Game: Electronic Battleship Advanced Mission

Thread: Re: Red and Blue planes

smithnewz — 2008-07-06T07:26:47+00:00

Hi. Not sure if you're still wanting a reply to your question of late last year, but in case you do, my copy came with 3 red plane pieces and 3 blue plane pieces - consistent with what jeffk says above. [They can sometimes be difficult to find in amongt the mass of other pieces though ...]

Thread: Re: Red and Blue planes

jeffk — 2007-12-16T05:10:59+00:00

You only need two red and two blue planes - one of each per player. I think the game came with a spare red and a spare blue plane, but I can't remember at the moment.

Thread: Red and Blue planes

electricvomit — 2007-12-16T02:25:36+00:00

So, I have acquired two copies of this game in my thrifting days. In the instructions there is a mention of 6 blue and 6 red planes, but when I inventory the games, I cannot find these. Does anyone know if there are specific plane pieces or are they just the blue pegs included?

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LarryKruger — 2007-02-18T18:47:07+00:00

Special Attacks

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LarryKruger — 2007-02-18T18:46:23+00:00

Recon One & Two

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LarryKruger — 2007-02-18T18:45:42+00:00

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LarryKruger — 2007-02-18T18:44:59+00:00

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Gialmere — 2006-11-15T06:12:40+00:00

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belial1134 — 2006-09-09T03:19:24+00:00

Thread: A Saturday game with my wife.

SliverXII — 2006-04-23T01:48:50+00:00

For about two weeks my wife was asking to play Battleship. It's definately not my favorite game, but my wife likes it. After all she did take the time to learn to play Caylus, and even beat me by 2 points. So I decided that we could play a game while our 14 month old son was taking a nap. We actually played two games.

The first game was with Salvo mission rules(1 shot per unsunk ship every turn). I had the uncanny ability to hit and find a ship almost every turn in this game and won easily with three ships untouched.

The next game we played with the Advanced Mission rules. We both fire our sub's torpedoes in the first couple of turns. My wife hit my Destroyer and my Patrol Boat with the first 2 torpedo shots. I hit her Submarine and Battleship with mine. She made the mistake of letting me know that I had hit her Sub on the first shot. I immediately did what I could to take it down, taking away her sonar scan abilities. We both worked to take out these ships before moving on to others. She had found my Battleship during this time and took it down. I was able to fire of the Battleship's Tomahawk missle before it was sunk, but the entire shot missed. Using my Sub's sonar scan I found a lot of clear waters and eventually found another ship. I fired an Exocet missile from my Aircraft Carrier, in the area I detected the enemy ship, scoring two hits on her Destroyer, which I sunk on the next turn with a regular shot. While scanning with her Recon planes, she had found my Submarine around this time. I tell her I'm gonna risk wasting a turn and fire my Anti-Aircraft gun at the recon culprit. "Bird Down!" the game says.

"How did you know where that was?" she said.

I responded, "I just figured that you'd be scanning from the corner. See how I know you." She did not like my response, but the game continued.

After taking down the Destroyer I make a couple of quick sonar scans before my sub goes down and find her Aircraft Carrier. She also found my Carrier which was my last ship. I rushed and sank her Carrier. Now with 3 hits left on my Carrier, I had quite a few holes to be looking to find this little Patrol Boat. Luckily, she had hit the middle of the Carrier. So I was pretty sure I had 4 shots left. She fires a shot, misentering the coordinate skipping one space for a miss. Now I know I have 3 shots before I lose. I begin babbling about how my screen is full of areas that this ship could be in, including the entire J row untouched. She tells me it's on the bottom half of the board. Why does she give me hints? I don't know. I fire J-10 and miss. She fires another hit to my Carrier. Next I fire J-8 and hit! My wife can't believe it. She hits my Carrier again. Unfortunately, I have three directions to go with this ship and only one shot to fire. I take a guess and fire I-8...HIT! The ship is sunk. My wife wonders why she gives me hints.

While I won't choose to pull this game out until my son is old enough, my wife enjoys it...and to be honest, I have fun too. That's what games are for anyway.

-Mike

Thread: A Battleship, Advanced Mission Strategy guide

ianh — 2006-04-04T13:56:49+00:00

First, a little review of the game:

The three versions of classic battleship are not worth mentioning (but I mention them anyway.) They're mindless and boring, and if you want to play them just use the boards and pieces without the computer.
The Advanced Mission, however, is a big improvement; it actually involves some tactics!

This is my evaluation of the strategy of the game. I will devide the game into four phases: setup, opening, midgame and endgame.

+ Setup
The main thing here is to minimize the places that a battleship missile could hit two ships in one shot. This is not hard, and it reduces the probability that your opponent will find a ship by accident while sinking another.
Another thing is to try to leave as many rows and columns completely empty as possible, to let torpedos through. Very rarely will your opponent miss with both his torpedos, and, even if he does, he gains a tremendous amount of information, which is about as good as hitting a ship in the long run. This game, however, is all about the short run, because you need to get good use out of your missiles before they sink with the ships that carry themk. One more thing about anti-torpedo formations: Your sub is your most valuable ship so, if you can, put it in the most torpedo-sheltered area.
Put your recon planes at least 4 squares apart. Next to the PT boat, they are the least important element of your fleet, but you should try to get at least one off, since they can be useful in the endgame.

+ Opening
If you play against the computer at level 3, you'll notice that the first thing he always does is to shoot a torpedo. That's a good strategy. Do it.
Torpedos are the best guarantee for hitting something, and you want to hit something as soon as possible. Use them early. Torpedos are not missiles; since they only hit one square, they are only good for finding ships, not sinking them. You need to find the ship before you sink it, therefore you should use your torpedos before your missiles.

After you shoot torpedoes, get your sub busy pinging! Use sonar whenever possible. You have an unlimited supply, and you want to get as much use out of it as you can; the missiles can wait until they're just about to go under or you have a target you need to sink quickly.

+ Midgame
There are two ways to use your turns and your missiles, offensively and defensively.

Offensive play defaults to using sonar or, if your sub is sunk, to recon scanning or single shots (whichever is more time efficient.) As a rule, you shouldn't use missiles on a whim; use sonar, recon or single shots to get a good target picture first.
Offensive missile use should be limited to sinking an enemy ship before it can use a missile or launch planes, or when you know the missile will get at least three or four hits.

Defensive play consists of scrambling planes, blindly launching missiles that are about to go under and getting those last few pings out of your sinking sub. There's not much tactics here, just common sense; don't waste your missiles by letting them sink unused. When you have to fire a missile defensively, you should use it where it will cover the most unknown area and increase your knowledge of the enemy position the most. Don't use your missiles where one or two single-shots would do the job.

A word about the blue pegs:
The blue pegs serve two very different purposes: to mark recon scan contacts and positive sonar scans. You need to make a visible distinction between the two. I use two blue pegs stacked to mark the center of a sonar scan. If there is already a peg there, stack just one blue on top.

Remember: When you score a hit or have a positive enemy contact inside the area of a sonar scan, the scan has no further significance, and you should remove the pegs. There is no inherent reason that the probability of more enemy ship being in the scan area should be greater than in any other place.

Use blue pegs to mark recon sightings, but also mark any other place that you know there is a ship but that you have not fired on yet. This is important because it is bad tactics to finish off an enemy ship that has fired all of its missiles and planes and has, therefore, no further reason to exist. Remember that you need to find useful things for your missiles and sonar to do before they are sunk; finishing off a helpless ship with single shots wastes turns with missile potential. There will be time enough to sink them later when you have no missiles left, but you need to mark their positions to remind you that that ship has not been sunk yet.

+ Endgame
When you have no missiles left, it's just about eliminating possibilities and pinning down the other guy's ships to be finished off with single shots in the shortest possible time. To do this, use sonar until either your sub is sunk, or you have scanned the entire board. Then use recon planes and single shots in conjunction. Lots of people complain about how weak and useless the planes are, but this is when they come into their own. Remember that it takes two turns to move and scan, so only use the plane when you can do what it would take three or more single shots to do. Also, don't forget that you can make two scans in different patterns without moving, and use two scans in the same place whenever useful. Just use common sense so that you don't waste turns.

Conclusion:
When you come right down to it, the game is decided almost completely by luck. The tactics and strategies I have outlined above will only tip the balance very slightly in your favor. Battleship AM is, in fact, only slightly less based on luck than the regular version, but, for some reason which I will not attempt to analyze here, it's way more fun! So I hope this article makes this game more fun for you, and that you now realize that BAM is actually more than just a mindless guessing game.

Thread: An upgrade for a light classic

SliverXII — 2006-01-04T01:08:41+00:00

Electronic Battleship Advanced Mission adds a little bit of strategy to a classic game that was the boardgame equivilent of blindly shooting fish in a barrel. The game maintains the same goal as it's predecessor, but now prevents your opponent from cheating by moving their ships. It also allows you to play solo against the computer if you'd like in all modes.

Electronic Battleship Advanced Mission has 4 different gameplay modes.
Classic Mission is the standard Battleship rules.
Salvo Mission allows you to fire once for each ship you have that is still afloat.
Bonus Mission plays with the standard rules, but allows you another turn immediately after scoring a hit.
And Advanced Mission which gives different weapons/abilities to individual ships and also gives you 2 recon planes.

In Advanced Mission all ships except the patrol boat gains special weapons. The battleship gains a Tomahawk missile that hits in a 3x3 square, but may only be fired once. The aircraft carrier get 2 Exocet missiles that hit with 2 firing patterns to choose from. Both patterns hit 5 spaces in a 3x3 square either in a '+' or an 'x' pattern. The destroyer can fire 2 Apache missiles that hit in 3 consective spaces, your choice of either vertical or horizontal. The submarine has 2 torpedoes which when fired start from one edge of the play area and continues until it hits or goes of the other side of the play area. You can also fire an AA gun to try and take down the recon planes, but it is hardly worth it since you have to figure their exact location to hit them and you could be firing on ships instead.

Besides the weapons there is now reconnaisance. The submarine can also scan a 3x3 square with sonar. This tells you if a ship is present in any of the 9 spaces you scanned, but no exact coordinates. You also have 2 recon planes which you can move or scan with. The planes can scan the 4 squares directly adjacent or diagonal from their current positions. However, when they scan a coordinate with a ship present they will give you that information. If you choose to scan or move a plane on a turn you forfeit firing for that turn.

The additions in the Advanced Mission mode do give some additions to the old game as well as speed the game up a bit. It also gives some worth to the individual ship, since if a ship is sunk before it can fire it's corresponding missiles they are gone. The submarine is especially valuable for locating ships faster. You do feel a loss if you lose this one early in the game.

Entering commands is relatively easy. You have to make sure you are paying attention when the game is telling you the results of the last shot. There is a button to repeat the last shot, but if it was your Tomahawk missile you will hear all 9 results again.

This is a good game for younger players and fans of the classic game, but like many electronic games it gets old after a bit.

Thread: Advanced Guessing Game

Quik_Fix — 2006-01-03T19:37:30+00:00

Advanced Mission is the latest iteration of the classic Battleship game that we've all played since infancy. The basic premise of the game holds true here; the object of the game is to locate your opponents five ships on a large grid board and sink them before he does the same to you. In the classic version of the game, you had the option of alternating turns regardless of outcome, allowing successful shots to result in an additional turn, or the dreaded "salvo" game, which involved firing once for each ship shill afloat on your side each turn.

Advanced Mission builds on these basic game modes and adds its own spice. First off, if you've ever played other typed of Electronic Battleship, then you will be very accustomed to AV. Turning on the game results in some good old tinny sound effects and a lithium-female voice asking you to input number of players (yes you can play against teh computer). Included in the rulebook are several ship setup configurations you can choose from for setting out our units. These make it easier to get the game started, as all you have to do it select a configuration, enter the code for your choice, and place your ships according to the diagram. You can choose to place your ships manually, but you will have to enter the location of each ship into the computer before starting. If both players do this, it will be 10-15 mintues before the game begins.

Players can choose from the classic game variations mentioned above, but for your money's worth, the option to pick is to play the Advanced Mission. In this variation of the game, each ship has its own special firing pattern that can be used once per game. The firing patterns are clearly explained, and are pictured on the game unit itself. If a ship is sunk before you use the special ability, it is lost. The special abilities don't vary much, with the exception of the submarine, which allows you to launch a "torpedo" down any row on the board. The torpedo will check every space in that row, stopping only if it makes contact with an enemy vessel, at which point it will tell you the spot where it made contact.

In addition to the new firing options, players can also launch two planes from their aircraft carriers. If the carriers are sunk before the planes take off, they are lost. The planes are used in the upper grid, and can be used to "scan" for enemy craft using two different scanning patterns, variations that scan the 3x3 space surrounding the plane. Instead of firing, a player may use a turn to either scan with their plane or move it to a new location. The pegs used in AV have holes in them that allow the planes to be pushed in on top of them. This allows the planes to be put anywhere on the grid, regardless of peg positioning. If the plane scan detects a ship, it will simply tell you that a ship has been located in one of the spaced it scanned. The game comes with blue pegs that can be used to mark areas that have been scanned and may contain enemy ships, but need to be fired upon.

In order to combat these little snoops, each player also has the option of spending a turn to fire his "anti-aircraft" gun to try and blow his opponents planes out of the sky. By listenting to the scanning results of the other player's planes, one may be able to guess the location of the enemy plane and fire upon it. The anti-aircraft gun can only fire at one spot on the grid at a time.

Play continues as in the classic game, until one player is devoid of ships and his opponents declared master and commander of the high seas!

Now onto the nit-picking.

Design & Quality: 6/10
In an effort to be non-biased, I will say that the've done a good job of the overall game design. Both lower grids fold up and lock against the center of the console, and recessed handles on the bottom of each wing edge make it each to carry if you don't have the box with. The bottom grid opens like a lid to store the ships and planes, and a storage bin on each side of the center console store the massive amount of pegs. The storage bins have grey soft-plastic lids to keep the pegs in, and during gameplay these lids are opened to reveal the different special abilities available to your ships. The Grids are made of translucent plue hard plastic to simulate the ocean, and the buttons for entering coordinates are well placed at close to each player.

The sound on AV is terrible. My wife and I frequently play games at the coffee shop, and we were sad to find that the basic background noise of an empty coffe shop completely drowned out the sound coming from this game. I understand that some parent somewhere is very grateful for this, but they should have had the forethought of sound level options. Even when playing at home, there must be no noise at all to hear what is happening. The designers thoughtfully added a "repeat" button in case you missed something, but we frequently found ourselves in an odd ducking position usually reserved for fire drills, trying to hear what happened.

The pegs that come with the game are soft plastic to allow them to be adequately pressed into the hard plastic ocean grids. However, several of the holes on the grid are not small enough to properly hold the pegs, and several times we had pegs fall from our upper grid, bringing with it a piece of vital information that we may not be able to replace if we didn't see where it came from. On the other hand, some of the holes were so tight that it took a ridiculous amount of effort to remove them from the board. In classic battleship, this would not have been an issue until the end of the game, but in AV, there are several occasions in which you need to replace blue pegs with red or white. If you need to remove a stuck peg and pull too hard, your loose pegs will rain down from your grid. This is a major flaw for a game in which the entire mechanic depends on those little pegs being in the right place.

Rulebook: 10/10
Well written and organized.

Gameplay: 3/10
Here's the gist: I'm going to put a nickel in one of my hands, and then I'm going to put my hands behind my back. Now you guess which hand the nickel is in! Repeat five times. That, unfortunately, is the overall gameplay of Battleship in all its variations. Very little strategy can be squeezed out of a game in which the basic concept is to simply guess where the other player's ships are located.

AV tries to improve on this gameplay with the addition of special firing options and planes, but the result is the same. The airplanes are a throwaway feature that are difficult to use in practice. It requies a full turn to launch a plane. After you've scanned in one location, is takes a full turn to move the plane to a new location. The planes do nothing but tell you that some part of a ship is somewhere in a 3x3 area. The next turn you can fire on it. That's three turns to fire at a ship based on an educated guess rather than an uneducated guess. You could instead use those three turns to fire three times at the same 3x3 grid in a diagonal, and at least have the three chances of hitting something. But should you decide to use the planes, the worst part is how the games suggests you mark its scanning area with pegs.... 9 BLUE PEGS to show where its scanning. Then as you fire within that area, remove the blue pegs and replace them with red or white. This is where you must have the skills of a Shinobi warrior to prevent the masochistic loose pegs from hurling themselves into the peg pit below. The amount of peg swapping in the game is absurd, and yet another reason to ignore the planes.

The special firing options add some needed pizazz to the normal game, but also result in wicked peg-pushing. For example, should you decide to launch a torpedo from your sub, and it flies along the entire row without hitting a blessed thing, you must now add 14 WHITE PEGS to the board. Even if the other player takes his turn while you do this, you may still not be done cramming those pegs in.

Replayability: 3/10
Hey, this is just my rating. The fact of the matter is that Advanced Mission sits unused in my closet, trumped even by the likes of Boggle and Monopoly when it comes time to play a game. I know that others would certainly see it differently. I know my kids love to play it. And I love watching them, because being a kid means you have NO CHOICE but to cheat and peek over the center console. If their Xmas gifts were right in the next room, they'd look at those too. That's just their nature. But there must be something about Battleship because its still everywhere.

Overall Score: 4/10
I'm a game geek. This is not a good geek game. Let's face it. Kids love Battleship because its easy to play and fun to cheat at :-). There is little or no strategy, the peg holes are poorly sized, the special options don't really enhance game much, the speaker is poor, and my kids want to play it all the time. If you're an adult, don't bother with this game. If you're buying for a ten year old, this will be right up their alley.

Thread: Advanced Guessing Game

Quik_Fix — 2006-01-03T19:36:32+00:00

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Gialmere — 2005-12-04T19:02:06+00:00

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Urhixidur — 2003-07-07T12:27:27+00:00

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Urhixidur — 2003-07-07T12:27:26+00:00