New Ships z-plan

We would love to have the stats for ships that were designed bit not built. Montana for the US. Z-plan for the Germans, Lion class for the brits.

Interesting, those could be added indeed. I imagine most of them would not require to much research to stat. There's only one thing; I'm currently working on the second edition of Naval War, so the game components are currently all being reworked, making it a bit tricky to generate datacards currently. You could compare it with a car being worked on, components everywhere

Still, the ship stats have not changed compared to 1.4, so I could turn out some data cards in the new format (which you could perfectly use with the current version). Unless that is a problem?

No problem at all. I thank you for your dedication and great deal of work to build this game. What will 2.0 add? Teaser

I'll get to work on the paper ships.

Version 2.0 will change some things that have been bugging me for a while but require some fundamentals of the game to be reworked.

1. Multiplayer games and scaling. This has been one of the major oversights in my game design. Because of the turn order (each player makes one activation, then the other player etc.) The games scales poorly when a lot of squadrons are involved. Since each squadron could activate up to 3 or 4 times per turn, that is a lot of time handling say 6 squadrons per side. In multiplayer games this becomes problematic. Since the system still allows only one activation per turn multiplayer games become a drag since all other players have to wait until a player finishes his activation.

The fix for this problem requires a fundamental rework of the turn order, going back to phases like movement and combat (so you can move all squadrons at once), but this undermines the unique aspect of the game; the possibility to move or shoot before your opponent does, depending on activation and initiative. This dilemma has proved too much to solve for a long time until I found some games that had an unique solution to this, keeping the best of both worlds. I'm currently implementing these mechanics and reworking them to work within the Naval War rules framework. It should lead to much faster games, including multiplayer games while keeping the unique aspects of Naval War alive.

2. Second is the order token curve. Since the amount of order tokens required during a game represents somewhat of a curve, the current system of generating them is not sufficient. Your stream of order tokens stays relatively constant, while at the start of the game you have a lot of excess tokens, since you only have a maneuver activation to make. At the height of the game, you have way to few. So I’m working on a way to have your amount of order tokens have a bit of a curve as well, to keep your resource management relevant from the start till the end of the game.

Just these two changes require some major reworking of some of the core mechanics of the game, along with all the cascading effects to officers, special rules, and the command stations. Hence version 2.0. Enough of a teaser?

We have played several multiplayer scenarios. Each person with 2 squadrons. We did not find the wait time to be a problem everyone helped with charts and were involved. I agree DO NOT got to a move and fire system. What you have now is unique and requires the overall commander to make key decisions on who is going to get activated next. Its a sub game in itself. Lots of strategy as you know. If you activate to many squadrons at a time the effect may be to overpowering giving the phasing player to many shots before a reaction. Our group has discussed this issue and certainly entertain other means but do not want to lose the feel of the current system.

Well, the amounts of feedback that I receive is not that big, so it might be that I'm currently acting on some outliers concerning game length and multiplayer games. Can you tell me some more about your multiplayer games? Amount of players involved, squadrons involved, air? How long did the games last and did you fight them to conclusion? Such feedback is very, very valuable to me to find the right things to improve upon.

We have not tackled the air part of the game yet. we have only played multiplayer battles with 2 or 3 players on a side. All battles were fought to conclusion and not through a 50% break point. The smallest battles were 3 squadrons vs three squadrons and the largest were 4-6 squadrons against 4-6 squadrons. The small battles lasted about an hour. The largest about 2.5 hours. Once players understand the game it takes less chart cranking and the game speeds up. Having other players help with the stats also keeps them involved as we;; they should be thinking about their next moves. Battles lasted no more than 10 turns with the average around 7. Starting range is important starting outside of fire range can cause to many turns of nothing. again its players choice I understand. we like the command chit generation your command does degrade as the battle goes on as squadron break up and command chits diminish. We feel that the indirect move should allow for turning as ship currently plod on in a straight course. Also you cannot fire torpedoes in the indirect phase? Ship commanders ought to have this option, This will help with the lack of command tokens.

Final question: Do you guys use the Excel fleet builder or the separate Datacards in your games? Thank you for all your time replying and writing here

Here you go:

Great!!! Thank you very much. If you ever need more play testers for ideas our group of 8 guys are willing to help'
Thanks again