Matrix Games Forums

Wow, I am going to England on holiday, so I got a Rick Steves Travel video. It has a segment on the HMS Victory in Portsmouth, built in 1760's... Wow, what a glorious piece of vessel technology, so beautiful and magnificent, I had no idea they built such beautiful ships, so grand, well endowed, etc..
Really inspires me to play this game.
Just wondering, what is it like to play England with it's naval? How id the naval aspect of this game?

Navy side of the game is very poor,my late uncle hellfirejet used to tell me how it used to drive him up the wall,he loved Nelson's navy and he had visited HMS Victory and loved it.Otherwise the game has improved since first release,it now has an editor available so you can change a great many things in the game,plus create new scenario's.

The naval game in the original board game was more a strategy level game, withno tactics. The current game tried to make it more tactical by introducing more ship types, but this not only failed, it also destroyed much of the original strategic aspects of the game. Playing a scenario without all the ship types is actually better than what we have now.

For this to have more tactical naval aspects, different ship types would do different things (i.e. light ships would be scouts and used to locate enemy shipping/improve intercept&evasion attempts and gain windguage. Only heavy ships would fight in the major battles). These rules don't exist yet.

There are optional naval combat rules available, either the official Advanced Naval Combat variant published in The General or the unofficial EiH naval rules, that could be implemented in some form as a future game option. This was Graham's and other's request for more tactical "flavor" in the naval game comparable to the land combat system. Nothing fancy, but at least something to make the naval game lmore interesting than it is. Some argue against this, so make it an option.

For the current game to be most like the original boardgame I think what needs to happen is for Marshall to simply adjust the political point losses for fleets and make it 1pp for heavy fleets, 1/2 pp for light fleets, and 0 pp for transports. Then a custom scenario created with the editor using only heavy fleets would be faithful to the boardgame, or equally fine for EiANW scenarios with mixed fleets. Since the pp losses are hardcoded, Marshall needs to reconsider these.

I'm curious, did EiH utilize 1/2 pp for the light ships? I can look but wanted to see if someone had a quick answer?

No... they were weighed the same.

From the 5.2 Version... See: 6.6.4.4.2 Political Points for Winning/Losing Naval Combats
Every member of the victorious stack now gains political points and every member of the losing stack loses them, recorded on the POLITICAL STATUS DISPLAY on the STATUS CARD. One political point is gained or lost for every Warship Squadron in the defeated stack (rounding fractions up) during the combat up to a maximum of “+/-3” political points. Political points are only awarded/lost if there are more than two ships on each side. Galley Squadrons and Transport Squadrons have no impact on the gain/loss of political points, i.e. they are ignored for PP purposes

Clearly, this was not well researched or play-tested, in my opinion. There is that rather arbitrary >2 ship rule too... I can see the point (limit PP losses by smaller fleets) but it is not well thought out..