Convoy, Rubber Duckie!

So I was toying with the thought of doing some of the Malta convoys. How do you think a game with one side only having land based aircraft would work? How would the side with no ships generate order tokens?

Actually working on that one currently, the battle of Prine of Wales and Repulse vs the Japanese bombers. I currently use a buffed officer for the Japanese to get them to generate order tokens without ships.

I had a thought. What about generating order tokens for each 'x' number of flights, 8 might be a starting point as that is the maximum allowed in one attack? With your off table leader adding in their bonus, too. Is this something that might be considered in games with ships on both sides? I was looking at trying to do the Marianas Turkey Shoot in the next few weeks and the Japanese have half their air assets from land based fields. Also that would mean the US should receive the same for their off table support, as I was only going to physically have one task group on the board? For the Japanese I was going to have the main 6 carriers on the table. Another issue here, have you thought about allowing for multiple leaders per side, ie 1 per task group in the task force? I have run into logistics issues in a couple of games and had to run large squadrons of 6-8 ships which is hard to keep in formation. Or am I misinterpreting the rules in that the number of squadrons a per side is dictated by the leader? So a force with a leader who can command 5 squadrons is limited to a maximum of 5 squadrons or is it that they can only generate the order tokens for his command rating?

I'd say, give it a try and post your thoughts and results on the change here. As said in the 1.5 notes, I'm trying to (re)balance the order tokens constantly. This idea would certainly aid the player with off-board air support. To counter mis-use I'd base the order token generation on the number of flights currently ON the table though. Otherwise I could just keep a bunch of cheap flights off-board in reserve just generating tokens. Maybe try one order token for each 6 air support flights on the table? That leaves room for a few planes that didn't show up.

Yes, that is the same as I was thinking. I will try that when I play the marianas turkey shoot. Thanks.

So I did the Phillipine Sea battle. It does take a little bookkeeping but it wasn't that hard to keep track of the off table assets for both sides and divid the number actually on table by 6 and allocate that many tokens. This seemed to work. For a couple of turns there were way too many order tokens, but on the turn of the massive attacks going in there were only just enough for the Japanese to complete their attacks. The US with many more aircraft did have enough to still be able to move their squadrons.

A question did come up about intercepts and escorts. In the rules it states "If the attacker wins the engagement it is now allowed to engage any other enemy flights within interception range. It is not allowed to engage the attacker another time with an escorting flight during the same turn. If the escort wins the dogfight it is allowed to function as an escort for another attack, after which it must break off for lack of fuel and ammo." So I had 2 interceptors on one japanese bomber. A japanese escort engaged each interceptor. The US won one, and lost one. The japanese player then wanted to engage the other interceptor. I claimed because of the second sentance he could not, he claimed because of sentance 3 he could. We really haven't come across this issue before as it was clear that if an interceptor was engaged by an escort it could not be targeted again by any other winning escorts. The argument in this case was that because I had doubled up it should be allowed. Thoughts, clarifications?

Interesting. I had to go back to my rationale for the escort rules to figure this one out. The thought behind it is that bombers are escorted by fighters. Once interceptors are detected escorting fighters will peel off the bombers to engage the fighters. Once engaged, a dogfight will usually take the combatants away from the bombers. So it is improbable that a fighter that has finished a dogfight will be in the vicinity of another bomber to escort it again and engage the attackers before they could have a shot at the bomber. I realize of course that this is not how all dogfights work in practice, but we have to remember here that we are talking about flights of +/- 6 aircraft engaging each other, not a 1-on-1 dogfight.

Balance-wise, the rule is meant to counter misuse of the two-engagements limit of fighters. If you subsequently put two fighters on a single attacker, he needs to fight two dogfights. Since a fighter can only engage twice, it would be a hard counter to keep any fighters away from your bombers.

So the rule is meant to say: You can fight two combats with an escort, but you cannot engage an attacker that has already been engaged by another escort. That attacking flight won its fight and therefore gets to take a shot at the bombers, they broke through.

I'll have to rephrase this, because you are right to say that you can read it completely different than intended.

"If the attacker wins the engagement it is now allowed to engage any other enemy flights within interception range. It is not allowed to engage the attacker twice with an escorting flight during the same turn. If the escort wins the dogfight it is allowed to engage another attacker that has not been engaged by another escort, after which it must break off for lack of fuel and ammo."

I also incorporated this change in my draft version 1.5, you can download it from the 1.5 topic. Since you've been playing lots of air games, can you take a special look to all the changes to the air rules?

Final question for you Andrew, Philippine sea is on the extreme end of game-size. How do you think the game system held up with such amounts of ships and aircraft?