Minesweepers in Combat Taskforces, how do they exactly work?

[Voigt]

Back when Mines were announced in a Dev Diary for MtG, these sentences could be read:

To get rid of mines you need minesweeper capable ships. This unlocks the naval mission to sweep mines and will slowly work at clearing areas. Minesweepers are also nice to include in your fleets as they will then be assumed to travel ahead of the fleet and reduce the impact of mines on them. I suspect a good design combo will be anti-air and sweeper on screen ships to be your passive defense when in enemy waters.

In the defines you can find this entry:

NAVAL_MINES_SWEEPERS_REDUCTION_ON_PENALTY_EFFECT = 3.3,            -- How much is the task force's sweeping attribute reducing the penalty effect.

But how exactly does this work, and what does this value mean? Hopefully @bitmode Can shed some light.

If this is in %, do I need 30 minesweeping capabilties for one taskforce to completly negate the effect, which would mean 15 destroyer with 2 modules on them? How does this work with degaussing, are then 8 destroyers enough? Or does it count destroyers and not minesweeping modules?

Finally does this effect even work at all, you can never be sure like with bad weather malus reduction or stuff like that.
I don't think I saw the tooltip change for a region if I have a taskforce selectet with minesweeper in them, but maybe the game just doesn't show the effect.

Anyone else already digged in this mechanic?

 

[DicRoNero]

Finally does this effect even work at all, you can never be sure like with bad weather malus reduction or stuff like that.
I don't think I saw the tooltip change for a region if I have a taskforce selectet with minesweeper in them, but maybe the game just doesn't show the effect.

It works. As for the info, you need to hover a ship within the taskforce ship list to get the % of mine protection. You need to have minesweepers for the line to appear, though. The exact minesweeping required for each task force depends on the ship number, there surely is no 30 or other value set in stone. I.e. a small task force made of several DDs alone protects itself just fine.

I don't recall the exact numbers [from my experience], but if you have a 'normal' fleet composition, having half (or maybe slightly more) of the screens equipped with minesweeping gear will grant 100% protection w/o any technologies. Once I saw that, my concerns over mine warfare pretty much ended - I just build destroyers with 1 minesweeper each and that's it. Too lazy to optimize such a small craft.

 

[bitmode]

I don't have much to add to that. The define is simply multiplied with the averaged minesweeping stat of the task force. So with an average stat of 0.3 across all ships you should arrive at 100% reduction.

 

[Voigt]

ah ok, this explains how that define value works, thanks to both of you.

 

[Secret Master]

So, the number of mines present in a sea zone do not matter in terms of minesweeper protection. The protection afforded to a task force is merely a function of minesweeping gear on enough ships to cover the the total number of ships in the task force.

The number of mines matter in terms of how long it might take to sweep the area. But that means if you don't have 5000 minesweepers, your minesweeping fleets need to be smaller so they can cover themselves and their escort ships from mine hits. A gigantic task force escorting a few minesweepers will be at risk.

This tells me that mine quality doesn't matter, either, in terms of minesweeping protection in task forces. Mine quality only really matters when mines hit a ship.

 

[Voigt]

You escort your minesweepers? ^^
Either my minesweepers are on their own sweeping mines, best case under aircover and my strikeforce in a nearby port to intervene, or they are part of my strikeforce in the first place to protect it against existing minefield.

But yeah the number of mines and level/damage of mines just influences the decision how much to invest in sweeping/protecting your ships (100 Contactmines can mostly be ingores, 3000 Magnetic Mines in three important seazones less so)

And yeah SM, this question comes from our current MP game.
I knew the fundemental mechanic, just wanted some clarification how it exaxtly worked.

 

[Secret Master]

And yeah SM, this question comes from our current MP game.

For everyone else in the thread, our current MP game has seen more use of mines than ever before. We've been adjusting rules trying to achieve some balance related to that facet of the naval game, so we allow mines at the moment.

If the minesweeping rules work well enough, even my ridiculous naval minefields might be balanced appropriately with the way we have it set up. I know some MP groups just ban mines outright.

 

[el nora]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't most mp rulesets ban mines not because of their mechanics but because of the lag they cause? That being mostly the same reason why air wing sizes are not allowed to be lower than 100 planes and division widths not lower than 20 width.

 

[Secret Master]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't most mp rulesets ban mines not because of their mechanics but because of the lag they cause? That being mostly the same reason why air wing sizes are not allowed to be lower than 100 planes and division widths not lower than 20 width.

There is a lag issue, but in terms of fairness, I could refit 100 old crappy DDs with 2 mine rails as Japan, and then mine the entire freaking Pacific Ocean during the war with China. I could even game the naval mine decay by keeping a single war alive as Japan. Then, when the US enters the war, they face 1000 mines every possible sea zone they could sail in.

Germany, UK, and Italy could all get up to shenanigans, too. Imagine Germany mining the entire Atlantic coast of the United States. Or imagine the UK mining every sea zone from the Panama Canal, up through Canada, and to the Western Approaches with 1000 mines before France falls, with the US not able to even make a complaint about either power mining their coastline.

I'm sure you can think of other silliness related to Italy and the Soviets. Hell, we had AI Romania in one game mine the entire Black Sea before Barbarossa. No one noticed until I trapped some Soviet divisions in a pocket near a port on the Black Sea, and we all realized that with the mines in place, it might take months for those divisions to sail across the Black Sea. The Soviet player was rather irritated, justifiably so.

 

[el nora]

@Secret Master none of those are reasons to completely ban them. Those problems can be mitigated without banning mines wholesale. Just restrict mineable naval regions like kamikazes are, or only allow mining after some date like some games do with 1943 tanks, etc. It's not like they will completely and irrevocably ruin a game against an unprepared enemy the way sub3 can.

 

[Secret Master]

@Secret Master none of those are reasons to completely ban them. Those problems can be mitigated without banning mines wholesale. Just restrict mineable naval regions like kamikazes are, or only allow mining after some date like some games do with 1943 tanks, etc. It's not like they will completely and irrevocably ruin a game against an unprepared enemy the way sub3 can.

Well, that's why we don't ban them completely. But I can see why some groups do.

We don't ban 1940 subs either, but we did mod the game to nerf them (and some other things related to submarine warfare).

 

[Voigt]

I mean some groups still ban "spacemarines" divisios, although you can counter them quite easily.

Just because some groups are quite slow, or don't wanna learn simple counters to strategies which are extremly strong if not countered don't make them senaible bans.

For lag, atleast 10W I often see allowed, and not lower than 100 wing size has more to do with ace generation and nav strike chance balancing those.

 

[el nora]

Spacemarines aren't banned because they are "hard to counter." Spacemarines are the counter. To everything. Good luck trying to break the Stalin Line when every tile between it and the border is full of nothing but 9-1 inf-HTD stacked at least 4 to a tile. Seriously, how do you push against that, I want to know. They pierce tanks and trade cost efficiently. Support AA counters CAS. The ostfront becomes a literal bloodbath with 10s of millions of losses on both sides.

Ace spam becomes a problem when it allows you to bypass ws requirements. But in actual air combat is not that big a deal. If both sides are spamming aces then neither is significantly advantaged. That can be dealt with in a number of ways. For one, 10 wing size is large enough to significantly reduce the war support to the point where it's not game breaking. Alternatively, restricting air volunteers well do the same. Or you can just mod out the ws from the ace event.

Naval targeting is a problem, I'll grant. But just because one mission is benefited by bringing smaller wings, didn't mean all should be restricted.

As far as 10 widths go, every game I've played that allowed them became a massive lag fest somewhere around '40-41, when the Soviets, and to a lesser extent, the USA, spam out over 1.5k divisions.

 

[myzael]

Good luck trying to break the Stalin Line when every tile between it and the border is full of nothing but 9-1 inf-HTD stacked at least 4 to a tile.

I may be so used to our mod, so this may not work in vanilla, but I'd trySPART heavy tank divisions, possibly with heavy tanks. You can't possibly have this many space marines and enough of your own tanks to stop it as Soviets.

 

[DicRoNero]

Spacemarines aren't banned because they are "hard to counter." Spacemarines are the counter. To everything. Good luck trying to break the Stalin Line when every tile between it and the border is full of nothing but 9-1 inf-HTD stacked at least 4 to a tile. Seriously, how do you push against that, I want to know. They pierce tanks and trade cost efficiently. Support AA counters CAS. The ostfront becomes a literal bloodbath with 10s of millions of losses on both sides.

Are you saying spreading TDs evenly thin across the whole front somehow isn't exploitable by the other party? Damn, I need to get into MP just to try fighting that, as I simply don't believe this could be the alpha and omega of strategy.

 

[Voigt]

To be pierced or not to be pierced is not everything. If the enemy puts HTD in literaly every division, he probably won't have an airforce.
So my planes will reduce the enemy defense quite a bit, then CAS will do alot of damage and my high soft attack tank divisions will push trough with quite ease, while my Infantry which either has AA2/AT2 will have decent enough piercing to pierce the enemy divisions after the CAS softend them up.

 

[Secret Master]

To be pierced or not to be pierced is not everything. If the enemy puts HTD in literaly every division, he probably won't have an airforce.

I was going to say this, but I'll also add that it's cheaper to pierce infantry divisions with HTDs in them with AT than it is to produce the required tank destroyers to cover every frontline division in the Red Army.

I'm saying this, and I'm the guy in our group who uses HTDs as the Soviets more than anyone.

If you run the game at speed 5 and never allow pausing, I can see space marines being more painful to fight, since they are a nice way to get uniform firepower and piercing in every division. You never have to worry about whether the divisions fighting in a particular area are good enough to pierce enemy tanks.

 

[el nora]

I may be so used to our mod, so this may not work in vanilla, but I'd trySPART heavy tank divisions, possibly with heavy tanks. You can't possibly have this many space marines and enough of your own tanks to stop it as Soviets.

Soviets don't need tanks to roach out the Germans until 1945. Even without spacemarines, roach Russia is a viable, if suboptimal strategy. When you let them hard counter tanks with spacemarines, you make it that much better. When Germany has to fight for literally every tile through cost-effective counters, where they are losing more ic in tanks and spgs than the russians lose in tds, they can't keep it up. Eventually, after millions of losses in both men and materiel, the higher combined manpower and industry of the allies and comintern will win the war of attrition.

Are you saying spreading TDs evenly thin across the whole front somehow isn't exploitable by the other party? Damn, I need to get into MP just to try fighting that, as I simply don't believe this could be the alpha and omega of strategy.

Not as well as might be hoped. Do you have a counter or exploit on offer? The soviets can easily spit out over 500 infantry divisions. Thats enough to stack a minimum of 80 width on every forest and marsh and river between the border and the Stalin Line. A competent player can use the terrain intelligently to allow enemy troops to slip through only to be pinned, encircled, and slaughtered. With deep battle, and their high reinforce and recovery rates as well as the reduced supply consumption, you can out-org any tank attack.

To be pierced or not to be pierced is not everything. If the enemy puts HTD in literaly every division, he probably won't have an airforce.
So my planes will reduce the enemy defense quite a bit, then CAS will do alot of damage and my high soft attack tank divisions will push trough with quite ease, while my Infantry which either has AA2/AT2 will have decent enough piercing to pierce the enemy divisions after the CAS softend them up.

No-air russia is literally the meta right now. Not having an airforce isn't as huge a drawback as you seem to think. Support AA effectively and efficiently counters CAS. It reduces CAS damage by 75% and with camouflage expert reducing CAS damage by an additional 50%, they deal practically no damage. Hell, even if, arguendo, they did deal full damage, the AA will shoot them down and deal more ic damage to Germany in lost planes than the CAS actually deal in ic damage to the Russian infantry. CAS are effective counters to tanks, not to infantry. Support AA will also reduce the defense debuff from red air by -16.74 percentage points, and with Konev giving an additional -3.5 percentage points, the air support is more than cut in half. "High soft attack tank divisions" will deal damage, but they will not deal more ic damage than they take. Roach russia can grind down tanks with pure org. Letting them use spacemarines just makes them that much better.

I was going to say this, but I'll also add that it's cheaper to pierce infantry divisions with HTDs in them with AT than it is to produce the required tank destroyers to cover every frontline division in the Red Army.

I'm saying this, and I'm the guy in our group who uses HTDs as the Soviets more than anyone.

If you run the game at speed 5 and never allow pausing, I can see space marines being more painful to fight, since they are a nice way to get uniform firepower and piercing in every division. You never have to worry about whether the divisions fighting in a particular area are good enough to pierce enemy tanks.

Infantry with AT aren't a threat to defensive spacemarines because infantry don't push tiles. Sure they will pierce, but they bleed manpower like crazy for every tile they attempt to take. They have no breakthrough or hardness, so they always trade inefficiently when being used to push against enemy infantry. The spacemarines are used to counter tanks whenever and wherever they appear. Germany can't push with tanks without taking untenable losses. Adding AT to infantry is doing nothing.

 

[Voigt]

LSPART divisions are quite cheap, so you can live with losing them while pusing into Roach Russia.

No-Air Russia is one viable meta right now yeah, but then you also need to somewhat heavily invest in Antiair equipment aswell, which is another factor. One single support aa doesn't reduce the modifier that much, a tank division needs 3~4 SPAA if I recall correctly to cap the reduction of the effect.

It also heavily depends on the ruleset of the server, if Germany attacks Soviet Union in early-mid 1940 this is a completly different situation than an attack in 1941 or even 1942. Also depends if Germany was allowed/could grind the forester trait on his generals before Barbarossa.

 

[el nora]

LSPART divisions are quite cheap, so you can live with losing them while pusing into Roach Russia.

As always, counters exist to counter. Obviously. If Russia sees that Germany is making LSPG heavy divisions, they don't need to make what would be the counter to medium-mechs. They can just use 10-0 with support AA to counter. LSPG divisions aren't cheaper than pure infantry.

No-Air Russia is one viable meta right now yeah, but then you also need to somewhat heavily invest in Antiair equipment aswell, which is another factor. One single support aa doesn't reduce the modifier that much, a tank division needs 3~4 SPAA if I recall correctly to cap the reduction of the effect.

No-air Russia is all of the viable metas right now. Because AA so decisively counters CAS. If you see an air Russia, it's either a mod, a meme, or a noob. Any amount of AA provides the -75% CAS damage reduction, including a single 1936 support AA, only 80 ic per division. And since the air superiority reduction curve is steep a low values and levels off to a constant at high values, each additional AA is less cost-efficient than the prior. Tank divisions use a pair of SPAA because with upgraded guns they will have over 112 air attack which beats the maximum unmodified air superiority penalty of 35%. But that's wasteful on infantry because the CAS are already losing more ic in trying to bomb them than they lose to being bombed. Regardless, if you wanted to reach 112 air attack on infantry, all you would need is 2 line and a support AA, but that's typically not done except on 40 width special forces because the additional stat reduction the line AA prevent are worth much less per ic than the initial support AA.

It also heavily depends on the ruleset of the server, if Germany attacks Soviet Union in early-mid 1940 this is a completly different situation than an attack in 1941 or even 1942. Also depends if Germany was allowed/could grind the forester trait on his generals before Barbarossa.

I assume historical rules unless otherwise specified. Meme games will be meme games.
Ranger is a nice trait, but not really gamebreaking. Adaptable is the trait to get, but many servers ban it.