"Early naval actions in World War 1" Topic

Gentlemen, I have been using "Fire When Ready" for my pre-dreadnought actions. I would like to recreate the Coronel and Falklands actions. The rules include central fire control. Would these rules be appropriate for the actions?

I am not familiar with those particular rules, but they probably would not work very well, as the bulk of the British fleet did not yet have director fire control systems installed in early 1914. Certainly you could fight the battles as if the British squadrons did have the capacity, but the results could not be expected to be historical.

Fire When Ready has a cut off date of 1905 so these rules would not work for you.

A friend suggested any set of rules that cover WWI for example General Quarters 2.

The rules would work fine for early war scenarios. Although they have a "cut off date" of 1905 on the cover they do of course contain a scenario set in 1913 and many of the ships involved in significant actions in 1914 were of tat vintage and earlier. The "centralised fire control" optional rule was added so that players could push the bounds of the rules into the First World War, at least for surface actions (the rules only cover very early submarines and of course there are no air rules).

I've done Coronel with FWR and the results seemed satisfactory to me.

Looking through my copy of Fire When Ready (v2.0 from A&A) I can't see any optional rules for centralised fire control. Could anybody elaborate on what they are?

Has there ever been any thought about expanding FWR to cover up to 1918?

The only ships at Coronel with centralised fire were the Scharnhorst and Gneisnau.
There are plenty of good WW1 sets; both Naval Thunder (if you like a lighter game) or GQ3 (Fleet Action Imminent) are excellent games.

@Doomed- I suspect A&AGE edited them when they released the latest edition.

A WW1 version? No reason why not apart from time and really wanting to concentrate on the core subject period.

"The only ships at Coronel with centralised fire were the Scharnhorst and Gneisnau."

And I guess Inflexible and Invincible at The Falklands.

I've done Coronel and the Falklands a number of times with various sets of rules (including pre-dread rules) and it is generally fine. It also makes an interesting mini-campaign.

I think that Inflexible and Invincible got central director fire control after 1914, so would not have had it at the Falklands.

Fire When Ready should work fine for encounters between old armored cruisers in 1914. Fleet Action Imminent also works well for those kinds of encounters.