Galleys R Us (Part 1)

 I know very little about Ancient naval warfare, and I've never been inclined to research it or buy any toys for it. I've played a few galley games however, and my recent foray with Mark Cordones Pelepponnesian Wars campaign got me thinking about doing some naval battles in the context of the campaign, particularly as Archduke Piccolo went and built a bunch of lovely galleys to fight some battles.

Now, I did toy with the idea of just buying some Navwar galleys, but I don't really have a clue what I'm doing. At last years Society of Ancients conference I picked up a copy of Corvus, mainly because it came with a bunch of ship counters and I thought I could do something with those. 

Corvus by Richard Lee, a whole game in a bag thanks to the SOA. Richard was a member of the Sheffield club until he emigrated to Bulgaria.

Now the supplied ship counters are 1/600th scale so quite big. I scanned the A4 counter sheets and reduced them by 50% to produce 1/1200th scale ship counters (ie the same size as Navwar) and then printed them out in colour. This produced quite a lot of potential ship counters, this is just the Red Fleet, there are also four sheets of Green Fleet!

I had a lot of thinking about bases. I really didn't want to do individual ships on the bases, but multi-basing to represent squadrons, and equally I wanted them to be flexible and be able to represent lines and columns. In the end I settled on 40mm x 40mm bases which would accommodate even the largest 10 bank battleship.

I had a go at colouring in some card to match the printed ship counters, but it ended up looking pretty awful (see above) .

So instead I bought some Marine Blue artists card, which is almost exactly the same tone as the ship counters. It may have been a mistake going with such a light blue, but it is much easier to darken things down than lighten them up.

The card is very thin so I stuck it to some artists mount board and did enough for 48 40mm x 40mm bases.

Then it was a case of carefully cutting out ship templates are trying various arrangements. In the end I decided each unit/squadron would have two bases, each with two ship templates apart from the 10 bankers with one. I'd already sketched out some 'army lists' for the Hoplite campaign and aimed to do for each side four light squadrons (3 and 4 bank), four medium (5, 6,7 bank) and a pair of huge galleys (9 or 10), or eighteen bases to start with.

The ship counters have big coloured blobs on them (see image above) , the colour being fleet colour and various numbers showing if they have a Corvus, how many banks of oars etc. I wouldn't have minded them except they are at the front and not the back of the ship counter. Why? That is completely counterintuitive! I always mark bases at the rear, only the deranged or enemy agents would put them at the front. Each to their own I suppose, but this setup certainly didn't suit me, it looks like the ships are rowing backwards. 

So off they came. That looks much better, and it looks like ships are actually sailing forwards again. I'll just mark up the bases myself, and or now I just did temporary markings on the underside of the bases until I sort out a proper marking scheme.

And after an afternoon of cutting and glueing, here is red fleet deployed for battle. That doesn't look too bad at all. The counters still need marking up, and I shall ponder whether I need to go over the 'sea' with dark blue.

I've sketched out a simple set of 3x3 galley rules based on Dominion of the Spear so I just need to base up Green Fleet and give it a go.

To be continued!