How to sweep mines correctly

[scaffold]

Hello everyone!
How do I use my minsweeping-capable ships correctly? Does it matter whether they are assigned to the AF or TP?

[gurudennis]

Mine-sweeping ships must be on AF and in the correct target area to sweep.

[indy]

Dec 20, 2021 21:08:26 GMT -6 gurudennis said:

Mine-sweeping ships must be on AF and in the correct target area to sweep.

What? That can’t be right! I’ve been playing this game wrong all this time?

I thought as part of protecting ‘trade’ from having ships get mined, you needed to be on TP. I absolutely do NOT want my ships, with mine-sweeping gear, specialized ships, to be included as active fleet (AF) units to be drawn into battle. This makes absolutely no sense. Someone please explain this to me.

[gurudennis]

You can build tiny 600-ton minesweepers with almost no armament. Those hardly ever enter combat (on AF) except being occasionally found under AI control in coastal waters during raids. Minesweepers on TP do both ASW and sweeping, both poorly.

[stww2]

One question I've always had with minesweepers: are all ships with minesweeping gear equal for minesweeping purposes, or are larger KE's better at sweeping for mines?

[JagdFlanker]

funny i always put a portion of my MS on TP since i assume mines mainly come from AMCs raiding my trade routes and i assumed some of my merchant losses were from those AMC mines, but looking at the manual there's no mention of that

also since i leave all MS in my home area i liked to put some of them on TP so they would be automatically "distributed" around to where they might be needed since i have no interest in micro'ing where i want mine sweeping

next time i play perhaps i might put some MS on Foreign Stations so at least i have some of my possessions covered during a war

also in response to the above question, i'm pretty sure all ships with MS gear are all equal no matter what size

[aeson]

Dec 21, 2021 7:42:51 GMT -6 stww2 said:

One question I've always had with minesweepers: are all ships with minesweeping gear equal for minesweeping purposes, or are larger KE's better at sweeping for mines?

There is a combined minesweeping rating for all ships in a sea zone given in the Area Overview tab. If you experiment with differently-sized minesweepers, you will see that minesweeping rating increases with increasing minesweeper size up to some limit, which if I recall correctly is 1,000 tons.

Mine-sweeping ships must be on AF and in the correct target area to sweep.

This is not my experience, and moreover the minesweeping rating given in the Area Overview tab does not give any indication of caring whether minesweepers are assigned to AF or TP.

Minesweepers on TP do both ASW and sweeping, both poorly.

I cannot think of any evidence within the game for minesweepers having impaired minesweeping efficiency when assigned to TP duty; the minesweeping rating in the Area Overview tab does not change, and it is not my experience that there is a notably different occurrence of "enemy minefield swept" events, though I admittedly have not kept statistics on such.

If it is the manual to which you are referring, pg. 31 of the manual says this of minesweeping and ASW:

However, if the ship has a capability in both minesweeping and ASW, the ASW value will be reduced to reflect the fact that the ship has to divide its time between the various duties.

There is no mention which I can find in the manual of reduced minesweeping ability on any status or with any other set of equipment.

[aeson]

Dec 21, 2021 8:17:51 GMT -6 JagdFlanker said:

also in response to the above question, i'm pretty sure all ships with MS gear are all equal no matter what size

[JagdFlanker]

Dec 21, 2021 8:39:58 GMT -6 aeson said:

Dec 21, 2021 8:17:51 GMT -6 JagdFlanker said:

also in response to the above question, i'm pretty sure all ships with MS gear are all equal no matter what size

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neat - never looked at that tab before

[stww2]

So the optimal minesweeper is 1000 tons? Great to know! Thanks!

[jwsmith26]

Dec 21, 2021 8:27:46 GMT -6 aeson said:

Dec 21, 2021 7:42:51 GMT -6 stww2 said:

One question I've always had with minesweepers: are all ships with minesweeping gear equal for minesweeping purposes, or are larger KE's better at sweeping for mines?

There is a combined minesweeping rating for all ships in a sea zone given in the Area Overview tab. If you experiment with differently-sized minesweepers, you will see that minesweeping rating increases with increasing minesweeper size up to some limit, which if I recall correctly is 1,000 tons.

Thanks for that information, aeson . I had no idea the size of the MS made a difference to their effectiveness. My set of old 400-ton MS DDs are due for an upgrade.

[wlbjork]

Dec 21, 2021 8:27:46 GMT -6 aeson said:

This is not my experience, and moreover the minesweeping rating given in the Area Overview tab does not give any indication of caring whether minesweepers are assigned to AF or TP.

I seem to remember a comment somewhere that ships with an ASW rating and minesweeping gear will spend ~half their time sweeping mines and half their time on ASW duties.

Having said that I don't think it's possible to build as mine-sweeper type without an ASW rating which kinda makes that point moot.

[flamedraken]

You build the sweeper without the extra ASW equipment on it, just the native ASW rating.

[sittingduck]

Based on information I gained from replies/comments in an earlier post, I worked up the Minesweeping Factor for KE's. This was just KE's.

KE tonnage - Minesweeping Factor:
600 - 16
700 - 18
800 - 21
900 - 24
1000 thru 1700 - 26

I stopped at 1700 tons because I don't build KE's above 1600. Even so, it shows that there is a relationship between Tonnage and MS value. Hope it helps some in some way.

[aeson]

Dec 21, 2021 11:52:51 GMT -6 stww2 said:

So the optimal minesweeper is 1000 tons? Great to know! Thanks!

I would be very careful in using the word "optimal;" a 1,000-ton minesweeper is only "optimal" inasmuch as it is the smallest minesweeper which maximizes the minesweeping rating, but this is far from the only metric by which you could measure optimality and it is far from the only factor to consider when building a ship. In the set of ships that I used to create the image showing how minesweepers of various sizes perform, for example, the 900-ton minesweeping corvette is as "optimal" as the 1,000-ton minesweeping corvette on a minesweeping-per-unit-upkeep basis (both offer 2 minesweeping per unit upkeep); while I have not checked, it would not surprise me if there were cases where you could achieve a higher total minesweeping score with sub-1,000t minesweepers than with 1,000t minesweepers for a given investment, even excluding fairly trivial cases like 10 1,000t minesweepers (260 combined minesweeping score, assuming it's exactly 26 minesweeping per 1,000t or larger minesweeper) and 11 900t minesweepers (264 combined minesweeping score, assuming it's exactly 24 minesweeping per 900t minesweeper).

Beyond that, there is the issue that "how good is this ship at being a minesweeper" isn't the only thing to consider when you go to build a ship - you have to consider the opportunity costs. Say that I want to add both destroyers and minesweepers to the fleet, and at the moment I can afford either eight 1,500t destroyers and eight 1,000t minesweepers or twelve 1,600t destroyer-minesweepers. Is a 1,000t dedicated minesweeper a better - i.e. more optimal - choice of minesweeper than a 1,600t destroyer-minesweeper in this scenario? It's true that the dedicated minesweeper is more economical on a ship-for-ship basis... but it isn't more capable, and whereas I'm considering building a dozen destroyer-minesweepers I'd only build eight of the dedicated minesweepers. There are of course factors that I've ignored here which may lead me to choice one option sometimes and the other option other times, but the point is that you need to make sure that your metric of optimality actually makes sense for the scenario in which you're trying to apply it. Otherwise, you might arrive at something which is exactly as useful as 'the optimal battleship armament is the 20" gun' - and if you do go ahead and say that something is optimal there is always the risk that someone will see "X is optimal" and overlook or ignore the conditions governing when X is optimal, or that those conditions will be lost in the game of internet telephone through which a forum's collective wisdom is often disseminated.