@Corbeau:
@timerover51:
Your shore bombardment idea has been picked up in the Anniversary Edition rules, evidently.
Ya, i saw that, that’s great news :)
I can only wish i was the one to propose it to the game designer but it really is a coincidence. That was a house rule we used way back then. Still great to see he thought of it too. :)
I like the also th idea of BB acting as artillery support. Good thinking there too. I would not allow it for planes too, i find them already too flexible as a unit acting both in land and sea. I’d rather have them seperated in 2 classes, Land based fighters and CV based fighters. They already have the different molds for some nations, german stuka and Bf-109 for exemple. anyways, that’s another discussion.
For the BB acting like an AA, that’s exactly what i meant. Would give a reason to have one in a fleet.
You need to remember that roughly 2/3 of a carrier’s aircraft were attack planes, dive bombers and torpedo bombers, that would be used in support of ground troops. This is the basis for the flexibility in fighters in A&A. If you had a dedicated attack plane, like the Stuka, you could reduce the fighter’s role by a little bit, but by the end of the war, the US Navy’s Corsair fighter was carrying a bombload heavier than that of the Stuka, and delivering it with comparable accuracy.
As for BB getting an AA roll, that makes a fair amount of sense, and is pretty historically accurate. Quite simply, BBs normally acted as a magnet for air attacks, even if a carrier was around. The US South Dakato shot down 26 Japanese aircraft while escorting the carrier US Enterprise at the Battle off Santa Cruz in October of 1942, while Adm. Raymond Spruance deployed his battleline in advance of his carriers at the Battle of the Philippine Sea in June of 1944 to deliberately absorb Japanese carrier plane attacks. However, the US did have the best naval AA fire control systems of the entire war, so what holds true for the US does not hold true for everyone else. The Bismarck had major problems with defending against a limited number of British Swordfish, while the Italian BBs had similar problems. The British were so-so, and the Japanese were close to hopeless until late in the war. You could make it a National Advantage for the US, but I suspect that would not be acceptable to a majority of Axis players. Making it universal is a bit of a stretch. It would be up to you.
