Message text Tornade wrote:
sfatula wrote: Tornade wrote: i have lost games by points when the game times out... the last case was a player who tucked his tail between his legs and managed to stay out of range long enough for the game to time out...i was overhauling him at the rate of one hex per turn and my ship was virtually intact...while his ship had ONE hull box left
Ok, here's the thing though. A ship with ONE hull left and that escapes IS in fact worth far more than the same ship sunk as it can be repaired. So, while I agree in principal, still, running to fight another day is a valid thing to do. You have to keep someone from running away by keeping the wind, or, reducing their hull, etc. But, I do agree. Perhaps points for damage, with a bonus for sinking. point of course is that the board game does not time out after five or ten turns with no firing...nor should this game...i would have overtaken the enemy ship in perhaps another five or six turns and would have been able to put another broadside into him...probably finishing him off i agree that a ship that retreats in the face of bad odds is doing the right thing...though the Admiralty would probably court martial the captain anyway...but retreating because the game times out is not valid...time frame of the game is sketchy...but we can assume that the turns are probably on the order of five to maybe ten minutes...stern chases could last for hours and it was unheard of for a ship that is clearly overhauling a crippled enemy to turn aways after an hour's chase
I think the time out limit is, in many cases, reasonable, and implements historical situations.
There were plenty of times when a victorious side gave up chasing damaged enemy ships, and no one received a court martial as a result. The problem here is that the players have far more information than any historical commander ever dreamed of possessing. A player knows the relative fighting power of his ship, and that of his opponent’s ship. A real ship’s commander would only have had a good guess about the chased ship’s sails and masts. He would not have known that the ship had only two hull boxes left (noting also that the damage system is WSIM rarely gives historic results – and no, this was not something which could be readily judged with wooden ships). He would not have known the status of the enemy’s guns, or the size of the remaining crew. In fact he usually would have known very little about the chased ship, other than that it has decided to withdraw from the battle. Thus, chasing an enemy was a gamble, and one which many commander prudently did not take, given the help that a reasonably fit ship could rendered to its own fleet in consolidating the victory including; taking possession of prizes and assisting damaged vessels. Further, gamers simply tend, thanks to their greater in-game knowledge, tend to be far more blood thirsty than real commanders. Sometimes, rules need to put a limit on this.
The game problems here seem, to me, to be:
1) Surrendering ships don’t give points to the ships which, for whatever reason, caused the player to surrender.
2) Surrendering ships drop their own points, although they earned them.
3) Partially damaged ships do not count for points, which doesn’t make sense.
|
|
|
