Is there a Battleset and database available anywhere for Classic 2002 - World War II?

Thanks

Keith

Hi Keith,

I don't believe there is a WWII database for HC unless someone is keeping it all to themselves. Every now and again (say once a year) the idea gets tossed around and people like me shoot it down as not very feasible. But here we are for the first time having this discussion on the HarpGamer forum.

First let me say that I would love to see a WWII database for HC. My favorite ships are battleships, and hurling large caliber shells rather than cruise missiles that any old AEGIS ship can hurl better. I've played a little bit of War in the Pacific and think it an amazing game but I would still like to crack open HC for a large scenario that can be played in days rather than months .

Now I'll jump in to some of the limitations HC has in executing a WWII battle:

• HC decides when to fire based on the distance between group centers, not the distance between two groups. What this means is that you may have two formations with ships dead on top of each other but yet not be able to fire 5" guns at each other because the group/formation centers are outside of 5" range. A potential work-around is keeping groups very small, allowing formations to be similarly tiny.
   
  
• HC guns are pretty much automatic. Once you get within range the AI will open up at you something fierce and something fast, often ships sink before you know what is going on. This one has a pretty easy work-around, all guns need to be implemented as missiles in the DB. That allows for time of flight as the biggest benefit as well as finer grained control of rate of fire.
   
  
• HC has a rather basic visual sensor model, works well for modern warfare but the granularity of the model is low so the game can't effectively model WWII visual conditions, at least the importance and impact of those conditions. I do not know of a good work-around here.
   
  
• HC does not model communications. Brad Leyte and I have had some fairly lengthy discussions about using radar to simulate communications. What that does is allow the enemy to 'snoop' communications and use triangulation to locate the emitting targets much as happened in WWII. In a similar vein, often communications led to detections (be it Pearl forwarding on decrypted location reports via radio) or signals back from picket ships and planes. So radar could possibly be a stand-in for modelling of communications in a way to suit WWII warfare. Similarly those signals can to an extent be jammed, a much improved feature of HCCE.
   
  
• HC has a weather model that does not suit WWII operations. Again HC was designed for a larger battlespace and modern weapons where weather should not play as decisive a role as it did in WWII. That said, weather will impact visual detections as well as radar quite dramatically in WWII situations. We don't see it much playing more HC scenarios since those scenarios often involve heavy duty radar, but the effects will probably show more in a WWII environment.
  

Okay, so knowing all of that (at least my take), who is interested in digging into this beast and taking a shot at it? CV32 here is the maintainer of the HCDB and I know a few things about the code. We're here to help but I don't think either of us is about to lead a WWII database project. In fact, divefreek here is the other main HC database editor with the EuroDB. Let's see some volunteers and start turning theory into wrecked and proven theory

 

All that rah rah said, there are WWII databases for Harpoon 3.

Let me point out another HC limitation for WWII

The aircraft guns are not good for ww2 modeling, again they are ok for modern warfare as most of the fight is done with missiles but in ww2 they were all you had. Air combat would not be properly simulated at all

Let me point out another HC limitation for WWII

The aircraft guns are not good for ww2 modeling, again they are ok for modern warfare as most of the fight is done with missiles but in ww2 they were all you had. Air combat would not be properly simulated at all

True about the aircraft guns though here again I think you would model them as AAMs instead of guns, large engagements could be a pain but then again it might just work decently.

You forgot to mention Mike Deegan's WWII DB on HarpoonPages

Another thing that cannot be accurately modeled with HC for WWII is the wide differences in training between the fighting countries:

 

How does one show that the Japanese Air Force and Naval Air Forces at the start of the war were vastly superior to the Allied Air Forces? How does one model that Japenese warships were specifically trained to fight at night and in bad weather, where the Allies trained mostly in calm seas during daylight hours?

 

Of course that completely reversed by the end of the war when both the JAF and Luftwaffe were vastly inferior to the allied forces, but you still have the same problem...how do you model the training aspect into the simulator which uses only raw numbers?

That one is easy, you have one set of numbers for early war, another set for mid-war when talents are closer to parity, and a third set for the latter war when the children take over.

 

Of course such an approach isn't the desired approach but I think it would suffice as a method of simulating the quality of the man in the loop.

 

So, more to the point, do we have interested parties in digging out the platform editor, scenario editor, and game to test out how HC really handles WWII and what parts can be fun to play and which parts are just plain a different beast that HC can't handle?

the platform editor, scenario editor, and game to test out how HC really handles WWII and what parts can be fun to play and which parts are just plain a different beast that HC can't handle?

You can get the very rudimetary HC-WW2-DB from me.

At this point it is only a base for future Testing!

 

www.harpgamer.com/databases/HC_WW2_DB-050316.zip

(Thanks a lot Tony!

 

Jan Masterson worked on the Sensors and I did some work on theweapons and Ships.

 

Regards rené

I think the biggest thing you will run into is getting the right weapons fit for the right time period. Remember that during WWII ships were being constantly upgraded in terms of equipment and weaponry, especially the addition of more and more AAA.

 

The problem is going to be knowing which individual ship had which weapons at which time, since the ships were upgraded as they came into port. Some ships ended the war relatively unchanged from their 1941 configurations, while others in the same class were upgraded numerous times during the war.

 

And while basically the ships all received the same upgrades (or at least plans) that isn't always what happened.

 

Of course there are all types of resources on the web for the weapons fits, but it is difficult to find the upgrade progession for an individual ship.

www.harpgamer.com/databases/HC_WW2_DB-050316.zip

(Thanks a lot Tony!

 

Jan Masterson worked on the Sensors and I did some work on theweapons and Ships.

 

Regards rené

no one interested in testing?

 

Regards René