All ships in the navy use their AA to reduce damage, but it only Count for 1/5 of what the attacked ships AA Count for damage reduction.
Is naval AA worth it or not, trying to do some math?
- Thread starter Denkt
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All the forumlas are provided on the wiki by bitmode:
https://hoi4.paradoxwikis.com/Naval_battle#Naval_strike
First there is target selection for Naval Strikes, which is much much higher for Capitals and Carriers than Screens. This is why you put AA on your Capitals.
Then for the targeted Ship it gets calculated if it gets a chance to shoot back and if yes how much planes they shoot down. So this shows a higher AA value on your capitals will shoot down lots of planes, especially against Kamikaze, since then you always hit the enemy wing, but with enough airplanes and to little own ships they just overwhelm you (1 Super Heavy AA Platform vs 1000 Ships).
If then some planes are still there for the attack, they attack you ship but the damage gets reduced by your fleet AA, which you can calculate yourself from scratch, or use the provided fleet AA value in a fleet battle. A value of around 50 Fleet AA gives around -33% damage reduction, of the surviving planes of the naval strike.
This is why you put AA on everything, an AA DDs are also a good idea. Rise your fleet AA cheaply by lots of cheap ships with AA, so you get a passive damage reduction. But also put good AA on your capitals, so they shoot down enemy planes and survive naval strike over naval strike. Also have lots of Capitals, so the enemy planes get spreaded from ship to ship, so no single ship is completly overwhelmed.
Lot's beeing relative though, since already 10 Capitals instead of 1 make a huge difference, but having much more makes it difficulty to screen against torpedos.
https://hoi4.paradoxwikis.com/Naval_battle#Naval_strike
First there is target selection for Naval Strikes, which is much much higher for Capitals and Carriers than Screens. This is why you put AA on your Capitals.
Then for the targeted Ship it gets calculated if it gets a chance to shoot back and if yes how much planes they shoot down. So this shows a higher AA value on your capitals will shoot down lots of planes, especially against Kamikaze, since then you always hit the enemy wing, but with enough airplanes and to little own ships they just overwhelm you (1 Super Heavy AA Platform vs 1000 Ships).
If then some planes are still there for the attack, they attack you ship but the damage gets reduced by your fleet AA, which you can calculate yourself from scratch, or use the provided fleet AA value in a fleet battle. A value of around 50 Fleet AA gives around -33% damage reduction, of the surviving planes of the naval strike.
This is why you put AA on everything, an AA DDs are also a good idea. Rise your fleet AA cheaply by lots of cheap ships with AA, so you get a passive damage reduction. But also put good AA on your capitals, so they shoot down enemy planes and survive naval strike over naval strike. Also have lots of Capitals, so the enemy planes get spreaded from ship to ship, so no single ship is completly overwhelmed.
Lot's beeing relative though, since already 10 Capitals instead of 1 make a huge difference, but having much more makes it difficulty to screen against torpedos.
The Aircrafts however favor damage ships alot more than fresh ones so they will likely hit the same ship over and over again to it sink, it also make Aircrafts effective at killing retreating ships.
A super Heavy battleship have around 700 HP so about 35 Aircrafts can attack it at full HP and with 10 you get about 350. Likely AA don't target the attacking Aircrafts but the whole airwing but can't kill non attacking Aircrafts.
I suspect something like this happended with 1 super Heavy battleship:
1 damage super Heavy battleship is attacked by 20 Aircrafts out of 1k airwing, AA hits and it kill 80% of the airwing, so 800 Aircrafts but since only 20 Aircrafts attacked it, 20 Aircrafts are shoot down but since there are 980 Aircrafts left, 20 new instantly replace the shoot down Aircrafts and the battleship is sunk.
For the destroyer: A 1944 destroyer have 60 HP and I had 40 destroyers, so 0.05*60*40 = 120 Aircrafts can attack it and the number of Aircrafts shoot down was exactly 120, but the destroyer was still sunk.
Conclusion, AA don't protect well against large airwings because the shoot down Aircrafts are instantly replaced in the same attack. The more HP your fleet have the more Aircrafts will attack but this can actually work against the Aircrafts since it allow the AA to kill alot more which can't instantly be replaced and for some reason it also seems like ships suffer less damage against air attacks.
AA kill a % of the airwing, roughly 1 AA value translate to 1% of the airwing shoot down (I'm not sure if it is random or not actually). In the extreme case with 50 super Heavy battleships, an 1k airwing lost 860 Aircrafts to an AA hit which translate quite well since an super Heavy battleship have 86.2 AA. For a 1k airwing to be able to attack the fleet you need a total of 20k HP, which is alot, like 30 super Heavy battleships.
A super Heavy battleship have around 700 HP so about 35 Aircrafts can attack it at full HP and with 10 you get about 350. Likely AA don't target the attacking Aircrafts but the whole airwing but can't kill non attacking Aircrafts.
I suspect something like this happended with 1 super Heavy battleship:
1 damage super Heavy battleship is attacked by 20 Aircrafts out of 1k airwing, AA hits and it kill 80% of the airwing, so 800 Aircrafts but since only 20 Aircrafts attacked it, 20 Aircrafts are shoot down but since there are 980 Aircrafts left, 20 new instantly replace the shoot down Aircrafts and the battleship is sunk.
For the destroyer: A 1944 destroyer have 60 HP and I had 40 destroyers, so 0.05*60*40 = 120 Aircrafts can attack it and the number of Aircrafts shoot down was exactly 120, but the destroyer was still sunk.
Conclusion, AA don't protect well against large airwings because the shoot down Aircrafts are instantly replaced in the same attack. The more HP your fleet have the more Aircrafts will attack but this can actually work against the Aircrafts since it allow the AA to kill alot more which can't instantly be replaced and for some reason it also seems like ships suffer less damage against air attacks.
AA kill a % of the airwing, roughly 1 AA value translate to 1% of the airwing shoot down (I'm not sure if it is random or not actually). In the extreme case with 50 super Heavy battleships, an 1k airwing lost 860 Aircrafts to an AA hit which translate quite well since an super Heavy battleship have 86.2 AA. For a 1k airwing to be able to attack the fleet you need a total of 20k HP, which is alot, like 30 super Heavy battleships.
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Interesting, so the ships chance to hit is not modified by improved Radar, Fire Control according to those calculations? They just improve damage if a hit is made.
Systems like the Mk IV Pom Pom director and the 28x series Fire Control Radars made quite a noticeable difference in the anti-air capabilities of the ships (to say nothing of later improvements caused by proximity fuses).
Screens not shooting aircraft unless they themselves are under attack seems like a major problem to me.
Yeah that's really dumb and doesn't make sense.
Yeah that's incredibly dumb. Seems like naval air combat needs a lot of improvement.
So Light Cruiser only work for passiv AA defense, because the CV chance to be targeted ist considerable higher.
But the Heavy Cruiser is an ideal AA platform: it's a capital ship so it's target-chance is HP*50 vs a CV's HP*70. Adding more CAs than CVs and you get a solid chance to shoot down attacking bombers.
We have found a solid role for CAs again.
@Denkt
Thanks for the great test!
I'm actually more thinking about doubling down on the Screens-only Fleet because of this.
Without capitals the wheight for getting hit by NAV is just the ships HP.
With all batteries CL'40 at 154 HP and DD'40 at 50 HP you'd want about a 3 DD to 1 CL ratio. Coincidently you'd want that either way, because you want to focus the enemies heavy attacks on the DDs. There they'll have the lowest hit chance and the highest chance of overkill.
The CL would have 6 light-medium Batteries 2 and the second secondary (~50 light attack without fc, 6,3 Air Attack) for a bit shy of 6k produktion.
The DDs would have a dual purpose main gun, four AA3's and one slot for torpedos. In total 3 light attack and 22,5 air attack for <1,8k produktion.
You'd have about a 50/50 chance that a 22,5 air attack ship gets targeted, that won't be a big loss to you, while you'd easily reach max damage reduction for your fleet.
Without capitals the wheight for getting hit by NAV is just the ships HP.
With all batteries CL'40 at 154 HP and DD'40 at 50 HP you'd want about a 3 DD to 1 CL ratio. Coincidently you'd want that either way, because you want to focus the enemies heavy attacks on the DDs. There they'll have the lowest hit chance and the highest chance of overkill.
The CL would have 6 light-medium Batteries 2 and the second secondary (~50 light attack without fc, 6,3 Air Attack) for a bit shy of 6k produktion.
The DDs would have a dual purpose main gun, four AA3's and one slot for torpedos. In total 3 light attack and 22,5 air attack for <1,8k produktion.
You'd have about a 50/50 chance that a 22,5 air attack ship gets targeted, that won't be a big loss to you, while you'd easily reach max damage reduction for your fleet.
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Well to begin with AA used huge amount of ammunition which was a problem for the Japanese which together with alot of other factors lead to their AA being maybe only reached 1/10 the effectiveness of the US AA.
Around 60% or so was estimated to not been shoot down by the target in the US navy.
Maybe the Devs got it the wrong way arround.
A ship with a high amount of anti air capabillities is hard to dive at, while every ship nearby has the possibility to shoot down the attacking planes.
Maybe Fleet-AA should be the damage dealer, while the targeted ships AA should be the damage reduction.
This way there's no question that the best solution would be to include specialized AA-CLs into your fleet to protect your capitals from planes.
All ships contribute to the damage reduction, but only the attacked ship get to shoot down Aircrafts. AA work in a quite strange way, most time it wont shoot down any Aircrafts at all but when it do hit, it can shoot down several hundreds at once.
If you make several small airwings it will probably be more realistic since AA get more chances to shoot at several small attacks and the number of shoot down Aircrafts per hit will be less.
All ships should fire on the planes, particularly those being attacked, perhaps the Fleet AA though should hit for half as they would be further away and their short range AA would not necessarily all be in range and have an unobscured view.
You could make it two phases, fleet AA attack first and after the target AA attack. Damage should probably not be a % of attacking Aircrafts but I don't know a better way to do it either.
It appears that damage inflicted on an airwing is totally binary, a plane either survives undamaged or it gets shot out of the sky, this also could do with a little improvement as I am sure if we knew we had damaged x number of aircraft and driven the wing away, it would be satisfying. But I suppose given there may be several hundred in a stack that might be a little processor intensive
To be fair, the bombers ought to have a small chance of totally disabling the AA of a target, but that would require something like giving the modules their own HP pool and allowing them to be damaged individually, or expanding the random broken propellers and secondary events to include AA (it may be there already I just have never seen it)
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The game don't allow for damage Aircrafts, either the Aircrafts is fresh or destroyed. Also Aircrafts cost like twice of what they should cost, a fighter cost about the same as a medium tank but I suspect the extra half represent stuff like pilot training which is not represented even though it was a bigger issue for the axis to replace their pilotes rather than their Aircrafts.
Don't critical hit allow for AA to be damaged?
AA right now is very binary, either it hit and kill alot of Aircrafts or it miss and no Aircrafts is lost, I don't know why it work like that but I don't have a good suggestion how it could work instead.
Don't critical hit allow for AA to be damaged?
AA right now is very binary, either it hit and kill alot of Aircrafts or it miss and no Aircrafts is lost, I don't know why it work like that but I don't have a good suggestion how it could work instead.
I think there are a number of issues with air combat overall, and for me at least, it definitely feels like the least satisfying part of HOI.
Fixing pilot training etc would take a full rethink on how manpower is handled, I have some ideas rolling around in my head, but as always with such things they would lead to quite a bit of complexity.
Yes and i think paradox just forgot to implement the improved hit chance for naval AA in radar tech. Land based AA get this improvement with later radar techs.
Can someone suggest this please? Or maybe open a Bug report?
It probably ought to affect naval guns hit chance and naval aa too, after a certain level, and reduce weather effect and smokescreen withdraw chance, I know they have somewhat abstracted this by increasing damage when they do hit, but it doesn't map accurately to what the Radar systems on ships actually achieved.
As mentioned in another thread recently we mentioned how Hipper plugged Glowworm, but it didn't mention how that engagement went, Glowworm actually used her smoke generators and tried to withdraw, Hipper's radar aimed guns didn't have any problems locking on and hitting Glowworm, the damaged and ablaze Glowworm then rammed Hipper, and badly damaged eventually sank whilst Hipper sailed off.
Also later with Duke of York vs Scharnhorst, DoY straddled with more than half her salvos despite extremely poor weather affecting visibility, and the only reason it was not more was due to a lucky hit from Scharnhorst cutting one of the cables from the Radar to the Fire control, this was rapidly fixed though and DoY then crippled the retreating Scharnhorst, who despite fighting bravely no longer could make enough speed to withdraw and was, as usual with 'unsinkable' German tubs, sunk by torpedoes.
With AA systems as we already discussed, late radar systems combined with proximity fuses made it very dangerous indeed for bombers to approach ships properly equipped, which as Denkt's work has shown doesn't appear to be accurately represented.
Radar allowed the sort of accuracy that would have astounded the likes of Fisher, Jellicoe & Scheer in an earlier age.
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