Mare Nostrum

So my latest game was a what if between Caio Duillio, 2 CA, 2 CL and 13 DD and an escort of 5 CL, 22 DDs, and 4 Merchantmen. The most obvious element to this game was the fact that the Italian DDs do not have rapid fire for their 4.7"s. I checked some of my notes and their ROF is half of RN guns of the same caliber, so guess that is right.... Makes it real tough. So the RN started with the AA CL C class, 7 Hunts and 2 F class DDs. The Italian commander started with Duillio and the 2 CLs. Things did not go well for the Italians from the start. The RN went first and was able to lay smoke to cover the convoy. It also dispatched the 2 real DDs into harms way. After a change in course of the initial Italian squadron, the RN DDs came under the concentrated fire of the 3 ships. Italian gunnery was not on form and only minimal damage was done to the DDs before getting in TT range. This was a little awkward for the Italians to say the least. Duillio took hits and one of the CLs was forced to break off. The trio of Dido class CLs arrived and immediate split their force into a further 3 squadrons, giving the RN a total of 6 squadrons, though only 4 would generate tokens. The Dido’s attracted the attention of most of the available Italian heavy units and took some moderate damage. This enable the newly arrived Arethusa groups DDs and one of the DD squadrons from the Dido group to catch the Duillio in a torpedo crossfire. Though hits were minimal the Italians decided enough was enough and “broke off”. I didn’t think that the Italians would have such a hard time of it. They did have far fewer forces, but were more powerful. The lack of DP guns on the DDs was a big factor, as the RN player I did not have to worry about using orders on gunnery activations and to a lesser extent movement activations for all the squadrons. The RN lost no ships, the Italians 1 DD.
Only a couple of questions came out of this Italian loss.
Does a Convoy count as a squadron, and therefore generate order tokens?
Can you create more squadrons than you can generate order tokens for? I know this has come up before. I feel it is okay as it is no worse than splitting a squadron into single ships.
Under the buying time deployment rules the attacker is only allowed to deploy one squadron. Would it be “cheating” to deploy all your forces in one squadron?

So I did the replay yesterday. I didn’t “cheat” and deploy my entire Italian forces as a single squadron and they were split up with each of the 4 cruisers leading 2 DDS and the Duilio had 3 DDs and was the squadron that started on table. The fighting was brutal and close. In the last turn the RN player tried to catch 3 Italian cruiser and DD squadrons in a massive torpedo attack, 80 launched…… I saw this coming and waited till all were launched and was able to get one squadron out it completely and the other 2 I positioned to be bow/stern on. There were no hits! This was a real destroyer melee, which the RN seemed to have the upper hand. In the end the RN lost 1 of the Didos, with the Cairo and Euralyus heading out of the combat zone, Penelope had taken some heavy fire from the Trento. The RN only lost 1 or 2 destroyers, the reminder had no torpedoes left. The Italians had lost 4 destroyers with all the others badly beaten up. One of the Italian 6” cruisers was trying to run down the freighters and the other Italian cruisers were undamaged, as was the Duilio. My reasoning for putting the DDs with a larger ship is their lack of rapid fire weapons, which is why I feel they suffered so badly from the RN DDs. I was able to get "work the guns" a couple of times. One thing I did try, that worked better than my opponent last week, was to use the Italian minefield special to play on the transports. Now I did use this during remaining actions, is that still valid?
Another thing that came up was the Britannia Rules the waves. We played it so you had to nominate the principle squadron and then pick the other 1 or 2 squadrons. On a successful roll you got to move all the squadrons. However on a fail there is another roll to see if any one squadron can move. If this fails nothing is moved and all squadrons are considered activated for movement and will then have to move in remaining actions. Is that what you were intending?
Also with torpedoes if a small ship is being fired upon in its bow/stern arc then it can’t be hit as you add one to the target score, or did I miss something?
Lastly I had a thought for another advance/timing order. Splinter Damage/Near Misses. 2+. Timing, after all rerolls have been made for a to hit roll. The target ship receives hits equal to the number of misses that were only 1 less than the target score, but at half Power and ROF of 1. Ie a cruisers target score at effective range is 5, so any rolls of a 4 could be used. This would give you a chance of damaging a destroyer at extreme range. This damage is in addition to any actual hits scored. No valid for torpedo attacks.
My opponent is moving out of state and next week will be our last game, so I don’t know how soon I will be playing again. Unless there is anyone in the Orange County area of California, that has any 1/3000 scale ships? Hopefully we will be able to play the game I have in mind on both sides. Operation Hats, August 1940. The British Med Fleet was almost intercepted by a far superior Italian force. They were 180 miles apart, before the Italians turned back. The Italians have on their force list 2 Littorios, both Duilios and Cesare, 7 CAs, 4 CLs and many DDs. The RN has Warspite and Malaya, Eagle with 1 flight of Gladiators and 3 Swordfish, 1 CA, 5 CLs and about 10 DDs. Obviously this would be pretty bad for the RN, so to make a game of it, I have broken the Italian forces into their respective sections and the Italian player must pick whole sections and build a force no more than 10% larger than the RN.

My wargame partner and I were able to get one last game in before he moved! Operations Hats. The RN is running a convoy to Malta with the secondary task of sending Valiant and 2 CLAAs to the Med Fleet in Alexandria. The part of the operation I was recreating was the possible encounter between elements of the Regia Marina and the RN. The Italian navy had set out with overwhelming force. So to make it a little less one sided I found the Squadron disposition for the Italians and the Italian player would have to construct a force that totaled no more than 10% above the RN forces. The RN forces in the battle were only those from the Eastern Med. Warspite, Malaya, Eagle, Kent, Gloucester, Liverpool, Orion and Sydney and nine destroyers. My opponent picked RN. I decided not to go with the main squadron with both Littorios, thought that would be over kill. Instead I opted for 3 squadrons with the older BBs and 2 squadrons with cruisers. One of the BBs was in distant support. To say it did not go well for the RN is an understatement. I thought even though there were only 3 flights of swordfish and 1 gladiators, the only aircraft on the table, they might make a difference, but that is too few in a battle like this. The only thing to prevent their demise would have been to try and attack when an Italian unit had fired its Dual Purpose guns at a surface target or possibly target the destroyers? The superior range on the Italian ships makes it very difficult for the RN, even if you have to spend an order to fire the destroyers. In the end the heavier Italian destroyer screen broke through to the BBs and CV and all but sank all three. The RN cruisers were damaged, can’t remember the exact Italian losses, but a clear Italian win. The reason I did not pick the Littorios was their fantastic range, but my understanding is that the shell dispersion was atrocious. Would this be something to build into the rules, maybe a special rule? Could be used for other ships with known accuracy/dispersion issues? Something like: Reroll all hits after any other rerolls, if the end result is no hits, as long as a hit was initially rolled place a splash marker. Or half the number of hits at extreme range, rounding down, even if this results in a net of no hits still place a splash marker? Could add in something with the Italian resource tokens?

Interesting, great battles. The 'cheat' of deploying all your ships in one squadron should be adressed I think. Maybe requiring an order token to assign a new flagship?

The extreme dispersion of the Italian guns could be addressed at the command station level. I'll see what I can come up with, there is ample historic data to warrant it.

Half hits for all Italian battleships at extreme range, rounding down, even after ranged in? Could be a ship/weapon special? Not just the Italians had this issue, didn't the French 4 gun turrets have an issue too?