Havana 1748

[MengJiao]

  I'm running a small sea battle based loosely on an action off Havana in 1748.  None of the ship names fit (there is an Invincible, but in 1748 she was Spanish and
was wrecked as a result of this action) but the ship characteristics are roughly right (RN has moderate guns and relatively small and weak ships -- Spanish slightly undergunned but relatively solid ships of New World timber) -- all crews are poor -- due as much to the strange signal systems of the time as anything else.

   One unexpected thing: turn-in-succession -- not sure this should work as smoothly as it does here.  I'll try again but with a crew check for making the turn (fail and go early or late).

[GJK]

What game is this?

[MengJiao]

What game is this?

  Flying Colors.  I'm trying some minor mods out on it.  (crew checks: sail states, gunnery, turns)

[MengJiao]

What game is this?

  Flying Colors.  I'm trying some minor mods out on it.  (crew checks: sail states, gunnery, turns)

Okay, a messy Turn by the Spanish and the RN has the classic problem of attacking from the leeward, which is that you close slowly and fall behind, so you can try to hit the rear of the enemy or edge up on the van and the whole time the enemy has perfectly good shots at you.

Another possibility is to go behind the enemy without engaging too much and get to the windward and then attack.

[MengJiao]

What game is this?

  Flying Colors.  I'm trying some minor mods out on it.  (crew checks: sail states, gunnery, turns)

Okay, a messy Turn by the Spanish and the RN has the classic problem of attacking from the leeward, which is that you close slowly and fall behind, so you can try to hit the rear of the enemy or edge up on the van and the whole time the enemy has perfectly good shots at you.

Another possibility is to go behind the enemy without engaging too much and get to the windward and then attack.

   The English decide to close (which they did in 1748) and put up more sail (which makes them more vulnerable to fire).    The Spanish can close and shoot up the head of the English (which they did without much success in 1748).  Or try something sneakier...Not sure what.  The English might move first in the next turn anyway.

[GJK]

Pretty neat stuff.  Beyond reading and watching "Master & Commander", I don't know a lot about the age of sail.  What's the complexity level on this game?  Is it like Star Fleet Battles on the seas or something a good bit more manageable?  I see that there's a number of copies available on BGG for a reasonable price.

[MengJiao]

Pretty neat stuff.  Beyond reading and watching "Master & Commander", I don't know a lot about the age of sail.  What's the complexity level on this game?  Is it like Star Fleet Battles on the seas or something a good bit more manageable?  I see that there's a number of copies available on BGG for a reasonable price.

  For a sailing game -- it is not at the upper end of the complexity scale.  The designer says if you want complexity you should use Close Action.  I'm using a few rules from Close Action to add to the complexity -- BUT in many ways Flying Colors is a more robust system so you can add chrome (and there is some chrome -- for example a card-using one-ship-on one ship battle system).  I've sort of lost track of what is simple and what is complex since my current aim is to make the battles as full of things gong wrong as the real battles were.

   But still -- there are some simplifications in Flying Colors: no ship cards or ship sheets-- everything about a ship is on the counter or in the markers on the counter.
                                                                                             no plotting (but there is a good command-control and impulse system)
                                                                                             no crew quality checks
                                                                                             Somewhat simplified gunnery
                                                                                             only two voluntary sail states (dismasted being involentary)
                                                                                             plays on a hex grid (but then so does Close Action)

   But since more complex games assume every ship is capable of executing its logged orders, Flying Sail works better for actually simulating battles with more than one ship on each side (if you add all the things-going-wrong that I am adding).

[MengJiao]

Pretty neat stuff.  Beyond reading and watching "Master & Commander", I don't know a lot about the age of sail.  What's the complexity level on this game?  Is it like Star Fleet Battles on the seas or something a good bit more manageable?  I see that there's a number of copies available on BGG for a reasonable price.

   The battle rolls on.  The Spanish roll and get the first move.  They move all the ships (one command group) within 5 (the command range = ca 750 yds) of the
commander.  Now the English have their impulse.  Most of the ships got their additional sails up last turn as ordered.  The flagship "failed" (though that turns out to be tactically good at the moment since ships are in range = ca 1500 yds and having more sails out makes damage from gunfire more likely) but since they are reaching and coming in range probably just as well.  The English might chose to move their out-of-command ships individually before moving the commanded body -- in my version the only penalty for being out of command is you don't get to move in the commanded impulse.  Command (ie signals) were so unbelievably bad in sea fights up to say 1794 that being-in-or out of command did not reduce the overall flow of things going wrong.  For example suppose Plan A was "Double the enemy rear".  There would be a signal that would say something like "Plan A" and the flagship would run it up.  Then everybody was supposed to just go do that even if the enemy reversed course (what's the rear then?) etc. etc.  Sometimes the flagship would run up two more or less contradictory orders as in "Engage your opposite" and "Line of Battle" and there was no concept of "execute"  (ie signal hauled down in later terms) or even acknowledgement.

   Anyway...we can assume both sides are signalling "Plan A" or Plan B" and that the ships are mostly just trying to support the flagship which is what most battles came down to at one point or another.

[MengJiao]

Pretty neat stuff.  Beyond reading and watching "Master & Commander", I don't know a lot about the age of sail.  What's the complexity level on this game?  Is it like Star Fleet Battles on the seas or something a good bit more manageable?  I see that there's a number of copies available on BGG for a reasonable price.

   The battle rolls on.  The Spanish roll and get the first move.  They move all the ships (one command group) within 5 (the command range = ca 750 yds) of the
commander.  Now the English have their impulse.  Most of the ships got their additional sails up last turn as ordered.  The flagship "failed" (though that turns out to be tactically good at the moment since ships are in range = ca 1500 yds and having more sails out makes damage from gunfire more likely) but since they are reaching and coming in range probably just as well.  The English might chose to move their out-of-command ships individually before moving the commanded body -- in my version the only penalty for being out of command is you don't get to move in the commanded impulse.  Command (ie signals) were so unbelievably bad in sea fights up to say 1794 that being-in-or out of command did not reduce the overall flow of things going wrong.  For example suppose Plan A was "Double the enemy rear".  There would be a signal that would say something like "Plan A" and the flagship would run it up.  Then everybody was supposed to just go do that even if the enemy reversed course (what's the rear then?) etc. etc.  Sometimes the flagship would run up two more or less contradictory orders as in "Engage your opposite" and "Line of Battle" and there was no concept of "execute"  (ie signal hauled down in later terms) or even acknowledgement.

   Anyway...we can assume both sides are signalling "Plan A" or Plan B" and that the ships are mostly just trying to support the flagship which is what most battles came down to at one point or another.

   A few remarks on opening fire and gunnery.  Gunnery was definitely a crew quality thing.  Good gun crews got significantly more hits.  I've tried to get this into the game by allowing all ships as much as two full broadsides a turn.  Since a turn is around 5 minutes, that was technically possible.  The catch is that the second broadside (if attempted) can fail to happen and in any case whether successful or not, the second broadside has a 50% chance of inflicting one hull hit on the ship that fires (or fails to fire) the broadside.  The self-inflicted hull damage relfects two things: guns exploding and guns straining the hull.  Hot guns released the explosive power of gunpowder much more efficiently and firing hot guns could strain the hull.  I have discounted the first-broadside gets special mods because it is obviously observationally biased and hot guns demonstrably fired shot with significantly greater velocities.  So it makes more sense in my version of the game to open fire at long range -- which was quite common at the time.

  The Spanish Open fire at about 900 yds and score some hits:

[MengJiao]

   Both sides trade broadsides at 600-700 yds.  The English are unlucky and take more hits anyway due to having their sails out and to the Spanish firing high.

   The English flagship, Hercules, is on fire and the Swiftsure is Pretty shot up.  The Invincible is undamaged.

[bayonetbrant]

how's your game comparing to the history?

[GJK]

Would miniatures work with Flying Colors?  It looks like it would be a fun table top mini's game.

[bayonetbrant]

Would miniatures work with Flying Colors?  It looks like it would be a fun table top mini's game.

or Legos! ;D

[MengJiao]

how's your game comparing to the history?

  Historically, there was a big fight around the flagships, as seen here, but the Spanish got the worst of it, though the fight was indecisive.  No Spanish ships were captured, but two (inlcuding the flagship) were wrecked the next day.  The Spanish commander was tried for incompetence -- but in the 1740s and 1750s there were a lot of trials of commanders in a lot of navies.  The English shot one admiral for generally not being aggressive enough.
  I was trying out a kind of worst case scenario for the English and the worst case seems to have happened: they try to close too fast and are shot up in the rigging at over 500 yds.  At this point, they should disengage if they can.  Swiftsure is going to be slow with half its rigging shot away.
  Now on the face of it this kind of result contradicts the supposed superiority of the English tactic of shooting at hulls at close range on the grounds that only that kind of fire was decisive -- but I think that is a misreading of English successes of the post 1794 period and a reading back of that later world onto the events that formed it.
  A standard reading of why the English tended to win at sea (which in fact was not particularly true before 1794) was that their foes shot at rigging and this didn't work.  The gunnery/command/sail system I'm working on will show -- I hope -- that shooting high (not so much just at rigging) can be very effective.  A few slight modifications to the Flying Colors system seems to be showing that here.

[MengJiao]

Would miniatures work with Flying Colors?  It looks like it would be a fun table top mini's game.

  It would work.  Close Action is often played with minis and Flying Colors is a derviative of that game.  You could have a way of recording
things about the ship (hits, sails, anchored, guns fired) in some area away from the minis.  Close Action has sheets for that, but for Flying Colors you could just have the chits on the off-board ship counters that record what is happening to the mini-ship.