A brief analysis of missiles and countermeasures
Jun 16, 2023 13:53:52 GMT -6
jwsmith26, templecenturion, and 1 more like this
Post by endwerk on Jun 16, 2023 13:53:52 GMT -6
Out of curiosity I started to go through the logs of post 1960 engagements to try to make sense of what each part does, how effective things are and so forth. I did a bunch of fleet exercises to optimize my ship loadout and then tested it in a real war against a peer naval power.
The results were... surprising. And very concerning when it comes to the balance of it all.
I first looked at missile countermeasures because at first glance I saw very few CIWS entries in the logs and no Medium/Heavy AA and that got me wondering. Keep in mind that this is with mostly maxed technologies, so the results will be far different earlier on.
First, the regular countermeasures that every ship has access to. In my mixed loadout, they contributed to 34.21% of missile intercepts. After I reworked my designs, their contributing dropped to a mere 10.61%. France, my enemy in the war I tested my new designs in and who didn't use an optimized design, relied almost entirely on countermeasures, which made up 74.24% of their missile intercepts.
CIWS underperformed significantly. They contributed a meager 4.39% of missile intercepts despite every ship in the fleet having 4+ CIWS. For an investment of 20 points, that was an abysmal performance.
LSAM did better despite being present on only roughly 60% of my fleet tonnage. Despite only costing 11 points, they contributed to 13.16% of all missile intercepts. Though despite the technology for extending their protection to nearby ships, they never managed to intercept a missile heading for another ship. Either this was a freak string of unlucky results or the technology isn't working as it is intended to.
The runaway winner of missile intercepts was MSAM. They contributed 15.35% to intercepts on the host ship as well as an additional 32.89% to intercepts on nearby friendly ships. And that is just missile intercepts, not even accounting for their other uses.
Speaking of which:
In a prior war, the end-of-war analysis of aircraft kills told me that exactly 0 had been killed by Light/Medium/Heavy AA, which made me question the use of those things in the age of jet aircraft. And so I did some testing on this as well, running a few fleet exercises where I sent full strikes of 4 large carriers against a small fleet of 8 Light Cruisers with my standard loadout at that time (1 of each SAM, 4 Light and Medium AA, 8 Heavy AA secondaries) to see how each one fares.
And across multiple simulations, the result of which anti-aircraft system contributed what was always the same.
Light/Medium/Heavy AA did not score a single kill, while the distribution of SAM kills was as follows:
LSAM: 27.3%
MSAM: 40.3%
HSAM: 32.5%
Though it has to be mentioned that with a set of 2 tubes each, the LSAM performed better than the 27% suggests considering that it takes up significantly less points than the other alternatives, which makes it the king of shooting down aircrafts when adjusted for that.
In each test, I sent out strikes against the cruiser fleet until the strikes had lost most of their aircraft, which was after around 3 strikes. After that only a few scattered remnants of the air groups remained. After 3 of those exercises the conclusion was fairly obvious:
Aircraft are completely pointless. I didn't sink a single ship despite using 4 large carriers against 8 cruisers who each costs about as much as a single aircraft group in maintenance. I didn't even get a result which was better than a lightly damaged cruiser. In one exercise, the aircraft scored zero hits while losing 78 of their number after just two strike missions. The highest damage result I managed to get was, again, light damage on one cruiser after landing a heavy bomb hit.
This test convinced me that carriers are a complete waste of money and time. I tried to incorporate Light Carriers into my fleet to act as scouts, but the battle setup always puts the light carriers into their own carrier group and completely messes up my force structure, so they aren't really worth the hassle of suddenly having to do carrier battles in the middle of the pacific where ships runs out of fuel before even reaching the enemy fleet.
The last part of my analysis was on the offensive capabilities of the various missile systems. The result of that completely transformed the way I design my ships past a certain point.
In my tests, I put somewhere between 4 and 10 HSSM on my ships with one reload each.
I honestly didn't bother to combine the data after my first test since the second only confirmed the findings, so the sample size might be somewhat small-ish yet suitably represents the lessons I learned from them.
23.9% of launched Missiles were HSSM, yet only 13.16% of hits scored came from those. The second test had 19.22% of missiles launched and only 8.73% of missiles hit.
The overwhelming amount of missiles launched and missiles hit were from HSAM and MSAM batteries, firing 76.1% of missiles launched and scoring 86.8% of hits in the first test, and 80.78% of missiles fired and 91.3% of hits scored in the second test.
It didn't really matter whether the target was a heavily armored BC or some lightly armored CLs, they all succumbed to the sheer number of missiles fired from SAM launchers.
Because unlike SSM, they are not limited to a single reload. Instead of being able to fire 8 missiles, they can fire more than 40 without increasing their number of reloads, or more than 70 if you do. And compared to SSM, HSAM and MSAM have a 360° firing arc which makes them perfect for the close ranges missile duals are usually fought at.
Combined with their ability to reliably massacre aircraft and also intercept incoming missiles, MSAMs are the undeniable king of the late game naval engagements. They do everything and they do everything well. After I concluded my tests, I re-designed my cruisers and destroyers, kicked out all the carriers and prepared for another war to see the results on the battlefield.
In the redesign, I focused on adding only a single set of HSSM for the initial, long-ish range salvo. All the other points were taking up with SAM of different sizes. No Light/Medium/Heavy AA at all. An assortment of 3-8" main guns depending on the ship to deal with leftovers without having to waste missiles. I will put the designs at the end of the post.
The results were fascinating, to be honest. Before the rework, I managed to intercept 75% of all incoming missiles. After the rework, that rate jumped to above 95%. Only accounting for the ones that would have hit the ship, of course. The engagements were completely one-sided.
Another interesting thing that I noticed while going through the logs was what ultimately caused the enemy ships to sink:
15.38% from straight up structural damage caused by mostly Medium Missile hits.
5.13% from fires raging out of control.
79.49% from progressive flooding.
While almost all ships hit by missiles were set on fire, good damage control usually got that back under control almost no matter how many hits impacted the ship. It doesn't look like additional fires started contribute to the ongoing fire, so it almost never spiraled out of control. Aluminium Superstructes also had almost no negative impact. I didn't do a full analysis on this, but from a brief glance through the logs of a handful of engagements I only saw the notification that a fire had gotten worse from the Aluminium Superstructure twice, with some of my log analysis batches having no such cases at all.
The real killer is the flooding damage caused by the missiles, and this is mostly from the Medium Missile hits. Armor does absolutely nothing against that, even heavily armored Battlecruisers succumbed to this after only a handful of hits.
Some lighter ships also sunk from just the structural damage caused by the impacts of the missiles and I was sufficiently surprised to see that happening more often than fires raging out of control. Going into the tests I was convinced that fires would be the main cause of ship loss since this has been mentioned a few times in this forum already, but it turned out to be dead last.
I know from experience that in earlier carrier battles, fires caused by ASM contributed to a lot of the damage since the ships had a lot of time to slowly go up in flames. In the much more hectic and short range engagements of most fleet battles, however, ships simply succumb way before fires raging out of control ever become a factor. If you have a screen of 10 Destroyers in a good formation opening up on a single enemy vessel with 4 MSAM missiles each, enemy ships simply go down in a single turn.
Ultimately, SAMs are completely overpowered. They are too strong against aircraft. One could argue that they are good enough at intercepting incoming missiles - and considering the sheer volume of missiles fired, a 95% intercept rates still leaves a lot of burning and sinking wrecks. That SAMs are also the best at massacring enemy fleets is where this is going way too far. Up to 35 reloads on double launchers for a volume of 70 missiles per battery is simply too much. After the initial barrage has died down, this is what is annihilating the majority of the enemy fleet. Fire Salvo -> Pick a single enemy ship -> Select up to 10 of your ships -> Launch all -> Watch 40 missiles obliterate a ship -> Repeat with the next visible enemy on the next turn.
As mentioned earlier, here are the designs I came up with after the initial batch of tests and oh boy did they perform better than I thought they would.
A Heavy Cruiser to anchor the fleet. 8" gun to mop up the remaining floating ships. Enough armor to safely sail through the burning wrecks of enemy destroyers and CL that may or may not have enough juice in them to fire back with their 3-6" guns.
5 LSAMs in the Forward and Aft positions, simply because they are the only SAM system which has a firing arc. Not sure if that makes a difference for LSAMs since they don't have to aim at other ships, but it's not like I need those slots for anything else.
4 MSAM because it is just the best system, really.
2 HSAM mostly for good measure, both MSAM and HSAM fire the same medium missiles, so it's almost impossible to tell which scored more hits. But since their missile stocks aren't drained by missile intercepts, they act like a reserve stock of missiles.
A Light Cruiser, which makes up the bulk of the fleet in terms of tonnage.
It has almost the identical loadout compared to the CA, just some smaller guns and one fewer LSAM tube. It's the main workhorse of my fleet, really.
And lastly my Destroyers, which follow the same design concept.
Since they are the most numerous ships in my fleets, they represent the weight of the initial HSSM salvo at longer ranges. These destroyers are what's swarming around the enemy and absolutely covering them with MSAM salvos, which is why I decided to put two of those launchers on the damn thing.
I considered building a BC, but it is purely a vanity project. Sure, it can fit a bunch more HSSM but those don't really make up a whole lot of the missiles launched and an even smaller percentage of missile hits. Because HSAM and MSAM can only be mounted in centerline positions and SAM slots are limited in general, they can only fit a single additional launcher onto their hull compared to a CA, so their firepower isn't really much higher. The big gun is somewhat obsolete, the armor is useless against missiles and topside points don't really scale well with tonnage. So why invest into a BC when you can instead get 3 CA who contribute more to a fight and can soak up losses better. No matter the size, a missile in the right spot can sink a ship no matter whether it's a 50k ton BC or a 3800 ton DD.
I am very curious to hear whether your experience matches mine.
The results were... surprising. And very concerning when it comes to the balance of it all.
I first looked at missile countermeasures because at first glance I saw very few CIWS entries in the logs and no Medium/Heavy AA and that got me wondering. Keep in mind that this is with mostly maxed technologies, so the results will be far different earlier on.
First, the regular countermeasures that every ship has access to. In my mixed loadout, they contributed to 34.21% of missile intercepts. After I reworked my designs, their contributing dropped to a mere 10.61%. France, my enemy in the war I tested my new designs in and who didn't use an optimized design, relied almost entirely on countermeasures, which made up 74.24% of their missile intercepts.
CIWS underperformed significantly. They contributed a meager 4.39% of missile intercepts despite every ship in the fleet having 4+ CIWS. For an investment of 20 points, that was an abysmal performance.
LSAM did better despite being present on only roughly 60% of my fleet tonnage. Despite only costing 11 points, they contributed to 13.16% of all missile intercepts. Though despite the technology for extending their protection to nearby ships, they never managed to intercept a missile heading for another ship. Either this was a freak string of unlucky results or the technology isn't working as it is intended to.
The runaway winner of missile intercepts was MSAM. They contributed 15.35% to intercepts on the host ship as well as an additional 32.89% to intercepts on nearby friendly ships. And that is just missile intercepts, not even accounting for their other uses.
Speaking of which:
In a prior war, the end-of-war analysis of aircraft kills told me that exactly 0 had been killed by Light/Medium/Heavy AA, which made me question the use of those things in the age of jet aircraft. And so I did some testing on this as well, running a few fleet exercises where I sent full strikes of 4 large carriers against a small fleet of 8 Light Cruisers with my standard loadout at that time (1 of each SAM, 4 Light and Medium AA, 8 Heavy AA secondaries) to see how each one fares.
And across multiple simulations, the result of which anti-aircraft system contributed what was always the same.
Light/Medium/Heavy AA did not score a single kill, while the distribution of SAM kills was as follows:
LSAM: 27.3%
MSAM: 40.3%
HSAM: 32.5%
Though it has to be mentioned that with a set of 2 tubes each, the LSAM performed better than the 27% suggests considering that it takes up significantly less points than the other alternatives, which makes it the king of shooting down aircrafts when adjusted for that.
In each test, I sent out strikes against the cruiser fleet until the strikes had lost most of their aircraft, which was after around 3 strikes. After that only a few scattered remnants of the air groups remained. After 3 of those exercises the conclusion was fairly obvious:
Aircraft are completely pointless. I didn't sink a single ship despite using 4 large carriers against 8 cruisers who each costs about as much as a single aircraft group in maintenance. I didn't even get a result which was better than a lightly damaged cruiser. In one exercise, the aircraft scored zero hits while losing 78 of their number after just two strike missions. The highest damage result I managed to get was, again, light damage on one cruiser after landing a heavy bomb hit.
This test convinced me that carriers are a complete waste of money and time. I tried to incorporate Light Carriers into my fleet to act as scouts, but the battle setup always puts the light carriers into their own carrier group and completely messes up my force structure, so they aren't really worth the hassle of suddenly having to do carrier battles in the middle of the pacific where ships runs out of fuel before even reaching the enemy fleet.
The last part of my analysis was on the offensive capabilities of the various missile systems. The result of that completely transformed the way I design my ships past a certain point.
In my tests, I put somewhere between 4 and 10 HSSM on my ships with one reload each.
I honestly didn't bother to combine the data after my first test since the second only confirmed the findings, so the sample size might be somewhat small-ish yet suitably represents the lessons I learned from them.
23.9% of launched Missiles were HSSM, yet only 13.16% of hits scored came from those. The second test had 19.22% of missiles launched and only 8.73% of missiles hit.
The overwhelming amount of missiles launched and missiles hit were from HSAM and MSAM batteries, firing 76.1% of missiles launched and scoring 86.8% of hits in the first test, and 80.78% of missiles fired and 91.3% of hits scored in the second test.
It didn't really matter whether the target was a heavily armored BC or some lightly armored CLs, they all succumbed to the sheer number of missiles fired from SAM launchers.
Because unlike SSM, they are not limited to a single reload. Instead of being able to fire 8 missiles, they can fire more than 40 without increasing their number of reloads, or more than 70 if you do. And compared to SSM, HSAM and MSAM have a 360° firing arc which makes them perfect for the close ranges missile duals are usually fought at.
Combined with their ability to reliably massacre aircraft and also intercept incoming missiles, MSAMs are the undeniable king of the late game naval engagements. They do everything and they do everything well. After I concluded my tests, I re-designed my cruisers and destroyers, kicked out all the carriers and prepared for another war to see the results on the battlefield.
In the redesign, I focused on adding only a single set of HSSM for the initial, long-ish range salvo. All the other points were taking up with SAM of different sizes. No Light/Medium/Heavy AA at all. An assortment of 3-8" main guns depending on the ship to deal with leftovers without having to waste missiles. I will put the designs at the end of the post.
The results were fascinating, to be honest. Before the rework, I managed to intercept 75% of all incoming missiles. After the rework, that rate jumped to above 95%. Only accounting for the ones that would have hit the ship, of course. The engagements were completely one-sided.
Another interesting thing that I noticed while going through the logs was what ultimately caused the enemy ships to sink:
15.38% from straight up structural damage caused by mostly Medium Missile hits.
5.13% from fires raging out of control.
79.49% from progressive flooding.
While almost all ships hit by missiles were set on fire, good damage control usually got that back under control almost no matter how many hits impacted the ship. It doesn't look like additional fires started contribute to the ongoing fire, so it almost never spiraled out of control. Aluminium Superstructes also had almost no negative impact. I didn't do a full analysis on this, but from a brief glance through the logs of a handful of engagements I only saw the notification that a fire had gotten worse from the Aluminium Superstructure twice, with some of my log analysis batches having no such cases at all.
The real killer is the flooding damage caused by the missiles, and this is mostly from the Medium Missile hits. Armor does absolutely nothing against that, even heavily armored Battlecruisers succumbed to this after only a handful of hits.
Some lighter ships also sunk from just the structural damage caused by the impacts of the missiles and I was sufficiently surprised to see that happening more often than fires raging out of control. Going into the tests I was convinced that fires would be the main cause of ship loss since this has been mentioned a few times in this forum already, but it turned out to be dead last.
I know from experience that in earlier carrier battles, fires caused by ASM contributed to a lot of the damage since the ships had a lot of time to slowly go up in flames. In the much more hectic and short range engagements of most fleet battles, however, ships simply succumb way before fires raging out of control ever become a factor. If you have a screen of 10 Destroyers in a good formation opening up on a single enemy vessel with 4 MSAM missiles each, enemy ships simply go down in a single turn.
Ultimately, SAMs are completely overpowered. They are too strong against aircraft. One could argue that they are good enough at intercepting incoming missiles - and considering the sheer volume of missiles fired, a 95% intercept rates still leaves a lot of burning and sinking wrecks. That SAMs are also the best at massacring enemy fleets is where this is going way too far. Up to 35 reloads on double launchers for a volume of 70 missiles per battery is simply too much. After the initial barrage has died down, this is what is annihilating the majority of the enemy fleet. Fire Salvo -> Pick a single enemy ship -> Select up to 10 of your ships -> Launch all -> Watch 40 missiles obliterate a ship -> Repeat with the next visible enemy on the next turn.
As mentioned earlier, here are the designs I came up with after the initial batch of tests and oh boy did they perform better than I thought they would.
A Heavy Cruiser to anchor the fleet. 8" gun to mop up the remaining floating ships. Enough armor to safely sail through the burning wrecks of enemy destroyers and CL that may or may not have enough juice in them to fire back with their 3-6" guns.
5 LSAMs in the Forward and Aft positions, simply because they are the only SAM system which has a firing arc. Not sure if that makes a difference for LSAMs since they don't have to aim at other ships, but it's not like I need those slots for anything else.
4 MSAM because it is just the best system, really.
2 HSAM mostly for good measure, both MSAM and HSAM fire the same medium missiles, so it's almost impossible to tell which scored more hits. But since their missile stocks aren't drained by missile intercepts, they act like a reserve stock of missiles.
A Light Cruiser, which makes up the bulk of the fleet in terms of tonnage.
It has almost the identical loadout compared to the CA, just some smaller guns and one fewer LSAM tube. It's the main workhorse of my fleet, really.
And lastly my Destroyers, which follow the same design concept.
Since they are the most numerous ships in my fleets, they represent the weight of the initial HSSM salvo at longer ranges. These destroyers are what's swarming around the enemy and absolutely covering them with MSAM salvos, which is why I decided to put two of those launchers on the damn thing.
I considered building a BC, but it is purely a vanity project. Sure, it can fit a bunch more HSSM but those don't really make up a whole lot of the missiles launched and an even smaller percentage of missile hits. Because HSAM and MSAM can only be mounted in centerline positions and SAM slots are limited in general, they can only fit a single additional launcher onto their hull compared to a CA, so their firepower isn't really much higher. The big gun is somewhat obsolete, the armor is useless against missiles and topside points don't really scale well with tonnage. So why invest into a BC when you can instead get 3 CA who contribute more to a fight and can soak up losses better. No matter the size, a missile in the right spot can sink a ship no matter whether it's a 50k ton BC or a 3800 ton DD.
I am very curious to hear whether your experience matches mine.