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Post by larcrivereagle on Apr 3, 2024 0:05:24 GMT -6
The first major carrier action of this 1959 war against the Japanese.
A crucial set piece of this battle is that neither side has the capability to target ships with SAMs yet, its running at 80% tech speed. Well, the Japanese decided to give it ago in 1967. This time around, their submarine attack to start the war missed, which was not a thing I knew could happen. The first major opening action was disastrous due to having stored all battle-fleets far away from Japan out of prudence. This lead to older ships arriving first without support, losing a carrier to planes and an older BB due for replacement (Launched 1946, 54.5k displacement 29kn, 9x 17" rifles, standard battleship w/ 14.5" belt (mag boxed, inclined, AON, TPS 3)) and several of their CA escorts (also older, not the newer missile cruisers) trying to fight their battle line against the last 3 Japanese BCs (Launched 1949, 50.5k displacement 34kn, 12x 15" rifles in 4 turrets, 2x3 guns forward and 1x3, 1x2 guns rear w/ 12" belt), in exchange for putting one in the dock for repairs. Not great, not terrible. The follow on battle was nothing major, a small action wherein 2 newer BBs there were refit into BBGs right before the war (65k displacement 30kn, 8x 18" rifles, 1x4 front, 1x4 rear, 12x HSSM front, 4x HSSM each broadside, 2x HSAMs (mag boxed, inclined, AON, TPS 4)), schwacked a few Japanese missile destroyers. But in June 1967 another full scale fleet battle occurred west of the Korean peninsula, with the American battle fleet mostly surrounded by dispersed carrier groups, with a single large battle fleet (the 2 active Japanese BCs and 5 or 6 modern missile cruisers with many missile armed escorts), coincidentally concentrating most all of their air defenses. I decided to test using my surrounding airbases to strike ships instead of suppress enemy bases. The Japanese battle line was meet by a composite battle line (which didn't include 3 BCs covering the CVs) which included 3 of said BBGs and 1 of my newbuild BCGs (53k displacement 34 kn, 5x 18" rifles, 1x front, 2x wing, 2x rear in singles, 4x HSSM, 2x HSAMs, 2x MSAMs w/ 10.5" belt (theoretically 16.5 effective) (Narrow belt, sloped, inclined, TPS 4); Built to the 2nd to last layout of s76748767's durability tests to see if what if any changes needed to be made to adapt them to the missile age), which was unfortunately not able to refit in time, and so technically worse at it's job in the battle line than the BBGs. The opening blows were a series of missile hits from land based MB and JA (which may have sunk a CV outright? Not sure, there are a few CV losses unaccounted for). After forcing the enemy battle line to retreat after eating some 20-25 missile hits and shelling a CV in the group (unable to run it down), my line retreated in turn to deal with flooding and a fire as night fell. At this point I focused on massing JA strikes at the CV reports the airbases had identified, which must have been more successful than I initially thought. The Japanese sunk a CL, a carrier from fire raging out of control, and disabled one of my old CVLs converted from my (at this point) only surviving B after several bomb hits. This process continued over the next day and night, the only major surface action of note being nearly losing the BCG with its narrow belt to a single destroyer from 6" shells ammo racking one of the missiles it was carrying. Fortunately a friendly port was only an hour away and damage control handled the fire without issue. Follow on Japanese strikes only found a CA wounded from previous engagements.   CVL Kaiyo survived through the final night at 58% damage with minor flooding till the end of the match. I had thought for sure it was burning up in the water the last few times it was spotted (due to being hit by at least 4 missiles and several bomb runs, and then repeatedly attacked by airbase strikes), and focused my remaining time and planes looking for the other carriers, which by this point where all at the bottom of the sea, baring two other CVLs that had entered port earlier. |
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Post by wlbjork on Apr 4, 2024 6:28:02 GMT -6
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Post by director on Apr 5, 2024 12:19:58 GMT -6
My Italian Navy wound up at war with France in 1942. I drew a carrier battle in the waters north of Libya, and it went great... they got off a strike first, which laid some bombs on an older dreadnought (oh Ruggiero Di Lauria, why do you always have bad luck?).
My strikes went out once I spotted their carriers and the results were... well, one carrier took 12 bomb and 18 torpedo hits and the other took 26 torpedo hits. Either they sank from sheer weight of ordinance coming aboard, or the torpedoes blew them into fragments and then shredded the fragments into metal confetti.
I have never seen two ships take that amount of explosives. The miracle isn't that they sank, but that there was anything left for the last dozen torpedoes to hit.
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Post by larcrivereagle on Apr 5, 2024 19:08:41 GMT -6
I have never seen two ships take that amount of explosives. The miracle isn't that they sank, but that there was anything left for the last dozen torpedoes to hit. It's highly entertaining. I once had a combined carrier strike/HSSM salvo generate an absurd number of missile hits over four 'turns' of unpausing the game to sort through notifications, one after the other. It petered out into one or two hits over the next few times I hit enter after that. Attachments:
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Post by larcrivereagle on Apr 8, 2024 21:26:40 GMT -6
Well, I finally did it, got a 1 million damage battle against the accursed French. This is the second war against them in 5 years, with the last one starting around 1973 and this one starting in 1978, it now being 1979. The first war was one entirely by my SSGs and improved SSGs (I was under-performing, still getting used to using SAMs on surface targets and the enemy doing the same in turn), which scored an average of 1.2k VP in trade warfare every month until the French surrendered (which was very quickly). This war, for whatever reason, those same SSGs are now only scoring an average of 100 VP a month. Anyway, the French declined almost every battle up to accepting a carrier battle off Panama. This would prove to be a poor decision. There was almost no impact from ground based planes this time, and the AI clustered into two carrier groups and a small screening scout force. I was able to concentrate and reinforce a battle fleet of 3 BBGs and 6-7 missile cruisers, brushed aside the scout force, and made contact with one of the reinforced carrier groups while sending my planes at the other. After a long back and forth of this tempo over about 3 hours of real time, the French had nothing left in sight. The battle group scored a total of 96 missile hits between SAMs and HSSMs. Oh, this is also the first battle I let my HSSMs engage over the horizon targets, aiming at reports of enemy ships the planes found. This turned out to be generally successful, maybe because I have the advanced missile tactics tech. However in the final half of the battle I noticed that a returning scout force of BCGs kept slowing down the game by firing at over the horizon unidentified reports... which appear to have been my own carrier group. Fortunately they never hit anything, or maybe they were firing at targets way the hell out of range? Don't know, the missiles were splashing down in near the group.
  Interestingly, the LJFs scored most of the air to air kills despite my using several 100+ super-carriers carrying 2 wings of HJF each. I'm not really sure what their planes were doing, I think they scored a grand total of zero damage, but I might be misremembering. I'm pretty happy with the results of my carrier strikes this battle. While they weren't quite as concentrated and immediate with missile hits in this battle, I believe they scored better over all, with similar losses.
Edit: They surrendered immediately after this turn rolled over, just when Italy allied Japan and Japan joined France against me.
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Post by brygun on Apr 9, 2024 14:10:16 GMT -6
The battle group scored a total of 96 missile hits between SAMs and HSSMs. Don't you just love the smell of jet fuel in the morning? |
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Post by brygun on Apr 9, 2024 15:04:11 GMT -6
 England gets educated about the Adriatic. 1923 my Italy has Albania etc taken from the Austria Hungarian Empire from earlier years. Thirty ish of my micro raiders cruise the oceans out of Iceland in North Europe, and multiple places in the Indian Ocean and Southeast Asia. 80 plus submarines hunt their merchants too. The British decide to push into the Adriatic with their might battle fleet. Nine of their war wagons lay at the bottom of the mouth of Adriatic. Five mangled survivors limped back to Malta. Though we didn't engage their transports none made it to the landing zone. |
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Post by blarglol on Apr 10, 2024 18:37:55 GMT -6
View AttachmentEngland gets educated about the Adriatic. 1923 my Italy has Albania etc taken from the Austria Hungarian Empire from earlier years. Thirty ish of my micro raiders cruise the oceans out of Iceland in North Europe, and multiple places in the Indian Ocean and Southeast Asia. 80 plus submarines hunt their merchants too. The British decide to push into the Adriatic with their might battle fleet. Nine of their war wagons lay at the bottom of the mouth of Adriatic. Five mangled survivors limped back to Malta. Though we didn't engage their transports none made it to the landing zone. DD swarm? |
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Post by brygun on Apr 11, 2024 8:54:33 GMT -6
View AttachmentEngland gets educated about the Adriatic. 1923 my Italy has Albania etc taken from the Austria Hungarian Empire from earlier years. Thirty ish of my micro raiders cruise the oceans out of Iceland in North Europe, and multiple places in the Indian Ocean and Southeast Asia. 80 plus submarines hunt their merchants too. The British decide to push into the Adriatic with their might battle fleet. Nine of their war wagons lay at the bottom of the mouth of Adriatic. Five mangled survivors limped back to Malta. Though we didn't engage their transports none made it to the landing zone. DD swarm? Combined arms though the DD swarm was part of it. I had only a few BX ships but they were mostly new builds of good quality guns and repeatedly upgraded fire control. There was the 3 CVLs with this being early carrier were one of the bigger carrier planes afloat. Yes, a DD swarm did get stuck in doing lots of damage. With the enemy battle line of 12 BX the DDs were getting horribly mangled by secondaries, as shown by my losses. Carrier planes made a few of their BX straggle at slow speeds or turn for home. This started gaps I could exploit. There was a nearby coast line I led and drove the enemy along which limited their evasions. The DDs were held back until then to go in swarm style and many torp hits. Half of the enemy BX sunk though still needed finishing blows from our small BX. I had to be careful to rotate away my own BX ships as they got torn apart with almost all needing four (4) months repair. One even needed five (5) months of repair! I do like the ~1100-1200 ton destroyers in this era for efficient torp dropping while having enough health for some of them to survive getting back to port. |
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Post by larcrivereagle on Apr 16, 2024 23:46:34 GMT -6
Well, I finally did it, got a 1 million damage battle against the accursed French. Still running this game, mostly just as a test bed to refine some designs, ended up getting into another war, this time USA+UK vs France+Japan. I am happy that the refinements to the older more conventional 68.5k displacement BBG/BCG generations of designs are working well, as well as a class of 19.9k CAs with 9.5 inch belt. This battle was a massive mess, as it was an unexpected battle with full fleets taking part on both sides. The forward scouting elements (a single older BBG of the oldest 68.5k design, + 3 CAs, all spread across some 20km, and so unable to really cover eachother), got immediately obliterated, which fortunately absorbed maybe half or a third of the enemies opening HSSM attack. Carriers on both sides contributed, but spawned way to close to the respective battlelines to be safe. The Japanese carriers got cut off from their port, then caught on the shore while retreating the other way, but I ran out of time and ammo before I could defeat them in detail. Overall not very satisfied by this battle, it's way later than I should be up.  |
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Post by attemptingsuccess on Apr 24, 2024 19:56:12 GMT -6
While Missiles may be the star of the show in later eras, Bombs are actually a very effective weapon. Especially with Jet Attack Aircraft, bombs can absolutely wreck a force, especially in concert with missiles Attachments:
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Post by darththorn on Apr 28, 2024 19:00:57 GMT -6
Not perfect, but perfectly adequate for a pre-1900 victory I feel. Given that you're on Admiral's Mode this is pretty goddamn impressive |
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