Odds and ends updates

[martin goddard]

Sent out 4 thoughts for POE play testers.  Duncan said a bit more detail needed. He is correct.

Here they are.
1. Change reefs to "shallows". Every time a ship moves into a shallows hex. Roll D6.1,2,3 (S,M,L). Modifier -1D6 if battle hardened. 6=aground for the next whole turn. then automatic release. No shooting either.
2. Shall we swap aspects B and D
3. Include medium ships into the large ship extra movement rule.
4. For simplicity. Merchant ships have 2,2,2( sail,crew ,gun)  then deduct 1 at game start.  warships 3,3,3 then add 1. Sounds smoother and more memorable(?)

land raids
i will start working on the written rules for soon play testing.

[Duncan]

So you mean just swap the order in which we choose aspect B and D in the setup? Yes I can see that but can I ask the reasoning behind your thoughts on this?

So with the warships being 333 and adding 1, does this mean it still has to be add 1 crew or can it be add 1 gun or sail if we  choose to do so? This could make a lot of difference if you want to allocate jobs to specific warships depending on their level as well, ie are they scurvy, able etc?

[Duncan]

The game last night included an island and a reef set up so as to create a bottle neck about a third of The way into the table so that after the first move really from deployment we were all upon it. It did create a bottle neck with no full hex around the island or the reef on the extremes we had really to go through the middle, the exception being a small warship I put further up the table in the setup.

The game was a win to Paul and Rob as defenders against Stewart and myself as attackers. I had tried to defend in the setup with only four dice, but they still managed to roll less than me even after I rerolled for a nil score. That pretty much put pay to my plan as the others dice had been allocated presuming I would defend which now I was not. The only upgrade I got was one ship to battle hardened but this was lost again as I lost every other dice roll in the setup.

The game did not go well for the attackers, Rob choose the trick that gave him extra dice for use against boarding three times. We tried to board a ship three times but every attempt failed in part due to this, although the one time I used our extra crew trick i only got one extra after replacing crew lost in shooting actions previously, so it did not really help. The Ree held up a big ship, but as I said we could just not grapple and board it. It maybe worth pointing out that one attempt to board that failed was when the defender had no sail, gun or crew markers left, the ship was not struck so they still beat us on dice rolls using the trick to oppose boarding despite no markers remaining and being stuck on a reef!

Coupled with this the new rule for warships being able to choose the extra thing they have gave the attacker two heavily gunned ships that were able to shoot ours out from under us before we could do anything.

The game was lost in the main due to my bad dice rolling in the setup, our seeming inability to counter wind when it mattered, the defenders trick being able to be used three times in effect blocking every boarding attempt and the ability of the defender to load extra armaments onto their warships with which to attack us.

On reflection, although it seemed like a good idea to allow warships to put the extra marker where they liked it did seem to give the defender (who did not need extra crew on there warships for boarding.) Yet one more advantage on top of being able to use the anti boarding trick three times!!!

From my experience with the game it does appear that the defender is much more likely to win in most cases but with these two things it seems now a dead certainty unless they make Some critical errors or really bad dice rolls, which is of course possible. But Rob and Paul played the defender pretty much as i was hoping to if my setup had gone to plan, (which it didn't.) taking advantage of these obvious choices to help their fleet.

A good game last night, but perhaps tweaking has gone a tad too far in one direction? I would be interested to read others experiences with this?

Nice ships though Stewart! But I was a bit worried about touching them in case I broke some rigging.🤔😮😊