Coastal forts - gun quality

[cnw]

Hello,

there's one thing that has been bugging me ever since I started playing the game, but I never got to ask or experiment.

How do the guns in forts relate to available gun quality? In order to build the fort you need to be able to use -1 (0 for turrets) quality, but beyond that? I can see 3 possible scenarios:

a) Gun quality is irrelevant beyond the basic requirement, all forts use some default gun
b) Gun quality is relevant, stays the same as it was when the fort was built
c) Gun quality is relevant, the guns are upgraded whenever better quality becomes available (this is possible, but I think unlikely)

Also, rant time - the enemy avoids your forts like the plague, seemingly knowing where they are and what their maximum range is, they're only really useful against the Japanese who have to get close for surprise attacks, and in coastal defense-bombardment scenarios in some cases. Meanwhile my first warning that there is a fort present is when I start taking high caliber hits (I play with the enhanced forts mod, so they tend to be pretty lethal).

Maybe a suggestion for any upcoming version - either tone down this enemy prescience or you should get some intel on enemy forts as well (even if only "hey, there's something here") - you can't exactly keep the very existence of a fort secret.

[director]

Well, maybe. Some forts you would have good information on - "Battleship Island" in the Philippines, for example. Others, you might not: the US Army used mobile artillery firing from prepared emplacements, and some fixed emplacements had 'disappearing' guns. And then there is the Oskarborg phenomenon, where the command staff of the German heavy cruiser Blucher presumably knew the fortress was there (it is hard to overlook) and likely knew its armament, yet sailed right up to it at point-blank range, took some 11" shells and a torpedo hit or two, and promptly sank.

As you say, I tend to use forts only to defend Asian naval bases like the Philippines or Tsingtao. I'm currently experimenting with an Austrian game that involves using lots of shore batteries... no conclusive evidence yet.

[bcoopactual]

The coastal battery *.sdf files that the game uses to generate the coastal batteries has quality 0 guns.  I couldn't find anything in the actual game save file that lists a separate gun quality for the batteries (for ships that information is kept in the individual ship files in the game save folder) so I assume that the coastal battery gun quality is always 0.  

I think the Coastal Battery mod uses quality 1 guns for the coastal batteries although I'm not sure because I don't use the mod myself.  Since you are using the mod the coastal guns in your game should all be quality 1.

director's right, pre-war knowledge of a gun batteries existence isn't guaranteed.  But the older the battery is the more likely the location would be known so maybe a tripwire (with a +_ spread of months or a year depending on the time frame) after a certain number of years has passed and that battery location should be revealed on the map.