Hi, I’m Requin. I play strategy, grand-strategy, historical, wargame, simulation, and base building games.
I’m a 37-year-old gamer and streamer from Scotland and I’ve been playing games for more years than I care to count. My aim with this channel is to find a small community of like-minded individuals to share in the narrative, discuss strategies, explore new games and have fun.
While I enjoy understanding and optimising game systems, I’m not a min/maxer or an exploiter. I’m not offering a gaming masterclass and mistakes will definitely be made. Did I say mistakes? I meant non-optimal gameplay learning experiences.
Feel free to explore my RU-vid and Twitch content and hopefully I’ll catch you in a livestream sometime.
Banner photos courtesy of Museum Victoria, Will Esayenko, Stephanie LeBlanc & Alexander Andrews. Available at www.unsplash.com
I think that setting up a target arc might had helped the BMP spot the tank. But yeah, it is quite bullshit how blind your troops can be on Combat Mission games.
It is hard to watch you play when you don't understand game mechanics very well. The carrier for example to attack the US heavy cruiser you need to switch from fighters to bombers. Then you would of had good results. Tactics wise you seem again to not understand game mechanics well.
Yes, it's 'gamey' but you can rebuild a ship ANYWHERE, it 'teleports' back to the home docks instantly. The only problem is that you may then end up with a FS shortfall where it got pulled from. But a very nice and needed rebuild of the fleet! Well, you never seemed to look at it on your new DD design--you left it as Speed and Oil + Turbine. Diesels will save tonnage for cost; and I always prefer to not have Speed engines now. The thinking between the missile CLs and DDs is: cost vs adaptability. DDs are cheaper, BUT, CLs offer the 4 Blockade points and full FS tonnage and not just 50% tonnage. Even though CLs are NOT capital ships, that one game routine thinks "They have an officer, so they need a DD escort." So if you build more CLs, the game may come back with an insane request for more DDs. ;-p It IS frustrating when you are angling for war to have the target suddenly get a huge ally! ;-( It's not like we can always summon up an Ally though it may make great sense all around. Like AH should jump for your help IF you could offer it--maybe for prestige points?--instead of hoping for a card to come up.
The fleet is coming along nicely. For a war, I suggest going after Italy again.🤣 They're weak!!! As this game nears it's end date, I do hope you'll play it again. Perhaps next time as Japan; and take over the Pacific! Or... Flip the board, play as Italy, and take the Mediterranean!😁 I was going to drop out at the jet/missle age (I love guns and big battleships!😁) But I have to see how Spain ends. I'm cheering for you! Also, can you send ships to SW Africa to help put down the rebellion? I hope you can hold that territory!
Turn messages. August 1955. The number of aircraft in capable air units exceeds our capacity to train pilots. Experience will suffer. That doesn't sound good. Seems to continue in September 1955. Anyway to help fix this problem.
The "bushells" as you called them are called abatis. Cut down trees and branches with sharpened points to hinder an enemy assault. An early form of barbed wire.
That was a near run thing. The battle seemed to swing between the sides several times over the course of the day. Fighting with interior lines sure helped you gain the victory.
When you rebuilt the first big CV, you didn't mention the 'Ship cannot install latest radar' which is incredibly important to do! You may have been thinking, CV, not supposed to shoot the main guns (though you upped the Fire Control) but by this time, you SHOULD have radar tech to allow you to help shoot at aircraft, which you very, very MUCH want to be able to do! {Ironically, you DID up the radar on the tiny Adalbert!, later.} And you can go one more level than your current tech. So it was saying you were radar 3, you can install up to 4 for the next version without having to do another actual refit. If you tried 5 you'd get a message about they can't imagine that much more radar or something. Ugh, then you GOT to level 4 tech before the end, so could have saved that one refit. Was hoping you'd choose the Peace Conference since you were only building CLs. But I forgot there was already a war--otherwise that could have been very good for you.
I was going to bow out when you reached the jet/missile age, but since you're close to the end of the game, I want to see it through. So far, your best ships (as far as War Records go) remain the 1920 era battlecruisers _Asturias_ and _Andalusia._ I suggested that design, and was very pleased with their performance! The "twin sisters" sank five of Italy's six battleships and battlecruisers. Nothing matched that record before or since! I feel I have to see it to the end to see if any other ships can beat their record!😁
As a Scot I am enjoying this. Oh and that tube Neil Oliver would hate you. He pretty much blames us Scots for slavery and for starting the American Civil War.
I think Sasstron stole my actress ggirlfriend. To die in glorious battle, or to look good while making the tabloids, those are the only proper conclusions to a real navy man's career.
It would be interesting to kinda go with the Soviet idea of putting SSMs on your carriers. Perhaps replace one or two pairs of 5in with them. Don't forget that your carriers got caught by surface units on multiple occasions in the last few wars.
Good to see you still making content Requin. I was just watching some of your Combat Mission Cold War videos and thoroughly enjoying them. No doubt you've heard about Slitherine buying Battlefront, the developers of the Combat Mission franchise.
Just going off memory here. In the US Navy the earliest guided missile ship was the battleship USS Mississippi which was converted into a test ship. The first frontline guided missile warships were WW2 cruisers that had one or two main turrets removed and replaced with SAM launchers. I think all smaller missile warships were purpose built, due to the size of the missiles and associated equipment, except for a couple that were converted into test beds. There were three early US ship mounted SAM systems meant to cover short, intermediate and long range targets. They were named Terrier, Tartar and Talos. with Talos being basically a flying telephone pole. I am only aware of one or two combat engagements using these systems and they were of indeterminate effectiveness. I am also unaware of any surface engagements involving units with these systems. I don't know if the games' ship designer or general combat mechanics would allow you to replace turrets with missile launchers during refit, but it would be cool to see in action if possible.
Nice DD at the start of the episode! That Q1 5" gun is nice! Once the Missiles come in, these will be sort of relegated, but still important to screen other ships, as the idea is to get them hit by missiles incoming via radar. A couple of things I learned from the AI builds made me change my DD designs a bit before the missile age: 1) You can actually get 6" guns on a DD! You DO get a penalty from being too small when under 2600 tons, BUT, they get the 1st shot against other DDs. And a 6" gun can take out CLs, too! 2) I always used to put max tubes on them, BUT, the AI wouldn't? So then I thought, "How often do I fire all my torps, anyways???" (This question is based on how you play--I play Grand Admiral so don't get to go in and manually launch, so usually never run out. Or how long do they survive--can they fire them all before getting smashed?) So then I make sure to have as many launchers as I can, if not as many tubes, so a single launch can have more torps going at the enemy in a spread. Oh wow! At the end and that CL, you also have Q1 6" guns! So you can make a killer DD with no missiles, OR, load a DD up with missiles. (That (0) showed you had no reloads for those missile launchers. Can right click on them to add reloads.) DO check to see if Diesels will give your DDs and CLs weight back--the game won't suggest it even when it will. (There is a "10% weight savings on diesel" tech you need for it to become viable.)
“I think that saved us the battle, Jackson standing for so long” uh you mean exactly the thing that won him the nickname Stonewall Jackson? At First Bull Run also known as the same map you fought on in quite similar positions? The historical parallel here is uncanny!
Oh, I forgot to mention earlier. One of the most useful corvette designs I have seen is less than 1k tons, 17 or so knots, 1 gun, ASW, mine laying and mine sweeping. Pretty affordable and has some capability that you don't want on a proper warship. I know you may find it a bit gamey but offering it just the same. lol
Been binging the series for the last couple weeks and am quite enjoying it! Looking forward to more. I love your gimmick of naming captains after your viewers and making them generational.
Will you do a Allied campaign next? I managed to win with 1 turn to spare so I was cutting things close. Managed to make China surrender in mid 1944 so it allowed me to focus on India as that is where the allies were concentrating their armies. Managed to hold the line somehow when I was outnumbered but when China surrendered it swung the tide with me brining the troops from there. America also kept building their navy. I had to kill it 3 times. At the end I had around close to 80 American vessels sunk. At one point I had 23 ships and they had over 40, so it was a difficult naval battle. I started to win in India as well as I was using the navy to sink all their troop transports that were coming there. Other than that, quite a fun campaign.
Was that 'build 18 Destroyers' event triggered by you ignoring your staff for over a year? - did they go behind your back and complain to Generalissimo?
Probably good that you DIDN'T get the Falklands--it would just be another FS sink for no real gain. Yeah, you DID free up a bunch of money finishing the KEs, just they had kept taking your money away! The missile tech you bought was Air to Surface, so planes might start getting them. Ships, not yet...
Sort of--IF you can afford it, which you almost certainly can't. Planes are expensive; jets are MORE expensive. Jets will get the various missiles (not bombs) and those are even MORE expensive. Medium bomber will get HUGE ranges later on and also large bomb loads but could also use missiles. SO, if you Suppress airfields before battles and have good medium bombers they can cover way more area than jets. (I have NO idea if suppression works or not, I choose it sometimes just because. ;-p) Jets on the carriers sort of needs super carriers to fit enough or else you are flying just a dozen or so. So regular fighters, which can do Night operations--unlike jets which can't--stay viable for carrier ops.
I wasn't yelling idiot. I was laughing out loud. Your a veteran of this game and have a Fast trigger finger. Knowing all that can happen. You blow though the turn notifications like a card dealer flipping cards. I push the K button on your videos more then any other. But then you had to stop and read. It was like Rosanna Rosanna Danna reading the news. Never mind. 🤣
Thank you for an absolutely amazing journey. I've just started your other GTCW playlist And I'm looking forward to completing it. I would love to see you do a union playthrough starting as an artillery commander. I noticed most of your artillery in this playthrough seemed to be defensive (counter-artillery, firing on advancing troops from a distance) but you can manage some serious damage by parking your artillery right up on the front lines behind your breast works where they will fire canister shot. You might even be able to speed up the effectiveness of this by having your camp focus on perk speed early in the war. There are lots of things you could do though aside from this, and there are lots of fun ways to use artillery, and even horse artillery which you didn't get a chance to mess with this playthrough.
A great campaign overall! I thoroughly enjoyed it. Hope to see more Grand Tactician in the future. There are so many options to explore with policies and strategy. I would love to see a Confederate player free the slaves and raise Confederate States Coloured Troops. You can do that if you take Industrialization as a starting policy. I think an interesting combination of policies would be Apostles of disunion, Kansas as a slave state and slavery to the west. This might be enough to get Kentucky and Missouri to secede at the start. Onward to victory!
Aww...I HATE when I start designing a big ship, like the El Coco, then IMMEDIATELY get a tech, (you got 1% hull savings) since I KNOW I will redesign it to use it. THEN you got ANOTHER 1% hull savings after they wanted to check the design, and you built it with OUT doing the redesign which would have been a decent amount of tonnage for more AA or less cost. I'm playing a game and am in the 40's like this, but I have more tech as I had auto-loaders on my 5 inch guns which wasn't showing on your build. The thing I always urge people to check, since the game does NOT default to it, is for DDs AND CLs, if the Diesel engine is better than Oil. You need Diesel tech, obviously, and the one improvement to it to make it worthwhile. But when you have it, it's a lot of tonnage saved!
I often don't chase the redesign for incremental improvements but because this is a large tonnage ship, you're right that it makes a sizeable difference. I just quickly checked the game and that will give us another 200 tonnes to play around with. We've not actually sunk any time into the build yet so I think a quick redesign will be in order - good catch!
There's always hope! I don't do a particularly good job in this game of prioritising research to win the naval war - it's been a secondary element in a lot of the SC titles and I haven't quite made that mental shift. But that's why I play my first run on normal difficultly - to allow for such inefficiencies.
Biggest mistake people make with this game is not checking the victory conditions and having a plan from turn 1. This is very much NOT a spread out and kill everything campaign.
It's a nice change from other SC titles where they're might be specific objectives, but general you are just rolling your front over the enemies land. I like the variation and depth it adds. That being said, I've not stuck to a victory focused plan as I don't think there was much value in the southern mainland India campaign and I'm pushing deeper into Chain than required (chasing a forlorn dream of capitulating them).
Here we go! Onward to victory! Great opening battle but the elation was tempered by those officer casualties. Hope to see more Grand Tactician content on the channel. I love this game and can’t get enough of it. Always looking for new campaigns. Going back to watch archived campaigns on various channels too. Remember one thing-The Watie will be with you always.
