Cruisers - Combined Arms

@Young:

I’m just trying to help make cruisers better.

I absolutely agree - cruisers need to be better - just throwing up a gauntlet so only your best ideas will get through. No harm meant to any.

@Der:

Historically one of the hardest things to do was an amphibious assault. If anything, an amphibious assault should be HARDER in this game, not easier. Not being able to bombard after a sea battle is one of the things that make an amphibious assault harder - that’s why I favor keeping it.

Proposing that ships can do both sea battles and bombardment, and their casualties cannot fire back = a cakewalk for taking islands and other land areas from the sea. Bombardment makes it easier than fighting any land battle, because you are shooting at something with no risk of being hit yourself.

I agree with you on that point:
and their casualties cannot fire back = a cakewalk for taking islands and other land areas from the sea.
I don’t think YG was implementing this particular point.
Shore bombardment cannot be a preemptive strike, unless you have some way to do the same with reasonable occasions in the game against amphibious invaders.

Toblerone77 suggested that Shorebombard is play OOB (cannot do it if Sea Combat happen) but
Cruiser also gives a +1A (as Artillery) to an Inf/MechInf.
Battleship also gives a +1A (as improved Artillery) to 2 Inf/MechInf.
For the duration of the land combat.

I believe this can work, since there is no additional hits outside the attacking ground units.

So imagine 1 Cruiser with 1 transport 2 Infantries on it. Cost 12+7+6= 25 IPCs
Shorebombard @3, once
1 Inf A1+1=2
1 Inf A1

1 Battleship with 1 transport 2 Infantries on it. Cost 20+7+6= 33 IPCs
Shorebombard @4, once
1 Inf A1+1=2
1 Inf A1+1=2

So, making an Amphibious assault with a Battleship is like having 1 Infantry and 1 Artillery (7 IPCs):
1 Inf A1+1=2
1 Art A2

So, for every transport with a BB, you get a small reduction of 1 IPC for the same attack value.

With Cruiser, it is not exactly as having 1 Infantry and 1 Artillery (7 IPCs) because there is only one Infantry which get the Attack @2.
@toblerone77:

I posted an idea a while back (which Baron sort of quoted) of
Cruisers and Battleships granting infantry and mechs artillery support in amphibious assaults.
1:1 for cruiser +1 for one inf/mech, and 1:2 for battleships so +1 for 2 Inf/Mech units.

Or
Cruiser and Battleship gives a +1A (as Artillery) to an Inf/MechInf.
And
Battleship is also able to move 1 Marines-Infantry unit on board.
1 Battleship with 1 Infantry on it. Cost 20+3= 23 IPCs
Shorebombard @4, once
1 Inf A1+1=2

And it solves the Marines unit at 3 IPCs case because it can Attack 2 Defend 2 in any Amphibious Assault supported by Battleship unit.

It fits the description of Marines, since they need less equipment, have smaller divisions and can be deployed in a short notice.
Hence, no need of Transport, just the Battleship unit (with a few support ships, as it is always the case, not represented but easily imagined.)

@Young:

No offence taken… The reason I don’t like changing cost is because the oob costs for all units is engrained in our heads and players may think $12 no matter how many times you tell them their now $10. As for giving cruisers AAA capabilities, I can’t get around the idea of giving it to cruisers and not AC Carriers or Battleships.

Well erm, the costs of specific units changed like about 10 times in the past editions. Therefore I can’t see a problem with changing some of them once more.
Changing the gameplay rules of units is more of a problem, as it changes the setup. You get completely new possibilities to open the game (however, even if it sounds interesting, the more conservative players would never accept it). If you change for example the battleship rules from for “bad” to “good”, those battleships will totally turn around the first turns of the game. Maybe you will even change the overall balance of the game.
The charming thing with only changing unit’s costs, is that it will in no way ever change anything with the starting setup of the game.

Well, I’m not totally against changing the rules, but i like it as simple as possible, and I simply can’t understand your opinion on changing costs. Imho costs is the first thing one should consider to change, and only if this can’t give the specific unit its own niche, one should consider changing the rules.

As far as I understand the defender of a firm “12 IPCs”, is also about first round set-up and placements at the end of the opening turn.
Some Powers will be able to put a 10 IPCs Cruiser in the water instead of a Destroyer and this can change some forthcoming battle in the next turn.
Just an example.

Just real quick, to CWO’s question about whether every unit necessarily needs to be a good or desireable purchase? I don’t think so. As long as there are at least some specialized cases where players have a reason to buy it. Having somekind of unique special ability would be helpful. I guess you could make the case that it’s bombardment is special, but in my experience this hasn’t been enough to get them on the board. That’s why the triple combo Anti Air idea seems like it might work, in conjunction with a carrier and battleship. I could see the anti air umbrella as a dedecent incentive. Right now though their cost at 12 seems prohibitive compared with 2 subs on attack or 1.5 destroyers on defense for the pips.

I don’t have a problem with lowering the cost, since unit costs have changed pretty frequently over the past few boards. Still I think a unique ability would be more fun for the gameplay, to cement it in the roster as something other than a nerfed Revised Destroyer with no ASW
:-D

Changing the costs of units are house rules afaik.
The easiest “house rule” to get them on board would be: Cruiser 10 IPC, Battleship 18 IPC.

@arwaker:

Changing the costs of units are house rules afaik.
The easiest “house rule” to get them on board would be: Cruiser 10 IPC, Battleship 18 IPC.

I agree but still flashed on the Black Elk Marines &BB.
It can be cool to increase action in PTO.
And it doesn’t exclude the above costs.

@Baron:

I’m more inclined to treat it exactly as an AAA unit: @1 against up to three planes.
After all, it is a known concept in ground combat adapted to Naval Battle and it requires 3 warships type, the number 3 is obviously on the board.
IC’s AAA seems too powerful and unrealistic: a defense @1 against infinite number of planes.
Defending Carriers are already much better than offensive ones. Anti-Air is providing an additional defense.

@Black_Elk:

Well the anti air for battlegroup concept seems cool. I think the hope was that we could find a combined arms that just had units pairing 1:1. That one requires a pairing of 3 different units 1:1:1, but seems like it could encourage Cruiser purchases.

Not only Cruiser but also Battleship buying incentive.
Another reason to not give IC’s AAA capacity: you want to defend against more than 3 planes, buy another Cruiser and BB to join another Carrier.
I’m pretty sure it can change some buying from Destroyers and Subs to Cruiser and Battleship.

It still cost 12+16+20= at least 48 IPCs (68 with 2 Fgs) to get this additional defensive abilities.

Maybe this concept can be simply extended to each combo of BB+Cruiser gives 1 AAA capacity as long as there is a Carrier to protect.

So 2 BBs + 2 Cruisers + 1 Carrrier will provides an AAA against up to 6 planes.

All this!  :-D

I think something along these lines could potentially bring both Cruisers and Battleships back into the mix as a purchasing consideration, and is relatively simple.

Of the combined arms proposed thus far, this one doesn’t bust the opening round combats. It would increase the swing on fleet defense making all out air assaults against a stacked battle group more risky. Right now the all air option is pretty powerful vs navies, this would give at least some way to counter that, but only at the cost of more expensive warship units, and somewhat diminished flexibility in other ways, since you have to keep the ships together to get the boost.

I still think a different bombardment bonus or marine concept could work for cruisers and battleships, or a maneuverability bonus for cruisers specifically, but both of those would surely have an influence on the opening balance.

Way Cool Baron!

Don’t know if it’s your’s alone but the idea of getting rid of limitless AA shots for infrastructure is a good one! Let them have a normal 3 shot limit and if you want more buy a AA gun.
Sorry to sidetrack on the cruiser thing but I really like this idea. :)

@barney:

Way Cool Baron!

Don’t know if it’s your’s alone but the idea of getting rid of limitless AA shots for infrastructure is a good one! Let them have a normal 3 shot limit and if you want more buy a AA gun.
Sorry to sidetrack on the cruiser thing but I really like this idea. :)

You overread my ambiguous sentence.
I was only thinking about a naval context.
So it is entirely your idea to limit IC’s AAA to up to three shots.
That can give a little incentive to buy more AAA units.

Maybe, maybe not.
Regular AAA units can be  allocated to IC’s defense while others against regular attack.
No need to have a special unit for this purpose.
Once used in SBR, AAA can only be used as casualty.

@Black_Elk:

@Baron:

I’m more inclined to treat it exactly as an AAA unit: @1 against up to three planes.
After all, it is a known concept in ground combat adapted to Naval Battle and it requires 3 warships type, the number 3 is obviously on the board.
IC’s AAA seems too powerful and unrealistic: a defense @1 against infinite number of planes.
Defending Carriers are already much better than offensive ones. Anti-Air is providing an additional defense.

@Black_Elk:

Well the anti air for battlegroup concept seems cool. I think the hope was that we could find a combined arms that just had units pairing 1:1. That one requires a pairing of 3 different units 1:1:1, but seems like it could encourage Cruiser purchases.

Not only Cruiser but also Battleship buying incentive.
Another reason to not give IC’s AAA capacity: you want to defend against more than 3 planes, buy another Cruiser and BB to join another Carrier.
I’m pretty sure it can change some buying from Destroyers and Subs to Cruiser and Battleship.

It still cost 12+16+20= at least 48 IPCs (68 with 2 Fgs) to get this additional defensive abilities.

Maybe this concept can be simply extended to each combo of BB+Cruiser gives 1 AAA capacity as long as there is a Carrier to protect.

So 2 BBs + 2 Cruisers + 1 Carrrier will provides an AAA against up to 6 planes.

All this!  :-D

I think something along these lines could potentially bring both Cruisers and Battleships back into the mix as a purchasing consideration, and is relatively simple.
Of the combined arms proposed thus far, this one doesn’t bust the opening round combats.

It would increase the swing on fleet defense making all out air assaults against a stacked battle group more risky. Right now the all air option is pretty powerful vs navies, this would give at least some way to counter that, but only at the cost of more expensive warship units, and somewhat diminished flexibility in other ways, since you have to keep the ships together to get the boost.

@arwaker:

Changing the costs of units are house rules afaik.
The easiest “house rule” to get them on board would be: Cruiser 10 IPC, Battleship 18 IPC.

Above all the others, another reason which can advocate to prove that such “AAA capacity” added to Combined BB and Cruiser is about the cost:

The combat balance cost of Cruiser is 2 IPCs lower, the combat balance cost of Battleship is also 2 IPCs lower.
When saying the 1 CA+ 1 BB + 1 Carrier get an AAA capacity against up to three planes,
it is like adding an AAA gun in the water, the cost is 5 IPCs.
CA 10 + BB 18 + AAA 5 = 33 IPCs
Which is pretty near 4 IPCs higher cost of 20 BB and 12 Cruiser.

So, all in all, with the large expanse required to get it 20+12 = 32 IPCs.
The 1 IPC difference is not so important, since it required to buy a 16 IPCs Carrier.
And you don’t get any additional hit taken as casualty.
(If you were able to put a real AAA on water, as it is the case in a land Territory.)

So I think this AAA capacity is perfectly balance in this configuration.

So which way is simpler to formulate it?
1- All 3 units BB+CA+CV required?
2- A Combined Arms of BB and Cruiser activated when any Carrier is present to be protect?
Making #2 more like other actual combined arms.

That way, for each Cruiser and BB combo you get an AAA capacity.
Ex.: 3 CA + 3 BB with 1 CV would provide AAA @1 against up to 9 planes.

#2 Is still Balance IMO.
But which ones fit better inside actual A&A rules system?

@Baron:

So which way is simpler to formulate it?
1- All 3 units BB+CA+CV required?
2- A Combined Arms of BB and Cruiser activated when any Carrier is present to be protect?
Making #2 more like other actual combined arms.

There’s something about this proposed battleship + cruiser + carrier AAA bonus that I would have commented on earlier if I’d noticed it before today.  My earlier description of the tactical formations used by the US Navy in WWII – carriers in the middle, battleships around the carriers, cruisers around the battleships and destroyers around the cruisers – was meant to emphasize that this formation allowed lots of defensive AAA firepower to be pumped into the air, but it wasn’t meant to imply that the carriers contributed significantly to this firepower.  The carriers were the high-value units being protected by the AAA, the overwhelming majority of which came from the battleships, cruisers and destroyers.  American carriers typically had a few 5-inch dual-purpose guns and some lighter AA weapons, but those were simply to provide a last-ditch defense against any planes that got through the surrounding rings of surface vessels.  Carriers were not, in and of themselves, considered to be major AAA platforms.  And it should be remembered that the battleship, cruiser and destroyer AAA guns were defending the carriers, but that the reverse wasn’t true (i.e. the carrier AAA guns weren’t defending the surface ships, they were defending their own carriers).

On the other hand, the case could be made that there was genuinely a kind of surface ship + carrier combo that did work both ways (meaning to the benefit of both elements of the pairing) in terms of aircraft defense.  The surface ships, as previously noted, contributed anti-aircraft artillery fire in greater volumes than the carriers could provide on their own.  The carriers, for their part, contributed a form of anti-aircraft defense that the surface ships could not provide: the combat air patrol, or CAP.  They’d keep groups of fighters operating over the task force (or on standby on the flight deck, ready for takeoff), and their job was to shoot down incoming enemy planes – preferably well before they reached the inner defense rings.

There was an interesting philosophical difference behind the British use of carriers with heavily armoured flight decks and the American preference for relatively unarmoured carriers.  The British armoured carriers were more resistant to damage if an enemy plane got through to it, but they could carry few planes because the weight of the armour consumed displacement and hence required smaller hangars.  The Americans, for their part, preferred to sacrifice armour in exchange for more hangar space, and in addition to the numbers of planes that could be stowed below they also liked to load their flight decks with additional planes.  Their rationale was that it was to a carrier’s advantage to operate as many planes as possible, and that these large plane numbers maximized the chances of shooting down incoming bandits well before they reached the carriers, which therefore made the lack of armour irrelevant.

If I understand correctly what YG is seeking, the requirements are for a special cruiser bonus that a) applies only to cruisers and to no other ship type; b) that does not involve a combined-arms pairing between a cruiser and another unit; c) that is historically accurate, both in terms of the technical features of WWII cruisers and their actual use in that war; and d) which does not involve an IPC price adjustment.

Frankly, I can’t think of any historically accurate things about cruisers that would fit all those requirements.  At best, there might be things that could be bent or stretched to partially fulfil what’s being looked for.  One idea I’ve already mentioned is the concept of giving cruisers some kind of equivalent to the OOB blitzing ability of tanks, to reflect the combination of speed and long range which cruisers offered.  Another possibility – which someone would have to develop more fully, because I don’t know exactly how this concept could be translated into house rule terms – would be the following one.  Task force commanders often (but not invariably) commanded their forces from a carrier or a battleship, or sometimes from a cruiser.  At Midway, for example, Yamamoto commanded his Main Body from a battleship, and most of the other admirals (on both sides) commanded from carriers.  Fletcher and Nagumo both lost their flagships (carriers in both cases) to battle damage, and both admirals transferred their flags to cruisers – the Astoria and the Tone, if memory serves.

So perhaps, as a stretch of this anecdote, there could be a HR stating that, only once per battle, if a player’s battleship or carrier is damaged but not initially sunk (2 hits being required to sink), it can be presumed that the force’s commanding admiral had been using that vessel as a flagship and that he has now transferred his flag to an adjoining cruiser (if there is one, of course, which would be the incentive to buy one ahead of time).  This transfer of the flag would confer some sort of mitigation-of-damage factor that would offset the BB/CV hit in some way.  I don’t know what that offsetting advantage could be, however; our resident house rule creators would have to see if they can come up with something.  The answer would probably be easy if the OOB rules used commander pieces, but alas they don’t.

The reason this concept is “a stretch”, by the way, is that flag transfers didn’t always operate as I’ve described.  At Leyte Gulf, for example, it worked in the opposite direction: when Kurita lost his flagship, which was a cruiser, he transferred to a battleship.

@CWO:

If I understand correctly what YG is seeking, the requirements are for a special cruiser bonus that a) applies only to cruisers and to no other ship type; b) that does not involve a combined-arms pairing between a cruiser and another unit; c) that is historically accurate, both in terms of the technical features of WWII cruisers and their actual use in that war; and d) which does not involve an IPC price adjustment.
Frankly, I can’t think of any historically accurate things about cruisers that would fit all those requirements. At best, there might be things that could be bent or stretched to partially fulfil what’s being looked for. One idea I’ve already mentioned is the concept of giving cruisers some kind of equivalent to the OOB blitzing ability of tanks, to reflect the combination of speed and long range which cruisers offered.

As always, instructive and interesting dive into World War II in depth history.
Thanks for both posts.

The single ability specific to Cruiser and not too unbalancing seems to be linked to his extended range.
1914 opens a window for an A&A M3 Cruiser.
Giving a basic 3 Moves, but what kind of effect does +1M Naval Base bonus, is yet to determine.
No bonus,
NCM bonus only,
both CM and NCM ,
so Cruiser gets M4 in such last two situations when leaving a NB.
I don’t know if any player ever play them that way.

A certain kind of Blitz capacity for one’s own can-opener Cruiser was develop in this thread from Black Elk:
Blitz units, Can Openers, and Turn Order
http://www.axisandallies.org/forums/index.php?topic=34869.msg1350988#msg1350988

This allows Cruisers to attack DDs blockers and once the SZ is conquered, let other Naval units attack another SZ behind the first line blocker or simply NCM into an unoccupied SZ further away.