Broken off ships: a missed opportunity to sink them

According to current rules after an unsuccessful command check, a ship has to try to leave the battle as fast as possible, even if it already moved. This generally makes sense, but it happened several times that this prevented the attacking player to "finish off" an enemy ship as it escaped. This not only takes away the satisfaction of sinking a ship, but also if the ship rallies successfully in the last turns of the battle, it will not count as a loss. Sometimes this happened to several ships in a single battle and led to unexpected battle outcomes - a player with a few last minute rallied ships near the edges of the table turned a deserved big loss into a draw.

I was thinking what if breaking off movement is done in the remaining actions phase as an compulsory move with max speed, but only if ship didn't already maneuver. This would allow the attacking player to finish off the ship if he can and wants to. And it would prevent the defender to get an unfair advantage by moving twice in a turn and rallying in the later turns. Does this make sense?

Hello Habaya,

The prevention of a ship being 'finished off' is exactly why the rule is stated as it is. In naval battles, ships being sunk outright was not that common (except for small ships like DD's) most of the time a ship would leave the battle for repairs or an enemy would shift its fire to another more dangerous ship once a ship was out of action.

In our god-like view of the battle with all the information, we can determine that a ship is almost sunk so it is logical to put in that last round of fire to sink it. This is logical from a gaming perspective but hugely out of character for naval battles. The effect you describe has 'working as intended' written all over it.

Now the one thing that does not seem to work correctly is the scoring. If the main point of the game is to put ships out of effective action instead of just sinking them, the scoring needs to reflect that. It looks like a simple solution would be to award full points for crippled ships. Maybe even put a cap on the number of times a player can try to rally a ship .

You've got a point - we probably do sink too many ships in games. Actually, your philosophy might benefit a campaign mode in the future

Btw, the way we play our dummy campaigns is that we choose an OBB, a side and decide on the number of battles we will play for this OOB (typically 3-5). Before the beginning of each battle we choose an OOB fleet, but those ships who were sunk or crippled in previous battles are not allowed to be picked. This makes the series of battles a bit "campaigny"

If you manage to adjust the scoring that would be great and sufficient. Thanks.