"So, if I wanted to....." Topic

….fight the WWII Pacific naval war without a single aircraft in sight, which rule set would play the best*?

* – for this value of "best", think reflects the gunnery skills of each navy and ship capabilities most accurately.

Thanks in advance.

One which allowed carriers to ram?

A long time back, we did the Kommondorski battle using
Fletcher Pratt rules.

Seemed to work pretty well.

I've played a bunch of rule sets and have not found anything that beats General Quarters 3 in my book. The gunnery charts and ship logs (which account for each navy's shooting skills and ship capabilities, as you are looking for) may seem imposing at first, but as anyone in my club can attest, once you've played with them a few times, things run very smoothly. I can't recommend them enough.

I'll second GQ 3 for the same reasons mentioned above.

Third for GQ III. We're playing this weekend.

Personally, I prefer Command at Sea

GQ 1 and 2, but GQ III will work too.

Night, destroyer and/or cruiser actions, early in the war. Some of the mid-war battles would work as well, since Japanese eye-sight and optics outranged American radar on a few occasions.

If playing smaller scenarios, with just a few vessels per side, use 1/4 and 1/2 hull/armament boxes, in lieu of the normal 1/2 and 1 hull box damage levels, and/or just increase the number of hull/armament boxes by a factor of 2x.

The reviews indicate that GQ3 like 1-12 ships for a game.

Is it possible to go bigger? I was thinking about fooling around in my 2-car garage and getting every major surface combatant (minus the carriers and probably not all the DDs, too).

You might want to consider reworking the Avalon Hill game Victory In The Pacific – pretty sure while they integrated carriers in, they don't dominate.

Good luck as I've had this idea too – imagining pouring out several hundred PzSch ships onto a sheet of painted plywood – just could never find quite the rule set that handled strategic combat at sea.

GQ (and even Fetcher Pratt) are going to creak for really big battles. For enormous battles we updated Colin Standishes pre-dreadnought 'De Bellis Navalis' (essentially DBA with battleships, Tsushima in an hour, that sort of thing).

Have a look around for 'Iron Ships and Wooden Heads' by Tim Gow, published in WI I think. It isn't going to work for battles post 42 when effective gunery radar really came into its own (same applies to FP really).

VitP is more a campaign game, so the battles are pretty abstract. Night actions are rather more prevalent than irl, but in a day action the carriers and land based air will sink everything in sight. It speeds play by ignoring destroyers, CLs etc, which might be an approach to adopt for your 'Pacific Jutland'.

If you want to fight the surface battles then Naval Thunder hands down.

Another good choice is Seapower II for big battles and Seapower III for smaller ones.

You could always do The Great White Fleet versus teh Imperial Japanese fleet from Tsushima!