Question on Naval Bombardments

[Mark Dutton]

Fleet units seem overly powerful. I lost a German Tank Group (strength of 6) to a single air attack followed by a single bombardment from a fleet unit. Given that maximum battleship gun ranges are about 20 miles and that hexes are bigger than that, how can a naval unit inflict such damage on a highly mobile unit?

Naval units also sit on the coast for weeks at a time muching on a land unit, slowly wearing it down. This is highly unrealistic given the way that all admiralities feared air attack on capital units. The only surface bombardments that I'm aware of in WWII were during amphibious assaults, once the troops moved inland, the battleships departed.

[Mr. Clark]

Originally posted by Mark Dutton:

Naval units also sit on the coast for weeks at a time muching on a land unit, slowly wearing it down. This is highly unrealistic given the way that all admiralities feared air attack on capital units. The only surface bombardments that I'm aware of in WWII were during amphibious assaults, once the troops moved inland, the battleships departed.

The answer to this would be to attack the naval unit with an Air unit. I've found that attacking ships tend to move away once they are engaged by an air fleet, or even attacked from the shore.

[gredeker]

Originally posted by Mark Dutton:

Fleet units seem overly powerful. I lost a German Tank Group (strength of 6) to a single air attack followed by a single bombardment from a fleet unit. Given that maximum battleship gun ranges are about 20 miles and that hexes are bigger than that, how can a naval unit inflict such damage on a highly mobile unit?

OTOH, in my first game, two Italian armies reduced the French battleship in Toulon from 10 down to 1 in one turn, by attacking it while it was in port.

And if you want to know what battleship fire can do to armored forces, read "Panzer Commander" by Hans von Luck. IIRC, while 21st Panzer was attacking Caen, battleship fire knocked out at least a company of Tigers, flipping some of the tanks upside down. While some were restored to working order within the next day or two, effective counterattack was deemed impossible while within range of the big naval guns.

[Ancient One]

Land units can do more damage attacking fleets than vice versa.

[Mark Dutton]

I've tried attacking fleets with land units (a weird concept when you think about it, as if a fleet would stand still for artilery batteries to emplace and then fire long enough to inflict damage on heavily armored battleships) and never had any success. One reply alluded to what happened at Caen. But that was against units defending against an amphibious invasion and the targets were within 20 miles of the coast. Given the scale of the hexes in this game it doesn't make sense to assume that the unit in a hex is crammed into a 20 mile strip along the coast.

I understand that there is a certain level of abstraction to this game but when the abstraction yields widely ahistorical results, it begins to look like computerized Axis & Allies.

[Jorgen_Cab]

I have no problem with it, a Battleship fleet will do around 0-2 damage on a army or tank group, which cost me maybe 0-50 to repair, I then attack him with an air fleet and do 2-5 damage and sustain 0-2 damage, that will cost him allot more than it cost me. He will have to go back to port and retool and repair the damage.

So all in all, using your Battleship fleets to attack ground targets is not such a great idea, just as it was in real life.

Though, you shouldn't be able to destroy a land unit with either naval or air units in my opinion anyway.

[pzgndr]

Both air and naval bombardments should have some negative attack modifier if no friendly ground units are adjacent to the target hex. Without ground units to call for fire, "blind" bombardments should not be very effective.