By the way, here’s one possible way to consider cruisers for gaming purposes. If I were to look at the six naval unit types used in A&A, but without looking at any of their rulebook specifications – in other words, if I were to consider them purely from a WWII historical perspective – the way I’d regard them would be as follows.
The first distinction I’d make would be between the surface combatants (battleships, cruisers and destroyers) and the other types: aircraft carriers (which are surface ships, but whose mission is to deploy units that fight in the air), submarines (whose primary characteristic is their ability to operate underwater) and naval transport ships (which are not combatants).
The next distinction I’d make between the three surface combatants would be to split off the destroyers from the battleships and the cruisers. Destroyers were considered “maids of all work” more than surface-combat vessels, and unlike battleships and cruisers they were never intended to get into artilllery slugging matches with other vessels…which is just as well because they had zero armour, hence their nickname “tin cans.” Their jobs were to escort bigger warships and/or merchant convoys, to hunt submarines, to serve as the outer ring of a fleet’s concentric defensive formation, to torpedo enemy ships if the opportunity arose, to engage in close-range shore-bombardment (of a very modest type, due to their very modest 5-inch guns), to put up a bit of AAA fire, and to carry out all sorts of odd jobs that might be needed. They were produced in vast numbers (especially by the US), and in some respects could be regarded as the naval equivalent of a fighter plane or a fighter-bomber: fast, agile, and able to be deployed in great numbers in all sorts of roles.
That leaves battleships and cruisers, which by the era of WWII (when fast batteships had become the norm) were very similar in their roles. Both were regarded primarily as fast, seagoing, long-range, armour-protected platforms for heavy guns, originally intended (and sometimes used) for ship-to-ship combat but in practice greatly used in a shore-bombardment role to support amphibious landings. Their large size allowed them to carry a large – and in some cases enormous – number of anti-aircraft weapons (.50 machine guns, 20mm and 40mm autocanmons, and 5-in dual-purpose anti-surface/anti-air guns), so they were extremely valuable as escort vessels for aircraft carriers, around which they would project a formidable barrage of AAA fire when enemy planes attacked. I’d argue that, when the chips are down, WWII cruisers were fundamentally similar to battleships, their main disadvantage being that they were less capable and their main advantage being that they were cheaper and therefore could be produced in larger numbers. The big American, British and Japanese navies had a number of modern battleships, a larger number of modern heavy cruisers, and an even larger number of modern light cruisers. So did the other navies, but with the difference that in some cases the cruisers were all they were able to afford (or finish building before war’s end) in any significant numbers, if any at all. Germany was probably the worst off, with very few modern battleships OR modern cruisers completed in time for war service.
So in game terms, I’d say that realistically:
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battleships and cruisers should have the same types of capabilities
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battleships should have capabilities high enough (their advantage) to offset their high cost (their disadvantage)
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cruisers should have a cost low enough (their advantage) to offset their lower capabilities (their disadvantage)