Well yeah it's small. Only the difference of about 2-3km or so because Brit shells are bigger, but only by an inch or so. Still, a few thousand meters of immunity is never a problem.

Neat, gonna try Red Sky then.

I played as both. I almost won as the Germans one time but seemed to explode and lose instantly. I think it may have been a torpedo? I have been playing and winning as the British though. I just go straight to the german ship and, when close, I beat the hell outta them. I might try the Germans again, but it was annoying. For the most part the British AI just kept running from me and it became time consuming to chase them around the map. As the British, the German AI likes to come right at me. Works for me.

Explosions can and will happen to anyone during WW1. It just happens more frequently in British ships because of lax precautions in powder handling and storage.

I threw together a Youtube video here:

http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=HobQfSiy7mU

smith

Jutland is an okay game, was hoping for more like Destroyer Command or Task Force 1942.

"Explosions can and will happen to anyone during WW1. It just happens more frequently in British ships because of lax precautions in powder handling and storage.", That's one of the reasons why the Hood exploded during its engagement with Bismarck?

I think that you are off by one war. Bismarck sank the Hood in WWII. ;)

Yeah I know, but Hood is an WWI-Post WWI BC, and do to the fact that they have lax precautions in powder handling and storage like what you said.

Not exactly, Hood was sunk because of weak aft deck armor (Which she was about to get reinforced) and a fire that spread to the 15" magazines, another one of the problems with BCs

What seems to be the accepted reasoning these days for the loss of the indefatigable,Queen Mary and Invincible is simply a real bad decision made by the Battle Cruiser Force. In general,the ships of the BCF had poor gunnery standards when it came to accuracy. Unlike the Grand Fleet they rarely did any gunnery practice. So they tried to make up for it by increasing their rate of fire,and they did that by throwing out all safety precautions. They left the magazine doors open,they stacked cordite and shells in and around the turrets and well,that is a disaster waiting to happen.

It wouldn't have mattered how thick the armor was on those BCs. Once a turret took a hit and the ammo and cordite cooked off,the flash fire would have an unblocked path to the magazine.

The only reason the Lion didn't blow up after Q turret took a hit was that the turret commander,even though mortally wounded,immediately ordered the magazine flooded. For that,he was awarded the postumous VC.

To this day I'll never understand why Beatty allowed the BCF to operate that way. But then I've always considered Beatty to be a mediocre Admiral who used the newspapers to build up a very undeserved reputation. After all,the BCF was involved in three battles and failed in all three. And each time Beatty found someone else to blame for it instead of his own incompetence.

England is fortunate that the HSF never came out to challenge the Grand Fleet while Beatty commanded the Grand Fleet. My gut feeling is that Beatty would have made a major mistake and the Grand Fleet would have ended up getting hammered.

3 Battles and failed in all 3?

AFAIK the BCF engaged in Heligoland, Falklands (Even though not under Beatty), Dogger Bank, Jutland and HMS Repulse engaged 2 German BBs very briefly in the 2nd Battle of Heligoland Bight, all those battles except Jutland and 2nd Heligoland were British tactical victories

Doggerbank was a failure as well. Due to Beatty's signals screwups,the BCF went after the Blucher instead of chasing down Hipper's BCs.

Even Beatty considered Heligoland Bight,Doggerbank and Jutland to be failures,but he blamed it all on his signal man.(Or on the Admiral in charge of the BCF's scouting force,or on his second in command,or on Jellicoe) Not on his poor choice of orders.

Admiral Sturdee was in command at the Falklands. The Invincible and inflexible were on detached duty so that does not count as a BCF action. And that was one of the few times where battlecruisers were used the way they were intended to be used.

It depends on what you're blaming Beatty for really. He gets lots of flack for having 'bad communications' with forces, but that's a problem everyone had during the era. That's just what you get for using signal flags on dirty, smokey, distant dreadnoughts.

That being said, I actually agree that Beatty was a pretty spotty commander, but then again most national leadership during WW1 was pretty awful. I mean, they convienently setup the Royal Navy for piecemeal elimination by the HSF using those akward "Battlecruiser Squadrons".

Probably not. No matter what the Kaiser thought the High Seas Fleet was never going to get it's day. After Jutland resources were diverted back to the German Army while Royal Navy only got bigger and bigger. Germany had...what, the 4 Bayern class BBs in production? While Britain had the Revenge and even more Queen Elizabeth classes on the way out with further designs on the drawing board. Beyond that, quality issues with Britain's ammunition had been fixed, and better safety standards meant that explosive British ships were much less frequent.

The end was nigh for Germany the moment Jellicoe crossed Sheer's T at Jutland. This left him with only 2 useless options, suicidally attack Jellicoe head on or try to run away.

I'm trying to say, is that really Beatty's fault? It's not like it was the first time that important orders had been missed or misunderstood during WW1. If anything blame should be laid on the Captain of HMS Tiger who failed to engage Moltke. Allowing the ship to inflict crippling damage on Lion which meant Beatty was unable to keep up with the line and continue giving orders. If Beatty was still able to participate in the battle does anyone here seriously think he would have just let his ships waste time with Blucher?

My review:

gamesquad.com/index.php?option=com_articles&id=8&pform=&aid=210

A con i'd list the game with is "poor wide scale unit control". The devs still haven't implemented a way to control huge specified formations simply. From the looks of it, they don't intend to either. They just want you to issue individual headings to every formation in your fleet.

Actually, you can use either "Task Force" to control everything or use "click & drag" to control multiple divisions.

If you try to give a "Turn by Succession" order while in Task Force mode the entire fleet will end up in a stupid mess as they all turn into each other. The problem isn't direction finding it's distance keeping which none of the ships are inclined to do themselves.

True, but then you can use the "Guide on" order to try to sort things outt. The problem may be that fleet actions don't start with an overll "Enemy sighted" command that would give divisions a template for coordinated movement. Such a command would be nice.

"Guide on" only makes ships follow eachother single file. It astounds me that the developers didn't set it to mean "maintain distance and direction from X ship". I guess they figured you needed to have a "Form New Division" command twice.

You can issue the Guide on command to the lead ship of one formation to follow the tail ship of another formation.

Just started a new German campaign, overly aggresive, split the HSF into three and patrolled lower north sea together.
Having them split worked a treat.
The British BattleCruiser fleet engaged one of the smaller offshoots at around 3am and didn't notice the other two formations creeping up from the south.
After a slightly confused clash only one BC escaped for the loss of a number of DD's and only one BB for me.

The North Sea is now mine.