Submarines...useful or useless?

[cavebear]

I happen to like submarines. I can plant a few in open ocean as scouts, I attach a few to a battleship stack for quick attacks (in defense), and I like to post a few in sheltered spots just off shipping lanes if my opponents are doing too much oversea trading.

I think of them as sea-catapaults. Just as a catapault on a mountain defended by a vet pike is hard to get at, so is a battleship with a sub or two.

------------------
Proud participant in GameLeague...

Proud Warrior of the O.W.L. Alliance...

[ravagon]

That battleship/aegis bug, where the defending unit was calculated before the x2 aegis bonus, was fixed in about patch 1.11 or somesuch.
I remember this one rather well as I installed the patch in a great hurry, wanting to continue a rather good game, and neglecting to check the list for other fixes. Does anybody else remember the bug with the NONE cities coming up after founding about 60 or so cities? This had the great advantage of creating NONE units as well as supporting said units in demo/rep with no support/unhappiness.
Anyway, what I didn't realize was that this bug was also fixed, and, as I'd set almost all of my offensive air/land/sea units with a homecity of NONE, when I reloaded my saved game my cities were no longer NONE cities and my units were all affiliated to a city with about 8 shields.
I lost about 120+ battleships/aegis cruisers/stealth aircraft/tanks before I could say boo!
Never again will I install a patch without reading the list of "fixes".


[Edit: Technically the patch did stop my battleships from being missiled to death but only because they were all disbanded, along with my aegis cruisers! ]
[This message has been edited by ravagon (edited October 29, 2000).]

[Kestrel]

An Alternative - Get Test-of-Time, then get my "3-D" scenario (amongst others) in which subs can dive to the DEEP OCEAN, provided that the Sub is not in shallow water over the continental shelf.

Subs, when submerged, can thus escape attack from surface naval units or air units, they can only be harassed by other subs !

Of course they can only attack shipping if they surface.

[Fiji]

I've found that against some of the mass shipbuilding civs, a sub with 1 nuke and 4 or 5 crs missles can really hurt.

I remember this one game against the French, English, Zulu armada.
Something like 50+ combat vessels (with many BBs amongst them) + 4 or 5 transports were heading my way. They ambushed a destroyer of mine and I didnt have any surface vessels in hte region.
so out came 3 subs with 1 nuke each and a total of ~12 crs missles. the handfull of ships that survived the barrage (a few AEGISs and a couple of destroyers) had to deal with the subs themselves. the 2 destroyers who survived that were just in range of my shorebased bombers.

offensively, i sometimes add a sub with missles (or several subs, if recketry hasn't been developed yet) to an invasion fleet.

Also, if my enemy's primary shipyards are in a semi-lake, i sometimes park a wolfpack just outside the entrance to the semi-lake (usually, there are 3 subs in a wolfpack, with one on the way)

[drake]

Subs should only be used like a stalking predator in the wild. Stay low, stay quiet and pick off the weakest members in a pack. If you can find a transport that has a weak escort (or none at all!), you should be able to sneak in and sink it. This will most certainly mean death to your sub from the escort, but if a ship full of units that are crucial to your enemys attack are now on the bottom of the ocean, it was well worth it. Subs are definetly a unit of opportunity to me. Stick to picking off weaker units and the subs usefulness will be realized. Dead units = lost money = good for you.....

quote: and I like to post a few in sheltered spots just off shipping lanes if my opponents are doing too much oversea trading.

Thank you cavebear, this is a perfect example of what I am talking about..........a sub won't win the war for anyone, but it can throw a good wrench in your enemies gears.........

------------------
On we sweep with threshing oar,
Our only goal will be the western shore
[This message has been edited by drake (edited October 30, 2000).]

[Chainsaw]

IMO, subs who have no escort are doomed. They don't survive long enough to make real damage. Every AI unit seems to find them, no trace of stealth. The only chance for the sub to escape is the abscence of another enemy ship nearby the one the sub has just sunk. Only nice in stacks. As posted out above.

[BlackJack]

I like subs. With Magellan and nuclear power they're like really formidable - and really cheap. What I do is use them in groups of 3 or 4, 3 or 4 spaces apart, and find the AI's favorite routes for approaching my coast, and deposit them there. The thing is to spot the enemy before they can get to you - keep 'em like +8 spaces from the enemy coast and move them up 3 or 4 spaces and then back 3 or 2 spaces. Attack with a trailing sub first so that when you spot the other enemy units - that are always just beyond view - the lead sub can get at least one of them. And the 4th sub, inside and behind is always the one with missiles.

And my vet subs sink non-vet unit, vet Aegis is about 50/50 and vet battleships alway win - I wish I could identify vets before I attacked 'em.

And relative to the Aegis/cruise missile them, it might be just a vet/non-vet thing. My vet Aegis takes on any air thing first, they're great in port with SAM when the AI looses bunches of stealth bombers. Use a 2 Aegis/1 battleship combo a turn ahead of your main force to soak up the enemy cruise missiles - they can absorb like 20 of 'em.

[Bereta_Eder]

Subs. So cheap to make
So easy to lose..

I generally don't trust them to defend my shores due to movement limitations. And once they get out of my defensive sea peripheral of battleships and Aegis they get sunk in no time...

The only time I had any use of them was when I was completely broke after a war with some pretty excited extremely powerful Russians, the naval forces of my tiny state were at the bottom of the sea courtesy of the russian offensive and I had to have at leat a pretext of presence at sea. The sub was the cheapest and the only solution. But then again it was sunk in the nex two turns ...

I guess that they could be a cheap alternative for first nuclear strike when there is sustainable peace so they can get close to targets.

Christos

[Andromeda]

I will always associate subs with the most exciting and challenging game I have ever had.
At the end, there were just two superpowers left, myself and the Babylonians, and, given the quantity of nukes between us, it was obvious one of us was going to go out in a blaze of glory !
At the heart of the Babylonian empire were six megacities, massively defended and loaded with nukes.
So, just outside his air range, I assembled 6 or 7 subs, with a nuke on each. On my turn, sent all subs in, launched their nukes at his cities.

After that, it was just mopping up !

[jcarkey]

I think I remember reading in the CIV2 manual somewhere that in early versions subs with missiles are capable of being seen. I can't remember what version was bugged by this.

Subs can't do much without an escort or missile. They are cheap units that can't do shore bombardments. I use them for blockades.


------------------
What if the Hokey-Pokey is really what its all about?

Contact me at cpoland@mail.win.org

[Hawkman]

One interesting way to use subs with missiles (although not very realistic) is to send the missiles out as "scouts" and if they don't hit anything then you know there is nothing there and the missiles return to the sub. Although missiles have very limited sighting capability, they can see surface ships in adjacent squares. If the missile spots something, you can hit it then get your sub out of the area very quickly.

[drake]

HM- cruise missiles are a great scout from cities too....
[This message has been edited by drake (edited November 01, 2000).]

[drake]

After thinking about it I like the idea of using cruise missiles from subs even better. If you stick those subs well out of the path of normal travle routes, you could pick apart a good fleet without them even knowing you're anywhere close........

------------------
"On we sweep with threshing oar,
Our only goal will be the western shore"
[This message has been edited by drake (edited November 01, 2000).]

[The Capo]

Early on, Subs can be very devestating like the German U Boats were. Later on they are best utilized to transfer nuclear missiles accross long distances, namley the polar north and south areas. The sea with usually little to no activity (on world map anyway) is the pacific ocean, therefore on a world map there is sort of a connection from the north to the south.

On non world games I think subs are the best to use, because the world is usually a littering of islands which creates intricate pathways, and a sub can easily coast through there, nuke a city and exit almost without being noticed.

[drake]

As usual, thank you for the history lesson Capo....