Superheavy AA Option doesn't do anything as far as I can tell?

[CrabMonarchy]

I was doing some testing to try to find the line in the save file that determines the effectiveness of SHAA shells and then to determine the different levels of effectiveness (because the manual says the effectiveness is randomized and I wanted to know the range), but my results seem to suggest that the SHAA option in the doctrine screen doesn't actually work? I started a 1935 game as Italy with a autogenerated fleet, used save editing to give myself the Large Shrapnel AA Shells tech, finished a CVL that was under construction at the start, and then ran tests with one of the battleships against the carrier using Fleet Exercises. However, although the SHAA option is supposed to use 10% of the large gun ammo capacity according to the manual, my tests showed that no ammo capacity was actually lost to SHAA shells, as far as I can tell.

Here's the two ships involved (note the 85 rpg for the 14 inch main battery of the Francesco Morosini, which with twin turrets would be 170 rounds per turret):

Here's the doctrine screen and the exercise setup:

(As an additional note, I checked the save file, and the UseSHAA setting was also set to equal 1 for Italy, so it should be activated, and just to verify this I changed the line to UseSHAA=2 or -1, which resulted in the option showing as unchecked in the doctrine screen)

And here you can see that despite the SHAA option being selected earlier, the turrets still have 170 shells each (136+34=170) instead of the 153 that the manual says they should have after the SHAA shells are deducted:

Furthermore, this shows how during an air attack in which MAA and LAA opened fire, no main battery shells seem to have been fired and the log does not mention any SHAA fire:

I've attached the save to this post; I think the above information should be enough to replicate what I did, but just in case have some instructions:
1. Open the save (Italy September 1935) and create a fleet exercise with the Francesco Morosini and the Airone on opposing sides.
2. Simply let the game run until the Francesco Morosini comes under air attack, and check the ammo counts.
3. Optionally, turn off SHAA and run the above steps again, and you can observe that the ammo count of the Francesco Morosini is the same.

Basically I'm super confused by this, am I missing something or is the SHAA option completely broken? I also noticed a SHAAQ=0 line in the save file but changing that value didn't seem to affect the tests (in that no ammo was converted to SHAA shells when SHAAQ=1 or 2 or even 100)(also as a sidenote, can anyone confirm what this line does?). Adding AA Directors, adding radar, and changing the fire control to Electro-Optical didn't fix it either, and neither did testing with a 8" gun heavy cruiser, so I have no idea what's going on here. Can anyone else replicate this issue?

Attachments:

Game1.zip (608.95 KB)

[blarglol]

Could it be a range issue? Perhaps by the time the incoming aircraft are spotted, they are too close to properly load and elevate the main battery to engage? Maybe if you had pickets further out it could increase the radius from the BB at which incoming aircraft are detected, and thus allow super-heavy AA shells to be used.

[CrabMonarchy]

Jul 21, 2024 23:18:01 GMT -6 blarglol said:

Could it be a range issue? Perhaps by the time the incoming aircraft are spotted, they are too close to properly load and elevate the main battery to engage? Maybe if you had pickets further out it could increase the radius from the BB at which incoming aircraft are detected, and thus allow super-heavy AA shells to be used.

That's a good point. I've run some additional tests, with results listed below based on looking at the BB's in-battle status to see the number of 14 inch shots fired (images omitted to save time and space):

1. Give the BB a pack of escorts to do spotting (2 divisions of 5 destroyers each, assigned respectively to Support/Screen the BB, and 1 division of 4 CLs set to Scout). Results: no SHAA shells fired despite the dive bombers attacking the CLs first, who were approximately 20k yards ahead of the BB (measured by eyeballing it using the on-screen scale).

2. Additionally give the BB and the CLs 5/5 radar with all radar techs to see if that allows earlier spotting. Results: no SHAA shells fired, as above.

3. Additionally replace the dive bombers with torpedo bombers, since maybe TBs have a lower altitude attack run which will allow the big guns to fire. Results: no SHAA shells fired, as above.

As an additional note, in all three tests the Francesco Morosini continued to display 136/34 AP/HE shells per turret in battle. Based on that, my wild guess as to what's going on is that the code that autoconverts ammo to SHAA shells is not working for whatever reason, so regardless of the conditions the large guns simply don't have any AA ammo to fire, and nobody else has noticed so far because basically nobody actually uses the SHAA shells setting lmao. Still, I'm open to more suggestions for testing, since I really do want to figure out what's going on here.

[blarglol]

Jul 22, 2024 12:24:30 GMT -6 CrabMonarchy said:

Jul 21, 2024 23:18:01 GMT -6 blarglol said:

Could it be a range issue? Perhaps by the time the incoming aircraft are spotted, they are too close to properly load and elevate the main battery to engage? Maybe if you had pickets further out it could increase the radius from the BB at which incoming aircraft are detected, and thus allow super-heavy AA shells to be used.

That's a good point. I've run some additional tests, with results listed below based on looking at the BB's in-battle status to see the number of 14 inch shots fired (images omitted to save time and space):

1. Give the BB a pack of escorts to do spotting (2 divisions of 5 destroyers each, assigned respectively to Support/Screen the BB, and 1 division of 4 CLs set to Scout). Results: no SHAA shells fired despite the dive bombers attacking the CLs first, who were approximately 20k yards ahead of the BB (measured by eyeballing it using the on-screen scale).

2. Additionally give the BB and the CLs 5/5 radar with all radar techs to see if that allows earlier spotting. Results: no SHAA shells fired, as above.

3. Additionally replace the dive bombers with torpedo bombers, since maybe TBs have a lower altitude attack run which will allow the big guns to fire. Results: no SHAA shells fired, as above.

As an additional note, in all three tests the Francesco Morosini continued to display 136/34 AP/HE shells per turret in battle. Based on that, my wild guess as to what's going on is that the code that autoconverts ammo to SHAA shells is not working for whatever reason, so regardless of the conditions the large guns simply don't have any AA ammo to fire, and nobody else has noticed so far because basically nobody actually uses the SHAA shells setting lmao. Still, I'm open to more suggestions for testing, since I really do want to figure out what's going on here.

Well...I guess one thing to test is build some 4 and 5 in DP DDs and see what their shell counts are as they engage the aircraft around the BB. Does the game draw exclusively from HE for AA duty, or are there "surface HE" and "AA HE"?

I suspect the game will just draw from a general HE pool regardless of target type. If so, it's likely the SHAA shells are not being drawn from the HE pool as intended.

Perhaps the game needs 4 types of shells distinctly: AP, SAP, HE, and HE-AA...

[CrabMonarchy]

Jul 22, 2024 18:22:38 GMT -6 blarglol said:

Jul 22, 2024 12:24:30 GMT -6 CrabMonarchy said:

That's a good point. I've run some additional tests, with results listed below based on looking at the BB's in-battle status to see the number of 14 inch shots fired (images omitted to save time and space):

1. Give the BB a pack of escorts to do spotting (2 divisions of 5 destroyers each, assigned respectively to Support/Screen the BB, and 1 division of 4 CLs set to Scout). Results: no SHAA shells fired despite the dive bombers attacking the CLs first, who were approximately 20k yards ahead of the BB (measured by eyeballing it using the on-screen scale).

2. Additionally give the BB and the CLs 5/5 radar with all radar techs to see if that allows earlier spotting. Results: no SHAA shells fired, as above.

3. Additionally replace the dive bombers with torpedo bombers, since maybe TBs have a lower altitude attack run which will allow the big guns to fire. Results: no SHAA shells fired, as above.

As an additional note, in all three tests the Francesco Morosini continued to display 136/34 AP/HE shells per turret in battle. Based on that, my wild guess as to what's going on is that the code that autoconverts ammo to SHAA shells is not working for whatever reason, so regardless of the conditions the large guns simply don't have any AA ammo to fire, and nobody else has noticed so far because basically nobody actually uses the SHAA shells setting lmao. Still, I'm open to more suggestions for testing, since I really do want to figure out what's going on here.

Well...I guess one thing to test is build some 4 and 5 in DP DDs and see what their shell counts are as they engage the aircraft around the BB. Does the game draw exclusively from HE for AA duty, or are there "surface HE" and "AA HE"?

I suspect the game will just draw from a general HE pool regardless of target type. If so, it's likely the SHAA shells are not being drawn from the HE pool as intended.

Perhaps the game needs 4 types of shells distinctly: AP, SAP, HE, and HE-AA...

Ran an additional test using the CL Taranto, which has 4x1 DP 4" secondaries (I tried to test using DDs but the CVL refused to bomb them lol):

Other scenario parameters were as in previous posts. Upon air attack, the secondary HE shells could be observed to be used up, as seen below (696 shells instead of 720).

This does raise another issue, however, which is that apparently my secondary ammo settings don't work properly either???? My 4" secondaries should have a half-and-half AP/HE split, but for some reason they're 100% HE? Tests with changed ammo settings didn't affect this either.

I did also check with a CA, and the 5" secondaries on that ship had the correct ammo loadout, although the 4" tertiaries were once again all HE, so I guess it might have to do with having multiple guns in the same size category????? Is this a known issue? I feel like someone else would have noticed this by now, although scrolling through the bug report forum I don't see any threads about it, but maybe I just missed it.

To be honest, at this point I'm pretty sure the issue is that my copy of RTW3 has been cursed by a witch or something lmao, so I'm going to reinstall and see if that fixes the above issues.

Edit: it didn't :(

Edit2: apparently it's only smaller guns? A ship with 9", 7", and 3" guns had correct ammo loadouts for the larger two calibers but all-HE for the 3", although maybe tertiaries are supposed to be all-HE so idk. That still doesn't explain why the Taranto has all-HE secondaries though.

[wlbjork]

One thing I have noticed missing from this - have you experimented with a BB carrying a secondary or tertiary battery of DP guns? It's possible that the tech is set up to provide a bonus to the HAA value, and as this is non-existent...

Also, 2" and 3" guns are not covered by the ammunition load out doctrine and will always load 100% HE. Not sure what's happening with 4" guns though.

[CrabMonarchy]

Jul 24, 2024 21:38:01 GMT -6 wlbjork said:

One thing I have noticed missing from this - have you experimented with a BB carrying a secondary or tertiary battery of DP guns? It's possible that the tech is set up to provide a bonus to the HAA value, and as this is non-existent...

Also, 2" and 3" guns are not covered by the ammunition load out doctrine and will always load 100% HE. Not sure what's happening with 4" guns though.

From what I recall of my testing, I did also try it out with a more modern BB which had 4" DP tertiaries which also didn't work, although it's been a few days so I may be misremembering. I'll go back and test it out again later with proper documentation to check if that's the case.