Dutch Wars Hexperiments

The Issue With Hexes

I've decided that the only sensible way to do fleet actions with large numbers of small scale ships is to use a grid of some sort. Without a grid it becomes a chore moving your ships, and almost impossible to measure angles with any degree of precision. But a hex grid comes with its own problems.

The image below shows what I consider the "standard method" of depicting the age of sail with hexes:

The "standard" hex method. The ship is close hauled on the larboard tack.

The main advantage of doing it this way is that movement is simple - the ship moves straight forward into the hex in front of it. There are 3 points of sailing: close hauled (60º off the wind), quarter reaching, and running before the wind. Everyone who has ever played a hex-based AoS game understands it.

It has some problems though.

Firstly - firing arcs. The arc extends 30º forward and aft, which is a bit wide. That's ok, you could assume that it's allowing for the ship to bear a little. After all, the ship's heading is quantised to 60º increments, so the actual heading could be +/- 30º. But if you look at the pic above, you'll see that, when the ship is close hauled, the leftmost hexes to windward and the rightmost hexes to leeward would require the ship to be within 30º of the wind. I could probably live with the distortion, but there are other issues too.

From the 2nd Anglo Dutch War onward it was common for opposing fleets to draw up in close hauled lines, often on opposite tacks like a slow jousting contest. Using the standard hex system, you can't do this because one fleet will be close hauled (slowest point of sailing), while the other will be on a quarter reach (fastest point). Looking at maps of various battles, (particularly in Frank Fox's brilliant book) I get the impression that 'close hauled' actually means the fleets were, on average, almost perpendicular to the wind - an aspect that isn't possible using the standard method.

So how about this instead:

The vertex method. Ship is on the larboard tack, wind abeam.

Now we have nice simple arcs, a bit restrictive perhaps but I think that can be compensated by the movement system, and it'll work nicely with squadrons in line. I like the fact that line of sight is so simple. It should make concentrating fire by several ships on a single target much harder to achieve, as it would require doubling (i.e. engaging the target on both beams). It also has the advantage that two ships can be laid directly alongside one another.

We now have essentially only 2 points of sailing:

Wind abeam which represents both close hauled and broad reaching.

Wind astern representing quarter reaching and running before the wind.

Obviously there's now some weirdness with movement, because the ship's bow points toward two different potential hexes to move into. I think it can be solved by having a set of standard moves that a ship may perform in either of the two sailing aspects. Here's what I'm thinking:


Wind Abeam

Wind Abeam, on the starboard tack.

Ships turn at the beginning of their movement by rotating one vertex. They retain that facing at the end of movement. Tacking will be a special case, but we'll ignore that for now.

The arrows show all the hexes the ship may move to. The red arrow indicates that the ship must make a leeway check (see later) in order to beat upwind into that hex. It may also choose to heave to, in which case it stays in place and makes a leeway check.

Wind Astern

Wind Astern, starboard tack.

In this case there are a couple of extra rules. The ship must move at least one hex, it may not heave to. There will also be some kind of dice roll, probably dependent on wind strength rather than the ship's leeway factor, to determine if the ship drifts an extra one or two hexes downwind. So squadrons bearing to leeward should be significantly faster, but harder to keep in formation.

Leeway

Ships that are wind abeam and beating must make a leeway check on 1D6. For most ships this will be 2+ and for less weatherly ships 3+. There may be modifiers due to damage or wind strength. If they fail they are moved 1 hex to leeward. There may be other circumstances in which a leeway check is made, due to random events, heavy winds and when tacking.

This image shows the average expected path of a ship with a leeway factor of 2+ or 3+ over six turns:

The six dark blue markers show the path over six turns assuming all leeway checks are passed. The 2+ and 3+ markers show the average expected end points after six turns.

I've forgotten all the trigonometry I learned at school, so I can't work out exactly what those 2+ and 3+ angles are, but they look close enough to the sort of windward performance you might expect from ships of this period - about 70º to 80º off the wind.

Working Title

Ideas that have names have a higher chance of coming to fruition than those that don't, so for now I'm going with the title "Weather Gage".