More Dutch Wars Ramblings

I had a go at trying out the hex movement system, applied to the situation of two fleets on opposite tacks. It was ok-ish but got very congested, till it ended up being a bit of a traffic jam with ships on both sides unable to move. Like this:

I'm going to need to come up with some kind of 'en passant' rule that allows ships to break through each other, firing as they go. There were also issues with ships failing their leeway rolls and drifting into an occupied hex - I need to nail down what happens in all these collision instances.

I might be able to alleviate some of the congestion problem with some morale rules governing how easy it is to close the range with the enemy, and perhaps reaction tests that force a ship to bear away under pressure.

Another issue is the movement rate. I'm struck by this quote from Frank Fox in his book "The Four Days' Battle of 1666":

In the two subsequent passes the combatants met head to head sailing as close to the wind as possible. Each time, divisions and individual ships of both fleets passed through to windward whenever they could, and were forced to leeward at other times.

Assuming that both lines stretched five or six miles, and that the converging forces closed at a combined speed of around ten knots, each pass must have lasted some thirty to forty minutes. In that time a ship could get off perhaps four broadsides on its engaged side, and would receive a like number.

So if our fleets are say 24 hexes long and they move at an average of 2 hexes in opposite directions, then it's 6 movement phases for the lead ships to pass the rearmost ones of the enemy. That works ok if we have 2 movement phases per turn with ships firing once in the turn. Our turn is then 8-10 minutes long.

The problem is once the fleets are closely engaged (i.e. at 1 hex range) the windward ships need to beat upwind to avoid the oncoming leeward ships, and so everything ends up moving at 1 hex per phase. It might be possible to fix by increasing the movement options to a 3 hex range, but to be honest it's making me question the wisdom of this whole vertex facing thingy.

Anyway, enough waffling, here are some gratuitous naval battle photos, just cos they're so much fun to take: