Matrix Games Forums

As I have shared with an opponent, my questions and posts are because I believe Warplan has the potential to be the best game at this level I've ever played, not just the best computer game, the best game. But for me, at my current understanding of the naval aspects, it is too ahistorical and so I am not there yet.

From my reading of WWII history, the British had naval supremacy in both the Atlantic and Mediterranean. They feared raiders/uboats impacting their commerce, but the German navy was never a major concern outside of raiding. Sealion was only feasible IF the Germans could get air supremacy, which would negate the ability of the UK navy to oppose a landing. Similarly, the UK had air and naval supremacy in the eastern Med, and there were never major concerns about a sea invasion of Egypt or Syria. The concerns were about pushing over land from Libya.

But in my games as the UK in Warplan, I find I have to deploy air/naval assets to simultaneously try to impact so many areas and, at least as of now, I haven't figured out how they can all be covered as they were historically. That said, as I have posted elsewhere, I fully admit the issue is probably me missing something, hence this post.

Also, due to shipyard limits, the UK does not have the ability to invest in their navy and have any real impact until late 1941. So they need to accomplish everything listed below with the assets they have at the start of the game.

So, with that long winded "setting of the stage", here are the areas I find that the UK needs to simultaneously try to apply assets to exert naval superiority:

* Ensure Sealion cannot succeed, which includes both the east coast, southern and the west coast of the UK. Obviously this includes air units and naval.

* Ensure Ireland cannot be taken - requires naval and air on the West Coast, but also southern Ireland). I am hoping the answer to protecting Ireland isn't "the UK has to invade Ireland" as that is definitely an ahistorical requirement.

* Track down subs - requires several carriers as far as I can tell (and investment in escorts and tech). But I was also told to get carriers to the Med and have carriers help chase raiders.

* Track down German raiders - because interception is so tough in open sea against raiders and raiders can suddenly "switch" to fleet mode, it requires a fair number of surface units to both succeed in finding them and avoid being ambushed (i.e. fail in attack, German changes to fleet and attacks if they outnumber and attack adjacent units). (BTW, I have mentioned elsewhere that I think the only time a fleet mode should be allowed to change mode is when in port because of this - they are either on a raider mission or they aren't).

* Ensure supply to Gibraltar (if Italy decides to place units next to Gibraltar) - air unit in Gibraltar can also make this tougher for Italy, but air units are getting spread thin in this list too.

* Defend eastern Med, which also requires air assets, CVs and two surface fleets at sea to protect both Syria and eastern Egypt invasions.

I am struggling to figure out how the UK can allocate their naval and air assets through 1941 to achieve all of these objectives, which they did historically.

Grateful for any thoughts or advice.

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There are the naval assets available to the UK at start (including those in deployment queue):

BB: 6 (1 more arrives December 1940)
CA/DD: 9
CV: 3 (1 more arrives June 1940)
Sub: 2

I agree on a number of your points. The Naval and Air game is a bit over simplified and has a number of imbalances. This being primarily a land based game it isn't surprising but some of the naval imbalances affect the land game. Hopefully, WarPlan will pick up some improvements from the Pacific version.

Thing I find that I think need some improvement:
1. The primary reason the German surface fleet spent most of its time in port is that UK air and sea power controlled the North Atlantic and in particular the Norwegian Sea. No German ships could move through this area without being spotted but in Warplan there is never a problem.
2. Large surface ships were extremely vulnerable in ports that could be protected. Which is why they never tried to base their surface warships out of French Atlantic ports. Warplan has little problem with this.
3. Many of the Air/Sea portion of the problems stems from only being able to intercept when a surface fleet arrives somewhere within intercept range. This is easily avoided unless the player has to invade something. So you have the ridiculous situation of the entire UK surface fleets surrounding a German fleet stack and they putting right through it to escape.
4. The ease of sluffing off air defenses by just moving a few ships around in range to trigger their intercepts then moving in with the vulnerable units like landing craft.
5. There are some specialized units that could counter some of this but they are way to expensive to build for a player to use them. Ships and Air configured for Anti Sub or Surface combat cost far to much for the UK to build and take far to long to be of use. Not counting the lack of Advance points to make the worth having.

My suggestions:

1. Make interception work on units starting within intercept range of the unit.

2. Lower the cost of some of the less powerful ships like Patrol Craft and shorten their build time.

3. Increase the number of US shipyards. The game seems to imply that the US wasn't a major ship producing country.

4. It would be really nice to add a unit or even facility (like AA's) that would reproduce the anti-sub and ship capability of the bases the US and UK set up to cover the North Atlantic and US coast during the war.

Hopefully others can Brain Storm some ideas to improve the system. And, hopefully some of them are easy to implement without a lot of work on the game.

I always max research for escorts (up to '43 tech anyway) and carriers, and use the latter exclusively for uboat hunting for as long as they are a problem.I will,however divert carriers to attacking german surface raiders in range as they seem to be more effective against merchants than subs, despite their failure to do very much in WW2. I have also taken recently to maxing UK warships too to help vs surface raiders.a 9 strength fleet of CAs and patrol groups/destroyers seems to work best vs lone or small group of raiders because the BBs can never find anything despite having radar and their own spotting aircraft.

Re the eastern med, proper garrisoning of ports, with surface ships and bombers in anti-ship mode covering them should suffice.

I think, though that it has got a little easier to find the bad guys since the last patch. I did KO 13 uboat factors in 1 turn vs my current opponent a few turns back. Double strike by 3 carriers vs subs hiding in Bordeaux.

That said, by far the biggest factor in the sea war seems to be luck. If you can find the little b#gg~rs the RN does carry a very big punch. Other times you can have the RN doing several attacks per turn for several turns but hitting nothing.