Ship Tactics Of The Early 17th Century

The Battle of Gibraltar (1607) by Adam Willaerts

A recent discussion on ship types for the 30 Years War on the Naval Wargaming Facebook group prompted a lively discussion, including this one from Ix Nichols that is such a great description of how a Galleys & Galleons game pans out that I thought it was worth sharing here:

I've been researching the 1600-1650 period for 3 decades, and there just isn't much written about it in English.

There simply wasn't any such thing as formal fleet tactics until the line of battle became formalized in the 2nd Anglo-Dutch War. In the first half of the 17th C. sailing ship commanders modeled their tactics on cavalry, charging in a mob lead by an flagship, and either settling into a boarding melee or withdrawing to reload and charge again (and again, and again, etc.)

It took a lot longer to reload a broadside (few gunners, primitive gun tackle), so Napoleonic exchanges of fire were nearly impossible. An individual ship bent on a gun duel might attempt to bear down, fire a broadside, come about, fire the other broadside, then break off to reload. Ships in a running fight would just fire individual guns as able.

The only fleet formations of the pre-Anglo-Dutch War period I'm aware of come from five days before the Battle of the Downs 1639: Oquendo put his ships in a crescent, and Tromp put his in a spread-out line ahead on the leeward gauge. Medina-Sidonia had used a crescent in 1588 and a Portuguese admiral used the retiring leeward line in the early 1500s, so both of these tactics may have had some known precedent to the belligerents, but most fleet battles with sailing ships seemed to involve pell-mell mob tactics (including the Downs).

Personally, I think this makes the period *excellent* for wargaming, because this is *exactly* how wargamers behave. Wargamers think (incorrectly) that Nelson's genius was initiating a melee, so the only way to keep ships in line is to handcuff them out of reach of the table and move their ships for them. In fact, the melee seems to have been the standard tactic until the 1670s, and it was always bloody and usually gave victory to the side with some kind of force advantage. That was bad in real-life wars, but great for wargaming.

So have at it wargamers - hurl your ships at each other with reckless abandon, and forget those neat and tidy lines!

Galley Fight

I'm still painting the latest batch of galleys (and it will probably be a week or so at least before they see any action, but I did have a play with my existing ones yesterday. I wanted to try out some alternative stats for ancient galleys I'd been thinking about whilst we were away over the weekend. 

The aim was to simplify the stats given in the rules and tweak the quality of the galleys so that some of the larger ones would be more useful. At present the quinquereme, which seems to have been a mainstay of some fleets, seems somewhat underwhelming compared to the trireme, because it has a Quality of 4, making a group of them quite hard to activate without a flagship to boost them. There's also a strange quirk of the quadreme where it seems to have been given the reinforced hull trait in order to have it sit uneasily between the trireme and the quinquereme in terms of ability to give and receive attacks.

What I decided to do was drop the C values on some types, leave others as they were and try to improve quality on some larger ships.

My proposed stats (including ships I'm not ready to field yet) are:

Bireme - Q2 C1 - Ramming, Unarmed, Yare, Shallow Draft

Trireme - Q3 C2 - Ramming, Unarmed, Yare, Shallow Draft

Quadreme - Q3 C3 - Ramming

Quinquereme - Q3 C4 - Ramming

Hexareme - Q4 C5 - Ramming, High Towers

I set up two sides, nominally Carthage (Red) and Syracuse (Blue), and gave each three quinqueremes and four triremes. There were no flagships, but with everything operating with a Q3 that shouldn't be an issue.

Here's the action after a few moves, with the quinqueremes of both sides in the centre, and triremes operating on the flanks.

The first attack saw a Carthaginian trireme get ahead of  its main force and get rammed by a Syracusan trireme.

A bad roll on the All At Sea table saw the Carthaginian vessel ground itself on the island, and sink. The Syracusan triremes then fell back to cover the flanks of their larger ships.

North of the island two Carthaginian ships closed in on a lone Syracusan trireme.

The quinqueremes were closing up now as well. Unlike the triremes they have deck artillery, and the Carthaginians soon started taking hits.

Indeed one was sunk rather quickly, and the Syracusans closed up to bring their newly gained fire superiority to bear at closer range.

Meanwhile near the island a Carthaginian trireme had been sunk, and another was forced to strike as a second Syracusan trireme joined the action.

A Carthaginian quinquereme caught fire. With galley actions I remove the possibility of explosions, however; any explosion result is simply treated as an additional fire (which pretty much dooms the vessel anyway, but not so immediately).

The end of the action - the Carthaginians had lost a couple of ships sunk, one surrendered and one burned beyond salvage. Syracuse had a trireme surrender, but had otherwise just taken damage.

The new stats seemed OK, but there is the danger that they make the artillery maybe too good, so I'd have to try them out some more.

To be fair I ran a second game using the stats in the rules. Whilst the quinqueremes had their moments failing to activate they still proved useful and weren't too outclassed by the triremes. I need to play more games.

New Gladiators

I completed another batch of gladiators yesterday evening. They've actually been finished since the middle of last week; I just had the bases to do.

They are all from Crusader. Crusader make gorgeous gladiator figures.

Here's an armoured scissor (left) and a secutor (right). The observant amongst you will see that the secutor got missed out of the group-shot above,

A thraex, and another secutor. The secutor figure is my favourite of this batch.

A veles and a barbarian.

I still have a few more gladiators left to paint, but then my supply will have dried up. I want to get some more, both from Brigade Games and from West Wind (via Old Glory), but postage rates from the US to Australia make that far too expensive a proposition at present.

Anyway, this batch of six brings my gladiator stable to over 90 figures.

Biremes Assembled

We had a family weekend away in Katoomba this weekend. There was enough downtime for me to put together some biremes I'd been working on for Galleys & Galleons.

Here I am, hard at work in the kitchen on the house we rented.

(It was a big house - there were seven adults and one small child)

I mostly cut out all of the components for fourteen vessels before we went, so that all I had to do was glue them together. First I stuck the hulls, prows and oar-sections together, leaving them to dry for the afternoon.

And then it was just a matter of rounding off the sterns, adding the bow and stern-posts and finally a little strip of deck trim

In addition you can see a ship with lots of towers - I was having a play with a design for an over-the-top polyreme flagship.

I'm back home now, with a pile of new ancient galleys to paint, although I'm away on an extra-long weekend next weekend, since Mrs Kobold and I are celebrating our wedding anniversary.

More Hebridean Piracy

I ran a game of Galleys & Galleons at the club last night, repeating my Hebridean Piracy scenario from the other day. I ran the merchant ships, whilst Peter and John ran the lairds in their birlinns. There was a little more terrain this time.

The merchant ships. I had some rocks and an island to negotiate at the start of the game.

The Laird of Skye's ships (Peter).

And those of Angus Redshanks (John). A couple of shifts of wind early on saw them having to row into the action, although the merchant ships would have to sail past them anyway.

That was assuming, of course, that the merchants made it across the board - in trying to get past the rocks two of them collided, taking minor damage.

When they emerged from the rocks, the lairds were already closing in fast. In the confusion one of the merchant ships fired on its fellow, although no damage was scored.

The Laird of Skye grappled one of the merchant ships.

The birlinns of both lairds became intertangled, although at this stage they threw nothing but insults at each other. The Laird of Skye took the lead merchant ship, and could now begin stealing its cargo.

Amazingly the other two merchant ships managed to slip past the birlinns, and began to turn for a run to safety. However John's red-sailed ships would be waiting, if they could row up fast enough.

Unfortunately at this point Peter had to leave, so we finished the game. John conceded that Peter had captured one ship and would be able to recover the cargo unmolested, whilst it was still uncertain if he could take any cargo himself. It was probable that one of the merchants at least would escape as well. Still, what we managed to play was fun and chaotic, which is how I hoped the scenario to run, although we considered adding in a victory condition that encourages some direct combat between the lairds as well (aside from simply stealing treasure off each other).