Anyone want to help thrash out campaign rules??

[Ozariig]

Hi Fred, I've read the rules over a few times and collected some thoughts for you. I haven't tried playing it out yet, so keep that in mind. That will be my next step

Encounters
I like the feel. It makes me think of Stratego and Poker, with a bunch of card play-and-counter-play mixed in. I can see three main situations arising:

1. Scout vs. Unknown force. A larger fleet, even a merchant convoy with one or two strong ships escorting it, may try to use tricks to force the scout into a fight, to try and get a cheap win.
2. Warships vs. Merchant Convoy: The convoy will either do their damnedest to evade right from the get-go, or act aggressive in order to convince the attacker that they are dealing with something more dangerous. Bluffing here is a bit of a fool's game though, considering the opposing player expended a card to initiate the encounter and thus has already signalled an aggressive disposition...
3. Warships vs. Warships: The larger defending force may wish to lure the enemy's fleet into thinking that they are dealing with a Convoy by using frail Evade attempts. Otherwise its just getting into close range

The one piece of information that isn't revealed at any distance is the damage level on respective ships. But considering that ships can only be damaged by the one opposing player, I'll assume that players won't have too much trouble remembering fleet composition and ship damage levels.

Suggestions:

• After the first round, there is no uncertainty as to the speed of the enemy fleet - which, in the case of a Merchant Convoy, might be all that you want to know. To make things a bit more tense/uncertain and to incentivize getting to Identification range, maybe each player should do a secret die roll or draw a chit from the A bag each round and add their fleet's speed?
• If you find people playing encounters too cautiously or aggressively, consider a sort of ante system (i.e. betting victory points or cards from your hand) in order to give people more incentive to bluff.

Card Deck
The card deck can be broken down into three main card types:

1. Merchant cards
2. Encounter cards
3. Map cards

As you noted, Fair Winds cards are very useful both in encounters and on the map, potentially leaving it in short supply. Some other cards have dual-purposes, but its possible that someone will end up with a hand that is heavy in one sort of cards or another, forcing them to end their turn early. Or, while playing through an encounter, each player needs to consider the value of cards that they play with respect to the rest of their turn as well. It seems like a legitimate strategy would be to attack with lots of fast ships just to have the other player burn through a bunch of their cards trying to evade.

Based on the draw/discard/pass mechanic, that seems intentional -- perhaps simulating commander initiative/logistics? Hand management seems key to accomplishing everything that you want in your turn. It makes me think of A Few Acres of Snow, except without the deck-building mechanic.

Suggestions:

• If it becomes too difficult for players to accomplish anything on their turns, you could experiment with different hand sizes and deck make-ups. Or you could consider splitting out the cards into two separate decks, and having players draw a bunch of Encounter cards for each encounter.

Map Layout, Raids, and Combats
My main concern here is to do with campaign length. I think you left it pretty open (probably the first person to X victory points, or the most victory points after Y campaign turns). Probably not whoever can sink or steal all of the other player's warships

Speaking of which, since there is no replacement of ships, sinking or capturing an opponent's ship is a huge tempo swing. I'd be tempted to ignore Merchant ship cards at the start and just go on the hunt. After I secured a ship advantage against the other player, I would be far more likely to be successful with merchants.

It seems to me that the four-section map could become crowded if you have too many ships and fleets. Any idea what the upward limit would be?

I'm not sure that there is much motivation to raid ports. Barring overwhelming force for the attacker, the defender seems to have a big advantage. Unless a port is poorly defended, it seems like it could take a long time to play out, and the motivation appears to only be causing damage to coastal batteries, plus whatever easy points are to be gained from sinking/capturing the inactive ships.

Suggestions

• Consider automatically replacing sunk/captured ships and commanders, and just leave the victory points as the incentive.
• If you find that merchant ships are being ignored, consider having merchants automatically appear instead of needing to be played from someone's hand. You could achieve this by putting the Merchant cards in their own deck, colour coded for each player. After each campaign turn, a Merchant card is drawn, causing merchants to appear at a designated sea zone on the edge of the campaign map, with a named port as destination. If you went for this approach, you might need a few more sea zones along the edge to prevent players from camping on the map edges with their Vice-Admiral.
• For people who are collection-challenged like myself, maybe raids and battles could be scaled based on proportional fleet size?

That's all I've got for now. I hope this helps!

P.S. If you feel like you're going to need a lot of playthroughs to determine optimal composition for the card deck, I might be able to help. I can set up a test harness using Python code; if we can figure out what stats to look for, I can simulate several million play-throughs and report on them, e.g. how often players can't do anything because their hands are full of stuff they can't use.