An Archimedes Moment....At Last!!!

EUREKA!!!!!!!!! The DBSA The Great War at Sea Gridded Naval Rules have finally hit the jackpot and WORK!!!! I cant begin to tell you how pleased I am to be at this point with the system. The game at the club featured Black Sea Fleet Russians versus Austro Hungarians and it went pretty well. I used my gridded cloth (11 by 14 squares) with the combatants approaching from diagonally opposite corners. The Austrians fielded a pair of Dreadnoughts, a pair of pre dreadnoughts, a pair of light cruisers and four bases of destroyers whilst the Russians had three dreadnoughts, a protected cruiser, two bases each of destroyers and torpedo boats.

The forces went pretty much full tilt straight for each other but it was gratifying to see proper screening of the heavy units by the escorts in the case of the Austrians - Mr Fox (despite his recent illness) displayed his customary naval cunning in this respect - although they paid a high price in that both the light cruisers (acting as flotilla leaders) ended the action in a crippled and sinking condition. The same thing happened to the Russian cruiser and all the destroyer bases received some damage both from their opposite numbers and the unwelcome attention of the vast array of secondary weapons from the respective battle lines.

I appreciate that is a little vague but all will be clear when I run the solo game. Tactically (and in terms of the game itself) it went very well and 'felt' right although one off naval games tend to be rather heavy on escorts as the natural war gamers tendency to chuck everything in against the opposition with little thought as to the aftermath usually comes to the fore.

Movement finally makes sense and works well - the use of the diagonal plane and 45 degree turns is a winning combination and also has the added advantage of ease of plotting for map moves etc. Even the split move idea worked well - I will make a card of some sort with long or short on each side to use as a visual reminder as to the speed for the turn.

Combat was good - results seemed about right and were heavier than the previous edition - this was what I wanted to enable greater decisiveness in the action. The only problem was that I had failed to allow for extreme scores against destroyers - this is easily rectified though.

Now that the main system has been proven to work I want to expand the rules in two directions. Firstly, I want to extend the set to cover up to 1945 - this means air power and such things as radar etc. I also, more importantly, want to introduce a simple plotting device to accompany the tabletop game to give some background to the action. I shall do this in conjunction with specific scenario types - either mutually agreed or randomly generated. This will make the games more 'formed' and with specific victory conditions which should serve to alleviate the kamikaze escort syndrome to an extent.

Once again I find myself extending my grateful thanks to many people for their unstinting help with this project thus far; in particular the aforementioned Mr Fox, Chris Hardman, Bob Cordery and Aussie Paul, all the members of SEEMS (especially Dave Kightly and Laurie)together with everybody that has read and commented on the blog on the evolution of this so far. Many thanks to one and all - I could not have done it without you!