ORIGINAL: spence
{In response to Freeboy}
(Further, and mostly as a historical aside relating to the whole Midway concept; the Japanese landing force that was supposed to capture the island was a patheticly inadequate joke in relationship to the opposition they would have faced: two battalions with no weapon heavier than an 81 mm mortar, with no liason with each other or the fleet, committed against two different objectives which could only reached by wading a minimum of 200 yards through the surf).
You know, I am very glad Tully and Parshall addressed that in Shattered Sword. Even though I admit to originally buying into the "Miracle at Midway" theory, even then, I had always wondered at the various writings (both historical and fictional) and games that seemed to take it for granted that Midway would fall if the USN lost the carrier battle. Given the USMC's success in defending Wake against the first landing there, the inability of the IJA to force the issue in the Philippines tactically against USMC, US Army, and Philippino troops in Bataan prior to starving them for 3 months, and the Japanese's general "shoestring" approach to amphibious logistics and their "throw more men at it" answer to most tactical problems they came across, I had alsways though it more likely an intial SNL assault would fail even with local air and naval superiority. Now at least I can point to Tully and Parshall to back me up when anyone accuses me of talking crazy.
ORIGINAL: spence
I have serious reservations about "Carriers at War". Matrix's UV and WitP depict carrier operations as essentially identical in the US Navy and IJN (and to a lesser extent the RN). In actuality the 3 navies all developed unique ships, planes, and doctrines and capabilities. If CAW, like UV and WitP depicts carrier warfare as the US USN against the USN that has "funny sounding" ship names then it will in my estimation be a complete failure as a simulation.
That is an interesting point. In fairness to the developers, prior to Parshall and Tully, there were no English-language authors who tried to understand the differences between IJN and USN carrier doctrine, or really even realized that they existed. I think the previous assumption that IJN carrier operations were similar to those in the USN was understandable, given the general lack of records to the contrary and some superficial similarities in the design and organization of their carriers (both generally had open bows; unarmored flight decks; above deck islands; air groups divided among fighters, dive bombers, and torpedo bombers, etc.). And of course, any game originally designed prior to publication of books such as Shattered Sword are going to be built on those same assumptions.
Now, keeping in mind everything Parshall and Tully wrote, I am still not sure that it would make much difference for a wargame such as "Carriers at War." A lot of it, of course, would depend on the exact level of detail of the game system, and the degree to which the designers want to force the player to adhere to doctrine (disregarding for the moment whether or not it is the right doctrine). In truth, most wargames do not require their players to utilize the doctrines and tactics of the nation or service they are playing, and generally allow a much greater freedom to improvise or simply make things up as they play than most real generals and admirals would have had. This is, in point of fact, one reason why we refer to them as "wargames" rather than "simulations." Some things, of course, are easy enough to represent in game. The IJN's neglect of damage control, for example, can certainly be included by lowering the appropriate values for their ships. On the other hand, is the fact that the IJN loaded and armed their aircraft in the hanger's really that germane to game such as CAW? Aside from differences in the time it took them to arm a strike (which could be included in CAW easily enough), would there be any real difference, from the point of view of gameplay, between that system and the USN's? Fueled and armed aircraft are a mortal danger to any navies' carrier, no matter its standard procedure, as illustrated by the Franklin, which was kept afloat only because of the Essex's superior design and her crew's excellent damage control techniques. In the world of CAW, getting caught with fueled and armed planes aboard is going to bad, I suspect; the difference between above and below decks is probably small enough to make it questionable whether it is even worth attempting to simulate.
Other doctrinal differences, such as the IJN preference to send off big coordinated "deckload" strikes as opposed to the USN's early war tendency to more less throw anything they could get in the air in the general direction of the enemy a carrier fleet in an often seemingly haphazard manner, would be extremely hard to implement without severely limiting the player's ability to control the game and making the game itself exceedingly complex. Moreover, those types of doctrines did frequently change. In just about every carrier action in 1942-1943, the USN tried some new variation of coordinating large strikes, and by late 1943 was using a "deckload" procedure very similar to that practice by Kido Butai in 1942. Moreover, as demonstrated by the Hiryu at Midway, even the IJN could improvise if it became desperate enough.
