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Title kinda says it all I am looking at getting into naval warfare WWII or maybe something in the wooden ship era say 1700-1800ish time frame. Also any idea as to where to pick up models and rules would be awesome thanks.


Also if anyone knows where I can get modern US 3mm rules that would be cool I picked up a lot of models but don't really have anything to do with them now just kinda wanted to paint them and they were really cheap but if I could play some game as well that would be cool.

Thanks for all your help,

Jonathan

Micronauts do a nice model range.

There's Victory at Sea for WWII. For Age of Sail I'm not really sure on specific rulesets but there are a fair few. GW did a set called Trafalgar back when Warhammer Historical was still a thing, might find a copy floating around ebay somewhere.
Too Fat Lardies also have 'Kiss Me Hardy' which sells itself as avoiding the intimidating complexity of other naval games.

 ProfessionalAmateur wrote:
There's Victory at Sea for WWII. For Age of Sail I'm not really sure on specific rulesets but there are a fair few. GW did a set called Trafalgar back when Warhammer Historical was still a thing, might find a copy floating around ebay somewhere.
Too Fat Lardies also have 'Kiss Me Hardy' which sells itself as avoiding the intimidating complexity of other naval games.

I haven't played it, but the Wings of Glory/Wings of War folks are currently publishing Sails of Glory for Age of Sail stuff. Pre-painted miniatures if you go that route.

http://www.aresgames.eu/games/sails-of-glory-line

Wooden Ships and Iron Men (avalon hill) - board based, but can easily be converted to miniatures

The aforementioned Trafalgar by Warhammer Historicals
Ship of the Line
Beat to Quarters

There are several free and several retail age of sail rules out there, depending on scope (single ship vs fleet actions)

As far as models:
Langton (1/1200, very nice, expensive), GHQ
Old Glory, Tumbling Dice, Figurehead, Hallmark (1/2400)
Valiant (1/2000)
Forged in Battle (1/3000)

Or you can use the plastic "Pirates of the Spanish Main" or others in a pinch

Thanks a lot I will look into these I like the idea of a simple rule set just to start with if nothing else.


Love the look of sails of glory

Rod Langton's Signal Close Action and Signal Close Action Fast Play are well worth a look for 1793-1815. He also does earlier periods rules.

If you want to do WW1 and WW2, look at the General Quarters rules from Old Dominion Games.

Seakrieg
Harpoon

If you want to get super technical about your game.

 Easy E wrote:
Seakrieg
Harpoon

If you want to get super technical about your game.

My FLGS owner picked up Seakrieg a couple of weeks ago. After looking through the rules a bit, he described it as "much more complicated than Starfleet Battles."

I'd recommend Victory At Sea or Naval Thunder for WWII.

Victory At Sea is not quite bear & pretzels but it isn't very difficult or detailed either. Naval Thunder is a step above Victory At Sea. Both will let you play out a reasonably sized battle in a few hours.

I've played Seakreig.. I have never finished a game of Seakreig.

There's a variety of manufactures for WWII in different scales and model quality to fit you budget, including a lot of offerings on Shapeways as well.

Sails of glory

Avalon Hill used to have a World War I rules set that was designed for fleet actions named Jutland. I don't know if it was explicitly marketed as a miniatures game. But the game came with counters that represented the individual battleships and battlecruisers (destroyers and light cruisers had squadron counters instead), and effectively played as a miniatures game.

As you want models too, Rod Langton does an excellent range of 1/1200 scale Age of Fighting Sail ships.
http://www.rodlangton.com/

Navwar do nearly every WW1 and WW2 ship ever made in 1/3000 scale. They also have Age of Fighting Sail in 1/3000.
http://www.navwar.co.uk/nav/default.asp?MMID=62

GHQ have a good range in 1/2400 scale, called Micronauts, covering WW1 and WW2.
http://www.ghqmodels.com/

for miniatures I would have to recommend Rod Langton - they are beautiful models

Sails of Glory is good for wooden sailing ships, played it once but seemed good. Wouldn't want to have more than a handful of boats to either side though.

Victory at Sea is ok for WW2, but a bit simplistic. Micronaughts seems better, marginally more complex but by using a D20 and not a D6 and a different volley system gets away from the 40k feel of buckets of dice.

Why does everyone think Star Fleet Battles is complicated?

It is fairly complicated to think out moves because you have to take a lot of decisions in advance for each ship rather than doing things as you go along.

leopard wrote:
Why does everyone think Star Fleet Battles is complicated?

When ADB released Federation Commander (i.e. the simplified version of Starfleet Battles), they released a list of reasons why players might be interested in the new game. One of the items on the list was the following rhetorical question - "Did anyone ever really finish one of those Fed CV vs Klingon C8V battles?"

I have a bunch of the 1:6000 ships from Figurehead for WW2. The detail is surprisingly good and the prices are darned good.

http://nobleminis.com/Figurehead/Figurehead6000.html#WWII

http://www.scalecreep.com/catalog/index.php?cPath=2509 (has pictures of a lot of them).

Topside makes colored counter ships (stickers on a wood base) that are a VERY economical way to get into WW1 or WW2 naval gaming, and they look pretty nice and are simple to store. They will send you a sample for free.

http://topsideminis.com/

I pledged for the Fatal Choices KS which includes some of the Topside ships after having gotten one of their samples.

Jake

Eumerin wrote:

leopard wrote:
Why does everyone think Star Fleet Battles is complicated?

When ADB released Federation Commander (i.e. the simplified version of Starfleet Battles), they released a list of reasons why players might be interested in the new game. One of the items on the list was the following rhetorical question - "Did anyone ever really finish one of those Fed CV vs Klingon C8V battles?"

Weird, never had that problem, used to play 200 - 500 point games in a lunch break (typically 3 cruisers of some sort of four war cruisers seemed to work, the DN classes just lacked the speed to run in the local meta).

Did a couple of larger games, full fleets of 14 ships did indeed take a while, fun though, carriers in one way slowed the game down but in another sped it up as no energy allocation on carriers - and not many in the local group really used them all that well. Carrier v Carrier was fun though.

Only real game that took an age was a starbase assault, through a minefield, multiple waves over a weekend, and still the sodding base won...

Maybe playing four and five way games helped but stuff died reasonably quickly, could play that game all day, and throw in too many of the wrong type of ship and probably would...


Most navy games seem to treat the ships as 'points', the counter being more of a way of knowing what ship is where or for line of sight, makes using coloured bits of card a seriously cheap way of playing.

Of course the age of sail models are beautiful

Eumerin wrote:

leopard wrote:
Why does everyone think Star Fleet Battles is complicated?

When ADB released Federation Commander (i.e. the simplified version of Starfleet Battles), they released a list of reasons why players might be interested in the new game. One of the items on the list was the following rhetorical question - "Did anyone ever really finish one of those Fed CV vs Klingon C8V battles?"

I played huge amounts of SFB back in the day, and I never had a problem to finish off single ship duels. It is true that the designers kept adding more and more stuff into the game, like X technology, pseudo-fighters and so on, and that is probably what put people off.

If you dislike the core SFB rule system, it's better not to play it at all. The whole point of the game is that you have these massively powerful capital ships that can be flung around like dogfighters with their flexible power and shields and so on. That part of it is inherently a lot more complex than "move 6 inches and roll 10D6" kind of games.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
I played huge amounts of SFB back in the day, and I never had a problem to finish off single ship duels. It is true that the designers kept adding more and more stuff into the game, like X technology, pseudo-fighters and so on, and that is probably what put people off.

A Fed CV vs Klingon C8V duel would require a lot of that "more stuff".

You've got the carriers themselves. Plus their two dozen fighters each. Absurd numbers of drones from the fighters in addition to the usual weapons. Three escorts for each carrier, probably with full AEGIS rigs on each escort. Gatling Phasers on the Fed escorts (and Fed fighters). MRS shuttles. SWAC shuttle. And that's just the stuff that I can think of off the top of my head.

Obviously I have forgotten what ships the C8V and so on were. It is about 30 years since I last played the game.

Eumerin wrote:

 Kilkrazy wrote:
I played huge amounts of SFB back in the day, and I never had a problem to finish off single ship duels. It is true that the designers kept adding more and more stuff into the game, like X technology, pseudo-fighters and so on, and that is probably what put people off.

A Fed CV vs Klingon C8V duel would require a lot of that "more stuff".

You've got the carriers themselves. Plus their two dozen fighters each. Absurd numbers of drones from the fighters in addition to the usual weapons. Three escorts for each carrier, probably with full AEGIS rigs on each escort. Gatling Phasers on the Fed escorts (and Fed fighters). MRS shuttles. SWAC shuttle. And that's just the stuff that I can think of off the top of my head.

Lol, and the rest, a heavy carrier group on its own is in serious trouble, you probably have at least six other ships in there, one of which will be a scout, probably three cruisers and a couple more frigates. Throw in all the different drone modules you can have as well and its a nightmare, on paper, in practice nowhere near as bad - if you played such as a group of 10 ships and 24 fighters plus assorted shuttles against someone who has a single fleet with fighter support you will be defeated. Energy plots are similar across the fleet if you are careful.

I may be biased having played the game four/five times a week for two years, and seldom single ship duels (typically three/four per side) but you got used to it. Weird game, a frigate duel wasn't much faster than a battleship duel, the time is thinking, not so much the dice rolling.

Admin jobs get split between the players with one calling movements, found the best way is a bit of paper folded anew for each turn, mark the '1' and '32' columns on it then put a mark for each unit using its called speed - yes you call the impulses but then you also call what is moving, and have a bit of paper to note when plasma will drop dead, drones run out of fuel etc, helps a lot.

If you wanted insane a Federation CVA v Klingon C8V (pair of dreadnaught/carriers) plus escorts wasn't the game to play, insanity was a Kzinti SSCS battlegroup controlled by a player who loved the custom drone rules against a Hydran SCS group... The Kzinti player will have the drone counters from Kzinti, Federation, Klingon, Orion and Lyran on the board... And the Hydran player will probably be borrowing fighter counters. Utter insanity but great fun.

The tournament pack was worth getting, one scenario up to 13 odd players (one per faction), you have a single target you can fire at (which only you know), you may also fire at the person hunting you - if you guess right, guess wrong and you are out (and they are not damaged by your attack).. Paranoia and mind games ahoy

The expansions I found helped, mostly because it was written in a pretty dry style, no fluff as such beyond an opening paragraph for a given system and better cross referencing and rule numbering than most legal contracts I've come across, complex maybe but very easy to use.

As you may gather I'm something of a fan, wish I could find someone anyone locally who had heard of it.