Battleship Row - Average Game Size

[admiralgrafspee]

Hi,

Just bought Battleship row and Bitter Rivals yesterday! Love what I've read so far, and can't wait to try it out with my War at Sea miniatures.

What size of games to people typically play? My buddies and I probably want something that lasts 2-3 hours - and for now we'll want to make our own fleets and not get into historic scenarios just yet.

One thing that concerns me are the "sub attacks". It seems to me that they could be very dominant for small games and not such a big deal for really big games. Were the number of dice for sub attacks associated with any point level?

Thanks!

[warchariot]

Welcome to the forum. I'm not sure about a point level, but there is a topic about sub attacks in this thread area. I'm sure others will be happy to help.

[TheDreadnought]

Well for very small games you might just want to skip the sub attacks. The sub rules are in place to reflect their effect on the exciting surface actions. If you're only running a small game, and one of the major combatants gets torpedoed and sunk by a sub the day prior, that doesn't leave you much to game, so it might be better to assume that the force was not spotted by subs.

A "typical" Naval Thunder (Battleship Row) game involving only 2 players, might involve a couple capital ships on each side, plus a handful of cruisers and destroyers. The more experienced you are, the more you'll be able to handle per player in a 2 hour game. I

'd suggest just trying out a couple games and seeing what your personal bandwidth limit is, you'll find that with a couple games under your belt, that number increases a fair amount.

[admiralgrafspee]

Thanks for the reply guys! Can't wait to try it out. Maybe we'll try 1000pts without subs to start and take it from there.

[admiralgrafspee]

We had our first real sized game over the weekend at 1500pts a side. We decided not to use aircraft or subs this time. It went smoothly and everyone had a blast.

We really like how there is not need to have an abstract "crippled" condition on ships in Naval Thunder - by the time you are down to a third of your original hull points your ship has very much lost a lot of functionality (usually).

We're going to take it up a notch to 2000pts next time, and this time include both subs and aircraft.

[warchariot]

Pictures! Take pictures, please

[shigure]

Very interested in the sub attacks. Let us know how they come out. Subs would most likely be submerged for a daylight attack on a fleet action. The sub would need to be almost perfectly placed to get a shot at fast moving targets engaging other fleet units.

[TheDreadnought]

Glad you are having a good time with it!

By all means, we'd love for you to do a battle report write up and post it in the AAR section. Pictures would make it even sweeter!

[admiralgrafspee]

I do plan on doing a battle report with photos - once i get my next Litko order! We're using War at sea figs, which look very nice on the table with litko counters for fire/splash markers/torps/smoke etc.

Next battle will be UK vs. Germany at 2000pts. Probably sometime in late Sept.

[shigure]

Yes, the Litko markers do make the photos look more visually appealling. However, I do hate placing that sunken ship marker with the combo fire and smoke marker when it is one of my own ships no matter how good it looks....:-)))

[warchariot]

Sept 8, 2010 13:26:08 GMT -5 shigure said:

Yes, the Litko markers do make the photos look more visually appealling. However, I do hate placing that sunken ship marker with the combo fire and smoke marker when it is one of my own ships no matter how good it looks....:-)))

Yeah, bad enough you have to remove the ship., much less have a reminder for the rest of the game.

[admiralgrafspee]

Had our 2000pt game. Sorry no bat rep this time, as I didn't have my litko counters yet (just came last night, so next time I promise).

We decided to try out the sub rules. Net result was minor damage to Bismarck and Scharnhorst and major damage to Nelson. In fact Nelson was reduced to a speed of 2, was listing and had lots half her hull points. Yikes!

I would classify our group as "semi-competitive". We started war gaming with the likes of 40k/WHFB, so we very much like the model of picking an nation, making a decent fleet that you think will counter what your opponent will bring, or catch them off guard with something. To this end we've decided that we aren't going to use ALL the nationality special rules, but allow each admiral to pick a single national benefit.

So, keeping that in mind, the Germans had the advantage going into the surface battle as the subs had performed much better. The Germans had chose "teutonic efficiency" as their benefit (-1 on damage control roles helps against pregame flooding!!) and the sneaky english took "Advanced Radar". On turn 1 the english lay down an impenetrable wall of smoke with 7 destroyers from which they would continually restablish for several turns. From here they pelted the Rapidly advancing german fleet.

Fortunately for the germans the english didn't take it as far as they could have, as one of their large ships was the hood that doesn't have radar, and also the Rodney was listing and not firing as efficiently as possible. They finally came out of the smoke when the germans were in short range.

The germans had lost all their destroyers on the advance, and had to dish it out with just their cruisers (hipper and scheer) and battleships (Bismarck and Scharnhorst). Turns out the germans had much better aim and managed to clean the brits off the map, at the cost of the two cruisers.

Anyway the long and short of it is that 2000pts really feels like a good sized game (especially if you have 2 people per side) for an evening. I think we are going to come up with some of our own house rules for subs and smoke - these may not be very reflective of how things were historically, but we want to make them a bit more fun/balanced for our group. We're also going to work a bit more on some balanced "national benefits" for all nations.

Is there an area in this forum for posting house rules?

Anyway, everyone really loves the surface combat rules. The shooting resolution and the way criticals are done is just amazing. I get great satisfaction in blowing off main turrets on other battleships.

[shigure]

Sounds like everyone enjoyed themselves. Certainly sounds like adding the subs into the fray had a major negative effect on the RN!!! Did you perform any ASW before or after the attacks?

I would be very interested in your house rules. Adds a little nationality spice to the mix. Might want to add a rule about having to check for wind direction when laying smoke. Could provide for some interesting results.

[regiamarina]

Smoke and radar has been the only "problem" that my playing group has found also. More a quirk really so we introduced a few house rules. These are designed for early to mid war, 39'-'43, before radar was fully tried and trusted by commanders.

Our rules are if firing solely using radar the ship must firstly pass a command check and if passed it must fire at the nearest target only. We found that this gives an historical feel with one target being hammered by an entire enemy fleet whilst the rest maneuver into position. This happened a number of times in night actions in the Pacific with the Japanese losing one sacrificial destroyer to radar guided fire whilst the rest of the fleet maneuvered to fire long lances at the US. For later war we are thinking of simply dropping the command roll as commanders came to trust radar more.

Haven't really come up with a better system for balancing a game where one side has smoke and radar and the other side doesn't.

Regards
Marty

[shigure]

I like that rule and have mentioned it in our group (all radar equipped ships firing at the same target). So far we have discussed it, but have not implemented it.

One thing we did implement for early to mid-war was that due to the shortage of available FC radars until late in the war the secondary batteries must fire at the same target as the main batteries or lose the radar modifier.

Looking forward to your write-ups and pics of upcoming battles.

[admiralgrafspee]

Hey guys,

Yes, we did the ASW rolls. Funny enough the RN did hit once, reducing the dice to 5. The germans missed, so UK had double the dice at 8.... but the german attacks were more accurate, and the RN players couldn't stop the flooding on the Rodney.

I like the radar house rule. I'll bring that idea up with the guys.

[TheDreadnought]

Yeah, one of the "problems" with a historical wargame is that your are modeling what actually happened and the situation that existed. In nearly every case, the situations were not "fair" to both sides. Even worse, with the benefit of hindsight, modern wargamers can take advantage of technology and tactics in ways that never happened historically, but could have if thinking had been different at the time.

The combination of smoke and radar directed fire control is a good example. Its an absolutely lethal combination against opponents who don't have RDFC. But the radar at the time was generally not trusted enough, or smoke was not used in many cases where it could have been. Finally, the big battles that get played out as games, who knows what tactics might have been used in that situation. . . but didn't because the battle never occurred.

So anyway, its just a limitation of playing in the 2010s a wargame simulating the 1940s.

That said I think its perfectly reasonable to make house rule adjustments to things like that to increase the fun factor of the game. The radar house rule above sounds like a good one that is based on some historical precedent as well which is always a good thing.

Still not a huge amount of help for the RDFC+smoke vs. No RDFC, but it would help some.

[TheDreadnought]

On the subject of competitive style play. It's always tough to do that with a historical wargame for the reasons mentioned. I can be done, but requires some work and deviation from the historical model, and/or creation of victory conditions that in some cases may be unsatisfying to play with.

When stratofleets comes out next year, I'd suggest you guys check it out. It's going to be WWI style naval combat with a starship-combat like ship design system. True it involves flying ships, but it would be possible to transalate to historical naval action very easily. That would give you a 'historical' naval game that would provide a good basis for competitive play.

Just something you might want to look at.

[regiamarina]

Yes the smoke+radar issue only arose when a competitve player with quite an extensive knowledge on naval warfare raised the point. So as you say 2010 knowledge in 1940's gaming makes for a harsh lesson for the side without radar.

We are still testing it out and we certainly aren't trying to make it a perfectly balanced game, some of the funnest games I've had are when the odds were stacked against me, we just wanted to try out a simple rule to allow the non-radar using side a chance to do more than be an unfortunate target. I leave the monumental task of balancing history and playability to far more capable minds than my own.

Regards
Martin

[shigure]

Night actions are the most difficult to make realistic. In reality, on a radar screen all you would see was a big marker on the screen. You have no idea what the ship type is or what its offensive capabilities are. But as we all like to play with minatures, that's the some of the realism we give up.

Unfortunately, the real commanders had no such advantage. If they were not careful they could and did fire at their own ships. Surigao Strait is an example of this, when the USN had very good RFC. Some of the USN tincans came under fire from the cruiser line.