1.5.10 Beta: Scouting takes too long?

We've played two 250pt carrier clash scenarios using rules 1.5.10 and noticed that both times the first spotting of the enemy happened after the middle of the game.

After doing a quick calculation it seems that it was actually not extreme. We had 7-7 hidden tokens, which meant that actually 12 successful discoveries had to be made to fully scout the battlefield (because of empty tokens). By "discovery" I mean one roll of 4+. According to 1.5.10 rules, fuel is restricted and scouting planes are not allowed to do any activation in the same turn. This means that on average a non-loiter pair of flights needs 4 turns to make 1 successful roll of 4+ (1st turn: take off and move to token, 2nd turn: scout, 3rd turn return home, 4th turn: land). Even if I max out the number of the loiter scouts in my fleet (4 loiters in Coral Sea Carrier Clash) and start them scouting immediately, and also launch as many non-loiter scouts as I am allowed (1 flight per carrier per turn), it will take approximately 3-5 turns to find the enemy.

We like the new scouting system because it has been fully integrated into normal game play, but taking away 3-5 turns in an 8 turn game feels too long.

What did your tests show? Do you have the same observation?

Interesting, I do not have the same observation and I think I know where we play differently
A flight starts with 4 fuel tokens
turn 1: Take off and move to token (3 tokens left at end of turn)
turn 2: Scout (2 tokens left at end of turn)
turn 3: Scout (1 token left at end of turn))
turn 4: Return to ship (0 tokens left at end of turn)
Turn 5: Land (landing is in the preparations phase, while crashing happens when no fuel is left at the 'start' of the end phase)

As you can see I get one extra turn of scouting out of each scout. Now if you have loiter, you get 2 extra turns.

I think that might cause the difference in length of the scouting part of the game.

On rereading your post, I do recognize that it might take 3 turns to locate an enemy, but I usually spot something around turn 2/3. Can you let me know if the extra scouting turn as described above improves your gameplay? Otherwise we might need to make some small changes to balance it out.

Ahh, I missed the "check fuel at START of the end phase" in the rules. We always checked for fuel at the end of the end phase . Your rule makes the situation much better, because this way a pair of non-loiter flights will most likely reveal one hidden token with one scouting run (5 turns). Also makes fuel token information more logical: it is enough to head home when 1 fuel is left (I made red colored fuel token for the last fuel for warning). I actually wanted to suggest such a change, because it bugged me that I had to head home with 2 fuel - should have read every word of the rule instead .

I think this way it is balanced: scouting will not last too long, but for getting the first strike players still have to invest into scouting. Makes sense.

Thanks for the clarification!

I scanned through the manual and the QRS - I was wondering if it makes sense to emphasize the fuel check more. Maybe other players also missed what we did.

One more thing: it says regular order and disruption tokens are to be discarded in the end phase. This prevents using these tokens during scouting phase (e.g. in dogfights). I know we could use officer tokens in the scouting phase, but don't you think it would be better to discard the tokens before we (re-)generate them in the prep phase? It would nicely align with scouting marker handling (remove+assign) and it would allow the players to keep tokens for the scouting phase.

Interesting! I'll give that a thought. It only benefits the one instance that you have a scouting phase dogfight though.....

I decided not to change the timing of the removal of tokens. After a quick experiment I found out this opens a giant can of worms with timed orders that can be played at any time during the turn. This can be exploited because in the initiative phase you can first spend your remaining tokens and then get new ones in the preparations phase.

I added two visual examples to the rulebook to draw more attention to the fuel aspect, and at the same time clarify on how fuel consumption is handled.