Nimitz Kriegsmarine v Royal Navy

Another one-off game of Nimitz with my Kriegsmarine taking on Andy's Royal Navy, this time with some limitations on what we could choose after our last game (basically no just picking Battleships for me!).

The Gneisenau, Blucher and an escorting destroyer:

The Tirpitz, Graf Spee and another destroyer make up the rest of the German force:

The RN have two main groups, one of a number of Cruisers and Destroyers and the other of two old slow battleships:

Tirpitz and Graf Spee move quickly to engage the British Cruisers before their supporting Battleships arrive:

Guns blaze away at close quarters:

Gneisenau and Blucher exchange long range fire with the British Battleships:

German gunnery is abysmal while the RN manage to cripple the Graf Spee which turns away from the action:

The Gneisenau joins the fight but German gunnery does not improve and little damage is caused to the British:

The Graf Spee is sunk:

Meanwhile the Blucher has also taken a pounding and is crippled:

The Blucher is finished off:

With the Gniesenau badly damaged and the RN having only lost a single Cruiser the Germans conceded the action and would attempt to escape together with the largely undamaged Tirpitz.

This was pretty much a complete reversal of the last game we played where, if I remember rightly, the big German ships sank the RN Battleships quickly and then were largely immune to the remaining RN Cruisers and Destroyers!

The much more vulnerable Graf Spee and Blucher didn't last long and the fire from the Germans was largely ineffective. 

Andy also played a smart tactical game, his old and slow (but well armed and armoured) Battleships led to me attempting to close to short range with his Cruiser group where their more numerous and lighter guns were more effective before Andy could bring his big ships into action. 

On reflection I should probably have stuck to the plan from last time which was to deal with the big ships first then, once they were out of action, take on the rest of the enemy fleet.

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Nimitz Kreigsmarine v Royal Navy

Another Nimitz game against Andy with equal points of Germans and British battling it out over an open sea!

I chose the Tirpitz, Scharnhorst, Gneisenau and six destroyers for a small but very powerful force which could quickly overwhelm any larger RN ships then mop up the rest!

The fleets approach. As expected the RN fleet is considerably larger but only has two battleships:

Action Stations! The Warspite and Nelson engage the Germans:

The Warspite is quickly sunk:

The German destroyers fare less well against the more numerous British:

The Nelson follows the Warspite to the bottom of the sea:

The British now have no answer to the German's big ships, with minimal damage inflicted on them and most of the British having fired their torpedoes the British retire what is left of their fleet:

We actually played two more Nimitz games last year that I didn't write up, the first being the Norway campaign which ended in a decisive British victory without having an actual surface engagement played out and the second a points based game with the RN against Italians which the British lost comprehensively! 

An interesting set of rules and a fun game but I suspect it is quite hard to achieve reasonably balanced forces especially if you use some of the tougher ships. 

Cruel Sea's Repaints

Being dissatisfied with the paint job I'd done on some of the earlier Cruel Sea's boats I thought I'd try repainting some of them and putting a bit more effort in than the 'slap some paint on and give them a wash of black' I'd used.

Two Fairmile D MGB 660's:

The previous paint job:

A Fairmile B RML 529 Rescue Boat:

Another USN Sub Chaser:

The old paint job:

Finally two R-23 R-boat's for the Kriegsmarine:

The old versions:

All I have left to do now is another USN Sub Chaser (which I have plans for), an armed trawler and the three large merchant ships plus the unpainted Flower Class Corvette. I won't be repainting the Vospers and E-Boats as I think they look fine as they are.