More Cruel Seas

Mike and Ed were over recently for a game of Cruel Seas. This was the first outing for the Liberty Ship, Minesweeper, US PT boats and Flower class corvette. The game was fun but the setup wasn't all that good so I will just give a brief report followed by some of our ideas for using the bigger ships 

Here is the setup: The Libery Ship, Tanker and Corvette are in a line with the Farmille and the two US PT boats in a line beside them. The S-Boats are coming in from the other side and the Minesweeper can enter on any long edge after the first ship moves. Having the allied boats screened by the big ships was the flaw in the setup. The allied boats would not be able to fire on the S-Boats until they had launched their first torpedo volley. Having the convoy in the centre of the map is also problematic since the S-boats were closer at the start. For Cangames, I will have a much larger separation at start.

The game started as expected with the S-Boats steering towards the Liberty Ship and launching torpedoes. The corvette also turns in to the S-Boats but the allied boats have to slow down to pass behind the big ships

The first set of torpedoes hit the liberty ship and caused a fair bit of damage.

The corvette was destroyed by the gunfire from the S-Boats.

A few more torpedo hits and gunfire from the Minesweeper finish of the Liberty Ship

When the PT Boats get on the scene they do some damage to the S-Boats but it is too late to save the merchants.

At the end most of the small ships are damaged or sunk but the Minesweeper was in pretty good shape.


Other than the bad setup we felt that larger ships were taking too much damage from the relatively small caliber guns of the torpedo boats. If the S-100 hits with all its guns (which is not too unlikely if it is firing at a huge slow target) it will do as much damage as a torpedo. It seems to me that it would take a lot more 20mm fire than that to do any noticeable damage to the structure of the Liberty Ship.

For the next game we are going to say that the huge ships will take no damage from guns 37mm or below (but they still can get critical hits). We may also try to reduce the damage that purpose built steel warships, like the corvette or minesweeper, take from an attack by 3 or 4 points. This will make MGs and small autocannons less effective but have less effect on bigger guns.

For the most part, I think we will try to avoid having larger ships on both sides (or at least set up the scenario so they are separated from each other)