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In previous games(usually playing as Germany), my naval bombers regularly wiped out British naval units. In my current game, my naval bombers regularly engage enemy fleets, but inflicct virtually no damage. Any suggestions as to where I may have gone wrong? I've definitely researched the strategy-techs etc. for 1940/41, so am at a loss.

Secondly, I seem to be encountering the usual problems with my escort-fighter brigades. I've included the "allowed_brigades = escort" line at the beginning of the CAS/Naval bomber/tactical bomber/strategic bomber files in the units subfolder of the modCORE2 directory, but, while most of my escort-fighter brigades were (after a long while) able to be distributed to relevant air-units, I still have two escort-fighter brigades left over, and and also have several CAS air-units(and all my naval bomber units) which won't allow any brigades to be added to them. In previous games, all my naval bomber units were able to have the escort-fighter brigades added to them - perhaps that would explain why the naval bombers in my current game are so useless in bombing enemy naval units.

Anyway, could someone please explain under exactly what circumstances each specific type of brigade(at which stage of upgrade) can be added on to which specific type of land, air or naval unit? I pretty much gave up on adding any land-brigades, when I first played the CORE game as Turkey, preciseyly because of the colossal problems caused by having dozens of newly-produced briages in my force-pool adding heavily to my TC costs, because they couldn't be added on to my land-units.
 
I don't have a good answer for your first question, since so many factors play parts (your doctrines, enemy doctrines, weather, day/night, etc). Perhaps the enemy fleets are larger than in your previous game?

As for the Escorts problem - are those aircraft grouped in units of four? If so, it may not be possible to distribute Escorts to them from the Deployment button. Try going to the bomber in question and click the Attach Brigade button there, if you haven't already, and see if that works. I encountered this problem very early in Doomsday (vanilla), but I don't know if it was fixed.

But it sounds strange that you can't attach Brigades to land units... perhaps you didn't produce the ones suitable to the units in question? I may be mistaken, but perhaps Self-propelled ones cannot be attached to non-motorized units?
 
Loerst said:
Or it might be, that your units are not on your national territory. Only there you could equip them with a brigade.
Click to expand...


AARGGHHH!! I had no clue that you had to do this. I'd naturally assumed that brigades could be added on anywhere on the map, as they were not real units, just add-ons. So, I take it only national-core provinces would do, as locations, for adding any type of brigade? - I've certainly not been able to assign any escort-brigades to any TAC/Naval bombers etc. when they were in German-controlled provinces in France(and I tried assigning brigades by province as well as onto individual air-units).

Thanks. You may have saved my game!
 
Looks like I was being premature. I just tried to attach an escort-fighter brigade to a naval bomber unit I'd transferred to one of my national core provinces in Germany, and it failed to work. The naval bomber was at full strength and organisation, and I'd made sure to include the "allowed_brigades = escort" command to be put into the naval bomber unit files in t he modCORE2 directory.
 
This is a DD issue and my understanding of it is a little dated so don't take it as gospel, but:

For brigading purposes, the DD map is divided into zones. Brigades produced in a given zone (i.e. the one containing your home territory) can be freely attached to appropriate units within that zone, but not to units in a different zone. To brigade units in a different zone it seems that you either have to transport them back to your home zone and do it there, or ferry the brigade (attached to an appropriate unit) to the new zone, detach it there from its host, and reattach it to the desired unit after a short 'recovery' period.

For the same reason, a brigade detached from a unit in a zone beyond your home territory will remain available for attachment in that zone, but not for attachment anywhere else (including your home territory).

At least that's how it used to work. I'm not sure if the details changed with the most recent update so it's probably (make that definitely) worth checking on the Wiki.
 
This all seems ridiculously convoluted. I hope that the next DD 1.3 patch or a future CORE patch make it much easier to add brigades to units. At the moment they are a real pain.

Turned out that I'd made a basic error in that I'd included an extra line from the music file in the naval bomber unit file, along with the "allowed_brigades = escort" file. Now brigades are able to be transferred to my naval bomber units, so that's sorted. Unfortunately, I still have problems with destroying enemy fleets with my NAV bombers, even when the enemy naval units have either very low strength and/or very low organisation levels. The only explanation I can think of is that the UK is automatically retreating all naval units to port as soon as they encounter any planes, given that fights are always so short(lasting a fraction of a second or so), and the fact that they're always in a sea-zone next to a British port. Perhaps there might be a difference if I targetted all my NAV bombers on the North Atlantic and the zones east of it towards the British Isles, so as to catch all retreating units.

This game certainly has turned out very odd. In previous games, my NAV bombers ruled supreme from 1940 onwards, destroying 3-4 British naval units every day or two of game-time. Now the best they've managed is to kill 3-4 Dutch(!) naval units in three years. On the other hand, my subs in the current game, are from time to time eliminating Allied naval units with usually only minimal losses, while "convoy-raiding" - whereas in previous games, they were constantly getting slaughtered as I'd put them on "naval combat patrol" instead. I even had one absurd sea-battle, just yesterday, where the mostly British naval forces lost as many as 40 ships, while my (12!)-strong submarine-force lost just one unit.
 
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CromCruachan said:
This all seems ridiculously convoluted. I hope that the next DD 1.3 patch or a future CORE patch make it much easier to add brigades to units. At the moment they are a real pain.

Turned out that I'd made a basic error in that I'd included an extra line from the music file in the naval bomber unit file, along with the "allowed_brigades = escort" file. Now brigades are able to be transferred to my naval bomber units, so that's sorted. Unfortunately, I still have problems with destroying enemy fleets with my NAV bombers, even when the enemy naval units have either very low strength and/or very low organisation levels. The only explanation I can think of is that the UK is automatically retreating all naval units to port as soon as they encounter any planes, given that fights are always so short(lasting a fraction of a second or so), and the fact that they're always in a sea-zone next to a British port. Perhaps there might be a difference if I targetted all my NAV bombers on the North Atlantic and the zones east of it towards the British Isles, so as to catch all retreating units.

This game certainly has turned out very odd. In previous games, my NAV bombers ruled supreme from 1940 onwards, destroying 3-4 British naval units every day or two of game-time. Now the best they've managed is to kill 3-4 Dutch(!) naval units in three years. On the other hand, my subs in the current game, are from time to time eliminating Allied naval units with usually only minimal losses, while "convoy-raiding" - whereas in previous games, they were constantly getting slaughtered as I'd put them on "naval combat patrol" instead. I even had one absurd sea-battle, just yesterday, where the mostly British naval forces lost as many as 40 ships, while my (12!)-strong submarine-force lost just one unit.
Click to expand...
With the naval changes of 0.30 I do think we'll just sit this one out, to be honest...
 
I'm amazed by your sub result, Crom. In my view one of the decided advances in CORE has been the reduction of sub org so that they generally can't remain in battle with surface fleets long enough to do much damage. I'd love to see a detailed, round by round, account of the encounter including force composition.

Any chance you can replay it from a save and enlighten me as to how it all went down?
 
This game certainly has turned out very odd. In previous games, my NAV bombers ruled supreme from 1940 onwards, destroying 3-4 British naval units every day or two of game-time. Now the best they've managed is to kill 3-4 Dutch(!) naval units in three years. On the other hand, my subs in the current game, are from time to time eliminating Allied naval units with usually only minimal losses, while "convoy-raiding" - whereas in previous games, they were constantly getting slaughtered as I'd put them on "naval combat patrol" instead. I even had one absurd sea-battle, just yesterday, where the mostly British naval forces lost as many as 40 ships, while my (12!)-strong submarine-force lost just one unit.
Click to expand...

This sounds about par the course, at the moment. Subs are rather too effective in naval actions, and not good enough in convoy raiding, at last count. Naval bombers were (very deliberately) reduced in power - the units you are now seeing are more like 20-25 planes.. not the 100 plane units of vanilla. Do not expect to win naval supremacy trough cheap NAV units - if you want to sink ships, you will probably have to use TAC bombers - NAV units are more for spotting and recon now. Of course.. you could always try ships to defeat a navy .. radical, I know.. lol. NAV units should be quite good vs subs, but not too much else now.

Tim
 
Epaminondas said:
I'm amazed by your sub result, Crom. In my view one of the decided advances in CORE has been the reduction of sub org so that they generally can't remain in battle with surface fleets long enough to do much damage. I'd love to see a detailed, round by round, account of the encounter including force composition.

Any chance you can replay it from a save and enlighten me as to how it all went down?
Click to expand...

I'm afraid not it's not really reproducible. It was a rather unusual battle, and I didn't save just before it - I have a rather ancient computer, in terms of RAM memory so I try to avoid saving the game too often - besides the game automatically saves every month which is enough for me.

Incidentally, I think I realise now why my NAV bombers were so ineffectual in this particular game. I hadn't bothered to research the early-war/mid-war strategic bomber techs, as I'd read somewhere on a Paradox forum that I should instead concentrate on other aircraft and research V1s/V2s and other missiles instead. Anyway, I only found out that I'd missed it out when Japan gave me the blueprint for "Early NAV" bombers - I'd already managed to research the midwar NAV-bomber tech. Anyway, things seem to be improving as I've managed to sink a few ships here and there with my horde of NAVs. Interestingly, I notice that my subs seem to becoming much better at sinking naval units(not transports) while on convoy-duty, but are increasingly hopeless at fighting enemy naval units while on "naval interdiction" or " naval combat patrol", compared to the first four years of the war.

As for the comment on building a navy, it takes years for Germany to build up a sufficient force. Even though I deliberately chose to keep my original navy-builds in 1936-1939 and not go for the increased industrial efficiency option with that event at the start of the game, by the time I've researched all relevant naval techs it'll be 1947 or thereabouts before I can build up a serious carrier-force to help take out the US, by which time Berlin would get nuked, even with the present occupation of the UK/SU/India etc. Ah well, I suppose I could just build a hundred TAC bombers, that should do the trick.
 
HistoryMan said:
This sounds about par the course, at the moment. Subs are rather too effective in naval actions, and not good enough in convoy raiding, at last count. Naval bombers were (very deliberately) reduced in power - the units you are now seeing are more like 20-25 planes.. not the 100 plane units of vanilla. Do not expect to win naval supremacy trough cheap NAV units - if you want to sink ships, you will probably have to use TAC bombers - NAV units are more for spotting and recon now. Of course.. you could always try ships to defeat a navy .. radical, I know.. lol. NAV units should be quite good vs subs, but not too much else now.

Tim
Click to expand...
I've actually found subs to be much improved in CORE - as Germany they have been fairly effective against convoys, but will often have their ass handed to them in any long-ish engagement with naval units - just as it should be. Occasionally my wolf packs (none larger than 12 at the moment) will sink an enemy DD or CL, but that's about it. The only strange encounter I had was a two-month-long naval battle between 12 of my subs against about half the USN - they had about 135 ships involved at some point. I think their carriers were engaging me at long range, but with little effect - my subs did not take any org or strength loss in the whole two months, nor did I sink any Allied ships. A useful way to tie up their navy, but not very exciting . . .
 
It just occurred to me that, historically, torpedo-planes were actually extremely effective against ships in World War II. For example, the Bismarck was famously sunk by a torpedo plane. So, I reckon NAVs should retain some destructive power and not just function mainly as scouts.
 
Well, no. The Bismarck had its rudder jammed as a result of a hit from an airborne torpedo, but its sinking took a lot more than that.

More importantly, as HistoryMan points out, NAVs in CORE aren't that kind of torpedo bomber. They're more like your FW 200 - long range recce units with some offensive capability. The sort of torpedo bombers that engaged the Bismarck and helped sink the Yamato are part of the CAG units run off aircraft carriers.
 
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