So, I've painted the Royal Navy fleet and the German fleet for Victory at Sea, and even bought the starter set and rulebook. It's high time we tried playing it!
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Since we just want to get a feel for the rules, we went for a small 200-point skirmish. On the German side, my fictional Admiral Hipper-class cruiser, the Admiral Bellingshausen; for the British, HMS Belfast and the two Tribal-class destroyers, HMS Cossack and Bedouin. The starter set comes with a booklet that has all the rules in it, as well as nifty little turning gauges. Each fleet box has cards for all the ships inside.
To be perfectly honest, this was a very short battle. The Admiral Bellingshausen scored some hits on the Belfast and damaged the destroyers, but not enough: Cossack's torpedoes missed, but Bedouin scored a direct hit and the Bellingshausen blew up!
So that was it! I'm glad to report that the rules were very easy to pick up: some fairly simple D6 rolls and easy book-keeping, and a manageable amount of special rules. This very brief game was fun enough that I definitely hope to do this again.
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Before my miniature-buying hiatus, I picked up the Schleswig-Holstein. A German pre-dreadnought battleship and veteran of Jutland, she fired the opening shots of World War II against Poland.
She's also hilariously tiny. Here she is next to a Type 1936A destroyer and a Hipper:
Wikipedia confirms this is pretty much right: the Schleswig-Holstein was 127m long and 22m abeam, to the 1936A's 125m. So she's absolutely dwarfed by the 200-meter Admiral Hipper.
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The starter set, Battle for the Pacific, comes with three Japanese cruisers and three destroyers, as well as three US cruisers and a whopping six Fletcher-class destroyers.
All the cruisers are in the lighter resin and are very good quality models. The destroyers are in the darker, softer resin, and will need more work. A couple are wonky enough to need boiling.
I'm going to start with the Japanese ships since I've got a bit of an Axis thing going here.
As per David Williams's Naval Camouflage 1914-1945 and this excellent website, with only very few exceptions, Imperial Japanese Navy warships were painted a uniform grey. I've seen several people use London Grey for the hull and Mahogany Brown for decks on cruisers and larger ships, so I'm going with that. I painted the Fubuki-class destroyers London Grey, with black tops for the smokestacks, and I think it worked great.
One thing I like to do is differentiate between individual ships, even when the models don't; destroyers don't have ship names on the bases, but just the class. With most navies, this is easy: I just freehand the pennant number on there. The Japanese, however, didn't use them. So freehand it is...
The Furutaka is in London Grey, with Mahogany Brown decks.
And so are the Mogami and Kumano.
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So I do have to say I quite like Victory at Sea so far: I'm enjoying painting the miniatures, and the game itself seems fun. I hope I get to play some more!