Real Sailing Characteristics

[RickAllen]

Andrew, As you may know, Age of Sail ships all had the same sailing characteristics when sailing close to the wind. Idealy, sloop rigged ships should be able to sail closurer to the wind than Square riggers.

In Salvo, has this changed? Can Salvo's sloop rigged ships sail closure to the wind?

Rick

[Andrew Lonon]

Rick:

Although many of the campaigns begin with smaller encounters, such as ship duels, cutting out, and small encounters, Salvo is geared toward and designed for the larger battles that follow in the campaigns. The movement system in Salvo is hex based, and the sailing superiority of smaller agile ships is represented by their “Ship Handling” rating. Ships with better Handling ratings will be faster, less likely to loose the wind, and able to turn & tack more often. The old First Rate 100+ gunners will usually have a bad handling rating. FWIW – this has come up a lot in the email I have received, and is on the LIST.

[RickAllen]

Excellent! Thanks Andrew.

Rick

[Rik81]

To amplify the question a bit: It seemed to me in reading through the documentation that the "movement rate" (how many hexes a ship would move in a single turn) was not at all affected by the "size of the ship". Thus a big "ship of the line" 3 master, wouldn't move any further (more hexes) that a lowly ketch. (Assumption here that both boats have the same aspect to the wind.) Did I mis-read, or is this a correct interpretation?

[RickAllen]

Rik81, I think you got the jist of it. Just to clarify, in history sloops (American style Nantucket or Chessapeak (sp) types) could sail closer to the wind, because of how they were rigged. Lateen (sp) rigged ships could also sail closer to the wind. This enable them to escape actions that would have involved them taking on larger, square rigged ships.

This was not taken into consideration in the Age of Sail series, rendering the campaign portion of the game unrealistic to me. However, the way Andrew explained it eventhough a sloop in Salvo (correct me on this, Andrew if I got this wrong) and a square rigger still sail up into the wind at the same angle the sloop's handling ability in Salvo has been upgraded to compensate for this, making the sloop more limber.

At least the designers of Salvo gave this some serious thought, which makes me very pleased.

If you like board games, check Ebay in the next couple of weeks. I'll be selling a bunch of them to pay for this one.

Rick

[Rik81]

I have a couple hundred board games, so don't think I will be checking e-bay, lol.

Well, I hope this is not too "unrealistic" (like I even know what realism is). I did play a lot of WS&IM (board game) in my time, and also have the computer version -- though my computer has outpaced it, so I am hoping Salvo fills the niche.

I've already got it on order, but I still wishing they would throw up a DEMO to try out.