|
loki100 -> RE: Nelson, Wellington and.. er Warspite (God help us) (3/26/2016 7:43:00 PM)
|
great to see this - you do such excellent exploratory AARs. But some advice/comments.
If this is your first AGE game, I'd really suggest play the Waterloo scenario a few times. Its an hour or so. But there are tricks to the game system such as stances, march to the sound of the guns and so on that can trip up those new. As with the advice I often give about PoN, get your early errors out of the way in a short scenario rather than find out you've undermined 2-3 years of game play.
Related to this, don't want to push my own contribution but do read the set of posts in the war-room. They were written to help those new to the game system avoid some of the learning frustration. Equally some good pre-game reading is Narwhal's Learning from Prussia (its buried deep on the Paradox forum) or mine and Narwhal's 'Wars In America'. Clearly neither are about WoN, but you can skip the game play and concentrate on the frequent bits of play advice. The underlying game system is the same. Warning the Wars in America one contains both lots of trash talk and a lot of needless violence towards the local populations.
Navies.
Few key rules. First unlike land forces naval stacks (whether with a named admiral or not) are always potentially active. This is important as it means you can always set them to look for the enemy or to intercept a passing fleet.
Second, the more active a fleet is the quicker it will lose cohesion. So a passive fleet won't do much but can stay at sea quite a long time. An active fleet is looking for battle but runs up cohesion quickly. The trade off here is obvious.
Third, fleets need to go to port, preferably a naval base, to recover cohesion and take on replacements. When doing this they are better in passive mode - ie useless for operations.
Fourth, when moving from port to sea, fleets are subject to a random delay. You'll see this in the turn messages as 'fleet x was delayed y days in port z'. So if you see that a given journey will take 7 days, its possible that you won't make it one turn.
All this makes permanent blockade hard but the British have enough ships to find and block in the main French fleet - but you will then need a reserve in port to come out and replace the originals and so on. Also on the high seas, finding your opponent is hard (the impact of the detection vs evade scores). So you get a cat and mouse situation. I've just finished a Wars in America PBEM where I was able to use the relatively small US fleet very effectively by exploiting this.
hope this helps you a little.
edit: there are three orders specific to fleets:
a) intercept - pretty obvious, your fleet can be either at sea or sat in a port and will try to engage a passing fleet - as above best if it is in attack stance;
b) distant unload - allows you to drop off troops without having to make a specific order. Use this one to invade. If you simply want to transport troops to a new port then target that port with the fleet. When the fleet arrives the troops will appear inside the city
c) bombard - this means your fleet will bombard troops on shore - most obviously a fort. As you will know full well ships will lose to shore based guns, especially bigger fortress ones. My advice is don't use this option unless you are really confident (or desperate) - I've lost hard to replace ships this way in the past
|
|
|
|
