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-Is playing all out (balls to the wall) actually better?
Thought of this idea when reviewing some battle reports for a recent post. Perhaps they are isolated examples or products of the multiplayer setups, but I noticed that I won both of the big games after the VASSAL tournaments under interesting circumstances.
I won the 8 fleet game after T1 and collected more total gold than Xerecs, but he had many more ships active at the end of the game.
I collected 71 total gold against Xerecs’ 66 total gold, but Xerecs had all his fleets active at the end while I only had the Jolly Mon from UPS 5.
I also won the 16 fleet game after T2 (starts near the end), once again collecting more total gold between all my fleets (with a much bigger margin this time, 60 vs. 5), yet again having far less usable ships at the end of play.
As far as player stats go, I got 60 more gold with my fleets than Xerecs did with his (154-94), along with one of my fleets actually winning the game, but he had many more ships active at the end of the game, including a nearly healthy Spanish Meta fleet and a Zeus that wrecked my hopes of HMS GT upsetting more fleets in the standings.
Perhaps it’s just a coincidence, but in both games the victor had more gold but almost nothing left to give actions to. Again, perhaps more prevalent in multiplayer games (in these cases with a LOT of fleets), but interesting nonetheless.
What is your experience with this?
Have you found it better to play “all out” and risk your ships getting sunk or captured to accumulate enough gold to win the game early, or have your games featured something else?
When I first read the heading I thought this would be more about running up the score after it was obvious the game had already been decided.
As far as taking just enough risks to squeeze out a win, to me that’s the whole point of the game. If you always play it safe, you might have a more consistent win/loss record over a large number of games, but you’ll be on the losing side when someone takes the extra risk and pulls it off. The real trick is finding the boundary of “safe” and pushing it just enough to give yourself the edge, without being so dependent upon luck that you can’t recover when it doesn’t swing your way.
Thematically/realistically, or in a campaign setting, it’s a different story. Coming away with a little bit more gold to take the win but losing your entire fleet in the process would be considered a disaster, very much a “win the battle but lose the war” type scenario. I’m yet to see a perfect system for it, but that’s largely what’s being attempted by the various house rules where remaining ships are factored into victory conditions along with gold collected.
When I first read the heading I thought this would be more about running up the score after it was obvious the game had already been decided.
That might be one of the only reasons to reveal gold when it’s unloaded at HI’s. Sometimes the game can seem close but in reality it’s a blowout, which isn’t known until the end. Which is why I sometimes like to have all the players peek at the last coin or two in play – if the final 1 gold in play won’t decide who wins, it can be better to save the 20 minute ram and board festivities and start another game or something.
As far as taking just enough risks to squeeze out a win, to me that’s the whole point of the game. If you always play it safe, you might have a more consistent win/loss record over a large number of games, but you’ll be on the losing side when someone takes the extra risk and pulls it off.
Perhaps that’s what happened in some of the tournament games, or just the big games at the end to celebrate the tournaments and fleets. Though since I don’t have more evidence of it (yet), maybe just a coincidence. It would be a largely pointless project to go through my BR’s to find more evidence of this happening… but interesting haha.
I’m yet to see a perfect system for it, but that’s largely what’s being attempted by the various house rules where remaining ships are factored into victory conditions along with gold collected.
Exactly. I love “points in play + gold” for the win, in terms of realism. Just need to test it out more… I wasn’t going to use that in the big game I hope to play within the next 2 months, but I think I’ll consider it. (biggest problem is the amount of gold required… 6 fleets at 150 points XD. Could have low gold values but multiplied by 10; 3 3’s could be worth 90 gold.)
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