The game this week was at Eric’s with Chuck planning and refereeing the game. We played Naval Thunder by SD Games. In our case Chuck put together a WWII scenario that pit the French vs the Italians. What if both happened to be out in the Med for their own reasons and happened to bump into each other?
Being the last one to arrive I was told I was French with Aaron. We rolled off to see who would get what. The “prize” being the Richelieu with gobs of hull boxes but a green crew. I ended up with the high die and taking her and two destroyers. Aaron ended up with two destroyers and a WWI era Battleship that from the pictures I can’t make out the name and I didn’t write it down. (alas)!
Our Italian friends had two battlewagons of their own, two light cruisers and then two destroyers. T’was hard not to feel outgunned!
Aaron’s squadron and one of the Italian squadron’s had a variable entry so it was just Luke and I facing off for the first couple of turns. We opened up at very long range immediately with the battlewagons. As we both were adding to our potential to hit due to poor crews I didn’t feel too bad. We both had amazingly bad rolling the first few turns and didn’t land a single shell.
A good shot of Eric’s new man-cave by the way. Everyone should have one. If not two.
At this point turned over to starboard with the intent of picking a decent range band and then sent in the destroyers to make a torpedo run and to start to lay smoke. I theorized if I could obscure things just right I could have a 1 on 1 fight with the battle wagon or the cruiser and hopefully take one on at a time. Ideally I’d get a few shells into the light cruiser, disable it and then concentrate on the Litorio the battlewagon I was facing.
Aaron entered and so did Eric on exactly the same turn. This complicated maters as I really needed and wanted to adjust course so that Aaron and I could form a line. Thus if any Italian destroyers came our way we could concentrate fire.
The Litorio’s shooting continued to be poor but it was better than mine as they started to land a single shell a turn or so.
The plan started to come together but still my shells continued to not find their mark.
Aaron’s destroyers flew past by bow and about to make another smokescreen for the Richelieu to partially mask out the Italians.
Around here I took a nasty crit and lost one of my main forward turrets. Those that know the Richelieu will remember she has two main forward turrets with 4 guns each. The loss of the turret dropped my main firepower by half.
You can see my destroyers streaming ahead and just about to lay their torpedoes. It was about at this point where I lost one of my destroyers to heavy fire from the Italians.
Stay on target… stay on target …. my lone destroyer dropped all her fish in on the water aimed at the Litorio and managed 2 hits, pretty good shooting. With the damage she started taking on water. With Naval Thunder it’s the rolls to contain flooding that essentially decide the fate of a ship. Battlewagons have time and hull boxes to deal, so they can miss some rolls and still make it back. Everything else, not so much….
Last turn before the French squadrons decided it was time to break away and make for home. The Litorio was still taking on water but the damage to Richelieu was starting to seriously add up. We lost a destroyer but sunk a light cruiser. The Litorio still have plenty of damage it could take but over all didn’t seem like it’d have any problems making it to port. Both Eric’s and Aaron’s battlewagons were undamaged.
A fun time had by all.
Being privy to additional info the other French battlewagon was the Provence, a WWI vintage unit. The other Italian was also vintage, but had undergone a significant modernization. Those big French destroyers are almost light cruisers on their own. Sounds like it was fun. I like NT in that you get a realistic feeling result in a reasonable amount of time. The most recent game I ran had eight battleships and six players who had never played the system before. But we got done in less than four hours.