[Consim-l] Analysis of Coral Sea

[Mike NotSpecified]

I'm leaving for vacation and will respond more thourghly when I get back. 
 Great discussion! - Mike


On Sun, 19 Nov 2006 03:30:36 +1030 (CST)
  Markus Stumptner <mst at cs.unisa.edu.au> wrote:
> On Thu, 16 Nov 2006, Mike NotSpecified wrote:
>> I have been playing a lot of games on Midway, including Smithsonian Midway, 
>> Victory at Midway and CV.  The first two use large groups of planes, which 
>>may 
>> or may not be squadrons I don't remember exactly.  
> 
> They're typically half-squadrons; squadrons were typically 16 or 18 
> planes. Since they both have step losses, one step loss is roughly 
> equivalent to a quarter squadron.
> 
>> CV uses a counter for every 
>> three planes which makes it much more interesting in my opinion.  A very 
>>real 
>> limitation in the first two game is you just can't run very many different 
>> missions, you are pretty much committed to all or nothing missions because 
>> each carrier may only have 4 or 5 air counters.
> 
> I don't really agree with that "because".  First, the number is not quite
> right since in VaM a typical US carrier has 9-10 counters on board. But
> even with 4-5, the issue would IMO not be the low number of counters, it
> would be that some tradeoffs in the different types of strikes are not
> made explicit. That said, both have a crude level of tradeoffs in place 
> since you get to choose how many fighters you launch and how many you 
> leave at home, but of course there are more subtle relationships.
> 
> I think these *can* be made explicit, even at this lower level of detail.  
> In fact you're obviously not committed to an all or nothing mission in a
> game if you have as little as 2 counters per carrier. :-)
> 
> Or three, if you include the ability to separate out CAP.
> 
>>  CV gives you a lot more 
>> flexibility and thus does a better job of holding my attention.  
> 
> That's a different issue. Here we're talking about a gamer who likes to
> use lots of units, which is perfectly fine - I see the appeal of Flat Top
> or CV or Carrier Battles (which is more detailed and more historical than
> both of them) myself.  But that's a different question from both quality
> of analysis and the style of historical operations. Historically, strikes
> were not launched at the level of FT air factors, they were launched at
> the level of squadrons (or simply in terms of what was available).  
> 
>Furthermore, even Flat Top/CV only encapsulates the detail of these
> decisions in terms of its minimum/normal/maximum launch factors. If you
> really want to explore these issues, the game to go to is Victory Games'
> _Carrier_, a solo game that has 20-minute air impulses and as a result has
> much more detailed plane handling than even FT/CV. *There* you can see
> what a "maximum launch" in FT/CV means - having half the strike in the air
> burning fuel while the rest is brought on deck, so that they both can
> progress (with accordingly less range for the whole strike package)  to
> their joint target.
> 
>> A second thing that struck me was that after stripping away all the
>> acadmeic language, at heart what these guys are reporting is not all
>> that sophisticated.  Or maybe I should say not a lot different from some
>> of the games I've been playing, which might suggest that our games are
>> fairly reasonable models in their own right.  
> 
> They are fairly reasonable. The article cites Hughes' book on fleet
> tactics, which actually manages to achieve a decent level of analysis of
> the WW2 battles by looking at strikes in terms of full carrier deckloads.  
> (Sometimes in terms of half loads where small carriers are concerned.)
> 
> Doing average case analysis for the various games' combat models is not so
> difficult, and some of them (in particular FT/CV) have been played a lot.  
> People have done some analysis in the past; FT/CV are typically criticised
> for having a too narrow spread of possible loss results (and with rather
> low loss rates).  The combat models of Rising Sun Simulation's Carrier
> Battles were purposely built to fix the problems in the FT/CV model and
> are quite a bit more varied and bloody in their outcomes, though not as
> much as those of the Smithsonian games. (The Victory at Midway model, by
> the way, is a rather good approximation of the Carrier Battles model's
> predictions - Ben Knight obviously did his homework.)
> 
>> Last thing.  I built a program to emulate the combat model in Smithsonian 
>> Midway.  So far I've only built it to capture the interaction of the CAP 
>>with 
>> different ratios of escorts to bombers. At this point I can run it and say 
>>how 
>> many bombers make it through to attack the ships and what happened to the 
>> fighters on both CAP and Escort.  My eventual goal is to run it all the way 
>> through AA fire, bombing and results, and then make it all with enough 
>> variables that I can determine the likely results from different numbers of 
>> aircraft, ratios of fighters to bombers, composition of the task force etc.
> 
> Very interesting, what did you write it in?  It would be interesting to
> see the outcomes, since anything except average outcomes was rather hard
> to compute analytically, given its competitive dice system.
> 
> Markus
> 
> Last 3 games played: Air Cav, Borodino '41, Borodino (Eagles of the Empire)
> --------------- http://www.dbai.tuwien.ac.at/user/mst/games/ ---------------
> "Bakayaro! Bakayaro!"  ("Stupid Bastards!  Stupid Bastards!") -- Admiral 
> Aritomo Goto's last words to his staff, October 11, 1942
> 
> 
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