Cruiser to transport infantry.
Hum……I’m not a fan of that.
I know japanese used destroyer to transport troops.
Tokyo express it’s a good national advantage for japenese but give the same opportunity
to the allies. Not realistic.
That’s a reason why a introduce liner ship in my game.
AL.
I hope that no one flames me for resurrecting a thread like this, but I was thinking along the same lines as introducing some form of smaller ASW escort, and the escort carrier to use in the A&A Pacific and A&A Europe game. The British had a range of ASW ships, from the small Flower-class corvette to the much larger escort sloops and Lend-Lease destroyer escorts. The destroyer escort was intended specifically as an ASW ship, and was actually more capable at ASW than the normal destroyer, having as good a sonar suite, and the ability to deliver a much larger depth charge pattern, along with Hedgehog attacks from 1943 on. It was generally viewed as being about 1/2 the cost of a destroyer, which would give it a cost of 6 IPC, an attack of 2 against surface ships, defends at 2 verses ships and planes, and attacks and defends against submarines at 3. You could drop the attack and defense rating against planes and surface ships if you really wanted a bigger difference than the destroyer.
The escort carriers were pretty much either converted merchant ships or built according to merchant ship standards to modified merchant ship designs. That would give them an IPC cost of 8, not counting planes. The British used some escort carriers as fighter carriers for amphibious landing coverage, and those could be viewed as carrying two fighters. You could restrict those to defending against air attack and maybe having a 1 for ship attack. Otherwise, the normal air group was 12 to 19 Wildcat fighters, and 9 to 12 Avenger torpedo planes if American, or Swordfish if British. This would carry only one fighter, but it would have the regular aircraft stats for attack and defense as representing a mixed air group. If you wanted to, you could use some of the 1/700 scale Avengers or Swordfish and give it a special ASW capability with limited air combat ability. If you did that, you might want to boost the cost of the aircraft up two IPC over a straight fighter.
For units to represent these two types, I was thinking about using the destroyers and carriers from my Attack Expansion game, and designating which color went with each country. Then I do not have to keep track of cardboard counters.
A couple of notes…
A Destroyer Escort as you describe it would need to be $10 in order to balance in game terms against other naval vessels. If I could buy a 2/2 unit for $6 instead of $8 for a SUB, AND it could fire on enemy aircraft… I’d probably almost never buy SUBs again, or regular destroyers.
Escort Carriers would need to be $14… cheaper than regular carriers, more expensive than a DST.
Preliminary: To introduce those items as you see it to the game you must consider that the game foremost needs cruisers. Using a D6 system will require that the OOB battleship moves to 20 IPC, the Destroyer moves to 2/2 costing 10 ( from 3/3) so that the new Cruiser ( takes two hits and representing both Heavy and Light types) is now at 3/3 and costing 16). Having said that you now have these to consider:
Destroyer Escort (DE) attack 1 defend 2 cost 8
Escort Carrier (CVE) or Light Carrier (CVL) attack 0 defend 2 carry’s one plane costs 12
In my version the oil tanker is the only new unit added. Well, apart from Radar installations and Rocket pieces.
But then one key rule I introduce is that all ships must refuel every turn, tying them to friendly land areas. With tankers it becomes possible to carry out long range naval operations, but the pieces themselves are expensive and have no combat value.
I’m not convinced that cruisers are anything more than a piece for the sake of having a 3-3 ship, with destroyers becoming 2-2, but we’ll see what LH has come up with in Guadalcanal. Eventually.
The problem with cost reduction is that you might create naval cannon fodder units bought in vast quantaties just to soak up hits. A ship costing 4 IPCs and having no combat value would probably be a good buy.
