Beating dead ships

[ck07]

Surely others have noticed this, but I could not find mention via keyword searches for "torpedoes" and similar. So apologies if redundant.

Ships expend too many shells and torpedoes on dead targets. I have seen my destroyers put an extra 10 or more torpedoes into a dead ship.  That can, at least, be stopped if the player recognizes the risk and forces holding fire. 

With torpedo bombers it's worse. In ~50 game-years after appearance of TBs in those games, I have seen > 20 instances in after action reports of >= 20 torpedo hits on the same ship, including CVLs and even TRs.
 Just today I saw a CV which had taken just one torpedo by air attack--I know this because to that point the log reported only one aerial torpedo hit total--before I saw it from a surface ship and beat it to death with shellfire. Then, once it was was thoroughly dead* but still in sight, along came an airstrike that ignored its intended targets 30-40 nm from there--that part being perfectly reasonable--and put 23 more torpedoes into it.

*AFAIK ("heavy damage" OR any reported level of damage + "on fire") + "5 knots" + non-moving = dead. 

I have less experience with dive bombers but suspect the same problem. When 5 DBs attack a CA that I can't see and score 5 hits, surely the target was already DIW.

I get that even immense amounts of damage might not cause a ship to sink within 1 minute, but historically no one ever put that many torps, aerial or full size, into anything. There's Musashi's famous 19, and Yamato's 7-12 depending on which report you take. Tinosa claimed 13 vs. Tonan Maru III, but reported 11 of those as duds. IDK of any other ships that took >= 10, even as overkill.

The implied solution would be to mark ships that have taken huge overkill as dead-not-worth-more more quickly. 

[wlbjork]

Jul 17, 2022 10:39:25 GMT -6 ck07 said:

*AFAIK ("heavy damage" OR any reported level of damage + "on fire") + "5 knots" + non-moving = dead. 

This is certainly not the case. I've seen ships listed as 'sinking' and '5 knots' (really, immobilised) appear in the survivors list as having suffered light damage due to a lucky engine room hit killing the propulsion temporarily.

The flooding/kill system could use some work - I don't think it's possible to capsize a ship even if you concentrate on just one flank. Maybe this could be considered for the future? I expect it to be fairly complex though as there is the ability to deliberately flood areas of the ship to counterbalance flooding from battle-damage.

[beastro]

I have a feeling this is to simulate the difficulty with which to determine if a ship is sinking or not. It can be a hard thing to judge in battle.

The opposite happened at Jutland with the way British shells were exploding and the tendency of German capital ships to heel over greatly while turning. The Grand Fleet came away thinking they'd done far more harm than they'd actually been doing because often the real damaging shots, the ones that go deep into the ship and explode in the vitals, don't make any significant signature explosions while the superficial ones exploding outside of the deck and belt do.

At first in RTW1 I'd ignore crippled ships too often to then have them after battle slowly sneak away as the battle moved off elsewhere. It's for that reason that seeing a good few torps put into them is acceptable. My major issue with torp use being a mainly RTW1 player, is that later torp ranges grow so large that your DDs can often fire them into your BBs that they're escorting and it really makes me wish there was better AI judgement to determine potential blue on blue. Far too often it would be like me shooting you in the back from three feet when firing at someone 30 feet away simply because I won't recognize that you're right next to me in the way.

[fronstermog]

Yamato was hit by ~5-10 Torpedoes after the initial dozen, they just don't usually get recorded as they were on a ship that was already capsizing.

Now, had there been a bunch of other Capital ships around I suspect that they'd have been hit instead, but there is historical precedent.

The game does get a bit ridiculous with it though. I suspect the easiest way to fix it would be to just cut sinking times in half, though that's obviously sub optimal.

[ludovic]

I think the issue is that there isn't a status of "obviously doomed, yet not actively sinking right now". There is only light, medium, heavy damage, and sinking. Sinking seems to mean "literally in the active process of submerging under the water" because I almost never see an obviously doomed ship show a status of "sinking" except for occasionally a few turns before it actually goes under.

I think that the solution would either be to increase the time under which a doomed ship is listed as "sinking", so that ships will concentrate on it less, or add a "fatally damaged" or somesuch status to indicate that a ship will surely sink in the near future even though it is still afloat. This should not entirely prevent ships from firing on them, because captains are wise enough to know that their own assessments aren't always correct, but should enable them to concentrate on active threats if there are any in the area instead of plowing all their shells into a stationary capital ship that hasn't fired a shot in quite some time and ignoring the ships that are actually shooting at you.

(And obviously sometimes the captains will incorrectly assess the status, and uselessly pour shells into a doomed ship, or allow a merely damaged ship to recover, but it feels like the former should be happening less than it does.)