Hi All,
I too played this rule set for the frist time on the 2 July.
We also did some modeling on the day. So did not finish the game. Our fault, not the rules.
We had 600 pts a side. That is about 10-11 S.O.L. per side. 1st to 4th rate. As I was using Russians I had 4, 4th rate ships.
Some say they dis-like all the dicing. Ships of the same rate did not all sail the same. SOG use the logs for different ships, David's rules do the shuffle thing at the start of his game to up-set your plans."Fighting Sail" use dice.
In large fleet games not having to hunt the ships-logs for each ship is lovely. After turn 2/3 we knew the number of dice to use. To help us we had one colour dice (yellow) for the 1st rate ship. That was for me 4 dice. I added a different colour dice for each smaller rate. 3rd rate, 4 yellow +1 red. 4th rate 4 yellow, 1 red and 1 green dice. This helped to remember how many too use for each rate. We did find that for a number of turns my 1st rate was moving faster than my 4th rate ships, Funny! but not too far-fetched (it did happen). Using 10 ships the dice do not slow the game down, any more than ship-log hunting. We are talking 10 ships.
I have been told that damage was fast and deadly with these rules.
We did not find this so. It took 3, 3th rate ships 2 turns to sink one 4th rate. Roll the number of dice to hit, the target ship has a number of save throws. The save dice do match the fire dice on the same rate of ship. The uniform damage and saves in a small game would drive me mad. In the big fleet game this helped. What is important after the set-up, is the fleet morale. We found that laying the damage tokens face down. Then at the end of the turn, we turned them face-up as we marked off the "Fleet morale". I found that to pull a ship out of the line if it was too damage, to give me a chance it repair it was the best thing to do.
We did not get too, short range or boarding.
I would say that for big fleet games this is a O.K. to good. No paper-work, only marking off fleet morale. For smaller games and ships, No! use the rules you like best.
Be safe
Rory