SGWAS: Fleets - Imperial Germany Book

Our Second Great War at Sea expansion sets (as well as a complete game) bring this story to our Second World War at Sea game series. New ships, new aircraft and even new fleets see action in the Second Great War – it’s a battleship war, also featuring airships and biplanes.

The Imperial German Navy, usually called the High Seas Fleet (the proper name of its sea-going surface element), is one of this world’s most powerful fleets, with ships ranging from modernized veterans of the First Great War through new fast battleships. While these ships never existed, we’ve designed them along the lines of German warship development and these are our best guess at what Imperial Germany would have built had the regime survived.

It’s an impressive fleet, as befits this world’s second-leading industrial power (behind the United States): 41 battleships and 27 battle cruisers, plus all of the cruisers and destroyers needed to round out the battle fleet. There are two aircraft carriers and five helicopter carriers, and sixteen aircraft-carrying zeppelins.

Unlike the High Seas Fleet of the First Great War, this iteration is no luxury. Imperial Germany needs that fleet to protect the overseas ties to its second-largest trading partner (after Austria-Hungary), the United States. German-American economic ties have blossomed over the last two decades, and even with hefty grain imports from Poland and from Austrian Ukraine, Germany cannot feed itself. The High Seas Fleet has to defend the supply line across the North Atlantic, in the face of French and Russian – and eventually British – attacks.

In the book, each warship class (most of them found in The Cruel Sea, with some from upcoming expansion sets) is described, with ship data similar to that found in warship guides of our own world, and some schematics of their design.

It’s a fun add-on to The Cruel Sea and other Second Great War games, filling out the background and making this world that never existed a little more real.