Message text dcr66 wrote:
Longneck wrote: Hubert and I played a few games of this. We'd like to suggest the following:
1) The beginning wind position is awkward, especially for the French, who must get raked to close with the British and have effective fire. Maybe a downwind position would make it easier. Unless the wind shifts early, the French just get pounded by the British until they can close the distance.
2) A larger first crew section for the French so they can take more damage before a lost crew section modifier makes them hopeless.
Other than that, I thought the balance was decent. Any thoughts Hubert? Anyone else? Both ships should face downwind to start with. The French crew should be average so they can take couple of good shots.
Thanks for the feedback 
Those points you made are actually part of a fine balance
The whole scenario revolves around the fact that British ship Surprise must stay at 4-hex range to hit Acheron without getting return fire. Acheron, by being the bigger ship, will win if it can stay at any range less than 4-hex.
British Surprise faces a difficult challenge, as any single mistake could be fatal - getting too near to Acheron can easily lead to some boarding action, where the Acheron will easily win due to superior numbers.
On the other hand, Acheron cannot simply rely on Surprise's mistakes, since Surprise can wear it down if Acheron stays at 4-range too long.
The game is thus a game of position - but not a static one as the ships are both very agile and will try to outmaneuver each other, while the wind can also shift and make it even more challenging (stormy Cape Horn).
I think this also captures somewhat the "spirit" of the movie, where both captains try to win by using their tactical skills and intelligence rather than simply by power (which would see Surprise immediately lose, like in our scenario).
The starting positions are not much of an issue - they just make the objective of the game evident.
French ship can escape even without a rake - but even in the case of a rake, it shouldn't cause much trouble given the low number of guns and the fact that Acheron is stronger in all aspects (guns, hull, crew, rigging).
Making Acheron's crew average (instead of green) would not give them better firing. The HDT modifier would still be zero for those guns. Instead, it would make Acheron even more powerful in boarding action, which is unneccessary.
It would worsen the balance since Surprise should be allowed to board Acheron once they have weakened their crew enough.
The same goes for making French crew larger. On top of giving it more boarding power, it would make them last longer against Surprise fire.
I'm not sure they need it, so far the game seems balanced or on French's favour so I'd leave crew size as it is.
One "issue" that I did find and that has been stated elsewhere by Ogrebait2 is that it can take a lot of time for Surprise to finish Acheron, even after it has gained the upper hand (e.g. stripped Acheron of a rigging or crew section).
There are several ways of looking at this:
if Acheron can still fight back (and it usually can, since it's easy to use even a single movement/drifting to turn a 4-hex range into 3) the game is still interesting
if Acheron can't fight back or the game is not interesting enough, well, the players can use the surrender button
whether this is a real issue or not, it will be automatically fixed in the future by introducing Critical Hits: they will make "finishing off" Acheron a lot faster once it gets to the stage where Surprise is in control of the range.
As for me, I'm having a lot of fun playing it |
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