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Werad

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Jan 27, 2021
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I have a quick question about the fleet. How, if at all, does positioning work? I'm testing various fleet configurations on the Italians, and the best way to sink them is to have one large fleet with all the ships, 154 in total. It seems like I'm not getting any negative modifiers for having too many ships.
 
And also attack values, so having bad positioning can be quite bad. You can check the value in effect in battle as a tooltip per side.

The problem is, that the value ia capped at -75% but your admiral with superior tactican gives +25% and with 4 stats in maneuvring you get another +10%.

Do at maximum you are hit with a -40% positioning modifier with a good admiral, no matter how big your fleet is.
Then your ships still bring their HP, even if their attack is halfed, so you are being stronger in battle because of that. But your attack is only halfed at -100% positioning. At -40% you only get -20% attack.

So currently it is always better to bring more ships.

In IHMP mod we drastically increased the values from the defines, so a modern fleet of 30x 1940 ships could defeat 80x older ships, although it was still a bloody battle on both sides.
 
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Positioning is a meme stat, first time I seriously played Italy, I thought it was important, sent a small battle fleet of 40 ships to their graves against a 200+ doomstack by France and U.K. After that, only every big navy stack. (and dont fight naval battles until France is out of the war!)

And also attack values, so having bad positioning can be quite bad. You can check the value in effect in battle as a tooltip per side.

The problem is, that the value ia capped at -75% but your admiral with superior tactican gives +25% and with 4 stats in maneuvring you get another +10%.
Doesn't the positioning penalty go away the further the battle goes along too? Positioning is a worthless stat
 
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Doesn't the positioning penalty go away the further the battle goes along too? Positioning is a worthless stat
I wouldn't go so far as this, positioning isn't worthless but it is very true that currently the addition of more ships to your fleet is more beneficial than the increase disadvantage of poorer positioning. This does mean that the so called doomstack is an optimal strategy. However, I would contend that this is historically realistic and therefore isn't, in itself, a bad design decision in the game.

The issue with doomstacks is, I believe, more to do with the limited use of naval forces. In practice I've never really wanted to use my navy to do anything other than convoy warfare of amphibious landings. It doesn't do much else in the game. Convoy warfare is effectively a different sub-game if it involves submarines and leaves you with an objective of being able to dominate the enemy fleet to get naval superiority. The new naval rules that are on the way look like they will change things a bit but I'm still concerned that there are too few things you can do with naval forces. The game really doesn't offer a decent simulation, for example, of the naval aspects of the Solomon campaign.

So, sticking to the subject, positioning - not worthless but more ships is better.
 
I wouldn't go so far as this, positioning isn't worthless but it is very true that currently the addition of more ships to your fleet is more beneficial than the increase disadvantage of poorer positioning.
semantics
northkoreangeneralsbelik.png

/s
 
Given the trait rack breaks with 7 traits already, I'm afraid to even think how abysmal it might look in your case outside of the battle. The UI should probably just give up and replace it with asterisk :)

 
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Given the trait rack breaks with 7 traits already, I'm afraid to even think how abysmal it might look in your case outside of the battle. The UI should probably just give up and replace it with asterisk :)

20250727011019_1.jpg
 
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