Galley Battles: from Salamis to Actium

Galley Battles recreates navel battles from the beginning of row and sail sea warfare until self-powered ironclads. The Egyptians, Greeks, Persians, Phoenicians, and Romans had fleets of hundreds of boats (and variously fought on the same side in mixed fleets), now gamers can experience commanding them. Which is a big part of the challenge. You can't exactly radio the captains. And when you're fleet is covering 655,360 square kilometers, not every ship is within visual range. The author chose the subject matter not only due to its lacking coverage in most war games but also because he doesn't like micromanagement in war games and the time periods involved make micromanagement unrealistic. Let the player worry about tactics, units, formations, weather, tides, and the computer will handing the inertia, accelerations, angles, and such parameters. Your best bet is having a good battle plan for everyone to follow before the action starts. And you need to match your crews on ships and match ships in your squadrons. Veterans and a rookies rigging the sails together will go slower than the rookies would alone. Rather the veterans should train the rookies before battle and command them during battle. And it helps if everyone on the ship speaks the same language (which is not always possible). Ships need to be similarly grouped in squadrons so formations don't break up and orders end up taking longer than expected to happen. Worse, a ship may run aground or collide with another. If needed, commanding squadrons to keep up with any necessary changes to the plan can be done. Better captains and crews and squadrons efficiently matched mean they are able to carryout more complex orders. When you don't have a matched force (it was unavoidable in some historic battles), you'd better keep the orders few and simple or they'll get snafued. And don't worry, if you really want to, you can give orders to individual ships using ancient methods from history (with historically realistic results). Each player takes turns giving orders, then it all plays out simultaneously until 5 game minutes have passed. Actual time this takes depends on the player's visual zoom level. Zoom in to see the details and slow things down, zoom out to end the action in as few seconds as possible.There is no grid and the world and everything in it is done to scale.

zerothis # 2012-02-27 01:27:44

display: raster

Yet there is a playable demo. In 2012, the author says the game is still in development.

Alpha versions of this game used a hex grid. The latest versions don't use a grid.

zerothis # 2012-02-27 09:30:36

Announced in 2005 with expected release date 2006. Has not been released yet (by 2012) and official website expired in 2009. Last activity by the developer was in 2008.

Sanguine # 2012-02-27 07:41:08