[Consim-l] Flat Top question

[Stephen Loughrey]

Marcus,

Thank you for your comments. Please excuse my long reply.

Point 1 - Air Attacks:
Yes Second World War at Sea uses the roll-six-to-hit system. If you only get
1 hit on a carrier then the mission kill would rely on what would be a
pretty lucky
critical hit roll. As a general point of interest the damage inflicted by
critical hit rolls a difficult balance to get right. You want a ship to be
tough and be able to withstand a lot of damage most of the time, but you
also want the odd silver bullet to be able to do an unlikely amount of
damage (but this unusual critical hit should happen a historically accurate
amount of the time).

I concede that the odds of getting a mission kill in an air attack might be
less
likely than what happened historically. But I don't believe that it
dramatically so. All sorts of dramatic things can happen with critical hits,
real naval damage is about complicated than crossing off hull boxes. Getting
back to your
question, a single air attack could disable a carrier but I would not expect
the die results to end that way during every battle. I expect that the
Admirals during WWII did not expect that either.

Aircraft counters are squadrons or half squadrons, so the actual number of
aircraft depends on the nationality and branch of service. And yes on every
attack there is a chance that you will lose aircraft or have them turned
back without making their attack. What I was really getting at by my comment
of "Some air attacks are hardly even worth the effort as they are unlikely
to sink anything and you run the risk of losing aircraft" is that during a
recent game of "Strike South" the Allied air units are forced to make air
attacks with a small number of counters with weak anti-ship ratings. They
are forced to do so to reflect the co-ordination restrictions at the time.
It is annoying but realistic - so it is good. :) What you commented on about
collecting all available air assets and attacking the threat is definitely
true, the caution that I would add to this is that sometimes if there are
multiple threats you may have to take a risk and make multiple smaller
attacks. Of course when there are enemy carriers about the target of choice
is obvious.

Point 2 - Task Force Location:

In a perfect world I would prefer to play SWWAS double blind with a referee,
but that is not possible. SWWAS uses dummy task force counters to keep the
opponent guessing as to which ones are the real ones and simulate that the
other side does not know where an enemy forces are until they are detected.
Detected dummy counters are removed. It isn't perfect but that is the
mechanism that is used.
In a similar vein consider this: Someone interested in Naval warfare would
know what forces each side has in most historical battles, something that
the commanders at the time would not usually have known so precisely, I have
never heard this brought up as a complaint of any game. We can
refight the battles but not recreate the predicaments.

Point 3 - Naval Gunnery:
This might help to explain what I mean a bit better. When you hit (roll a 6)
with naval gun fire you then roll 2 D6 to resolve the actual damage to the
enemy ship. There are 6 chances for some sort of weapon damage (1 of these
being to the torpedoes), 3 chances of hull damage, 1 chance of critical
damage and 1 of no damage. So you don't lose all of the turrets before you
start taking hull hits, there is just a greater chance that you will take
hull hits. A good system which reflects reality.

-------
Before I played any of the Avalanche Press games if some one had briefly
described the handful of D6 dice approach, basic movement and simple log
sheets I think that I would have been quite suspicious about the results.
However it really does the job well. It is fast and simple and gets the
balance right. The games gives an excellent feel for the combat of the time
without slowing down the tactical combat needlessly. Too many overly vocal,
off the cuff, derogatory things have been said about the game series, and I
encourage everyone to give it a fair chance. Not just as a carrier game, but
a WWII naval combat game.

Stephen



----- Original Message -----
From: "Markus Stumptner" <mst at cs.unisa.edu.au>
To: "'Consim-L'" <Consim-l at mailman.halisp.net>
Sent: Wednesday, February 21, 2007 2:39 AM
Subject: Re: [Consim-l] Flat Top question


> On Sun, 4 Feb 2007, Stephen Loughrey wrote:
> > *Some air attacks are hardly even worth the effort as they are unlikely
to
> > sink anything and you run the risk of losing aircraft.
>
> I don't know how the air attack system for SWWAS works, but this does
> strike me as a potential problem.  I don't remember what a single aircraft
> counter stands for (2,4,8 aircraft - probably 8), but as a matter of fact,
> a counter of as few as 4 aircraft surviving AA fire and CAP should have
> the capability to severely damage a cruiser or carrier (in effect, achieve
> a mission kill).  The decisive attack against Yorktown at Midway was flown
> by not more than 10 bombers and less than half of those got through to
> actually attack. That said, if SWWAS uses Avalanche's trademark
> roll-six-to-hit system, that might be OK - you can always roll a six even
> on a single die.  The question is whether that single six can produce
> enough damage to leave a carrier dead in the water, or unable to take on
> aircraft (as was a pretty good historical chance that it would).
>
> This problem is what wrecked SPI's Fast Carriers, which had a standard
> old-style odds-based attack and a single full strength torpedo bomber
> counter couldn't do more than scratch the paint on a carrier - apparently
> you had to have five or so torpedoes hit at the same spot to penetrate the
> armor. :-)  So that game was a very extreme example.
>
> Conversely, there should normally be a risk of losing aircraft; in fact in
> air attacks on naval targets it should almost be a given that some
> aircraft would be lost.
>
> Historically, the reaction of all sides in WW2 against all kinds of naval
> threat was pretty much the same.  Collect everything you can get into the
> air and throw it against the threat.  There was never a question of
> conserving resources; the chance of hitting a ship (a much larger piece of
> equipment) was always considered worth it.
>
> >* Flights on an anti-ship mission might not even navigate to and find the
> target correctly.
> >*The Long Lance torpedo is devastating and a big threat.
> >*A ship might roll a handful of dice in an attempt to hit but miss, or be
> lucky and score a number of hits.
> >*A few good critical hits can finish a foe quickly.
> >*Aerial recon reports on enemy fleets are often inaccurate, they could be
> higher or lower.
>
> Nothing to say against all this; of course they are merely features that
> the series shares with most carrier game out there, and it has to fight
> against the handicap that (unlike virtually all carrier games out there)
> you already know where the other side's task forces are while you play.
>
> >*The naval gunnery hits seem to most often take out the other ships guns
> >first (which from what I have read is pretty historically accurate).
>
> Depends on the degree. Generally, turrets were less heavily armored than
> the main citadel of the ships of the time, and of course they were above
> the waterline.  So it was not unlikely that a ship would lose individual
> turrets during a fight, even if not by a direct hit, then by power to the
> turret being cut.  If you tend to lose most or all turrets before a ship
> is in mortal danger, then something is amiss.  Most ships that stopped
> firing would have had major engineering or flotation damage at the time,
> and usually the (essentially unarmored) targeting systems would go before
> the turrets.
>
> Markus
>
> Last 3 games played: ASLSK #1, Air & Armor, At all Hazards
> ---------------
http://www.dbai.tuwien.ac.at/user/mst/games/ ---------------
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> Aritomo Goto's last words to his staff, October 11, 1942
>
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