I am still pretty new to the game but totally not new to the genre. Probably I arrive to late to the party to voice an opinion, yet I don't see a reason to keep it hidden.
I am absolutely grateful for the changes announced with the 1.03.01 Beta
I think this is going into the right direction.- naval units that are surprised by a hidden enemy unit will no longer be reduced to 0 action points, remaining action points divided by 5 will now apply with the following exceptions:
- naval units in cruise mode will still be reduced to 0 action points.
- Subs in Silent mode will be reduced to remaining action points divided by 2.
- naval units that have engaged in combat will now have their action points reduced to remaining action points divided by 2.
- naval units can now pass through enemy naval units but may suffer a 50% chance of a 1 strength point loss for doing so.
To the current system (1.03.00), this is what puts me off:
While I absolutely understand that huge portions of any game of a grand strategic scope will have to deal with abstractions, I also can follow that in (most cases) the naval and air warfare suffer the most from these imperatives.
Probably there is no satisfying way to simulate naval encirclement or some kind of surprise factor hitting a vessel when stumbling over an unexpected enemy force.
Simulating encirclements in this game is obviously handicapped by the hex tile size and the amount of time which is represented by a game turn. It is of course not really feasible to have a naval engagement, which might have taken some hours in real life, last for 1 weeks, forced by the turn lengths. But, as already said, I understand there is no other way to do it, as the other option would mean to not have such engagements ingame at all or to reduce them to some abstract on the fly calculations "a naval engagement has happened last turn, your unit took 2.63 points damage", like itis done with convoy raiding.
Instead we have some kind of minigame inside the game, where sea hex tiles become a chess board, with naval units as playing figures and a set of rules.
So far, it is ok for me.
What I absolutely couldn't stand, was when a surface combatant lost all ActionPoints because it stumbled over some enemy. This mechanic, apparently copied from the land warfare mechanics in this game, killed my immersion abruptly. The point is, naval combat is unlike land warfare. There is no concealment the enemy could have hidden in and laid an ambush. But the game interprets any discovery of an enemy vessel as successful enemy ambush. Which felt totally wrong. You send a cruiser, you may want to do that intentionally to discover enemy vessels. After leaving home port, your cruiser stumbles over an enemy sub or a destroyer, only 3 hex tiles off of your home port. Your cruiser patrol is effectively been postponed by this encounter, for a full week, just like that.
In real life, your cruiser would probably have radioed the presence of the enemy home, afterwards proceeding with its original task.
Not so here. Your cruiser loses 20 Action Points and drops anchor, postponing its cruise for a week, by that time you had scheduled it to be some thousands of miles away in some area of operation. Not so here. You met an enemy destroyer. You don't even engage it. Yet your cruiser is doomed to linger in place, losing a full turn. Outright nonsense if you ask me.
This gets even worse when your enemy stops your vessel's movement like that by placing a cheap unit in your path. Since you can't proceed, you are lingering dead in the water. Then, during the enemy turn, they come in with loads of combatants and damage your unit severely, maybe even destroying it. You won't want to proceed into the area of operations with that damaged unit. No. You will be happy your cruiser wasn't killed and send him the 3 hex tiles back into your port for repairs. So each way your combat patrol was canceled. By a submarine you only spotted, but which made you stop in place for a week.
The changes on the 1.03.01 seem to address this. Honestly it is still too harsh in my opinion. Under no circumstances should a naval unit get its ActionPoints reduced to zero at all. Never. Reducing it partially is probably generally a good solution though.
Ambushing enemy naval units should be in the hands of a smart player, who has hunter/killer units ready in vicinity of the location where your units might end their move. To have movements end at a specific location by game mechanic, only by stumbling over a single contact, regardless of its size, is going way too far.
This is just too easy. Let the ambusher make up his mind more, where your moves might end and therefore guessing where it might be smart to place his encirclement forces. Don't let the ambusher do it by this current "road blocks" mechanic. This feels just lame and gamey and also it doesn't leave much room for a player to tactically plan a safe route for getting units somewhere without being blocked.
You can't really consider right now where your enemy might have his encirclement forces ready. Instead, the road block could be anywhere. No strategy, no fun, at all.
Maybe let my cruiser lose 2 AP upon encountering some enemy, no more. The enemy already benefits from the encounter by now knowing of my cruiser's presence and the general direction it is marching. My enemy will also be able to see, in which direction my cruiser continues the march after the encounter. Now it is a matter of my enemy's skill to estimate where my cruiser reached in this turn when reaching zero APs. Then he can draw his forces to that area and try to encircle me. That would be indeed an ambush I could accept. Right now it is just lame and gamey and killing immersion big time. And it doesn't require much tactic skill on my enemy's side.
Meeting an enemy vessel should never cut ActionPoints to zero. Keep in mind that meeting enemy vessels at sea is the only purpose of your Navy. They won't drop anchor. They will engage or they will continue their patrol, avoiding engagement.
Avoiding enemy engagement might cost Action Points, but only if it is reasonable to assume that some otherwise unnecessary maneuvering is necessary. There is no way a destroyer could be blocked by a single battleship. The destroyer would notice the battleship from a long range and simply pass it in a safe distance. The much slower battleship has no chance of inflicting any inconvenience. So this encounter shouldn't cost the destroyer more action points than it will need to circumnavigate the hex tile in which the enemy battleship is located.
