I'm looking forward to this one

Serpents of the Seas is charging and should be shipping in a month or so. I'm looking forward to this one.

It also means I need to get cracking on my next installment of the "replay" of the Chesapeake and Shannon fight. Next up will be Close Action because I plan to cap the series with the Serpents of the Seas review.

"I didn't know that!" Wargaming and perusing through History

One of the alluring things about wargaming for me is the discoveries it can bring.

Today happens to be the anniversary of the Battle of Audierne Bay, which was fought on Jan. 13, 1797. In the grand scale of things it wasn't a very big battle -- just a pair of British frigates against a French ship-of-the-line -- or a very important one. It's notable as probably the most famous fight of the renowned British frigate captain Edward Pellew, who is one of the probable inspirations for famous British frigate captains of fiction such as Horatio Hornblower.

I pulled out my copy of Flying Colors, which happens to have a scenario about the battle, and looked it over. It's one of the more interesting small ship actions of the Napoleonic era. The French ship was the Droits de l'Homme (with the suitably revolutionary name The Rights of Man), a 74-gun ship of the line that would normally have been able to fend off two British frigates despite the superior British seamanship. But the French ship was unlucky in several respects.

First, the weather was bad, with a stiff wind making it impossible to open the lower bank of gunports without sinking the ship! This deprived the French battleship of its heaviest guns.

Second, while one of the British ships was the 36-gun Amazon, a standard frigate for its time, the other was the 44-gun Indefatigable, a "razee" frigate, which meant that it had been built as a ship-of-the-line and had been turned into a frigate by removing the upper deck. This meant it was much more stoutly built than a standard frigate and had a heavier battery of guns. It also meant that, being lighter, its gunports were higher and it could therefore use its guns despite the waves.

Finally, the Indefatigable was commanded by Sir Edward Pellew. (Shown at left)

The battle ended with both the Amazon and the French battleship (after heavy damage) being blown ashore and wrecked and Pellew skillfully sailing his ship out of danger.

All good stuff, already. But I was curious about Pellew and soon found out that he had indeed had a long and surprising naval career.

As a midshipman he fought against Benedict Arnold's fleet at the Battle of Valcour Island on Lake Champlain on Oct. 11, 1776. Almost exactly a year later, as a lieutenant he was present at the Battle of Saratoga (facing Arnold again!) and became a prisoner when Burgoyne surrendered his army. Paroled, Pellew couldn't see any more active service against the Americans, but he distinguished himself in other waters until being put on half-pay after the wars ended.

When Britain and France resumed fighting after the French Revolution broke out Pellew was given command of the 36-gun frigate Nymphe and resourcefully manned it and got it to sea as one of the first British frigates to sail. He defeated the French frigate Cleopatre in one of the most famous single-ship duels of the war. He was then promoted to command the larger Indefatigable.

Eventually he rose to the rank of admiral, was named a viscount and died at the age of 76.

So a small scenario in Flying Colors led to a line of inquiry that brought out a lot of intriguing facts. While I'm not surprised that Pellew was also the commander of the Nymphe vs. Cleopatre fight, I was very surprised to find out about his role in the American Revolutionary War. His participation at Valcour Island was a definite "I didn't know that!" and doubly so for his participation at Saratoga. Indeed, I had never heard that Burgoyne's army included a naval contingent, and I've read quite a few accounts of Saratoga over the years. "I didn't know that!"

This si the sort of thing that reminds me why I love wargames.

Breaking new ground with 1805: Sea of Glory

When you think about it, there's not a lot of fresh ground to trod in wargaming.

Just about every war anybody heard of -- and many that no one heard of -- has been done. Every level of command from private to field marshal is covered. Every era from the neolithic to interstellar is depicted.

So 1805: Sea of Glory is quite a remarkable design achievement. I won't say that strategic warfare in the age of sail is entirely untouched, but I think 1805: Sea of Glory is the first real serious wargame to attempt the topic. I'm looking forward to seeing how it plays in practice, but if it works as well as it appears it may this may open up a whole new genre of wargames. Evidently the next campaign that will be covered in 1798, but one can easily imagine games covering Suffren in the Indian Ocean and operations off the American Coast from the Revolution.

And one rich area for exploration would be the Anglo-Dutch Wars, which have been barely covered at all, largely because they don't have a lot of tactical interest and tactical games were the only age of sail games until now.

Ask And Ye Shall Receive

Even as I typed the words in my pervious post grousing about having to wait for my pre-orders there was a Priority Mail box sitting on my table at home from GMT Games with my copy of 1805: Sea of Glory. As promised, here's my out-of-the box impressions.

First off the box is the standard GMT Bookcase size, the exact same size as Flying Colors with very similar colors, too. They will look nice next to each other. No complaints there.

Inside the box there's a pretty standard GMT-style rule book. This is already online at their site, so there were no surprises there. The game does appear to be a little more complex than I was expecting. It's definitely a full-fledged hard-core wargame that takes account of a myriad of factors and definitely not a euro-style wargame.

I had mixed feelings about the map. It's very nice looking, almost worth framing, but it's paper, so I was a little disappointed on that score, having gotten used to the cardstock maps in many GMT games. Being a paper map I do have some concerns about durability. Definitely worth playing under glass. It appears functional but I reserve judgement on that until I play it.

There are two counter sheets and indeed, while it will be perceived as being a block game, the vast majority of playing pieces are cardboard counters. And the majority of those are ships and admirals, with various game markers and chits for sundry purposes. All are attractively done, although not out of the ordinary for GMT.

The key component of the game are the fleet blocks. This was a little puzzling, however. It appears that a late decision was made to go with bigger blocks, because the rule book shows the small blocks we have seen used for infantry units in the Commands & Colors: Ancients series, and the stickers are sized for that size of block -- but the game came with the larger blocks that have been used for cavalry units in C&C:A. This poses a small problem because the larger block really don't quite fit in the hexes on the playing board, which may create some confusion about the location of the block and also make it hard to have multiple blocks in the same spot. I can only surmise that the larger blocks were substituted for ease of handling. The blocks with stickers affixed (I'm lousy at doing that, BTW) are shown at right. From top to bottom are a French "Fog of War" (dummy) block, a British frigate, A Spanish fleet, a British fleet and a French fleet. The numbers and letters on the blocks refer to the fleet's destination -- in other words there is a form of plotted movement, but rather painlessly handled.

The game also contains a couple of fleet and port displays, which is where the composition of the fleets is tracked. The ship counters, with a handful of exceptions, don 't appear on the map.

There are also two different player charts with various table needed for play. In an apparent error the box says there are four charts, but posting on Boardgame Geek indicate everyone is getting just two so I assume the box is in error.

Finally there are five dice and the usual allotment of small plastic baggies that GMT thoughtfully provides.

I'll save any remarks about game play for later once I have had a chance to play it, but overall it looks pretty good out of the box.

Special conditions required for fleet warfare

Russian Cruiser Aurora

Looking at the broad sweep of history one constant is that there are few extensive eras of general peace. Armies are fighting somewhere just about all the time. It's hard to find a decade without major wars and battles, virtually impossible to find a peaceful century.

At least on land.

But major naval actions involving fleets are far less common than battles involving armies. And those eras when naval fleet actions occur are concentrated far more in time. It appears that there are special conditions required for there to be contending navies.

Naval fleet actions in history seem to be largely confined to two half-millennial periods of time, with those two eras separated by nearly a thousand years.

Now, I am not arguing that there were no navies at other times, and I'm not arguing that there were no naval battles at all. But outside the eras of contending navies naval fleet actions were very rare and isolated events, while during the eras of contending navies they formed an interrelated strategic narrative. And the two eras showed some remarkable parallels.

The natural state of affairs for most of history is what could be called open seas. Navigation is largely free, with what state control there is being confined to local waters. Military expeditions across the sea are episodic and generally unopposed due to a lack of capability to oppose them.

The first era of contending navies lasted from roughly 500 B.C. to 31 B.C. During this era the dominant form of warship was the oared ramming vessel. The era started with the maritime-Greek states led by Athens facing the powerful continental power Persia. Naval powers rose and fell over the ensuing five centuries but at the end of day Rome, the intellectual and cultural heir to Greece emerged with total naval supremacy. A supremacy that lasted for centuries before slowly evaporating into another era of free navigation and uncontrolled seas. But during the era of Roman naval hegemony military expeditions across the sea were not possible for non-Roman powers and the Roman state controlled navigation throughout the known world.

During the first era of contending navies, however, many states attempted to float fleets. Naval campaigns and battles were relatively common and there were even wars that were primarily naval affairs.

USS Olympia

The second era of contending navies started around 1450 and also lasted about 500 years, until the mid-20th Century. Naval battles again became relatively common and many powers attempted to create navies and exercise control over large parts of the ocean. Again an early leading naval power in that era, England, eventually saw its intellectual and cultural heir, the United States, emerge with naval supremacy.

Naval supremacy, once won, seems impossible to have wrested away, although it can be lost through decadence and neglect. While effective armies can be raised in short order, creating a strong navy requires enormous resources and time, and cannot be done against the opposition of a hegemonic naval power. At the height of its naval power the Royal Navy sought to be as strong as the next two potential rivals combined, a margin of superiority it calculated could not be overcome. The contemporary U.S. Navy is stronger than all the other navies of the world combined, and most of those other navies are its formal allies.

Ships from five nations

There's a bit of talk circulating about China's rising naval power, but the stark reality is that China is generations away from being able to challenge U.S. Naval power, and will only succeed if the U.S. leadership is negligent. The best the Chinese can hope for in the case of a war with the U.S. is to seize temporary control of its local waters. This is much less ambitious than what England faced in its challenges from the Dutch, Spanish, French and Germans or the U.S. faced from the Japanese or Soviets.

From a wargamer's perspective, what all this means is that we may be generations away from seeing fleet-on-fleet naval actions again. Indeed, there may never be that sort of warfare on Earth again, although whether something similar might happen in space is an open question.

Nearly all naval wargames are set in one of those two eras of contending navies. There are a few wargames placed in the era or classical oared warfare from roughly Salamis in 480 B.C. to Actium in 31 B.C.

Most other wargames are set in the era that began roughly with Lepanto or the Armada in the late 1400s and came to a close, as far as active combat went, in 1945, although the Cold War standoff between the West and the Soviets included a strong naval component.

It seems to me that in order to have fleet actions there need to be particular conditions present. There have to be technological means to exercise naval control. There must be an international system with several great powers with access to the sea, but no one superpower. And there has to be sufficient economic wealth, as navies are extremely expensive propositions.

Because those conditions occur rarely, naval warfare is a very unusual occurrence. While battles on land are spread throughout the last 50-plus centuries, battles at sea are concentrated in about 10 of those centuries, in two consecutive batches.