Carribean mod

[Beck]

Just FYI, grapeshot was used to kill crew. The weight of the shot just bounced off wooden decks. Fired down the length of a ship they were deadly since the shot bounced around till it expended its energy or hit something soft, ie. crew. If you want something to match your description, it would be doubleshot which was the short range, high damage shot of choice. Also, for the Age of Sail period, archers would have been ancient technology and not in use. If your looking for a long range, less damage option against crew/security, I would use the muskets and use either the grapeshot (above) or deck guns (basically a hand held cannon used by marines to fire grapeshot)for a greater damage, shorter range option. A caveat about oars, during the period only the smallest of the ships would have been so equipped (typically 20 guns or less having a class rating of 5 or 6, though most would have been 6). No Ships of the Line were so equipped, they simply were too large and weighted too much for oars to be useful. Of course you can always let any ship use them for the fun or gameplay factor or its a way of making small ships more useful over larger ships. A more common approach used by ships of all sizes to improve their speed was the lining of the hull below the waterline with copper. Wood in contact with the sea has problems with barnacle growth which in turn adds to the friction of moving through the water slowing it down. Copper lining eliminated this since barnacles could not attach themselves to hulls so lined. Mortars of the period were useless against any moving target, they were too slow to load, target and fire (ie. reload 5 or 6). They were only used against fixed targets like forts, in the parlance of SE4, they are planet only weapons. They also take up a lot of room. Mortars on ships were used as singles or pairs (the ships were called bomb ketches). Heated shot should be restricted to weapons platforms (forts?) as it was never used by ships on the high seas, too dangerous. Exploding shot of the period were the bombs fired by mortars. No other weapons had any exploding shot. By this time period, ramming was not really not used. If you could get close enough to ram an enemy ship, why not simply board and capture it? Instead,how about fireships for warheads? They were not used often, but every fleet had them.