Heavy Cruisers, Batlecruisers and Pocket Battleships

I don’t have any particular numbers to recommend (unit stats aren’t my strong suit), but here are a few general comments.  A battlecruiser, in very general terms, would generally be faster than a battleship, but less well protected armour-wise, and would have a less powerful armament (either in terms of the number of its main guns, or their caliber, or both).  Things got very blurred in the WWII era, when battleships and battlecruisers essentially merged into the “fast battleship” type and the pure battlecruiser concept was mostly abandoned.

Regarding your list:

The Schleswig-Holstein was a WWI-era pre-dreadnought battleship, not a battlecruiser.  The Deutschland class of which she was a member wasn’t the same Deutschland class formed by the three pocket battleships Germany built in the late 20s/early 30s.  Technically, those three ships weren’t really battlecruisers either; Britain’s three real battlecruisers of the time (Hood, Renown and Repulse) would have both outrunned and outgunned them.

The Fuso class ships were WWI-era battleships, not battlecruisers.  They were rebuilt in the interwar period, but the reconstruction didn’t substantially raise their speed; by WWII standards, they were considered slow for a battleship.  And you can pretty much say the same thing for the Nevada class, another WWI-era battleship class rebuilt during the interwar period.

HBG has a number of units like the ones you’re looking for at their Shapeways Shop. They are building up in advance of the release of Global War 1914. You can check them out here;
https://www.shapeways.com/shops/historicalboardgaming?section=Global+War+1914&s=0

@Erocco:

What would you suggest for stats on D6 and D12 system for a unit between a cruiser and a battleship.

For stats, this is what I would do:
D6: A4 D4 or D3 M3 C20, no second hit.
D12 A8 D7 or D6 M3 C20, no second hit.
In both cases, your battlecruisers move quickly (as battlecruisers historically could) but can’t take a hit (as battlecruisers historically could not)

If you like the idea of fast-moving but weakly-armored capital ships but don’t want them to be alone, you could try giving extra movement to cruisers and destroyers. Then you would have a fast wing (battlecruisers, cruisers , destroyers) and a slow wing (battleships, carriers, submarines, transports).

For sculpts, I would use the Admiral class (HMS Hood) battlecruisers in American green and British tan and the Kongo class battlecruisers in German black and Japanese burnt orange from A&A 1941. Both the Hood and the Kongo were classic battle cruisers from back in the day (World War I designs). The main difference between the Hood and the Kongos was that the Kongos (there were four of them) were rebuilt in the 30s into something that was essentially a fast battleship while the Hood never got that refit in the mid 30s to do the same. Hood vs. Bismarck showed, again, why battlecruisers didn’t fight battleships very well - not enough armor.

-Midnight_Reaper

@Midnight_Reaper:

For sculpts, I would use the Admiral class (HMS Hood) battlecruisers in American green and British tan and the Kongo class battlecruisers in German black and Japanese burnt orange from A&A 1941. Both the Hood and the Kongo were classic battle cruisers from back in the day (World War I designs).

Yes, good recommendation – those sculpts are a perfect fit for the role, and they’re easy to buy because 1941 is still in print.

We use some battle cruisers in our 1936 game. The stats work rather well, regular cruisers and battle cruisers all get purchased and have a place in our games as well as Battle ships.
Battle(heavy) cruiser D12 cost 14 A7 D7 move 3 bombard 3 1hit
cruiser d12 cost 12 A6 D6 move 3 bombard 2 1hit
Battle ship d12 cost 20 A8 D8 move 2 bombard 4 2hits

I have not tried to incorporate these with d6 dice so I can’t give something definitive that works. I’m sure others have though

HBG has a number of units like the ones you’re looking for at their Shapeways Shop. They are building up in advance of the release of Global War 1914. You can check them out here;
https://www.shapeways.com/shops/historicalboardgaming?section=Global+War+1914&s=0

GHG thank you for this. I wasn’t aware that HBG has their own sculpts at shapeways. Are they eventually going to be part of the HBG website and sold in mass production? You talk to Doug more than I do.

I don’t know for certain but I’m thinking that it may go the other way and their printed units will be only available on Shapeways. They already have several of their 3D printed units uploaded over there now and they aren’t restocking them on the HBG site. If that was the case at least you wouldn’t have to wait for them to be restocked. You would have to ask him to be sure though.

I would go with this.
                     D12
Battleship  C20 A8 D8 M2 SH6 2 hits   133 1.26
B. Cruiser  C14 A7 D7 M3 SH5 1 hit     116   .86
Cruiser      C12 A6 D6 M3 SH4 1 hit     100 1.00  
The B. Cruiser is a bit weaker than the Cruiser for
the cost compared to A & D.

D6
Battleship  C20 A4 D4 M2 SH3 2 hits  133  1.26
B. Cruiser  C14 A4 D4 M3 SH2 1 hit    133    .98
Cruiser      C12 A3 D3 M3 SH1 1 hit    100  1.00

Now here the B. Cruiser is a bit stronger
but still a bit weak for cost. But it still gets a +1
on A D plus the M3.

If you wanted to make pieces closer to cost compared to A D
then you would need to adjust the Cost of pieces.

If you like the idea of fast-moving but weakly-armored capital ships but don’t want them to be alone, you could try giving extra movement to cruisers and destroyers. Then you would have a fast wing (battlecruisers, cruisers , destroyers) and a slow wing (battleships, carriers, submarines, transports).

This. A thousand times this. One of the most interesting features of WW2 naval combat that’s missing from Axis & Allies is the idea that some ships were just much faster than others, so countries had to decide whether to strike now with the forces that could reach a target this month, or strike later (possibly too late) with a larger, slower force.

I think splitting the naval units into a ‘slow wing’ and a ‘fast wing’ would also create room for a more interesting “escort carrier” unit. As I understand it, the main drawback to the escort carriers was not that they were weak (per dollar or per sailor, they still launched plenty of planes), but that they were slow. They were used for escort duty because they could keep up with relatively slow transports, but not with fast cruisers or fast fleet carriers.

I’m working on a complete unit roster with this idea in mind, but to answer the original question about how to stat out a battlecruiser using d6 units, I’d recommend:

Battleship C20 A5 D5 M2 (2-hit, bombard)
Battlecruiser C14 A5 D3 M3 (bombard)
Light Cruiser C10 A3 D3 M3 (bombard)

@Argothair:

As I understand it, the main drawback to the escort carriers was not that they were weak (per dollar or per sailor, they still launched plenty of planes), but that they were slow. They were used for escort duty because they could keep up with relatively slow transports, but not with fast cruisers or fast fleet carriers.

Escort carriers were indeed slower than fleet carriers, but there were other differences too: they carried fewer planes and, even more significantly, theycarried a smaller variety of less capable planes.  Their mission wasn’t to attack enemy battlefleets, but rather to protect ships on their own side from enemy attack, so they carried few (or no) dive bombers or torpedo bombers as far as I know.  Light fleet carriers, by contrast, were in the same league as fully-fledged fleet carriers in terms of speed and of the plane types carried; they just carried fewer of them.

They carried fewer planes per ship, but my understanding is that each ship was much cheaper, so the escort carriers didn’t necessarily carry fewer planes per dollar of naval investment. That’s the point I was trying to make about cost-efficiency. Because “carriers” and “fighters” are a pretty arbitrary unit of measurement (each miniature ship or plane on the A&A map might represent anywhere from 2 to 300 of its real-world equivalents), designating a separate “escort carrier” unit that was just like a fleet carrier only smaller and cheaper wouldn’t be especially meaningful. It’s like if you go to your very casual neighborhood diner and order a slice of pie for $4. How big is a slice of pie? There’s no real answer; it’s however big the diner cuts them. Suppose you only want half a slice of pie. OK, I’ll take half a slice of pie for $2. Hmm, I’m still hungry. I’ll take another half a slice of pie for another $2. Great, now we’re right back at the original $4 slice. Nothing has really changed, and I figure it would be the same way with escort carriers…except escort carriers are slower, which does introduce a meaningful and interesting difference, and I’m excited about that.

As far as escort carriers packing a less-diverse and less-powerful assortment of planes, how much of that is mission-based vs. capability-based? In other words, were escort carriers incapable of launching and re-supplying naval bombers? Or was it just that escort carriers were second-tier ships, and so people tended to put the second-tier planes on them, because that was enough for them to do their job of escorting transport shipping?

@Argothair:

If you like the idea of fast-moving but weakly-armored capital ships but don’t want them to be alone, you could try giving extra movement to cruisers and destroyers. Then you would have a fast wing (battlecruisers, cruisers , destroyers) and a slow wing (battleships, carriers, submarines, transports).

This. A thousand times this. One of the most interesting features of WW2 naval combat that’s missing from Axis & Allies is the idea that some ships were just much faster than others, so countries had to decide whether to strike now with the forces that could reach a target this month, or strike later (possibly too late) with a larger, slower force.

I think splitting the naval units into a ‘slow wing’ and a ‘fast wing’ would also create room for a more interesting “escort carrier” unit. As I understand it, the main drawback to the escort carriers was not that they were weak (per dollar or per sailor, they still launched plenty of planes), but that they were slow. They were used for escort duty because they could keep up with relatively slow transports, but not with fast cruisers or fast fleet carriers.

I’m working on a complete unit roster with this idea in mind, but to answer the original question about how to stat out a battlecruiser using d6 units, I’d recommend:

Battleship C20 A5 D5 M2 (2-hit, bombard)
Battlecruiser C14 A5 D3 M3 (bombard)
Light Cruiser C10 A3 D3 M3 (bombard)

Id still would buy L. Cruisers before B. Cruisers.

Battlecruiser C14 A .61  D .37
Lightcruiser  C10 A .72  D .72

2 Battlecruisers  C28  A 1.22  D .74
3 Lightctuisers  C30  A 2.16  D 2.16

@Argothair:

As far as escort carriers packing a less-diverse and less-powerful assortment of planes, how much of that is mission-based vs. capability-based? In other words, were escort carriers incapable of launching and re-supplying naval bombers? Or was it just that escort carriers were second-tier ships, and so people tended to put the second-tier planes on them, because that was enough for them to do their job of escorting transport shipping?

Off the top of my head (I haven’t looked it up), it wasn’t a mission-based option that could be switched on and off.  Keep in mind that operating, let’s say, a dive-bomber off a particular carrier isn’t just a matter of loading that type of plane aboard; there are also structural, equipment and crew requirements.  High-performance carrier planes in WWII (and today) are machines that require well-trained deck crews who service them, fuel them, load them with ordnance and guide them into position before takeoff and after landing.  Doing this correctly, and doing it quickly and efficiently, and doing it safely in what is a very dangerous working environment full of whirling propellers and volatile liquids and explosive payloads, requires a lot of training and experience, plus leadership from the plane captain assigned to each aircraft; it’s basically the naval equivalent of the closely coordinated pit crews at an Indy 500 race, who can change the tires of a car and refuel it in a matter of seconds.  My guess is that at least some of that training and experience is plane-specific; loading a torpedo on a Devastator torpedo-bomber isn’t the same operation as loading bombs on a Dauntless dive bomber.  By the same token, there are presumably structural requirements in the ship itself (proper storage racks for each type of ordnance carried) and equipment requirements (such as the specific types of trolleys used to carry ordnance to a plane from its storage racks).  The trolleys could be added and subtracted easily enough, but I’m not sure that would be possible for the ship’s internal ordnance-storage facilities.

Thanks, CWO_Marc.

SS, if you want to at least link me to an explanation of your scoring system, I’d be happy to click the link and read about it. I don’t have it memorized and I can’t really comment intelligently just based on your assertion that my battlecruiser would have “A .61”.

@Erocco:

A battlecruiser, in very general terms, would generally be faster than a battleship, but less well protected armour-wise, and would have a less powerful armament (either in terms of the number of its main guns, or their caliber, or both).

I agree with this. This is why I am heaving a tough time deciding on stats. Making the movement 3 means my house rule unit will be faster than all types of ships.

Again, as I said, have a fast wing (of Battlecruisers, Cruisers, Destroyers, and maybe Fleet Carriers) and a slow wing (of Battleships, Submarines, Transports, and either all Carriers or just Escort Carriers). If you’re looking for 1940’s naval realism, this was a thing in that time. The Fast Battleship was a technological breakthrough - just one not on display here.

{snip}

@Erocco:

For stats, this is what I would do:
D6: A4 D4 or D3 M3 C20, no second hit.
D12 A8 D7 or D6 M3 C20, no second hit.
In both cases, your battlecruisers move quickly (as battlecruisers historically could) but can’t take a hit (as battlecruisers historically could not)

Interesting stats. The only thing I am having a hard time is the movement. Historically speaking I don’t think battlecruisers were faster than cruisers or destroyers.

Battlecruisers did not tend to be faster than Cruisers or Destroyers. But they were faster than the Battleships, Submarines, and Transport ships of the day. Below I’ve linked the main Battlecruiser classes “chopped down” by the Washington Naval Treaty and the Battleships that would have accompanied them (US United States, UK United Kingdom, IJN Imperial Japanese Navy, CC Battlecruiser, BB Battleship:
US CChttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexington-class_battlecruiser
US BBhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Dakota-class_battleship_(1920)
UK CChttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G3_battlecruiser
UK BBhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N3-class_battleship
IJN CChttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amagi-class_battlecruiser
IJN BBhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tosa-class_battleship

What you’ll notice when you compare them is that the Battleship were slower and carried more armor and the US and UK Battleships were to carry either more guns or bigger guns. Only the IJN Battleships carried the same number of the same guns as the Battlecruisers, and the IJN Battleships still had more armor and less speed. Cruisers, Destroyers, and Fleet Carriers all slowed down to follow Battleships when arrayed together in a fleet.

@Erocco:

{snip}
I am thinking of the following stats:
D6 A4 D4 M2 C16 one hit-point
D12 A8 D8 M2 C16 one hit-point

Reducing the hit-points to one makes it less defensive powerful than a battleship
Attacking wise lot of the battle-cruisers from my research had 12" guns and some even 15". Off course not as many quantity wise and that’s the reason I made them as powerful as battleships.

Fair enough. I laid out my sources above, all I’ll say is that a cost 1/2 way between BB and CA sounds about right for a ship about 1/2 way between a BB and a CC.

-Midnight_Reaper

To follow up on this, here’s the interpretation I’d put on the concept of fast versus slow groupings of capital ships (battleships and battlecruisers) with other ships.  The concept did exist in both WWI and WWII, but it took different forms.

In WWI (and the decade leading up to it), naval technology such as turbine engines and face-hardened armour, plus ship design philosophy in general, had progressed to the point where the dreadnought-type capital ship (uniform-caliber main battery in more than two twin turrets, good protection, and fairly high speed) had become feasible, but it had not progressed to the point where all three features (firepower, protection and speed) could be optimized at the same time.  That would have to wait for WWII, when the true “fast battleship” type emerged.  (The same thing happened with tanks, but with a one-war difference: in WWII, tanks could be optimized for two of three features, or have medium performance in all three areas, but it was only during the Cold War that technology allowed a tank to have excellent performance in all three areas.)

During WWI, technological limitations (plus the considerable influence of Admiral John Fisher, who was a visionary in both the good and the bad sense of the concept) led to the emergence of two varieties of dreadnought-type capital ships: the battleship and the battlecruiser.  Basically, dreadnought battleships were reasonably fast (but not as fast as cruisers), and had both heavyweight firepower and heavyweight armour that allowed them to slug it out with anything afloat; the rule of thumb was that a balanced battleship design had “proportional” armour capable of dealing with an enemy ship carrying the same caliber of main guns as it itself carried.  Battlecruisers were similar to dreadnought battleships (the British, in fact, tended to create a parallel class of battlecruiser for its respective battleship classes), but they carried fewer main gun turrets and had less armour so that they could achieve higher speed than a battleship; they were roughly as fast as a normal cruiser, considerably better-armed, and somewhat (but not always by much) better protected.  Battlecruisers, according to British doctrine, were operated as part of what could be called “fast heavy scouting divisions,” in advance of the main formation of the more powerful but slower battleships.  For a classic example of this, have a look at the two main British formations at the Battle of Jutland: Jellicoe’s slower battleship force, and Beatty’s faster battlecruiser force.

In WWII, the picture becomes more complicated.  There were relatively few battlecruisers at that time, and they were a strange mixture of British and Japanese WWI hold-overs, weird German designs reflecting (or intended to cheat) treaty limitations, clear-headed French and Italian modern evolutions of the battlecruiser concept, plus the well-made but rather pointless American Alaska class (which the Americans denied were battlecruisers).  To me, these odd ships muddy the picture more than anything else.  In my opinion, the real fast-versus-slow capital ship distinction in WWII wasn’t between battlships and battlecruisers, it was between the modern 1930s- and 1940s-era “fast battleships” on the one hand and the surviving WWI-era battleships (some of hwich had been modernized between the wars) on the other hand.  The classic example of that distinction can be found at Leyte Gulf, where the Americans assigned their old slow battleships (plus some escort carriers) to support the amphibious invasion directly (I think they were officially under McArthur’s command), and assigned their fast battleships and their fleet carriers (under Halsey) to fight the main Japanese fleet if it showed up.  Halsey’s carrier pilots did take a substantial crack at the IJN during the Battle of the Sibuyan Sea (they sank the Musashi, notably), but Halsey later took the bait of a Japanese decoy operation and charged off to the north with his fast battleships and his fleet carriers to engage Japan’s remaining fleet carriers (which actually had few or no planes left aboard, and were simply meant to draw him away from Leyte Gulf).  As a result, the Japanese surface-combat forces (in two groups, operating well away from the decoy force) had a clear shot at Leyte – and the American forces which ended up stopping them were, respectively, the US Navy’s older battleships at the Battle of Surigao Strait and a force of escort carriers and light surface-combat vessels at the Battle off Samar.  In the latter engagement, the hopelessly outclassed (if you go by the raw ship types and numbers) Americans engaged the Japanese battle fleet so aggressively that the Japanese commander, Admiral Kurita, ended up retreating because, in his mind, the tiny American forces couldn’t possibly be attacking him so energetically unless they were expecting massive US Navy reinforcements to arrive at any moment.  In fact, Admiral Sprague, the US commander on the spot, knew perfectly well that Halsey was nowhere near him; he dealt with a hopeless situation by going on the offensive because that was he was a leader in the tradition of WWI’s Ferdinand Foch (who at the Battle of the Marne reputedly signaled to his superiors: “My left flank is driven in; my centre is giving way; the situation is excellent: I attack!”)