Draco's Cruel Seas - Germans

As a gamer of limited resources (like most of us), a bit of planning is usually the first step in putting together a new army for me. In the case of Cruel seas, this consists of looking at the scenarios, the lists and determining what I’ll need to have a decent sized collection.

Now, most of the scenarios have pre-determined forces – to play “Invasion”, I’ll need a couple of Siebel Ferries, a Minesweeper and two S-38 Boats, but there’s also the “kill them all” game type. In that case, aiming for around 1000 points seems to be a decent size list.

But there’s also the units themselves to think of. My demo games showed, hands down, that the S-100 E-Boat is superior to the S-38 – which means that my main force will be S-100s (with a couple of S-38s for scenario purposes).  As for equipment on those boats, although putting a 20mm Flakvierling 38 on the rear of the S-100 is tempting in terms of outright damage, my experience has shown that a 37mm Flak 42 is probably a better option, due to its longer range (the to-hit penalty you have at long range is fairly significant). But luckily, your boats can have different equipment within the flotilla, so two  S-100s with 37s and one with a quad-20 quickly became the core of my force.

Next – what to support them with. As I’ll talk about in my British project, my first thought was to have a Corvette or Frigate as the main backbone of the force, supported by lighter boats. Whilst the Germans do have a Corvette in the form of the M-Class Minesweeper, and the next ship up is a Destroyer. There is the VP-Flakship, and its comparable to the F-Lighter, trading out a few guns for better speed.  However, given that I’m planning on using the F-Lighter i’ll get with the Italian fleet as a German ship, but I actually don’t like the VP-Boat model I see no point in getting one.

After a bit of playing around, I manged to figure out a few lists I could use, mostly centred around a larger ship (M-Class Minesweeper, F-Lighter etc) with S-Boats as an attack force, but as an experiment, I also went with boats only. This is when the R-Boat starts to come into play – its slightly more expensive than an S-Boat, and it trades out torpedoes, some of the guns and a bit of speed for 50% more hull. Its an interesting choice, and historically, the R-Boat was more of a workhorse than the S-Boat was. After some consideration, I added a pair of them to my wish list, thinking of using them as maybe some flank- or rearguards. Plus, one of the scenarios requires an R-Boat anyway.

So, after all that consideration, I had a shopping list. Some of the items weren’t available right now, but that just takes some of the pressure off me later when it comes to painting.

Right – time to talk to some industrialists…