[House Rules] The Cruiser

I think this is not the way to go for a Cruiser. They really didn’t drop off troops on amp assaults. The L . cruiser and H. cruiser both did different jobs to do in war. So you need to find the happy medium.
In order to make the Cruiser worth anything you need to revamp the whole cost Structure of all Naval pieces.
That Will never happen in this game. So try this.
Battleship A5 D5 M2 SH S 2 hit
Cruisers A4 D4 M3 SH S 1 AA shot at a plane FSR only.

Where is this BM at ?

@SS-GEN said in [BM3] The Cruiser:

Where is this BM at ?

See the stickied topics in the “Other A&A Variants” category:
https://www.axisandallies.org/forums/topic/27451/g40-balance-mod-3-0-rules-and-download/
https://www.axisandallies.org/forums/topic/27121/g40-balance-mod-feedback-thread/

Hey just make it 2 inf instead of 1. W. E. Bye.

@Mursilis Please see the Handling of House Rules thread to understand why your topic had been moved. As BM in general is way more than only adding one or two house rules to the OOB ruleset it was placed under “Other A&A Variants”.

As you mentioned BM four times in your topic including the suggestion of a BM3 change I was under the impression, that your topic was about… well … BM. So I moved it there. It was not obvious to me that you wanted to discuss cruisers under OOB conditions, what would justify to place it under the dedicated Global 1940 Category.

Now that you clarified your intention I am of course fine to move it back to Global 1940 and tag the topic with [House Rules]. Good discussions are always welcome :slightly_smiling_face:

@Mursilis

If I remember correctly, the marine unit in BM is optional, same as the Vichy rule. Better to leave it as an option for those that enjoy it.

Cruisers have been discussed a lot over the years and you are correct, most people don’t buy them in oob. I like giving it an AA capability but not activating it until the start of the 2nd rd so you don’t break the rd 1 battles.

I still don’t buy a lot of them, but I do like to have 1 per fleet or several, if just one big fleet.

Very odd you think that Japan is too powerful. Japan is much easier to kill than Germany, especially easy to cut off its economy from the home islands.

Keep all OOB units the same

Cruiser OOB is now Heavy Cruiser but moves 3 spaces no matter where it is
new Light Cruiser is a 2-3, which is in between 3-3 and 2-2, cost is between too, but does not move 3 unless its in port. Reason is they were slower.

Peeps might buy the Light because of defense, or if they had 9 IPC left

I like where youre going with a middle ground and without destroyer abilities and maybe he bombards at a “2”. More interesting than a escort carrier idea half sized

I don’t think the mainline A&A games need a cruiser at all – as I understand it, the point of a cruiser, historically, was to raid merchant shipping, sink enemy transports, and show the flag at small, distant ports that literally weren’t worth the cost of a battleship. Cruisers were supposed to be big enough to reliably outfight minor boats, fast enough to outrun enemy battleships, and cheap enough to send all over the world.

This role really doesn’t exist in Global 1940 – a single destroyer can reliably sink enemy transports, and if you’re going to send one ship to a distant port, it’ll be a transport (to conquer it) or a submarine (to convoy it). You would never send just a cruiser somewhere in A&A 1940, and tweaking the cruiser stats won’t fix that.

The cruiser works just fine in World at War, because that map is huge enough and dotted with enough small, marginally valuable islands that there really are theaters where you want to send exactly one medium-sized boat to protect your sea lanes. They let the cruiser carry 1 inf, as @Mursilis suggests, and they also let it bombard, and it seems to work just fine. I think it’s 12 IPCs for A3/D3/M2 carry 1 inf, bombard @3.

I think what games like Global and Anniversary and 1942 Second Edition are missing is the patrol boat: a tiny ship that can be used by countries that are small or broke or both to keep their enemies honest. Something like 4 IPCs for A1/D1/M1, carry 1 inf, bombard @1. That way if the Allies abandon the Mediterranean before utterly destroying Rome, Rome can build a patrol boat and start grabbing islands. If the Axis abandon the Indian Ocean before utterly destroying Bombay, India can build a patrol boat and start taking back Ceylon and Java and Borneo.

I have a premonition that CWO_Marc is going to weigh in to tell me I’ve got the wrong name, so feel free to call it an assault boat, or a landing craft, or a PT or AS or DE or whatever you like – the point is that it’s a small, slow, cheap, multi-purpose ship that can help lend a sense of scale and dimension to the naval wars.

No matter which way we go, we are pushing the granularity of a d6 edition here. G40 is about the end of that matrix…other ideas are exceptions, compromises, middle grounds…thus YG Delux…

@taamvan! I didn’t know you worshipped at the church of the d12. :-)

I don’t mind using larger dice if other players want to do so; dice are pretty cheap these days, especially if you buy in bulk. And I agree that there are limits to how many different unit types you can cram into a hit-or-miss system with only 7 basic settings (0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7).

In this case, though, I don’t think we’ve reached those limits quite yet – I think the main limit on the usefulness of cruisers is the number and distribution of the territories on the map. It is rarely worthwhile to send (let alone build) a transport to capture an island worth 1 IPC – to make that kind of thing worthwhile, you have to capture a string of islands in relatively rapid succession, or, even better, you have to move an infantry to a new island chain where it can keep capturing a new 1 IPC-island every turn. World at War has those island chains. Global 1940 doesn’t. If you’re not sending out transports to capture tiny island groups, then you don’t need medium-weight ships to protect those tiny island groups. Either the territory is important (Borneo, Philippines, Norway, etc.) in which case you can send a whole fleet of capital ships, or the territory is unimportant (Crete, Marshall Islands, Iceland, etc.), in which case you usually wouldn’t bother sending anything at all. The problem isn’t lack of room in the numbers on the dice; the problem is a lack of appropriate targets on the map for any type of cruiser to either attack or defend.

@Argothair said in [House Rules] The Cruiser:

I have a premonition that CWO_Marc is going to weigh in to tell me I’ve got the wrong name, so feel free to call it an assault boat, or a landing craft, or a PT or AS or DE or whatever you like – the point is that it’s a small, slow, cheap, multi-purpose ship that can help lend a sense of scale and dimension to the naval wars.

It’s not so much the name that I’m wondering about, but the concept. You refer to a “small, slow, cheap, multi-purpose ship” that can “be used by countries that are small or broke or both to keep their enemies honest,” which has the ability to conduct bombardment and to grab islands. I’m not aware of any such thing existing in WWII, nor even really today. The problem isn’t with the (perfectly valid) concept of a multi-mission ship in and of itself; WWII destroyers, in my opinion, were the quintessential “maids of all work” of the war, and today’s modern frigates occupy a similar niche. The problem is the notion that a highly effective multi-mission ship could be small and cheap. Multi-mission implies multi-capability, and those capabilities have to come from somewhere, which means that they necessarily translate into physical components of a ship: weapons, engines and so forth. Adding components means adding weight and size, which means more contruction time and costs (basically, parts and labour).

A small, cheap WWII-era ship could not have capabilities which were both diverse in nature and all high in effectiveness. The best you could have is a small, cheap WWII ship which was very good at one specialized thing and had a few useful minor capabilities in other areas, but which had severe limitations outside of its specialized context. One example would be flat-bottomed landing craft, which were sometimes fitted with rocket launchers; this made them very useful for amphibious landings, but pretty useless for other applications, given their low speed, minimal range and terrible seakeeping abilities. Another example would be the fast attack craft, of which the American PT boat is a classic example: very fast, packing a considerable punch in terms of torpedoes, and carrying machine guns as auxiliary weapons. Conceptually, you can think of them as the very poor cousins of destroyers (the latter originally having been conceived in the role of “torpedo-boat destroyers”), with most of the destroyers’s capabilities jettisoned. They did carry torpedoes and sometimes depth charges, but they carried no anti-surface or anti-air guns other than .50 cal machine guns (in contrast with destroyers, which typically had 5-inch guns), their range was limited (even when fitted with lots of extra gas canisters, as was done for the MacArthur evacuation), and they were only suitable for use in coastal waters. They could not “bombard” (firing a machine gun at a shore target doesn’t count) and they couldn’t conduct amphibious landings in the same sense that landing craft could (a Higgins boat could carry 36 fully-equiped troops, in addition to its own crew, whereas PT boats typically carried a crew of about 15 people, with little room to spare).

So CWO your saying Destroyers cannot do a shoreshot and carry Inf for amphibious assaults
Correct ?

@SS-GEN said in [House Rules] The Cruiser:

So CWO your saying Destroyers cannot do a shoreshot and carry Inf for amphibious assaults
Correct ?

I’m saying PT boats can’t conduct shore bombardment (because they carry machine guns rather than artillery) and can’t land troops in meaningful enough numbers to be considered amphibious assault troop carriers. WWII destroyers, which carried 5-inch artillery, most certainly could – and did – conduct shore bombardment in support of amphibious landings; as an example, look up the USS Corry (DD-463), which was sunk off the Normandy beaches on D-Day. And some WWII destroyers did carry small numbers of troops and put them ashore, though as far as I know this was an anomalous situation limited to the Tokyo Express at Guadalcanal (an operation, which, incidentally, has been criticized as counterproductive because it cost Japan some valuable destroyers which could have been used for more useful purposes…such as convoy escorting, a task to which Japan paid far too little attention until it realized that US subs were demolishing its vital merchant fleet).

And just to add a clarification: destroyers were versatile, but they were not “small and cheap” in the same sense that a tiny plywood PT boat was cheap. Destroyers were high-powered (both in terms of speed and armaments), fully-fledged, ocean-going surface-combat vessels. They may have been smaller and cheaper and faster to build than a cruiser (to say nothing of a battleship), but they were still substantial pieces of naval construction…actual “ships”, as opposed to “craft” and “boats”, which is what “small and cheap” refers to in absolute terms rather than just relative terms.

Ok. Thank you very much. Then I have those 2 correct in my game

@SS-GEN said in [House Rules] The Cruiser:

Ok. Thank you very much. Then I have those 2 correct in my game

My pleasure.