Ship of the Line

[CerberusIV]

Gets a bonus against frigates and so is the most powerful thing afloat until Ironclads. But the SotL is only as good as a frigate against privateers, East Indiamen, galleons, etc. Seems a bit strange as surely this unit should definitely be stronger than anything pre-ironclads?

I may have the maths slightly wrong here but the SotL gets a 50% bonus against frigates - so 12 vs 8. But it doesn't get the bonus against privateers and East Indiamen so faces them at 8 vs 6. So a frigate is stronger than a privateer but the privateer has a better chance of defeating a SotL than a frigate does? Just seems a bit odd.

[Kuciwalker]

It's silly, but it's entirely a balance issue. Rock-paper-scissors and all that.

[The Priest]

Silly perhaps; but it brings into the age of sail some of the limited sophistication of later naval combat where you don't just build battleships because they are the biggest and best - you have to supplement them with other ships e.g. destroyers to handle subs.

SoL are the best at real war fighting (vs other navies and bombardment), but frigates have their place (speed and as you point out chasing down galleons and privateers).

So silly in a way, but all part of making a more complex and interesting game.

But, I take the point that it seems odd for a SoL to have better odds against a Frigate than a Privateer. But this pushes us towards combined arms at sea - which would be a good thing - though this would only really work if in a mixed stack of Frigates and SoL the Frigates defended first against anything other than Frigates (now both SoL and Frigates being 8, this may not happen). That would mean you would always stack some Frigates with your SoL to protect the big, cumbersome, warships against pesky attacks.

[The Priest]

Silly perhaps; but it brings into the age of sail some of the limited sophistication of later naval combat where you don't just build battleships because they are the biggest and best - you have to supplement them with other ships e.g. destroyers to handle subs.

SoL are the best at real war fighting (vs other navies and bombardment), but frigates have their place (speed and as you point out chasing down galleons and privateers).

So silly in a way, but all part of making a more complex and interesting game.

But, I take the point that it seems odd for a SoL to have better odds against a Frigate than a Privateer. But this pushes us towards combined arms at sea - which would be a good thing - though this would only really work if in a mixed stack of Frigates and SoL the Frigates defended first against anything other than Frigates (now both SoL and Frigates being 8, this may not happen). That would mean you would always stack some Frigates with your SoL to protect the big, cumbersome, warships against pesky attacks.

[Kuciwalker]

You can say that again.

[Lancer]

The frigate operated at the edge of the fleet against other frigates and smaller craft, sloops etc. They could not stand in the line of battle, their sides were not thick enough to stand the punishment, the weight of metal they could bring to bear was often unable to pierce the thick oak sides of the line of battle ships. The frigates best chance to survive such an encounter was to run, and this would work almost without fail. The SoL was heavy, not fast. The SoL had one purpose, to fight other SoLs. Even on blockade they would rarely attempt to catch smaller blockade runners, this being the job of the lighter, faster ships. Only when the enemy SoLs came out did the SoL serve its main function. Even bombardment was pretty much beyond them. Their solid shot was direct fire, not indirect. The fleet used other ships for indirect fire, the term 'bomb ketch' comes to mind for such a ship as it fired the explosive shells of the day as well as solid shot.

Frigates were also commerce raiders and were much prefered as vessels to serve on because of the prize money was greater.

An interesting aspect of the different fleets...the Brits had a better system of reloading. Also the Brit SoLs would always go for the hull to kill the crew while the French would go for the sails to curtail manouverabilty, and mainly to decrease the Brits speed. Alot of French and Spanish ships were taken by the Brits so leaving was often on their minds. The Spanish took to building 1st rates, ships of three decks and over 100 guns in an attempt to out gun the Brits. The Brits ruled the sea because they were almost universally better at it than anyone else. They got this way by their long seafaring tradition which was supported by law. For instance, in order to import French wine to GB it had to be carried on Brit ships manned by Brit sailors.

The young US beat them in several frigate to frigate battles, but ours were built with thick sides from our plentiful oak and with bigger guns in greater quantity (44 to 38) and were partly crewed by run Brit sailors and transplanted Dutchmen, who were also quite capable.

Still, nobody else beat them so regularly, and the British Admiralty had to make a rather embarrassing standing order...no one on one frigate battles with US frigates.

So, for game purposes, if you include SoLs you must model blockading and that involves trade. Blockaded SoLs crews fell out of practice, blockading SoLs got beat up by weather and wear and tear. It took a greater force to blockade as maybe 1/4th of the fleet was in port refitting or going to/from. If a bad storm hit the fleet could suffer great damage and have to head for port (100%) leaving things wide open. Storms were also prime time for blockade runners to run for open sea.

[CerberusIV]

I suspect the real reason for this is that if the SoL is given a higher strength it then threatens the ironclad. Thinking about it it might have been a better balance to give the SoL a higher basic strength - say 12 - and give the ironclad a bonus against the SoL.

[Lancer]

The ironclad was such a revolution that SoLs were obsoleted by them. Shot would bounce off the iron but the ironclad could just pound away while basking in its invulnerability.

[joncnunn]

Quite similar to a UK Frigate trying to fire upon the USS Constitution but on steroids in fact.

I do note though that there were actually very few first generation IronClad units actualy built. (The ones in Civ IV). The second generation with similar speeds to SOL and more importantly able to safely operate in deep waters were the ones that were mass produced.

Originally posted by Lancer
The ironclad was such a revolution that SoLs were obsoleted by them. Shot would bounce off the iron but the ironclad could just pound away while basking in its invulnerability.

[wodan11]

"Mass produced"?

[Quillan]

All modern navies of the time transitioned to ironclad warships. The Monitor was designed as a very low riding vessel from the start, and the Merrimack was a raised hulk refitted so it was very low as well. They weren't very seaworthy, though; the Monitor went down in a storm. The early British and French ships were designed with the hulls of the sailing vessels, but with steam engines and thick iron plates sheathing the hulls. This eventually led into all-steel hulls, which would probably be represented in game by the destroyer, although you could argue that since it requires oil to build the destroyer wouldn't come in until the post WWI designs.

[Jaybe]

Once news of the Monitor vs. Merrimac got around and the superiority of ironclads became apparent, most new ships of the major navies became "ironclads". But not on the model of the Monitor or Merrimac. Instead, common ships that were powered by both steam & sail (but not solely sail) had metal armor applied.

[gdijedi7]

I've always found it...interesting that ironclads could be sunk by other ironclads and/or frigates in Civ...

[Wiglaf]

Monitor
Merrimac

[nbarclay]

Technically, the ship Monitor fought was the Virginia, not the Merrimac. The ship started out as the U.S.S. Merrimac, but when the Confederacy rebuilt it as an ironclad (after it had been burned, sunk, and raised), they renamed it Virginia. If Virginia were merely the same ship sailing under a different name, I could view it as reasonable to ignore the change in names as irrelevant. But since Virginia was rebuilt as a very different type of ship from what Merrimac had been, calling the Virginia the Merrimac seems like a significant error in spite of its also being a very common error.

Regarding what it takes to sink an ironclad, keep in mind that just a little over three years elapsed between the introduction of ironclads and the end of the Civil War, and that very few battles between ironclads were fought because the South lacked the resources to make more than a handful of ironclads. Since ironclads in Civ IV often remain front-line units for a much longer period of time, there is a lot more involved in the question of what ought to happen when ironclads fight each other than just what happened in the first three years of ironclad production.

Also, there has been speculation that either Virginia or Monitor might have been able to sink the other under different circumstances. According to http://cssvirginia.org/, Monitor was handicapped by regulations prohibiting her from firing her guns with full-strength powder charges because the guns were a new, experimental design, while Virginia didn't have any solid shot available. So we don't know for sure what would have happened if Monitor had been allowed to fire her guns at full power, or if Virginia had been able to try using solid shot against Monitor.

The ability for frigates (and ships of the line) to have a chance against ironclads in Civ IV is mostly a concession to gameplay, in much the same way that the ability for a lucky longbow unit to defeat an attacking infantry every now and then is a concession to gameplay. Maybe the ironclad's designers or builders made a mistake and left a weak spot, and the frigate got lucky and hit it. Or maybe the frigate managed to lure the ironclad into hitting a mine - a "torpedo" to use the language of the era.