Forced Detachment

[Admiral Bismarck]

So recently I was playing and I just found out that sometimes when ships stop being the flagship of the fleet, this seemed to happen take x amount of DMG. This has screwed with some battles of mine as the ship can hit other vessels and make them stop, thus more easily hit.

 

I was wondering if there will be settings for this and whether you'll be able to allow a ship to break formation without detaching her

[Jatzi]

1 hour ago, Admiral Bismarck said:

So recently I was playing and I just found out that sometimes when ships stop being the flagship of the fleet, this seemed to happen take x amount of DMG. This has screwed with some battles of mine as the ship can hit other vessels and make them stop, thus more easily hit.

 

I was wondering if there will be settings for this and whether you'll be able to allow a ship to break formation without detaching her

So generally afaik ships fall out of line when they take engine hits and can't maintain the speed of the whole formation. Since everything likes to focus fire right now, which is a bad thing in naval combat and I hope that changes, the flagship is usually the first to take enough dmg to make it lose speed and thus it falls out of line. I hope in the future they automatically detach themselves when this happens so as to not mess up the formation or anything as in RTW. Of course you can reattach it if you want afterwards. I'm sure if it's a ship in the rear it'll lose speed and slowly fall back from the main formation unless you drop the speed of it. Eventually it will get so far that it automatically detaches or again as in RTW it asks you if you want to slow down the formation or have the ship be detached. 

In RTW this can happen from main tower hits as well and I wonder if that's the case here. I try to armor my conning tower pretty well, equal or better than my turrets since the debuff from a destroyed bridge is massive, and so I rarely see it happen. Also despite the superstructure being huge I actually don't think conning tower hits are all that common

[Norbert Sattler]

What the ships are trying to do is take the ship out of it's current position in the line, loop around and become the rear-most ship. If it's the leader, then the second ship will take the lead.
In principle that is fine, but the problem is that most often the following ships will evade the slowed ship by chaning the course into the same direciton in which the damaged ship is making it's loop, resulting in both ships veering widely off course, because the slow ship is now in front of the fast ship, blocking it and at the same time the fast ship is blocking the slow ships attempted loop to the back of the line.

They would just need to make sure that the AI of the runner-up evades into the different direciton than the (former) lead ship tries to fall out of the formation.

[Jatzi]

If you keep your formation normal rather than tight, it's tempting to have it tight since you get an accuracy bonus, than it shouldn't be a huge issue. I don't see tons of issues with it if I detach the ship falling out of line and just have it move forward and back rather than turning around entirely. I think if any ship that isn't the rearmost in the formation takes a hit in speed and is forced to fall out of line than it should automatically be detached. Also don't keep escorts super close to your main battle line. That's just good practice since friendly fire is a thing and enemy fire can hit ships that aren't being targeted. It also helps to detect torpedoes if you have your escorts closer to the enemy although right now the AI likes to focus fire DD's cuz they're easy to kill.

Of course the auto-collision stuff needs to be reworked I think. At the very least it needs to be reduced big time and not to work against the AI. I tried to ram a ship once in a custom battle and the game just wouldn't let me. 

Edited June 4, 2020 by Jatzi

[Latur Husky]

The formations work quite realistically at the moment to be fair. There are some issues with how smart decisions are being taken by your ships at times, but in reality similar mistakes happened.

So if you see it happening, my advice is to select the ship and detach it from the formation manually or deal with consequences of bad AI decisions.

Edited June 4, 2020 by Latur Husky

[Norbert Sattler]

Depending on the speed of the ships, the distance and the rudder shift time (as well as game-speed) it can sometimes be too late by the time you see it.