TLAMs very unreliable - most just slide along ground

[DirkDP]

Isn't there a way to mod the TLAMs to do more dammage? A 1000lbs warhead should do more than 10pct dammage per hit?

DDP.

[Molon Labe]

Considering that the targets mentioned in this thread are a shipyard and an airport, 10% might actually be on the high side. 10 missiles to completely wipe out either of those seems quite low. Consider just how many different facilities/buildings there are on each of those sites that would draw at least one missile, if not two, three, or four.

[Dr.Sid]

It would be rather simple in DB editor .. but changing the mission would be much easier.

[bottomcrawler]

SPOILERS AHEAD!

- - - - -

Yeah, I changed the mission and started over. The first part is ridiculously easy anyway. The transports run straight and don't really fire back, and the subs run too shallow so they end up surfaced. Finished them all off with Harpoons and one Mk48.

As it turned out, a steady stream of TLAMs from some allied ship far to the south finished off the naval base for me, while I was busy racing down to kill some of the ships in the carrier task force group heading for the island.

[DirkDP]

First, vanilla DW patched 1.04 does not have this problem with the Taiwan Strait TLAMs. My TLAMs hit the Ningpo buildings 12 out of 12 every time.

I replaced the TLAM doctrine with the LwAmi ones. Everything works perfectly, so no problem there. But not with the LwAmi309 mod activated.
So I started looking around with the DW editor. And I found following:
TLAM Surf - Object Type: missile - Sim Type: missile.
TLAM - Object Type: missile - Sim Type: torpedo.
TASM - Object Type: missile - Sim Type: missile.

In stock DW there's only one TLAM in the database and both object & sim type were missile.

That 'sim type torpedo' seemed strange to me so I changed it to missile. And while I was there I increased the TLAM damage to 556 because that was the damage for the TASM.

I tried out the mission (several times) and it worked. I do get an occasional dud but I'm able to kill the naval base (100pct damage) and one of the shipyards with my 12 TLAMs.
I do not put my TLAM waypoint on the exact location of the objects because they are in the water but just 'over the edge on land' and I spread them a little.

DDP.

[Molon Labe]

That's interesting. The "torpedo" type is so launching them produces a TIW warning. I'll try to reproduce this tomorrow to see if the torpedo tag has any other unintended side effects.

[Molon Labe]

Well, I've run some tests and I've been able to reproduce the result you've described. Apparently adding TIW alerts in this fashion keeps causing more problems than they're worth. Maybe in a few months we'll find out it's screwed up the SUBROCs too! Actually, no, those are used much more by the players so if there was something wrong we'd probably have known about it by now.

LWAMI 3.10 will either remove the TIW alerts on LAMs or have a seeker for coastal targets.

[DirkDP]

Glad to have helped.

I've done some more testing and the final TLAM waypoint can be on the water, best about 1/3 the distance from the land/sea border to the object mark (Thruth showing). But there are still some TLAMs that do nothing.

Also, I sometimes get a bigger blast with up to 40pct damage on the base and both docks get damage as well (around 10pct) but maybe that's because I've increased the damage a bit for the TLAM.

DDP.

[Molon Labe]

Thanks for running some tests on this, it's always nice to have people try to run some things down a bit and give us enough information to try to reproduce the effect.

LAMs that detonate at a waypoint instead of striking a particular object do AOE damage (they have to, in order to hit anything), so it's not unusual to damage adjacent buildings. The higher damage level will increase the AOE damage.

Funny story, while doing 3.09 I was re-doing the damage levels for mines, and one of them (I forget which, maybe the Mobile Mine) had a massive, massive warhead that needed to be turned up quite a bit for the damage to be accurate relative to other underwater weapons. Influence mines, like LAMs, don't hit their targets directly but detonate and do AOE damage, so I tested the weapon in a harbor with several ships nearby. When the damage-adjusted mine exploded, it sank every ship in the harbor (which was probably a few miles across). To see how bad it really was, I put several buildings along the coast and tried it again... most of the buildings were severely damaged. I decided the mine as adjusted was basically a tactical nuke and kept the damage artificially low to minimize the AOE (ships in the same formation can still be damaged, but the effect won't go for miles). So, if you ever see a ship get hit by a Mobile Mine in 3.09+, just remember, however much damage it got, it got off light.