Actually the guns on these ship weren't extremely accurate. I'm and old board gamer (Oh ye who are to young to remember the days before the PC
)and the guys that made those board games were just as into there realism as the computer jocks. Your hit percentage counted on several modifiers (some of which we don't have to deal with because we fire the guns) that most of the time brought the hit percentage down below 10%. It takes a lot of rounds to sink a ship normally just do to the fact that you miss a lot. Not that first salvo kills never happened but it wasn't the norm. One of the things that effects the accuracy of shore bombardment is the lack of a good spotting system. During shore bombardment your using indirect fire most of the time (meaning you can't see the target). It's in those cases you need spotter planes, vehicles, or people. Without spotters (as in real life) your just firing at an estimated target pint on the map for effect. Of course if you can directly fire on the target you can spot your own rounds.
I'll give you a list of modifiers from an old board game that will give you a feel for the accuracy of the naval guns:
Ship type, bigger ships are steadier gun platforms
Gun type, main guns had the best fire control and secondary guns were poorly equipped relatively speaking.
Main gun fire control will suffer if one of the gunnery directors is knocked out.
Nationality, different countries had better optics and radar.
Crew quality.
Crew fatigue.
Salvo count, simply with each round you fire the accuracy of or targeting goes up.
Visibility.
If your doing evasive maneuvering or just making a turn.
Sea state, how rough the sea is.
Size of the target ship.
The number of ships firing at the target ship.
Aspect, the angle that the target ship is at retaliative to you.
Speed.
Turning.
Information level, meaning have you determined what ship it is.
Again I'll say that after adding up these modifiers your chance to hit would drop to 10% or less most of the time. Again don't discount it because it's a board game. The navies of the world used the same type of system to simulate battles for strategy and planning before the computer. Like I said we don't have to deal with many of these because we fire the guns and there's no sea conditions.
