Sea Mines

[Rasputitsa]

How about the ability to designate sea hexes as a minefields, laid by a fleet containing cruiser units (like RN 'Manxman' and 'Welshman', but mainly to simulate light vessels). Mine fields can only be detected, or cleared, by fleets containing light ships (cruisers at a minimum number of ships and health level, set at 'engage'). Fleets with only large ships would only find the mines when they go off. This is to stop fleets just turning up and bombarding and launching landings, without any preparation. Or, fleets can only detect mines when they are at a certain health level, e.g., they have sufficient light escort ships, a BB fleets at say 50% health doesn't have enough support ships left.

The mines would not affect your own fleets, as your ships will know where the cleared lanes are, unless the enemy decides to lay mines in the same hex and, ideally, we will need a hex marker so you know where you put the mines. You might want to lay protective sea mines around your own ports.

Each nation would have to have a limit on the number of minefield hexes they can create and have a PP cost, we don't want the whole English Channel, or Med, filled with mines. It would introduce another naval strategy issue, where to place the mines and the naval and air superiority to be able to send fleets in to detect and clear mines.

This only works if the game tracks where fleets move in a sea zone to enter and leave ports/bombard/amphibious landings, but if the game can't calculate this, then perhaps it just becomes a general odds calculation in selected narrow sea zones, like the English Channel, Irish Sea, Danish Straits, Alboran Sea, Adriatic Sea, Aegean Sea, so you designate a sea zone for mine fields rather than specific hexes, a bit like the odds for raider attack with the similar odds calculation to find and destroy the mines. This would have the effect of making players think more about committing major ships into narrow seas. During the 'Channel Dash' the only damage inflicted on Scharnhorst and Gneisenau were caused by mines (albeit laid by aircraft). [:)]