I got to play a test Warlord Games' Victory at Sea naval rules at Will's gaming shop. It was SO nice to have a game and interact with others. It was a quickie set up. I had a Japanese heavy cruiser and two destroyers. My opponent, a friend of Will's, had the USS Northampton heavy cruiser and three Fletcher class DDs. Will acted as umpire.
It was a pretty crazy battle. Ships were constantly circling each other, particularly the destroyers to get a torpedo launch in. Torpedoes have a very short effective range. Only my cruiser had the Japanese long lance torpedoes. Bottom line, the Americans sunk all my destroyers and heavily damaged my cruiser. I badly damaged his destroyers and sunk the Northampton with my cruiser's torpedoes. It was decided that it was a minor victory for the Japanese in terms of points. I suppose the American destroyers could have pursued, but all of them had already launched their torpedoes. I had a reload of torpedoes ready to go, and probably would have taken down at least two of the destroyers before their guns got close enough.
The rules seem ok. I would need to play a few more games. It seemed like torpedoes are not at all effective particularly in terms of ranges. I'd have to compare it to other rules. I'm not sure if I want to buy the models. They aren't bad, but frankly, at 1/1800 scale, they could have better detail. I think GHQ's 1/2400 figures have a lot more detail to them.
Looks like a nice sort of small-to-medium craft action that makes the Pacific naval campaign so interesting - at least until attrition and fuel shortages began seriously to starve the Japanese efforts.
ReplyDeleteThe Guadalcanal campaign in particular lends itself to plenty of enthralling naval action...
Cheers
Ion
We probably are going to focus on Guadalcanal and the sea battles related to them. Another idea was to develop a "what if" scenario where the most of if not all of the French fleet at Mers-el-Kébir was able to break out and fight the Royal Navy.
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