[Consim-l] Analysis of Coral Sea

[Mike NotSpecified]

Markus makes lots of good points, as usual!

My combat model is written for MS SQL as that is the program where I had a 
real (paying) need to learn about generating random numbers.  Since the last 
week was enforced absence from computers and games I had lots of time to think 
about how to improve it for modeling CV's combat engine and as soon as 
possible I will do so and share the results.  I could probably aso do it in 
Excel which might make it more accesiable for most gamers.  Let me add this to 
my project list.

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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