Task and patrol forces?

[samweston]

I understand not being able to pick your forces, the whole army you have versus the army you want argument. I have to say that if you don't have an idea where the army you have is or how its organized then you shouldn't be going to war anyways. Now I may be thinking way above what the battle generator can do, but wouldn't it be possible to organize ship into groups for certain things. Such as the Task Force system that the U.S. used during WWII. I find it hard to believe that any admiral would have every destroyer organized into one group seemingly wandering around an area with no specific aim, or just have cruisers meandering randomly around the Caribbean grouping ad hoc all the time.

[director]

I think the purpose of the battle generator was to scramble forces so as to give you an interesting and challenging match with the AI. Over time, however, players have developed needs for greater control (there's a surprise that's never come up before in the history of gaming LOL) and for greater historicity - the appearance of historical reality if not the actuality. My belief is that the mission generator uses some weighting to balance the tonnage or fighting power for both sides if it can, which is why you sometimes get battleships with no or few destroyers etc.

I'd support a DLC for the game that would do five things:

1) permit the player to use the current system with no change including balanced engagements
2) permit the player to organize ships in squadrons/divisions before, say, 1930 with balanced engagements
2a) organize ships in squadrons/divisions before, say, 1930 without balanced engagements
3) organize ships in task forces after 1930 with balanced engagements
3a) organize ships in task forces after 1930 without balanced engagements
4) add a marker to designate ships that will not be permitted to engage in any mission (think ships on the turn they go from training to ready, leftover Bs in the dreadnought era, etc)

The downside of this, of course, is a large increase in player micro-management. Think about sorting out the Royal Navy of 1900, then add-on moving every ship into a division or squadron 'holder'. And after repairs/refits, reassigning them into the same. It also increases the memory requirements for the game... might reduce movement micro-management by permitting movement of squadrons or TFs.

The mission generator would still have to pull from available ships, so either you'd have to let it keep balancing the engagements (not in all cases - I too have seen or been the poor lone CL running from four enemy BCs) or abandon that for a 'send in all of the available fleet/task force ships minus a percentage for repairs, other duties, etc'.

[polishkruk]

You’re overlooking the fact that the player holds the position of naval secretary and CNO. The CNO dictates what forces go where. He doesn’t decide how those forces are organized beyond that. That is up to the discretion of theater commanders. That is not what our job is.

That being said. I wouldn’t mind the player being about to have a pool of admirals to pick from with different attributes that would affect such things as force disposition.

[seawolf]

Dec 31, 2019 14:05:05 GMT -6 polishkruk said:

You’re overlooking the fact that the player holds the position of naval secretary and CNO. The CNO dictates what forces go where. He doesn’t decide how those forces are organized beyond that. That is up to the discretion of theater commanders. That is not what our job is.

That being said. I wouldn’t mind the player being about to have a pool of admirals to pick from with different attributes that would affect such things as force disposition.

If we can control the individual movements of destroyers in battle then the game isn’t fixed to CNO, there’s no reason why players shouldn’t have an option to have strategic control

[tbr]

When I was on active duty I had some insight into this process, in the German Navy it is called the JÜEP, the annual training, maintenance and tasking plan. The "CNO" definitely has the final say on which ship joins which task group when under what commander. While the plan is annual with a couple years planning cycle chaos near always has a say. This hit me several times when I was aboard, with everything from a SECDEF unilaterally advancing the decom date of a boat I was slated to go on to material casualties leading to retask cascades. And then there was the utterly shameful chaos created by a certain Bundeskanzler in 2002...

While I am not on active duty any more my "civilian" job is also affected by this cycle, albeit periphally.

[rodentnavy]

As I see the problem here is in fact more a reaction to the fact that battle selector rather than being at least somewhat random currently feels very broken. Players are rarely wrong to assume they are heading into a ridiculously contrived ambush and are thus let feeling frustrated by the lack of control. It is not just the preference for sending lone light cruisers off to face massed air power but that the player has to time and time again try and extricate their oldest slowest light cruiser in the region from yet another mission that would probably make sense for a larger ship but not it. Indeed it is not just light cruisers but any rate where time and time again the AI will select the oldest slowest player ships available to go up against the most modern and fastest AI ships available and worse compound the frustration by doing so in a manner defying any kind of random chance or probability.

Yet it should be noted the AI still manages to lose. If some kind of force vetting were introduced this would only get worse. Artificial Intelligence is a terrible misnomer for what is simply an automated decision making process, intelligence does not come into the equation. Look at the RTW"2 AI's talent for ship designs, AI navies may churn out illegal light cruiser designs and yet seem to utterly forget minor details like, oh I don't know, putting actual armour on them. Actually the number of times I have seen AI designed heavy cruisers explode to 6" shell penetrations of a magazine is simply ridiculous. The same with those ridiculous ambushes where you are either spawned into a cross fire or force sailed into the pincers of the trap and yet the when you have slogged your way out the AI has still bodged it and much of a fleet that should have had the advantage is sinking or burning or burning and sinking across the battle space while most though perhaps not all the player's fleet limps away.

I get that the AI needs a certain amount of "cheating" a certain amount of "unfair advantage" to keep it remotely challenging for players that unlike it can learn and adapt. However I think the battle selector needs to be properly randomised. Players are more likely to blunder their units into an ambush if there is a genuine chance that this is an occasion where a hot pursuit might yield a real prize rather than forever knowing if they are facing a clearly inferior force then darkness is set to fall at least 20 minutes before the AI estimates the player can take advantage of that fact and if it is not then the AI most likely has something nasty poised over the horizon.

I think the lack of task grouping would feel a lot less of an issue if players were not so sick and tired of having to weed out their inferior units and send them into another area or reserves to avoid having them be the only units that ever see the enemy. I think that task grouping would all too likely result in too much player dominance of the AI which is, quite frankly, hopeless at understanding ship roles.

[director]

And yet, in its defense, I must say that I've never played against a naval AI that was better at tactics than the RtW; never, in fact, seen one as good.

It is frustratingly - almost scarily - good at seizing tactical position and managing position in battles, rarely pressing attacks past the tipping point. It manages torpedo attacks pretty well (as a result of it never, ever permitting its human enemy to get ahead of its beam) and can conduct a fighting withdrawal. I have some issues with its passive/aggressive manuevers and tactics and I have learned how to (sometimes) sucker it into a trap. Its great weaknesses are that it is robotic and mostly predictable, and that it both overestimates what it needs to attack and underestimates when it should withdraw, leading to a lot of back-and-forth dithering. In general (in my opinion) it plays a better battle than many of the commanders of WW2.

I agree that players get awfully tired of being thrown into ambushes, or having a new-minted AMC thrown into a battle, or one elderly CL suddenly carrying the entire war effort. All of that (and the over-use of certain sea areas) is fixable by expanding the available missions in the war files. A group of RtW players could probably mod that out without much trouble.

[akosjaccik]

In my experience it probably depends on the state of mind as well. When I'm an impatient mood, I'm less tolerant to semmingly odd engagements, but when I'm able to frame it right, even a """waste of time""" engagement can be really intriguing. For example, I ahd a battle recently where almost all of my ships up to CA-s were present, but the enemy raided with two B-s. I hounded them all day, then tried to intercept their perceived route at night to carry out a torpedo attack, but they managed to just barely slip away (I spotted them, but in an unfavorable position and couldn't re-estabilish contact for the rest of the battle). I lost, I did not do anything meaningful, and literally a single shell managed to hit a ship in the entire engagement, and yet I was enjoying it immensely.

Still, I am rather unhappy about "dumb" engagements still, like when two of your destroyers spawn in the middle of the land-based air's hell-territory, and get promptly murdered no matter what - a situation they weren't supposed to be in the first place in any circumstance, either because no orders should've send them over there, or because they would've been sunk before they arrive there. If anything, I'd love to get rid of those instances, but at the same time, I can see the technical difficulties of trying to filter out such cases in a random-generator. All in all, that's just something we have to live with I believe.

However, I still believe that some sort of limited events could be great fun, where the player gets to assemble forces on pre-planned offensives - that is a DLC I'd definitely pay for. The simple idea is that it would not be the norm but the exception, so random battles would still be the mainstay. In this case, the player could select exactly what (available) forces will be sortied for the given task, and the AI will probably be able to give it's best shot to match that.

Otherwise, the possibility to rearrange the OOB in turn zero would suffice.

[rs2excelsior]

I think the one thing I really want to see in this vein is some sort of “task force” interface in the strategic ship list, so you can put together ships for moves on the main map. It gets tricky sometimes separating ships moving through an area from those which are supposed to stay there, and re-selecting a force ship-by-ship every time it needs a new destination gets tedious.

[samweston]

Jan 2, 2020 8:37:30 GMT -6 rs2excelsior said:

I think the one thing I really want to see in this vein is some sort of “task force” interface in the strategic ship list, so you can put together ships for moves on the main map. It gets tricky sometimes separating ships moving through an area from those which are supposed to stay there, and re-selecting a force ship-by-ship every time it needs a new destination gets tedious.

That's part of what I meant, I mainly play Italy, CSA, and A-H. I like designing heavy defensive ships that can't traverse the world, but can stand up to most contemporaries and are affordable for that purpose. Largely because I don't want to deal with the headache of trying to remember which ships I sent here to blockade who, and when do I need to swap them out, and how many destroyers/cruisers/corvettes should I send. However if it could be set up to where I set these ships in a group and can swap all of them with a click it would help. The whole task force thing in my mind is more, these ships are in port, these next are set to intercept shipping, and this third group is set to patrol and interdict naval forces. I would know, if not their location down to minute or second, at least what they are doing and if they are likely to get hit. Put the older ships in a domestic patrol group and put more powerful ships in frontline combat groups.