I'm in the process of brainstorming a number of table top miniatures wargames, one of which is a naval wargame in the classical period. My idea is to write a fleet level game which can allow for playing the big battles of the Greek and Roman age in around 3-4 hours.
The target is a battle with around 50-60 ships on the table, completed in an evening.
I had been looking at adapting the rules of GMT's War Galley to miniatures play, but have read that this has already been attempted, and it turned into a confusing mess. I suspect this is for two reasons - War Galley is one of those ancient naval games which presumes generals fought their sea battles very much like their land battles, and secondly it tries to micro manage the fighting between ships, which inevitably slows the game down.
One of my design goals was to see if I could manage the individual squadrons using a colour block system with each ship responding to orders from a squadron leader. For example, all the ships in the purple squadron will be on purple blocks. Initial research shows that ancient fleets typically had between 3-4 squadron commanders operating under an admiral.
The actual ship to ship fighting would be managed more adroitly based on doctrine - e.g. is a captain likely to try a ram, ram and board, or simply shear off the oars from an enemy ship?
An admiral will deliver orders to squadron commanders, and captains will try to follow the lead from the squadron commander's ship. But confusion will set in once a battle is joined and captains lose line of sight to their leader's ship (checked in the command phase). Contact can be re-established using small boats to ferry orders between ships, but there is a limited number of these available.
Random tables will determine the behaviour of captains once they begin to realise they have no idea of what is going on, possibly dictated by their level of Aggression.
Obviously there will need to be rules governing sea state and wind, as well as the exhaustion of rowers. I am thinking of using a morale system similar to that used on the Lord of the Rings miniatures game, with affected ships making morale checks every round to see when they decide to leave for home.
I'll probably start in the Roman civil wars of approx 75-50 BC and work backwards and forwards from there. It's early days yet - I had made some progress with War Galley, but now feel I should start my efforts from scratch, thanks in no small part to an inspirational chat with Mike Hutchinson, author of Gaslands, at Dragonmeet in London last weekend.
Very happy to play test this...
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