Recent Nimitz Game - US Navy v IJN

It was nice to get a few of my recently painted WWII ships out for a game of Nimitz. I took the US Navy and Dale the Imperial Japanese Navy, with an allowance of 250 points each. We have played three previous games at 200 points per side and I wanted to see what difference the additional 50 points would make:

I deployed with a destroyer screen, a line of cruisers and four battleships:

Whereas Dale organised his fleet into three battlegroups, with a battleship, cruisers and destroyers in each line:

The side who gains the initiative gets much more scope in terms of where and the direction in which they can deploy on the table. I lost the initiative role and so deployed first. The first two moves were spent closing in to gun and torpedo range:

Large guns have a range of 24", small guns 16", while most torpedoes including those carried by the USN have a range of 12". The Japanese long lance torpedoes however have a long range of 24" and hit on the roll of a 6 on a D6, and they carry a lot of them. 

Torpedo attacks are resolved after all shooting has been done, so I blazed away with as much as I could enjoying the better USN odds due to superior radar and fire directors, and managed to inflict a fair bit of damage on the Yamato leading the closest battlegroup. I then held my breath as Dale fired his first dozen torpedo salvos, the Missouri suffering two nasty hits but managing to remain afloat.

Shooting is by formation on an IGOUGO basis, with the side winning the initiative for that turn choosing a formation to fire first. This is therefore an incentive to keep as many ships in formation or base-to-base contact as possible.

Turn 3 saw me finish of the Yamato which which exploded in a fireball, although it had already suffered significant damage, while the Japanese accounted for the Missouri and a couple of cruisers. Some of my destroyers managed to cross the Japanese line for a close-range torpedo run:

Turn four saw the demise of the Yamato's sister ship Musashi, while the Japanese sank the South Carolina which can be seen peeling off from the line, having lost buoyancy and been reduced to a quarter of its speed:

That left me with two battleships, the Massachusetts and North Carolina, with a gun turret missing on each, versus Dale's older Ise battleship. He however still had an advantage in the number of cruisers left and also outnumbered me in destroyers:

We both basically surprised each other at this point and simultaneously conceded that the other had most likely won, so decided to call it a draw.

This was a lot more of a slug-fest than the previous three games and I'm not sure whether the additional 50 points was the cause, but the other games felt a lot more tactical. In Nimitz you can retain half points value for any damaged ship which exits via its deployment zone, but the temptation is to keep them in the fray and pound away. In the absence of a campaign's in-built incentives to preserve forces I'm thinking that if two-thirds or three quarter points were retained for exiting ships then there might be more of an incentive to disengage earlier. 

I'm keen to include aircraft for our next game as this will add a whole new dimension, but we are about to delve into General d'Armee 2 which looks like it could be a decent set of rules for a few Napoleonic games.