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Originally Posted by Randomizer
Koger's pro-German bias is obvious in assorted yet subtle ways throughout the game.
Fortunately new scholarship, Keith Yates, Andrew Gordon and Peter Hart to pull three immediately off the shelves, have done much to place the myth of High Seas Fleet victory to rest. Losses should never be the sole criteria by which naval battles are judged and for Jutland, this was the case for a century.
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It's difficult to say. There's no question that German fire control directors and night-fighting were superior, and they simply armoured their ships better. Battleships were really hard to sink, when you think of the pounding the QEs took and yet remained afloat.
An interesting scenario I just created and I'm playing. It's 1917ish and a large convoy of 10 cargo ships. The main escorts are two pre-dreadnoughts, HMS Canopus and HMS Ocean. There are two light cruiser groups (one of three light cruisers, one of two) scouting ahead, a line of 5 destroyers on each side of the convoy, and 5 armoured cruisers like Minotaur, Black Prince. The two pre-dreads are forming the van of the convoy line, a few kilometers ahead. Abreast of the pre-dreads, an armoured cruiser a few kilometers each side, and then the remaining three provide an outer defence.
70 kilometers north, four Queen Elizabeth are able to come to provide reinforcements if necessary.
On the German side, two light scouting groups each of a light cruiser (like SMS Niobe) leading three destroyers. The German battle line is three Nassau class dreadnoughts (which, if you will remember, were the first German dreadnought class) leading five Deutschland class pre-dreadnoughts.
I set the German side PO to "Aggressive", and when their scouting group saw the QEs, they immediately moved to engage them. The entire time I was crossing their T, blasting away at the front of their battleline, although the wing turrets of the Nassau class allow them to fire 6 x 28cm guns in the forward direction). Essentially, the distance meant my armoured cruisers arrived one-by-one from the south to assist. At the close of the scenario where I saved it, I'd sunk all three Nassau class dreads and two Deutschland pre-dreads. I lost two Queen Elizabeths and I decided to withdraw them from the battle and turn south. At the same time, the three remaining German pre-dreads decided to disengage and turn north. All-in-all I lost two dreadnoughts, one armoured cruiser and two light cruisers to their three dreads and two pre-dreads.
In the settings, I've switched accuracy to 100 (the starting setting of 10 is simply not historically accurate) and switched off catastrophic magazine explosions.
Is the above an accurate outcome? Surely four 15-inch gunned QEs which were crossing the T on 3 dread + 5 pre-dread the entire time the German line was steaming toward them, firing from 20km out all the way up to 4km distance, should have annihilated them? I think you're right about a certain German bias, although the Royal Navy did have issues.
Losing the two QEs made me so angry that I just re-jigged the scenario and added three Revenge-class battleships and two battlecruisers. Only a short way into the scenario but already done well, the AC's shooting is superb. HMS Black Prince and HMS Warrior sunk three German destroyers with their 9 inch guns at maximum range, and the Cordelia and Conquest sunk the Niobe, they went right up at point blank range on each side and just blasted the thing to hell.
There may be issues with the game, but it has awakened in me a very pressing interest in WW1 naval history, so for that I can only thank the developers, and I still enjoy the game, in spite of its limitations.
Below, the Duke of Edinburgh finishing off the SMS Niobe as Cordelia and Conquest move northeast to deal with some destroyers. I rather like my armoured cruisers.
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Sorry for the text wall, The Battle of Jutland has been a passion of mine for some fifty-years now and I own a rather large and growing Jutland library
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It was this video below that awakened my interest in Jutland, and reactivating the game. It also provoked my awe at Jellicoe's manoeuvre remodelling his cruising lines into a single battle line, amazing and I suspect the High Seas Fleet could not have pulled off something like that. When Scheer sailed over the horizon and saw this semi-circle of British battleships on the horizon all firing their guns at him... no wonder he turned.