Naval Units, NO LONGER IN USE 1715

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Naval Forces

Ships

Naming Not Required: If you guys think it's too much of a hassle to have to name all your ships, I don't care. Don't do it. Do it if you want to.

Heavy BatRon - consist of 1 - 1st rate and 2 - 2nd rate ships and between them these 3 ships carry more and heavier artillery than most field armies. Construction time is very lengthy, at 10 years, but these ships can last centuries if properly maintained. Cost 15, maintenance 1, Naval combat rating 7, range 5, speed 1, 2,500 men including 200 marines

BatRon – consist of 2 - 3rd rate and 2- 4th rate ships. Construction is lengthy, at 6 years, but these ships can last decades if properly maintained. Cost 9, maintenance .75, Naval combat rating 5, range 6, speed 2 2,500 men incl.300 marines

CruRon- consist of 1 - 5th rate and 3 - 6th rate frigates. Construction is lengthy, at 4 years, but these ships too can last decades, and heavy 5th rate frigates can last centuries as well. Fast, and heavily armed, but lack the durability of the heavier ships of the line. Cost 4.5, maintenance .5, naval combat rating 3, range 8, speed 3 2,500 men incl. 125 marines

PatRon- consist of 12 Sloops and Brigs. Construction is relatively fast, at 2 years, and these ships can be readily converted from merchant ships during wartime as well. They are also ideal pirate vessels, as they are manueverable, and can operate in shallow water as well. These ships are not particularly durable, a couple of decades is the usual working life. Cost 2, maintenance .25, naval combat rating 1, range 8, speed 3 2,500 men incl. 100 marines

Commerce Vessels

Commercial fleet– 50 ships the size of frigates, sloops and brigs. All merchant ships of this era are armed and their crews trained to fight but not as effectively as naval crews and morale is generally far weaker than trained naval personnel as well. Build time is 2 years, cost is 3, maintenance is free but it costs .5 points to use a merchant flotilla as a transport which takes them out of merchant service for that game year. Commercial flotillas provide .5 income when not mobilized. A merchant flotilla can carry 2 light infantry or 1 other type of brigade. Combat rating 1 (defense only), range 5, speed 1.

Converting commercial shipping into warships is not advisable. The referee will give you specifics on that should you desire, but it is not advisable as any conversion is subject to a +1 to hit by purpose built warships, and is not as fast or maneuverable usually as a purpose built warship of the same size. They are built for endurance and cargo space, not durability and handling. They also can carry only light guns, as their gun decks are not built up enough to handle heavier ordinance.

Nations cannot have more than 3 Commercial Fleets per port. Entrepots can support up to 10 additional commercial fleets

Naval Facilities
cannot be moved once constructed, and can be destroyed by combat action.  

Ports - any port can repair any size ships, but can only build PatRons and commercial shipping. No maintenance cost is required.

Naval Yards – large facilities that can build any size ship or repair any size ship. They have a work force of 10,000 military and civilian employees, and also serve as centers of administration. Naval yards must be built in a port. It takes 10 years to build a naval yard. Cost is 25 points. maintenance .5

Naval Factories – very large facilities that can build any size ship or repair any size ship in half the time of a naval yard. These huge facilities must be built in a port, and require 50 years to build. It takes 150 points to build a Naval Factory. As of game start, the only cities with the naval acumen to build them are London and Rotterdam. These facilities employ 50,000 civilian and military workers. Maintenance 3

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Shipbuilding and Repair

A port can repair any 10 maintenance points of naval or merchant unit, and can build 2 points of shipping at a time

A naval shipyard can repair any naval or merchant unit (up to 50 maintenance points at once), a can build 5 points of naval units of any type per year (so up to 50 build points can be under construction).

A naval Factory is a vast highly complex system that consists of multiple shipyards, huge amounts of warehouse space, and a sophisticated network of contractors and suppliers. These are exceptionally rare. A Naval Factory can build up to 15 build points of any type per year (so up to 150 can be under construction), and repair up to 150 maintenance points of shipping at once which includes conversions and captures.

Conversion
Any merchant unit can be used for military transport purposes during war time, but if used this way they require maintenance paid by the State. For every season they are used (AT ANY TIME DURING THE SEASON) reduce their earnings by 25% for the year.

Captured vessels
Warships in this day and age do not fight to the death as a normal rule of thumb. Once sufficient damage has been inflicted and the ship is helpless, it will surrender. 30% of the time the damage will be too great and it will sink anyway, while another 10% of the time too much damage will be inflicted at once and the ship will burn or explode (rare, but catastrophic when it occurs). During combat, units accumalate damage and if their damage rating is met or exceeded they strike their colors and surrender (thus the term "strike" is used). A die roll is made to see if they are salvagable, and if so, they are then taken to the nearest friendly base by the victor and can be repaired and added to his navy. The victors also make a fortune when this occurs, but this has no game effect other than sometimes coloring the actions of your admirals who may chase prize money instead of acting strategically on many occasions.

It is entirely possible for your entire peacetime merchant marine to be lost while you are adding enemy captures to your own over the course of a war and thus end up with more ships than you started with.

Adding a captured warship to your fleet requires paying its maintenance cost, and takes one season. For game purposes it goes to one of your yards and sits there until the winter turn, when you allocate money to fix and crew it and it becomes available during the spring turn.

Laying up ships

This was common practice, but limited to CruRons and above (BatRons and Heavy BatRons), as the lighter ships simply rot away too quickly to make it worth while and are cheap to build.

Ships laid up have 10% maintenance cost. To activate costs double maintenance for that year, plus another 50% for every 10 years they are laid up. Maximum length a ship can be laid up is 20 years for CruRons, 50 years for BatRons and Heavy BatRons.

It takes 1 season to make them operational, 2 seasons if laid up more than 10 years, and 1 year if laid up longer than that. This includes repairs and crewing them.

This counts as new construction for purposes of naval yards and naval factories (so limits apply, there are only so many slips available.

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Changes post Northern War, effective 1704

The maintenance cost for Heavy BatRons has dropped from 1.5 to 1.

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Rules update 1/13

Marines - Each naval unit has a set number of marines aboard, which I've indicated above. It takes 200 to form a company and 1,000 to form a battalion. Marine companies are generally too small to matter against anything other than marine companies or certain battalion-sized units (militia battalions, when fighting at a large TL advantage, raiding basically undefended locations). A marine battalion is treated like an average infantry battalion.

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Rules Clarification 1/22

Naval Yards and factories, though consisting of 10,000 and 50,000 reserves, respectively, cannot be mobilized to provide that same number of units, just as militia. The yards employ a substantial number of men too young or too old to fight, not to mention if they were willing to be combatants they probably would have elected to join at the very least a militia. Similarly, the installation likely does not have enough weapons to arm every single worker--mallets and hammers and saws are deadly, sure, but even in the age of gunpowder often insufficient. In the event that a city hosting a Yard or Factory is besieged, and the defender seeks to utilize some of that manpower, the moderator, at his discretion, will decide if anywhere from 1/4 - 1/2 of the manpower can emergency mobilized as militia combat units.

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