Cruisers vs fighters [House Rules]

I have been using AAA for the house rules Cruisers for my Pacific 2000 edition for quite some time.  The Cruisers roll first, like normal AA guns. Each Cruiser  gets one die per attacking aircraft…a max a 3 die per ship. Rolls of one are a hit and aircraft  is removed immediately, with no chance to engage in battle.    NOTE:  there were no Cruisers in this version…we added those, and Escort carriers that can carry one aircraft…adds a little spice into the game.

Maybe they just jammed in the cruiser because it wasnt in other games.

If you change the cost just for Cruiser it may could work. But best bet is to change the whole roster of pieces were C A D will be adjusted for all pieces if need be.
With d6 system you will always have a piece or 2 to weak and to strong.

Maybe try this.

Cruisers
A4
D4
M2
C12
AAA shot at only 1 plane per Cruiser @1. FR only.

Battleships
A5
D5
M2
C20 if this is correct in game.

You’re not wrong, Simon – it seems clear that the unit costs in the official board games were chosen by intuition, and that they don’t match up with any kind of consistent theory or system. If you look at earlier versions of the game, ships were even more expensive than they are now, so the prices seem to be moving in the right direction, even if they’re still not quite right yet.

It’s clear that cruisers are overpriced; people very rarely want to buy them. What’s less clear is how to fix the problem or what kind of theme or niche cruisers are supposed to fill. In real life, cruisers were simply one of many economically efficient ways of getting guns into the water – it’s not obvious that a navy primarily composed of destroyers and battleships would fare noticeably less well than a navy that had a mix of destroyers, cruisers, and battleships. People have suggested that cruisers have an anti-aircraft bonus, or that cruisers be better at shore bombardment, or that cruisers be able to move through 3 sea zones, but none of these are obviously historically accurate: cruisers were an all-around average ship that had average performance in all of these areas. They were fast enough, powerful enough, and cheap enough to be worth building, but they didn’t seem to have any unique strengths. Cruisers carried larger-caliber guns than destroyers, but the damage inflicted by the gun was often a matter of range, accuracy, how many shots you can get off before being sunk, and so on – it’s not as if a battleship could sit quietly next to a destroyer firing all its guns at point-blank range and invincibly absorb the damage. Any type of ship could and did sink any other type of ship.

Personally, I favor something like:

Submarines – 2 offense, 1 defense, 5 cost
Destroyers – 1 offense, 3 defense, 6 cost
Transports – 0 offense, 1 defense, 7 cost
Cruisers – 3 offense, 3 defense, 8 cost, bombards
Battleships – 4 offense, 4 defense, 14 cost, bombards, 2 hits

The idea here is to showcase cruisers as the cheapest surface ship that’s useful on both offense and defense. It sets up what I hope is an interesting rock-paper-scissors dynamic. You need transports to get your troops to their targets. If all I have is transports, you can build subs that can cost-efficiently kill my transports…but if all you have is subs, I can build destroyers that can cost-efficiently protect the transports…but the destroyers aren’t quite good enough to proactively hunt subs on their own, so I might also want a cruiser to help give the destroyers some offensive punch – but if the warring fleets get large enough, then a fleet that’s anchored by a battleship will have more staying power and outfight your cruisers – but a fleet made up of nothing but battleships will be too expensive for its role.

If we’re just sticking with out-of-the-box rules, I’d say the only point of having a cruiser rather than a fighter are that (a) the cruiser can hang around in a sea zone to help guard transports even when you don’t have a carrier handy, and (b) the cruiser can lend offensive punch against a land zone even when the land zone is protected by AAA guns. I don’t necessarily want to invade Northwestern Europe with fighters every turn because it often has an AAA gun – sending in 2 infantry and 2 fighters against your 1 infantry and 1 AAA gun is not particularly cost-effective for me. I’ve got a slightly-better-than-1/3 chance of losing an infantry and a 1/3 chance of losing a fighter, so expected net losses of about 5 IPCs just to kill your 8 IPCs’ worth of units and take your 2 IPC territory.

On the other hand, if I send in 2 infantry with 2 cruisers bombarding, that gives me about a 50% chance of losing an infantry and 0 chance of losing the cruisers, for expected net losses of 1.5 IPCs to kill your 8 IPCs’ worth of units and take your 2 IPC territory: a much better profit margin.

If you see that I have zero cruisers and zero battleships then this kind of defensive strategy can start to look attractive to you. Maybe you start putting 2 infantry + 1 AAA gun to guard Northwestern Europe instead of just 1 inf + 1 AAA gun, and now I need to bring either more planes to take it reliably (more expensive losses for me) or I need to unload more infantry there, which means I need more transports (more up-front investment costs for me).

So cruisers aren’t literally useless in 1942 Second Edition – they’re just severely overpriced and lacking a theme.

@Argothair:

You’re not wrong, Simon – it seems clear that the unit costs in the official board games were chosen by intuition, and that they don’t match up with any kind of consistent theory or system. If you look at earlier versions of the game, ships were even more expensive than they are now, so the prices seem to be moving in the right direction, even if they’re still not quite right yet.

It’s clear that cruisers are overpriced; people very rarely want to buy them. What’s less clear is how to fix the problem or what kind of theme or niche cruisers are supposed to fill. In real life, cruisers were simply one of many economically efficient ways of getting guns into the water – it’s not obvious that a navy primarily composed of destroyers and battleships would fare noticeably less well than a navy that had a mix of destroyers, cruisers, and battleships. People have suggested that cruisers have an anti-aircraft bonus, or that cruisers be better at shore bombardment, or that cruisers be able to move through 3 sea zones, but none of these are obviously historically accurate: cruisers were an all-around average ship that had average performance in all of these areas. They were fast enough, powerful enough, and cheap enough to be worth building, but they didn’t seem to have any unique strengths. Cruisers carried larger-caliber guns than destroyers, but the damage inflicted by the gun was often a matter of range, accuracy, how many shots you can get off before being sunk, and so on – it’s not as if a battleship could sit quietly next to a destroyer firing all its guns at point-blank range and invincibly absorb the damage. Any type of ship could and did sink any other type of ship.

Personally, I favor something like:

Submarines – 2 offense, 1 defense, 5 cost
Destroyers – 1 offense, 3 defense, 6 cost
Transports – 0 offense, 1 defense, 7 cost
Cruisers – 3 offense, 3 defense, 8 cost, bombards
Battleships – 4 offense, 4 defense, 14 cost, bombards, 2 hits

Your suggestion still makes the Sub and Destroyer stronger than the Cruiser and Battleship compared with cost and punch. I think your aiming at having a fleet escorted by subs and destroyers to protect your capital ships ?

@SS:

@Argothair:

It’s clear that cruisers are overpriced; people very rarely want to buy them. What’s less clear is how to fix the problem or what kind of theme or niche cruisers are supposed to fill.

Your suggestion still makes the Sub and Destroyer stronger than the Cruiser and Battleship compared with cost and punch. I think your aiming at having a fleet escorted by subs and destroyers to protect your capital ships ?

In case this is a useful element to add to this discussion, US Navy doctrine in the Pacific ultimately settled on the concept of the carrier-based task force, and those task forces were generally set up to provide multiple layers of protection to the carriers at their centre.  The protection emphasized anti-aircraft capability (because by the end of WWII naval aviation had overtaken gunnery as the primary offensive weapon of major fleets), but it also was designed to protect against enemy surface-combat ships (whose approach is easy to detect, and thus which are relatively straightforward to deal with) and against submarines (which pose a more difficult defense problem because they’re harder to detect when they’re submerged).  Perhaps the A&A cruiser problem could be solved by applying this model in some way, possibly as some sort of combined-arms bonus, so that the cruiser by itself would still be a debatable purchse but a cruiser as part of a combined-arms defensive setup would be of definite value.

The multi-layered defense model used by the US Navy basically had two components: the task force itself, disposed in a concentric-ring arrangement, and distant scouting elements which were arranged more loosely and which weren’t necessarily part of the task force itself (they might include, for instance, subs which were on patrol missions for other purposes).  The job of these distant elements was to alert the fleet about any enemy units they happened to come across, whether by accident or by design.  That part probably isn’t applicable to A&A, where all the players can see all the units on the board.

An enemy force (for simplicity, I’ll simply deal with an enemy force of aircraft) approaching the task force itself would run into its layered defensive structure, which was designed to subject the attackers to increasingly dense firepower and wear them down by attrition.  The outermost ring would consist of destroyers (both conventional ones and specialized anti-aircraft destroyers).  The next ring would consist of cruisers, which carried more (and heavier) guns that destroyers.  The next ring would consist of battleships, which carried even more (and heavier) guns that cruisers.  Mixed in with all this was the task force’s combat air patrol (CAP), i.e. fighter planes launched from the carriers, whose job was to shoot down incoming enemy planes (ideally as far away from the task force’s centre as possible).  At the centre of the task force were the carriers themselves, which had a certain amount of anti-aircraft firepower of their own for last-ditch defense against incoming planes, though not as much firepower as the battleships and cruisers.

Obviously this ring structure, which is a tactical formation that involved many dozens of ships, isn’t suited for literal replication on an A&A board, but it could be implied by placing one or more ships of each type into a group and by applying to the group some kind of combined-arms bonus (perhaps specifically an anti-aircraft combined-arms bonus) whose value would depend on which types of ships are present in the group.  A complete group would have the best bonus – so in that context, the value of purchasing a cruiser would be that it allows a player to obtain a full-bonus complete group.  To give a concrete example: a full-bonus complete group might consist of at least one destroyer, one cruiser, one battleship and one carrier (and maybe one submarine too), and the absence of one particular unit type (let’s say, the cruiser) could not be compensated for by throwing in multiple units of a different type (say, several destroyers).

Right Marc. My response was based on A&A board games. I did see a rule here on site to the affect of if you have a Cruiser with a Battleship they both get a AAA shot at a plane or the Cruiser does only. Many scenerios you could go with.

Like you said if you have 4 ships no sub or 5 ships counting sub in a group then they get a +1 on A or D or just the Cruiser A4 D4 and Battleship A5 D5. If you dont have a dogfight round in the beginning of a battle I would put that in too. Bunch of tweaks to test but…

Also if enemy planes fly over a Carrier with planes in non combat that is an act of air invasion and the carrier based planes should get a round of dog fighting.

@SS-GEN
I agree cruisers are over priced, but it seems some of the options laid out are nuclear and change a LOT. I agree that one change can create a domino effect, but not if you make a small change. Here are a few suggestions.

What about giving Cruisers ONE of the following:

1. Just a little bit cheaper. 11 or maybe 10 IPC. 10 probably gets them too close to destroyers, but given subs are so cheap I don’t think it makes Destroyers irrelevant.
2. Make Cruisers (and Battleships) bombard ability like a sub’s sneak attack. Defending land units don’t get to return fire. This is a nice perk, but IMO not over powered. Maybe it does not apply to air casualties.
3. Cruisers (and agains you probably have to do the same for Battleships) bombard ability go for 2 rounds instead of just the first.

I like buffing the bombard ability of Cruisers as it is what makes them different - cheaper way that a Battleship to get a 3/3 in the water and hit the coast for invasions. Just some thoughts as I have not tried any of these.

@DespotDoug said in Cruisers vs fighters:

@SS-GEN
I agree cruisers are over priced, but it seems some of the options laid out are nuclear and change a LOT. I agree that one change can create a domino effect, but not if you make a small change. Here are a few suggestions.

What about giving Cruisers ONE of the following:

1. Just a little bit cheaper. 11 or maybe 10 IPC. 10 probably gets them too close to destroyers, but given subs are so cheap I don’t think it makes Destroyers irrelevant.
   In my game I have lowered the cost of a Cruiser and raised the cost of the fig. D12 system
   Cruiser : A7 D7 M3 C9 SHB 3 with a return shot.
   Fighter : A6 D7 M5 C11 DF3
   Also Battleship SHB@4 with a return shot.
   Destroyer SHB@2 with a return shot.

2. Make Cruisers (and Battleships) bombard ability like a sub’s sneak attack. Defending land units don’t get to return fire. This is a nice perk, but IMO not over powered. Maybe it does not apply to air casualties.
   Stated in above post.

3. Cruisers (and agains you probably have to do the same for Battleships) bombard ability go for 2 rounds instead of just the first.

No need to.

I like buffing the bombard ability of Cruisers as it is what makes them different - cheaper way that a Battleship to get a 3/3 in the water and hit the coast for invasions. Just some thoughts as I have not tried any of these.

When you start to lower costs to pieces you have to adjust your whole roster of pieces is best. This is what I have.
Battleship A9 D9 M2 C15 SHB@4 1 damage A6 D6 M2 no SHB.
Cruiser A7 D7 M3 C9 SHB@3 with a RTS
Destroyer A3 D3 M2 C6 SHB@2 with a RTS
Subs A5 D2 M2 C7 FS can dive with destroyers present.
Carrier A2 D4 M2 C14 A & D at planes only.

What would you say to cruisers attacking and defending on a 4 without changing anything else?

@Faramir said in Cruisers vs fighters [House Rules]:

What would you say to cruisers attacking and defending on a 4 without changing anything else?

Is this question for me ? Then make battleship A5 D5