The Naval Gun Bug - and a solution

**Ryker** · May 11, 2011, 01:00 PM

I found a bug in patch2.pack's "gun_type_to_projectile" folder I'd like to adress.
If you look at the the attached .jpeg you'll see that some of the naval guns have an extra projectile (6 instead of 5 for the cannons, 4 instead of 3 gor the 32lb carronade) and I'll try now to explain while this trows the naval battles out of proportion in both, battle and campaign.
I know there have been different attempts to deal with the overly strong 6lb gun, but I didn't see the explanation I'm about to give anywhere in the forum, so I'm not trying the steal anyones laurels.

The firepower for each individual naval battery is calculated by cumulating the damage of all the projectiles this battery is able to use, completely different from land batteries which display the damage of the shot as the units firepower.
Firepower is not multiplied by the number of guns in both cases, at least not in a way we can see in the unit card.

This might have to do with the fact that there is no rifled cannons and improved grape are not (properly) enabled, I simply don't know.

However - the game adds up the damage of the following 3 for carronades:

shot, chain, grape

and

the following 5 for cannons:

shot, shot_rifled, chain, grape, improved_grape
while the first 3 might use the long range (lr) for guns from 6lb to 18lb.

Note that the damages for shot and shot_rifled are always the same, while grape and improved_grape are always 0.99 and will be rounded.
I found the line following in taw's decompiled luac-file "patch-ui-templates-template.unitcard_tooltip.luac"

Spoiler for patch-ui-templates-template.unitcard_tooltip.luac (cut out):

The script in patch.pack might be different from later patches, since it doesn't say how artillery is supposed to be displayed.
I'll write a PM to taw to ask if he can help out with that matter, my knowledge about scripting is next to nothing, while my decompiling skill appears to have a negative value.

I deleted the additional entries and this is the result for the batteries

Spoiler for Firepower of Individual Batteries:

So you see by adding an extra 42lb_shot_rifled to the 6lb gun, the firepower of the 6lb battery is 102 (22+80)

The firepower of each is the cumulated firepower of each battery (gun_type 1 to 7), regardless of where these batteries are located ( bow chasers or main battery) and how many guns are in this battery.
Adding more batteries to a ship does increase the firepower of this ship, but the number or guns will not change.
Maybe another thing to be checked with the scripting, since there is some mentioning of displaying guns, men etc.

These are the changes some of the ships:

Spoiler for Firepower of Ships:

You see, the ships were unbalanced before and they are unbalanced now, but to a far lesser degree.
The 3rd_rate, as I found in the naval_stats_table, does not only carry more, but heavier batteries than the 2nd rate, compared to the 1_rate the snd_rate carries more, but lighter guns. Brig and Sloop just seem to have a accidental gun-swap.

What I need to know now is how to create a mod or patch that overwrites the additional values rather the deleting them.

I already worked on a new unit_naval_stats table and am almost done a quick fix (gun placement in the slots might be off as well, thats more boring clicking in db_editor), changes and additions in guns_to_projectiles and gun damages are to minor to bother asking for help....

... but I'm open for any suggestion.

**Ryker** · May 12, 2011, 08:36 AM

After getting advice from taw on the scripting - which was that calculations are mostly not done in scripts, but in C++, using the values from db_tables - I double checked in DBE:

Improved_grape and rifled_cannons are not enabled! Nothing is truly enabled for any ship, only the effects in the technology_effects_table (Price +/-X%; upkeep +/-X%) are working.
There is an effect that's supposed to enable improved_grape and rifled cannons but: Imp grape and rifl. cannons do not have an entry in unit_abilities or unit_to_unit abilities
Therefore: They both do not make the prior tech obsolete and that’s why the game adds up the values instead of using them individually. Adding chain, shot and grape damage to shot remains a (minor) problem, but that’s maybe why they cancelled those two enabling effects:
Something wasn't working right. (as I'm writing this I remember: grape shot and chain shot already exist at the beginning of the game, other than cannister shot for land cannons, whiich is a technology)

If anyone feels like looking in the db_tables to see if I missed something, I would appreciate it.

And of course:
Thanks to taw for the advice.

**Ryker** · May 13, 2011, 08:52 PM

Originally Posted by Ryker

If anyone feels like looking in the db_tables to see if I missed something, I would appreciate it

I made it real simple:

**Ryker** · May 13, 2011, 09:03 PM

Here the balanced ship stats. They, of course, only make sense if you delete the additional entries in patch2.pack could still need some tuning on table names, but works
Maybe I will add new guns to the Mod to be able to fix the problem without deleting stuff from original files, but the interest in the matter seems rather limited,
since I used this thread for nothing than talking to myself.

**Didz** · May 14, 2011, 10:31 AM

To be honest I've never really understood what improved grape was supposed to be modelling. I'm not familiar enough with the history of 18th century naval gunnery to be able to identify what improvements if any were made to grapeshot between 1700 and 1799.

However, I am pretty certain that rifled artillery were never employed on ships in the 18th century and so the whole issue is a bit of mute point in my opinion. As far as I know the first rifle cannon appeared during the American Civil War over fifty years after the period represented by ETW.

The overpowered 6pdr's is quite clearly a programming bug that CA couldn't be bothered to fix, but can be resolved simply by removing them from the ships armament and replacing them with a similar size weapon that has been programmed properly. If there are more legimate weapons that have been improperly programmed then we need to have a mod that disables those also. Plus of course, we need to disable all rifled cannon and work out exactly what 'improved grape' is supposed to represent.

I'm assuming that most modders advertising their naval mods as 'historical' will do this as a matter of course, as well as:

- eliminating the silly ship classes like 'Bomb-Ketches' and 'Rocket Ships' that played no part in 18th century naval battles.
- Changing the movement behaviour of ships to properly take into account the wind direction.
- limiting pirates to smaller vessels and avoiding the massive pirate fleet bug.
- Enhancing the movement speeds of smaller vessels so that they can corrected evade ships of the line.
- altering build costs for vessels so that relfect the true cost ratio's.

**Ryker** · May 14, 2011, 11:08 AM

Originally Posted by Didz

To be honest I've never really understood what improved grape was supposed to be modelling.

The number of pellets is doubled - from 5 to 10.
Maybe they are added, I would have to count.
That value isn't just cosmetic:
I changed it to 100 for 6lb and 9lb, and took a sloop against a bigger ship - I lost, but reduced their crew severely.
Maybe they are added
Rifled cannons vary from smooth bore in only one stat also, but I can only guess it to be half-chance-to-hit-ratio (0 vs 50)

Interesting however: carronades do not have an entry for rifled_grape or improved_grape.

eliminating the silly ship classes like 'Bomb-Ketches' and 'Rocket Ships' that played no part in 18th century naval battles.

I lowered their accuracy and damage, since they provide prestige as well.

we need to disable all rifled cannon

maybe I give that I try, by simply deleting the entries for now.
Edit: from patch2, patch and main.pack that is.

**Didz** · May 15, 2011, 05:05 AM

So, was there an improvement in grapeshot for naval gunnery between 1700 and 1799?

The doubling of pellets seems to me to be a bit abitary. Logic would suggest that as the space in the gun chamber is limited the number of pellets one can ram down it must also be finite. So, if the number of seperare pellets was to be doubled then their size would have to be reduced, and that doesn't sound like a good idea in naval gunnery where shot needs to penetrate the hull of a ship to be effective. I know on land that various patterns of canister/grape was employed with different mixes of ball weight and volume. The purpose there was that balls of different weights carried different distances, and had greater penetration, thus heavy canister was used at longer distances and fired at deeper formations. But I'm not aware of any similar system used at sea.

'Bomb_Ketches' and 'Rocket Ships' should be removed from the game completely. They were bombardment vessels and were only used against shore batteries, forts and moored ships. In fact, they cannot be fired unless anchored and require a complicated system of anchoring to enable them to aim their mortars. They were no doubt included as a sop to the American patriots amongst us who wanted to pretend they were refighting a scene from the star spangled banner, but of course that becomes ridiculous unless you also have Fort McHenry on the screen.

BTW: Not sure you can simply delete the entries for a cannon. As I understood it the cannon types are used in the ship tables to define a ships armament, so removing them from the gun table would create an error, as ships would be loaded with cannon that don't exist. Thats why when I was told how to deal with the bugged 6pdr's, I was told to replace them with a different cannon on the ship table, rather than just deleting them from the list of guns.

**Ryker** · May 15, 2011, 08:39 AM

Originally Posted by Didz

So, was there an improvement in grapeshot for naval gunnery between 1700 and 1799?

Short answer: no
According to my reading there was a simple variant of placing balls in bag and one that used clay balls with nails in it ("hail shot") earlier, but real grape shot seems to have been in use since 16th century.

The doubling of pellets seems to me to be a bit abitary. Logic would suggest that as the space in the gun chamber is limited the number of pellets one can ram down it must also be finite. So, if the number of seperare pellets was to be doubled then their size would have to be reduced, and that doesn't sound like a good idea in naval gunnery where shot needs to penetrate the hull of a ship to be effective. I know on land that various patterns of canister/grape was employed with different mixes of ball weight and volume. The purpose there was that balls of different weights carried different distances, and had greater penetration, thus heavy canister was used at longer distances and fired at deeper formations. But I'm not aware of any similar system used at sea.

When cannons where double shotted, the powder charge was reduced. I assume it would be the same.

'Bomb_Ketches' and 'Rocket Ships' should be removed from the game completely. They were bombardment vessels and were only used against shore batteries, forts and moored ships. In fact, they cannot be fired unless anchored and require a complicated system of anchoring to enable them to aim their mortars. They were no doubt included as a sop to the American patriots amongst us who wanted to pretend they were refighting a scene from the star spangled banner, but of course that becomes ridiculous unless you also have Fort McHenry on the screen.

I'm sure we can use them for something else, I was thinking of implementing cheap, short ranged gun boats anyways, so maybe I'll use their ability to shot forward for something more 18th century.

BTW: Not sure you can simply delete the entries for a cannon. As I understood it the cannon types are used in the ship tables to define a ships armament, so removing them from the gun table would create an error, as ships would be loaded with cannon that don't exist. Thats why when I was told how to deal with the bugged 6pdr's, I was told to replace them with a different cannon on the ship table, rather than just deleting them from the list of guns.

By "deleting entries" I meant from the gun_type_to_projectiles_table, not from naval_stats
Take a look at my 2nd upload: I changed gun types on the ships and used a "dummy gun" to deal with the overpowered 3rd rate.
with 5 guns buggy, our options would be rather limited. All guns should be new, unbugged guns to have a proper workaround that can be used as a mod.
The guns are ready to be hoisted on board btw.

______________________________

Yesterday however, I found more:
The projectile_shot_type_enum_table says, improved_grape obsoletes grape and naval_rifled_cannons obsolete round_shot,
but yet in the projectiles_table, rifled cannons shoot round shot and improved_grape shoots grape
(see attachment for changes)
I'm getting really close to fixing it, but more and more I'm convinced to just replace the to techs with something else, for historical reasons.

**Ryker** · May 15, 2011, 09:30 AM

What do you think about other issues:
There were steam boat developments in the 18th century, just nothing seaworthy - how do you feel about turning that thing in a pleasure cruiser?
the issue with the carronade's range will be fixed I read that the range was "half to 2/3rds" of cannons. I feel like 250 (close to 2/3rd of 400, half of 500). what would you think?
I will set the number of pellets for grape according to the caliber.

**Didz** · May 16, 2011, 05:56 AM

Again the first steam frigates appeared around 1850-60 there is no justification for them in ETW.

Naval cannon range has always been a bit of mystery to me to be honest. According to range tests conducted during the period most cannon relied upon the richocet effect to achieve their full range, the first graze being somewhere around 400 yards from the gun at zero elevation, 700 yards at one degree elevation and 900 yards at two degree's elevation. However, one could not rely upon the richocet effect at sea, and although the guns would generally be higher above the sea than a land gun is on its carriage much of this height would be lost if there was any significant swell running. Plus range tests of land guns suggest that height actually reduces the richocet effect, by increasing the angle of impact.

There are stories for Nelson using bouncing shot to hit Spanish ships, effectively using a technique similar to skimming stones over the surface of a pond. However, cannonshot are not flat, and neither is the sea so I'm not sure if these stories are reliable. The skimming effect might just have been the result of the balls clipping the tops of the waves in their path, rather than bouncing.

Overall, I'm dubious that naval gunnery was capable of achieving the same ranges as their land based equivalents simply because of the fluid nature of the surface they were fired across. But I haven't seen any tests to prove it either way. The next best thing would be to look at some ships logs and see if they mention the ranges that engagements began.

**Ryker** · May 18, 2011, 12:55 AM

There are similar references about the skipping on water in yhe "Master and Commander" novels, but in "Peter Simple", whose Author served in the Napoleonic Wars, I find no mentioning of it.
Yet: I remember that there's supposed to be a shotgun-contest in Austria where the participants shoot on a lake surface, the goal being to hit a floating target with the ricochet.

The gun ranges are supposed to be the effective ranges I think and are alright according to my reading, even though the longest range must have bee much higher. Three miles being for the most advanced land cannon at that time (1702), I do remember reading about naval shots ranging a (nautical) mile.
Here's a table I found a few days ago:
http://www.thepirateking.com/histori...ores_early.htm

Even if we increased those ranges drastically:
I did a test battle with a sloop against three Galleons and found out that the ship can not make out an enemy at a distance of 1500.
I do not know what the absolute max is for the settings, but I do know now that the damage per gun is definitely per pellet.

**Didz** · May 18, 2011, 06:44 AM

Be very wary of some of the tables quoted by historians, many are based upon range tests which were intended to stress test the barrel of the gun. As such the gun was fired from an artifical mount at an impossibly high elevation it could never have achieved on the battlefield and stuffed with the maximum powder charge possible.

The real performance of guns in the hands of real gunners on a real battlefield using real cartridges and charges was much different.

The issue of skipping roundshot I think is a red-herring. It might be possible on a completely clam sea, but in any sort of swell the most likely result is that the shot would bury themselves in successive waves and lose momentum rather than gain distance. There seems to be some evidence that gunnery officers tried to avoid this by having their gunners fire 'on the uproll'. e.g. when the ship was heeling away from its target. This would have increased the elevation of the gun and hopefully resulted in the shot clearing most of the waves between it and its target. However, it would have also increased the angle of impact when it did hit the sea surface reducing the likelihood that it would skip further.

Battles such as Trafalgar where the British fleet took some considerable time to close with the Franco-Spanish fleet pose an interesting dilema. On the face of it, assuming that the Franco-Spanish fleet opened fire as soon as the leading British ships came within effective range then the British fleet should have been defeated in detail had that fire commenced at some extreme range.

However, although some damage was done it certainly wasn't critical, and yet we are told that when the British fire into the Franco-Spanish ships at less than 100 yards range single broadsides were disabling entire vessels. To me that would seem to suggest that the effective range of naval gunnery was quite short, and that the Franco-Spanish were losing most of their shot in the sea. However, so far I've not managed to find any clear evidence of what ranges were involved as most histories just skip over the approach to battle and start the detail as the British break the Franco-Spanish line.

Been doing a bit more research on this subject here: http://www.jmr.nmm.ac.uk/server/show/ConJmrArticle.201

Captain Villemadrin of the French Swiftsure thought it ‘inconceivable… that in attacking us in this manner they ought at least in approaching our ships to have sustained a great deal of damage particularly aloft; but when they arrived within musket shot they did not appear to have suffered much, so badly were the first broadsides aimed’. Both Villeneuve’s flag-captain, Majendie, and his troop commander, Major General Contamine, agreed, but explained it as resulting from the great swell taking their ships abeam and making them roll heavily, which rendered their aim uncertain, and the dense cloud of smoke that the calm prevented from dispersing, ‘which often forbade our seeing anything around us’.28 Captain Lucas of Redoutable thought the fire so bad that he ‘ordered on deck a large number of the captains of guns in order to point out to them how badly our ships were firing; every shot was aimed too low and fell in the sea; I urged them to fire at the masts and above all to aim well’.29

I assume by musket shot Villemadrin means about 100 yards, as that would be the maximum effective range for a musket of the period.

Interestingly, test conducted in 1808 using the captured French frigate La Piedmontaise disclosed that its guns were firing just over 15% shorter than their British equivalents due mainly to deficiencies in the quality of the powder used in their charges.

‘We had also,’ recalled Pierre Sevaux, master at arms of the Fougueux, ‘according to our bad habit in the French Navy, fired away over a hundred rounds from our big guns at long range before the English ship had practically snapped a gun lock

The French gun crews were therefore exhausted even before the British fleet began firing. But despite all their efforts had done little major damage at the long range they were firing.

Other testimony from the French side suggests that when recieving long range fire the only shot that reached them were those that were fired on 'the uproll' and thus hit high. Those fired low at the hull rarely reaching their target.

We have the report of Captain Épron, of the French Argonaute, who was on the receiving end of distant fire from the lagging rearmost ships of Collingwood’s division, that

Five other enemy ships, one being a three-decker [the Dreadnought], which were bearing down on the rear, fired furiously into us, and in the space of an hour and a half we had 190 men killed and wounded, all our shrouds cut to pieces except a few of the fore-shrouds, as well as our back-stays, all the rigging cut up and the spars in a most shattered state, especially the main and mizzen masts, the fore top-mast, the jib-boom, courses, hull, boats and spare spars.

So much damage aloft suggests that either the British ships did not always fire at the hulls, or that, if they did, then their aim was far from accurate, and Argonaute was not sufficiently damaged or closely engaged to prevent her from escaping:

Annoyingly, I've still not found any reference to distance in these accounts apart from the mention of musket shot by Captain Villemadrin.

**Ryker** · May 20, 2011, 10:03 PM

Sorry, again I had less time then i hoped.
I hoisted the new guns in the (standard) ships to see where I and up with firepower. The Galleon is down to 80, 5th Rate at 57. I increased the range a little for the *_lr guns (500 to 555) and lowered the reload rate for the Galleons, but i think that Galleons and Fluyts (FP: 48) are now too weak.

I attached a replay so you can see for yourself.

Edit: difficulty was "hard"

**trueman11** · May 27, 2022, 10:37 AM

I made my own fix for this bug, and also fixed the wrong gun battery types used by ships, so that balanced them out: https://www.twcenter.net/forums/show...mple-naval-fix