Archive for the ‘Videos’ Category

This is a short video showing how to perform ship boarding and capture in Naval Tactics. To board a ship you first need to immobilize the ship by reducing its sails to less than 20%. Once a ship is immobilized, any enemy ship in an adjacent hex and has more than the minimum crew can perform a boarding action. When you perform a boarding action, it is the only action that ship may take that turn (you may not move, reload, or fire your cannon while boarding). Boarding is a chaotic melee that can go either way; if you board a ship and reduce the enemy crew to 0, then you can capture the ship. However if you board and your own crew is reduced to 0, the ship you boarded can capture your ship.

Note: this video was captured using the “quick replay” feature which speeds up the playback performing ship actions simultaneously. During normal game play, each ship moves and fires in a specific order, called “movement order”. This ordering is the number on the left of each ship on the game board

Naval battles come in all shapes and sizes; this particular mission had only 500 fleet configuration points. Both myself and Diebo opted for a single Vanguard, a 3rd Rate Ship of the Line. These are massive ships that pack a ton of firepower! Pay special attention to the replay, for during the entire approach neither Diebo or myself could see each other has we were cloaking in the fog of war due to the island in the middle. When we did stumble into each other, we were broadside-to-broadside at close range!

At this point I had two options. I could load double-shot and duke it out in a close-range slugfest; for this I didn’t have damage bonus Captain Cards to help my chances there. Instead, I opted to load up chain shot and spike down his sails while maneuvering my ship onto his stern. If I get his sails below 20%, he would become immobilized the following turn, and since he was dead in the wind I knew he wouldn’t be able to go far. Diebo surprised me, however, when he played the Devastating Broadsides card! This card only works when you are this close and broadside-to-broadside, and it cancelled all of my movement orders for that turn. Instead of being safely behind him, I was forced to spend another turn broadside-to-broadside. Sadly my ship could not withstand two broadsides of close range double shot, so Diebo claims victory!