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spectralent posted:Yeah, true, actually - I was thinking early modern is where the issue pops up but ancients has the exact same thing of "organised enough to not do stuff half-assed, no technological capacity to support the all-skirmish modern combat style". Things also get really wonky when you think about games like Bolt Action, 28mm WWII skirmish. 28mm scale is about 1/50. So that means a standard 4' x 6' table is roughly 66 x 100 yards/maters. That's pretty much the size of a FIFA field, or a bit wider than a US football field. Having a platoon level skirmish with tanks, anti-tank guns, artillery (!), and infantry platoons maneuvering in terrain in that area is ludicrous. The idea of using, say, a Katyusha to do indirect fire in that sort of space is just laughable.
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Oct 19, 2023 19:47
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Cessna posted:Things also get really wonky when you think about games like Bolt Action, 28mm WWII skirmish. 28mm scale is about 1/50. So that means a standard 4' x 6' table is roughly 66 x 100 yards/maters. That's pretty much the size of a FIFA field, or a bit wider than a US football field. yeah that space is barely big enough for an infantry platoon, which had handbook frontages of ~100-250 m (generalizing heavily here). it would be better to have table edges on the short side too, since engagements in any but extremely dense terrain would open up far in excess of 100 m
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Oct 19, 2023 19:52
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Cessna posted:Things also get really wonky when you think about games like Bolt Action, 28mm WWII skirmish. 28mm scale is about 1/50. So that means a standard 4' x 6' table is roughly 66 x 100 yards/maters. That's pretty much the size of a FIFA field, or a bit wider than a US football field. Oh, well aware - I play Chain of Command in 15mm which is a more plausible-looking (to my brain!) spread when there's a couple of tanks there, and there's no artillery on the table (unless the howitzers are your objective, say). But, that said, I played Where Sten Guns Dare recently and seeing it again really did strike home how much more of a spectacle it is when chunky 28mm lads take the field. I think realistically all miniatures games fall down at some point*, but it's just where your brain draws the line. Like I say, it probably has more to do with me not watching enough sharpe  *I think, probably, high-scale board games can get closer to the thing they represent by virtue of being more willing and able to abstract things - but, for miniatures games, the toy soldiers need to show up somewhere. spectralent fucked around with this message at 20:06 on Oct 19, 2023 |
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Oct 19, 2023 20:03
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The "problem" with Sharp Practice is not that small skirmishes didn't exist. There were tons of small engagements, from the size of half a company to a battalion or two per side, constantly being fought along the perimeter of advancing armies. These are very suitable for Sharp Practice. Take for example the 1809 campaign in Austria, there were lots of raids where as few as a boatload of voltigeurs crossed the Danube to cause havoc on the Austrians, or small bands of Tyrolean militiamen fighting in the valleys in the Alps. It's one of the reasons why Thunder on the Danube might be the best written depiction of a Napoleonic campaign, because Gill gives attention to even such small highlights instead of just featuring the big battles. I think the "problem", if you're looking for realism, is that it includes tactical flavour of the period that doesn't really fit if you look at it as a 1 mini = 1 soldier. Like, a dozen men "forming a square" would not be an impossible hurdle for a bunch of roaming cavalrymen. But you want to be able to form square, as it's a part of the stone paper scissors of napoleonic tactics that makes the period so good for wargames. One solution, if you can't get over such unrealistic situations, is to consider a unit to represent more men. So, a formation of three units represents a whole company. Two groups of cavalry would be a squadron. Then a lot of the tactical situations you get in Sharp Practice makes more sense than if you look at it as a 1 model = 1 man presentation. Or you just roll with it because it's a game that more aims at recreating the feel of the period than complete verisimilitude. E: as for the WW2 discussion, I'm very thankful that CoC at least went so far as to say that indirect fire bigger than a 5 inch mortar has no business being represented on a table. lilljonas fucked around with this message at 20:12 on Oct 19, 2023 |
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Oct 19, 2023 20:07
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Cessna posted:Sure, you get that sort of thing. But as spectralent points out in reality this sort of skirmish isn't a recreation of a big battle on a smaller scale with proportionate types of troops and formations. For example, a regiment of infantry form a square to defend against cavalry, but you wouldn't see a group of twenty guys in a square; it just doesn't work like that. Also, a force of skirmishers would be entirely of the same type; i.e., you'd run into a unit of all voltigeurs or all dragoons. You wouldn't have mini- combined arms battles with a group of line infantry supported by a dozen cavalrymen and a single canon. Ah I must have misunderstood the topic in question then. No, I agree, that kind of stuff is silly and makes no sense.
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Oct 19, 2023 20:23
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lilljonas posted:E: as for the WW2 discussion, I'm very thankful that CoC at least went so far as to say that indirect fire bigger than a 5 inch mortar has no business being represented on a table. Though even that has the actual weapon sitting behind your line! And, good points, honestly. It's just a game and I should probably just relax!
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Oct 19, 2023 20:24
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spectralent posted:Though even that has the actual weapon sitting behind your line! It all goes into the whole question of if you want to simulate the "feel" of a historical conflict or if you want to simulate the minutiae. After trying many games I am now pretty firmly in the former camp. Nerding out about map scale and how many minutes a turn represent and exactly how many yards a regiment can move in half an hour is probably realistic in the way that you would use stuff like Kriegsspiel to train actual military staff in the 19th century. But after trying Lasalle, where a lot of details are extremely unrealistic (like troop movements being very abstract and simplified. "You can just... like... wheel around and move however you want?!" I almost cried as I read them) but ending up with games that feel like what you'd read about in a historical Napoleonic campaign, I'm pretty convinced that what appeals to me is not the details, but the overall battle. And also detailed rulesets tend to bog down into a miserable gameplay experience, but that is another thing. I think a somewhat similar game would be all those hours I spent on Civilization 1 and 2 as a kid, where basically EVERY SINGLE MECHANIC in the game is insanely unrealistic if you even think about it, but still leaves you with the feeling of real nations in conflict while still being an enjoyable game.
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Oct 19, 2023 20:58
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lilljonas posted:It all goes into the whole question of if you want to simulate the "feel" of a historical conflict or if you want to simulate the minutiae. After trying many games I am now pretty firmly in the former camp. Nerding out about map scale and how many minutes a turn represent and exactly how many yards a regiment can move in half an hour is probably realistic in the way that you would use stuff like Kriegsspiel to train actual military staff in the 19th century. But after trying Lasalle, where a lot of details are extremely unrealistic (like troop movements being very abstract and simplified. "You can just... like... wheel around and move however you want?!" I almost cried as I read them) but ending up with games that feel like what you'd read about in a historical Napoleonic campaign, I'm pretty convinced that what appeals to me is not the details, but the overall battle. And also detailed rulesets tend to bog down into a miserable gameplay experience, but that is another thing. this is why sam mustafa makes such good games. mechanically, they're simplistic and reductionist. but because he is an extremely well and diversely read historian, the result is that games play out in a manner you'd expect from period warfare, and it has that je ne sais quoi taht so many wargame rules makers seek out, that you allude to - it feels like a period battle. he gets it right every time
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Oct 19, 2023 21:07
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hot cocoa on the couch posted:this is why sam mustafa makes such good games. mechanically, they're simplistic and reductionist. but because he is an extremely well and diversely read historian, the result is that games play out in a manner you'd expect from period warfare, and it has that je ne sais quoi taht so many wargame rules makers seek out, that you allude to - it feels like a period battle. he gets it right every time Yeah and he actually makes the effort of doing the probability calculations, which a surprisingly large number of rules writer don't. A typical example was a facebook thread I read where he was talking to someone about the cavalry vs square rules. The person was was complaining that he didn't think the rules felt right, and referred to circumstances where cavalry did break squares. Sam simply pointed out that a typical cavalry charge has X percentage chance to break a rypical square (I think it's about 10% or so) which is already higher than the expected chance in actual battles, and asked the person to state what percentage chance he thought was more fair and why. Of course there was no reply. It's really fashinating to compare to the lardies. Lardie games often have a kind of genius to the core mechanics that also lead to games that "feels" like a period battle. At least CoC and SP2, which are the ones I've played. However, I don't think he puts nearly as much rigour into thinking about probability and leaves that more to a gut feeling. Which he sometimes gets right, but also sometimes are off. So for example the value in support points In CoC given to guns and tanks are sometimes just weird because the math don't add up. For one thing, the 2mm automatic gun on vehicles is way overcosted. Those things can easily be polished by the players, so I still like the games, it's just that I would not expect something like that in a Sam Mustafa game. lilljonas fucked around with this message at 21:19 on Oct 19, 2023 |
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Oct 19, 2023 21:13
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Comrade Merf posted:Anyone have any experience with Sharp Practice in 10 or 15mm? Any model range suggestions for those scales in either physical or STLs?
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Oct 19, 2023 21:45
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lilljonas posted:It all goes into the whole question of if you want to simulate the "feel" of a historical conflict or if you want to simulate the minutiae. Oh, absolutely. The "realism vs. playability" arguments have been around for a long, long time. I remember reading heated debates on the subject in AH's General magazine back in the day; they weren't solved then and they won't be solved now. I remember one article that was a back-and-forth between the designers of Tobruk and Squad Leader. Tobruk was firmly on the side of "realism," with all kinds of math-y rules for hit locations and armor thicknesses - but it made for a very sterile game experience - for example, it took place in North Africa and didn't have any rules for terrain, every game presumably taking place in a perfectly flat and barren desert. In contrast, Squad Leader (classic, not ASL) was a much more loose, holistic design that wasn't afraid to throw precision out in favor of a good time and favorable overall feel. Comparing and contrasting the two approaches is interesting. (The article is here, page 14: Link I too usually prefer the "holistic feel" games, but there are some exceptions where I like the detail. There's never going to be a perfect design; inevitably you're going to make compromises. It's just fun to look at some of the more absurd ways game design goes in either direction.
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Oct 19, 2023 21:57
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lilljonas posted:It's really fashinating to compare to the lardies. Lardie games often have a kind of genius to the core mechanics that also lead to games that "feels" like a period battle. At least CoC and SP2, which are the ones I've played. Also, in terms of getting the statistics right: it turns out accurate dive bombing is really hard!. I did a Dunkirk BtH scenario with some Stukas trying to dive bomb a couple of transports (both underway and escorted by a destroyer) - with fighter cover from both sides - and yeah, I am not at all surprised that the Luftwaffe screwed the pooch there. Getting a direct hit is difficult, and actually sinking a ship with a single 500-lb bomb is far from a guarantee.
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Oct 19, 2023 22:00
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And on the other side there's Battleline/Avalon Hill's Air Force/Dauntless, which is::strip_icc()/pic133601.jpg)
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Oct 19, 2023 22:09
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Ilor posted:I've played a bunch of them, and yeah, they are so often so good at capturing the feel of the conflict. Bag the Hun is one of the best air combat games I've ever played because it actually feels like a dogfight. The desperation of trying to shake someone off your tail, the "oh poo poo" moment of having your guns jam just as you get an enemy in your sights, and the rising panic as your powerless, burning aircraft starts descending through the altitude bands while you fail one successive "bail out" test after another is just fantastic. And the card-driven activation system gives you uncertainty without enforcing the "blind" maneuvering of a system like Wings of Glory (where you spend most of the game flailing around trying to guess where your opponent is going to be and flying around each other in circles). Bag the Hun is so goddamn good. even without fighter cover it can be difficult. there are stories of entire carrier air wings failing to produce effective attack results against an enemy offering little pressure more than ship based aa
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Oct 19, 2023 22:20
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Ilor posted:I do ACW stuff using Sharp Practice in 15mm. I use mostly Old Glory figs, with a smattering of other stuff (I think all my cannons are Musket Miniatures and all my cannon crews are Scale Creep). Oh lovely would you mind showing off how you did basing? I'm in a tossup between multiple men on a base for multiple game duty like General DArmee or going the individual casualty method. Oh and thanks for all the suggestions on model ranges so far everyone!
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Oct 19, 2023 22:42
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lilljonas posted:The "problem" with Sharp Practice is not that small skirmishes didn't exist. Yeah, that's why I'm starting an AWI/FIW/1812 maybe? project. Lotttts of little raids and skirmishes. Having read through the Musket and Tomahawk rules, I think it's going to be a lot of fun.
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Oct 20, 2023 00:05
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EdsTeioh posted:ANYWAY so after flirting with wanting to check out Flames of War for a while, a buddy of mine ended up dumping ALL of his minis and hobby stuff after his mother in law asking him "why he likes to play with toys so much" once she saw his hobby room. I ended up with, among other things, 2 Hit the Beach sets, an American Combat Command starter, a Cav Recon platoon, a 57mm platoon, and a platoon of Panthers. I think I'm totally good here as far as Americans go, but what's a good way to expand on the Germans? Tigers? 88s? If 3d printing isnt an option and you wanted bang for buck, imo the German Panzer Kampfgruppe starter would best augment what you have. It contains 5 pIV, 3 stug, 2 tiger, 1 armd pzgren platoon, 2x flak 88 and a battery of nw41, none of which would be useless. MGs and medium mortars would flesh out the infantry, plus a scout unit. Its probably not meta but all your bases are covered, anything past that would just be feeding the mania to collect and paint all the things. As a bonus, prettymuch everything there could be used for mid war as well. If you wanted to go a la carte you could do mgs, medium mortars, scouts, artillery, and some additional pIV or stugs to flesh out an armd option, but that would cost as much as the box anyways.
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Oct 20, 2023 05:46
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Comrade Merf posted:Oh lovely would you mind showing off how you did basing? I'm in a tossup between multiple men on a base for multiple game duty like General DArmee or going the individual casualty method.  I've done them a couple of different ways. For Gettysburg soldiers I mounted them on 1" square sheet metal plates I got from somewhere (above, right). But for Sharp Practice I use sabot bases (above, left). The minis are individually based on #8 steel washers. The base is then made of magnetic sheet (the kind used for refrigerator magnets) and laser-cut card. The cool part about this is that you can use the same kind of bases for both infantry and cavalry (as individual horses are just glued to two washers instead of one).  I am in the process of redoing everything as sabot bases.
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Oct 20, 2023 16:39
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EdsTeioh posted:I ended up giving him money; there was all that FoW stuff, a bunch of Necromunda with terrain and Forge World stuff, then a Proxxon foam cutter. lilljonas posted:One solution, if you can't get over such unrealistic situations, is to consider a unit to represent more men. So, a formation of three units represents a whole company. Two groups of cavalry would be a squadron. Then a lot of the tactical situations you get in Sharp Practice makes more sense than if you look at it as a 1 model = 1 man presentation.
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Oct 20, 2023 17:17
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Arquinsiel posted:I'd have told him to hang onto it and if asked again just reply with "well your son/daughter is poo poo in bed". Barring edge case weirdness it's really none of his mother in law's business what he does for fun. Yeah. "I can afford them, it's a fun hobby." Beyond that it's none of anyone else's business.
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Oct 20, 2023 17:24
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that's like stuff from some boomer sitcom amazing to see it happen irl
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Oct 20, 2023 17:26
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Count Thrashula posted:Yeah, that's why I'm starting an AWI/FIW/1812 maybe? project. Lotttts of little raids and skirmishes. Having read through the Musket and Tomahawk rules, I think it's going to be a lot of fun. I love M&T
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Oct 20, 2023 23:49
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I enjoy playing with tiny metal toy soldiers because I’m not a joyless weirdo that subsumes their entire personality to some outdated idea of propriety. Have some whimsy in your life for god’s sake.
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Oct 20, 2023 23:53
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There's so much other stuff to it too! You get to paint your little toy soldiers, and play games with them, and make flags for them and build little houses and trees for them to fight amongst. loving great hobby. So yeah, lol at your buddy and his mother in law.
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Oct 21, 2023 01:55
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Y'all, I tried to get him to keep all of it and just start playing, but he was pretty determined to get rid of everything. He flipped a Necromunda Dark Uprising for crazy money, so I don't think he's actually *out* money. Anyway, I think I'm painting Panthers today.
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Oct 21, 2023 16:23
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Thinking a lot about movement, flanking, and firing ranges atm. I feel like there's a kind of natural problem in this, mechanically, because any form of singular action system - not even IGOUGO but anything where resolution of one unit is resolved before another - there's the prospective chance for a unit to lunge into the side of someone by taking a circuitous route. A lot of ancient and medieval games sort this out by saying "a charge is straight forward", or something equivalent, and that works nicely, but there's an issue with games where firepower is dominant. In most of those, gameplay's simulating close range firefights and tend to give huge fire ranges in comparison to vehicle movement - the chance of lunging into a flank to take advantage of the juicy side armour is ameliorated by the fact it'd take several turns to get there. But, then there's zoomed out big games. Understandably, these are usually aiming for more parity between movement and fire range - but in a number of them it does mean that anyone who can shoot their target is in immediate danger of being flanked. This seems to be an issue mostly in large-scale WW2 rulesets - it's a possibility in Spearhead and Fistful of TOWs, for instance, but Blucher and ESR also seem to allow units to just lunge through arcs of fire to get to juicy flanks. But, I'm not sure what the alternative is - I also understand why that happens, because the game is aiming to emphasise the manuever bit over the fire bit - it's part of the appeal of big scale stuff. Thinking on it more I feel like maybe the easiest way to deal with it is adding a reaction fire mechanic of some sort - I do like ESR's threat projection system a lot, and I wonder if that's somewhere to go from it. I'm probably massively overthinking this.
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Oct 21, 2023 16:27
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I think a lot of it is also battlefield knowledge, you can see the flank as it begins to happen and maneuvere your assets so there is no flank, or any attack will be retaliated upon in kind. Your tank isn't sitting next to a hedge unaware of the other tank coming from the side, it is completely aware of everything all around it at all times.
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Oct 22, 2023 03:09
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Cessna posted:Yeah. "Well you see when I got started it was this or heroin..."
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Oct 22, 2023 20:45
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You joke but a ton of people from my shop back home are recovering addicts. It's a great thing, you take obsessive negative emotions and instead, devour rulebooks and ensure your tiny dude's jacket is the correct colour.
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Oct 22, 2023 20:52
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That's kind of wholesome. Good for them.
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Oct 22, 2023 21:12
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The Warhammer explanation is that you're just seeing a zoomed in slice showing the most important or dramatic 10 minutes of a huge battle I don't see why that can't apply to WW II
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Oct 22, 2023 22:55
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:You joke but a ton of people from my shop back home are recovering addicts. It's a great thing, you take obsessive negative emotions and instead, devour rulebooks and ensure your tiny dude's jacket is the correct colour. This. I couldn't afford any hobby this expensive before the hundreds of bucks every month I spent on alcohol or drugs started heaping up.
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Oct 23, 2023 06:38
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spectralent posted:I'm probably massively overthinking this. Maybe, but it's an interesting subject. It's particularly odd because as far as I know board wargames solved this almost immediately when they became popular by just giving units a Zone of Control. There's no real reason why miniatures can't also have ZOCs, even if it's just "you can't move/take a big penalty if you're within the arc of this unit out to X range unless it's suppressed/occupied by another unit". I guess it's a bit more fiddly with miniatures because you'll potentially need to be measuring a lot where in most hex and counter games it's just if you're adjacent. The alternative as you suggest is probably automatic reactions, which again something like Advanced Squad Leader has and again takes time but makes a more interesting battle imo. I think the lack of automatic reaction in modern settings in particular is one of the bigger failings of those systems. I think as you point out they tend to cop out with short movement ranges meaning units are exposed to fire for longer than they maybe should be, where the reality is instead that the fire they are exposed to whilst moving should be more impactful unless the enemy is being actively suppressed. Cassa posted:I think a lot of it is also battlefield knowledge, you can see the flank as it begins to happen and maneuvere your assets so there is no flank, or any attack will be retaliated upon in kind. The perpetual perfect information struggle! I think it's particularly difficult to solve in miniatures because where in a board wargame you can use hidden counters etc., the whole point of a miniatures game is to have minis on the table and that's what people want. It's not that much fun spending dozens+ of hours painting your stuff only to play with markers all the time! It would be interesting to see a game with "dummy" miniatures, where some of your force is fake but you can still move it around to represent soldiers getting confused/hearing things/seeing civilians/their own troops etc.
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Oct 23, 2023 12:15
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INinja132 posted:Maybe, but it's an interesting subject. It's particularly odd because as far as I know board wargames solved this almost immediately when they became popular by just giving units a Zone of Control. There's no real reason why miniatures can't also have ZOCs, even if it's just "you can't move/take a big penalty if you're within the arc of this unit out to X range unless it's suppressed/occupied by another unit". I guess it's a bit more fiddly with miniatures because you'll potentially need to be measuring a lot where in most hex and counter games it's just if you're adjacent. This "zone of control" in Lasalle is that a unit can behave very very freely until they are within 4 base widths of an enemy. Once you are near an enemy, you move way slower and issuing orders becomes more difficult. You also trigger a turnover (the equivalent to the automatic reaction you ask for), where the opponents gets a chance to react, such as shooting at the unit or charging it. As you mention, it does at a huge amount of the tactical nuance of the game. For the latter, I think Chain of Command is one of few tactical WW2 games that allows you to make realistic surprise ambushes and flank attacks, as you typically have several points on the table where your undeployed units can turn up during play, and you also have ambush rules that can extend the deployment range quite far. If you play with hidden support choices, which most people do, you are usually not sure in the starting turns (or even later) if your opponent has an MMG team that might pop up in that house on your flank or if a bazooka team might suddenly shoot at your panzer's butt from those hedges. So yes, there are ways to get around the perfect information issue, but you have to think a bit more creatively as a game designer than the old fashioned "just plop down your troops in your deployment zone on turn 1". I think the use of patrol markers in CoC is an excellent way to get around the need of bookkeeping and secret markers, while still making ambushes feel fair as if you're a victim of them, you probably did not allocate a proper infantry screen to dig out any potential ambush spots. Until your opponent has committed their forces, there will be lots of possible flank attacks, but you can use proper screening tactics and positioning to limit them. lilljonas fucked around with this message at 12:44 on Oct 23, 2023 |
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Oct 23, 2023 12:33
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Yeah - Chain also has relatively small movement ranges vs weapon range (which is usually essentially unlimited) which does a lot to lessen it. I do think there's something to the fact that reaction fire needs to be far more of a thing in modern wargames - almost every modern wargame has a "suppression" mechanic whereby units can't move or suffer limited movement when they've recently been shot at, but in practise troops have movement shut down by the potential for fire, rather than because they've been shot at recently - the two hour wargame FNG has a mechanic somewhat like this, where just seeing the enemy causes a type of morale check and can quickly lead to poorly lead or green troops scrambling back and running for cover. Generally, though, in any WW2 game (or modern or cold war or-), if there's an overwatch mechanic at all it's a specific action you need to take and otherwise units can just run past each other freely. It was one of the things that made me go "ooh!" when I read ESR - the fact units project a cone of threat in front of themselves and it's explicitly described as "your troops are just going to engage stuff nearby them, the skirmishers are out roaming and the artillery officers know their doctrine, you're not going to be specifically directing who can shoot what from the general's chair". I feel like there's something there for more modern games too.
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Oct 23, 2023 13:45
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spectralent posted:Yeah - Chain also has relatively small movement ranges vs weapon range (which is usually essentially unlimited) which does a lot to lessen it. The challenge is, reaction fire to movement is incredibly difficult to administer and adds a lot of game time, well, reaction fire in general does this but especially when every move in the view of an enemy unit requires a check or something to see if the other guy wants to do it.
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Oct 23, 2023 13:57
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Panzeh posted:The challenge is, reaction fire to movement is incredibly difficult to administer and adds a lot of game time, well, reaction fire in general does this but especially when every move in the view of an enemy unit requires a check or something to see if the other guy wants to do it. Absolutely. IGOUGO is a clear development in the interests of not having games take forever and require an umpire, and everything moving forward from there is a clear tradeoff between gameplay and playtime. Still - infinity does it, so it's not impossible.
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Oct 23, 2023 14:06
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INinja132 posted:The perpetual perfect information struggle! I think it's particularly difficult to solve in miniatures because where in a board wargame you can use hidden counters etc., the whole point of a miniatures game is to have minis on the table and that's what people want. It's not that much fun spending dozens+ of hours painting your stuff only to play with markers all the time! It would be interesting to see a game with "dummy" miniatures, where some of your force is fake but you can still move it around to represent soldiers getting confused/hearing things/seeing civilians/their own troops etc. Panzeh posted:The challenge is, reaction fire to movement is incredibly difficult to administer and adds a lot of game time, well, reaction fire in general does this but especially when every move in the view of an enemy unit requires a check or something to see if the other guy wants to do it.
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Oct 23, 2023 14:13
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Solo Nimitz on the weekend. I did a Savo Island refight. I put the start of the game basically at the moment when the IJN opened fire on the southern group. I put the American picket destroyers on the board, west of Savo, and allowed them to join the fight. I ignored the existence of the USS Jarvis, since it didn't affect the battle at all and was later sunk during the day. I also didnt allow for any eastern forces closer to the troop transports to be present, in the interest of fairness and also because there was never any attempt for them to join irl either. The only change to the rules I made for setup, aside from the initial dispositions, was that the IJN automatically won initiative, and that the USN could only move at "low speed" for turn 1. Apologies for phone pics, my photog guy wasn't around lol The forces (Topside Miniatures printed on sticker paper at UPS, then stuck to 2 mm thick 3d printed bases):   Initial disposition (quick and dirty islands lol):    Some smattering of random gameplay as the battle progressed:          Regarding the scenario and action itself: The IJN lost. It was a pyrrhic victory for the us, but a victory nonetheless. If I were to redesign the scenario, I may start the IJN further back to allow for some maneuver, and simply remove the USS Blue and USS Ralph Talbot, to simulate the IJN cruiser force having simply bypassed them without note. That may give the USN an even bigger advantage tho. The IJN really only has the Chokai, and a bunch of other mediocre cruisers, and irl was relying on surprise to do the damage. Basically as soon as the New Orleans class heavies arrived to help southern group, the IJN became badly disadvantaged. The USS Chicago did get some good hits off on Chokai before being sunk (and the Aussie cruiser went down almost right away, as in real life), and US torps failed to do much. But once those well armoured cruisers of north group with 9x 8 inch guns each arrived, well, the Japanese were simply outshot without much means to return the favour. Maybe I should have saved the excellent IJN torpedoes for the northern group, who were much tougher. Fun scenario anyway, may tweak it a bit to run it again with a friend. Regarding Nimitz: Really fun, and very tactically interesting, despite being simple and quick. The movement mechanics are brilliant, the interplay between the "move first, shoot first" rule where, obviously you want to shoot first, but you don't really want to move first, makes for interesting considerations. Having to move all the slow ships first, then moderate speed, then high speed, makes it a fun and challenging to predict back and forth with maneuvering to try to outflank the enemy. The movement rules are also not unnecessarily cumbersome but still preserve the philosophy of ship maneuver. It is also very hard to maintain your ships battle line, especially once contacting the enemy, which I appreciate reflects reality. Shooting and torpedoes are handled well, and damage tracking isn't overly complex, not quite Battletech levels (my point of reference for something like this), but maybe not quite as simple as Alpha Strike. I do like the progressive degradation of a ships ability to fight as it takes hits and criticals. But I'd say the most interesting part of the game is the maneuver. In the shooting phase, you can choose any contiguous line of ships to shoot simultaneously, which really encourages you to keep a good battle line, as that means if you're shooting first, you may be able to cripple or sink some enemies before they can return fire. I need to print some high speed/low speed markers, as I used paper for that this time lol (thats what the H/L markers were). Also some indication of shooting, to make sure ships only get to shoot once (the book recommends cotton puffs), and "flash" markers, which matters for night fighting, which Savo Island was. Maybe I'll make double sided "shot/flash" markers as well. I also think I'll see about printing the individual unit cards and laminating them, so they are reusable. Great game, will play some more!
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Oct 23, 2023 14:58
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| # ? May 12, 2024 22:32 |
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That's awesome! I'm really tempted to paint up some WW2 ships to play Nimitz with. Sam Mustafa writes some really cool rules, and I've been waiting for a "goldilocks" naval ruleset to come along, especially one that can be played solo. Naval rules and air rules both suffer from needing hidden movement orders to make a game "fun", so it's cool to see that Nimitz plays well enough solo.
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Oct 23, 2023 15:05
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