How Will C# Effect Carriers?

[Jorgen_CAB]

If missile engines are easy to spot (90 million kilometers is really long range), any ship launching them will have been spotted far from launch range due to its heat signature.

You are right about passive seeker missiles and ships though.

The 90 million km was an active sensor missile not the thermal which Steve said was 10 million km.

Since the sensor model no longer is linear then detecting something twice the range will now take roughly four times the sensitivity so the range fall of quite rapidly after a while even against something with a high thermal signature.

The most important thing is that you detach the active sensor from the ships or fighters firing the missiles to hide where they are and at what vector the missiles will come at an enemy group of ships. This is the easiest way to make sure the enemy can't counter strike until it is too late or even at all. This is probably why I think Aurora C# games will become allot more interesting since finding the enemy while not being found in return will become very important which also might lead to more interesting skirmishing fights rather than all out attacks against giant fleets all located in one single spot.

[Father Tim]

If missile engines are easy to spot (90 million kilometers is really long range), any ship launching them will have been spotted far from launch range due to its heat signature.

I disagree, primarily because I don't go blazing around at max speed with max-boost engines making up 40% of my ship's displacement.

I bet you could get a missile boat's thermal sig down to about four times that of a size-6 missile designed all-out for speed.

[Garfunkel]

Anything that decreases the power of doomstack, ie all ships in one big blob, versus a more "realistic"/"immersive" deployment is a plus.

[QuakeIV]

Only if it comes with the tools to easily do that.  The biggest upside for doom stacks for me is it's easier to move them and supply them in terms of time, annoyance, and number of clicks.   

[Jorgen_CAB]

Only if it comes with the tools to easily do that.  The biggest upside for doom stacks for me is it's easier to move them and supply them in terms of time, annoyance, and number of clicks.

The old fleet organisation system worked pretty good but the new one seems really much better for this purpose.

Once it is set up the number of clicks should be tolerable.

[Bremen]

Anything that decreases the power of doomstack, ie all ships in one big blob, versus a more "realistic"/"immersive" deployment is a plus.

I was actually just thinking that if you can easily see missiles coming from 10mkm+ out, it might start to make a lot more sense to detach escorts to be between you and the missiles and hit them with area defense fire.

[Desdinova]

"Doomstacks" aren't unrealistic. Concentration of force is a real military principle. You want to keep your big ships together or you risk being defeated in detail.

[Akhillis]

"Don't divide the fleet" is a naval truism. During both the First and Second World Wars the major naval combatants usually concentrated the overwhelming majority of their striking power into a single battlefleet. The occasions when they did divide the fleet are considered mistakes. Sending Shokaku and Zuikaku to the Coral Sea probably ended up costing the IJN the Battle of Midway.

[QuakeIV]

"Doomstacks" aren't unrealistic. Concentration of force is a real military principle. You want to keep your big ships together or you risk being defeated in detail.

I also tend to agree that peoples claims about doomstacks tend to belie the historical reality.  In any situation where the position of the enemies large assets is in serious question, you are more or less forced to concentrate huge piles of ships together to avoid accidentally encountering them and getting crushed.

That having been said, I think the direction we are going (distant pickets to help detect incoming missiles) is a fun and novel concept and perhaps you can agree. e: Minding, it doesn't actually remove the idea of huge stacks of ships, the formation is just spread out on your screen rather than being concentrated into a single exact point.  Which also might lead to fun situations where you have part of your screen destroyed and it actually takes time to repair the screen, during which time your sensor coverage is degraded in a particular direction.

[Father Tim]

"Doomstacks" aren't unrealistic. Concentration of force is a real military principle. You want to keep your big ships together or you risk being defeated in detail.

"Don't divide the fleet" is a naval truism. During both the First and Second World Wars the major naval combatants usually concentrated the overwhelming majority of their striking power into a single battlefleet.

For some of us, the terms 'doomstack' and 'battle fleet' are not synonymous.  It was not uncommon for Great War fleets to have a nautical mile between major combatants, with screens two or three nautical miles out.  In other words, escorts at a significant fraction their own maximum gun range away from the battle line.

I also tend to agree that peoples claims about doomstacks tend to belie the historical reality.  In any situation where the position of the enemies large assets is in serious question, you are more or less forced to concentrate huge piles of ships together to avoid accidentally encountering them and getting crushed.

That having been said, I think the direction we are going (distant pickets to help detect incoming missiles) is a fun and novel concept and perhaps you can agree. e: Minding, it doesn't actually remove the idea of huge stacks of ships, the formation is just spread out on your screen rather than being concentrated into a single exact point.  Which also might lead to fun situations where you have part of your screen destroyed and it actually takes time to repair the screen, during which time your sensor coverage is degraded in a particular direction.

QIV has it right.  I want a ring of escorts around my battlewagons as standard fleet formation, and I want the squadron-wide 'continuous time on sensors tracking bonus vs missiles' to function correctly so that my PD escorts get a tangible benefit from spreading out 100,000 along the axis of threat.

VB6 Aurora got me halfway, with Deploy/Recall Escorts orders and saved formations, but sadly it meant degrading the effectiveness of my point defense to do it since the ships ended up outside of effective supporting range of each other.

[chrislocke2000]

Only if it comes with the tools to easily do that.  The biggest upside for doom stacks for me is it's easier to move them and supply them in terms of time, annoyance, and number of clicks.

Yes, I'm hoping for some form of drag and drop functionality on the fleet screen to manage deployment of ships in relation to the direction of advance / threat. The old distance and bearing inputs worked but I felt were a lot of faff and stopped me using them. I'd also given up on using fighters for the role due to the huge click fest on trying to cycle fighters in order to manage deployment time and fuel endurance. Some way to address that would be great.

[Jorgen_CAB]

Yes... there is a huge difference between a battle fleet and doomstack. A battle fleet in WW2 was made up of many elements such as task-forces, screening ships, scouts, planes etc... These fleets were usually spread out over vast distances in order to pursue and engage enemy forces while also able to support ground operations, conduct reconnaissance etc.

In the game this means you will not keep all your ships just in one spot but you will need to break it up into task-forces, screening and scouting elements. If there are several ground installation in a system you might need to divide some forces to protect them, at least to give fair warning of any incoming threats. You might need to provide support for a ground invasion while at the same time intercept an enemy fleet that jump into the system since otherwise it can bypass you and threat other systems.

You will need to provide security for your scouting elements, this might turn into skirmishing fights or you will loose your scouting elements faster than you can replace them. Same thing with screening forces might happen.

Question is how will you defend your scouting effort in order to find the enemy main battle fleet assets before they find yours. You might also have a supporting task-force that is detached from the main battle fleet that also need to be protected. Support ships often are much slower than main combat ships for example and allot more vulnerable.

If your main striking force are carriers you don't necessarily need to keep them in one spot so you might spread them out in a few task forces to increase the scouting envelope and possibility to defend the scouting forces over a bigger area. If you want to strike you can still group bombers from multiple carriers from different task-forces to do so.

The new scouting model will likely produce these results with smaller sensors being allot more powerful and useful now against both small and big ships.

[Desdinova]

World war 1 tactics aren't really applicable to Aurora because the threat environment is totally different. The main threat is standoff missiles that are usually 10-20x faster than ships. In WWII, when the Japanese surface threat had evaporated, and the main threat was from aircraft and especially kamikazes, you saw tight formations so that ships could provide mutual, overlapping AA defense.

I've experimented with screening ships in Aurora. They're useful if they meaningfully extend your detection range and are survivable. Unfortunately, a cruiser-sized scout or screen is usually not survivable because the AI likes to shoot at the closest target. For scouting, I try to give each major ship a scout fighter, like WWII cruisers would utilize floatplanes. Sending a cruiser out front to scout in the face of enemy guided missiles is suicide.

[Garfunkel]

"Doomstacks" aren't unrealistic. Concentration of force is a real military principle.

"Don't divide the fleet" is a naval truism.

You two are completely missing my point and it boggles my mind since I thought everyone who has played Aurora would have come to realize this:

Aurora VB6 forces players to stick all the ships in their TF/TG into a single point and keep them there. Doing anything else weakens your defences significantly. This is because how sensors and PD currently work. Usability of the interface plays its part too, as QuakeIV mentioned. The only reason to ever detach a ship from a doomstack was for it to take care of a cripple while the stack itself kept pursuing the enemy.

With the changes to sensors, the fixing of missile tracking bonus and the improvements to the Fleet Organization window, Aurora C# gives the impression that having escorts surround your capital ships and scouts pushed ahead and to the sides will actually be useful and improve your chances of victory, instead of being either useless busy work or actively harmful.

Doomstack is a term that describes the bad habit of strategy game designers to ignore their own game mechanics that lead to silly abuse of them, like in Civilization or Hearts of Iron or Stellaris, where doing anything else except a doomstack was to gimp yourself. I'm not talking about having one's fleet concentrated in one system, or waging an interstellar war in a single system at a time - that's perfectly fine. I'm talking specifically of the game play issue, caused by game mechanics, of having your entire fleet in a single point in space-time.

[Jorgen_CAB]

World war 1 tactics aren't really applicable to Aurora because the threat environment is totally different. The main threat is standoff missiles that are usually 10-20x faster than ships. In WWII, when the Japanese surface threat had evaporated, and the main threat was from aircraft and especially kamikazes, you saw tight formations so that ships could provide mutual, overlapping AA defense.

I've experimented with screening ships in Aurora. They're useful if they meaningfully extend your detection range and are survivable. Unfortunately, a cruiser-sized scout or screen is usually not survivable because the AI likes to shoot at the closest target. For scouting, I try to give each major ship a scout fighter, like WWII cruisers would utilize floatplanes. Sending a cruiser out front to scout in the face of enemy guided missiles is suicide.

In WW2 they did NOT put all the ships in one spot, they were organised into task-forces that could be about maybe 5-10 capital ships/cruisers or some such. And even within a task-force not all ships would be able to contribute AAA fire to each other. Task-forces could also be separated with huge distances and be hours if not days in between them in distances.

During Midway the US had two carrier groups while the Japanese also had two carrier groups and a third invasion fleet.

It is the games mechanic that in VB6 Aurora forces you to use the empire state formation almost exclusively. If you now can get real benefits from splitting a fleet up that is good from a game mechanic point of view and also more "realistic" if we look at modern fleet warfare. Since the sensor model will become more like radar on earth with more limited range (non linear) you will now also need to defend the scouting elements in some form.

I could even see reasons for splitting your main capital ships in different task-forces in order to cover more space within a system while conducting the hide and seek game which might lead to more skirmishing fights.