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Post by anthropoid on Jan 8, 2020 18:33:46 GMT -6
I've done a lot of manual solution ciphering in Silent Hunter 3 and 4, so the fact they aren't over eager to fire them in early days makes sense!
Hard to believe that screen cap from Jwsmith with 51 torps didn't hit anything! That is an insane web of torpedoes in the water.
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Post by garrisonchisholm on Jan 8, 2020 19:57:29 GMT -6
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Post by cabalamat on Jan 9, 2020 3:30:03 GMT -6
My personal advice is overgun your destroyers. I find even if it whines about it in the builder, 5" guns are the way to go. 3" seem to take forever to kill even a light destroyer and 4" is better, but still lacks punch. A single solid 5" hit seems to stop light destroyers and put 1200 tonners out of the fight. If I have spare tonnage secondary guns are a way to get a hint more firepower, but only for fleet destroyer use. Keep your "trade protection" destroyers pure, and by that I mean cheap. I've had late game destroyers with 8x4" guns and directors which seemed good against enemy destroyers.
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Post by dorn on Jan 9, 2020 6:55:38 GMT -6
My personal advice is overgun your destroyers. I find even if it whines about it in the builder, 5" guns are the way to go. 3" seem to take forever to kill even a light destroyer and 4" is better, but still lacks punch. A single solid 5" hit seems to stop light destroyers and put 1200 tonners out of the fight. If I have spare tonnage secondary guns are a way to get a hint more firepower, but only for fleet destroyer use. Keep your "trade protection" destroyers pure, and by that I mean cheap. I've had late game destroyers with 8x4" guns and directors which seemed good against enemy destroyers. I use 4x2x4" or 3x2x5". In my experience 4" variant is better during night, 5" variant during day.
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Post by fleet5 on Jan 9, 2020 7:51:15 GMT -6
Knots! Destroyer battles are about maneuver, the second thing is firepower, while some people prefer to fill their destroyers with torps, I still like to have a balance between guns and torps but overall I favor speed the most. Set your destroyers to follow the flagship in line ahead, that helps as well.
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Post by director on Jan 9, 2020 8:13:34 GMT -6
xt6wagon - "My personal advice is overgun your destroyers." Oh, my, yes. A good load of 6 to 8 torpedoes is desirable but a powerful gun battery is essential. I love seeing enemy BBs wrecked by a well-timed torpedo attack but equally I love clearing the ocean of enemy DDs. Along those lines I've even built classes of CLs with massive 5" and even 4" batteries... 24-4" will stop a DD or even an enemy CL in its tracks, assuming they come within range of the buzz-saw. I don't recommend that strategy, but I was playing as the US and had the money, and I got good results from them - so long as they could get in range. I'll use whichever gun is better quality - if one is a +1 instead of a 0, I mean. I have experimented with 8x5" designs but honestly they come out slow and can't carry any sort of torpedo load. I do agree that the 5" hits harder and has a slightly longer range, but given good fire control a hail of 4" is more than sufficient. I'll take either load-out against a typical AI DD. The aim, after all, is not to stop a torpedo attack - that is probably impossible. The goal is to keep the enemy at longer range, and to what the USN did to the IJN - to attrit the enemy DDs when they commit them, in such a way as to end that threat in future battles.
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Post by vonfriedman on Jan 9, 2020 10:35:18 GMT -6
I do agree that the 5" hits harder and has a slightly longer range, but given good fire control a hail of 4" is more than sufficient. You reached the same conclusions as Admiral Da Zara, after his experience in WW1, wrote in his book "Pelle d'Ammiraglio" (Admiral's skin). He also believed that the problem of fire control was greatly simplified thanks to the higher rate of fire.
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Post by wlbjork on Jan 9, 2020 11:13:21 GMT -6
I do agree that the 5" hits harder and has a slightly longer range, but given good fire control a hail of 4" is more than sufficient. You reached the same conclusions as Admiral Da Zara, after his experience in WW1, wrote in his book "Pelle d'Ammiraglio" (Admiral's skin). He also believed that the problem of fire control was greatly simplified thanks to the higher rate of fire. Interesting. The British Admiralty concluded, based on experiences during WW1, that the 4" gun was inadequate for anti-destroyer work, that destroyer hulls were tough enough to resist 4" shells and so switched to the 4.7" (and later, 4.5") guns
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Post by vonfriedman on Jan 9, 2020 13:48:34 GMT -6
Da Zara criticized particularly the gun armament of Italian DDs and CLs, considering that Austria-Hungary had made wiser choices with its ships.
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Post by director on Jan 10, 2020 8:39:28 GMT -6
vonfriedman, wlbjork - As much as I admire the RtW systems I don't think it perfectly models reality - no playable game can. My friends in college used to joke about SPI producing 'WW2 with the original cast' games where each counter would be one person or one vehicle... Real-world models, tactics and examples are excellent guides for the what and how of RtW, but there are cases where things work a little differently in the game than in reality. After all, the difference between theory and practice is that, in theory there is no difference but in practice, there is... Along the same lines, the USN (and I think the Royal Navy) came to view the 12x6" or 15x6" cruiser as superior for shorter-ranged surface engagements due to their faster rate of fire, and modern warships have stepped their guns down even further to 5" or smaller. Against unarmored portions the smaller shells are effective, and at shorter engagement ranges they are good against light armor also. So all I can say is that DDs with a 'Tribal'-type layout (but smaller 4" caliber guns) work well in a destroyer role. My designs of all types tend toward gun power rather than speed, so they also fit into my philosophy. I do prefer a 6x5" armament, particularly if the 5" is +1 quality, but there isn't much to choose between them. IF you can control when and where they engage (which is not always possible), cruisers with large numbers of smaller weapons can be quite fearsome. You don't have to get a lot of armor-piercing hits to mission-kill or just plain kill an enemy - a downpour of 4" and 5" shells can do the job, particularly if they are +1 quality. The great weakness of small-caliber weapons is range, and the AI is quite capable of staying out of reach and pounding you to bits... but if they close, enemy DDs and cruisers get fed to the wood-chipper. Sometimes quantity really can trump quality - not always, but everything has its place.
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Post by brygun on Jan 10, 2020 9:04:21 GMT -6
Side note:
Part of simulation theory is that in general the more realistic a simulation is the more expensive and difficult and also the simplifications to make a simulation affordable or possible move it in some way away from realism.
I was with an infantry officer who talked about TEWT being a Tactical Exercise Without Troops. In that officers walk/drive around terrain discussing how they conduct tactical operations. This places it as less realistic but hugely more affordable than doing a full war game with all the troops present needing their food, water, ammunition and the accidental injuries that tend to occur. The TEWT is more expensive and more realistic than a map exercise inside a room. One important role in using the simpler simulations is that it is easier to train people in those to get down principles before spending the expense of putting them through the more realistic programs.
RTW2 as an affordable game so will by that be stepped away from actually having ships, radio failures and a lack of exposing the player to sea sickness.
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