Operational Level Sea Power Requirements

[bcgames]

What do you want to see added to this game engine to best replicate an operational-level sea campaign? What about operational-level brown water and coastal naval operations?

BCG

[RocketMan]

Sea power is always difficult to model accurately in a strategic game. On land, an individual soldier or even a 100 individual soldiers more or less doesn't make any difference to the outcome of a battle. But 1 ship, or one plane can make a huge difference on the ocean. To accurately model sea power requires a completely different engine than you would use for land combat, which is why games abstract sea combat so much.

However, with the small operational scale of this game (5-10 miles/hex?) Naval units could traverse the entire length of the map in one turn, so using Area movement with abstract interception like a lot of games of this type use would probably not work. Without writing an entirely new engine to handle sea movement, sighting, combat, air searching, air-to-ship attack, etc., I don't see how you could add a sea campaign except in a highly abstract way.

[bcgames]

Yes, these are all very good points.

Given that every element in this game is an abstraction of an actual thing, what should be modeled to best render the effects of naval operations? For the sake of narrowing the discussion, let's assume the naval scenario is the Eastern Front (Baltic and Black Seas, and major rivers) 1941-45.

[RocketMan]

For the effects of naval operations, I would add shore bombardment which could be used on coastal hexes and maybe one hex inland, and invasion points, which could be used like strategic transfer points except they at least partially be used up in an invasion. You would also have to model coastal batteries, which would have only a minimal land attack rating as well as model artillery firing on shore bombardment groups.

[bcgames]

So for naval gunfire (shore bombardment), ships would act like "floating artillery units"; perhaps grouped as squadrons of destroyers, light cruisers, or cruisers, and task groups/task forces centered around a battleship, monitor, or battle cruiser.