First Game - not happy with results.

[Captain Kremmen]

This game has obviously been extensively played by a number of people who would probably find most of the problems. I have played one whole game so am not an expert, this is my findings so far though.

Battleships with big guns rule the seas, not cruisers, not destroyers and certainly not useless aircraft carriers. This would be nice in WWI but appears completely wrong in WW2

Aircraft are completely useless. As I anticipated aircraft being useless we played our first game with each attack planes having 2AD instead of just 1. Didn't make much difference US planes inflicted moderate damage on a nagato and the Japs inflicted moderate damage on a portland class cruiser. That was it.

Zeroes V Wildcats was fun and of course the wildcats lost. Official rules for dogfighting seems to give the player with additional aircraft a dsiadvantage rather than an advantage. Zeros +4 dogfight. Wildcat +2 This just means that if 2 wildcats engage 1 zero the zero gets to shoot down 2 wildcats instead of one. We chose instead to give +1 to the dogfighter for each additional fighter he had in the dogfight, this allowed the zeroes to be swamped. They still won but at least it blocked them for a while.

I think I would have to play with attack aircraft with 3AD in future and think they should be given a chance to rearm and take off again, though this is unrealistic in the timeframe. Otherwise it means one shot and they are out of the game

Battleships - big dogs, they rule, the torpedo bulge is over the top, makes them indestructable. Suggest +1 on the DD roll instead of re rolling all hits

Cruisers, play nice, but even 8inch guns have almost no kick at all. A quite small battleship will have at least 5 times the firepower of a very heavy cruiser despite the cruiser having rapid fire large 8 inch guns. This seems a little disproportionate.

Destroyers, very good, but like aircraft once you have fired their torpedoes they are totally worthless, all they can do is run away. I appreciate torpedoes are a good weapon, but the destroyer should be able to do something after they have fired their torpedoes.

Spotting planes, you quickly end up with skies full of the ridiculous things, it starts to look silly and confusing. We gave up bothering with them in the end, I don't think the amount of benefit they add to the game outweighs the amount of hassle and inconvenience they cause, just factor them into cruisers and above to hit chances.

I would be interested to hear if anyone else has had similar experiences, or if anyone has ideas if I did anything wrong. I have to say I prefer ACTA at the moment, but will play some more games to get better at it.

Cpt Kremmen

 

[Renny]

Hi

I agree with a lot of what you said but particularly the fact that the sky is awash with spotter planes which is not at all realistic. Problem is, you can't afford to keep them on the deck if you have them

Renny

 

[Court Jester]

Battleships with big guns rule the seas

I would agree here.

Aircraft are completely useless.

I played my first game today and although I managed to win the game before I comitted my dive bombers I will agree that the Japanese torpedo and dive bombers were not as effective as I was dreading.

Zeroes V Wildcats was fun and of course the wildcats lost. Official rules for dogfighting seems to give the player with additional aircraft a dsiadvantage rather than an advantage. Zeros +4 dogfight. Wildcat +2 This just means that if 2 wildcats engage 1 zero the zero gets to shoot down 2 wildcats instead of one.

I will agree that the dogfight rules as written are very ambiguous. Although what you may not have noticed is that your two flights of Wildcats would be adding +4 to their dice roll in a dogfight. So two wings of Mustangs would add +10 and so on.

We also played that when a flight is outnumbered and wins a dogfight it can only cause a single point of damage. As again the rules here are not clear at all and as written it seems the writer was not envisaging dogfights with one side out numbered.

the torpedo bulge is over the top,

From what I saw of a firne using the Iowa I would say that a Torpedo Belt is indeed a good thing. Allowing the Iowa to survive around 10 long lance slavos without really looking to be in any trouble.

Destroyers, very good, but like aircraft once you have fired their torpedoes they are totally worthless, all they can do is run away. I appreciate torpedoes are a good weapon, but the destroyer should be able to do something after they have fired their torpedoes.

Again this was the case in our game although I did not really have a problem with it.

Spotting planes, you quickly end up with skies full of the ridiculous things, it starts to look silly and confusing. We gave up bothering with them in the end, I don't think the amount of benefit they add to the game outweighs the amount of hassle and inconvenience they cause, just factor them into cruisers and above to hit chances.

Although we did launch Spotter planes for the most we forgot about them. I used them to hold up some Japanse dive bombers and then one was shot down by AA fire. Another factor was that we were doing plenty of manuvering and so not stopping long enough to launch spotters.

The first game we played was much more interactive as neither fleet used a ship above raid level. The American air power pretty much neutralized the Japanese dive bombers (I was using the Yorktown) and the US navy was able to skirt around the battlefield and keep at relative range to the Japanese ships.

It was also quite fun as none of the cruisers were able to outright destroy each other unlike in the second game.

The US fleet dropped almost all its points into the Iowa-class Battleship which went on to destroy one enemy ship each turn whilst taking everything thrown at it.

I still enjoyed the game although I agree an out of place Battleship could easily make for a silly game. I want to play a few more games before I decide about aircraft.

 

[Der Kommandant]

Although what you may not have noticed is that your two flights of Wildcats would be adding +4 to their dice roll in a dogfight. So two wings of Mustangs would add +10 and so on.

ummm what?

 

[Court Jester]

Say you had two flights of Mustangs dogfighting one flight of Zeros. The Zeros would get D6+4 the Mustangs would get D6+10

The rules say:

Everyflight in contact with an enemy flight must engage in dogfighting. Both players roll one dice and add their flights' dogfight scores

As it reads you total your dogfight values. The rules do not state that each flight dogfights seperatly (an individual roll for every flight) and there is no mention of anything else like outnumbering bonuses and such. In fact the dogfight rules neglect to really adress the situation of multiple flights involved in dogfights.

 

[DSV1]

Kremmen

You didnt say how may carriers you had ?

It took about a dozen torpedoes + bombs to sink Yamato, and if you factor in all the ones that missed thats a helluva lot of ordenance to sink 1 ship.

I get the idea that the game is supposed to be semi realistic so we have fun playing it, I for one love ww2 naval games but I really cant be bothered trawling through 20 pages of rules to find out what happened to that stray torpedo.

If planes are ineffective there is nothing stopping you upping their DD or AD , wargame rules are made to be modified mate.

 

[Der Kommandant]

i think youre reading that wrong jester...

4. If an ME109 flight engages two flights, a Fulmar and a Swordfish, then the follwoing occurs. The British player chooses the Fulmar (he could choose the Swordfish for some reason) to fight off the 109. If he predictably fails to shoot down the 109s then the Swordfish and 109 engage one another on the same turn.

 

[Poi]

I think youre reading that wrong jester...

4. If an ME109 flight engages two flights, a Fulmar and a Swordfish, then the following occurs. The British player chooses the Fulmar (he could choose the Swordfish for some reason) to fight off the 109. If he predictably fails to shoot down the 109s then the Swordfish and 109 engage one another on the same turn.

Never mind, we'll know next time.

 

[Court Jester]

i think youre reading that wrong jester...

4. If an ME109 flight engages two flights, a Fulmar and a Swordfish, then the follwoing occurs. The British player chooses the Fulmar (he could choose the Swordfish for some reason) to fight off the 109. If he predictably fails to shoot down the 109s then the Swordfish and 109 engage one another on the same turn.

Although I will go with as it has been ruled that way I will point out that rules as written do a VERY bad jpb of supporting that answer.

That answer feels like a bad fix to an oversight in the rules. It also makes no sense how one squadron will wait its turn to be killed whilst watching one enemy squadron systametically wipe out the entire bomber wing.

The writing of these rules needs to be so much tighter to avoid many mis-understandings.

 

[Der Kommandant]

i think youre reading that wrong jester...

4. If an ME109 flight engages two flights, a Fulmar and a Swordfish, then the follwoing occurs. The British player chooses the Fulmar (he could choose the Swordfish for some reason) to fight off the 109. If he predictably fails to shoot down the 109s then the Swordfish and 109 engage one another on the same turn.

Although I will go with as it has been ruled that way I will point out that rules as written do a VERY bad jpb of supporting that answer.

That answer feels like a bad fix to an oversight in the rules. It also makes no sense how one squadron will wait its turn to be killed whilst watching one enemy squadron systametically wipe out the entire bomber wing.

The writing of these rules needs to be so much tighter to avoid many mis-understandings.

ill agree with you on that jester. there are a lot of rules that are written pretty vaguely. personally i like the way that you guys were doing it, it kind of makes more sense. there should be a benefit to having numbers superiority.
i'm just disappointed that official answers to questions are not very forthcoming. they still havent made a ruling on how turning is done nor have i seen anything official on radar.

 

[pixelgeek]

Battleships with big guns rule the seas, not cruisers, not destroyers and certainly not useless aircraft carriers. This would be nice in WWI but appears completely wrong in WW2

That doesn't really appear to match with what I have read abut WWII naval engagements.

Especially in the Pacific.

One often reads comments, regarding the damage from Pearl Harbour, that it was lucky that the US carrier assets weren't at Pearl Harbour because a battleship only fleet (i.e. no carriers) wouldn't have been able to fight effectively against the Japanese.

 

[Chernobyl]

the one shot deal of fighters seems kind of weird. They ought to be able to re-arm and re-launch. I'm trying to figure out how something like the battle of midway could happen in VAS.

Chern

 

[Steelwhip]

the one shot deal of fighters seems kind of weird. They ought to be able to re-arm and re-launch. I'm trying to figure out how something like the battle of midway could happen in VAS.

Chern

I dont really think it could.....in the small scale time frame that the game runs and represents....rearming aircraft would be a long process and probley outside the scope of the game scale..

I did a quick search through some books and according to historical records(History of the United States Naval Operations in WWII by S.E. Morrison-Book 4 Coral Sea, Midway, and Submarine Operations)

Admiral Nagumo "broke the spot" at 0715 4 June and ordered his aircraft to be switched from carrying torpedos to carrying bombs for a follow up strike on Midway Island. A job that would require more than an hour of work.

So if we even asume that reaming aircraft would take 1/2 the time to rearm as it would to totaly switch out armaments that is still 30+ minuets of work. possibley a very long time depending on the time frame each turn is supposed to represent.

Would I like to see it-sure.

Im thinking of dragging out my old copy of Midway from Avalon Hill and seeing about adapting that to a VaS campaign. Use the map boards to represent the movment and searching, but switch to VaS to fight the engagments out. [/quote]

 

[Chernobyl]

probably a good point, with the time span involved.

Chern

 

[Fitzwalrus]

We played our "Carrier Clash" scenario Friday night so I now have played all of two games to Capt. K's one, but I have to agree with a lot of his points.

I like VAS a lot, particularly for it's "fast play" style of game mechanics (which work well overall IMHO and in that of the other two WWII naval geeks who are helping play out the bugs in the system) but for the most part the damage rules need serious help if they are going to simulate the "feel" of WWII naval combat rather than the made-up sci-fi "history" of B5 and ACTA that the rules are drawn from.
One of our player/testers is a big Seakrieg fan, which for all it's elaborate game mechanics and handfuls of charts and tables does do a very good job of simulating historical WWII damage results. While VAS's surface gunnery and damage between smaller ships (DD's to CA's) seems to work out pretty well, the amount of damage dealt out by torpedoes and bombs to BB's and CV's comes nowhere near the damage from a similar situation in SK or in historical accounts.
(Someone mentioned Midway above: take six flights of Dauntlesses (there were 32 planes in the historical attack, but close enough), let two Shokaku's stand in for Kaga and Akagi, and see how many times you have to run through the VAS system in order to duplicate history and irretrievably cripple both carriers in one attack. Hint: pack a lunch.)

These are some of the ideas we're adopting or will be trying out in future games in an attempt to push our game results a little closer to historical ones, and hopefully without bogging down the game:
(a) Add Searchlights and Starshells to Night battles to eliminate "bulletproof" 7+ or 8+ destroyers,
(b) Adopt the old GW system for rolling 7+ on a D6, ditto,
(c) Modify Torpedo Belts so they degrade with accumulated damage,
(d) Drop the 4+ second roll to "confirm" Crits from aerial torpedo and bomb hits: such hits to automatically Crit on a DD roll of 6,
(e) Increase the Speed of Observation Aircraft (which currently are slower than some DD's, and no faster than the rest) and come up with specs for each fleets' own type of plane,
(f) Set up rules for Carrier Operations, allowing CV's to Launch, Recover, Rearm and Relaunch aircraft during the course of a game; include increased damage to CV's caught and attacked with aircraft onboard and/or being rearmed,
(g) Increase Carriers' vulnerability to Fire damage, and make Fires on CV's correspondingly more difficult to put out,
(h) Possibly increase the number of AD a flight of Dive- or Torpedo-Bombers gets: I want to think about that some more and see what effect our other ideas have first.
(A 250-lb. bomb is roughly equivalent to an 8" shell: a Flight of six Dauntlesses would thus carry at least the equivalent of a single-shot broadside from a six-gun CA like the Aoba. Trouble is, we don't know if a ship's turret AD are meant to represent one salvo or several, so direct comparisons there are tricky. Torpedoes are a little easier: a Flight of six Devastators or Avengers carries six torpedoes, and it's not too tough to look up the number of torpedoes on DD's to see how many torps their AD are meant to represent. However, aerial torpedoes are lighter and have smaller warheads, so that comparison isn't perfect, either. Hmmmm.....)

I'm not saying anyone else should have to do all these things: if you're happy with the way VAS plays "as is" then go for it and have fun. These are just some of the points that our playtesting so far has identified that need adjustment to give a more accurate historical "feel" to the results, or at least get ones that are close enough to keep interest in the game.

 

[Reaverman]

Why were'nt these bugs picked up on the play test?

 

[Captain Kremmen]

Hi Guys,

I am interested that the majority of respondants are having something like my experiences and all on 1 or 2 games, yet with extensive play testing most of this questions must have come up in the first few days, I am quite surprised no one did something to fix them.

I rather like the idea of making crits automatic on a 6 rather than having to then roll a 4,5,6. For smaller cruisers and destroyers it doesn't really matter as these ships are hammered quickly anyway. But it would increase the damage done on big ships, which would help carrier aircraft and torpedo destroyers.

I am deffinitely going to go for 3AD instead of 1AD on all attack craft and despite increasing their firepower by 300% I still don't think they will affect a battle as much as say one Iowa.

I am not sure Battleship turrets should be allowed to fire at smaller targets, it seems unhistoric, I suspect a 16 inch Armour piercing shell would just go through a destroyer (in the unlikely event it could hit it) without doing much damage?

I think I am just going to ban spotting planes as they drag the whole game down.

Sorry we only had one carrier on each side. But remember we were using our attack craft as 2AD not one so did as much damage as 2 carriers should have done, which was still trivial.

Ta

Cpt Kremmen

 

[Reaverman]

Hi Guys,

I am interested that the majority of respondants are having something like my experiences and all on 1 or 2 games, yet with extensive play testing most of this questions must have come up in the first few days, I am quite surprised no one did something to fix them.

I rather like the idea of making crits automatic on a 6 rather than having to then roll a 4,5,6. For smaller cruisers and destroyers it doesn't really matter as these ships are hammered quickly anyway. But it would increase the damage done on big ships, which would help carrier aircraft and torpedo destroyers.

I am deffinitely going to go for 3AD instead of 1AD on all attack craft and despite increasing their firepower by 300% I still don't think they will affect a battle as much as say one Iowa.

I am not sure Battleship turrets should be allowed to fire at smaller targets, it seems unhistoric, I suspect a 16 inch Armour piercing shell would just go through a destroyer (in the unlikely event it could hit it) without doing much damage?

I think I am just going to ban spotting planes as they drag the whole game down.

Sorry we only had one carrier on each side. But remember we were using our attack craft as 2AD not one so did as much damage as 2 carriers should have done, which was still trivial.

Ta

Cpt Kremmen

K,

reading through the post I can only make one suggestion;

You had way too much going on, for your first game. Burger and I played the 'Denmark Straits' scenario last Tuesday, and we still made mistakes and errors with just 2 ships each. Play a few scenarios with some simple ships, and then start to add other rules like Spotting, Carriers, and smoke etc.

 

[LaranosTZ]

After talking with several naval buff friends of mine, I don't think the unhittable destroyers situation is all that unrealistic. *shrug*

During world war two, especially before the advent of radar destroyers and other light, relatively fast ships -were- pretty much unhittable at night at ranges further then close spotting distance. Remember, they were relying on charting, spotting, mechanical measurements and plain ol' instinct to hit their target. When all you can see at night is a few lights -waaaay- off in the distance, moving relatively much faster to your own vessel, it's no wonder you can't hit it.

I think we think much too commonly in modern warfare terms, where ship-to-ship combat is much more about electronic warfare and tracking, waiting for that right moment when you can hit the button and get a kill, as opposed to World War 2 where often times they were forced to make on-the fly adjustments and hope to hit something that they might be barely able to see.

I do also think that VaS is kinda the anti-ACTA game, while still using the same rules. In ACTA, fleets of smaller ships generally have a better chance of coming out on top over a smaller fleet of larger ships. This game is the opposite, where a solid, strong heavy fleet will not be overly threatened by a fleet of light harrying ships. I think this also reflects world war two naval warfare a bit better. This didn't mean the fleets of small harrying ships weren't effective, but it did mean they would more often hit shipping targets, smaller ships, and then escape before the big guys can retaliate and sink too many of the smaller vessels.

The aircraft thing? Eh....I have to agree here, there really are some balance/gameplay issues with aircraft. The only problem is that I have yet to come up with my own idea, nor have I seen an actual proposal on the forums that has a realistic chance of fixing the problem. At this point though, I'm not going to complain about it -until- I can propose a solution. That's a small issue I see in this regard, many people who post here complain, very few offer a potential solution.

 

[Captain Kremmen]

Hi all,

I may have used too complex a fleet, but it was only 5 point raid, nothing special, no smoke and no subs. I had tried to keep it simple.

The carrier aircraft did not complicate the game, the silly spotters did, both fleets had 3 ships that carried multiple spotter, at one point I think we had more spotters than carrier aircraft up in the air, until my zeroes got annoyed and shot most of the US ones down.

I do think the battleship as king is more of a WWI reality than WWII. As far as I can see in most cases carriers were king for fleet actions. 2nd rate battleships got used in the atlantic as convoy escorts and elsewhere as off shore bombardment. Cruisers and destroyers fought all the small night engagements in the pacific, battleships were not suitable for close in knife fights in restricted waters. Destroyer escorts and aircraft hunted down the U boats. Submarines sunk most of the merchant shipping. The only thing your first rate battleships like Yamato, Iowa etc did for most of the war was trail along behind the fleet carriers as "escorts". They were two vulnerable to be used in a fleet action and too valuable to risk in close in knife fights where a single torpedo could cause extensive damage. In WW2 Battleships were pointless white elephant status symbols, a left over from a past age that no one knew what to do with. Yet in these rules they are mini death stars that can single handedly swat anything else from the oceans or skies.

I am going to fight another battle on Wednesday, try and simplify the forces involved. I for one will not be wasting points on carriers.

I am also going to refight yesterdays battle with an alternative set of rules I bought recently to see how it goes. In fairness to Mongoose I don't think this is the forum to discuss other manufacturers products so I will not even name them. IF the results are interesting I will post a thread on TMP WWII naval message board. If however I can't be bothered then I wont. I am nothing if not lazy at heart!

Cpt K
PS Still happy to play a tournament, I'll have every Yamato Navwar have got and a few loaner Iowas for good measure!

PPS Will do pics of my aircraft shortly. Models and painting are rather good. Attaching to flying bases is NOT.....