Post your best Tsushima battle (not operational) results

[sabratha]

Post your best Russian results, as this battle is as hard in the game as it was in RL for the Russians. I found it very hard to achieve anything other than a major defeat, although I did better than my historical counterpart.



Probably the extent of my naval tactics. 1 japanese BB (Shikishima) and 2 crusiers sunk. 3 old Battleships of the 3rd squadron (Apraxin, Ushakov, Senyavin) and all the battleships of the 2nd squadron (Oslabya, Navarin, Sissoi Velikyi), plus 4 crusiers survived and were making their way to Valdivostok unopposed when the scenario was ending.

I think the Russian objectives need to be tweaked to something like "have 5 capital ships survive", as the "reach objective" doesn't seem to eb working all that properly.

[sabratha]

Addendum:

The game seems to be telling me that "software" was not at the roots of the Russian defeat.
I made a custom scenario - a copy of the Tsushima scenario from the game, but with Russian crew skills and accuracy up to the same level the Japanese had. Surprisingly (or not) I still got defeated as the Russian player by the AI, but perhaps in a slightly less decivie manner - lost 3 Bs and some crusiers, while Japan lost only 4 DDs.

For Russia there was certaionly "something wrong with the bloody ships" at Tsushima.

[randomizer]

Did you remove the speed penalties for the Russian's? These were imposed to represent the material condition of Rozhestvenky's fleet and can provide the Japanese with a significant advantage in maneuvering. Another possibility is that the Japanese are much more homogeneous than the Czar's Last Armada (with a tip of the hat to Constantine Pleshakov and his book of the same name). The AI in the RJW will tend to fight CA to B with more aggression than in TGWAS and the superb force of Japanese 8" armoured cruisers can be quite effective supporting the four B's of First Division.

The "Reach" objective was used for Russian victory since if the Russian's made it into the middle of the Sea of Japan in strength, it's likely that the Japanese would have had to break off pursuit do to ammunition and fuel for the torpedo craft. That was my assessment when I wrote the scenario, feel free to edit the battle to taste.

Thanks for sharing.

[sabratha]

Well, the "reach" objective either does not work, or the center of the objective should be set to Vladivostok and set with a larger range.

For whatever reason, I find my ships (in proper numbers) at the end of the scenario about 4/5ths of thei way to Vladivostok, unopposed and the game fails to give me the Victory points for that.

Perhaps its because I'm taking a more western route, nearer to the Korean cost but still, the objective should be made more fesible. I think the Tsushima scenario is hard enough as it is for the Russian side, without adding some rather not-working objectives.


As for my "software vs hardware" experiment, no I just changed the crew skills of ships and the global accuracy modifier to 0. I wanted just to fiddle around with teh human side of the euqtion.


One other thing I noticed is that the AI seems to be very eager to engage Russian Battleships with their crusiers in the Tsushima scenario, but is entirely unwilling to engage with cruisers the chinese ironclad battleship Dingyuan (both in my own Yalu secario, as well as in the Yalu scenario made by someone else and posted on the forums some time ago).

Is there any specific rule when it comes to AI crusier vs Battleship behavior? I observed cruisiers flee from the rather old and unimpressive chinese ship regardless if I had teh chinese vessel set as CA or B.

[andyhall]

Having just finished Constantine Pleshakov's The Tsar's Last Armada, I gave Tsushima a go for the first time, playing as the Russians. They got pummeled, to be sure, but they did much better than I expected:



I lost three battleships (including Suvorov, with "Mad Dog" Rozhestvensky), but by dark on the second night the other eight battleships, along with a handful of cruisers and destroyers, had crossed the 39th Parallel in good order, at a steady 11 knots, and were just 23 hours from Vladivostok. After about midnight on the first night, the main Japanese fleet seems to have lost track of the Russian battleships, and eventually headed off toward Korsakovsk on Sakhalin Island. The main Russian force made no contact at all with the Japanese on the second day, and I'm not sure that, by the end of the scenario, the Japanese could have caught up to the main Russian force before it reached Vladivostok. On the second day Japanese cruisers and destroyers shredded most of the Russian transports, that had scattered away to the east during the main battle and were proceeding north on their own, but the ships of the main Russian battle fleet that had survived the battle on the first day got clean away on the second.



One apparent difficulty for the AI was that the initial battle between the two main forces drifted steadily westward, close to Tsushima Island. This caused some problems for the AI-controlled Japanese (shown above, in red), that got a number of its ships muddled and hung up along the shore and especially around Shushi Bay, near the north end of the island.

A complete listing of ships is here (PDF).



Given the historical outcome of the real battle, I'm going to call this a Russian victory.

[andyhall]

Tsushima again. The Russians didn't do as well this time as last, but still a bit better than they did historically:



This time they suffered badly with ship damage that slowed them down, with the result that the surviving battles only made it a little past 37d North by the end of the scenario. (Last time they were past 39d North, a full 120nm further along their track.) They're still 350nm/35 hours from Vladivostok, and I think it's near certain that the Japanese will be able to regroup, locate the Russians, and attack again.

Both Mikasa and Knyaz Suvorov were sunk.