Combined Fire

[Origen]

I have one suggestion to help alleviate some of the more egregious problems in the game. Allow units to combine fire.

Historically, having more than one ship firing at a single target reduced the effectiveness of each ship individually (because it was difficult to determine which misses were your own and correct accordingly) but the increased weight of fire did increase the chances of causing damage. Also, for game balance reasons simply adding the firepower of multiple units together would be a mess. Therefore my suggestion,

A unit may add it's fire to that of another unit of the same class (assuming it they are both in range of the target). When resolving the attack, use the larger attack value of the two units and add 2 dice to it's attack. This does not work with torpedoes.

This will make small gunnery platforms such as DDs much more effective en-masse, especially when hunting subs (which is critically necessary), allow fighters a reasonable chance of shooting one another down, and give Dive Bombers a reasonable chance of actually hurting a large BB. Since you must combine by class, and the benefit is a fixed two dice, you would see diminishing returns as the larger classes attempt to combine fire with one another.

There may be some new issues to deal with using this rule, but I see them as being much less burdensome than the current crop of problems. Please let me know if this works out well in your gaming group.

[mpickering]

I don't think this will work all that well for a few reasons.

One is the fact that the game does represent 1:1 scales for the sea combatants and a group of aircraft. In reality, a dozen dive bombers had a tough time putting bombs onto battleships (or any ship bristling with AA guns). Bombs would hit superstructure, less critical areas, glance off deck armor, etc. It did generally take a lot of planes diving into heavy fire to get a few bombs actually onto the target. Only through dogged persistence did good hits get landed.

For ships like DDs, it depends on the target. Honestly, 2 or 3 DDs throwing 5 inch at a battleship don't suddenly become more lethal than one. They simply increase the probability of them scoring a good hit. The guns don't get more powerful no matter how many you put together. The reality is some ships can shrug off gunfire from smaller ones for a long time against their massive unarmored works and indefinitely with sufficient armor.

Same applies to bigger classes. Two cruisers combining fire don't suddenly get the hitting power of a battleship main gun just because they're both shooting at the same target. That essentially is what your proposed idea is saying.

Ships did work in concert to increase their effectiveness but it came through command-and-control and application of tactics. The firepower remained the same. Two escorts could bracket and enemy sub and co-ordinate to sink it. The problem is, in this game, we aren't operating on that level of tactical detail.

All games have to balance their level of detail against their playability. WAS opts for fast and easy playability at the expense of detail and precision. What you are looking for requires more fine-grained detail than WAS is capable of.

Nice off-the-cuff idea but for me it doesn't fly.

Matt

[Origen]

This is why I so rarely post on these forums. Too many people have very little idea of how the paper statistics and the written rules translate into actual gameplay.

Adding 2 dice to a destroyer's 5 dice hardly gives it the ability to hurt a battleship. Two cruisers can combine for a whopping 8 or 9 dice, again hardly enough to threaten a BB. Also, a couple of dozen dive bombers were indeed a major threat to surface combatants. A carrier full of said strike planes was more than capable of hammering any BB into oblivion in short order, something the game currently cannot do.

As for the couple of cruisers getting the firepower of a BB, 10 or 11 dice (VERY generous) is hardly the firepower of a BB, especially when you consider that you are giving up the opportunity to hit their target twice (scoring 2 damage) rather than combining to increase their odds of getting a single hit. It is especially true when you consider that you are giving up any secondary guns on the supporting ship entirely, and the main ship gets no benefit for anything other than it's largest attack. Finally, a pair of cruisers certainly did have the firepower to seriously impair a BB. Even if their guns were unlikely to sink a BB outright, they were easily powerful enough to damage steering, superstructure, turrets (especially smaller ones), etc. and numerous incoming hits would increase the odds of this happening significantly.

I'm sorry, but adding 2 dice is hardly going to let DDs go after BBs with gunfire. Even if this rule were modified to allow more than 2 ships to combine fire, just try to get a half dozen DDs into position to do so. You would have to 1) Buy them in the first place. 2) Survive aircraft, other screening ships, and subs. 3) Get all 6 within 2 spaces of the BB while obeying the 2 ship per space rule. Good luck with that.