New naval combat mechanics...

[Jorgen_CAB]

1- speed -> Not that slow, 25 is still a good "heavy ship" speed and this is not a ship you want to use for scout or something. They are to be close to the action so speed to get there is not a issue. Radar is there for the buff not for the detection ^^.

For detection you make a more nimble ship with scouts ^^.

2-> Escape in bad fight with a swarm strategy (The case for ship above) is just not a option. When you realize you are actually losing its already over and you will not recover. (I used quite a bit swarms of DD III´s + coastal on patch 1.0-1.3 as japan to even the odds vs the US air superiority and it was quite effective, but also a One Bullet strategy. Thankfully it was very rare for a US player to recover in time ^^).

So any swarm strategy now in 1.6 is going to follow more or less the same logic.

3-> AA you don´t need anything outside of a DD giving it. They share AA now so you can overstack AA guns on DD`s that are way cheaper and easier to replace. There the AA/Anti-ship gun is also more effective.

Remember a AA increase the overall price of the ship by 2%. (Don´t know why they gave such a penalty to AA but oh well....). So a AA can give more than a 500IC increase in a carrier for example.....

4-> you don´t need a heavy turret if you're going to rely on a swarm of DD´s and Torpedos. Its also the difference beetween killing a DD with one shot vs two shots.

I agree with using screen and torpedoes is very strong.. a bit too strong in my opinion so balance needed.

I also think that if you are in a aircraft heavy environment you do need as much AA as you can get... so having some AA on most ships is a plus. DD are have a -50% penalties to their AA in deep ocean for example and CL a -25%... so you want AA a bit here and there. You don't want to send your DD/CL swarm into the deep ocean and then risk them with severe move penalties in top of an already bad movement.

in my opinion 25 knots is bad if you are to escort your carriers. A slow ship also risk being engaged by quicker CA and sunk before they can engage properly or attacked by carrier aircraft since the carrier is much faster etc... Speed is important for many things... speed give you more options for a relatively small cost in other efficiencies.

You can design a simple CA to screen your carriers or just use the ones you get from the start to fill out that spot.

 

[sterrius]

I agree with using screen and torpedoes is very strong.. a bit too strong in my opinion so balance needed.

I also think that if you are in a aircraft heavy environment you do need as much AA as you can get... so having some AA on most ships is a plus. DD are have a -50% penalties to their AA in deep ocean for example and CL a -25%... so you want AA a bit here and there. You don't want to send your DD/CL swarm into the deep ocean and then risk them with severe move penalties in top of an already bad movement.

in my opinion 25 knots is bad if you are to escort your carriers. A slow ship also risk being engaged by quicker CA and sunk before they can engage properly or attacked by carrier aircraft since the carrier is much faster etc... Speed is important for many things... speed give you more options for a relatively small cost in other efficiencies.

You can design a simple CA to screen your carriers or just use the ones you get from the start to fill out that spot.

Im stil trying to calculate how much AA does really factor because its quite a investment. Because there is a cap of how much supression you can get from it. (50%) and im yet to find out how much AA is enough to give that 50%.

Also don´t get super concerned about the deep ocean. The penalty also affects the enemy, and even if you compensate with more bigger ships DD´s are still dangerous due to numbers. (But you might want to go cheaper and just make them a torpedo/anti-sub role).

For AA they can still amass 26.5 in 1940 tech + 2AA techs (1942) but them they will cost quite a bit. (2500).


About speed at the time of escaping in fact you want a slower ship compared to your carriers. Because if everyone runs first your carriers will be stuck in battle with everyone targeting them. So carriers need to be the fasted big ship out there, followed by Cruisers and finally BB´s that can take most of the dmg and are slow anyway.


and in a battle the difference beetween killing something with one vs two shots. (or even more) its pretty big. Specially with the bad % to hit ships have in this game.

Quicker you clear the screens faster your subs and small ships can support your big ships.
Not saying you need to Always sacrifice speed, but some designs do benefit quite a bit from it.

If it was 2 hits vs 3 hits i would concede and also tell speed was more important. ^^. (and this will happen on 1936. As you can only pull what i put on the screen on 1940).


Also on a sidenote. SHBB´s armor can reach 77 now (Japan) . HE can´t pierce itself if you get some bonuses ^^. vs piercing 42 (BB with a ton of cannons) that means only 60% dmg ^^. So i find its worth vs a normal BB if you can get close to 70+ armor. (still not worth in my view with basic 55 armor).

Pretty much unsinkable unless you kill with air units ^^.

We need to also start to think about naval tree + advisors as they change the numbers quite a bit.
A manufacturer can give +15% heavy attack and screen +10% meaning you can remove a whole turret, keep the damage and speed up the boat.

 

[EntropyAvatar]

and in a battle the difference beetween killing something with one vs two shots. (or even more) its pretty big. Specially with the bad % to hit ships have in this game.

So ships really make a single roll for all damage each hour? You'd think breaking it up into several rolls would make a lot more sense.

 

[sterrius]

So ships really make a single roll for all damage each hour? You'd think breaking it up into several rolls would make a lot more sense.

if we actually go that road it would be better to remake the whole system again and go for something more like this.

A total air view would make much more sense and would not be impossible to make this in 2D. As they move around a "chess board" and take shots at each other.

Add AI´s that each ship class has to follow (like in stellaris) so you had some control about what every ship in your company had to do.

And a limit to how many ships can be at the fight at same time.

For super big battles we can have work arounds the issue. Like opening a second battle at same place. (So for a big battle you will have a few side battles. In fact pretty historical).

Or if not ships enough let the ships offscreen give a penalty for the smaller ship to escape. (As he can´t just run anywhere or he will find the other fleet).

For air there is no need to make planes appear on the map, they still would only show as numbers on the screen and focus on individual ships every X hours a day.


Maybe in patch 1.12? ^^

 

[Jorgen_CAB]

Im stil trying to calculate how much AA does really factor because its quite a investment. Because there is a cap of how much supression you can get from it. (50%) and im yet to find out how much AA is enough to give that 50%.

Also don´t get super concerned about the deep ocean. The penalty also affects the enemy, and even if you compensate with more bigger ships DD´s are still dangerous due to numbers. (But you might want to go cheaper and just make them a torpedo/anti-sub role).

For AA they can still amass 26.5 in 1940 tech + 2AA techs (1942) but them they will cost quite a bit. (2500).


About speed at the time of escaping in fact you want a slower ship compared to your carriers. Because if everyone runs first your carriers will be stuck in battle with everyone targeting them. So carriers need to be the fasted big ship out there, followed by Cruisers and finally BB´s that can take most of the dmg and are slow anyway.


and in a battle the difference beetween killing something with one vs two shots. (or even more) its pretty big. Specially with the bad % to hit ships have in this game.

Quicker you clear the screens faster your subs and small ships can support your big ships.
Not saying you need to Always sacrifice speed, but some designs do benefit quite a bit from it.

If it was 2 hits vs 3 hits i would concede and also tell speed was more important. ^^. (and this will happen on 1936. As you can only pull what i put on the screen on 1940).


Also on a sidenote. SHBB´s armor can reach 77 now (Japan) . HE can´t pierce itself if you get some bonuses ^^. vs piercing 42 (BB with a ton of cannons) that means only 60% dmg ^^. So i find its worth vs a normal BB if you can get close to 70+ armor. (still not worth in my view with basic 55 armor).

Pretty much unsinkable unless you kill with air units ^^.

We need to also start to think about naval tree + advisors as they change the numbers quite a bit.

A manufacturer can give +15% heavy attack and screen +10% meaning you can remove a whole turret, keep the damage and speed up the boat.

Yes I agree to most of that.

I have not tested either how AA works and where it caps out... that is something I will have to do at a later date.

The terrain will of course have a great impact if you over commit to a certain design, that was what I meant with if you run mainly with a swarm tactic. In the Pacific you might perhaps want to consider more CL in your task-forces instead of huge number of DD and mainly use the DD as a submarine defense.

I also believe that torpedoes don't care much for armour either so torpedoes sink BB and super BB just fine.

I also think that Carriers in general are pretty fast so they generally can disengage before most ships in the fleet.

There are more things to consider now in the game than it was before so the naval game are a bit more complex than it used to be.

 

[sterrius]

@Jorgen_CAB
torpedos ignore armor, they just care about evasion and the fact that takes 4 hours to shoot them instead of 1.

 

[Jorgen_CAB]

@Jorgen_CAB
torpedos ignore armor, they just care about evasion and the fact that takes 4 hours to shoot them instead of 1.

Yes... I know they shoot once every four hours but does evasions still exist as a value on ships?

Was this not just replaced with the Visibility versus weapon system value which I mentioned earlier in the thread?

 

[sterrius]

Yes... I know they shoot once every four hours but does evasions still exist as a value on ships?

Was this not just replaced with the Visibility versus weapon system value which I mentioned earlier in the thread?

COMBAT_MIN_HIT_CHANCE = 0.05, -- never less hit chance then this?
COMBAT_EVASION_TO_HIT_CHANCE = 0.007, -- we take ship evasion stats, and mult by this value, so it gives hit chance reduction. So if reduction is 0.025 and ship evasion = 10, then there will be 0.25 (25%) lower hit chance. (Fe. 50% base -25% from evasion +10% bcoz it's very close).
COMBAT_EVASION_TO_HIT_CHANCE_TORPEDO_MULT = 10.0, -- the above evasion hit chance is multiplied by 400% if shooting with torpedos. Torpedoes are slow, so evasion matters more.
MIN_HIT_PROFILE_MULT = 0.0, -- largest hit profile penalty to hitting
COMBAT_LOW_ORG_HIT_CHANCE_PENALTY = -0.5, -- % of penalty applied to hit chance when ORG is very low.
COMBAT_LOW_MANPOWER_HIT_CHANCE_PENALTY = -0.25, -- % of penalty applied to hit chance when manpower is very low.
COMBAT_DAMAGE_RANDOMNESS = 0.3, -- random factor in damage. So if max damage is fe. 10, and randomness is 30%, then damage will be between 7-10.
COMBAT_TORPEDO_CRITICAL_CHANCE = 0.2, -- chance for critical hit from torpedo.
COMBAT_TORPEDO_CRITICAL_DAMAGE_MULT = 2.0, -- multiplier to damage when got critical hit from torpedo. (Critical hits are devastating as usualy torpedo_attack are pretty high base


Evasion still is located on the defines so its either still working or they just did not care about removing old code.

Also we do have some advisors still giving (+10% Defense) to screens, no idea what its going to upgrade.

Unfortunaly the expansion still have a ton of "ghost info". Information we have to dive into the code to find out or make very complicated calculations. Like they did not want us to know....
And its a shame, as some information like how good a ship is to evade or how planes agility impact the combat are pretty fundamental.

Veterans do know how to look for this info and have the patience but im placing myself in the shoes of a new player and its no surprise a lot of people find the game way too complicated.

HOI still needs quite a work into showing how each stat works and how they influence things outside of. "it shoots better" giving no way to know if +1 is a huge boost or just a marginal one.


other things i found interesting .

ANTI_AIR_TARGETTING_TO_CHANCE = 0.2, -- Balancing value to convert averaged equipment stats (anti_air_targetting and naval_strike_agility) to probability chances of airplane being hit by navies AA.

and going more below....

ANTI_AIR_TARGETING = 0.9, -- how good ships are at hitting aircraft


but can´t find about AA supression....

 

[wingren013]

It seems like we need Torpedo Belts as a tech in game. Actual Capital ships were not anywhere close to this vulnerable to light vessels.

 

[sterrius]

@Jorgen_CAB
@Alex_brunius

EDIT: Scroll just a little more. User Krogan Elite have the Droids you are looking for. The exactly formula and how AA works in 1.6.
Still keeping the original post only for memes ^^.



Here is the test i made to see how effective is AA.

Here are the rules.
1-> 2 CV´s with 50 NAv´s each. (20 naval dmg ).
2-> 20 DD´s + 5 BB´s for both sides.

- Both DD`s and BB´s had the worst gun possible to prolong the fight.
- The side without CV´s got a configuration with 10 AA on each ship, 20 AA and 30 AA.

1-> 10 AA for each ship was clearly not enough. The Bombers bombed everything and still inflicted a good chunk of dmg. The battle was very fast as the ships started to flee as fast as they could.

2-> With 20 AA i started to see the planes had a much better difficulty to actualy damage the ships. The battle lasted longer but they still fled.

3-> With 30 AA the planes where clearly nerfed. I had some trouble to make that configuration engage, so i had to place way more DD`s and tainted the results.

But no matter, it was very very clear the planes where not doing their job fast enough. The battle lasted over a week. Also different from test I and II when they startet to retreat as soon they got a few dmg. Here they stayed in a true Samurai style. Fighting to the end.

Pictures.

10 AA vs 100 Nav´s II

20 AA vs 100 Nav´s II

30 AA vs 100 Nav´s II (Tainted test)

Conclusion ->
You need some AA so the air will not murder you completely.
Multiply number of ships per the number of AA you are aiming and try to stay that way.


Problem is that AA will only become really effective for "no plane support" fleets only above 20 AA and thats is likely impossible to achieve without 1942-44 tech.

but if the game drags to this remember that if you rely too much on planes you can find yourself being killed by a well designed fleet.

Also some advisors and techs do increase AA value up to +25%. (15% advisor, 10% tech).

 

[technoeyes]

I like the idea of ship cap on admirals.

 

[Diwtop]

@Jorgen_CAB
@Alex_brunius

Conclusion ->
You need some AA so the air will not murder you completely.
Multiply number of ships per the number of AA you are aiming and try to stay that way.


Problem is that AA will only become really effective for "no plane support" fleets only above 20 AA and thats is likely impossible to achieve without 1942-44 tech.

but if the game drags to this remember that if you rely too much on planes you can find yourself being killed by a well designed fleet.

Also some advisors and techs do increase AA value up to +25%. (15% advisor, 10% tech).

Yes that are my results too.

Did you find any kind of Suppression/Disruption Value in the defines?
If not the only thing AA can do is to shoot down planes and for this job they do far to less damage to planes. The longer one fight lasts the less likely the carriers should be the main damage output. I cant think of a massive naval battle and there are just a few planes lost. Planes attack every 4 hours on daytime(2 times per day), this should be represented by some losses.

i saw this line in the defines(but there are many more wich effect naval air game):
ANTI_AIR_TARGETTING_TO_CHANCE = 0.2, -- Balancing value to convert averaged equipment stats (anti_air_targetting and naval_strike_agility) to probability chances of airplane being hit by navies AA.

if this is correct only 1 out of 5 times the AA will hit anything. If there is bad luck there would be no plane shoot down after 2 days of fight and planes can easily replenished. Ships take some time.

Do I have a wrong vision about the game or naval combat?



EDIT: for testing purpose I set ANTI_AIR_TARGETTING_TO_CHANCE to 1.0 and on every attack wave some planes went to the ocean, but that is maybe to strong.

 

[sterrius]

Yes that are my results too.

Did you find any kind of Suppression/Disruption Value in the defines?
If not the only thing AA can do is to shoot down planes and for this job they do far to less damage to planes. The longer one fight lasts the less likely the carriers should be the main damage output. I cant think of a massive naval battle and there are just a few planes lost. Planes attack every 4 hours on daytime(2 times per day), this should be represented by some losses.

i saw this line in the defines(but there are many more wich effect naval air game):
ANTI_AIR_TARGETTING_TO_CHANCE = 0.2, -- Balancing value to convert averaged equipment stats (anti_air_targetting and naval_strike_agility) to probability chances of airplane being hit by navies AA.

if this is correct only 1 out of 5 times the AA will hit anything. If there is bad luck there would be no plane shoot down after 2 days of fight and planes can easily replenished. Ships take some time.

Do I have a wrong vision about the game or naval combat?

The main idea of AA is not really to kill, mostly to stop bombers from hitting your ships by nerfing either their chance to hit or damage (Don´t know the aproach they used).

So don´t expect AA to ever get a good kill count to justify the cost by that. It was buffed compared to previous patchs but still too little and mostly realistic in that way. (AA really had a low kill count).

and no, i did not find the exactly values in the defines, reason i had to get some info the hard way by testing in the game.

 

[KroganElite]

Dug around the defines and found :

SHIP_TO_FLEET_ANTI_AIR_RATIO = 0.2, -- total sum of fleet's anti air will be multiplied with this ratio and added to calculations anti-air of individual ships while air damage reduction
ANTI_AIR_POW_ON_INCOMING_AIR_DAMAGE = 0.2, -- received air damage is calculated using following: 1 - ( (ship_anti_air + fleet_anti_air * SHIP_TO_FLEET_ANTI_AIR_RATIO )^ANTI_AIR_POW_ON_INCOMING_AIR_DAMAGE ) * ANTI_AIR_MULT_ON_INCOMING_AIR_DAMAGE
ANTI_AIR_MULT_ON_INCOMING_AIR_DAMAGE = 0.15,
MAX_ANTI_AIR_REDUCTION_EFFECT_ON_INCOMING_AIR_DAMAGE = 0.5, -- damage reduction for incoming air attacks is clamped to this value at maximum.

Lets try and put in some numbers

This will always be the same:
Received air damage = 1 - ( (ship_anti_air + fleet_anti_air * 0.2 )^0.2 ) * 0.15

or if we remove the "1 - " we can just get the damage reduction

#1 Scenario: A fleet of 10 ships with AA value of 1 each
( (1 + 10 * 0.2 )^0.2 ) * 0.15 = 0.187 or 18.7% damage reduction due to AA to each ship(since they all have the same AA value)


#2 Scenario: A fleet of 20 ships with AA value of 5 each
( (5 + 100 * 0.2 )^0.2 ) * 0.15 = 0.286 or 28.6% damage reduction due to AA to each ship(since they all have the same AA value)

To simplify we can chart how much fleet AA you would need to get certain air damage reduction for each ship guaranteed:

It's on a logarithmic scale so low levels of AA will see high damage reduction gain but then it's diminishing returns.

Example:

Initial AA->New AA = Initial reduction->New reduction (Total gain)

0->1 = 0%->~11% (+~11%)
1->5 = ~11%->15% (+~4%)
5->15 = 15%->~18.7 (+3.7%)
15->50 = ~18.7->~23.8% (+5.1%)
50->200 = ~23.8%->~31.4% (+7.6%)

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/13eNEVV7A9hwUhy9_2fvIXJKqYzwBZS2p_g1bl1SRyhU/edit?usp=sharing

edit: for more accurate values on a single ship, just multiply the ship's AA value by 5 and add it to the fleet's AA value.

 

[sterrius]

Dug around the defines and found :

SHIP_TO_FLEET_ANTI_AIR_RATIO = 0.2, -- total sum of fleet's anti air will be multiplied with this ratio and added to calculations anti-air of individual ships while air damage reduction
ANTI_AIR_POW_ON_INCOMING_AIR_DAMAGE = 0.2, -- received air damage is calculated using following: 1 - ( (ship_anti_air + fleet_anti_air * SHIP_TO_FLEET_ANTI_AIR_RATIO )^ANTI_AIR_POW_ON_INCOMING_AIR_DAMAGE ) * ANTI_AIR_MULT_ON_INCOMING_AIR_DAMAGE
ANTI_AIR_MULT_ON_INCOMING_AIR_DAMAGE = 0.15,
MAX_ANTI_AIR_REDUCTION_EFFECT_ON_INCOMING_AIR_DAMAGE = 0.5, -- damage reduction for incoming air attacks is clamped to this value at maximum.

Lets try and put in some numbers

This will always be the same:
Received air damage = 1 - ( (ship_anti_air + fleet_anti_air * 0.2 )^0.2 ) * 0.15

or if we remove the "1 - " we can just get the damage reduction

#1 Scenario: A fleet of 10 ships with AA value of 1 each
( (1 + 10 * 0.2 )^0.2 ) * 0.15 = 0.187 or 18.7% damage reduction due to AA to each ship


#2 Scenario: A fleet of 20 ships with AA value of 5 each
( (5 + 100 * 0.2 )^0.2 ) * 0.15 = 0.286 or 28.6% damage reduction due to AA to each ship

To simplify we can chart how much fleet AA you would need to get certain air damage reduction for each ship guaranteed:

It's on a logarithmic scale so low levels of AA will see high damage reduction gain but then it's diminishing returns.

Example Going Fleet AA from:
-0->1 = +~11% damage reduction
-1->5 = +~4% damage reduction
-5->15 = +3.6% damage reduction
-15->50 = +5% damage reduction
-50->200 = +7.6% damage reduction

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/13eNEVV7A9hwUhy9_2fvIXJKqYzwBZS2p_g1bl1SRyhU/edit?usp=sharing

Nice Work Krogan Elite and thanks for figuring the formula.

Even going to edit my post above.

Graphs show that 5AA is likely the sweet spot. Aiming for more only if its cost effective to do so. (to give a little more for other ships).

 

[Diwtop]

Oh, well ... than there is no point in building ships with focus on AA.

 

[KroganElite]

i think i miss understood something. If I build only 1 light cruiser with 30 or more AA i am that high with damage reduction? Oh, well ... than there is no point in building ships with focus on AA.

Having one light cruiser with 30 AA would give your entire fleet 21% damage reduction from air and give itself 30% damage reduction from air.

 

[Diwtop]

Thanks, nice information! So it is nearly impossible to get to 50% damage reduction, but i think that is on purpose.

 

[CharlieFox]

It seems like we need Torpedo Belts as a tech in game. Actual Capital ships were not anywhere close to this vulnerable to light vessels.

I agree completely, torpedo belts should definitely be a ship component in the game.

 

[RikiBreeiki]

ship aa is useless. because carriers are useless, and planes are useless too if you have air above the ships.

with just torpedos and light guns you basically delete anything.