Question about landing craft armo(u)r

[PvtJoker]

Sorry if this is has been discussed before, but I couldn't find anything with the search engine:

From the MobhackWW2 Guide:

Ship Armour:

A note on boat "armour" . . . if you do not give them top armour -- no matter what size they are a single 50mm mortar can sink them. At least a 1 top armour for small rivercraft, and 2 or more for larger craft. Same for the side armour -- if you want an MG to sink a 60-ton ship with a single burst . . . give it 1 side armour. 2 is the playable minimum for rivercraft, more for larger craft.

Yet the official OOB files do not have top armor for many landing craft type vehicles, which means that they are easy to sink with even light indirect fire weapons. Many of them also have only the minimum 2 of hull front armor, which means that sinking landing craft with something like 37mm AT guns is quite easy. Is this by design or omission?

This is not so much of an issue with human players, who can most of the time anticipate such tactics (like a wall of AT guns), but it makes AI landing attempts really easy to stop in generated scenarios. The unrestricted line of sight to the sea on beach landing scenarios means that the AI will impale itself on the defenses more thoroughly than is even possible on land.

So my suggestion is to increase the front armor of landing craft to at least 3 or more and give them the top armor, although historically such craft of course mostly were open topped and had very little or no armor. A "proper" solution could be to widen the survivability scale to better reflect the fact that vessels larger than a rowing boat are actually not very easy to sink, but I suppose that would require a major coding effort.

Incidentally, I heard the programmers at SSI followed this principle:

[DRG]

It's a no win game with landing craft and ships. If we give them the real amour values the accuracy freaks want they can be sunk easily and if we give them values that allow them to survive "realistically" and function "normally" within the framework of the code we get complaints the armour values are too high. If you dig through the forums you can find numerous examples especialy when LVTs are involved. I think the expectation is if we are forced to use real armour values we'll eventually adjust the code....but it's not always that simple.


I had forgotten all about the write up about top armour values. It's probably 15 years old. It's all on the ever growing list to investigate but as there has been, once again, such enthusiasm for error reporting I seriously doubt everything people want will get done before the next patch....but we'll see what we can do. One day I would like to get back to improving the actual game instead of mired in the endless ( and I mean endless.....) OOB massagefests that every year brings.

However, that said, the issue about the MOBHack guide info will be investigated

[PvtJoker]

Originally Posted by DRG

One day I would like to get back to improving the actual game instead of mired in the endless ( and I mean endless.....) OOB massagefests that every year brings.

However, that said, the issue about the MOBHack guide info will be investigated

Thank you. Like I wrote, the landing craft issue is not really that big, since beach landings are not very common in long campaigns -- well, at least not unless you play Japanese or USMC.

I am all for improving the game and leaving the OOB issues for later, but perhaps you should delegate more of that work for someone else. There seems to be plenty of skilled OOB modders around and surely somebody would be willing to share some of the "official" OOB development responsibility on a voluntary basis.

[DRG]

We've been down that road, it's why we do OOB work the way we do it now. The BMP-2M issues recently brought up on the MBT forum come from copying the OOB of a "reliable source". That said we do exactly as you suggested on a very limited basis with a couple of the OOB's only because we haven't been burned by them....yet.

The thing is, OOB work is another no win game. The stock example I use is the Tiger 1. You would think that after all this time and the popularity of that vehicle there would be one universal set of stats but that is not the case and given the number of units and weapons and formations this game models it's a given that SOMEONE is going to find some source somewhere that when converted to usable game numbers disagrees with what we have and sometimes, when buried in "corrections" and given we've been doing this for 15 years now it's hard not to think that 5 years from now someone else is going to show up with a "new" source that shows the info we are putting in now is inaccurate and the frustrating part is... yes, I WOULD like the OOB's to be 100% accurate but minor corrections , and most now are minor corrections but there are the occasional doozies that are caught..... minor corrections don't change how the overall game plays at all. If the game plays different now than it did 5 years ago it's due to code changes not OOB tweaks

[Imp]

On landing craft & just from memory I thought most had armour 4 not 2 & I think it works fairly well.
If it gets hit by something decent it sinks but have often had several damage results & still landed or decided to postpone or try elsewhere.
Sure they sink a bit quick but if its cargo is a soft target & its just been penetrated that's a confined space any survivors would probably not be battle capable after witnessing the carnage so in game terms its game over unit destroyed. Certainly if its hit by indirect fire I would not like to see the carnage resulting from HE going off in an enclosed space.

[Imp]

Don't know if this would work as an idea to make boats more expensive. Working on the rational waterline hits are more dangerous than superstructure hits.

Give them a higher game mechanic (invisible turret) armour rating.

This effectively means they are still easy to hit due to size but unless its something decent hitting them it will be a no effect result.

[PvtJoker]

Originally Posted by Imp

Don't know if this would work as an idea to make boats more expensive. Working on the rational waterline hits are more dangerous than superstructure hits.

Give them a higher game mechanic (invisible turret) armour rating.

This effectively means they are still easy to hit due to size but unless its something decent hitting them it will be a no effect result.

This seems like a good idea. Not perfect, but it would be an improvement over the current situation.

About the actual armor ratings; this is from USMC (SPOB13):
(All unit class 41 Landing Barge)

075 - LCVP - armor 2 all-round except top 0
080 - LCP(R) - armor 2 all-round except top 0
112 - LCM - armor 2 all-round except top 0
247 - Barge - armor 4(!) all-round except top 0
252 - LCA 50 - armor 2 all-round except top 0
253 - LCA 30 - armor 2 all-round except top 0

So yes, the generic landing barge (the image of which appears to be the LCVP) does have more armor than the historical US landing crafts.

By the way, the LCA was a British design which was in limited use by the US Army, but I don't know if it was used by the USMC. Currently they have a radio code 92, perhaps that should be 91. Historically the LCA had more armor that the US landing crafts, which had unarmored hulls and only the MG positions were protected by armored bulkheads.

[Imp]

Well glad you understood my last comment, expensive? What happens when your holding a conversation with several people at the same time.
The other way would be to give ship quasi advanced ERA so they stand a chance of taking a no effective damage hit, say 3-6 based on size.

[PvtJoker]

Originally Posted by Imp

Well glad you understood my last comment, expensive? What happens when your holding a conversation with several people at the same time.
The other way would be to give ship quasi advanced ERA so they stand a chance of taking a no effective damage hit, say 3-6 based on size.

I didn't even notice the wrong word there...

Does heavy ERA work against HE shells in the current game engine? I haven't played MBT much in recent years. I am asking this because making HE shells ineffective would be a bad thing. In real life HE shells from 57mm upwards were highly effective against small unarmored vessels. That's also one thing against increasing the general armor ratings too much, since most coastal guns* do not seem to have AP ammo at all in the current OOBs. Nevertheless, I think your invisible turret idea would still work well enough.

* Well, of course historically you would try to pick your landing site so that you would not face coastal guns directly or failing that, make a maximum effort to suppress them. The first Japanese landing attempt on Wake Island in December 1941 is a good example on what happens if you're facing active coastal guns.