Hi!

[lily99]

Welcome aboard! Lots to unpack there, hopefully some other shipmates can pick up what I miss. I'm one of Ares' historical consultants doing the research and analysis behind the game, so while I can't promise answers to all your questions I will try to help get them for you as you post them.

For 3d modeling, the gurus are Henry Turner and Simon Mann--both are members here, Simon goes by "T1ckles35" IIRC.

Advice on learning the game: Start with the most basic, stripped-down ruleset option first, then gradually add "moving parts" a little at a time. "Learn to crawl before you try to walk, then learn to walk before you try to run" kinda stuff. (Ironically, this from a guy who went straight to running as a toddler...) Really, Wings of Glory WWI is actually the best place to cut your teeth on the game system, Wings WWII is more complex and Sails can be the most challenging of the three.

Scale in the game models is a dog's-breakfast of inconsistency--a new engineer at Wave 3 brought an undiscussed but deliberate rescale because "the old ships looked too big", while the new ones sometimes measure as far under as the old are alleged to over. The one "known" is my personal fault, USS Constitution is oversized to 197' LOD when it should have been 175'--I over-relied on an older edition of the "game bible," Rif Winfield's British Warships in the Age of Sail 1793-1817 when I SHOULD have cross-checked Winfield with Greenwich draughts and USN records. (197' OAL however is about right; it's on my to-do list once I have access to a 3d printer to work the numbers and "retrofit" my personal collection with Turner and Mann designs painted to match their Ares counterparts.)

Drawings your best resource is the same one we use at Ares: the Admiralty Draughts Collection, and as a supplement the J M Hilhouse Collection, at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich. (Hilhouse wasn't Admiralty, rather a commercial shipbuilder who was occasionally contracted to build warships to Admiralty designs and kept copies of the construction plans just in case further copies of a design were ordered.) https://www.rmg.co.uk/collections/ob...D=Ship%20Plans (It's been many years since I last trawled Greenwich's website, this new version stinks worse than the aftermath of a Bad Day At The Mongolian Buffet.)

Thanks so much! This forum is filled with so many talented people!! I'm very glad to have found it. I played the basic version of the game with my friend the other evening and it is a lot easier to learn than I thought, adding the rules little by little is definitely helping the learning curve. (Although I also went straight to running as a toddler too )

That collection is so interesting I had not come across it before so thank you for sharing. Being a historical consultant sounds like a dream job, it must be very interesting to see the behind the scenes development :0

[Diamondback]

Thanks so much! This forum is filled with so many talented people!! I'm very glad to have found it. I played the basic version of the game with my friend the other evening and it is a lot easier to learn than I thought, adding the rules little by little is definitely helping the learning curve. (Although I also went straight to running as a toddler too )

That collection is so interesting I had not come across it before so thank you for sharing. Being a historical consultant sounds like a dream job, it must be very interesting to see the behind the scenes development :0

TBH, most of what I did when things were in active development was comparing ship plans to each other to figure out "what else can we pass an existing or proposed sculpt off as, and what are the remaining Must Haves to complete Trafalgar and other major engagements?" Last project I actively worked on was Wings WWII identifying units and aircraft sculpts for a Cactus Air Force theme in '20... but you might find this thread interesting. :) https://sailsofglory.org/showthread....ht=view+inside

Who knows, between you and Henry and Simon, maybe your 3d modeling might find something big differing from otherwise similar ships that I missed--and my usual bias is "When In Doubt, Don't Do It." Or you might find things a closer fit to each other than I'd previously thought... I come at this as less a traditional wargamer than a recovering scale modeler, where details like the different tail gun setups between an otherwise identical B-52B and RB-52B matter, while David is more "traditional wargamer" steeped in the days when you had to make do with "generic British 32-gun frigate," so hopefully our efforts from our opposing biases complement and balance each other.