Age of Sail naval warfare game

[bobarossa]

No one has mentioned the game Salvo yet!  I haven't played it since shortly after it came out but it still available at HPS (I think).  Also, I recently bought Crown of Glory: Emperor's Edition during a Matrix sale.  They added tactical naval action to the original game.  The manual has about 25 pages on this part of the game and it looks impressive.  Contains grounding, loose cannon, wind blockage (due to upwind, same size ship), 4 sail states, marines, morale, etc.  Unfortunately, I don't see a way to simply generate a naval action without playing the rest of the game to set up the situation.  I was hoping there was a 'battle simulator' built in like with some games.

[MengJiao]

For my money, I will probably stick with Flying Colors for squadron actions, and Close Action for ship-to-ship stuff.  I know you have posted about some challenges with Flying Colors, but I'm not sure what else is out there.  Perhaps I should look into the old but venerable Heart of Oak rules from FGU.


Signal Beat to Quarters,

Jack Nastyface

Flying colors is good and easy to modify, but as you say, in digital games things are very uneven.  I kind of like the steamships in fall of the samuri, and it seems like that might be a better model than sailing actions for a sandbox game.

For example, you could use sails for transits and steam for actions so you would use trade wind planning for long-distance travel and then a simple steam model for battles.

[TacticalWargames]

I think Salvo was Shrapnel games.

[Silent Disapproval Robot]

   For now, Naval Action seems reasonably promising, though I think steampower would help with player comprehension -- apparently early steampower is even more lost to the imagery of the popular mind than pirates and what not.

Please, not steam power or dreadnaughts.  I find naval combat games between the age of sail and the introduction of air power to be crushingly dull.  Talk about linear.  Once you remove the element of wind from the tactical situation every game I've played on the subject devolves in to little more than a slugfest between ships with each player hoping for a critical hit on a magazine or some such.

[Nefaro]

Hmm...I don't think I could play an age-of-sail game where the British lose to the French  :P
But seriously...I have reluctantly come to the conclusion that realistically simulating age-of-sail naval warfare is unlikely, and we will must needs be satisfied with pseudo-historic games designed with low-to-moderate complexity.  Although the era is incredibly colourful and interesting, many age-of-sail battles are little more than massive slug-fests between giant wooden behemoths.  When you try to play this out in board game (like Sails of Glory) or computer game, this mostly equates to getting in close, hoping for a lucky shot that causes critical damage or a completely ahistorical quick maneouver, and then battering your opponent into submission.  While this can be fun (especially if you use some kind of ersatz flag-signalling system between players, like in Close Action), there are few surprises.  Compare this vis-a-vis something like Wings of Glory, where smart or risky maneuvering can turn what looks like an imminent defeat into an exciting victory.
Considering that I have probably owned nine or ten age-of-sail games (board and PC), and my on-line "tag" is taken from that era, no-one is more surprised than me that I am casting doubt upon this genre.
Yours in gaming,
Jack Nastyface

Funny you should mention it, but I still have a copy of CoA's Close Action I had purchased long ago (the late 90s??).  Was eyeing it the other day, wondering if I should finally punch the counters and dig in.  However, the points you made also struck me as how the gameplay would proceed.. pounding away at each other until something gives.  To be fair, the combination of restrictive time limits and scenario setups on some other games tend to force a similar style of play.  The HPS Squad Battles series on PC is one example which springs to mind.

[Jack Nastyface]

@Nefaro,
Admittedly, there is great pleasure to be had in gaming a slug fest between wooden ships.  As I see it, a game designer really has one of two choices when desiging a game from this era:  Should the challenge come from managing the particulars of individual ships, or from command and squadron maneuver? Close Action does the former, while Flying Colors attempts the latter.  Both have their benefits and drawbacks.  I like Close Action because it provides enough detail to reflect the many-faceted challenges of the era, but uses a number of mechanics to make these tasks workable.
WSIM is still a great game, but I feel it needs one or two house rules (especially wrt dis-masted ships) to make it slightly more "accurate".  Flying Colors plays very easily, and I like the command / leadership element it uses.
CA plays very well with a group of people...if you can find a group willing to game the era.

[Nefaro]

Yes, I can certainly imagine playing Close Action or a similar game being very fun in a team setting.  O0

When it comes down to it, most strategy games could be generalized as boiling down to pounding away at each other up close.  It's an unfair simplification as the fun is in the little details and specific situations you find yourself in.  Kinda reminds me of someone's synopsis of their recent flight sim experiences as, "take off, get in a fight, return home and land.  Rinse/repeat."  (was that you Jomni?  ;D ).  Over simplified summary, I gues.

[MengJiao]

   For now, Naval Action seems reasonably promising, though I think steampower would help with player comprehension -- apparently early steampower is even more lost to the imagery of the popular mind than pirates and what not.

Please, not steam power or dreadnaughts.  I find naval combat games between the age of sail and the introduction of air power to be crushingly dull.  Talk about linear.  Once you remove the element of wind from the tactical situation every game I've played on the subject devolves in to little more than a slugfest between ships with each player hoping for a critical hit on a magazine or some such.

Well...I'm shocked.  I'm personally quite fond of hoping for critical hits.  As usual, I tend to think the problem is with the choices available to game-makers rather than in the situations peope make games about.  What if the ship models were done well enough that every hit had a story?  For example in a recent book about French Battleships 1922-1956 there is the tale of the 4 15-inch shells that hit the Dunkerque: 1 went nowhere in particular, one bounced off the top of a main gun turret but still caused a chain of events that killed 8 crewmen in the turret and knocked out a gun; two did exactly as designed (and here apparently the authors decided everybody knew what a "Greenboy" was since these 15-inch shells were earnestly noted to be "descendents" of the "famous Greenboys") and penetrated the thickest armor on the Dunkerque to knock out the control center for damage control, the engines, the electric power and start a fire in the refrigerator that was fueled by secondary charges falling through a hole into the burning meat locker.

[MengJiao]

Yes, I can certainly imagine playing Close Action or a similar game being very fun in a team setting.  O0

When it comes down to it, most strategy games could be generalized as boiling down to pounding away at each other up close.  It's an unfair simplification as the fun is in the little details and specific situations you find yourself in.  Kinda reminds me of someone's synopsis of their recent flight sim experiences as, "take off, get in a fight, return home and land.  Rinse/repeat."  (was that you Jomni?  ;D ).  Over simplified summary, I gues.

  But that's actually totally wrong for the age of Sail.  The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries insisted on re-reading and re-projecting the dull pounding tactics of Nelson and company back into the whole of the 18th century.  Actually, ships were profittably opening fire at over 1000yds and shooting the sails of their enemies to bits.  The French did perfectly well with that basic opening gambit as long as their fleet control was tighter than that of their (RN) opponents -- which it usually was from say 1690 to 1790.  The result was a pretty endless stream of RN fiascos in that period.  The RN had to tighten up its signals and tactics from say 1785 to 1805 which happened to be at the expense of the French and Spanish as both of those navies drifted into catastrophic ineptitude.

[Silent Disapproval Robot]

   For now, Naval Action seems reasonably promising, though I think steampower would help with player comprehension -- apparently early steampower is even more lost to the imagery of the popular mind than pirates and what not.

Please, not steam power or dreadnaughts.  I find naval combat games between the age of sail and the introduction of air power to be crushingly dull.  Talk about linear.  Once you remove the element of wind from the tactical situation every game I've played on the subject devolves in to little more than a slugfest between ships with each player hoping for a critical hit on a magazine or some such.

Well...I'm shocked.  I'm personally quite fond of hoping for critical hits.  As usual, I tend to think the problem is with the choices available to game-makers rather than in the situations peope make games about.  What if the ship models were done well enough that every hit had a story?  For example in a recent book about French Battleships 1922-1956 there is the tale of the 4 15-inch shells that hit the Dunkerque: 1 went nowhere in particular, one bounced off the top of a main gun turret but still caused a chain of events that killed 8 crewmen in the turret and knocked out a gun; two did exactly as designed (and here apparently the authors decided everybody knew what a "Greenboy" was since these 15-inch shells were earnestly noted to be "descendents" of the "famous Greenboys") and penetrated the thickest armor on the Dunkerque to knock out the control center for damage control, the engines, the electric power and start a fire in the refrigerator that was fueled by secondary charges falling through a hole into the burning meat locker.

As the steampower/dreadnaught tactics are usually limited to cruise along in a nice line and slug it out (and maybe send a few torpedo boats out) it just feels kind of dull.  For me, there just isn't enough tactical variety to make the details of slugging it out interesting enough to overcome the lack of variety one finds battling it out on a 2D plane. I feel like I'm essentially playing a drawn out random number generator.   

[MengJiao]

   For now, Naval Action seems reasonably promising, though I think steampower would help with player comprehension -- apparently early steampower is even more lost to the imagery of the popular mind than pirates and what not.

Please, not steam power or dreadnaughts.  I find naval combat games between the age of sail and the introduction of air power to be crushingly dull.  Talk about linear.  Once you remove the element of wind from the tactical situation every game I've played on the subject devolves in to little more than a slugfest between ships with each player hoping for a critical hit on a magazine or some such.

Well...I'm shocked.  I'm personally quite fond of hoping for critical hits.  As usual, I tend to think the problem is with the choices available to game-makers rather than in the situations peope make games about.  What if the ship models were done well enough that every hit had a story?  For example in a recent book about French Battleships 1922-1956 there is the tale of the 4 15-inch shells that hit the Dunkerque: 1 went nowhere in particular, one bounced off the top of a main gun turret but still caused a chain of events that killed 8 crewmen in the turret and knocked out a gun; two did exactly as designed (and here apparently the authors decided everybody knew what a "Greenboy" was since these 15-inch shells were earnestly noted to be "descendents" of the "famous Greenboys") and penetrated the thickest armor on the Dunkerque to knock out the control center for damage control, the engines, the electric power and start a fire in the refrigerator that was fueled by secondary charges falling through a hole into the burning meat locker.

As the steampower/dreadnaught tactics are usually limited to cruise along in a nice line and slug it out (and maybe send a few torpedo boats out) it just feels kind of dull.  For me, there just isn't enough tactical variety to make the details of slugging it out interesting enough to overcome the lack of variety one finds battling it out on a 2D plane. I feel like I'm essentially playing a drawn out random number generator.

That was the theory of course (at least for the Japanese after 1903 and for everyone else after say 1913) -- but (with the exception of the Japanese again) it only happened once for a few hours at Jutland and even in that case there are more exceptions than anything else.

I'm thinking that steam power for games at least has the virtue of simplicity: you don't have to worry about how to deal with the wind.  With that out of the way you could just have the game run wild with ramming, guns, engines, boilers, coal and armor.  It's true since nobody really knows what strange events would happen if the ships of say an 1880 vintage fired at each other -- randomness could be modelled on the extreme side.  Or not.  Games on the topic could make a virtue out of necessity and model the ships in some details so that the occasional penetrating event could cause all kinds of mischeif short of just knocking out this or that standardized subsystem.

[MengJiao]

As the steampower/dreadnaught tactics are usually limited to cruise along in a nice line and slug it out (and maybe send a few torpedo boats out) it just feels kind of dull.  For me, there just isn't enough tactical variety to make the details of slugging it out interesting enough to overcome the lack of variety one finds battling it out on a 2D plane. I feel like I'm essentially playing a drawn out random number generator.

  And another thing ( I was just reading the Naval Action site in horror), apparently there is no way to get people to drop their nineteenth-century views of 18th century warfare.  Yet again we are hearing that the French kept to the lee side of the engagement (with the RN on the windward side) so that their ships would heel in such a way that they could hit sails.  This is just totally wrong wrong wrong wrong.  For one thing you can shoot at sails even from the windward (as the French did off Ushant in 1778) and for another shooting at sails is a good long range tactic no matter what side of the wind you are on in relation to the enemy (as is clear from accounts and modified simulations).  In fact it works even better if the enemy is leeward of you since if it cripples them it leaves them easy for you to pursue. So anyway,  At least if people shift to steamships, all this complete nonsense about the age of sail will not be repeated over and over and uncritically applied.

[Jack Nastyface]

  And another thing ( I was just reading the Naval Action site in horror), apparently there is no way to get people to drop their nineteenth-century views of 18th century warfare.  Yet again we are hearing that the French kept to the lee side of the engagement (with the RN on the windward side) so that their ships would heel in such a way that they could hit sails.  This is just totally wrong wrong wrong wrong.  For one thing you can shoot at sails even from the windward (as the French did off Ushant in 1778) and for another shooting at sails is a good long range tactic no matter what side of the wind you are on in relation to the enemy (as is clear from accounts and modified simulations).  In fact it works even better if the enemy is leeward of you since if it cripples them it leaves them easy for you to pursue. So anyway,  At least if people shift to steamships, all this complete nonsense about the age of sail will not be repeated over and over and uncritically applied.

Jeez, Meng...next thing you'll be telling us that ship-boarding melees featuring sailors jumping across decks or swinging from ropes in the rigging was almost unheard of ;-).

FWIW...theoretically speaking, staying to windward would increase your chance of hitting the windward standing rigging of your enemy (things like the chain-plates, shrouds and stays), and since it is the windward rigging that keeps the mast from tipping over to leeward  you would therefore increase the chance of losing a mast-section in that downwind direction.

[MengJiao]

  And another thing ( I was just reading the Naval Action site in horror), apparently there is no way to get people to drop their nineteenth-century views of 18th century warfare.  Yet again we are hearing that the French kept to the lee side of the engagement (with the RN on the windward side) so that their ships would heel in such a way that they could hit sails.  This is just totally wrong wrong wrong wrong.  For one thing you can shoot at sails even from the windward (as the French did off Ushant in 1778) and for another shooting at sails is a good long range tactic no matter what side of the wind you are on in relation to the enemy (as is clear from accounts and modified simulations).  In fact it works even better if the enemy is leeward of you since if it cripples them it leaves them easy for you to pursue. So anyway,  At least if people shift to steamships, all this complete nonsense about the age of sail will not be repeated over and over and uncritically applied.

Jeez, Meng...next thing you'll be telling us that ship-boarding melees featuring sailors jumping across decks or swinging from ropes in the rigging was almost unheard of ;-).

FWIW...theoretically speaking, staying to windward would increase your chance of hitting the windward standing rigging of your enemy (things like the chain-plates, shrouds and stays), and since it is the windward rigging that keeps the mast from tipping over to leeward  you would therefore increase the chance of losing a mast-section in that downwind direction.

wow!  I had not thought of that.  So when the French fired high from the windward (as they did at Ushant in 1778), they could even do extra damage.  And the results did show a fair number of RN ships with seriously messed up rigging.  Immobilized in fact.  at least for a few hours.

Boarding!  It definitely did happen, but like many heavily-emphasized aspects of 18th century warfare, it was the result of doing a lot of other things well.  then you get the wild drama that the nineteenth century worked hard to pride itself on and then busily misrepresented everything else.

[MengJiao]

Saw this on Steam Greenlight.  Looks like it might be good.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=259130636

Now has greenlight:

http://forum.game-labs.net/index.php?/topic/879-congratulations-this-game-has-been-greenlit-by-the-community/