@Young:
I think giving the Cruiser a damage capability (2 hits to sink) automatically balances, and justifies their 12 IPC price, however, Battleships now become obsolete under this rule and need a boost to balance and justify their 20 IPC cost. Giving Battleships 3 hits to sink is unnecessarily complicated making naval battles long and frustrating, but there are abilities that can be given to Battleships that make more sense than making Cruisers too powerful. So if Cruisers, Aircraft Carriers, and Battleships all require 2 hits to sink, an ability or two has to be given to Battleships which I believe is a better discussion than what to give Cruisers.
This is a tough one to decide because, if Global 1940 were more realistic, a carrier itself would actually require only 1 hit to be sunk, not 2. WWII carriers with heavily armoured flight decks (like the British Illustrious class) were the exception, not the norm. Most carriers of the time were quite vulnerable to dive-bombing attacks because of this lack of armour, and for other reasons: their flight deck elevators, if open, allowed a bomb to drop right into the ship’s interior, and their flight decks (if you caught them at a bad moment, as happened to the Japanese at Midway) and their internal hangars (most of the time) often housed large quantities of explosive ordnance and of aviation fuel. The Japanese battleships Yamato and Musashi both absorbed great numbers of torpedo and bomb hits before sinking, whereas the four Japanese carriers at Midway were fatally damaged by just a few bombs each.
I can nevertheless understand why, for game reasons, the OOB rules give carriers the same two-hits-to-destroy capacity as battleships. Both units are expensive (battleship = 20, carrier = 16), so the sinking of either unit is a big loss. For the battleship, this risk of sinking is partially offset by its defensive rating of 4 (which I’d say is valid historically). The carrier, on the other hand, only has a defensive rating of 2. This too is valid historically, but it means that the carrier is more vulnerable than the battleship. If carriers didn’t have a two-hits-to-destroy capacity, this would make them even juicier targets than they are now, and would serve as a disincentive to their purchase.
Should cruisers likewise be granted a a two-hits-to-destroy capacity, for the same reason that carriers have this capacity? As I said, that’s a tough one to decide…but my inclination would be to say no. Cruisers cost less than carriers (12 versus 16) and have a higher defensive rating (3 versus 2), so in my opinion they have less need than carriers for the 2-hit capacity because cruisers are less likely to be sunk and less of a financial loss if they do get sunk. And in terms of historical accuracy, their defensive rating of 3 (more than a carrier, less than a battleship) accurately reflects the fact that cruisers tended to be more heavily armoured than carriers and less heavily armoured than battleships.
