Blood Red Skies

Now the game has been out a while and we've had chance to get more than a few games in, I wanted to get some thoughts down about the various faction's fleet lists for fellow gamers/non-history-specialist folk out there. I've been playing kriegsmarine and IJN against royal navy , so those three are the ones I'll be focussing on. These are intended purely as a gaming overview for those who aren't history buffs or those intent on recreating specific actions from ww2 with this ruleset. So, the Japanese, in ww2, they started their attack with the element of surprise and rolled through large swathes of poorly defended territory with far superior troops but rapidly overexpanded, got stretched too thin and then pushed back by the allies. This applies to the tabletop too, the IJN fleet box seems to be set late war when the quality of force was poor and all sorts of odd craft got merged in with the remaining bigger ships (hence additions like suicide boats and civilian

A brisk north-easterly tugged at the watchman's lapels as he watched the huge ship clear its berth and amble out into the harbour's waters, gliding gracefully into the inky blackness. It'd been a quiet month so far, a few sightings of aircraft, a few false-alarms with "submarine" sightings but nothing concrete. He looked up to the sky and saw the full moon, his gut knotting at the thought that today might be the day that the calm ended and the storm broke. He shoved his hands deeper in his pockets and took up his position. As a change from BRS, my friend and I bought into cruel seas and have been batting our way through the core missions, stepping them up the other week to include some of the bigger craft to get the more complex mechanics down. Tonight's game was a riff on the rulebook mission 6. I played Kriegsmarine, he played Royal Navy. Apparently this is Zerstorer Z-25 but the kit as built doesn't match the specified armaments!  The forces: