Mustang Sinks a Battleship Armada?
- Thread starter Jackanape
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...a city can only have one plane in its city centre... and can only have one plane patrolling per tile unless you use an exploit... but you can have overlapping patrols... its even mentioned in the in game wiki, type in intercept and you get something (for a change)
Yes, then lets see people say Naval melee ships are useless... a destroyer is +20 against a battleship as well.
EgonSpengler
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Wait, what? I'll admit to never having built an Aircraft Carrier in this game, and while I've built a number of Battleships, I don't think they've ever been attacked by an enemy plane. But sheesh, the more I learn about this game, the more I'm convinced it was released far ahead of completion. At some point, the pile of bugs/oversights just looks like an unfinished product to me.
Anyway... on the alternate history tip: I think Mustangs, or a variant, were used for some dive-bombing missions against ground targets in Europe. The Germans didn't have a navy worth worrying about after the RAF had their say, and the US Navy in the Pacific had their Dauntlesses, so Mustangs weren't used much against naval targets. Nevertheless, a Mustang variant capable of carrier operations was developed, and the bombs used by the Mustang were the same size as the bombs used by the Dauntlesses, 250-lbs and 500-lbs. Back then (and maybe still today) the differences between an Army/Air Force plane and a Navy/Marine Corps plane wasn't so much in its target-striking capabilities as it was in things like whether it had a tailhook and folding wings, and whether the pilots had trained for carrier operations. I'm not sure you could just ask a Dauntless or Wildcat pilot to land a Mustang on a carrier deck without training and practicing.
So purely from the plausibility angle, game mechanics aside, it's not even a stretch to think that Mustangs could've gone after the Tirpitz or the Kirishima, had real-world events gone just a little differently.
Tech Osen
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The sad thing is that these things worked as one would expect in Civ5. It is baffling indeed. On the history thing: any well placed torpedo or bomb could sink a battleship I guess.
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Yep, I have no real issue with a squadron of mustangs taking out a battleship... the armada of battleships not have an AA upgrade is a terrible oversight.... they should at least get +10 for two other battleships
What I am lost at sea about is ironclads being on equal footing attacking a battleship
The British actually used a torpedo plane called the Swordfish to good effect against German and Italian ships early in the war, and it was instrumental in the destruction of the Bismarck. Note; the Swordfish was a 30's era biplane.
SammyKhalifa
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Could? Did often. Air Power in WWII showed old model navies there was a new boss in town.
EgonSpengler
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Right, the specific bombs carried by the Mustang and the Dauntless might not have been the same, but the weight was the same.
I had been imagining that a fleet or armada represented the addition of escorts, as much as a 2nd battleship. I recently read Neptune's Inferno, by James Hornfischer, which focuses a lot on the smaller US Navy ships. Wikipedia says the Atlanta-class carried eight 20mm AA guns and twelve 1-inch AA guns. But the real feature of the ship, and this I remember from the book, was that their sixteen 5-inch guns - common armament on US light cruisers - were modified to be able to fire straight up, using anti-aircraft shells. The author quotes a US Navy sailor who watched USS Atlanta from a distance as it opened up its anti-aircraft guns against a Japanese air attack; he said it looked like the whole ship was on fire.
The only thing I could offer as a plausible, alternate-history explanation is that ironclads could be outfitted with deck-mounted torpedo tubes. iirc, self-propelled torpedoes (invented by an Englishman, if I'm not mistaken) preceded HMS Dreadnought by a few years. At the very least, the torpedo and the battleship were contemporaries.
Indeed! WW2 saw major shift in overall naval strategy as the carrier and its task force surpassed the battleship in importance. By the end of the war, battleships were mostly relegated to shore bombardment before invasions. Destroyers and cruisers became the escorts and screens of the carrier task force and ship to ship combat became a thing of the past in favor of carrier launched air assaults. It was a remarkably rapid progression.
SammyKhalifa
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Still I wouldn't have a problem with a "Fleet escorts" type promotion that would provide some AA cover.
One would expect such to be the case. By the same token, I am assuming the attacking fighter is actually a squadron or wing flying several sorties in the heat of battle. That said, defensive value for naval units *should* be scaled accordingly.
oh there is a promotion for battleships. a whopping +7 if i'm not mistaken
SammyKhalifa
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Shows how much I use battleships I guess.oh there is a promotion for battleships. a whopping +7 if i'm not mistaken
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The main weapon discussed in ironclad days was a ram, hit them below the armour.
Torpedoes were near the end and the start of the destroyer class
granted anything that could fire a torpedo could sink a battleship but it's not really an ironclad feature.
Archon_Wing
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Yea, let's put planes on a carrier but not have them actaully fire at other planes. Wonder how some battles would have turned out.
Incidentally, I think destroyers should have better anti-air. Doesn't anyone find it weird that they're more expensive (battleship), or just as expensive (carrier) as the units they're escorting?
Incidentally, I think destroyers should have better anti-air. Doesn't anyone find it weird that they're more expensive (battleship), or just as expensive (carrier) as the units they're escorting?
EgonSpengler
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Right, that's the alternate-history part, and the only way I can plausibly explain how an ironclad does anything but explode and sink in the presence of an enemy BB.
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I play navy a lot and can tell you right now that if the patch by some miracle bought intelligent as well as more naval warfare you would be building more destroyers... it's in the name..... they are 80 melee strength and can see subs... the sub bit is handy but let's just repeat... 80 strength. Ever fought against a destroyer with a battleship?
Caravels vs frigates are nowhere near what destroyers are... base 80 before promotions etc.
The problem with unit combat values that I see in Civ is an issue that dates back decades to the old tabletop war games. Everyone wants an interesting and wide variety of units, but the larger the scale of the game, the less distinct the units need to be. This does not deter designers, however, from satisfying the consumer who wants to see their favorite war pieces represented in any given game.
The sheer scale of Civ6 hardly supports the distinction between the standard fighter and the P-51, as an example. In my humble opinion, there is no cause to distinguish between carrier, cruiser and destroyer since they typically operate as a single integrated task force. In Civ6 scale, the lone ship (with the exception of the ICBM submarine) would be too inconsequential to be represented.
Likewise the distinctions made between land units, especially the support units. While many modern armies still use terms such as "armor division" or "infantry division", if one were to study the actual composition of such units one would find that they often have pretty much everything to make for an integrated combined arms fighting force. The SAM and AT units make even less sense within the scale of Civ6. These are weapon systems that are a part of virtually every fighting unit.
When trying to represent such a variety of units in such a scale, it is difficult to not skew the values without making some units seem too powerful, or others too weak. (Designers hate to offer 'weak' units.)
All of this "reality" aside, however, I am sure most of us prefer seeing a multitude of unit varieties in our game.
The sheer scale of Civ6 hardly supports the distinction between the standard fighter and the P-51, as an example. In my humble opinion, there is no cause to distinguish between carrier, cruiser and destroyer since they typically operate as a single integrated task force. In Civ6 scale, the lone ship (with the exception of the ICBM submarine) would be too inconsequential to be represented.
Likewise the distinctions made between land units, especially the support units. While many modern armies still use terms such as "armor division" or "infantry division", if one were to study the actual composition of such units one would find that they often have pretty much everything to make for an integrated combined arms fighting force. The SAM and AT units make even less sense within the scale of Civ6. These are weapon systems that are a part of virtually every fighting unit.
When trying to represent such a variety of units in such a scale, it is difficult to not skew the values without making some units seem too powerful, or others too weak. (Designers hate to offer 'weak' units.)
All of this "reality" aside, however, I am sure most of us prefer seeing a multitude of unit varieties in our game.
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@Karpius the scale in the game is not a single scale, it is a group of scales. There is a continent scale to make things look global and give it the country feel. There is a city scale so that cities can be broken out, of course cities are not that large. There is equally a military tactical scale to avoid having a separate tactical screen or doom stacks. The troops on the board are not scaled to fit continents, it's a game where the lines are blurred... and to be honest you cannot fit to much realism into them. I mean 10 battleships?... with 2 destroyers? That's what people float around with. And in reality there was only 1-2 battleships to bombard a city. I get where you are coming from but remember that scales are very blurred in this game
EgonSpengler
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Yeah, I think I've made my peace with the game's bizarro scale. To some degree it's unavoidable and to some degree the game's developers just had different priorities than I would have had. If another game developer makes a Civ-like game that goes in a different direction, I'll certainly take it out for a spin. I played the bleeding heck out of Empire: Total War, for example, although Europa Universalis went over my head, I think.
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