We had ourselves a battle of Naumachiae to test some simplifications. There are some nice mechanisms that makes it a great game, but we are trying to scale down the book-keeping and make a large naval action playable in an evening.
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- The fleets line up. I decided on echelon and line astern.
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- Light fives with tower and extra marines makes them a little slower.
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- We simplified the movement rules by a standard penalty on turning.
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- Snaking away.
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- The ship classes have changeg from letters to numbers. We call them hitpoints instead.
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- All modifiers are calculated and written down on the roster sheet to avoid following a list of 50 modifiers.
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- The distance between ships have been standardized to 3cm for all ships. Hand of god moving triremes into flanking positions.
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- Wreck markers put to good use during the battle.
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- There are still some things that should be simplified. The morale system and fatigue system among them.
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- We ignored weather in this scenario.
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- We could possibly make the movement system even more streamlined as it can be a bit fiddly, moving the boats around.
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- half cm is will be the smallest measuring unit.
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- All in all this was a nice game. I won the engagement an was happy to see my tactics working, for the most part.
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- The hulking of the Carthaginian admirals ship concluded the battle, as four enemy ships surrendered in the following morale test.
We had a good game in the evening, landing on approx 5 hours.
The reason i like the rules so much is that they take in consideration how ships and fleets moved with communication limits and that speed and maneuver is crucial for success. I`m opposed to the idea that naval battles are just land battles at sea, and i think it`s important to try to emphasize the different tactical aspects of a land battle and a sea battle. So, that is why we simplify this good, but too complex game.
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