Introduction

This article has a fairly convoluted history. In March, 1991, I sent Rick Gayler a draft article on using sea zones in Europa. The very next issue to reach me contained, of course, Supermarina. At Mark Pitcavage's request, I spent about six months trying to grasp the implications of both Supermarina and the beta playtest version, and finally submitted a redraft. Then a few weeks later Victor Hauser called, saying that the Supermarina concept was proving to be impractical and not very popular. So, would I do a further rewrite in time for Origins? Victor was also very helpful in pointing out concepts and mechanics that were not standard Europa, and how I might change them.

What follows has therefore been through some significant scrutiny, and could conceivably become official at some future date (my dream), given lots of enthusiasm from the readership. I am proposing a way to introduce a uniform and reasonably challenging naval system that does not outweigh the land game in complexity. The heart of my proposal is time-graded sea zones, which I propose to explain in three parts.

• Part 1 explains the time-grading aspect
• Part 2 shows my new idea for a naval phase that exploits time-grading
• Part 3 shows how sea zones might be applied to the standard Europa maps

Need I say it-all this is utterly and completely unofficial. If you like it, please write in and say so. That is the only way we can measure its acceptability. If you don't like it, I'd rather you didn't write in, but (my sensitive feelings aside) you probably should anyway.

The Challenge of Naval Operations

One of the most challenging parts of simulation gaming is the problem of map scale and time scale. How big is a battle? How long? How big should hexes be?

For modern land warfare, the Europa standard of 16 miles per hex is arguably ideal (give or take a mile or two). For one thing, the typical unit, a division, just about fills the hex from side to side; and a normal defense in depth will fill it from front to back. Artillery ranges are almost all less than 16 miles, yet the rare exception (railroad gun Dora) can add zest to the game. And so on.

For pure air warfare, the same 16-mile hexes and 15- day turns are arguably a poor fit. A day or night "bomber stream" might gather from thirty or forty airfields spread around England, and move across Europe strung out in column over 150 miles or more. Fighters might be drawn down from bases 200 miles on either side of this grand formation, and when climbing to intercept would cross a 16- mile hex in less than 3 minutes. To handle these geometries, as well as radar diversions, standing patrols, intruder operations, and other complexities, we might make Northwest Europe into one big air zone, or introduce minute- by-minute, hex-by-hex air maneuvers that make 10 weeks of the Battle of Britain as daunting as 4 years on the Eastern Front; one approach is as plausible as the other.

What saves us from this ridiculous impasse is that Europa focuses on ground operations. We choose to ignore the purely air-related complexities and instead imagine air battles as a series of "furballs" over specific targets, with neatly packaged formations commuting to and fro. The result is not necessarily as true to life as our model of the ground war itself, but it will serve; the air war in Europa is a means, not an end.

[See Gary Dickson's article in this issue for a fresh look at the air systern-VAH]

Naval operations in Europa are also an interesting side issue-but the saving grace from air warfare, the clear tie-in, is denied us.

• We cannot always tie a naval operation to a specific land objective.
• We have no masses of identical units flying dozens of identical sorties within a single turn that we can abstract.
• We need to measure events in inches and in thousands of miles simultaneously.

Never mind a week; a handful of ships can decisively alter the course of the war in an hour. The crucial exchange can be over in minutes. Thus to the operational game of Europa we must attach-kicking and screaming-an appropriate simulation of naval war that is stubbornly tactical and yet strategic at the same time, and never just operational.

To this challenge I offer no real solution. None! Naval warfare is just plain different; that's the way things are. But for the serious Europist, whatever cannot be solved must therefore be kludged, elegantly kludged if possible, and so I am offering a kludging tool. I believe that it will improve the naval game, and bring naval operations into reasonable harmony with the main baffle on land. I hope it will win praise and greater sales for the Europa system from far and wide. (Pretty good for something that isn't a solution!) It won't be a naval simulation; it'll be a not-too-annoying naval game to complement a serious land simulation.

Why It's Time For Sea Zones

The basic idea of sea zones stems from the speed and resulting ground scale of naval operations. The teensy- weensy Battle of the River Plate, with 4 ships total, managed to sprawl across the equivalent of 3 all-sea hexes in about an hour and a half. Most surface naval battles were running fights, and easily occupied 6 or 7 hexes (steaming at twenty knots for several hours, plus 17,000-yard gunnery ranges).

Some were even bigger. For example, Cape Matapan, one of the few main fleet actions in the Mediterranean, stretched for some two hundred miles and involved separate groups along a sixty-mile "front." The destruction of Arctic convoy PQ-17 was spread over the equivalent of 350 (yes, 350) hexes and took several days. Even a normal convoy, not yet under attack by subs, might zig or zag by more than one hex to either side while proceeding along its main course.

I feel it is inappropriately specific, much like the commuting furball model of air combat but without the same justification, to say in the course of a naval turn representing 15 days, "Okay, I'm intercepting you in this hex here." If we are not going to break down battles into more modest time-slices, or play about with radar and rain squalls and such, then the most we can say of any given encounter is that it happened within a hundred miles or so of point X.

Even this is only true for 3 or 4 hours, so having a counter just sit there on the hex, like a rifle division at a crossroads, is grossly misleading. The time problem I will address below in Part 1; with regard to space, a sea zone of a hundred miles or so across is at least more reasonable; the examples I've given above show why. I will address exactly how big the zone should be in Part 3.

The Case for Sea Zones The Europa Naval Rules Get a Refit

Introduction
Part 1: Why Sea Zones Should Be Time-Graded (and Fixed-Radius)
Part 2: The 3-Naval-Phase Sequence of Play
Part 3: The 61-Hex Sea Zone
Conclusion