Kick ass!

How's this going?

Just got excited about doing WWII Naval games again.

I think I've managed to glean quite a bit of info from this sheet.

For combat you seem to add up all the modifiers.  If its positive you use the left most column for a weapon and use the modified to hit values.  If you have 0 or negative you hit on a 5-6 and shift right one column for each negative point.

The damage check confuses me a bit.  I'm wondering if the ship cards have changed?  I can see where you'd mark "weapon damage" (much like Nova), but that doesn't seem to jive with speed reduction.

Looks overall like combat resolution will be pretty fast - just will have to get used to the modifier calculations as there are a lot of factors in there (armour vs. pen included).

-Tim

Just looking over some of the data cards that have been previewed, there are a few things I really like compared to other mini games of the same genre:

1) The cards are quite compact yet still clear to read.  It will be no problem to manage several ships without eating up a huge amount of table real estate.
2) If playing a "pickup" game - constructing fleets up to a given point value - its easy to compare ships.  The Speed, armour and relative firepower are all right there to see.  This is especially true for firepower where things like rate of fire/size of shell/number of guns has all been pre-calculated down to one number.  (Of course there is still relative AP of the guns to consider)
3) Little book keeping - other than the odd critical hit (which are tracked by counters on the table), all you have to keep track of his hull damage and degradation of speed/weapon systems.  Because of the way the damage is marked (from the left most box) there really is no thinking required to fire with damaged weapon batteries, as you still just read off the leftmost unmarked box.

Anyway, looking forward to GF3 when it comes out.

-Tim

A shame about the colour, but on the other hand when I do my own conversions, at least my cards won't look so bad compared to the "official" ones now 

@Arrigo

I have also been very much looking forward to GF3 coming out.  I tried Victory at Sea, but it wasn't for me (not enough granularity overall is my feeling).  I actually liked Naval Thunder better, but there was a lot of little numbers, and didn't really feel satisfied with the way aircraft and subs were treated.

Not so long ago I picked up "Stations Manned and Ready 2".  Its quite good IMHO, but a touch more complicated than I think the rest of my group is interested in trying out.

GF3 really strikes a great balance with everything.  Can't wait to play and also to grind out some more ship stats!

-Tim

I'll be honest... part of the reason I'm not including color cards with the initial release is the time involved in creating them. And I'm sure y'all would prefer to have the game in hand before I start spending time on "extras".

But now that the black-and-white cards are finalized, creating the color versions is that much closer to a reality. Here's a quick tease.

Daniel,

if you can get the game out before March 14... it will be nice, because I can print for free (B&W) in my College... later on I do not know... 

So B&W cards are incredibly attractive in this light... the color ones can wait... one thing I liked in the previous version was the ship profile.

Tim,

If you stop looking and the Deutschland class as battleships/battlecruisers and instead you think as "cruiser killers"  the thing starts to make sense. Battlecruisers were, more or less, a failure out of the mind of Jackie Fisher. With the fast battleships coming into age (QE class for example) battlecruisers lost their primary purpose (killing everything else, running away from BBs). But... and here comes out Admiral Hans Zenker. Hw wanted something that could deal with French overseas trade.

If you look them this way they made quite a lot of sense. And Daniel has correctly rated them CA. I am curious to see the armor of the typical treaty cruiser and see how it works against the 1 rating. The Scharnorst class is a different beast as the WW1 BCs were. Remember they were designed to operate in conjunction with the battlefleet.

Arrigo

compare quite well with historical specs. The main differences were guns (quite evident from the cards) and turrets. The Scheer had 5.5 inch at the turrets the Exeter only 1 inch. It was a clear design decision, but I do not know if this is the level of detail we can go into in GF3 (or how this can be really replicated except in CaS or Seekrieg).

and Daniel, game first, then pundits like me will argue about the colour cards with ease. But as a quick comment, probably having just a gradient rather than all the background "noise" will help ease of reading. The German card for example is more pleasant to my eyes than the Commonwealth one.

Daniel,

I was literally thinking loud about the differences in the two differences. When I said "was a clear design decision" I referred to the ship constructors.  Technically on the Exeter they were gun houses... I do not think it is a good idea to go into such kind of detail in GF3. sometime CaS made exceptions for particular design with special armor ratings for turrets, but on average you have only belt/deck armor. Usually you include the differences in turret armor in the likelihood of turret hits as critical.  I can see this as a problem only if you have a crazy design where the turrets are massively armoured and the rest of the ship is not. AFAIK only Seekrieg and Stations Manned and Ready have gone down that road.

I am quite confident you do not need to just start tinkering with rules just for me! 

GF3 looks as though it will provide a much-needed rule set to cover the gap in "re-fighting" fleet actions.  I cannot wait to try it for some of the engagements in the Med. in WW2 between the Italian and British fleets - there are some really interesting "rolling" battles with cruisers, pursuits and battleships

I am also looking for rules to replay Jutland next year and hope GF3 will do the trick.  So far the rules I have used - GF2, Naval Thunder, GQ3, Micronauts, Stations Manned & Ready (1 &2) and Command at Sea are better for squadron sized actions and cannot handle larger number of vessels well (in terms of time added to the games, as play is slowed, more than mechanisms).  While I have had some good fleet actions (including some novice admirals and squadron commanders) with Battle Stations, No Safe Port, and All at Sea these designs are TOO abstract and are also hard to usefully convert to a campaign game with a system of repair and refit etc.

BTW will GF3 include a simple repair system for use in a campaign game?  The sorts of things we have cobbled on to various tactical/operational rule sets for this purpose include:
- For BA/BB/BC, we say it takes 5 days work to repair each "box" of damage.  For cruisers and destroyers we make this 10 days; as the damage proportionally is more significant.
- When a ship has received hull damage, but no damage that reduces speed), we allow repairs at any port with facilities, or an anchorage with repair ships etc. 
- Any ship taking hull that reduces the ship's speed we require to be repaired at a dockyard/major port/designated ports.
- Main battery gun turrets we require to be repaired at naval dockyards and take 20 days to repair.  Secondary battery gun turrets etc require 10 days to repair.  We allow this work to be done at the same time as work to the hull.

What I have seen from the reference sheet, ship cards and discussion on the forum makes me think GF3 will hit the sweet spot - I cannot wait

Thanks,

Andy.