Sometimes I don't like how ships can fall apart so quickly. I was reminded of this when play-testing a scenario where two ships opened with full double-shot broadsides. Nearly half of both ships' hull and crew boxes were filled on the first turn. In other cases, if one ship is lucky and the other unlucky, the game can be over from the beginning.
I've seen other threads discussing this matter and which present some ideas for reducing damage taken. I like Dobb's suggestion of reducing damage depending on the size of a ships primary size of artillery (-1 for 12 pounders or less and -2 for 6 pounders or less). Dobbs' suggestion of side-specific damage is also interesting, though I'm not sure I'm ready to adjust the game to this extent yet, especially for scenarios with a number of ships.
So far, I've decided to generally not use the "First Broadside" rule. In a way I feel that this historically-correct situation is already taken care of since the first hull box or boxes have larger broadside numbers anyway and are usually blasted away after the first turn or two.
Now I'm wondering if there is a way to reduce the strength of double shot. One suggestion I saw was to only allow double-shot at C/D range. However, I feel this could lead to double shot being used too little since it is often too tricky to move this close given the game's different scales for artillery range and movement.
Thus I've considered the following house rule for double shot:
At B range, draw the correct number of A damage counters, but only half the number of B damage counters (agreeing to round odd numbers up or down at the start of the game).
At C/D range, draw the correct number of A and B damage counters, as per the rules. (Alternatively, one could draw the correct number of B counters and half the number of A counters).
I have not play-tested this and haven't considered how this might work with carronades.
Any thoughts on this idea or other simple ways of sometimes reducing damage for games are welcome!