally posted by KungMarkatta

Dont know why they made it like this but I can only think of 2 reasons, (a) they wanted to encourage the use of small fleets or (b) there is some historical/statistic proof of the matter (ie lets say more ships makes more targets or something?).

There's probably some accuracy in that analysis for torpedo spreads e.g. any given torpedo spread will likely cause more hits on a 10 ship formation then on a 1 ship formation.

Due to the nature of surface fleet gunnery though, you actually get the oppisate effect. If two fleets, one of 5 ships and one of 6 ships meet and start shooting at one another, the larger fleet has a greater than 6:5 advantage. Since one of its ships will not be targetted at all, that ship will be able to basically have target practise that day and will get significantly more hits than a ship that is under fire.