Almost Home and Dry....

SMS Lutzow opens fire at Jutland

I have spent the past couple of days trawling through ship specifications for the latest version of the Portable Naval War Game and can safely say it has actually been quite a therapeutic experience. I have various fleet lists so it has been merely a case to setting up new column headings and translating some of the data into the new format. The occasional foray into either Conways or Janes completes the process where any clarification is needed. As usual I have started with the Royal Navy and followed this with the Germans - mainly because their fleets were the largest.

It did throw up a single anomaly though that I have had to address with the rules; that and a minor clarification.

Basically guns are rated as heavy, medium and light and these have maximum ranges of 6, 4 and 3 hexes respectively (remember my models are 1/3000th and the rules are designed for use on a hex grid surface). I wanted the maximum range (6) reserved for dreadnought type ships so the pre dreadnoughts should only be able to reach to around  two thirds of this i.e. 4 hexes. Rating these earlier guns as heavy was okay as far as the shell weight was concerned but the range was wrong (although there were exceptions historically as the Goeben experienced in the Black Sea). What I have decided therefore is to allow for guns to be rated by weight and range. For the most part the system in use is fine and so guns rated at whatever weight will have the corresponding range but for the exceptions will now have a split rating e.g 1 H/M means a ship has 1 heavy (H) gun dice with a maximum range of medium (M) or 4 hexes.

The clarification refers to the Close Range Attack procedure. I had forgotten to allow for the effects or torpedoes from ships other than destroyers. What I have settled on is to allow any ship other than a destroyer when launching a Close Range Attack and then successfully hitting the target to roll a single d6 for torpedo based damage. It is not hugely effective although more so against older ships.

I will be making the rules available to anybody that is interested but I want to complete the ship specifications first of all and also to run another couple of games. I am not expecting this to be much longer and so all should be done and dusted in the next couple of weeks or so.

The Portable Naval Wargame (Again)....Final Thoughts

With the fickleness of indecision for which I am legendary I have decided that I will complete the ship specifications to go the rules after all. This is not as painful as it sounds since I already have pretty much most of the world's navies tabled in one form or another and so 'tweaking' them to the new format would not be a massive undertaking. I really want to have the entire 'offering' on one plate so to speak, as much for my own benefit as anything else as it means that I will not have to draft up new ship specifications for any other ships I might acquire in the future (and before you ask, yes I do have a couple of long term ideas on the go!). It also means that when I pass them on to anybody that is interested they will have everything they need to get straight into the action. In the short term then, it means I shall have to concentrate on beating this task into submission over the course of the next few days.


The earlier version - covering 1860 to 1890 - will have to wait for a while as I want to get the ACW ships finished first.


For a variety of domestic reasons my planned foray into the ACW this weekend will have to be postponed for a week but on the plus side I can get to go to the Toy and Train Fair at my daughter's school on Sunday so the weekend will hopefully feature some satisfying retail therapy.


The last time I went to this event (it is held every six weeks or so) I was able to acquire some BMC die cast warships - upon which the famed Minifigs ships were, ahem, based - so I am hopeful that I may be able to repeat this.

The Portable Naval War Game (Again)....Part 5

The much tidied draft is now ready for further testing and so I can now draw a line under this part of the project. I have a tendency to draft rules as a play sheet firstly and so this tends to get very congested as 'tweaks' arise through testing and rethinks. The next step will be to draw up the specifications of a selection of ships from my collection for use in further testing and so I shall be once again making use of my Conways and Janes (never a hardship it must be said!) for the details required.

In the fullness of time I hope to make the end result available for use outside of my cosy loft - I want to get some more game time under my belt first though.

Based on the first play test I am quietly confident though that this time I might just have cracked it - however, past experience has taught me not to count any chickens before they are hatched!

The Portable Naval Wargame (Again)....Part 4

Of Torpedoes, Destroyers and the concept of the Naval Melee....

I have used many different sets of naval rules that handle the subject of torpedoes in a variety of ways - from estimating the course change of the target to putting matches on the table and moving them. The one thing that has struck me though is that in virtually every case they are treated as a weapon of mass destruction rather than of mass distraction. Torpedoes are powerful weapons to be sure and there are plenty of historical examples of ships being sunk by a single hit but the problem with them, aside from the reliability aspect, is actually hitting the target. Consider this, the German fleet at Jutland according to their own sources fired off 107 torpedoes. Of this it was reckoned that 2 hit the target. Now clearly it would make for a dull game if we mirrored that unenviable strike rate BUT, the potential of such a weapon had a massive psychological impact historically so just how do we best factor it in?

Imagine, just for a moment this scenario. You are the commander of a destroyer and the signal has just gone up to attack the enemy battle line in the distance. Thus far all you had to do was to maintain station on your own battle line whilst the big ships traded salvo after salvo but now it is your turn to 'face the elephant'. As one the division of destroyers of which you are one swings its helm hard over and accelerates to attack speed. the engine revs increase as the ship buffets and noses into anything approaching a wave and the halyards sing and signal flags crack in the streaming wind. The range comes down and the target battle line gets larger by the minute. Then, like a sparkle of firecrackers the twinkle of the secondary guns followed by a succession of shell splashes mean that they know you are coming. It must seem like every enemy gun is trained on you and tour own artillery fires back - more in hope than expectation as all the while the volume of fire increases; the soaking of near misses drenching everybody topside. You hope and pray that the enemy is unable to adjust the range quickly enough until at last the range for torpedoes is reached and so they are fired - no salvos, just individual tubes. With the helm hard over the ship heels alarmingly as the turn away to safety and away from those terrible guns starts. You were lucky this time but others of the division were less fortunate and flames and smoke bear mute testimony to the enemy fire.

Dramatic and overwritten as usual I know but you can see the point I am making. Large ships cannot safely ignore a torpedo attack and just the threat should be sufficient to disrupt the enemy gunfire at least.

Here is how it will work.

All ships have a Close Attack  value equal to the number of Light gun dice the ship has. Destroyers add their torpedo rating (1, 2 or 3 depending on the size and quantity carried) to this figure so, for example, a battleship may have 2 light gun dice for a rating of 2 whilst a destroyer may have 1 light gun dice plus a rating of 2 for torpedoes making 3 in all. The destroyer declares a Close Range attack (at a range of 1 or 2) and nominates the target. At this point the target ship has two options. It can either engage the attacking destroyer using its own Close Attack rating (and thereby forfeiting any fire for the turn) or it can ignore the threat. In order to score a hit each player must roll equal to or less than their Close Range attack rating with a single d6. If a hit is scored the damage from the attack is based on rolling the number of d6 equal to the Close Range rating of the ship on the normal damage resolution table. All hits from a Close Range attacking destroyer are treated as hull hits. Potentially then, a destroyer could sink a dreadnought outright with the right combination of dice rolls. The destroyer though, if hit, will sustain heavy damage if it is damaged at all.

The target ship has the option to ignore the destroyer, thereby ensuring it can fire in the gunnery segment (I should mention that all Close Range attack resolution is completed before normal gunnery) but the penalty for this is the Close Range attacking destroyer goes straight to damage resolution - in effect a free hit - so this alone should force the player under threat to consider their options very carefully.

Again this probably looks more complex on paper than it is in operation and of course, it will need testing further.

I hope this short series of posts has given a little insight into what I am trying to achieve and also why I am trying to achieve it.

Maintaining the Initiative or the Enthusiasm

In order to stoke the fires of my ACW project 'final hurdle' with the ships I have decided to run a block based ACW land action at the weekend. This will be a first for me as I have not run an ACW game in any shape of form (other than via Battle Cry) at home. I could just as easily use Battle Cry rather than the blocks but that kind of defeats the object of having them somewhat. I may use a Battle Cry scenario though as it will be interesting to see how they work out using blocks rather than figures togther with the Portable War Game system rather than the game rules.

Alternatively I may just set up a hypothetical action and have done with it! I have a few days to consider what I want to do in any event - and it will give me the opportunity and impetus to finish typing up the revised play sheet incorporating strength points and exhaustion levels.

With this in mind I have decided that I want to get into the habit of ensuring that I play at least one game week if possible. This will be in addition to a monthly visit to the club (something I have been somewhat negligent of lately!). It is a lofty (no pun intended!) ideal to be sure but one I should aspire to in order to maximise the use of the new den. Having the use of fast play game rules is a must then as I want to make the most efficient use of my time 'upstairs'!

The Portable Naval Wargame (Again)....Part 3

Of Hit Points and Armour


This is another tricky subject to right in a set of naval war game rules. For me the latter has been far easier to address and so I have gone for armour/protection levels equal to heavy, medium or light. What does this actually mean in a game context? Heavy is reserved for those ships with extensive armour protection and of a meaningful degree of thickness appropriate to the type. Invariably this will mean battleships. I have not considered the location of the said protection simply because there is no need to as gunnery does not look at hit location as such. Medium protection is generally lighter than the heavy type - either because the actual thickness of the armour is lesser or is not as extensive in its coverage. This could also be used for older examples of a given ship type - I am thinking of such things as older, first generation pre dreadnoughts for example. Light protection is taken as having little or no armour and so during the WW1 era would tend to be light cruisers or destroyer types. I am toying with the idea of having gunfire at range 6 (the maximum range for my purposes) treat all armour as light regardless of what the ship is armoured as. The rationale for this is to allow for the effects of plunging fire whereby shells at the end of their trajectory and range tend to hit the target from above and at a steep angle and usually down through the deck into a ship's vitals.  Even for dreadnoughts with armoured decks this was a major problem simply because deck armour was always inadequate as the effect of this type of attack had never been seriously considered.  I will experiment with this and decide later how to apply this - from a rules perspective it is simple to include.

Hit points for ships have given me more sleepless nights than any other aspect of naval rules writing I can think of! It is such a subjective topic although you would not think so when you see the tables of ship specifications in any one of a number of sets of rules. I have experimented with many different approaches to this subject but at the end have come down to assigning an arbitrary figure to a given ship type and then taking it from there. As a benchmark a typical dreadnought battleship will have around 10 hit points. This can be moved up or down as required for older or later examples or for those that differ in some way from the dreaded 'norm'. An example might be to allow for the famous German build quality for their dreadnoughts or for the vastly superior protection offered on the war built dreadnoughts. Everything else can be scaled back from that level  - and in this I have made a couple of what seem to be inconsistent decisions. My smaller ships tend to have proportionally more hit points than would seem logical - for example I want my destroyers to have between 2 and 4 hit points. The reason for this is purely 'gamey' in concept. In most naval games I have taken part in (and this includes those of my own design!) the lot of a destroyer commander is usually a short and exciting one and invariably ends with most of the types being sunk very easily and quickly. Of the 139 destroyers and torpedo boats at Jutland some 13 were sunk or under 10% of those engaged.

Of course destroyers are vulnerable ships when faced with batteries of 5.9 and 6" weapons determined to ruin their day but just because they are does not mean that all they should be is target practice. I want these ships to have some meaning in a game context and so survivability is an important factor. If a destroyer commander is foolish enough to attempt to out shoot a bigger and invariably better armed opponent then he is asking for everything he gets but the canny player - using his ships in a tactically sound fashion - has the ability to fully utilise the strengths of the ships under his command. Essentially I shall be doing away with the 'one hit wonder' approach for this class of ship in the interests of both playability and historical accuracy.

The final part of this series of posts will look at the concept of the Close Range attack or how I did away with torpedoes and lived to tell the tale....

The Portable Naval War Game (Again)....Part 2

Gunnery
The thorny subject of naval gunnery in a war game has probably had more ink spilled over it than any other subject I can think of from a rules perspective. Over the years I have tried a number of different methods but for the sheer fun factor rolling numbers of d6 as a game mechanic is hard to beat so I am not about to upset that hallowed tradition. My last version of the rules used a d6 per two barrels firing which was not bad but I wanted to streamline this and so have opted instead for using a d6 per 4 barrels instead. This means that a typical pre dreadnought will be firing 1d6 for its main guns and a typical dreadnought will be firing 2d6. It makes for faster resolution but maintains the all important fun factor - the ritual cursing of d6 rolls that go against the thrower is again, a time honoured war games ritual, not lightly cast aside.
A d6 gun dice can take two hits before being removed (effectively a hit is two barrels worth of damage, or, if you prefer, a knocked out turret) - the first hit (all will be revealed in due course) - and the first such hit means that the dice suffers a -1 firing modifier. This is easily represented by the simple expedient of using a different coloured d6 for the damaged gun(s). It also is a handy method for representing odd numbers of guns e.g. the Goeben had 10 x 11" guns so this translates into two normal gun dice and one special dice, firing with a -1 modifier.
I have rated guns as being either heavy (range 6), medium (range 4) or light (range 3). Heavy guns are typically anything 11" or larger; medium is anything larger than 6" up to 10" and light are 6" and smaller. Within those bands modifiers to the damage dice could be applied where needed for guns that vary in their impact from their notional category - a good example would be the RN 15" gun gaining a bonus due to its sheer destructive power e.g. the gun would be rated as heavy (obviously) but with a plus 1 damage modifier. Again, this will be optional and will require some research from the gamer as I have neither time nor the inclination to factor every single permutation of gun calibre/weight/shell size/range/age in use with the world's navies over the years under consideration! Seriously though, I will have some gunnery tables included and slotting types in will be easy enough to do - in any event I will do this for my own collection. For my own purposes (and initially using 1/3000th models) I am looking at using a maximum range of around 6 grid areas - so that on my playing surface it means there is some sea room outside of gun range. I have used the familiar short, medium and long range brackets for determining hits with a 6 being required at long range (range 6), 5 or 6 at medium (range 4 and 5) and 4, 5 or 6 at close range (range 1, 2 or 3). A simple table exists to find the modifier used when making a damage roll after having obtained a hit and this compares the weight of the gun against the weight of the target ships armour. The basic principle for gunnery I have employed will be the same for the earlier period although obviously with some appropriate tweaks - smoothbores vs. rifles for one!
The base score to convert a hit into damage relies on a d6 roll and 1, 2 and 3 are misses; a 4 is a hull hit, a 5 is a gun hit and a 6 is two hits - either a pair of hull or gun hits or one of each. The choice lies with the target ship. Depending on the gun/armour combination of the firing/target ship the dice roll for damage can go up or down e.g. a heavy gun hitting light armour gains a +2 to the damage dice meaning that as long as the firing ship does not roll a 1 damage will be inflicted.
In summary then, gunnery is designed to be simple and uses a d6 based system for hits and damage rolls in order to adjudicate results. Armour penetration effects are acknowledged by the damage modifier found by cross referencing the weight of the gun versus the level of the target's protection. Damage is either hull or gun related and this is determined by the damage effect roll. The closer you get, the easier to hit.
The next part of this series of posts will cover damage and allocation of hit points and armour ratings.