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Soapy Frog -> RE: Fog of War (1/24/2008 5:29:33 AM)
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Yes that is correct, the biggest complaint of the Advanced naval rules is the advantage it conferred Britian who would (generally) win all the battles (of course it was possible to lose anyway with bad luck, and indeed I have seen it happen, but the tables and morale differences massively favoured the Brits).
However the stratgey for beating Britian in the ANW was much the same, attrition. It was just a much less certain strategy than it is in the base rules. In the base rules, a combination of Span, France and Russia typically results in the destruction of the British fleet (if the British player is so foolish as to fight), a result absolutely carved in stone, barring incompetance. With the ANW Britain could fight it out and have some chance of success, although again the attrition and the probable loss of Nelson would result in defeat.
The problem was that, since Britain would win 80% of the battles they would get most of the hulks and the result was that they could rebuild their navy stronger for the next war at their enemies expense.
The most common solution I saw for this was to drop the British morale to 3.5 from 4 (or conversely, raise Spanish, Russian and French morale to 3.5 from 3, thus lowering the proportion of British victories... but still allowing britian a chance for survival against the Spanish-French-Russian coalition (roughly equivalent in my estimation to Frances' chances against a Prussian-Austrian-Russian-British coalition).
In any case that' s a very simple solution which actually pretty much fixes the central imbalance of the ANW (even though the rules themselves were more historically accurate; Britian could not reasonably be challenged on the seas after Trafalgar, that's not exactly FUN!).
IMHO a more complex solution would be adding chits to the mix as I have seen with other variants, that return the rock-paper-scissors challenge that makes land battles so interesting to fight.
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