GWAS: The Mediterranean Battle Scenario 5 The Spilling of Ink, Fall 1915 Played: Nov 2009 During the years before and during the First World War, Austrian and Italian naval writers constantly compared the supposed allies’ fleet strength, always asking “what if?” While Austrian planners always included the semi-dreadnought Radetzky class in their battle fleet, their Italian counterparts never considered their own predreadnaughts capable of standing in the battleline. All agreed on one thing though – only battle could ultimately decide control of the Adriatic. The Austrians have four modern (1914 remember) battleships; BB VIRIBUS UNITUS, BB TEGETTHOFF, BB PRINZ EUGEN,BB SZENT ISTVAN. They also sail with three of the borderline obsolete predreadnaughts, B RADETZKY, B ERZ. FRANZ FERDINAND, and B ZRINYI. The Italians have six modern battleships, BB DANTE ALIGHERI, BB CONTE DI CAVOUR, , BB GIULIO CESARE, , BB LEONARDO DA VINCI, , BB ANDREA DORIA, , BB CAIO DUILIO, . These forces meet somewhere in the Adriatic… Sighting range is four hexes and the aggressive Austrians, with the initiative immediately turn in on the Italians, cutting the range to three hexes. At three hexes the modern battleships can open fire, but the predreadnaughts are limited to a maximum range with their primary guns of two hexes, so the initial gunfire exchange puts the Austrians at a disadvantage. Nevertheless, the Italians do only minor damage. A second salvo at three hexes range causes slight additional damage to both fleets, except for a critical hit on the BB CAIO DUILIO, , which promptly loses speed to “1 Slow”. All of the ships in this action are rated as “1” for speed, one level better than “1s” so the Italians are immediately disabused of their hope of holding the Austrians at range 3, to move away now would be to abandon BB CAIO DUILIO, . With range closing to 2 hexes, the Austrian predreadnaughts get into the action, and the Italian ships take a lot of damage to their hull mounted torpedo tubes. Against this, the Italians score a lot of hits on BB VIRIBUS UNITUS. The Austrians continue to close the range, sending the predreadnaughts forward to 1 hex range, which is the maximum for torpedo combat. Both sides exchange torpedo volleys, with the Austrians scoring the only hit, which leaves BB CAIO DUILIO, dead in the water. The remaining Italians ships begin to move south. The Austrian response is confused when an excellent salvo from the Italians sinks B ZRINYI. Nevertheless the Austrians keep coming south east. This puts two more of their ships within torpedo range of BB CAIO DUILIO, , but they decline to waste their torpedoes on the obviously crippled wreck. This decision was later harshly criticized as neither ship ever got another chance to launch those torpedoes and BB CAIO DUILIO, although immobile, continued to pump out shells for quite some time. Another furious round of gunfire sees BB DANTE ALIGHERI, and B ZRINYI sunk. Both sides are engaged in what amounts to ship to ship duels, with each ship attacking it’s counterpart in the opposite battleline. The Austrians decide to reopen the range, they want the bonus for plunging fire which is only available if firing from longer ranges. (Ships of the period had extensive armor belts along the hull, but the decks were often unarmored and longer range shells tended to crash down into the ships vitals). The Italians change tactics a bit and concentrate their fire on a few of the more wounded Austrian ships in an attempt to sink them and put more Austrian guns out of commission. BB VIRIBUS UNITUS with multiple prior hull hits attracts a lot of attention, but to the consternation of the Italians their shells are very evenly distributed over the Austrian ship and while she is left with just one hull square, all of her guns are destroyed. Not the economical victory the Italians were hoping for. Still, BB VIRIBUS UNITUS, breaks off for the north, with no guns and her torpedoes previously expended she can contribute nothing more. Gunfire continues to batter both fleets. B ERZ. FRANZ FERDINAND, is sunk. The Italian ships all begin to lose speed, soon only BB ANDREA DORIA, is capable of full speed. The Austrians pick up on the tactic of concentrating on sinking ships instead of battering the entire fleet. They concentrate their guns on BB CAIO DUILIO, , which being dead in the water, is an easy target. However, they also have trouble getting hull hits, instead they smash the guns and completely irrelevant machinery like the torpedo mounts. The Italians open the range slightly and direct their ships to pick targets at 3 hexes to take advantage of plunging fire. The hull hits on the Austrian vessels begin to add up, and they decide to withdraw. As they go, they get in the final hits they need on BB CAIO DUILIO, and sink her. But in fleeing the Austrians have incurred the wrath of Mars and the Italians sink BB VIRIBUS UNITUS, BB TEGETTHOFF and BB PRINZ EUGEN on what is the last roll of the dice… As fog rolls in, ending the battle, the Austrians withdraw with only two of their original seven ships, including the maligned B RADETZKY. still in good shape and the heavily damaged BB SZENT ISTVAN. For the Italians, four of six ships survive, although only the BB ANDREA DORIA, is any condition to fight again soon. In terms of Victory points, the Italians win 236 to 171, a combination of ships sunk and damage inflicted. The difference is 65 points, roughly the value of any of the modern battleships and slightly more than twice that of the predreadnaughts. Three more hits on BB GIULIO CESARE, or one less Austrian ship sunk, and this would have been a virtual tie. Commentary I’m still pretty new to the GWAS and SWWAS series, but very interested in both. I had a few hours of downtime and thought I’d try this scenario because it was two fleets I knew next to nothing about, featured just a few ships and had some big guns! After setting it up, I almost put it back away. It looked to be nothing more than a serious die rolling contest. Slow ships, short range weapons and nothing but open sea seemed to preclude much player input. That impression proved to be not entirely accurate. The early critical hit to BB CAIO DUILIO, , and her subsequent going dead in the water, meant I soon had ships with three different speeds (DIW, 1s and 1) which did create some interesting possibilities for maneuver, albeit very slow maneuver! I also didn’t really appreciate how important the plunging fire bonus might be at first, nor how infective torpedoes of this era were. The Austrians thought they were making the smart move to close to torpedo range, and with respect to their predreadnaughts, they were probably correct, but their battleships probably should have stood off more. I wasn’t really happy with the tactic of concentrating fire on the more seriously damaged ships. True, from a game perspective it was (or should usually be) more efficient to sink a ship with a few primary guns left than to try and batter down the other sides ships equally. It certainly makes sense to do everything you can to limit the number of guns firing at you. But from a historical perceptive I have some problems with this. My understanding is that it was very difficult to spot the fire of shot when more than one or two of your ships engaged the same target, and it wasn’t a great idea to ignore some of the enemies ships and let them line up their shots in the comparative security of not being targeted recently. The game provides no penalty for massing fire against one target, not any bonus for firing while unengaged. In this instance I limited both sides to never having more than 2 ships engage a given target in any gunfire round, but I didn’t award a firing bonus for unengaged ships. Something to think about for next time. And a final note. I estimate I rolled 2,000 dice in the course of this game! 13 ships with a variety of guns, not all of which could fire every turn, and many of which were destroyed by the end of the game, is still a lot of dice. Add in the rolls for damage, and critical hits and I’m estimating it comes to about 10 dice per ship per gunnery impulse. There are four gunnery impulses per round, so that’s 520 dice per round, and there are four full rounds in the game. That’s a lot of wristage! I don’t have anything against rolling dice per se, but the main claimed advantage of this tactical system is that it resolves battles quickly and gets the action back to the operational map which is the soul of this game series. But I’m not finding that to be true. This little battle took a good 3 hours with all that die rolling, even though I followed the advice to use multiple sets of colored dice so I could roll the different gun classes and even provisional damage results in the same throw. All told I’m still a little leery of this tactical system. Simple yes. Fast no. Meaningful player decisions? Well, some, but hardly enough to fill three hours. And historical insight, well it left out a few tactical details like the problems with spotting shot or leaving an enemy ship unengaged that even I’m aware of. So the jury is still out for me. I like the idea of mastering the relatively simple game system and then having so many different theaters and scenarios to choose from. I’m playing a game of SOPAC, the sister series of WWII naval combat right now and while the tactical resolution has some of the same problems (slow, minimal “feel”) I have to admit the results of any given battle accord well with what I would expect and the operational aspects are really fun. I’m hoping that as I get more into the operational scenarios in the GWAS series I’ll find more and more to like and the downsides of the tactical resolution will become less and less of an issue for me. _______________________________________________ Consim-l mailing list Consim-l@mailman.halisp.net http://mailman.halisp.net/mailman/listinfo/consim-l