Naval Units: what is worth buying?

[Je_Gab_Fan]

depends on what you want to do…

cruisers are great for latter part of the game considering you play on allies side. you will strike the units on the beaches whom cannot defend anymore.

but still I think that you have to mix up units to have a strong navy.

The best german fleet you can have though is a bunch of planes and a nasty pile of subs.

But just like Romulus said cruisers kinda suck, and if you are the Italian dude and you loose yours early on you start crying I guess…

[Richter von Manthofen]

DDs are a must cheap/defending against subs

BBs because the free hit

Cruisers would be an option if you don’t have enough money to buy a BB, but are to fragile

CVs seem a powerful choice if you stack the with fighters, but once the fighters are gone…

Subs - they don’t seem to influence my games - ever…

[ShredZ]

@Richter:

CVs seems a powerful choice if you stack the with fighters, but once the fighters are gone…

…you buy 2 more for only 20ipcs and get 2x 3/4units instead of spending 24 and getting 2x 3/3 units which cant help out on the land after the sea is clear.

The AC doesnt just ‘seem’ to be a powerful choice in my mind.

[AxisOfEvil]

Battelships make up the cost difference of a cruiser after the first naval battle. That is if you assume Destoyers are the new cannon fodder. Each consecutive battle, battleships are paying for themselves. absorbing hits is the best way to maximize your TUV trade in naval battles!!

[Funcioneta]

@ShredZ:

The AC doesnt just ‘seem’ to be a powerful choice in my mind.

It’s pretty powerfull in Pacific ocean

[HolKann]

The only bad sea-unit is … the cruiser! The rest is fairly balanced, let’s take the DD as the standard sea unit:
sub = cheap naval hit, worthless if no enemy ships are around, bad defense, superb at keeping the opponent’s navy from spreading out, immune to air fleets => totally worth the cost if enemy ships are a problem. I would advise them to any nation except USSR.
DD = cheap naval hit, neutralises enemy subs, can hit air, 2/2 is decent => The bulk of an all-round fleet should be this guy combined with subs
AC = expensive naval hit, 1/2 is very low, but allows ftrs to engage in sea combat, is multifunctional: even after the enemy ships are gone, it still has the bonus of extra mobility for you’re fighters. => If you need to get fighters across a big distance (pacific!), or fast defense (with help of ftrs)
BB = moderate naval hit: after 1 battle, the BB has repayed itself in terms of cost/hit (it still has 2 hits, even after taking 1), and you get an extra shore bombardment on top => 1 BB is always handy when waging a sea war, because of the free hit…
Cru = expensive naval hit, can shore bombard, 3/3 is good, but 3 DD’s are better than 2 Cru’s because of the extra hit. => only good if a lot of shore bombardments are needed, otherwise, buy a battleship or DD’s. Note that for each shore bombard, 1 land unit is required, so shore bombardment doesn’t repay itself the way it did in revised… So how many times will one actually use the shore bombardment? => I don’t like the Cru… make it cost 10 :)

:oops: Just saw Romulus posted the same arguments in essay-form… Aw well, this is a summary then  :|

[toblerone77]

The worst has got to be the sub, I’m used to classic A&A and ever since AAR and the spin-offs the sub has become a complex, not worth it, pain in the ass. To the point where I don’t even buy them. Mind you, I just started getting back into the game and it’s been a while.

[Romulus]

@HolKann:

The only bad sea-unit is … the cruiser! The rest is fairly balanced, let’s take the DD as the standard sea unit:
sub = cheap naval hit, worthless if no enemy ships are around, bad defense, superb at keeping the opponent’s navy from spreading out, immune to air fleets => totally worth the cost if enemy ships are a problem. I would advise them to any nation except USSR.
DD = cheap naval hit, neutralises enemy subs, can hit air, 2/2 is decent => The bulk of an all-round fleet should be this guy combined with subs
AC = expensive naval hit, 1/2 is very low, but allows ftrs to engage in sea combat, is multifunctional: even after the enemy ships are gone, it still has the bonus of extra mobility for you’re fighters. => If you need to get fighters across a big distance (pacific!), or fast defense (with help of ftrs)
BB = moderate naval hit: after 1 battle, the BB has repayed itself in terms of cost/hit (it still has 2 hits, even after taking 1), and you get an extra shore bombardment on top => 1 BB is always handy when waging a sea war, because of the free hit…
Cru = expensive naval hit, can shore bombard, 3/3 is good, but 3 DD’s are better than 2 Cru’s because of the extra hit. => only good if a lot of shore bombardments are needed, otherwise, buy a battleship or DD’s. Note that for each shore bombard, 1 land unit is required, so shore bombardment doesn’t repay itself the way it did in revised… So how many times will one actually use the shore bombardment? => I don’t like the Cru… make it cost 10 :)

:oops: Just saw Romulus posted the same arguments in essay-form… Aw well, this is a summary then  :|

Yeah! You have explained better than me what I tried to say about ACs: flexibility.
ACs great advangages, in fact, is that fighters may be used with an increased benefit for range and mobility, and once the sea war is finished they can leave the fleet going to combat on the ground.

[TG Moses VI]

toblerone77,

The worst has got to be the sub, I’m used to classic A&A and ever since AAR and the spin-offs the sub has become a complex, not worth it, pain in the a**. To the point where I don’t even buy them. Mind you, I just started getting back into the game and it’s been a while.

Agreed.  It’s such a turnoff when I see Larry Harris constantly tweaking the rules for subs – making them worse, not better – that people just got fed up with that unit.  This time around subs MIGHT seem like a worthwhile investment, but there are so many scars of Harris butchering the boat.  Simplicity please.

[Romulus]

I consider the sub rules in Anniversary better than the rules of other A&A. Sub is a particular ship and deserve particular rules. Moreover I do not see them difficult to learn nor I believe that sub in Classic are better than in Anniversary.
The problem in Anniversary is not the sub the problem is: one DD able to counter the ability on any sub…

[jeffdestroyer]

I like the new sub rules.  It will force a lot of players to pay attention to the naval game and be prepared for balance and alternatives.  A lot of players are just tank commanders in AA Revised.

Here are the most important items that I think will affect subs.
1.  A player may not have enough IPCs to have enough DD’s in all of the correct places to counter subs.
2.  2nd and 3rd rounds of a naval battle will be more critical if subs are involved and you lose your DD’s.
3.  subs might be moved during non combat after a DD threat has been neutralized and the sub is in a better postion for the following turn while not subject to attack in the meantime.
4.  DD’s are subject to air attack  thus they might not be forward deployed without other assets, while subs will be.
5.  need a DD to hit a sub with air power
6. Subs are cheap.

[toblerone77]

The problem is that they’ve been tweaked way too much and yet they haven’t ever really addressed the effect of submarines on commerce.

On another note when I used to play Iron Blitz my favorite navies had lots of DDs and ACs.

Again I haven’t played AA50 yet, but in AAR subs are just no fun for me unless radical house rules are used for them.

[tin_snips]

a few house rules have been mentioned with subs in other threads

i think my favourites are one DD can detect and negate only one subs first strike and submerge, and the allies lose 1 IPC for every axis sub that is on the board at the end of each round

[toblerone77]

Yeah I’ve done stuff similar to that. After doing some reading around here I see alot of folks thinking along the same lines. I think the root cause of subs not being so hot is that the added destroyers to other AA games as, I suspect…a gimmick, without thinking it through well enough. Now it looks like DDs will be attack capable cannon fodder and the no defense TRN ? Well I’ll have to see how it all plays out in reality.

I think they should’ve had convoy zones from AAE incorperated into AA50. Let subs defend against air, and kept the 1 DEF for TRNs.

[tin_snips]

i’ve never played any of the off-shoot games (being AAE, AAP, and AAG). what do these ‘convoy zones’ entail?

[Romulus]

I am happy with the no defense TRNs and with the DD as backbone of the fleet.

Gaining the uper hand on the sea is no more a question of how many TRNs one have in a fleet. TRNs where too good as they were: amphibious landing capability, transport to friendly territories, cannon fodder and also defend at 1! Naval battle were fought by the warships not by the transport ships. A single ship doing all the task is too much Risk-like IMHO.

Now, I see the need for a more balanced fleet with each ship aimed to a task. Only the DD is slightly “overpowered” in terms of abilities. Before we toss in house rules, however, we should really test the gameplay.

[toblerone77]

It’s been along time since I played AAE. But there were SZs that you could capture that took away money from the allies, just like a land territory.

[Volkov]

Being a battleship junkie I go all battleships, and usually I play Japan, so with the 41 setup I have 3 CVs to boot. I will build 1 DD for its anti submarine ability but basically only BBs, and I have never been let down in this new edition. My usual opponent loves a good naval battle so he goes all navy with the US. He has tried many combinations of ships against me but my old two hit ironsides have always pulled through

Speaking now, a little more objectively, I don’t see a worth for cruisers. When I am playing I want to build them, they are new and exciting (I don’t have guadalcanal so this is my first exposure to them) But running it in my head, battleships seem so much more worth while when you are already putting that much down for a naval ship.

[toblerone77]

Cruisers seem to be one of those things you buy when you want a battleship and a bomber but can’t afford both and donforget that you can do naval bombardment withthe cruiser. It’s maybe like buying that last infantry or buying a pack of gum in the checkout line :-D

[Black_Elk]

Convoys are easiest and most direct way to make capital ships (and the naval game in general) more relevant. They are straight forward and require only a limited amount of stats tracking, since all the values are written directly on the board.

The second easiest way to give fleets a value outside of defending transports or bombarding, is to have subs doing economic damage. There are number of proposals for how this might be accomplished, but the essential idea is that subs can take IPCs away from the enemy in some fashion.

If we lowered the cost for all naval units that would definitely be fun, but bombardment has to be taken into consideration too. If you make cruisers or battleships too cheap, then the effect of bombardment starts to become heavily magnified. I tested the design concept in a TripleA game the Great War with battleships at 18 ipc, and bombardment ended up breaking the set up (this without cruiser bombardment mind you.) So if we did drop the price of all the ships, then the easiest way to deal with that problem would be to just nerf the bombardment value: down to 2 for the cruiser, and 3 for the battleship. I prefer convoys though for easy of use though. They are the simplest to work with and don’t require much additional overhead with the rules.

In AA50 bombers are my favorite naval unit so far :-D