pirates & blockade, a Yankee perspective

[Treefrog]

This is just a beer and pretzels observation on the Confederate raiders aka pirates that live in area AO2 and feed on helpless Yankee merchant mariners, how to deal with them and how to blockade the coast while fighting them.

First, let me say I'm not very good at handling these problems; this article is more a plea for suggestions than an intelligent opinion to guide others.

Game starts with 1 pirate in AO2, the "pirate box". Left to its own devices it will typically sink a merchant ship almost every turn, costing the Union a political point and 3 supplies. Over the course of a war of 46 months this one pirate will cost the Union roughly 36 political points and 106 supplies. As I recall New Orleans is worth 37 PPs. Additional pirates mean additional losses to a maximum of 3 PPs per turn, or roughly 106 PPs over the course of the game. You could draft twice for that cost. Ouch.

Although you may think that your cruisers would do better by blockading, your cruiser captains would prefer to take to the high seas and fight the pirates. So would the Secretary of Importing Cool European Stuff.

My standing order: turn one send the 5 closest Atlantic cruisers with a leader that has a "3" naval rating to the pirate box. (Attack and defense ratings don't seem to make a difference in chasing pirates, only the naval rating. Save the good attack leaders (Dupont for example 3-3-3) for the actually fighting against heavy artillery, gunboats, and perhaps ironclads.)

The Secretary of ICE talks to Staunton and has maximum cruisers built the first turn, typically 9 (plus one already building). If you don't use them in the pirate box (because the CSN doesn't build pirates) they can do blockade duty, so always build them. In fact, there is a unit on the building "ladder" that you can toggle to "stop building right now" and start a new cruiser in that build spot too.

Those five cruisers remain on station until the first pirate is killed, then return to blockade duty at Georgia, South Carolina or Newbern/Elizabeth City, anyplace where an island with a depot will double their effect.

You will see the next pirate building in the "newspaper: land battle, sea battle" screen and in the pirate box when it arrives (and before it can do any damage to you). They come one at a time, taking 4 (maybe 3?) turns to build. When the next pirate arrives, the five cruisers go back on station in the pirate box, perhaps reinforced by cruisers from the Gulf squadron.

Usually the CSN continues to build raiders every turn starting in July 1861 until Emancipation. I recently played a game where I ignored the pirates for a few months, focusing on the blockade, you know, just for fun, just to see what would happen. A disaster is what happened!

Although I quickly had 20 cruisers, in supply, with leaders in the pirate box, I made no progress in thinning them out. Each USN cruiser has a 95% chance of a 5% chance to kill a pirate; twenty cruisers should kill slightly less than one pirate per turn. Not my guys, the pirates were killing more cruisers than vice versa, I went stretches of 2 or 3 months with no kills, and pretty soon there were 10 pirates with more on the slipways. To paraphrase the line from the Ghostbusters, "This is bad, very bad."

So plan to build maximum cruisers and put them on station in the pirate box with naval leaders of 3 or more as soon as they are available. Bad news, the new pirates start arriving before the new cruisers come on line. Good news, by then you should have brought the Gulf of Mexico cruiser squadron to the pirate box to help until the waive of 10 or 11 new cruisers arrive.

Gulf Squadron: If you block the Mississippi River with heavy artilllery, you can send all of them to the pirate box. If you don't block the river with heavy artillery, you can leave 2 cruisers and a gunboat with a 3 naval rating leader and a depot on the island. This will give you a blockade factor of 2 cruisers (4) plus 1 gunboat (1) for a total of 5, doubled for the depot to 10, which will reduce every Mississippi River port to the minimum you can achieve with blockage alone (only heavy artillery shuts the river ports down 100%).

By the way, although it is not in the written rules, blockading ships without any leader at all automatically receive a penalty of -1; this happy news is buried in a forum thread written by one of the Matrix staff.

With CSC consider sending your higher CR leaders to the pirate box if they'll command subordinates. You may wish to use them first in the riverine war. If they survive, their CR may rise from 5 or 6 to the magic 7 sooner. Both the overall commander and his subordinates' naval ratings appear to count in the fight against pirates. This probably offsets the "experience" advantage the successful pirates gain.

Eventually your cruisers will start to get "experience" battle stars from killing pirates. This generally happens around the time you turn the tide on piracy.

Who blockades with the cruisers at sea? It took me a long time to understand the designer's strategy notes on the blockade. I now think that what they are suggesting is to build 3 gunboats in New Jersey and 5 gunboats in Pennsylvania on turn one. Four gunboats with a naval rating 3 or better leader based at a depot island have double effect, subtracting 8 from the port imports, which is significant. There is an argument to be made to repeat that cycle twice, i.e. building 16 gunboats for blockade duty. Those four squadrons of four ships each can really close down ports with island/depots in support (most Yankees capture Fort Jackson or it's twin and shut down the Mississippi River 100%).