Soviet CIWS Balance?

[McWallerson]

Set up a scenario with a Nimitz class against a Soviet task force of a Slava, Sovremeny, and Udaloy.

Full flight of A7s launch harpoons, so 16 total against Slava and Sovremeny, 12 against Udaloy. Plus 2 prowlers jamming them. Slava gets hit and sinks, but the other two CIWS and guns shoot down every single harpoon against them?

Might need to try again and see if it was a fluke, but seems like ciws and guns are shooting down an incredibly optimistic number of missiles.

[FartingFox]

In general I have noticed that soviet missile defense seems stronger. I have no proof just observations.

[Bambi]

a volley of about 12 missiles penetrated a battlegroup nicely for me, and sank several ships. I think it's kinda random how good the CIWS is.
It's important to coordinate fire so that missiles all arrive roughly at the same time to actually overwhelm the defense though

[fja12856]

I agree there seems to be a bias favoring the Soviet/Russian CIWS missile defenses.

[starship_trooper]

Originally posted by McWallerson:

Full flight of A7s launch harpoons, so 16 total against Slava and Sovremeny, 12 against Udaloy. Plus 2 prowlers jamming them. Slava gets hit and sinks, but the other two CIWS and guns shoot down every single harpoon against them?

Might need to try again and see if it was a fluke, but seems like ciws and guns are shooting down an incredibly optimistic number of missiles.

Sounds kinda weird. Are you sure it was the AAA and not the Slava's SAMs (before she got hit) that took out the majority of those Harpoons?

[McWallerson]

Originally posted by Bambi:

a volley of about 12 missiles penetrated a battlegroup nicely for me, and sank several ships. I think it's kinda random how good the CIWS is.
It's important to coordinate fire so that missiles all arrive roughly at the same time to actually overwhelm the defense though

They were arriving at the same time. I watched as around 6-8 harpoons rose up for the final attack just to all get obliterated by CIWS from a single ship. It was crazy.

[Wiz33]

I have no idea where the Dev got that the Harpoon 1a flies at 150ft. No Harpoon ever produced flies that high. Even with the mass of AK-630 and SA-N-4/9. The soviet are not confident that they can intercept the Harpoon, that's why they pack their later ships with them while US and NATO figures that they cam do it with 1 or 2 CIWS since none of the Soviet ASM, SSM are true sea skimmers.

[McWallerson]

Originally posted by starship_trooper:

Originally posted by McWallerson:

Full flight of A7s launch harpoons, so 16 total against Slava and Sovremeny, 12 against Udaloy. Plus 2 prowlers jamming them. Slava gets hit and sinks, but the other two CIWS and guns shoot down every single harpoon against them?

Might need to try again and see if it was a fluke, but seems like ciws and guns are shooting down an incredibly optimistic number of missiles.

Sounds kinda weird. Are you sure it was the AAA and not the Slava's SAMs (before she got hit) that took out the majority of those Harpoons?

Pretty sure. Event log was saying guns or ciws destroyed them, and the jamming meant hardly any missile launches from the ships.

[Redeye 43]

Difficulty settings have major influences on player and enemy performance. Try the same scenario with you as the USSR and the enemy as USA, or turn the difficulty down.

I was wrong. Realistic is true balance, everything else just makes the game progressively easier for the player side.

[whatdoesthisbuttondo?]

I've tested this fairly extensively so far, all the non-missile intercept methods the soviet side has are pretty ineffective against the Harpoon.

The dual-purpose naval guns tend towards zero intercept chance, doesn't matter the caliber.

The AK-320 and AK-630 do a bit better, but still not anywhere near effective, hard to put an exact number as I didn't write down every test run, but probably in the ballpark of 5% intercept chance.

Many ships have fairly good coverage though, e.g. two AK-630 unmasked no matter the approach vector.

If you have a larger group of ships, missile defenses can be fairly effective, especially the SA-N-9 can save your skin as it can respond fairly quickly to missiles that got past your longer-range missile systems.

Generally speaking, the numerous shorter-range SAMs their ships tend to mount will give you somewhat of an advantage when letting the AI handle air defense, since those are typically ready to fire when the longer-range missiles failed and something got through, basically a built-in reserve for immediate threats to your ships that the AI can't waste with bad decision making.

[McWallerson]

Replayed again. There might be a glitch where the harpoons just disappear randomly. 52 harpoons all arriving at once should be able to take out the task force. Or they’re flying so close that one explosion just takes them all out? Watching the Soviet task force and didn’t see a single SAM launch due to the jamming. So it’s just their guns/ciws defending.

The event log shows the Slava ciws downing 2 harpoons, the Udaloy ciws shooting 1, and 2 harpoon hits on the Slava. And that’s it, the rest of the harpoons just vanished, making me think this is a glitch.

[BlubbOfDeath]

Originally posted by McWallerson:

Replayed again. There might be a glitch where the harpoons just disappear randomly. 52 harpoons all arriving at once should be able to take out the task force. Or they’re flying so close that one explosion just takes them all out? Watching the Soviet task force and didn’t see a single SAM launch due to the jamming. So it’s just their guns/ciws defending.

You might have fired the Harpoons at max range.
That oddly seems they are self detonating in the final approach when they would pop up and come down because then they would travel slightly more than 65 nm. so don't fire at max range, more at 64-63 nm and they should reach the target.

[McWallerson]

Originally posted by BlubbOfDeath:

Originally posted by McWallerson:

Replayed again. There might be a glitch where the harpoons just disappear randomly. 52 harpoons all arriving at once should be able to take out the task force. Or they’re flying so close that one explosion just takes them all out? Watching the Soviet task force and didn’t see a single SAM launch due to the jamming. So it’s just their guns/ciws defending.

You might have fired the Harpoons at max range.
That oddly seems they are self detonating in the final approach when they would pop up and come down because then they would travel slightly more than 65 nm. so don't fire at max range, more at 64-63 nm and they should reach the target.

That might be it. I’ve tried a similar scenario just with planes, and it seems like it’s a combo of Soviet CIWS being too effective and the Harpoons just self deleting.

[McWallerson]

Originally posted by BlubbOfDeath:

Originally posted by McWallerson:

Replayed again. There might be a glitch where the harpoons just disappear randomly. 52 harpoons all arriving at once should be able to take out the task force. Or they’re flying so close that one explosion just takes them all out? Watching the Soviet task force and didn’t see a single SAM launch due to the jamming. So it’s just their guns/ciws defending.

You might have fired the Harpoons at max range.
That oddly seems they are self detonating in the final approach when they would pop up and come down because then they would travel slightly more than 65 nm. so don't fire at max range, more at 64-63 nm and they should reach the target.

I think this is the answer. I moved the planes 60 miles out before ordering them to fire and only about 3-4 missiles were stopped by CIWS/Guns. The rest slammed into each ship. Awesome sight to see 10 harpoons hitting a ship in rapid succession.

[Julhelm]

Originally posted by Wiz33:

I have no idea where the Dev got that the Harpoon 1a flies at 150ft. No Harpoon ever produced flies that high. Even with the mass of AK-360 and SA-N-4/9. The soviet are not confident that they can intercept the Harpoon, that's why they pack there later ships with them while US and NATO figures that they cam do it with 1 or 2 CIWS since none of the Soviet ASM, SSM are true sea skimmers.

It doesn't. They're all set to cruise at 20ft.

[Julhelm]

Originally posted by McWallerson:

Set up a scenario with a Nimitz class against a Soviet task force of a Slava, Sovremeny, and Udaloy.

Full flight of A7s launch harpoons, so 16 total against Slava and Sovremeny, 12 against Udaloy. Plus 2 prowlers jamming them. Slava gets hit and sinks, but the other two CIWS and guns shoot down every single harpoon against them?

Might need to try again and see if it was a fluke, but seems like ciws and guns are shooting down an incredibly optimistic number of missiles.

If you ever want to know what's going on, you can access the debug menu via F10, then select 'EventLog' and all the info will be there. I just ran a saturation attack myself with 8 Harpoons vs Udaloy and Udaloy shot down 7 of them with SA-N-9, with AK-630 not managing a single shootdown. AK-630 in the game already has a lower probability of kill than Phalanx does, btw. But Soviets tend to put a lot more of them on their ships.