First of all, let me state that I obviously 100% agree with all of you that it's weird that you move men to a ship and they can't fight, while men from another ship move AND fight
Longneck wrote:
Karl makes a good point here. The "friendly" TBP can never win, but both should have an equal chance.
They should have an equal chance only on "realistic" terms. By the same "realistic point of view" we should then also change the fact that a 30-men TBP transfer can't help defending a 1-crew-only-ship.
BlueDragon: I agree the rules are silent on this, but one without a crew could be considered neither friendly nor unfriendly. We imply that now by allowing transfers between adjacent friendly ships that aren't grappled or fouled, but you CANNOT TBP to an abandoned "friendly" ship without grappling/fouling. That's inconsistent.
The inconsistency is because I have no time to code at the moment, so I couldn't finish the changes to grapple/fould system.
According to the rules, there's no need to grapple/foul your friendly crewless ships to transfer to them.
So no inconsistency there.
We have two paths: follow the rules as they are or modify them as they are not realistic.
If we follow the second path, we could change a lot of other things... and even if change only this crewless thing, we would still have this strange thing that you would fight for a crewless ship but not be able to help your 1-men-only ship.
The basic attitude we chose is to implement the game exactly as the boardgame.
We had to make a few changes because of the nature of online play (e.g. to speed up turns you don't choose targets to fire/grapple) and we made 1 house rule so far (the struck ships) because the rules weren't complete there.
In this case however, the rules have no inconsistencies, they are only "a bit weird" compared to our perception of a real sea fight.
However, they are fine once you realize that:
1) A crewless ship is still a ship of yours, like ships which have lost all guns or all riggings but have not surrendered yet.
2) You can't help your ships by sending a TBP at the last moment, you need to send it at least the turn before
The confusion arises because rule 1) isn't coded properly and both 1) and 2) are different from the "real world", however, once you accept that this is how things in "WS&IM world" are, you will see that they aren't inconsistent... it's just a different world, where men who board a friendly ship are always lazy while men who board a friendly ship want to fight immediately
Some confusion probably arises as well because we use the surrender flag for crewless ship and we even award some points if you make a ship crewless by firing against it.
These sources of confusion are also not in the rules and I was planning to open a discussion on them but I didn't yet because my time is limited at the moment.
Let me state again that the first time I've thought about crewless ships, I was thinking the same things you proposed and I was going to change them to be "without owner". However, thinking again, I simply re-read and tried to follow all the rules and once I accepted that 1) and 2) are how WS&IM world goes, there were no more inconsistencies. So changing these things would not be "a needed fix because rules are broken", but a "wanted fix because these rules are not realistic
