Flailing About with Fletcher Pratt

Time for some WWI naval action last night. Great fun was had, despite my poor Germans being hopelessly outmatched!

Saturday Night Fights - Fighting Sail

Jim and I play a game of Osprey's "Fighting Sail." This is a fun set of rules that I immediately bought after we played. I can use this with my collection of ships from "Sails of Glory" to play larger fleet actions!

Post-Origins Hangover

It always seems like it takes me awhile to get back to the blog after Origins. In the past this has been due to a bit of a "gaming hangover" where I didn't play much for a month or so after the convention. This year has been the opposite: I've been playing so much I really haven't had much time to blog!

Thunder in the Korea Strait

Despite owning both of the NWS Steam and Iron games, I've never tried the campaign portion of either. I guess I wasn't sure I understood enough about naval warfare of the era to do a campaign justice. All of the focus on WWI this month rekindled my interest in the era, and that combined with picking up a game about the naval campaign of the Spanish American War prompted me to revisit these fine simulations.

The cruiser squadron at the heart of my force in the Bay of Korea. CL Hashidate took a torpedo hit during a skirmish with Russian destroyers.

Spelk's excellent Command AAR

If you're at all interested in how Command plays, don't miss the excellent AAR Spelk has put together for the first tutorial mission.  This scenario will probably be your first interaction with the simulation, and Spelk does a great job amplifying on the instructions from the tutorial to make your first play through easier and more sensible.

More Command

Some more Command screenshots.  I'm just getting started really learning this, but am getting an itch to try some scenario creation.  This AAR really illustrates the capabilities of the engine.  I think this just might interest me in creating some linked "story scenarios" using Command and CMSF, and maybe Arma II.

Firing TLAMs against some land targets.

Tutorial mission 3.  Engaging a hostile missile boat, using my helo to observe while keeping my DDGs emissions silent.

Sub hunting.

More sub hunting, up close.  An ASW helo hovers over the localized sub, while the torpedo it dropped earlier hunts.  To the north is a sonobouy.

Naval gunfire sinks the damaged hostile missile boat. Yes, those are the individual rounds in flight.

Norwegian missile boats and an FFG versus incoming Soviet ships.

While not yet perfect, Command is what I always wanted Harpoon to be but never was.  I think this is what the guys at Warfaresims.com were after, and they've done a great job.  I think this is going to be a great sandbox naval warfare sim, playable for hundreds of hours like Arma II and the Combat Mission games.

Command - Modern Naval/Air Operations

I've spent the evening playing Command: Modern Air/Naval Operations, and even though I've only played the first tutorial scenario, I'm pretty pleased with the game thus far.  I didn't run into any obvious bugs; though I did notice some odd mission behavior by the planes assigned to a SEAD patrol mission.  This may well have been due to my own lack of understanding of how the game works as anything else.

I was so engrossed in playing I forgot to grab any screenshots, but I will tomorrow.  Until then, here's a quick snap of the map at the beginning of the Basic Air Operations Tutorial:

If you've played Harpoon on the PC, you'll find this easy to pick up.  The UI is much cleaner but conceptually many things are the same.  I felt right at home in the Mission Editor, for example.

I think I'm going to have a lot of fun with this.

Troubridge Takes on The Goeben

One of the most speculated on hypothetical naval engagements of WWI involves the squadron of armored cruisers under Vice Admiral Troubridge attempting to stop the German battle cruiser Goeben as it breaks for the Aegean at the beginning of the war.  In reality Troubridge stopped the pursuit before engaging, convinced that he was outgunned by the Goeben.  For that he was tried (and exonerated) for cowardice.
Both Steam and Iron and Jutland have Goeben scenarios available for them (the scenarios for Jutland are user-created, since the game itself doesn't cover the Med).  JC over at Real and Simulated Wars covered the Steam and Iron scenario last year, which I've also played.
Below are a few screenshots from a recent attempt at the Jutland version.  Unfortunately I had to terminate the scenario early, so I won't be doing a complete AAR at this point.  Suffice to say that Admiral Troubridge's concerns turned out in this case to be well-founded.

The Jutland scenario is different from the SAI scenario, in that in SAI, the three destroyers Troubridge had with him are available.  Here, the RN has only the CAs.

I've played a number of the smaller scenarios now in both SAI and Jutland.  Next week, I plan on taking on something at least the size of Dogger Bank.

Coronel AAR 1 - Steam and Iron

I've been bitten by the naval wargaming bug the past few days.  This happens every so often; this time it seems to have manifested as an interest in the dreadnought battles of WWI.  As I result I've dusted off (meaning updated) my copy of NWS' Steam and Iron and I purchased the flawed-but-still-interesting Jutland from Stormeagle Studios.  It's interesting to play the same scenario in both games.  SAI is a 2D, graphically plain but highly detailed game, while Jutland  is a 3D ship simulation.
Today I'm playing Coronel, an engagement between the Imperial German East Asia Squadron under Vice Admiral Graf von Spee and a British Squadron under Rear Admiral Sir Christopher Craddock.  The battle happens off the coast of Chile near the port of Coronel.  The East Asia Squadron is composed of the Armored Cruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau and the Light Cruisers Dresden, Leipzig, and Nurnberg.  Craddock's Squadron is made up of the Armored Cruisers Monmouth and Good Hope, the Light Cruiser Glasgow, the Merchant Cruiser Otranto, and the aging pre-Dreadnought battleship Canopus.  Craddock has left HMS Canopus behind in his efforts to locate the East Asia Squadron, due to her slow speed and poorly-trained crew.  He's significantly out-gunned by the Imperial German squadron.
Given my lack of familiarity with the systems and tactics of the time, I'm going for the easy win here and playing the Germans.  The German objective is to sink the two British Armored Cruisers.  The British win if they can avoid that and manage to sink any single large German ship (meaning either of the two CAs).

The fight opens with SMS Leipzig identifying HMS Glasgow and HMS Otranto as the main force of the Far East Squadron proceeds SSW.  Leipzip and Glasgow exchange some long-range gunfire.

The German ships turn west to bring more guns to bear on HMS Glasgow.  After a few minutes, they run across the British main body, steaming south. The German battle line turns SW, closing the distance between the two groups and engaging in a running gun battle.

German gunnery soon takes it's toll, and a turret flash fire causes CA Monmouth to explode.

Leipzip has taken a hit that slows her to under 20 knots, making it difficult for her to continuing scouting/screening in front of the German CAs.  Scharnhorst has also taken some light damage, but the German main body of the two CAs and the CL Dresden continue to close on the remaining British CA, HMS Good Hope.

Soon HMS Good Hope begins taking hits from the combined fire of the German CAs.

Soon enough, like her consort, HMS Good Hope takes a magazine hit and explodes!

Objectives achieved but with time left in the scenario, there was nothing left to do but some mopping up.  The British light ships had fled to the west, but damage in the early phases of the engagement slowed their top speed.  The Germans were able to catch HMS Glasgow and pounded her with gunfire until she too sank, as night fell.
Historically, HMS Monmouth and HMS Good Hope were sunk, but both HMS Glasgow and HMS Otranto escaped.  HMS Glasgow was part of the British squadron the destroyed and sunk nearly the entire East Asia Squadron a month later off the Falklands.

The toll for Craddock's squadron was heavy.  Note the presence of the undamaged battleship on the British side (the "B" designation}.  That's HMS Canopus which played no part at all in the battle, and which I never even sighted.

A nice feature of Steam and Iron is the ability to plot the track of the fleets during the battle for later examination.  I love how this plot looks so similar to naval battle maps you might find in a military history book!
Now it's time to fire up Fraps and Jutland, and grab some screen caps of the same battle in 3D.

Indo-Chinese Fleet Action in the Straits of Malacca

My initial attempt at a scenario in Fleet Command:  a skirmish between small Indian and Chinese surface warfare groups during a border dispute.

My small task force's initial position is to the northwest of the entrance to the straits.  I have my ships set a course to the southeast at 2/3 full.

About 20 minutes in I've picked up a contact to my southeast, about 70 miles out.  I need to identify this contact, and sending out the Ka-28a ASW helicopter is a better choice than lighting up surface search radars on the ships.  Doing that will alert the Chinese to my presence long before I can see them, allowing them to get off the first missile strikes.  I have my DDG crew prep the helicopter to Alert 5.

Once the helicopter is at Alert 5 status  I set course to intercept and launch the Ka-28a with orders to make a visual ID.  I need to find those targets...

I give orders to have the helicopter move ESE about 25 or 30 nmi before lighting up its surface search radar.  I want some separation between it and the task force in case the Chinese pick up the emissions.  Once on station, my scouting helicopter crew picks up a second contact to the NE.

I decide to intercept the contact to the NE, in case it's a Chinese ship.  I don't want them leaking around my flank while I probe south.  In the meantime, my scout helicopter's radar has firmed up the first contact as a civilian cargo ship, and picked up two more contacts farther to the SE, moving NW.  I suspect those are the Chinese.

The NE contact is another cargo ship.  The southern contacts pretty much have to be Chinese warships.  I re-orient my forces to scout them and move to intercept.

About then minutes later I have a confirmed hostile contact!  Here's where I screwed up and failed the mission.  Being concerned that the enemy would detect my Ka-28a, I have it dive for the deck and start a high-speed run for home as soon as I get a good ID.  I immediately have my ships launch missiles.

Realistically, ROE doesn't let me target unidentified contacts.  So, while I have three flights of  surface-to-surface missiles in the air, they're all targeted on the single identified contact, an aging Sovremenny 1 DDG.

What I should have done was continue to scout the enemy force with the Ka-28a until I had ID's on all of the contacts.  I should then have closed until my shorter-ranged, obsolescent SS-N-2D missiles were also in range, so that I could have launched everything at once and saturated the Chinese defenses.
Instead, my birds come in piecemeal, and directed at a single target.  Even so, enough get through the SAM and CIWS defenses of the Sovremenny to do some damage.

As I watch my strike get picked out of the air I realize my mistake and turn the helicopter around to finish the scouting I should have done in the first place.  As I close I can see the smoke from the burning DDG rising into the sky.

Eventually all three Chinese ships are ID'd without the Ka-28a coming under fire.  I launch my remaining missiles, a handful of creaky SS-N-2Ds.  The remaining two Chinese ships are a more modern DDG and an FFG; I have little hope that the SS-N-2Ds will get through their defensive screen.

In the end I'm right.  While the Sovremenny takes another two hits (but still doesn't sink!), neither the Haribing or the  Huainan  are so much as scratched.  I withdraw my helo to keep it from getting picked off by SAMs, and begin to lose contact with the enemy task force.

In the end, a poor showing.  While I didn't sustain any damage, I didn't sink a single enemy vessel, leaving the Chinese task force combat effective.

Admittedly, I'm far more a ground-pounder than a squid.  Still, I forgot some basics here, like fully scouting the enemy and keeping contact, as well as concentration of fire and fire superiority to overwhelm the enemy defense.  I was impressed at how well Fleet Command (with the NWP mod) has held up over the years - this is ultimately a 12 year-old sim, but it does pretty well.  It isn't graphically the greatest but it manages to pull off a few graphical niceties that NWAC doesn't do, particularly in regard to launch animations and the like.  Hopefully I'll have time to work some with the scenario editor during the holidays.

Thanksgiving Weekend

It's been a busy gaming weekend here so far.  I've played a few hours of Skyrim and finally started a new game of Sword of the Stars II now that Kerberos has given the all clear and the game is playable.  The Steam and Matrix/Slitherine sales have wormed their way into my wallet as well: yesterday saw me grab Elemental: Fallen Enchantress, Fleet Command, and a couple of Field of Glory modules I didn't have yet.

Fleet Command is a bit of a bugger on a modern gaming rig; it doesn't seem to care much for modern video drivers and can't run at very high resolutions.  Naval War: Arctic Circle has it all over FC  in that respect.  Unfortunately, the rest of the game doesn't measure up.  I'm debating picking up Harpoon to get my naval fix and just dealing with the interface and complexity.

With any luck, my copy of Decisive Action will show up today from HPS.  If so, I suspect I'll be engrossed in that.  Until then, I think it's some more Skyrim, perhaps some Fallen Enchantress, and probably starting a multi-session game of Decisive Campaigns: The Blitzkrieg From Warsaw to Paris.  I keep meaning to play the Polish campaign in the latter and never get started; this weekend seems a good time.  And of course, probably another 60 or so turns in SOTS2.