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Post by crossdeck on Aug 23, 2019 14:29:25 GMT -6
Is anyone else getting a ridiculously small force for what the battle ends up being? For example, I'm playing AH in 1921 and have my entire navy in the Mediterranean, outnumbering the French 2-1 in everything but CAs. I keep getting coastal raid battles where I get 2 or 3 CLs against half the French fleet, including BBs, BCs, and swarms of destroyers. Where in the world is my navy?
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Post by mycophobia on Aug 23, 2019 14:45:50 GMT -6
I've, and have also seen the reverse like 6 of my BB against 3 of theirs in a medium battleship engagement, even though they have more ships than I in the seazone. These things happen, and if you want to avoid these kind of risk, the best way is to only accept "large" battles, where majority of your fleet is ure to be present.
Also I've pulled off some good coastal raids with CLs that's significantly out numbered. Enemy ships are usually dispersed except for the main fleet that's looking for you. You can easily sink some lone isolated CL or DD and then get out before the main fleet catches. Its a lot more "salvageable" than cruisers battles at least.
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Post by crossdeck on Aug 23, 2019 15:09:38 GMT -6
The problem is I have no idea how many ships will be there. Some convoy defence missions, I have battleships. The one I just played a few minutes ago, I had two CLs and one DD against 4 French BBs, 5 CLs, and a bunch of destroyers. It's honestly a bit ridiculous.
Edit: It's even worse when they spawn on top of you and there's no chance of escape. I started this war with 18 Light Cruisers. I now have 2 because of these sorts of battles.
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Post by mycophobia on Aug 23, 2019 15:31:18 GMT -6
The problem is I have no idea how many ships will be there. Some convoy defence missions, I have battleships. The one I just played a few minutes ago, I had two CLs and one DD against 4 French BBs, 5 CLs, and a bunch of destroyers. It's honestly a bit ridiculous.
Edit: It's even worse when they spawn on top of you and there's no chance of escape. I started this war with 18 Light Cruisers. I now have 2 because of these sorts of battles.
The only reliable way I find is to look the battle size. You can be confident that any “Large" battles will have your capital ships if they are in the region, where as any "small" battles will usually involve no more than a single squadron and their escort. Medium is really the "anything goes" category. I usually find it safe to go in if your enemy is significantly lacking in force in the region(not outnumbered, but rather he literally don't have much at all), in that case you sometime get to use like 3CL to bully 2 DDs. But if the AI at least have a balanced force in the region you should expect for some pretty random scenarios. My advice would be, you can either refuse these "medium" sized battles and wait for a decisive engagement, or, if you are confident in your light ship's ability to get out of trouble, accept and scout what the enemy have. The spawn on top of you thing is a bit annoying, I think that kind of scenario should've been limited to "Unexpected Battles" only. If you run around and bump them into the night is one thing, but have them spawning 5000m from you in decent weather, while rare, does suck.
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Post by crossdeck on Aug 23, 2019 15:39:35 GMT -6
That's good advice, thanks. This entire war has been a frustrating set of RNG. From invasions failing to fire to every fleet battle starting at dusk and resulting in a crazy torpedo storm, I just want it to end at this point.
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Post by mycophobia on Aug 23, 2019 15:51:03 GMT -6
That's good advice, thanks. This entire war has been a frustrating set of RNG. From invasions failing to fire to every fleet battle starting at dusk and resulting in a crazy torpedo storm, I just want it to end at this point. I definitely thing the game's approach to battle generation can be a bit frustrating since part of it is rather RNG based, but I think if you adjust your play to it you can actually find the possibilities rather exciting. A couple more tips I feel that maybe helpful. If you have a stronger fleet, your numerical advantage is only guaranteed to appear in a "Fleet Battle", so if you are pushing for that decisive action you should never pass up those opportunities. (Fleet battle will more or less spawn your entire capital ship fleet, meaning your numerical advantage in the strategic phase is reliably transferred to the tactical phase). - Enemy may refuse fleet battle, so you can consider moving a few ship away from the current zone to try to bait the enemy into accepting. Invasion can trigger large scale convoy/invasion battles, giving you a good chance to fight large battle with more resource on hand as well. Be very cautious with med sized cruiser action, but these can also be good opportunities to earn point against a stronger opponent without risking your capitals. Just make sure your cruiser force is adequately built to either out fight or outrun what they may come across. Try to avoid cruiser action if possible and instead go for coastal/convoy raids that are med sized, since in those scenarios you can actually pull off victories without fighting the enemy fleet. Accept that some time your goal is not "kill the enemy fleet", but just getting the job done with your cruisers.
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Post by crossdeck on Aug 23, 2019 16:44:08 GMT -6
That all makes sense, and yeah my goal for this war is taking Tunisia and Algeria, maybe Corsica if I can. It's funny that, even though I control Libya and have a direct land route to Tunisia, weather keeps delaying my invasion.
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Post by mycophobia on Aug 23, 2019 16:50:07 GMT -6
That all makes sense, and yeah my goal for this war is taking Tunisia and Algeria, maybe Corsica if I can. It's funny that, even though I control Libya and have a direct land route to Tunisia, weather keeps delaying my invasion. My feel when playing as Canada and try to invade Newfoundland, but being told that I have "Insufficient range for naval invasion" xD
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Post by rimbecano on Aug 23, 2019 17:22:30 GMT -6
My feel when playing as Canada and try to invade Newfoundland, but being told that I have "Insufficient range for naval invasion" xD Haha! After all the years of being the brunt of jokes about their slow wits, the Newfies have proven themselves smarter than Canadians! (Or, in the modern day, the rest of Canada).
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Post by sloanjh on Aug 23, 2019 19:21:43 GMT -6
Another thing to think about: force mix. My experience with the battle generator is that it seems to set a maximum ship class (often CA) and accept anything less than that for the battle but nothing more. So if you have 10xBC, 0xCA, 1xCL, 5xDD in a zone for a cruiser battle or coastal raid, it will sometimes spawn the CL (even though in principle BC can be present for a cruiser battle). Even better: if that 1xCL isn't available it will often spawn DD. So one of the tricks in non-home zones is to adjust your OOB to avoid these situations - it's often a really bad idea to have e.g. 1xBB and 2xDD in a zone because the destroyers will spawn into a cruiser battle without the BB, even though your intent that the DD are acting as escorts for the BB. It would be nice to have an "ES" (escort) mode that you could set in such situations that reduced the force points for small combatants but ensured that they wouldn't show up in isolated battles if more powerful units were present. Another example of this kind of force selection is to only put CA into a zone (without CL or DD) - that way the powerful ship shows up for cruiser battles.
PS - it also seems like RtW2 has a lot more battles in home waters than RtW1.
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Post by crossdeck on Aug 23, 2019 22:10:03 GMT -6
Yeah I usually put all pre-1915 or so destroyers on trade protection so they don't join battles. I wish there was some sort of escort designation.
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Post by JagdFlanker on Aug 24, 2019 3:40:58 GMT -6
save the game at the end of every turn, and if you get an unfair battle/event then at the beginning of the next turn exit the game without saving, reopen the game and resolve the turn again
the game never resolves a turn the same way twice, and if it takes some of the frustration out of the game then why not - why throw a whole campaign away because of a single bad result?
the beauty of this game is you can sandbox it and create your own fun, and it helps with learning the game since there's a LOT to learn. you can't 'save scum' your way to victory in this game because there is no victory, and if your idea of 'reasonable' doesn't match the game's idea of 'reasonable' then don't be afraid to re-start turns to maintain your idea of what 'reasonable' should be and enjoy the game
also if you are getting undesired ship types in battles (like CLs) put them on TP so they can't be chosen for battles. i personally design my ships to be faster than the ai's so i can control whether i want to engage or disengage in any battle
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Post by johnthegamer on Aug 24, 2019 6:29:29 GMT -6
I've had several convoy defence/attack missions where I get a single CL or a couple DD's, and the enemy gets a dozen CL+ sized ships.
The defence missions usually end in a victory, so long as I can keep the enemy away from my convoy, but the attack missions just end in pointless death.
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Post by noshurviverse on Aug 24, 2019 9:27:24 GMT -6
I feel that this isn't quite a problem with the game and battles themselves, but rather the lack of contextualization that occurs. This topic has come up before to a fair amount of debate, but let me try and elaborate.
Pre-battle assessment: Coastal Raid Friendly force in area: 2CA, 3CL Enemy force in area: 1B Actual engagement: Friendly force: 2CA, 3CL Enemy force: 2BC, 1B, 3CA, 2CL
This was the Battle of the Falkand Islands, where Spee made the decision to launch a raid against the British. It turned out to be a horrible decision, but Spee had been operating off of bad information. But while that engagement might be forgiven, I can think of another that would almost certain annoy any player. Imagine you're in a war in which you've been beating the enemy fleet down severely. You've been pulling off successful invasions before and you have nearly your whole fleet in the same sea zone of the next target. Sure enough, the invasion fires off and you've got an invasion battle in which your forces in the area are immensely powerful in comparison to your opponent. You have fleet carriers, a dozen battleships, twice as many cruisers and over a hundred DDs. You accept the battle and are met with...
Friendly force: 6CVL, 7DD Enemy force: 4BB, 6CA, 2CL, 11DD
What the hell is going on? Where are all your forces? Even I, who tends to be pretty forgiving of this kind of stuff, would be asking some seriously probing questions about the game's logic here. But this is pretty much exactly what happened in reality, at the Battle off Samar. Hasley and his battleships were off chasing a decoy force and left the passage to the invasion fleet unguarded. It wasn't realized at the time by many involved because of a simple combination of exact phrasing and a choice to send a clarifying message via voice radio, not telegraphic. And this is where the issue comes from, the game doesn't give you the context as to why these battles are the way they are, it just gives you the battle. I've been a proponent of adding in some form of elaboration to explain why certain ships are not present in an engagement, such as because they are suffering some fault or are busy doing something else.
However, I do agree there are some real issues. Getting missions where you are constantly outnumbered is most likely an issue that should be addressed, so long as confirmation bias isn't clouding the information. One other thing I want to bring up is location of battles. In RtW1 and in the first 20 years or so of RtW2 it doesn't really matter, but once you hit the 30's aircraft range and lethality totally change the game. I'm playing a Spain campaign right now, and I absolutely dread getting forced into a large in the Baltic with Germany, because I might as well order the entire force scuttled at minute 0.
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Post by sloanjh on Aug 24, 2019 9:31:39 GMT -6
I've had several convoy defence/attack missions where I get a single CL or a couple DD's, and the enemy gets a dozen CL+ sized ships. The defence missions usually end in a victory, so long as I can keep the enemy away from my convoy, but the attack missions just end in pointless death. I've had these too, and I agree they're frustrating. On the other hand IRL battles these sorts of things can happen, and one of the decisions to make is whether to have the "moral courage" (to quote Honor Harrington ) to run away and accept the defeat rather than to charge in and throw your ships away to no gain (and before that to recognize that you're in such a situation at all). In my experience many more of the battles occur with the imbalance in favor of the attacker, and the AI is much worse at "so long as I can keep the enemy away from my convoy", so I view this as both a realism and balancing effect. From a realism point of view, I would actually prefer to have more of these types of battles, but I wouldn't want them to be subject to the "only fight one battle per month" rule, and I would probably want them to have "run away" and " engage" auto-resolve buttons in place of the decline button (I remember someone saying something about auto-resolve, but I don't remember seeing such a button - I may just be filtering it out of my perception). The effect that I dislike is that one-battle-per-month leads to a tuning pendulum of "fleet battles" vs "cruiser actions" and "home area" vs "colonies". In RtW2, I often see substantial fleets in e.g. SEA that never have a battle. What I would like is if the battle generator looked at the fleets and bases in a theater, divided them up into typical forces and missions, and rolled an RNG for encounters between the two sides that lead to a battle, independent of what's happening in other zones and independent of the enemies OOB. The player would be presented with the option to take manual control or auto-resolve (again with "run away" or "fight" options) for each of these battles. In a particular month there might be several of these or there might be none, and the frequency of them in home waters would be decoupled from the frequency in the colonies. I suspect this a much more complex (especially the forces and missions division) than what's there now (and so is too much to hope for in RtW2), but this would be my "perfect" version of the way RtW* battles are generated. To be clear, I *LOVE* the game concept that RtW* works on to avoid micromanaging every ship detail every minute of every day; this is just a tweak to make it less contrived (in the sense of "why should there be only one battle a month" and "why should the forces that encounter each other be evenly matched"). While typing this, it occurs to me that there's something a little off about the current victory point mechanism for declining battle. Let's say there's a fleet action between Germany and UK, and that a decliner loses 9600 victory points. What this means to me is that if I let the enemy continue unopposed, the enemy force will proceed with missions for the rest of the month that generate 9600 points worth of value to the war effort, unless it is destroyed or disrupted (sent back to port for repairs). So even if I engage the enemy in battle, if I don't achieve a "mission kill" on the opposing force then the enemy should still get the same victory points as if I had declined. I think this should be tied into the engagement objectives, i.e. the value of achieving the objective should be coupled to the victory points awarded if the battle had been declined. This is already somewhat there for convoy protection and bombardment missions (although I suspect the objective VP are not tied to the "declined" VP), but it's not present for e.g. fleet actions. So maybe fleet actions should have an objective like "keep 60% of your capital ships combat effective" on both sides, where "combat effective" might mean "only light damage and at least 60% ammo remaining", and have the point values be correlated with the "declined" stuff. In addition, these "declined" point totals should probably be asymmetric: each force should have a mission that has a certain number of points associated with it, and gets those points if the mission objective (which might be "survive") is achieved. This enhances the "attacker" vs "defender" roles. So this has turned into a long ramble that wanders through a couple of years' worth of RtW thoughts To be clear, I understand that a lot of the ideas above might not be actually workable in terms of generating a fun game and that they might just lead to a different, more complex and harder to code/maintain system that has just as many opportunities to have unrealistic pathologies and opportunities for gaming the system as the current one. It's easy to sit in on the sidelines and criticize suggest improvements if you're not the one trying to put together a workable game system. At the 90% level I love the philosophy of abstracting away the detailed micromanagement of ships at the strategic level; it's just that last 10% is REALLY hard to get exactly right. John
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