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Greetings fellow designers,

What is a favorite game mechanic that you have run across in a naval game, that you wish more would use?

Please give a brief overview of the mechanic, the name of the game it is from, and what you really liked about it.

I will add some thoughts soon.....

I'm saving up for this: Geoff Engelstein's "Building Blocks of Tabletop Game Design: An Encyclopedia of Mechanisms"

I always enjoyed dystopian wars, but I don't think it was well made. basic systems like torpedoes and fliers were made redundant by the ack-ack and anti-torpedo abilities. Basically torpedoes were no more powerful than guns, but were easily defended against.

What I did like was the combined fire and the exploding dice. It was the first game I'd played where you could do these things.

Combined fire - each gun firing at the same target adds half (rounding down) its attack dice to the initial attack.

as defenders defend against each attack, you're more likely to go through thick armour by combining. 4 guns with A5 would give 5+2+2+2 = 11 attack dice in a single attack, or 2 attacks of 7, or 1 of 9 and 1 of 5, or 4 of 5. generally you were better combining fire.

Exploding dice was simply that a 6 was 2 hits and an extra dice. we had a very fun scenario where a 4-dice gun scored about 18 hits with this, and the target subsequently cancelled them all with 5 defence dice! the dice were hot that day!