Figure 1 depicts the situation at the end of turn 24. Nothing dramatic has happened since turn 20 but there are some changes:
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| Figure 1 - Turn 24 |
a) the second OPFOR CV was sunk fulfilling one of the secondary objectives and the Green Team was awarded a core PBY Catalina reconnaissance flying boat (top left corner);
b) the first VP was taken and two auxiliary DDs became immediately available (center left edge);
c) the submarine has reached its final destination and is keeping the OPFOR's BB under a watchful eye; its torpedoes can only do about two points of damage once every four (five?) turns so I only use it for reconnaissance; it is lightly damage courtesy of the mine at the top center edge (there's more mines in that area);
d) the two core fighters are busy strafing the OPFOR's Radar because they can and they need all the experience they can get;
e) the blip South of the radar is the plane guard DD heading towards the exit points on the bottom right corner; the other plane guard DD has already exited through the ones on the top corner; the trickiest problem in this mission is sinking both the OPFOR's CVs before one of them decides to exit the map;
f) Red B Squadron has lost all five of its DDs (65 points of strength) and taken five points of damage to one of the CAs with only two Green Team auxiliary DDs lightly damaged (3- and 4-damage respectively); they started outnumbered but the real reason was they didn't fight as a cohesive unit choosing to come into range of my ships in ones or twos; note also that the full strength CA is on the other side of the island chain and can only fire at extreme range (and minimal damage) at my core CA and the two DDs by the VP while the other CA's movement is limited by the three DDs.
There's two more things I'd like to mention about this image.
It is a mosaic out of nine screenshots and I have one each for both start and end of each turn up to and including turn 28; technically turns 1 through to start of turn 9 are only six screenshots because nothing was happening on the East edge of the map.
There's an error on the bottom corner of the image: the medium blue of the aircraft radar range do not align at the right (west) edge. I have no idea if it was just mislabeling a screenshot, an error while editing or even if this was a turn that I had to redo because the game crashed and I ended up using screenshot(s) from both plays.
Figure 2 is from turn 33 both start (left) and end (right). At the start of turn 33 the Green Team is at the exit of the "Channel" and once more deployed in battle line. There are only four surviving OPFOR ships: the BB at the top corner of the map, the heavily damaged Gunboat making a suicidal attack and two undetected submarines in the vicinity of the (second) VP.
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| Figure 2 - Turn 33 |
I don't remember exactly what happened during the turn. The core BB, CA and two of the DDs fired and sunk the OPFOR Gunboat but that's too much potential damage against such a fragile target. Two of the auxiliary DDs also performed some action and at least one of them used Sonar to detect and fire on the OPFOR submarine which I believe is submerged (otherwise I would have fired on it at least with my third DD). I think the other auxiliary DD also used Sonar to detect the other OPFOR submarine on the surface and together with the BB and the core DDs managed to sink it.
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Comments on this post are disabled. That's just for ease of management. They will be enabled in the last post for each mission.
