@Gary-Mark-Scott-Cooper said in I am a new player and have a few questions from my first game.:
- The people i was playing with had problems identifying some of the types of ships. Is there a quick way to identify them or a reference document that can help me out?
This thread…
https://www.axisandallies.org/forums/topic/21626/a-a-unit-identification-charts
…provides unit identification charts. The charts can be clicked to expand them to full size for easy viewing, and you can also print them out for consultation during a game; I keep mine in a ring binder.
To identify ships at a glance, I’d recommend this approach, which partially works by process of elimination:
The easiest ships to identify are the aircraft carriers (they have flat decks), the submarines (which are very slender, with some of them looking almost like toothpicks), and the naval transports (most of which have two or three prominent masts). That eliminates half the ship types right away.
The three remaining types are the surface-combat vessels: the battleships, the cruisers and the destroyers. The destroyers are the easier group to pick out: they’re the smallest, and many have square sterns (the rear part of the ship) rather than pointed or rounded sterns, which is a useful detail to look for. This leaves just the battleships and cruisers, which are the hardest to distinguish at a glace – not surprisingly, because of all the ship types in the game, the battleships and cruisers are conceptually the most similar ones (as they were in real life) – so those are the ones you may have to memorize or look up in the charts. The battleships are a bit larger, which is fine if you see one alongside a cruiser, but some of the battleships or cruisers by themselves can be a little hard to identify, even to sculpt enthusiasts (and naval history buffs) like me. Fortunately, some of them have very distinctive designs; the Russian Gangut-class battleship (with its freakish funnel structure) and the Japanese Yamato-class battleships (with its highly pointed stern) are impossible to mistake for any other unit.
