As a designer, I like to focus on why things happen in campaigns, operations, and battles.  In old school terms, I “design for cause.”  This tends to make my games more complex, but I hope players come away with a better understanding of why their game progressed the way it did beyond “he had better cards” or “the dice hate me.”

In World War II carrier battles, there were eight factors of significant importance in determining how attacks took place and their outcomes:  wind, weather, range, reconnaissance, CAP (Combat Air Patrol), coordination, targeting, and training – WWRRCCTT.  All are interdependent to some extent and have an impact in Imperial Eagles (at least in the Advanced Rules).

WIND

The effect of wind is often overlooked in games depicting carrier operations, but its impact is profound.  In virtually all conditions, carriers must steam into the wind to launch and recover aircraft, dictating what course they must steer while doing so.  This aids or hinders their ability to increase or decrease the range to the enemy forces depending on which force is leeward (downwind) and which is windward (upwind).  The leeward carrier force will be closing the range when conducting flight ops, and the windward force will be opening.

In IE, the actual historical wind conditions in each battle apply.  Forces launching more than one deck load in a Round cannot try to Close Range if windward or Open Range if leeward in that roughly 2-hour period.

WEATHER

If bad enough (fog, heavy rain or snow, high seas), weather may prevent flight ops altogether.  If this were the case, there would be no battle, so when recreating historical battles in Down in Flames it won’t be this bad.  But clouds and rain can and did interfere significantly in the ability of one or both sides to locate enemy forces, both with reconnaissance aircraft and with air strike targeting.

This applies in IE, where random events and campaign special rules can change the weather during the course of an operation as well as hide one carrier in an enemy force from attack.  Increased clouds assist aircraft on reconnaissance missions to survive long enough to make their reports but can also hamper bombing attacks through a “Clouds Over Target” Resource already familiar to players of previous DiF campaigns.

RANGE

The range between the carrier forces impacts how long it takes aircraft to complete their missions and whether they can do so at all.  Distant targets are harder to locate as they can be beyond the reach of some search assets, have longer to move before a strike arrives, and the strike has more opportunity for navigation error.  Some aircraft may not have sufficient operational radius to reach the target at longer ranges, particularly in carrier operations, where returning to their moving base with sufficient fuel to find it and land aboard is a necessity.  Damaged aircraft and injured pilots especially are less likely to safely return to their carriers from farther away.

All these factors are included in IE, although the recovery rules are part of the Advanced Rules.

RECONNAISSANCE

Perhaps most important is reconnaissance, since you can’t strike the enemy unless you know where they are.  If one side finds the enemy before the other, they can strike first and potentially put enemy carriers out of action before they can launch in return.  It only happened twice during the war, at Midway (where USN coordination and targeting problems almost threw away this advantage) and at Philippine Sea where poor Japanese training rendered their opportunity moot. 

In IE, you are generally not allowed to launch a strike against an unlocated target.  While the search process is the result of a random card draw by each side that incorporates non-carrier assets, players may commit additional carrier aircraft to the effort at the expense of reducing the size of their strikes.  Often the card draw will result in a Reconnaissance Mission with CAP (if any) intercepting the search aircraft and the mission’s result determining the accuracy of any information gained on an enemy target.  Even a successful search can be undone by poor communications (a random event in the game), as the results fail to reach the Carrier Task Force in a timely manner.  But fear not:  an optional rule allows players to presume location of the enemy carriers for the first two Rounds to guarantee initial strikes are on the way.

CAP

Combat Air Patrol (CAP) is the principal defense against enemy air strikes as well as the only defense against enemy reconnaissance aircraft.  Balancing the needs of this defense against the desirability of providing your own strikes with fighter escorts to fend off the enemy CAP is a fundamental decision commanders had to make.

Players must also make this allocation in IE.  Control of the interceptors matters, and here the USN had a clear advantage with their system of radar detection and radio fighter direction while IJN control was essentially nonexistent in 1942 (although they did have radar by the Battle of Santa Cruz).  Resources in the game grant these advantages, with the lack reflecting their inconsistency and absence during this period.

COORDINATION

Strike coordination is one of the more frequently overlooked aspects of carrier warfare, directly affecting the size of strikes brought to bear on the enemy.  The Imperial Japanese Navy were masters of this in the first year of the war as they routinely launched strikes from up to six carriers simultaneously, which rapidly joined to strike their target together.  The US Navy…not so much.  Each carrier and its air group were free to formulate their own strike procedures, with widely varying results.  Only Yorktown was able to get her whole strike group to the target consistently, while in every battle of 1942 at least one strike failed to attack together if at all.  Even by 1944, when individual carriers’ strikes were coordinated, the air groups from the carriers in a task group were not able to arrive and attack the same target together at Philippine Sea.

Each carrier’s strike is coordinated in the IE basic game, but the Advanced Rules often require each USN air unit to draw a card to determine when in a Round it attacks (sometimes complicated by weather).  This is crucial in re-creating the Battle of Midway, where no less than five waves of Navy, Marine Corps, and Army Air Force planes futilely attacked before the decisive blow by Yorktown’s air group and the Enterprise dive bombers the morning of 4 June wrecked three Japanese carriers in minutes.

TARGETING

Locating the enemy with reconnaissance is only halfway to targeting them with an air strike.  In every carrier battle in 1942, at least parts of some strikes were unable to find the enemy carriers and either attacked alternate targets or none at all.  This famously happened with the Japanese evening strike at Coral Sea on 7 May (where weather played a role) and with Hornet’s dive bombers in her first strike at Midway on 4 June.

In IE, each strike (and its elements if uncoordinated) must draw a card to determine if and when it locates its target force.  The result depends on the location status of the target force, which varies in increasing accuracy from Undetected to Contact to Located to Shadowed.  Attacking a Shadowed force is almost guaranteed, but other results are increasingly likely with poorer status:

• “Nowhere in Sight” requires an additional one or two draws, delays any attack, puts some or all strike aircraft at risk for recovery, and may still fail to locate the target.
• “Mistaken Target” offers the player an alternative target most likely dictated by the campaign conditions (e.g., a tanker representing oiler Neosho at Coral Sea rather than the enemy carrier force).
• “Nothing Found” sends the strike home without attacking.

Additionally, strikes that succeed in locating the enemy carrier force must draw randomly to determine which carrier each unit attacks if more than one is possible.

TRAINING

Finally, training impacts how well air units perform in battle almost as much as the quality of the aircraft the crews fly.  The Japanese had the edge initially, but their inability to quickly produce well-trained replacements eroded this advantage over time, ultimately leading to the debacle of the “Marianas Turkey Shoot” in June 1944.  Even the US did sometimes send barely-trained aircrews into battle, especially early in 1942 in their carrier raids and with the Marines at Midway.

Imperial Eagles shows this with the tried-and-true Down in Flames mechanism of randomly-selected Skilled and Green aircrews.  Skilled crews have an advantage in both Reconnaissance and Strike Missons, while Green crews will not fare as well.  The latter remains an Optional Rule, although its effects are not too deleterious in the 1942 carrier operations.  But when the 1944 Philippine Sea campaign appears in a future expansion, the game may play radically different from history without it!

I hope this overview is instructive for those readers less familiar with WWII carrier operations.  It should give all of you an idea of how much thought has gone into this major rework of the DiF system for these campaigns and why it is taking so long to find a balance incorporating all these elements while not making the mechanics too burdensome.

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