[Enioch]

The ship selection in the starter set is abysmally bad.

IJN torpedoes are made to kill big ships – anything from a CA (heavy cruiser) upwards. They are very good at that. They are not as good at killing DDs and CLs. Guess what the starting set gives the USN? That’s right – heavy cruisers, that are made to be murdered by IJN torps.

The USN (and any fleet, really) has very clear answers to IJN torpedoes and those are:

– Dive bombers. The IJN DDs have relatively bad AA and 2-3 DBs will typically cripple or outright kill a DD with Devastating damage on a 3+ to hit.

– Light cruisers. Anything with Fast Tracking, Twin-linked or Light gun turrets will neutralize the DDs’ dodge buff at high speed and murder them at relatively long range.

– Cheap destroyers. Find something that costs around 40 or 50 points and swarm the IJN fleet destroyers with cheap shitty hulls. What are they gonna do? Dump their Long Lances to kill a 40-point hull?

-Smoke. Use smoke to break line of sight (you need it to launch torps).

IJN torpedoes have an insanely low skill floor to use, but even the most basic fleet building and tactical play will neuter them something fierce. It’s just sad that the starting set does not give you the necessary tools.

[Enioch]

Yubari is amazing and probably the best of the IJN’s ultralight cruisers (although the others are also very good and frequently underestimated).

7″ Agile move with 2+ armor and light guns makes her an utter terror as a DD leader / killer. Also, she can be followed by 2-3 Long Lance destroyers for a torpedo run on enemy capitals and suffer the enemy fire while laying smoke for her brood, and you don’t care if she dies because she’s cheap as hell.

 

[Enioch]

1) If I’m trying to hit a Ship e.g. with the Prinz Eugen with Torpedos at extreme Range (10″ only) I have to roll a impossible 8+ (4 + ‘2’ (extreme Range) + ‘2’ (Torpedo Attack))

So I only get a slight chance to hit if I fire at short Range (5″) by rolling a 6+ (4 + ‘2’ (Torpedo Attack))

Correct?

Yes.

2) In the FAQ is stated that Torpedos can do over the horizon attacks which are at distances of > 30″.

How is that possible with these short Ranges of Torpedos?

Greets Franz

It isn’t. To do a Beyond the Horizon attack with a torpedo, you need a torpedo that has >30″ range. The only torpedoes in the game that currently fit the bill are the Japanese Type 93s (32″ range), which are, as you can tell, unavailable to the Kriegsmarine.

[Enioch]

As this reads it is independent of the enemy’s scouting effort – although both sides might claim the same benefit?

Correct

So if I have 3 destroyers off scouting, that’s 3x d6, say I roll a 3, 5, 6 – so I have two scouting points.

Correct

It makes no difference if the enemy has 0 scouts or 10 to my efforts.

Correct

How can scouts mask your own fleet?

They cannot

Do you subtract the enemies scouting score from your own?

No

There seems to be a missing paragraph?

There is no missing paragraph

How does it work?

Exactly as you described it. You cannot prevent the other player from scouting you, if they dedicate the necessary forces.

[Enioch]

If your DP operates as a normal AA gun, most of the AA problems disappear.

You’ve just sprinted your airplanes into the enemy formation to snipe the BB? Say hello to its 5 DD escorts within 9 inches that contribute with an extra 10 DP dice before you can activate your plane attack (and its own Local / dedicated AA).

But now, DP is essentially irrelevant in defending the fleet ; all it can do is punish planes after they have sniped the BB.

Anyway, DP rounds AD up not down.

[Enioch]

that still leaves the question of can you shoot between the smoke template and the bridge of the ship laying it?

Rules as written say “Yes”. Only the smoke token blocks vision, not the ship model.

[Enioch]

Not seen the changes to DP guns

Back in the day, most people assumed that DP guns fired with the rest of the AA, after movement and before gunnery.

This is not the case, as the FAQ specified.

DP guns can only engage air targets in the gunnery phase. This means that an incoming airstrike can activate before you get the chance to fire your DP guns (or after a single ship has fired its DP guns, if you have the initiative) and they only have to receive Local / dedicated AA Battery fire before that.

Essentially, if you time your airstrike properly, you can weave past the escort screen and just focus all your planes on the big targets behind them and the “AA escorts” cannot use their DPs to fire at the planes before they drop their payloads.

Yes, this means that e.g. a Fletcher AA screen is essentially neutered, unless you literally body-block.

[Enioch]

Assuming you have a Fubuki with Long Lances, and that you would normally launch torpedoes at a 6-to-hit range (which you shouldn’t, you should be getting closer for a 5+ or a 4+), with a fan salvo you’re rolling 1 x 6-to-hit for a random target instead of 9 x 6-to-hit against a target of your choice.

Fan salvoes can hurt if you build your fleet around them, but ships with Long Lances are very expensive compared to everything else they bring to the table, and if you’re bringing enough Long Lance ships to get consistent hits in the fan salvo, your opponent has, by default, enough of a budget to bring escort vessels and cut your chances of hitting anything important drastically.

Like, to get a statistical certainty that you’ll get one hit with a fan salvo, you need to bring 6 Long Lance ships. Assuming you go for three Kageros and three Mogamis, (~1150 pts), a UK opponent can bring almost three Tribals for each Kagero. The odds that you’ll be able to land a hit on whatever the big ship those DDs are defending is minuscule.

Bottom line – if you know you’re going vs IJN, flood the table with small, cheap DDs. They essentially hardcounter Long Lances.

Feed the IJN with few, expensive targets and you deserve what’s coming to you. That is literally what the IJN fleet lists are built to fight.

[Enioch]

Given that the Warlord FAQ eviscerated DP guns, body-blocking is currently the only way escorts can effectively defend larger ships. Yes, it’s gamey, but unless you’re willing to homerule more effective long-range AA, there’s gotta be some way for escorts to…well, escort.

Which without body blocking, they would currently be 100% unable to do.

[Enioch]

@Nat he means fan salvo, not normal over the horizon shot.

And yes, it’s bullshit on the receiving end; but it is also a significant risk on the IJN’s end as well, as it removes a significant part of their torpedo armament for relatively limited success chances, especially if your ships don’t have reloads (e.g. Fubukis)

[Enioch]

@leopard

There has been no official response from Warlord on this question, but Matt has answered it unofficially:

https://www.dakkadakka. com/dakkaforum/posts/list/120/786189.page#11002068 (remove the blank space)

Aft of the base. Just pop it behind the ship, nothing complicated should be considered here or, indeed, in any part of the rules – if you are wondering about something in this detail, you are <i>probably </i>overthinking it, if you want to take that as a guideline.

[Enioch]

Based on rules as written, carrier flights cannot be used for scouting.

*If* you are using homerules that allow for carrier-based scouting, you typically “burn” any flights used for scouting and use the remaining flights for the game. In this instance, if you had a carrier with a total of 10 flights and sent out 3 to scout, but only got 7 points, you would be able to begin the battle with 5 of your remaining flights on the board.

I will emphasize again that rules as written FORBID you from using carrier planes to scout. Yes, I do realise that real-life american doctrine prioritized carrier-based scouting above everything else. It does not seem to matter.

[Enioch]

And yes, it would not surprise me if USN players would prefer Warlord points. Like I said, they’re hilariously (or tragically, depending on your point of view, I suppose) broken.

[Enioch]

Taking your questions in ascending order of the “patch” versions. Note that these are CHANGELOG notes (i.e. they document how the SHIPS mod has changed through different versions). Most of them only make sense if you’ve followed development from the beginning and wonder about things like “Why has thing X changed when we went from version 0.8.5  to version 0.9.0 of SHIPS?) :

• 0.9.0 Carrier Rework –  Again it mentions they only provide 80% of points, agin I presume this refers to victory points? I don’t know what it means when it refers to paying a points penalty? I thought it meant to do with a low base cost but then the more flight you carry it gets more expensive!

This is under-the-hood algorithm information, and does not affect you as a user of the lists (it only concerned playtesters): use the values of the ships as listed.
What it means is that the hull of a CV costs less in points than the hull of a surface combat ship with equivalent stats (to reflect the fact that CVs are not meant to fight with their primary hull, their combat value increases primarily based on their aircraft, not their HP or guns). To give you an example, if a carrier brings an extra pair of 6″ guns or a few HP, it’s not that important, since it’ll be hiding in the back and (hopefully) never using them. Whereas an extra pair of 6″ guns or some more HP on e.g. a light cruiser makes all the difference in the world.

Note that CVs also have to pay their hangar costs on top of whatever the hull is actually worth.

• 1.0.0 AA Rework, Carrier Tweaking – I find this note a little confusing, when you talk about the price increase in AA etc, is this refering to Refit costs? So any gun with the Dual Purpose Trait, Local Trait and Physical increase in AA batteries is costing +5 points each, would that be correct?

This is partly the case: to calculate the cost of a ship, a gun contributes with its standard anti surface cost (which varies depending on its stats) and on top of that it gets the added +5 AA cost if applicable. So, increasing local by 1 costs 5 points, but increasing any DP or AA weapon might have additional costs, depending on the stats of the gun.

I have not statted all refits yet (the list give you costs for base ships), but I have made an .xlsx that you can use to calculate ship values based on any stats. I’ll see if I can find it and post it here. For now, you can basically use Warlord costs for the refits, they’re close enough for government work (although still hilariously broken in some instances).

• The last paragraph about carriers, you say it only provides 50% of an equivalent surface ships points, does this refer to victory points? And does this refer to map based or of map? And I presume this overides the next questions about Carrier Rework?

This is essentially a rebalance of the previous (0.9.0) costing of CVs. Instead of 80% of an equivalent surface ship, hull stats only provide 50% of the equivalent surface ship (and to that you add the hangar cost). You pay that when you bring the CV to battle, it doesn’t matter if it’s on the table or in deep deployment. In any case, these are all under the hood calculations, and they’re all factored in the final lists: pay the cost of the CV as listed (+ Hangar Cost or Combat Air Group cost, whichever is the highest).

• 1.0.5 Hotfix for USN CAs – When you say statted with 8 secondaries, I presume you just mean the initially desription of the weapon (8×5 inch) as the AD  does say 6?

I had made a mistake and told the cost algorithm to calculate the value of these ships as if they had 8 secondary attack dice. In actuality, they have 6. I fixed that. This resulted in a -5 point reduction in their price from the 1.0.0 -> 1.0.5 version of SHIPS. This is irrelevant to you, you’re on version 1.3.0, it’s fixed.

• 1.1.0 Release of MTBS ……….. – Can you confirm that the Shimmikaze has jumped right up to 175 pts to reflect the speed increase? 😮

Confirm.

Warlord points do not take into account the capabilities of the vessel, including but not limited to:
1. Agility
2. Speed
3. Torpedo load
4. the ability to use RADAR to acquire targets at night for torpedo strikes.

• Not sure what the 3/3/4 refers to in the notes about the Fubuki, I thought it might mean either the AD or DD, but these are all 3/3/3 in both the book and stat cards.

Same as the USN CAs above. I had originally told the algorithm to calculate points for the Fubuki as if her launchers had 3/3/4 attack dice. This was a mistake, which I identified and corrected in this version (1.1.0). It does not affect you, you’re already on 1.3.0 and the correction is implemented.

• 1.2.0 Second AA Rework – it mentions about the AA costs, I presume this cost is implemented into the base cost of the ship and not a seperate cost for AA?

Correct. The rebalance of AA in 1.2.0 affected the cost of the base value of AA batteries, before the +5 bonus. They became slightly cheaper, to better match other AA options. Once again, this does not really affect you – you are using 1.3.0, this is already implemented in the lists.

[Enioch]

@Eric Kingsley
You will find that SHIPS provides essentially exactly that: a system to pay for your CV flights with a discount compared to Land-based air. And fixes surface ship point imbalances as well.
Docs are posted above.

[Author]

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