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It depends on the country you play and what "style" you want to play or what goal you have, e.g. it would be wise to build submarines as Nazi-Germany because they have already the proper naval doctrines and you need your IC for more important things like building IC and later your army and airforce.
But Great Britain for example should build surface ships mainly (some Subs too, maybe), especially Carrier Vessels I guess because the navy is GB's strongest weapon.
But Great Britain for example should build surface ships mainly (some Subs too, maybe), especially Carrier Vessels I guess because the navy is GB's strongest weapon.
Although if I remember correctly, if you use enough subs you can sink entire home fleet of BRits. I did it couple of times, but you need to push them into small sea areas where the distance will be of little effect. And well, you need loads of subs. 50+
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i hear that could be posible but i didnt do it. seems to be dificult.
submarines are more related to reduce comerce percentage in the path or to sunk convoys better than surface. Usefull to isolate an island or block an industrial country wich need more resourses.
submarines are more related to reduce comerce percentage in the path or to sunk convoys better than surface. Usefull to isolate an island or block an industrial country wich need more resourses.
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Massed SUBs are DEADLY.
This is with AOT Torpedoes, but take a look.
Before and After.
This is with AOT Torpedoes, but take a look.
Before and After.
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Has anyone ever done any testing for the best anti-sub fleet? Last patch heavy cruisers were immune to submarines as long as their fleet only contained heavy cruisers, and would eventually whittle down a sub fleet, maybe it changed in this patch.
How do 30 destroyers with ASW attachments fare against 30 torpedo submarines? Or 15 destroyers and 15 escort carriers?
How do 30 destroyers with ASW attachments fare against 30 torpedo submarines? Or 15 destroyers and 15 escort carriers?
Heavy cruisers were worthless in fleets ive sank. I mass produce subs and group them into fleets of 18, then send them on Naval Interdiction missions and usually within a year or 2 the Allied Navy in the Atlantic is decimated, the US tends to keep more ships in the pacific so i usually mass sink their transports and some DD's.
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Well, Lets find out.
I took my save from before, loaded as ENG, gathered up all the Royal Navy units, and made these test fleets.
Gentlemen, place your bets!
Heavy losses for test fleet; minimal losses for target fleet.
Bonus: One of the combats stalled out for over 5 months before I got bored and manually retreated; look at the experience
Slightly less heavy losses for test fleet; minimal losses for target fleet.
Modest losses both sides - advantage target fleet
Very heavy loss for target fleet; test fleet undamaged
Big losses for test fleet - small losses for target fleet, except for the one time it got trapped at max range and took big losses as well
Also it consistently took a very long time for it to find its target fleet
Big losses both sides - advantage target fleet
Lets do some comparisons on costs and loss ratios.
Cost (somewhat approximate)
Target: SUB(+Torp)*6 = 5.68 ICY, 1.8MP
Fleet1= 35.0ICY, 8.1MP
Fleet2= 31.9ICY, 6.2MP
Fleet3= 7.21ICY, 6.4MP
Fleet4= 29.3ICY, 5.4MP
Fleet5= 13.2ICY, 4.8MP
Fleet6= 6.4 ICY, 7.8MP
Loss Ratios, >1 good, <1Bad (ICY basis, MP basis)
Fleet1= 0.0078, 0.01
Fleet2= 0.037, 0.061
Fleet3= 1.07, 0.38
Fleet4= Inf, Inf
Fleet5= 0.51, 0.41
Fleet6= 1.9, 0.5
Letter Grade for ASW
Fleet1 - F
Fleet2 - F
Fleet3 - C
Fleet4 - A+
Fleet5 - D
Fleet6 - B
The success of the destroyer only fleet fits with my experience, that my subs seem to take bigger losses convoy hunting (from escorts) than against proper fleets.
Cost (somewhat approximate)
Target: SUB(+Torp)*6 = 5.68 ICY, 1.8MP
Fleet1= 35.0ICY, 8.1MP
Fleet2= 31.9ICY, 6.2MP
Fleet3= 7.21ICY, 6.4MP
Fleet4= 29.3ICY, 5.4MP
Fleet5= 13.2ICY, 4.8MP
Fleet6= 6.4 ICY, 7.8MP
Loss Ratios, >1 good, <1Bad (ICY basis, MP basis)
Fleet1= 0.0078, 0.01
Fleet2= 0.037, 0.061
Fleet3= 1.07, 0.38
Fleet4= Inf, Inf
Fleet5= 0.51, 0.41
Fleet6= 1.9, 0.5
Letter Grade for ASW
Fleet1 - F
Fleet2 - F
Fleet3 - C
Fleet4 - A+
Fleet5 - D
Fleet6 - B
The success of the destroyer only fleet fits with my experience, that my subs seem to take bigger losses convoy hunting (from escorts) than against proper fleets.
edit:added math
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Great work, many thanks for your efforts.
For fleet 1, no surprise here, the carriers have no sub attack and get sunk easily. Fleet 6 is also somewhat predictable, destroyers and submarines have approximately the same firing distance, so they both fire and sink.
The strange thing is in fleet 4, why are heavy cruisers immune to submarines ? My first bet was the floatplanes that gives them extra firing distance and some sub attack, so they can hit them before any torpedo shows up. But this should make the Battleships and Escort carriers fleets also powerful against submarines, which is not the case. So I guess that fleets behave differently when having capital ships or having only escorts, and having only escorts makes them better against submarines. But again Fleet 5 with Light Cruisers should be better at sub hunting, their firing range is greater than submarines ones and they are faster, but still not good results.
So it's either :
- Heavy cruisers have just the right combination of Firing distance and speed to be able to sink any submarine incoming without any risk, but adding another type of ship reduces the positionning or speed and makes them vulnerable again. Kind of the 6 CV fleet thing.
- A bug that makes heavy cruisers only fleets immune to submarines
- Another thing that i missed ?
For fleet 1, no surprise here, the carriers have no sub attack and get sunk easily. Fleet 6 is also somewhat predictable, destroyers and submarines have approximately the same firing distance, so they both fire and sink.
The strange thing is in fleet 4, why are heavy cruisers immune to submarines ? My first bet was the floatplanes that gives them extra firing distance and some sub attack, so they can hit them before any torpedo shows up. But this should make the Battleships and Escort carriers fleets also powerful against submarines, which is not the case. So I guess that fleets behave differently when having capital ships or having only escorts, and having only escorts makes them better against submarines. But again Fleet 5 with Light Cruisers should be better at sub hunting, their firing range is greater than submarines ones and they are faster, but still not good results.
So it's either :
- Heavy cruisers have just the right combination of Firing distance and speed to be able to sink any submarine incoming without any risk, but adding another type of ship reduces the positionning or speed and makes them vulnerable again. Kind of the 6 CV fleet thing.
- A bug that makes heavy cruisers only fleets immune to submarines
- Another thing that i missed ?
First, you are very welcome. I am glad these tests are useful to all of you.
Basically, the issue is range.
The magic number that keeps your fleets preferred range to out range the submarines is 21km. (21 * 0.9 = 18.9 > 18)
CL-5 ('30) is the first light cruiser to have that kind of range without add-ons.
Even a badly obsolete 1888 CA-2 has a range of 22km. (CA-1 also has a range of 22km, but is slower than a sub)
Remember, I am using an AI-built Royal Navy for these tests and they only have 3 such modern CLs (well 4, but the HMS Orion was badly damaged by the time I got to it.)
Keeping that in mind, Let's look at the BB issue.
The British commander is trying to keep combat close enough for his CLs to participate too. So, that explains that.
Lets look at what happens if we up the range a little by stealing some more sea-planes from the rest of the navy for Fleets 2 & 5.
Again, what a difference range makes.
I am coming to the conclusion that a fleet is only as good as the worst ship in it.
I guess the big conclusions for sub hunting are:
- CAs & modern CLs do a decent job.
- Modern Sea-Planes can make even an obsolete CL serviceable and give a nice little boost to sub-attack.
- A DD-7+sFC-1 ('37 tech) has the magic range of 21km and a sub-attack of 12, four times better most of the above
- This gets even better with '42 tech DD-8+sFC-2 has a sub-attack of 14 and range of 24km (enough to out-range even '50's era subs)
Edit: I feel I should say something on the topic of immunity to subs. Because of how the tests are set up, each combat begins at long range with the subs being spotted. If the subs are on a mission where they try to engage and catch a fleet, they get a sneak attack.
PS: What is the 6CV thing?
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There is a popular myth around here that a carrier fleet with six CVs will basically always, automatically win any naval battle, due to their range and attack values.
Why stop at six? Why not fifteen?
Anyway, carrier fleets tend to get eaten alive by submarines since they have no sub attack.
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I wonder if there's any modding that can be done for the naval model in DH. Given their lack of cost, fast build-times, and immunity to naval bombers, submarines are pretty much a no-brainer win at sea unless you're facing one of the quirky fleets above, which the AI is highly unlikely to deploy.
Submarines shouldn't be much good in a fleet role, and they should be forced to run and hide when attacked by a dedicated ASW fleet. On the other hand, they should be capable of doing horrendous damage to non-ASW fleets.
I think it's stupid that fleet carriers have a sub attack of zero while escort carriers get a decent sub attack - sure, CVs weren't used in the ASW role since it was inefficient to use them like that, but a fleet carrier would be several times better than an escort carrier if involved in a fleet battle with subs.
It's also counter-intuitive that if you want your destroyers to fight submarines, you give them fire-control upgrades rather than ASW upgrades.
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Wow. Going to go hunting for subs in the Atlantic now. Hopefully this will be of good use.
Serious though, I appreciate this test you've done.
Serious though, I appreciate this test you've done.
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Yes - it's really good to see someone who's willing to put some time into doing practical tests of the mechanics.
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As stated by practically everyone, subs are not what i would call Overpowered, the problem rather is the AI building smaller fleets of CV and whatever they can get glued in there versus stacks of subs.
A human player, by contrast, can deal with the Sub Spam in a much better manner than the AI. A 30 DD fleet, with up to date ASW equipment, can truly bring down God's smackdown onto a sub fleet. Granted, you might lose a few ships and have to repair a ton more, but the damage done to the subs is still in favor to you.
A human player, by contrast, can deal with the Sub Spam in a much better manner than the AI. A 30 DD fleet, with up to date ASW equipment, can truly bring down God's smackdown onto a sub fleet. Granted, you might lose a few ships and have to repair a ton more, but the damage done to the subs is still in favor to you.
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The tests above show that you actually want to dump your ASW equipment in favour of fire control systems, since they allow your DDs to attack without taking return fire.
A "fleet" of submarines engaging a fleet of warships simply did not happen, and was not really possible, as pretty much any ship would outrun a submerged submarine, meaning that submarines could only engage ships that happened to sail over the top of them. That isn't well modeled in the game.
Subs should have a very low probability of engaging a warship, but inflict a lot of damage if they do so. Historically subs were responsible for the destruction of a lot of capital ships, but not reliably or in a short time.
If you have, say, a hundred submarines in the Mediterranean, and the enemy is sailing a battleship fleet up and down in the Mediterranean, you should expect to sink one or two of his battleships/carriers/heavy cruisers each year. You should not be able to fight some kind of latter day Jutland with 100 submarines charging in and sinking the whole enemy fleet in one day.
Really subs would be better handled off-map at the level of abstraction of convoys and escorts. A swarm of 500 destroyers encountering a swarm of 500 submarines and each side inflicting tens of thousands of casualties in a single engagement is pretty weird.
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