Sensuikan — Australia! | Episode 2 | April 1942 | WW2 Solo Japanese Submarine Game
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Transcript
Hi everybody, I'm Zab Blitz and welcome to our continued adventures with Senuicon, the World War II Japanese submarine simulation game from Compass Games. It's April 1942. Our submarine has been refitted after the damage it sustained in the previous patrol. We're ready to head back out to sea. Let's get started. So, here we are, ready to start our second patrol. Our first patrol was a resounding success. We stren sank a US destroyer and a small freighter for a total of 3,900 tons in damage inflicted. Now, uh this is our crew. We are back with all of our regular crew members. We suffered no casualties on the previous mission. We do also have a name for our submarine. I want to go with iron shark. And in Japanese, we can create that with the kanji for iron, which is tetsu. And then the kanji for shark which is s or if you combine it with another one it' probably be co. So that would get put together as techco. So that is the name of our submarine. Now now a couple of little things as we look at this too. We have this trait that we picked for the captain trait out of the submarine school is shibumi. And a couple of people mentioned that you couldn't use this for escaping detection which we did use it for in the previous patrol. Now a little quick story about that. I looked for that answer previously before starting the game on board gamegeeek and the designer Gregory Smith actually answered and said you could use Shibumi to escape detection. Once I read that I stopped but the thread on board gamegeeek continued where people asked
him about it again and then he changed his mind and said no you can only use the Shibumi trait for the four actions that are listed in the rule book. So we are going to going forward restrain ourselves to only using Shibumi for those four actions that are in the rule book. we no longer can use it to escape detection, which to be fair did seem like it was a quite a strong skill if in each patrol one time you could escape detection without having to worry about the die roll. So, we'll use that correctly going forward. Thanks to the people who pointed that out in the comments. Lastly, as we head out on our patrol here in April 1942, the previous patrol because it was surrounding a major event counted for two successful patrols in our patrol experience accumulation. Which means if we are successful on this patrol, we'll have three successful patrols and we can pick one skill down here to upgrade on the crew. And I have a pretty good idea as to what we might get. All that being said, let's take a look at the world map and let's see where we're going to be assigned for our second patrol. Here's a look at the Pacific in 1942 April.
There's only one major event going on which is in the Indian Ocean here. Other than that, it is standard operational procedure. Now we have a lot of possibilities on places where we could end up here. Let's see where we are assigned for our second patrol. Oo, a 12. Wow, we're going to Australia. So, this is another one of these patrols. This would be cool. We're going down under, and this will take us to another place where we have these two extra transit boxes, which means that our time on station will be reduced by two zones. And let's uh take a look and see what all this means. as we can take a look also at the setup that we've got for our submarine. So, we'll be leaving from Yokoska and we will transit. Now, because there are those two extra transit zones, this one here and this one here, you split them up on either end will also be transit zones. So, we'll only have three uh station onstation experiences really, but we can use our scout craft to give us extra searching capacity. We are loaded with our good torpedoes, the five oxygen torpedoes in the forward torpedo tubes and then the 11 steam ones in the reload tubes. We've also got our deck gun ready to go. Our crew is trained and no damage on either flooding or hull damage, of course. So, with that in mind, it's time to head out to sea.
So, we have two transit zones to navigate. We a ship on a 12 would actually be a random event here, but we do not want to see anything to do with a two. We get a lucky seven right down the middle. That's perfect. So, we passed through the first transit zone. Let's now go to our second transit zone. Getting to Australia, we get a nine. So, no problems getting through the transit zones. We are now on station. And it is time to search. And if we look here at the Australian search map, it's a little bit of sparse hunting here. I hope we can come up with a target. And this number seven that has an asterisk, the asterex means treat as no encounter before July 1942. So the seven is really no encounter. The five is if we have radar, which we don't, which means that we need a six or an 11 or three. Um, this is tough hunting here. We might be we might be on a baron patrol here. But let's see what happens with our first one here. We get a nine, which is nothing found yet.
But now we are going to, like we did last time, we can use our E14 Y1 with Russ Sees and Gatock as our crew here on this. They're going to launch up and see if they can find something. Now, to do that, we have to have a successful launch, which means we need to avoid a two or a 12 to have to roll on the malfunction chart. See if we get them up in the air. They are up in the air on a six, which is excellent. So, now we get an extra search in this zone here. See if we can come up with something. We get another nine, which is another futile search attempt. So, we're 0 for two so far. Not looking very good for us here. But, u we also have one other thing that we need to do. The search plane up in the air. We have to successfully recover it. Now, on a one or a two, our crew and pilot are lost forever. On a three to six, they're recovered. But, as you may recall, we have the aerial navigation. Gadat, our pilot has aerial navigation, which means we can add one to this die roll. So, hoping for something two or better. No problem. That's a super easy recovery for us. And the E14 Y1 is back safely attached to the tech go. And we are ready to move to the next station.
So, we are now in the midpoint here of our patrol. Let's hope we have some better luck here. We could use something good. Oh, yes. 11. This is good. Convoy. Time to go hunting. So, let us get this set up. All righty. So, the first thing we need to do with this is to determine whether it's day or night. And because this is a convoy, we're going to roll up three targets. In in this game, uh you roll three targets for potential convoys. They're always escorted. And the first thing we're going to do is determine whether it's day or night. On a 1, two, or three, it is day. A four, five, or six, it's night. Hoping for night. Yes. Excellent. Good. So, it is nighttime, which could give us some advantages here. I was going to go in anyway if it were daytime. But now the next thing we need to do is to roll up the ship sizes here. These are all part of a convoy. So we're going to roll three ships. On a 1 to four, they're small. On a five to six, they are big. So we'll just roll three dice all at once here. We get uh two small targets and one large target. Now I'm going to roll these up off camera and then talk about what we found here. So I will do that and then be right back. So our first small freighter is the Cynthia Olsen at 2,100 tons. Our second target here is the El Medina, 4,000 tons, which is a good size target for a small freighter. But our big prize here today is the William Williams, the interestingly named William Williams at 7,200 tons. So, that one is one we want to try to take down to the bottom here.
Now, for a large freighter like that, that's that many tons, 7,200 tons, it's going to take three damage to sink it. for the other ones, the two small freighters, it's going to take two damage to sink those. So, now it comes time for us to think about whether we want to try at night surface attack or in what range we're going to go at and then how we're going to allocate our torpedoes here to try to impact inflict maximum damage while also minimizing the likelihood that we can get spotted coming out. All righty, we've got a plan. We are actually not going to do a night surface attack cuz I want to give us a better chance to get away. And I think if things go well, we might be able to get these targets with this torpedo array. If we get one of them, that's good, right? That's a successful patrol. So, we're going to commit at medium range. Medium range gives us a 2 to seven chance to hit. Uh, and we're not doing a night surface attack, so there's no bonuses.
We just need a 2 to seven to hit with a torpedo. They will be duds on a one. Now the detection will be at a straight up two to eight die roll then because of this because basically we are uh not getting the the penalty for a night surface attack. So with duds at a one now we do have our shiboomi trait here that we can use to make like one torpedo automatically hit or make it not be a dud. Automatically hit would be the better mathematical choice for that of course. So let's start out with our two shots here at the El Medina and we're leaving the Cynthia Olsen alone. And we might be able to follow and get that one later here. But let's uh let's take a shot here at the El Medina. We'll take our first torpedo. We need a two to seven to hit. And one is a a dud. Ah, we miss. And we get a dud. So we got all our bad luck rolls out of there on the way. That would be the steam torpedo. By the way, the first one here, there is a difference in damage. We'll do the type 95 next. Get a 10 and a five. We miss badly. So 0 for two. Two torpedoes go sliding harmlessly by the El Medina. But this is the big fish now. The William Williams here, which is the one we really want to hit.
So, let's get fire three now. Seven and a five. Bang. Our first torpedo slams into the side of the William Williams here. Three more shots to go. We get a six and a five. Bang. Second hit. Now, we need three damage to sink this. Even with horribly bad damage rolls, we should be able to put Well, maybe. Yeah, we need another one here. Fire three on this one. An eight and a three is a miss. Fire four. And let's not use our Shiboomi roll yet. Let's see if we can I think two hits might be an idea. Get a seven and a two. Excellent. So, we slam into it with our third hit. So, this one misses and these two miss on the Elm Medina. Shame we didn't hit the Elm Medina. It would have been nice to follow that and sync that. But, let's now roll for damage. damage is down here on this chart with a torpedo. There are no modifiers cuz these are all type 95 torpedoes. So, it's just straight up die rolls. I'm going to roll all three dice here at once. We'll see what we get. We're looking for low numbers, but it doesn't really matter.
We get a 226. So, a two does three damage, a two does three damage, and a six does one damage. We do seven damage on the William Williams here and send it to the bottom of the sea. Excellent. We've got a successful patrol now. We've sunk the freighter, but now the escorts are coming for us. And this is perhaps the the biggest role we've got yet. Now, we can exceed test depth here, but we would take hall damage. So, I'm not going to do that yet. We are uh going to see how we can do. I'd like to escape if possible. I would like to escape without damaging the sub so we can get a faster refit and get right back out for our third mission. So this is to escort detection. We need a 2 to8 on the base roll. Nothing's been hit. It's not a steam torpedo in the day. Not T95 torpedoes which we were firing but not at close range during the day. No previous detection. None of these modifiers apply including the night surface attack because we passed on that one here. So u we need a 2 to eight to avoid detection. Bring out the lucky dice here now. Yes, four. We are away and off and free of the escorts. We have made a successful attack on the convoy.
We've taken down the William Williams. Excellent work to the crew of the Techco. Here we are in business. So, we've broken away from the escorts. And now, the nice thing about a convoy is that you can follow the convoy and re-engage it as if it's a completely new encounter because it's supposed that there are just a lot of different ships in here. To successfully co follow the convoy, we need a one to four. And if we get that, we get a brand new convoy encounter in this zone. We do. Yes. Excellent. We get a four. So, I am going to roll up the new set of ships and we will go right in. First, we need to see though if it's day or night. 1 2 or three, it's day. Four, five, or six, it is night. Ah, that sounds so good. It is day, which makes me think we might want to wait for night. Let me think about this. So before we decide whether we want to wait for nighttime, we can see what ships are in here. So I'm going to roll up the ships and see what kind of targets we have and then we'll decide whether we want to attack now or we're whether we're going to dis kind of wait around and wait for nighttime. So let's see what we get here. We get again two small freighters and a large freighter. So let's see what we roll up on the chart here. So we are going to go in and attack again. I think if we lose this convoy, this would probably be the last.
I mean, chances are we get these juicier targets again, and I don't want to risk losing it. So, what did we roll up? Well, we are in a section of the convoy that has uh this is the tanker we rolled up. It is a 5,300 ton stau romana, which would take three hits, three damage to sink it. Then we have the 2,200 Caribou, Caribou, which is over here. And then the Ice Fold, which is a small uh freighter, but it's 4,200 tons. So, it's a rather large small freighter, and it will only take two hits to sink it. So, I have a plan. Um, it is daytime, and the problem with these type 6 steam torpedoes is that during the daytime, they give the enemy plus one detection to find us on their things because they can basically see this, the bubbles in the water. So, we're going to come in at long range, which reduces our chances to hit to two to six. And there are no other D die roll modifiers here for anything else that's involved.
So we have two to six, but we have the Shibumi, which could guarantee one hit if we need it. So with that in mind, we're going to fire an array of three torpedoes at each of these targets and hope we sink one. If we get lucky, we might sink two. And I think we can use the Shibumi to guarantee a hit if we need it after we start seeing these torpedoes hit. So, let's start first with our attack on the u the what is this the big one here? Steo Romana 5,300 tons. And let's see how we do. If we would probably need two hits to sink this one, which is a little bit of a push here, but we get one big hit. We could sink it as well. So, let's uh fire one. Oh, nice. First shot. We get a three and a four means it's not a dud. A die roll of a one is a dud. So, our first torpedo slams into the side of the STE Romano.
That was good shooting. Fire team. Oh, eight and a six. It misses. Now, I'm actually going to pull out the We're going to pull out our Shiboomi here. And we're going to play it here. And what? So, this one missed. We're going to send this third Storter. We're going to use it. This is automatically going to guarantee a hit. We still have to roll for the dud, which would be a one. We got a We would have hit anyway, two to six, but it does. So, we've burned that up now on this mission. That's used up for this mission. But we get a second hit on the Stale Romana, which is good. Now, let's see if we can get one hit here on the small freighter. This is the ice ball. It's still 4,200 tons. The fourth torpedo is in the water. Yes. Wow. We are really on fire here. Our torpedo room is red hot. So, uh, one hit on the that could be enough to sink it.
A second hit would guarantee it. Fire. Oh, look at this. We are smoking hot. Wow. This is some good die rolling, some good torpedo firing. And our third torpedo. It's overkill, but it misses. Okay, so still very good start to us here. Let's roll for damage on this small one, the ice fold here, but we are pretty much guaranteed to take this one down because we've hit it twice. We're going to at least do one damage to it. And I believe there are no modifi Oh gosh, that's right. a type. So, plus one on the die roll for a type six torpedo. I forgot about that. So, we have to add one to these die rolls. That is I mean, we're going to get two hits and do two two damage. So, we're going to sink the small one, but it's going to make it harder to sink the large one. So, let's see what we get for our hits on the ice fold. First, we get a one and a four.
So, the one instead of doing four damage, it does three damage. The four instead of doing two damage, it does one damage. We do four damage on the ice vault, which only takes two hits. So, the icevold kilters over to its side and goes underneath the waves for gone for good. Our second ship sunk on this patrol. Now, we get two hits on the uh stale Romana. And we need three damage to sink it. So, a one would do it. Oh, that's terrible. Oh, that's the worst possible roll. We needed like a one, two, or three with any one of the dice. anything except that. So, a five does one damage. A six does one damage. We do two damage. Uh the torpedoes do two damage to this one here. So, it stays afloat. Now, we can follow this. I mean, first we have to survive it. So, that's the end of the attack round. Let's not get ahead of ourselves here. Now, we need to survive detection. So, we are at long range, which we need to survive detection. We need a two to eight. We're at long range, so it's minus one. and we get a plus one because we're using steam torpedoes during the day. So plus one minus one cancel each other out. We need an eight or less to avoid the escorts and the destro detection here.
Let's go. Oh, it gets real now. Okay, here comes the attacks on us here. So a 10. We are detected. Uh that's not good and very bad. So, let's see how we going to roll here to see how many hits we get here. Do we have any die roll modifiers? Electric motors, nope. Night surface attack, nope. 11 detection, nope. Aircraft attack, no. Nothing. So, we just have to roll on this escort air attack here. And we roll two dice. We're hoping for a very low number. Seven. That's not super low. We get two hits on our submarine here. So, now we have to roll for damage. Ah, these things can go sideways fast. Okay, so we're going to roll two dice. We're going to read the red dice first and look on the submarine damage chart. See what we get here. A red dice first is a 43. Flooding. Okay, so let me just double check how that works. So our flooding starts to uh create problems here. We do have a lot of capacity to take on water water here. So so far probably one of the milder spaces we could get some damage here on. And after this we can blow it completely out. Let's get the second hit on us now. 46, which is the anti-aircraft gun. So, our anti-aircraft gun is damaged. So, we've got a damage now on our anti-aircraft gun. That shouldn't be a problem unless we run into an aircraft. All in all, that could have been a lot worse. So, now we go to the next round of detection here. All
righty. So, the next round of detection, all the modifiers stay in place, I believe. So, the steam + one and the longrange minus one. However, um we have been detected in a previous round. So, it is now plus one. We need a 2 to 7 to escape. And the question is, do we want to try to dive to get take on some hull damage to give us a 2 to 8 to escape? And we are going to do that. So, we're going to exceed test depth, giving us uh one hull damage here. Now, it's not possible for this to cause the submarine to blow up because we can't roll less than a a one a one or less. So, that's not a problem. That gives us a another minus one die roll modifier. So that means that we instead of a 2 to 7, we need a 2 to eight. Let's hopefully we can escape this time. A seven. Oh, okay. So we have escaped. Um we've got a little bit of damage. Now we have to roll on this to see what happens here with the repairs. We can try to stem the flooding. Our engineer will go out and try to stem the flooding here.
But let's see if he can do that. stem the flooding. We need a one to four to be successful. Otherwise, the uh we'd have additional flooding, but it doesn't really matter. It does. So, Koi, our engineer, stems the flooding, but after the combat, the flooding is completely removed. So, we are able to to uh drain the submarine and pump out all the water and things are okay there. We did sustain that hull damage, which means if we do survive, it will be another round of retrofit here. Now, we can reload all the torpedoes here. We've only got five left. All steam again. And let's now as well see if we can fix the anti-aircraft gun. This again will be our engineer koi. Not looking good. Only a one or a two will fix it. Five. So our anti-aircraft gun is permanently damaged. You can Yeah. Inoperable. It is knocked out of action. So with that in mind, the next question is what do we do now? Okay. So this uh frighter, the ice fold is taken off the board.
This one is taken off the board and we are going to follow this large tanker. Now we have to first check to see if it stays escorted or not. So this is basically on a roll of one to four. Um they are still considered to be escorted. On a five or a six though the escorts abandon the tanker here, the ST Romano and leave it to its own fate which would make it indeed easy pickings for us. So let's see what happens with that. Yes, very nice. So we get the stale Romana by itself. There are no escorts here. We can come in basically and really just try to I think with re-engage with it here, but it's should be easy pickings. We should be able to finish it off here, I think, with our deck gun, which is still working. So, the first thing we do is to roll to see whether it's day or night, but it doesn't really matter at this. It's It is nighttime, which is fine. But we can come in because there's no escorts here. We're going to come in right on the surface here and we can use our deck gun. We're going to get two shots uh with our deck gun is the ammo that we can use. So, that's good. And that would be a two to eight to hit because we're at close range.
However, I don't want to risk missing this. So, we are actually going to fire two torpedoes at it as well. Um, that will leave us three torpedoes. If we pick up another ship or something like that, we might be able to have some attacks there. But I'm kind of guessing that this is going to be our last chance to attack something. So, we're going to let loose with two torpedoes and the deck gun. And I think we can fire the torpedoes first and then decide whether we want to shoot the deck gun to finish it off. But let's see what we can do with our torpedoes. So, we need a 2 to eight to hit normally, but we are at uh close range. That's 2 to eight and minus one because they're surface torpedoes. And there is nothing else here that's money. So we need a two to nine to hit. Fire one, a five, and a six. It hits. And that that's enough going to be enough to put it under water. If we get a three and a three, both torpedoes hit. We do not need to use our deck gun to finish it off. We get two more hits on the tanker.
Now these torpedoes are plus one, but we only need to damage it once more. So let's see what we get for damage. Those that's the roll we needed last time. So the one here does three damage. The two does three damage cuz we add one to it. Six hits here on the Staw Romana and the tanker sinks to the bottom of the ocean. We have put another ship under. Now we can because this was only one round, we can just escape the scene here and leave the ship to its demise. And we've cleaned that one up. And so because we followed the target now, I believe that is our second considered our second round of content. It just says I think after this you go next to the next station. So I think that means not 100% sure based on the way the rules are written but I think that means our time on this station is up because we followed the convoy. So we go to the next onstation patrol. Now we've only got three torpedoes left and our chances of finding something. Finding that convoy was extremely good fortune here. But let's see what happens for our next location. We get an eight which is nothing.
Now the question is, do we want to risk losing our scout plane to go one more? I mean, if we got a three, that's our only chance really to get a ship. I don't think we can take a warship down with it. Depends what we got with three torpedoes left. Yeah, let's launch our scout plane and see what happens. So, a 2 to 12. It's a successful launch. We get a seven. Our scout plane is up. We're going to get one more search here. Let's see what we get. a seven which is a warship but not before July 1942. So that's another nothing. So no success there. Now we do have to retrieve our search plane. We need a two or better to retrieve it for get our search plane crew back safely on hand. Excellent recovery attempts. And with that our patrol action for the most part it depends on what we run into on the way back. We have two transit zones to get through to reach back to our port in Yokoska. Let's see what we get here. For the first one, we get a five.
We're through the first transit zone and our last transit zone. We get a seven. No worries. We have successfully completed our patrol. Damage sustained. We've survived our first depth charge attack. Yet, we were able to knock out three ships here. Excellent. And with that, the Iron Shark is successfully back in base in Yokoska. We've sustained some damage to the submarine. So, the hull damage will mean it will take us an extra month to refit. So, April goes by, that was a two-month patrol for this sub. So, April and May, June and July will be back out to sea in August of 1942. But this patrol uh three ships sunk. The William Williams at 7,200 tons, the Stour Romana at 5,300 tons, a tanker, and then a small freighter Icevold at 4,200 tons, giving us a 16,500 ton tour here. This was a successful patrol indeed. Three ships sunk, giving us a total of five total ships sunk for 20,400 tons in our career so far. Now, interestingly enough, this gives us a another successful mission, which is our third mission. And that means we get to pick a skill point from our list. And the one I want to pick here is keen judgment. Keen judgment, I think, can help us a lot. It allows us once per patrol, once per patrol to not take hull
damage when we exceed test depth. So in essence, it gives us one time we can get a minus one die roll modifier for free without having to worry about the hull taking on any damage. So that would allow us like on this patrol for example, that would mean we would only have a one-mon refit instead of a two-month refit. So I think that will be very helpful in combat and a good one to have. So our engineer Koi who did a great job stopping the flooding and then he didn't fix the anti-aircraft gun, but stopping the flooding was key. So Koi has leveled up with his keen judgment. And that brings us to the end of our second patrol here. And I'm going to do uh one more patrol. So our third and final patrol of this mini campaign will be coming up again in about a week or so. Thanks for watching. I look forward to hearing your comments.