Worklist for update 1.4

I've been experimenting with the Iowa and it's big guns. I've tried 13AP/4Dam , 12AP/5Dam, and the by the book 13AP/5Dam. I think that 12AP/5Dam plays best.

Hi,

I just wanted to inform you my gamers group and me have fought several battle now with your rules (Version 1.3.6). We included the QRS from 1.4 which increases the probability to make superstructure hit.
Yesterday we fought our first night battle. As we played historical battles only up to now we can compare the results with the real outcome of theses battle. I think the AP values of the ships don't need an increase of +1. The damage output of our BB, BC, CR, CL and DD was always realistic. Our last battle (1st Guadalcanal) showed the difficulties of the US light cruisers to penetrate the armor of those Japanese Kongo-Class Battlecruisers. Only superficial damage could be made. Which is historically correct. In reality there was the same problem for these US gun crews.

Regards,

Lindinho

After the last few days of testing I agree with you. The only weapons that should keep the +1 adjustment are the plane bombs and torpedoes. Guns should stay as 1.3x

Fair enough, I've rolled back the AP increase on the gun systems, kept the values for the Torpedoes and the Bombs. I'll post a new fleet builder file later tonight after I addressed the other new posts.

Thank you all for your feedback!

Before you change it I think we should ask Lindiho if he thinks I'm right about the torpedoes and planes. I believe that planes should keep AP 10 because battleships should be able to be damaged beyond just superstructure hits. Japanese torpedoes should be at 13AP. They were more powerful than any gun and a terror to ships. I'd like to hear Lindiho's opinion on this.

No worries, 1.4 is still in Beta, so if you guys come up with further results from your playtests we can change it accordingly. That aside, more input, battle reports and discussion is always welcome, so please tell us if you have an opinion on the AP stats for the Torpedoes and bombs.

In lieu of that, I have a few observations to share from one of my own recent playtests. I played with 3 squadrons, a Battleship squadron, cruiser squadron and DD squadron. So I ended up with 8 order tokens each turn. I found that at the end of each turn I usually had some order tokens left and I tried hard to burn them all on activations but that proved quite hard, especially in the early game. On the other end, I only had 5 Disruption tokens which only give you like two effective disruption possibilities on 8 activations, which means that with a little bit of smart play, it is quite easy to burn your opponents' disruption tokens and get a lot of free orders in.

All this came a little too easy for my taste, do any of you recognise this? I imagined the system to give the player some hard choices and to give an advantage to players that used smart indirect activations to save order tokens etc. I didn't see this in smaller games. Might the scaling of the order & disruption tokens be off a bit?

I haven't tried a large game so I don't know.

I've updated the 1.4.1 fleet builder file with the changed gun AP ratings.

Hello Garmel,

I haven't playtested bombs so much up to now. I only saw one attack of a Ju-87 Stuka dive bombing a transport ship. As I did not find a datacard for the Stuka I just used the stats from a Japanese D3A Val dive bomber (bomb AP 9). The bombing result was not devastating. It damaged the ship, started a fire and damaged the engine. A reasonable result for one hit, I think. Usually one or two more bomb hits would easily finish off that kind of civillian ship. How this would work with a more armoured warship? I don't know. I am going to playtest the attack on Force Z. Here a battleship and a battlecruiser were sunk solely by aerial torpedoes and bombs. You can compare the results with the historical outcome then. As far as I know the bombs did not that much damage. These two ships were sunk by several torpedo hits.

Are Japanese torpedoes superior to other nations? Yes, but only because of their more modern propulsion giving them a range of up to 40 kilometers (!). Of course, they had a larger caliber (610mm compared to the usual 533mm) and a larger warhead with 500kg explosives (german torpedoes had 280kg) but I think their AP12 value, compared to AP11 of the other nations works very well. I would not increase that to AP13 imho.

I'm thinking that it's too easy to hit planes with AA. How about when shooting at planes the short modifier is dropped?