"How to make a playable Savo Island scenario?" Topic

I just finished reading a couple of books on the naval battles during the Guadalcanal Campaign. Fascinating stuff! I'm thinking about running a series of games using Sam Mustafa's "Nimitz" rules set (which I like a lot).

The first battle is Savo Island which was historically a major disaster for the Americans and Australians. So how do I set this up so the Allies have a better chance of it (i.e. have some fun rather than just marking off damage as their ships get sunk), but still allow the Japanese to 'win' even though they'll almost certainly do worse than their historical counterparts?

I'm thinking of having the game set up with the ships exactly as they were when the Japanese first opened fire. Give them one turn where the Allies can't fire back. This will probably doom the Canberra, Chicago, and two destroyers of the Southern Force. But then, I will assume that the other Allied ships actually pay attention to all that shooting and explosions over yonder and allow them to maneuver and fire freely (limited by the night action rules in Nimitz). I'll also include the other three Allied cruisers who were on the scene but who were not historically engaged to get into the action. This ought to produce a much more even fight.

To give the Japanese a chance for more fun, I'm also thinking about including the Allied transport ships unloading off Guadalcanal and Tulagi and making them victory objectives. So if they can break through and sink some of them the Japanese can still win a decisive victory even if they take more damage and sink fewer enemy warships.

Thoughts?

Allowing the Allies to respond better to the first shots is a good option if you want a fairer fight. Perhaps allow the Allies to have a different set up (so the Japs dont know exactly what & where they are facing) but still make them have to allow the Japs the first shot due to surprise. In the end the Japanese won a tactial victory when they could have won a strategic one if they had continued on to destroy the transports.

You can start the game before the first Japanese fire to give the Allies some flexibility. But to keep the flavor of the actual battle, put limits on what the Allied commander is allowed to do. As in not believing in radar, that kind of thing.

Love the idea of the transports being there.

2 factors prevented the Norther force (Astoria, Quincy & Vincennes) from responding to Chicago's and Canberra's predicament.

- There was a rain squall masking both allied forces from each other.
- Captain Bode, of Chicago, who was was replacing Admiral Crace RN as the commander of the Southern group, never sent a word of what was happening.

Taking these in consideration, I'd suggest playing the Southern force alone first. Each turn after start + 2 or +3, you test for 2 events :
the rain squall moves away and the Northern Force comes to the rescue.
Captain Bode sends a warning, allowing Northern force to interfere.
In both cases, well, if the roll is successful, dice tor the number of turns before their arrival (between 0 and 3 turns). This is due to the fact that they sailing a closed circuit, the time of their arrival will depend on the point of the circuit they are at when warned.

BTW, nice project you have there. Looking forward for your game reports, as I'm also thinking of simulating battles of the Solomons campaign, and painting some ships for it.

I answered this on Facebook, but I think maybe the rules have already evened out the game. In the real battle Mikawa had a much greater visual advantage, along with other factors. Cruiser planes dropping a lot of flares, better night optical equipment, a burning transport from an earlier air raid beyond the American ships, the best torpedo tacticians in the world, and some seriously extra good shooting by the Japanese – none of these are game factors. I think that Blue as the watchdog is thought to have missed the radar signal because of the proximity of the island.

I do use the transports for objectives and it adds a lot of interest. I also find that torpedoes don't seem to score many hits. This hurts the Japanese also. I too really enjoy this game.

If Mikawa had gone on to destroy the transports, it would have been unusual. He had no clue that the US carriers had withdrawn. After Midway, getting caught in daylight running back up the Slot must have seemed like suicide to him.

Allow the US Navy to properly use their radar.

From what I read, a lack of understanding of how to use radar was a contributing factor to their defeat.

Eric

The Allied forces were dutifully steaming prescribed patrol boxes. Until a triggering event occurs they're locked into plodding along as ordered.

Unbeknownst to the Japanese, the GM has moved the patrol boxes. If he plows down the slot expecting to find everyone in their historical locations, he's in for a gotcha.

The GM will run a plot on a sea chart which only he sees. The Japanese player issues a start position and informs the GM of his formation, course and speed.

The Japanese player gets to air search before play begins. There were 3 float planes launched. GM invents a d10 chart for search efficacy on 3 rolls. Picket DDs can't be sighted.

GM runs plot until 1st sighting. Japanese night vision is excellent. US night vision is poor. US radar is fair, but operated only intermittently.

When either side declares they are opening fire, move to a tabletop, with markers not models. Once spotlights are engaged, models of illuminated ships are set out. Illuminated ships are sitting duck targets, but fire control vision for both sides equalizes. It takes 15-30 minutes for night vision to be restored. In the meantime, illuminated ship crews are night blind.

GM must make a (likely dice assisted) judgement call if the other US forces have been alerted.

The Japanese player can order the floatplane to drop flares to try to find other US forces.

If the Japanese can spot the picket destroyers and bypass them it could get interesting. If they succumb to buck fever it could be a more nearly straight up fight.

All of the above are good ideas. In our replay of the battle the radar picket reported the Japanese and the Americans were more or less ready. The j's had abyssmal sighting and ended up loosing more than the A's! The "Canberra" still sank when hit by a long lance in it's last run segment.

My experience of playing Savo a few times over the years is, in order to make the game come out anything like it did historically, you REALLY have to hamstring the Allies. I play GQ, and have played Savo both with GQ1/2 and GQ3, most recently an an Enfilade a few years ago. The Japanese are outnumbered, and so once the Allies – mostly Americans – wake up, the Japanese get overwhelmed. If you add enough scenario-specific rules to hamstring the Allies to simulate their fatigue and poor spotting (radar and visual), it becomes pretty un-fun for the Allies. However, if you don't, it only tends to take only one lucky roll for the Allies to spot/react, and if the Japanese stick around, they've had it.

There is a Savo scenario in the GQ3 Solomons Campaign book. I have a friend who has played the campaign several times, and after beginning the campaign once or twice with the Savo battle, and the IJN coming out the loser, he learned to just start the campaign with the historical results.

Another weird/funny story: I once did up a Full Thrust (Sci fi space ships) scenario based on Savo. For one of the players, it was his first time playing Full Thrust, and rolling for sides found him on the side representing the Allies. To this day, he won't play Full Thrust anymore…

I thought about it last night, and I think it would be interesting to run it with the players controlling the Japanese and the Americans programmed.

If you can get your hands on a copy, Bruce Loxton's "The Shame of Savo" in interesting reading. Loxton was a mid on "Canberra" and was wounded when the first Japanese salvo struck her bridge. He was convinced the "Canberra" was torpedoed by USS Bagley. Not an expert on the battle by any means, so I can't independently verify or dispute his claims, but the descriptions of inexperience and chaos resemble the accounts I've read of Cape Esperance, Guadalcanal, and Tassafaronga.

The Navy had a lot to learn in 1942, and friendly fire was a component of several of these engagements.

Mikawa's decision to ignore the initial contact with Blue and Ralph Talbot was a key point in the battle. It put him undetected and south of the island.
The Japanese could spot Canberra and Chicago via the still burning transport and they lit them up with flares from the planes and let them have it. Chicago took a torpedo, Canberra was hit with a bunch of shells and a couple of torpedoes. If there was friendly fire, I don't think it changed the outcome.

The three other US cruisers got lit up next and really took a beating. The shell fire was fast and accurate.

Nimitz can't really capture the disparity between the skills of the crews and commanders. So the rules themselves help even things out. The Japanese were better trained on this night, their torpedoes were the best, their shooting awesome. None of this is apparent in Nimitz, so I think the game is more even than you might assume and the outcome not a foregone conclusion.

Nimitz is designed to be playable as a competitive game. It does not capture how tired the US crews were, how skilled the Japanese were, how hard it was to fight in the dark at the dawn of the radar age. It plays an enjoyable game, with everybody getting to see far too much, and subtle differences minimized.

In the end I think the night surface actions are hard to capture in a miniatures game because night sighting mechanisms are not easy to come up with. All that said, Nimitz is still a great game.

I've played this using Nimitz, it's really close in part because it's really hard for the Japanese to really sneak past the pickets. I set up the battlefield in 12 inch squares and diced for where the USN were on their historical patrol patterns. In my game the Japanese lost a cruiser to a magazine explosion very early and whilst the USN took a beating the Japanese also did.

Had a chance to playtest the "All players Japanese" game a few days ago with teenagers. They each had one Japanese ship and I ran the Allies with responses dictated by die roll. Set up was in line ahead, high card got to choose their ship first and low card got to choose their position in line first.
The players could not seem to avoid attacking the picket destroyers even though I made it clear how to easily avoid them, and one player further back in the line intentionally ruined the ambush torpedo bonus by shooting a gun (you got a +1 on a d6 for any torpedo fired before the first explosion) so players further up the line couldn't use it. Many of the players actually took advantage of the darkness to penetrate and attack the transports.
The alterations I decided on were to double the victory score for the destroyer and light cruisers, to gauge the allied response by squadron and not individual ship and to put a turn limit on the game. Otherwise it worked pretty well, though it would have helped if the players knew the rules.