Cruel (Grey) Seas: Ambush Battle Report

This weekend, Mike, Stan and I got together for a game of Cruel Seas. Mike has already posted the British point of view on his blog here. I had hoped to have my new submarine painted for this game but I had only got as far as basing it.

We had some more large ships painted up so we decided we would play scenario 6: Ambush. I was going to take both the Minesweeper and the Flak ship as the 2 large ships but decided that would be to unbalanced so ended up with the Flak ship and the Tanker that we used in the previous game. For an escort I took and S-38 and an S-100 with a veteran crew.

The British had a Farmile D with a veteran crew and 3 Vosper MTBs (I think one of those should have had an inexperienced crew but we forgot about that)

The British start on the far side of the table and the Germans will enter on the bottom left corner and will move to the left until they spot an enemy vessel (which happens if any go faster than slow or get withing 60cm).

Since the large ships are so slow, my plan was to bring out the S-Boats first  and try to sink the British before they fire their torpedoes or at least to force them to fire them earlier than they otherwise would.

The battle started in earnest when the Farmile launched a torpedo hoping to catch the tanker as it cleared the island. My S-100 fired at the Farmile but missed.

The S-38 faced off against the 3 Vosper MTBs

The S-100 got an engine critical hit on the Fairmile

 Both of the big ships are now on the table and the torpedoes are starting to head towards them

The Fairmile managed to finish off the S-100 but it did suffer a second engine critical from  the Flak Ship.

The next turn has a lot more destruction, the Fairmile is finished off by the Flak Ship and the S-38 is taken out by the Vospers -- but since a bunch of British dice were drawn in a row, on of them ended up crashing into the burning wreck of the S-38. At this point both my escorts were done and I had been quite lucky dodging the torpedoes from the Fairmile.

This luck would change as 3 torpedoes from the Vospers hit the tanker --48 dice of damage later the tanker was just a burning wreck.

The Flak ship had also taken a torpedo hit but was still steaming forward at 12kts. It completely outguns the remaining 3 Vospers but it is big and slow and easy to hit.

At the end the Flak Ship is overwhelmed but there is only one Vosper left. The British have won but at great cost.

I think we have a better sense of balance for the game now. I had another issue with the use of the speed bands on the to hit tables. My flak ship was traveling at full speed (12 kts) and was not easier to hit even though that speed is slower than most craft would be at slow speed -- where they would be penalized. I am not sure yet how I want to tune the to hit tables to match that -- we came to an agreement about what was "fast" and "slow" but this will need to be codified by the time I run the game at Cangames.

Keeping the wrecks on the table was interesting (and I think makes the table look a lot better). I think according to the rules the ships should be removed immediately but this seems to be more fun so we will stick with it for now.

Hopefully next game I will have some targets to fire my torpedoes at and we probably should try the aircraft rules, though I am not sure that having air attacks in the middle of a naval battle makes any sense (even in a game that is as "cinematic" as this)