magazine explosions - night battle

[bolitho]

a few days ago I fought a large night battle between the main part of the HSF (without pre-dreds) and the british BC and GF. It was a campaign battle and I learned that I should prevent this type of engagement in the future. About the half of the HSF were sunk! Critical Ammo handling and poor shells are active.
I did a analysis of the game log and got a very low rate of magazine explosions on the british side. I compared the number of critical magazine hits with the number of explosions on both side.
British 161 hits 10 explosions -> 6%
DD Fortune
AC Shannon
BC Indefatigable 3
BC Queen Mary
BC Tiger
DD Brisk
DD Hope 2

german 12 hits 3 explosions -> 25%
BB Rheinland
BB König Albert
BB König

Some british ships suffered more than one explosions Idefatigable exploded 3 times!
I do not think that this is a bug, one must play this battle a few times and compare the results in a statistical manner.
I want to show that the poor ammo handling of the brits must not be a decisive disadvantage....

regards,
Thomas

@admins: I was not sure about putting this article in the after battle report section, please feel free to move it...

here is the history of the battle: (I forgot to make some screenshots)
From, the campaign map I knew that the british BC were around and therefore I followed some CL which came in sight at short distance (4000 m).
The german Cl seem to be quite useless because they have no chance against there british counterparts due to their larger guns. In addition, as stated before the shooting of the german Cl is also worse.
After a short chase the AC devonshire and four british BC came in sight and were sunk in a short-range battle (2000m). I hoped on some lucky hits on the british ships but the luck was not on my side...
At this distance the stronger armour of the german bb was quite useless and Rheinland explodes and also Friedrich der Grosse was sunk. My favour was only the advantage in numbers. The British BC were Lion Tiger Queen Mary and Princess Royal. Then another BC, Indefatigable came in sight and was pursued. I hoped to catch the other BC as well and used some CL as scouts. But the CL are still very vulnerable and due to the short viewing distance they were hit hard when the enemy BC came in sight. Ok, Indefatigable was sunk but suddenly Agincourt shows up in south but without escort. I detached POSEN and NASSAU to sink her, with success. But then the GF shows up at north and as a good Admiral I should have tried to escape and wait until sunrise but I thougth it would be possible to separate a small part of the GF and keep the others out of sight. The leading ships were the QE´s and my ships suffered a lot of heavy hits and run after this in the DD escort at close distance. Due to a miracle some of my BB escaped this inferno and sunk most of the britisch DD. Battle is not ended yet but my fleet is on retread and POSEN is in bad condition.

British losses:
AC Achilles
AC Shannon
AC Cochrane
AC Devonshire
Barham
Queen Elizabeth
Warspite
Agincourt
Idefatigable
Lion
Tiger
Princess Royal
Queen Mary
some CL and about 20 DD

German losses:
Friedrich der Grosse
Rheinland
König
Kaiser
Kaiserin
König Albert
CL Rostock
CL Stuttgart
2 DD

 

[PepsiCan]

Np, we can leave it in this section of the forum

Your data, also highlights something else. The gunnery of the Germans was a lot better than that of the Brits for whatever reason. So, although as a percentage of hits, the number of explosions was lower, as an absolute the British suffered a lot more from this evil.

 

[bolitho]

the most number of hits (only critical magazine hits counted) have been in the BC battle when about 10 BB targetted 4 BC. I would not say that the british gunnery was bad, the british CL shot quite well
I presume that a number of turrets of the BC were disabled quickly...

 

[Double Whisky]

Your data, also highlights something else. The gunnery of the Germans was a lot better than that of the Brits for whatever reason. So, although as a percentage of hits, the number of explosions was lower, as an absolute the British suffered a lot more from this evil.

Anyway, what troubles me most, is the rather absurd proportion of hits.
O.K. - we can accept that German gunnery was somewhat better than British (for the purpose of the game - historically the topic is debatable, except the poor gunnery of the 1st and 2nd Battlecruisers Squadrons).
A lot of posts on the forum indicates, that - for average - German gunnery in the game is a lot more precise than a British gunnery. May be 1 : 8 proportion of hits like in Bolitho's example is not "standard", but generally Germans can place several hits on British ships for any hit in return!
I'm still playing only demo version of Jutland, but getting still similar results.
For God's sake - the proportion of accuracy in Jutland battle was something around 1 : 1,5 for Germans, and this was achieved with great part of British shells fired by poorly shooting 1st and 2nd BCSs!
Accuracy of British BBs was generally on the same level as for German BBs!
If the game proportion of artillery accuracy would be historical - we should name the Jutland Battle "The Great Hunt For His Majesty Ships"!!!

 

[bolitho]

in addition more than the half of the magazine hits were on british DD which could not expect to get any hit on the german BB.... The most other hits came from the shooting of 2-3 german bb against one BC. The later part of the battle with the GF involved lasted not so long as can be seen on the number of hits on the QE´s. Their turrets are larger and therefore maybe the hit area....

regards,
Thomas

 

[PepsiCan]

Anyway, what troubles me most, is the rather absurd proportion of hits.
O.K. - we can accept that German gunnery was somewhat better than British (for the purpose of the game - historically the topic is debatable, except the poor gunnery of the 1st and 2nd Battlecruisers Squadrons).
A lot of posts on the forum indicates, that - for average - German gunnery in the game is a lot more precise than a British gunnery. May be 1 : 8 proportion of hits like in Bolitho's example is not "standard", but generally Germans can place several hits on British ships for any hit in return!
I'm still playing only demo version of Jutland, but getting still similar results.
For God's sake - the proportion of accuracy in Jutland battle was something around 1 : 1,5 for Germans, and this was achieved with great part of British shells fired by poorly shooting 1st and 2nd BCSs!
Accuracy of British BBs was generally on the same level as for German BBs!
If the game proportion of artillery accuracy would be historical - we should name the Jutland Battle "The Great Hunt For His Majesty Ships"!!!

Well, let's not get ahead of ourselves. We don't know a lot of things here.

• We don't know the impact of sun, wind and formation on the gunnery as we don't know the position of the ships.

• and we also don't know what ships were involved. We only know which ones were sunk. Maybe the Germans had many more ships and guns available. And if you look at the list of sunk Brits, then there are some there without directors (Agincourt) and known culprits of bad shooting (the BCs).

• Maybe some of the Brits blew up early on in the battle, greatly diminishing the number of guns the Brits had left. Then the discrepancy of shells fired and therefore of recorded hits can become disparate quite quickly.

• One test for this scenario is not statistically significant to draw any conclusions from. Maybe the Brits had their really bad day where they should've just stayed in bed and the Germands had their once-in-a-year-best-shooting-ever.

Not saying you are wrong, but I think there is not enough data and information on the situation to draw any conclusions on.

 

[Double Whisky]

Well, let's not get ahead of ourselves. We don't know a lot of things here. Not saying you are wrong, but I think there is not enough data and information on the situation to draw any conclusions on.

Of course, You are right.
I'm only suggesting, that from my own very limited experience, and from a quite significant number of posts I got an impression that there is a matter worth to dig in a little.

Let's try this way - may be some members of this forum will be so kind and for next week will check their game logs - for one or two games for example, putting the note in this thread about hit ratio for both sides. It is quite a lot of work - I know - but may be we can get sure that everything is O.K., or - if it is not - we can help to make a game better a little. Just an idea.

Regards

DW

 

[bolitho]

sorry for the missing information but I have no screenshots and it is difficult to describe the tactical situation by words only.
German ships involved are the whole HSF without the pre dreds. Some of the german BB had still a little flodding damage from a mass collision a few days earlier.
In the first part of the battle the british BC are outnumbered by 1:2 ships actual in battle range which was less than 4000m !
In the second part the HSF crossed the T on the GF this could explain the large amount of hits on the leading WARSPITE. Most of the GF ships didn´t got into battle range.
After this the HSF runs into the destroyer escort which received a lot of hits in a short time without beeing able to inflict comparable damage by gun fire.
And once again, these were only the [critical] magazine hits not the overall number of hits. Surely there might be some relation between the two numbers but we have no information about the factors determining this.

regards,

Thomas

 

[Rhetor]

Let's try this way - may be some members of this forum will be so kind and for next week will check their game logs - for one or two games for example, putting the note in this thread about hit ratio for both sides. It is quite a lot of work - I know - but may be we can get sure that everything is O.K., or - if it is not - we can help to make a game better a little. Just an idea.

Regards

DW

Look at my AAR "Close shave for Aufklarungsgruppen". I have ahd an engagement where the British BCs outgunned me completely. I have lost five turrets in a quick succession while scoring only a few hits.

Accuracy is not a constant value in this game. While in DG I was uinder the impression that the guns are too accurate (and hit effects too large), in Jutland it seems right.

 

[PepsiCan]

Let's try this way - may be some members of this forum will be so kind and for next week will check their game logs - for one or two games for example, putting the note in this thread about hit ratio for both sides. It is quite a lot of work - I know - but may be we can get sure that everything is O.K., or - if it is not - we can help to make a game better a little. Just an idea.

Regards

DW

There is something better we can do! You remember your experiments you ran with Japanese AC vs Russian BB in Distant Guns? Now that we have a scenario editor, we can retest in a much more controlled fashion.

A scenario could look like this:
- zero wind
- no sun (the sun turns as time progresses) or have the sun at slightly before noon (i.e. 11:30) and then stop the test when it is slightly past noon (i.e. 12:30).
- one brit bb and one german bb, both with directors and clear visibility (so no belephorons)
- same visibility for both ships
- both on a parallel course heading north
- both with the same number of main guns
- 15km apart
- both doing 20 knots
- first German fires on brit, then rerun for brit to fire on German

And then vary distance and speed and run it often. That should give us an idea of what the true hit rates are. And all it would take is changing the Duel scenario.

 

[Bullethead]

Just so we're clear on this....

I would like to point out that just because the log says there was a magazine critical hit does NOT mean the ship exploded. In fact, magazine criticals rarely result in explosions.

I'm talking about the regular critical hits here, NOT the ACH for Brits. The regular critical hits always function, regardless of the ACH setting.

There is a wide variety of outcomes for regular critical hits. In the case of magazines, these usually result only in more fire than the hit would otherwise cause, by a varying amount. Only very rarely does a magazine critical hit result in an explosion. IOW, if you look through the logs, you will often see that ships take multiple magazine critical hits, but usually none of them explode. However, occasionally there are explosions. This is what blows up Germans and also what makes Brits explode if you have the ACH off.

The same sort of variety also goes into the critical hits on other systems. For example, steering critical hits usually just apply more steering damage than normal, but sometimes also jam the rudder.

 

[bolitho]

but with ACH on the probabilty of ship explosion on the british side should be clearly higher as on the german side or not?
Or does the ACH on only was taken into account on direct hits at turrets?

regards,

Thomas

 

[Bullethead]

but with ACH on the probabilty of ship explosion on the british side should be clearly higher as on the german side or not?
Or does the ACH on only was taken into account on direct hits at turrets?

If you have the ACH on for Brit magazine explosions, this results in a 20% chance of a Brit ship blowing up if one of its main turrets is not just hit, but penetrated. The regular critical hits to magazines still apply, but are not made more frequent by the ACH setting.

IOW, it's like this:

Cordite ACH On

• Germans: occasionally blow up from regular magazine critical hit
• Brits: occasionally blow up from regular magazine critical hit (same odds as Germans for this), plus additional 20% chance to blow up on main turret penetration

Cordite ACH Off

• Germans: occasionally blow up from regular magazine critical hit
• Brits: occasionally blow up from regular magazine critical hit (same odds as Germans for this)

Regular magazine critical hits do not necessarily mean the magazine itself was hit. They usually mean some sort of extra problem in the ammo-handling department. The name might seem a bit misleading, but remember that the log file is a diagnostic tool for our use. It provides zero feedback to the player during the game, and was never intended to provide any outside the game. Thus, folks who read the log file usually come to the wrong conclusions.

 

[Heinz Fischer]

So just out of curiosity - is any penetrating hit in the magazine considered a critical hit?

 

[Bullethead]

So just out of curiosity - is any penetrating hit in the magazine considered a critical hit?

Well yeah. Hit location is one of the many factors considered in determining the severity of regular magazine critical hits.

 

[Double Whisky]

There is something better we can do!

Good idea
I'm using demo only for a time, so I can do only with ready scnarios, but I'll do my best, as soon as time will permit

 

[Invincible]

Bullethead post #13 explains the effect of poor ammo handling ACH ON.