"Victory at Sea, short BIG-boys battle!" Topic

A couple more buddies (A&A War at Sea players) dropped by last night to watch us play VAS and were quickly hooked on it. One wanted to try Battleships or something big so we decided to do a basic 5 point "raid" level scenario with ships setup across the narrow sides of the table from each other. They were limited to deploying within 6" of the table edge so the fleets would start at least 36" apart.

Kriegsmarine player chose 2 Scharnhorst-class BC's for his heavies and backed them up with the Graf-Zeppelin carrier and 4x flights of ME-109's and 3x flights of Ju-87's.

Brits took 1x Renown-class BC and 1x Quenn Elizabeth-class BB backed up with the traditional Ark Royal carrier and 6x swordfish and 4x Fulmar fighters.

The Germans had superior radar fire control and out-ranged the British ships by 12", and had superior aircraft.
The British had larger guns and armor pircing shells to give them a marked advantage once they closed range.

The first turns had both carriers hanging back and launching their remaining flights while the Scharnhorsts opened up immediately and began scoring minor long range hits on the Renown as they ganged up on the weaker target before the British ships were within range to answer back.

Note- The aircraft basically neutralized each other with the superior German ME-109's butchering the British planes in dogfights. Only 1 fairy swordfish lived to launch a torpedo that missed and the ME-109's killed it before it could return to the Ark Royal to rearm. The British fighters killed half the ME-109's before dying and all the Ju-87's died from AA fire as they attacked the Ark Royal within range of the Renown's and Queen Elizabeth's AA guns.
Suffice to say that 22 dice of AA split between the 3 planes quickly blew them out of the sky.

Now, for the main show. The Brits finally got within range of their own guns and immediately started hammering the nearer Scarnhorst with everything they had. The larger caliber British armor piercing shells quickly scored heavy damage and several critical hits and at one point 10 fires were raging across the unlucky Scarnhorst and it was a race to see if the damage would cripple it before the fires reduced it to a skeleton crew.

By the time the Germans had amassed 12 damage against the Renown, the nearer Scarnhorst had 25 damage on it and fuel system explosions and magazine criticals had already silenced it's guns for 2 full turns where it sat there motionless, a lovely target. Within their effective range of 20'' (no range penalties), the heavier British guns quickly butchered the lighter gunned German ships and we called the game once they started aiming at the undamage Scarnhorst.

With the aircraft being basically ineffective, I think the German side would have done much better taking a single Bismark in place of the two Scarnhorsts and a Heavy Cruiser to replace the Graf Zeppellin, but that's just my opinion.
The German fighters did butcher the Brit torpedo bombers so maybe they did earn their money, although I find it hard penetrating a BB's AA guns to do your air attack.

Cruisers are vulnerable to air attack though as we've proved several times already. We did FINALLY notice the small sentence on page 13 about limiting air attacks to only 3 flights of planes per target, but we quickly chose to ignore it anyway as even full flights (of 6) seem to be required to handle Cruisers and anything less gets eliminated by BB or CV AA guns all too easily.

We all had fun and we'll be playing again saturday night, possibly with 4-6 players this time so we'll se ehow it goes.

Sounds like a great game.

A great write up, enjoyed reading it. I agree that the AA seems way out of all logical proportion. I would think that if 6 flights of aircraft attacked a couple of cruisers it would be a massacre (for the cruisers)! Otherwise sounds like a fun game. I saw somewhere on one of the TMP posts that some guy has done credible revisions to the VAS rules to overcome issues such as this. Take a look at recent threads on VAS, it may be of help to your group.

Oops, forgot to add that we so far find carriers and aircraft deadly to cruisers and below but almost ineffective against BC's and above due to a combination of their higher armour and much higher AA dice.

Actually, 1 decent DD with 4-5 torps has the firepower of an entire carrier launch of torp bombers, and we find the DD longer lived usually due it's high target number and the fact they can take 2-3 damage before sinking.

So far, I think this game was designed so that it really takes a BB to fight a BB, more like the old days before carriers rules the waves. This would seem to imply the rules work much better for WW1 games than WW2, or we have to implement some of the suggested ideas for improving carrier firepower like tripling the number of aircraft carried of tripling the number of attack dice for bomber attacks. No idea, but it's great so far.

I really have no idea if a single carrier's planes COULD actually nail a Battleship with much chance of success. I know they hit Yamato with literally hundreds of planes to take her out as noone wanted to get within range of those 18" guns.

I don't want to start trouble. I think it is great that there are more gamers playing naval, but I have been playing naval going on 30 years and I was alway under the impression that tactically aircraft carriers would not be anywhere near a surface battle. I know the rules are fun but they bear no resemblance to a real naval battle, they don't even make the effort. Oh and by the way an Iowa class BB would have taken the Yamato apart.

Tom
(Ducking for cover)

@Waterloo
I agree a fight between a Yamato and an Iowa would be too close to call with any certainty and so far the forum chatter seems to be that those 2 ships really need their own rating (War+ maybe) as they outclass all the other BB's by a mile.
And yeah, carriers should probably be represented as off table and a hundred miles away from the shooting but where would the fun be in that? :-)

Off the top of my head two carriers came under fire of large guns in WW2. A British Carrier Glorias was sunk during the British withdrawal from the Norwegian campaign by British BCs, and a US Jeep carrier was shoot up at Leyete Gulf (while its planes were harassing the Japanese BBs).

Waterloo, wow, at 30 years experience with Naval gaming I'd love to know what you consider to be the best rules for ww2 naval games in two categories if you can so indulge:

1) Best for realism

2) Best for fast play, fun, younger kids

3) Best for balance of both, fun and realism

Would you mind sharing your thoughts on this as I know nothing about naval gaming but am interested in it now. Also what do you think about Avalanche Press's board game series (if you don't do boards than please ignore).

The Avalanche Press games are very good operational games that fall down a bit when it gets to the tactical rules.

Podette

Rules are a personal choice, some people like one thing others like something else. As for myself I play two sets of rules Seekreig IV & V and General Quarters. Seekreig is well written and researched. It can handle a fair amount of ships per side if all the players know the rules. For my club days when there are players that don't normally push ship models around I use General Quarters. In my mind the best for fun and realism is Seekreig, it also helps that your fellow players like the rules and know how to have fun. Boardgames I really don' play. Just remember that the rules you pick are there to enable you to have a good time.

Tom

Presumably HMS Glorious (rather than Gloria's)!

Must admit I've yet to give the rules a try after a good read through recently. Sound like a good system from the various reports I've read here.

Must dust off my 30 year old 1/4800 WW2 ships and get the lads round for a game.

"Off the top of my head two carriers came under fire of large guns in WW2."

There was also the Battle of Leyte Gulf where Taffy 3's jeep carriers were attacked by a Japanese surface group. The Carrier USS Gambier Bay was sunk by Admiral Kuritas attack force. Another interesting note is that the USS St.Lo and the USS Gambier Bay fired their 5" gun at enemy ships doing some damage. See this link for more info: link

BonzaiBob,
Yes the Escort Carriers came under fire, but they were running away from the Japanese and thier escorting destroyers and destroyer escorts were engaging the surface forces. I believe that the battle of Leyte Gulf was the only time any American carrier of any type came under fire from a surface ship.

Tom

Technically the abandoned burning wreck of the Hornet was sighted by some IJN destroyers at the end of the Battle of Santa Cruz and one of the IJN 'desk jockey' admirals ordered the destroyers to take it under tow for display as a 'prize'. The on-site Admiral was Kurita who wisely chose to sink the hulk rather than expose his ships so, again purely technically, Hornet was sunk by enemy surface vessels.

Glorious stumbling into the path of the German BC's was more bad doctrine and bad luck than anyones plan although as an interesting point, I think Scharnhorst hit her at around 26,000 yards, essentially tying one of the Brit Queen Elizabeth's (either Warspite of QE herself) for longest gunfire hit ever from one ship to another at,IIRC, Cape Matapan.

I forgot about Hornet, but I would argue the technicality.

Tom