Single Battleship in a river destroying whole unit stack in 1 day.

[CertainDeath]

great war dlc single BS destroys 7 unit stack cav 1-2 tiles away - i commanded a retreat, but 28km rangefinding ship artillery OP, all dead, no chance.

i just looked up the stats... a single battle ship has 175 soft attack (and a ridicolous amount of hard attack too) how is this in any relation to the hitpoints of the units, or the damage a heavy artillery brigade (12 soft attack) puts out? pls fix.

[Rosalis]

LOL i wish my battleships in 2020 all had 175 soft attack. Good finds.

[evildari]

thats called pay2win (SCNR)
note to myself - check my 4digit modding values again...

[SGTscuba]

great war dlc single BS destroys 7 unit stack cav 1-2 tiles away - i commanded a retreat, but 28km rangefinding ship artillery OP, all dead, no chance.

i just looked up the stats... a single battle ship has 175 soft attack (and a ridicolous amount of hard attack too) how is this in any relation to the hitpoints of the units, or the damage a heavy artillery brigade (12 soft attack) puts out? pls fix.

Do take note though, ships are treated as single units but land units have stats per unit displayed, so the actual firepower of a land battalion is the displayed figure multiplied by the units strength (usually 18 for artillery). So your artillery unit has soft attack of 216.

However, if the artillery as in this case is attacking a ship, it uses the naval attack stat which is normally lower.

[Nerei]

It is not really that uncommon. You got 34 capital ships from before 1930 with 175 soft or more.

If you look at traditional big gun warships they reach up to 352 soft attack which ironically is found on an Atlanta CL that only carries destroyer grade weapons. Yes that is probably a bug.
For real battleships A-150 is best at 300 followed by Montana at 280, Iowa at 260 and Yamato at 250. Hard is 30-50 points lower.
US Navy Virginias or Ticonderogas as well as the Russian Slava are also in the same range as A-150 being 10-20 points lower in soft and 40-50 in hard.

If we go by the wiki it is not really as OP as it appears. According to it total combat strength is adjusted by the number of units so an artillery unit with 18 units each with 12 soft has an unmodified attack strength of 12 * 18 = 216. That is not to say there might not be issues. I do not have a hard time finding stats that I consider odd and warships tends to be a good source.

For those of you curious yes if that is accurate then it means that if you load a B-36D Peacemaker with a 10kt nuclear bomb then you are actually decreasing its performance compared to just dropping conventional ammunition if your plan is to kill infantry or destroy vehicles. For naval surface and fort it will need to do two passes which luckily it can on a single flight.


For another good example of warship stat fun take the best choice for world war 2 ship killer ships. The candidate would be either a Des Moines or Worchester depending on how highly you value range. These are cruisers. They carry 9 8in or 12 6in guns as their main armament yet they outdo weapons that are much, much more potent like the 16in mark 7 or Type 94 found on Iowa/Montana and Yamato respectively. Worchester is comparable to A-150 in terms of raw warship damage but really does it matter if your AP shell weights in at 59kg or around 2000kg?

Also no they do not carry torpedoes not that these add all that much if we look at destroyers like Shimakaze that has 235 naval surface attack for 15 Type 93 "Long Lance" Torpedoes.


Really I can probably write a small essay just about how the stats for big gun warships are goofy.



With regards to shore bombardment capabilities however keep in mind that the capital ships category covers more than just battleships and battlecruisers. It includes missile cruisers like the Slava and Kirov that would more or less be outgunned by a world war 2 destroyer if we simply go gun calibre and number of barrels.
The same is true for basically any real world post-world war 2 entry the US have in this category if we ignore the upgraded Iowa.

It is possible that most of the 2020 era capital ships are not really typical battleship but large missile armed warships like Kirov.

That being said for some odd reason the Virginias, Californias, Ticonderogas, Slava and Kirov are among the best shore bombardment capital ships in the game so it is possible that BG have messed up some stats.

Personally I find it ridiculous that missile cruisers with a couple of destroyer grade cannons can almost match if not outright outdo a Yamato class battleship when it comes to shore bombardment but that is basically the case with the above missile cruisers.

[Rosalis]

Nice essay, but battleships, capital ships, escorts however you wanna call them and conventional missiles do no damage to 2020 inf. There is nothing about that. Those ww1 ships had like no accuracy.

[CertainDeath]

there is no way, that a single battleship in a river without any support from recon or infantry or anything can totally annihilate 7 cav brigades that are 6-12km away (in one day).
if you tell me, my numbers with arty are higher then i think, then i thank you for getting me more insight, but thats not really the main issue of the topic.
Ask the US about the effectiveness of shore mombardment with battleships, you are an effective supression force, doing damage here and there, but especially against dug in enemy the critical blows you land are more or less random. And there the enemy you shoot is basically in direct line of sight, not way beyond visual range.

maybe my mistake was playing with advanced ranges and spotting?
Sadly there is also no real explanation what this settings really do, so i pick session settings more like random

[Rosalis]

There is a 50% increase in range of spotting or doing damage, well some of the units get a boost in range. Thats about it i think. Prolly less realistic in ww1, where in 2020 it can be used to balance a bit more to your liking.

[Nerei]

there is no way, that a single battleship in a river without any support from recon or infantry or anything can totally annihilate 7 cav brigades that are 6-12km away (in one day).
if you tell me, my numbers with arty are higher then i think, then i thank you for getting me more insight, but thats not really the main issue of the topic.
Ask the US about the effectiveness of shore mombardment with battleships, you are an effective supression force, doing damage here and there, but especially against dug in enemy the critical blows you land are more or less random. And there the enemy you shoot is basically in direct line of sight, not way beyond visual range.

maybe my mistake was playing with advanced ranges and spotting?
Sadly there is also no real explanation what this settings really do, so i pick session settings more like random

No a battleship should not be able to do that but neither should 18 150mm field guns. However chances are they will do it just as fast if not faster.
This is a problem with how combat fundamentally work. Artillery as well as many bombers and capital ships have the indirect fire flag meaning they attack everything in a hex at once.
Nerfing this battleships soft attack will prevent it from doing it yes but there is probably a few hundred units that can replce it that will also have to be reworked to avoid such situations.

As for enhanced spotting it probably made no difference in this case. Great war battleships have around 2 hex spotting range and artillery range. They also have a spotting strength of 150 which is plenty to detect units two hexes away with stealth-strength 20-50

Nice essay, but battleships, capital ships, escorts however you wanna call them and conventional missiles do no damage to 2020 inf. There is nothing about that. Those ww1 ships had like no accuracy.

The reason modern warships are pathetic shore bombardment vessels is due them not being designed for this and their armament thus not being suitable for it. Typically you find a 76mm dual purpose cannon or a 127-130mm cannon as the main armament on such ships. That is not a lot. A cruiser like Ticonderoga or kirov might carry two 127-130mm cannons. Again not much.
If you are lucky you got an armament similar to the first generation Project 956 Sovremmeny. That carries 2x2 130mm cannons. The last ships however removed the aft turret cutting artillery armament in half.

You have to consider the actual armament of a warship when it comes to stats and taking this into consideration the stats are not terrible. It is actually quite interesting just how much you get for very little. You might get over 100 soft attack for a sing 76mm or 127mm cannon. That is way, way more than say a Leopard 2A6 that for it's 120mm L55 smoothbore gets 36 soft. Naval artillery shells are heavier but enough to justify that much more? Probably not.


If you want I can give you a lot of examples of how modern warships have very weak artillery armament and unless I have missed something all but one warship class currently in service have pathetic shore bombardment capabilities.
Instead however lets look at the US navy and its quest for better naval fire support over the last 40 years. It highlights the problem with current artillery for the shore bombardment role.

The US developed the 203mm/55 Mark 73 cannon in the 1970's due to the retirement of the last world war 2 cruisers and its entire fleet only having 5in cannons that where deemed unsuitable for shore bombardment (the projectiles fired by the Mark 73 where around 3 times as heavy as the 5in shells on existing warships). The plan was to fit this weapon on the the new Strike cruisers as well as the Spruances. That is to say more or less all new non-carrier warships. A refitted Long Beach where also to have gotten this weapon. In the end the Mark 73 was cancelled as was the strike cruiser and Long Beach upgrade.
Instead both the Spruances and the new Ticonderoga class cruisers got 5in cannons.

When Regan later introduced his 600 ship navy programme the solution was to reactivate and modernize all 4 of the 1940's Iowa class battleships to serve in the naval fire support role. Given how insanely expensive these vessels are to keep in service they certainly must have wanted a heavier cannon than the 5in. After the end of the cold war the US decommissioned the Iowas but they where deemed vital enough that some of them where maintained as part of the US Navy well into the 21st century and only when it look certain that their replacement where getting there where they fully retired. That fire support replacement was the Zumwalt that ditched the single 5in/62 Mark 45 cannon found on the Arleigh Burkes and instead went with 2x1 155mm/62 mk51 Advanced gun System (AGS).

Compared to the 5in/62 Mark 45 cannon the Long Range Land Attack Projectile (LRLAP) fired by the AGS is 2-3 times the weight and has 5-7.5 times the range depending on propellant charge. Even the guided munition fired by the 5in cannon only has around 2/3 the range of the LRLAP. Due to cost overruns on the Zumwalts however their numbers where reduced from 32 to 3 ships which made the cost of the LRLAP explode to just under $1M meaning two shots would likely match a Tomahawk in price. Due to this the US stopped acquiring it in 2016 leaving the AGS without ammunition and the US Navy without its new fire support weapon.

It is probably not an overstatement to say that the Zumwalts are quite a few times more capable than the Arleigh Burkes in the fire support role and even then I have heard arguments for reactivating the Iowas one last time due to the sheer weight of HE shells the 16in/50 Mark 7 can throw at opponents.

Keep in mind that the 5in/62 Mark 45 is largely comparable to naval artillery in service with other navies at least for shore bombardment and both Russia and the PRC have gone with one artillery piece for their latest takes on guided missile warships some of which would easily qualify as capital ships. Basically they are also not suitable for shore bombardment.

So really beyond adding a few near future dedicated fire support vessels or a significant rethink of how warships are build in general I overall see no issues with the shore bombardment capabilities of modern warships. That change might happen when railguns start appearing but there are still significant hurdles to solve before that will happen.
That is not to say I agree with the stats of individual warships. In a lot of cases I do not. A type 54A beating Zumwalt in shore bombardment is a joke as is Slava being a top tier shore bombardment vessel far beyond Zumwalt.
With regards to BG's more futuristic warships I am not going to touch them. Their stats are in places outright terrible and I have no idea what the logic is behind them. Perfect example is that it is hard to find a better air defence warship in the 2050's than the 2006 Sejong the Great or even 1996 flight II Arleigh Burkes.



For missiles the problem is they are one explosion after which they are expended. All I need with vehicles or infantry is ensure they are not bunched up and the damage the missile can cause can potentially be limited to a few infantry or one vehicle. If my opponent has say artillery I probably want to take such precautions anyway. This should be doable in an area over 166km^2. With proper placement it is not a far fetched argument that you need 54 missiles to kill a M2 Bradley unit assuming all hit which is a stretch. Naturally such vehicle placement will reduce the combat efficiency of the unit but then again missiles apply suppression so that part of missile attacks are represented.

If we just want to look at damage an example would be Iran's retaliatory attack on US bases in Iraq for the death of general Qasem Soleimani. They fired a number of ballistic missiles but from a Supreme Ruler perspective they basically did nothing. Assuming the numbers we have are accurate the injuries would account for 13-14 squads in a light infantry unit being disabled. That is around a 20% reduction in combat strength. All this is assuming all injuries are unable to fight.

Had this been SRU had each ballistic missile fired reduced the combat strength of a light infantry unit by around 2% on average. Beyond damage however the US soldiers having to take cover to avoid the attack would be represented by the missiles applying suppression with a subsequent reduction in combat performance. I have not checked how much suppression is applied but that might be the real strength of missiles when it comes to killing land units.

This is not to say I agree with the stats of individual missiles as there are a lot of odd things there like how 1980's Tomahawks are basically the best soft attack conventional missiles in 2020. Just that missiles should not be a solve all problems tool except against ships and structures. Not being able to specifically target structures though is a significant problem there.

[Kristijonas]

Didn't read through the whole thread, but just a thought:

Maybe this is a good time for someone to start work on a unofficial patch for SRU, now that official support had ceased? Certainly would be appreciated!