Skirmish Between Le Swiftsure and HMS Goliath (Solitaire)

[Salem Vendari]

This week I went out and bought myself two SoLs: HMS Goliath/HMS Bellonna and Le Berwick/Le Swiftsure, and decided to I wanted to try them out. This was another game using the Advanced rules, as well as several optional rules: First Broadsides, Let the Men Drink!, and Variable Wind.

The two ships started opposite each other on the map, HMS Goliath in the north, and Le Swiftsure downwind in the south. The wind blew in from the west, giving the Goliath (AI) the ability to use the wind to its advantage. It promptly turned south-westward toward the Swiftsure, which sailed straight ahead at full sail for two turns before turning slightly westward to catch the wind. This move brought all of her starboard guns to bear as Goliath unfortunately turned her nose into an incredibly powerful bow-rake at short-range (a whopping 10 damage after applying rake and First Broadside). In addition to killing several members of the crew (3 boxes), several rounds shot through the sails, knocked down a mast, and knocked over some lanterns that started two different fires. This was a devastating blow, taking out three of the Goliath's hull boxes.

Goliath had several members of its crew working to repair the mast and put out the fires (which took out two more boxes), but managed to get off a full broadside (a whole 4 damage with its First Broadside) that managed to knock out a small portion of the Swiftsure's crew and fill two hull boxes. Then the Swiftsure, coming about at backing sail, again brought all of her guns on the port side to bear, though this time just barely missing the rake shot. The damage from this salvo left only two points open in the Goliath's final hull box, but the fire still remaining on board took her out of commission.


Unfortunately, I have no pictures this time (something happened when copying them to my computer and I ended up losing all of the interesting ones).

Some thoughts:
-Fires are extremely powerful, to the point that I think, from a game perspective, they need to be nerfed. However, this could also simply be the result of having two onboard at once, but I still feel like fighting fires takes too much time to save the ship (a ship loses a minimum of two hull boxes before it can put out the fire, versus countering a leak with the pump action and taking no damage). I'll still play with it as-is for the time being, however.
-1v1 is kind of boring, especially when it comes to the advanced game. I'm looking forward to bigger games where there are multiple targets.
-Artificial intelligence is a little wonky when it comes to repairs; I feel like given the situation (with it only having two or three hull boxes left) it should have prioritized repairing the hull rather than the mast (especially considering the amount of fire damage it was taking). I might end up overriding AI decisions when certain choices are obvious.