Naval movement affected by weather

[Talar]

Just a thought, would it be possible to make ships move slower in bad weather? or is this already in the game?

This would also make them consume more supplies and effectively limit their range if the weather is bad.

 

[unmerged(115311)]

It's possible to mod. Dunno if it already exists, but a good idea.

Also one issue that has to be fixed, is that transports can't carry supplies, while ground troops use the supplies on the ships when doing amb. assaults. Basically this means that a-assaults are impossible without escort ships attached to the same fleet. I prefer to keep them seperated.

 

[froek]

It's possible to mod. Dunno if it already exists, but a good idea.

Also one issue that has to be fixed, is that transports can't carry supplies, while ground troops use the supplies on the ships when doing amb. assaults. Basically this means that a-assaults are impossible without escort ships attached to the same fleet. I prefer to keep them seperated.

You could also use some extra transports for the supplies.

 

[Balesir]

Neither air nor naval movement speed is currently affected by weather, although combat effectiveness is. It's a good idea, though - and you could mod it easily enough by changing modifiers.csv (under db/units). I'll think about it for patch 1.5, too

 

[Talar]

Ok nice, I think it would add to the sense of realism if weather affects more than just combat.

 

[Caesar_Augustus]

Agreed that this is a good idea, but I've modified the appropriate data entries the the db\units\modifiers.csv but have not witnessed any speed change on naval vessels, for example, while navigating in a raining province. Well, unless this speed change is an "internal" calculation not visible to the player in the movement speed indicator of a ship... Anyone to confirm that this feature works for ships?

 

[Lennartos]

Agreed that this is a good idea, but I've modified the appropriate data entries the the db\units\modifiers.csv but have not witnessed any speed change on naval vessels, for example, while navigating in a raining province. Well, unless this speed change is an "internal" calculation not visible to the player in the movement speed indicator of a ship... Anyone to confirm that this feature works for ships?

Well even if it works, the time of arrival is set at the beginning of the movement, so if it begins to rain that doesnt change when the event (this is how it works in game) is fired.

 

[Fürstbischof]

Just a thought, would it be possible to make ships move slower in bad weather? or is this already in the game?

This would also make them consume more supplies and effectively limit their range if the weather is bad.

Neither air nor naval movement speed is currently affected by weather, although combat effectiveness is. It's a good idea, though - and you could mod it easily enough by changing modifiers.csv (under db/units). I'll think about it for patch 1.5, too

+1

During winter often freeze large parts of the Baltic Sea. The winters 39/40, 40/41 and 41/42 were very harsh. Although the tool tip of sea provinces mentions that they are frozen ships can pass freely. Only if they stay a little bit longer in a frozen sea province they are exposed to attrition. It would be an improvement if you could impose severe penalties on movement through frozen sea provinces and also make attrition more painful.

 

[Fürstbischof]

Agreed that this is a good idea, but I've modified the appropriate data entries the the db\units\modifiers.csv but have not witnessed any speed change on naval vessels, for example, while navigating in a raining province. Well, unless this speed change is an "internal" calculation not visible to the player in the movement speed indicator of a ship... Anyone to confirm that this feature works for ships?

Well even if it works, the time of arrival is set at the beginning of the movement, so if it begins to rain that doesnt change when the event (this is how it works in game) is fired.

It would make things more complicated, but it is possible to change the code in such a way that the whole trip is split in a series of - one province - trips, which could be recalculated after each completed trip?

 

[Lennartos]

It would make things more complicated, but it is possible to change the code in such a way that the whole trip is split in a series of - one province - trips, which could be recalculated after each completed trip?

Everything is possible - but this would require us to rip out a pig portion of the current event driven design. so while its possible, i think we would get a lot of new bugs for a relatively small gain.

I will keep it in mind, if we decide to change anything in that part of the engine.

 

[Fürstbischof]

It would make things more complicated, but it is possible to change the code in such a way that the whole trip is split in a series of - one province - trips, which could be recalculated after each completed trip?

Everything is possible - but this would require us to rip out a pig portion of the current event driven design. so while its possible, i think we would get a lot of new bugs for a relatively small gain.

I will keep it in mind, if we decide to change anything in that part of the engine.

Not always is the most detailed or seemingly best solution the proper solution. Nonetheless the OP has made a valid point. Out of curiosity I have looked into the modifiers.csv and discovered to my surprise that AOD atm doesn't penalize naval movement. It seems that a simpler solution might be to introduce some modifiers for movement during bad weather conditions. Rain, storm, snow and blizzard should hamper naval units but not as drastically as land units. (by the way, air units need some negative movement modifiers, too) Ships use the frozen modifier neither for attack nor for defense; this leaves me wondering if this modifier is even usable for naval units? It seems to be desirable, because naval movement is often prevented by such conditions.

 

[Amallric]

Could you explain why on the earth should modern navy ships be slowed down by weather? A storm can make it more difficult to coordinate actions of the fleet, thus resulting in combat penalty, but overall on a great scale the fleet will move in the right place at normal speed.

 

[unmerged(115311)]

One really wild thing would be that in winter the especially cold areas like the Baltic Sea, lake Ladoga and such would freeze. Basically this would change sea to frozen plains, or at least give the same characteristics. I mean historically the Soviets and Finns fought hard battles to control Lake Ladoga during winters, and through this lake Leningrad was supplied along the icy roads. The Soviets called it the road of life or smt...

And some ports would freeze in especially cold weather, so no ships or trade could move in/out of them. If they could assuming there were icebreaker ships or smt, at least the efficency/speed would be impaired.

But in the end, I believe Lennartos that it would be too much modding/bugs for a small gain. But just saying that I've seen this in other wargames, and it's always a possibility.


@Alallric: I'm no sea captain, but it doesn't take too much of visualization to compare a ship sailing in fine weather and stormy weather. On stormy weather the visibility is poor, so you are forced to slow down already for safety's sake. If you ask what could possibly happen at sea, watch Titanic! :rofl:

Also the strong gusts and waves rarely give a ship a boost in speed. They rather just throw it all around, thus reducing the overall speed.

You're right that a storm can make it more difficult to coordinate the actions of the fleet. But besides that just combat is affected, the ships will find it harder to stay in formation. If they want to stay in formation, all the ships have to travel at the speed of the slowest ship. Communications are weak, visibility is reduced to zero, but you just have to keep the fleet together. Aka wait to hear from DD #65, thus leading to slower speed...

The ships weren't too modern those days. They had no GPS, so basically they relied on what we know as dead reckoning. Basically you calculate that if you go at 30 knots to a heading of 230 degrees for 18 hours, you will eventually end up 540 nautical miles from your original position in the heading of 230 (SW). In VMC, visual meteorological conditions you would only need to worry about factors such as wind, compass error, small human errors and stuff like that. Then if you were lucky, you could confirm your position if there were a small island as a reference point in some part of your course.

But imagine the same in a storm. Strong gusts, waves, visibility at zero. The waves would throw the compass all over the place, so good luck keeping that heading of 230 and navigating there!


Hopefully that will make it more understandable why ships more slower in poor weather.

 

[Fürstbischof]

Could you explain why on the earth should modern navy ships be slowed down by weather? A storm can make it more difficult to coordinate actions of the fleet, thus resulting in combat penalty, but overall on a great scale the fleet will move in the right place at normal speed.

Could you explain why on the earth should modern navy ships NOT be slowed down by weather? Modern ships are even lost during storms today - fairly frequently. And those ww2 ships were by no means modern. If you search thoroughly you'll find many cases of (nearly) shipwrecks or incurred sea damage in ww2. Atm I can only name some examples re:german ships in ww2, simply because I have read recently some books concerning the german naval war effort. Several sorties of the german BCs Scharnhorst and Gneisenau had to be aborted due to structural damage caused by the stormy sea. In 1936 the german CL Karlsruhe couldn't evade a storm in the northern pacific and broke nearly apart. Another example for (german) ships struggling in heavy seas would be the Narvik invasion force during "Weserübung".

During the worst conditions naval movement can easily hampered by 30%, while movement through frozen sea provinces, which is totally dependent on ice breakers, might even be hampered by 80%. But this is only a guess, it's up to the devs to decide how strongly bad weather should influence naval movement.

 

[Fürstbischof]

But in the end, I believe Lennartos that it would be too much modding/bugs for a small gain. But just saying that I've seen this in other wargames, and it's always a possibility.

As you have read I came to the same conclusion that some sort of "dynamic" computation of the travel time during movement might be not worth it. Interestingly I stumbled across the modifiers.csv which has some blank spaces for naval and air movement. Therefore a fairly simple solution exists for the problem of the OP. It seems that the devs only need to fill in some proper modifiers and we all can playtest those in v1.05.