Coral Sea 1942 Carrier Clash (NW beta v1.5.05 mod rules)

An after action report for Coral Sea 1942 Carrier Clash.

Disclaimer: this is a test game, using rules that are under development, not released yet. The AAR uses rules Naval War beta v1.5.05 with custom modifications.

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That's an interesting meta you have going on there. With that many subs and no AA escorts for the carriers. Interesting game! I am trying to make sense of your datacards though... are they Naval War compatible?

The cards are 100% NW compatible - just made appearance changes: more visible fonts for weapons, translation into Hungarian, used a few icons instead of text and made it more printer friendly. Laminated them for re-usability.

It's not only that submarines are fun to play, they started making sense when we noticed that IJN ships do not really add to the AA protection in this scenario. They are lousy AA defenders. IJN player started picking subs (which are quite deadly), so US player also had to pick destroyers to counter them. Since US subs are not that strong, maybe USN should have picked something like HMAS Australia for AA protection instead of subs. Maybe in the next game

Funnily, this was our first game where subs did not make any direct impact on the battle outcome. In previous 1.4 version games usually Japanese subs wreaked havoc among US carriers.

It's interesting how such things can develop. The addition of subs in those lists was just an afterthought because some were present in the theatre. The 1-3 is completely arbitrary and not really based on anything. I just never went back to correct it as I gained more insight in fleet compositions over the years and versions. The only nation that used subs in such numbers close to each-other were the German Wolfpacks.

In a future update I'd probably reduce the number of subs to 1 for lists that early in the war. At a later point more US subs started working together, usually duos if I remember correctly. I wonder what that would do to your meta. It is true that the Japanese destroyers really suck at AA cover... Later lists have access to the Akitsuki class though, they come a long way towards decent AA protection.

The number of subs could be used to offset the US AA superiority as a balance measure. So maybe I'll keep the option for 2 subs in the Japanese lists eventhough it is a bit of a stretch historically.

I agree, that makes sense.