Scenario Idea

[SandMonkey]

I saw a special on this on the History Channel before. Wasn't there a giant land army waiting for the Armada to pick them up to finish the invasion of England? Also, you should give the Armada ships a low attack, or firepower, since it's been found on their ships that they had the wrong cannonballs for the cannons they had! This meant that it took them forever to find the right cannonballs to use and fire. And I thought the English were outnumbered in their number of ships? I'm not too sure about that one, the show was never clear about that part. If I'm totally wrong in this, blame the History Channel!

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SandMonkey

"Shut up brain or I'll stab you with a qtip"
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[DarkCloud]

To simulate the storm, merely use barbarian units which will destroy both English and Spanish, but hopefully to simulate real history, the Spanish ships, however since Civ is alternate-history it would be interesting to see an equal amount of ships on each side to be dashed to pieces.

An idea: create special unit types.

Another idea: make each ship represent 5 or so, otherwise the turns will take too long (of course you probably have determined this already but just in case...)

[Stefan Härtel]

quote: Wasn't there a giant land army waiting for the Armada to pick them up to finish the invasion of England?

Ah yes, I believe it was the Duke of Alba (or Parma?) waiting on the Dutch shore.
Why don't you simply give the Spanish ships trireme abilities? More later, I'm short on time!

[sluggo]

CornMaster –

It’s a neat idea but I see one big problem – the wind.

The major tactical advantages the English held were that their ships were more weatherly than the Spanish, and hence could attack or not depending upon circumstances, and that their cannon were better. Spanish tactics depended on closing with the enemy and boarding – gunnery was secondary – whereas the English tended to stay at a distance and bang away.

But in the Age of Sail, the wind was all – a change in wind direction could completely alter the logic of a battle – and without some mechanism for simulating its effects, a central aspect of the battle would be lost. (In the battle of the Armada, for instance, the prevailing winds forced the Spanish to retreat north around Ireland rather than just heading back down to Spain.)

Same caveat applies to fire ships, which were essentially unguided missiles – you set them on course and jumped overboard. In practice, their main advantage was to force a fleet to scatter in order to avoid them – as long as you could maneuver you could usually get out of their way, but your line of battle was disrupted.

As for boarders, it might be possible to modify Diplomats or Spies to be able to “attack” from ship to ship, and you could give the Spanish an edge in this aspect.

In general, seems to me that tactical naval battles work best in the steam era – the battle of Manila Bay, Tsushima, Jutland, etc. are some of the relatively unusual possibilities.

I do think your idea of “cannonballs” is a very good one; I’ve been trying to work out a similar idea for a kind of “Big Bertha” for late-19th/20th c. war – the “gun” would actually be a city, and the “shells” would be units as in your idea. But my notion is still sort of half-baked.

Thinking about the wind leads me to weather as well; I wonder if there couldn’t be some way to modify ALL terrain on a map to allow for seasons – i.e. in “winter” all movement except on RR drops to 1, etc. I can see how event triggers could tell the game what season it was, but I suppose the actual (temporary) modification of movement factors (and maybe even food production) would involve some major hacking.

Sluggo