Slitherine

DD's get +2 to survivability vs subs. They will not fire first. You will notice that subs will initially get positive odds vs BB's, but negative vs DD's. So you need the DD's to screen the BB's as well or the BB's will become sub targets.

Stauffenberg wrote:DD's get +2 to survivability vs subs. They will not fire first. You will notice that subs will initially get positive odds vs BB's, but negative vs DD's. So you need the DD's to screen the BB's as well or the BB's will become sub targets.

Excellent. That's how it should be. What ship would a u-boat commander rather go after, a merchant vessel or an unescorted Battleship?

If we look at the warships sunk by u-boats in WW2 many of them were capital ships: e.g. HMS Ark Royal (carrier) or HMS Barham (battleship). So the majority of warships tonnage sunk by u-boats was capital ships and not destroyers. And this keeping in mind that the destroyers, because of their convoy escorting duties, were much more exposed to subs than capital ships that used to have escort. So increased survivability of DD´s reflects well this.