Conquer Club

Alright, so the idea is that the primary method of attack is bombarding, like in a true naval battle.

You start out with say five armies on the cruisers and twenty on battleships. Each large ship can bombard the ships within its sphere of attack, except for the littler ships, which form a network between the larger ships that link all the sides.

The little ships (boarding parties ?) can attack and conquer the ships around it and progress towards the enemy "capital" ships.

I think it'd make the most sense that if your capital ship is destroyed or captured, you lose - That's where you're commanding the fleet from, right?

The main strategical gimmick behind this map is whether attacking from your capital ship or invading the enemy ships is more cost-effective. Obviously, a player would want to build up defenses for their capital in order to avoid getting destroyed quickly, but the added bonuses for capturing an enemy capital ship would outweigh the risks.

Main elements of gameplay:

Capital Ships

• Every player starts out with one (XML will need to work out what happens with less than 5 players - does everyone get two?)
• Is comprised of three parts - Bridge, Battery, and Deck - If you lose the Bridge, you lose the game,
• Can bombard all other Capital ships' Batteries, and Decks, and the central island from the Battery (might pose balance issues)
• Can invade all neighboring ships from the Deck

Auxiliary Ships

• Every player will have several types of auxiliary ships.
• These ships are yet to be determined but may include gunnery ships (will be able to attack a significant portion of the boarding parties), battleships (+8 bonus on the ship every turn + very long range of attack), ironclads (can't be bombarded, must be invaded, medium range of attack), and scout ships (full range of sight on fog of war maps, can't be bombarded, must be invaded, **May cause XML problems if you have to be able to attack something in order to see it in Fog. Maybe a -20 bonus at the beginning of the turn.), among others.
• These ships would be boardable by the boarding parties and attackable by destroyers and possibly other Auxiliary ships.

Boarding Parties/Island

• Boarding Parties bridge the sea between the eight factions.
• Based around rowboats, a player will be able to use them to physically board an enemy fleet.
• The central island will have a fortress with a battery located in the middle. Maybe. Optional strategic gimmick that sounds fun.

Thematics:

• Option 1: Traditional navies from nations like Spain, England, and France. Eight-way battle.
• Option 2: Based off of a historic battle (Battle of Gravelines)
• Option 3: Competing Pirate factions fighting for a central prize.

Alright, AWFUL map. Please someone put it out of its misery. Orange-brown is Cap ships, Brown is battleships, light gray is ironclads (I'm thinking these are redundant), Dark gray is boarding parties, Center Island hopefully self-explanatory.
http://img89.imageshack.us/my.php?image=map1uu3.png

For some reason I'm picturing the classic boardgame Battleship... LOL. Interesting idea. Can you put something down in graphic form to give us an idea?

I could try. I don't have any aptitude at graphics software - I have Gimp but I suck at it. I don't know how to work the thing. I'll see what I can do.

This sounds pretty awesome possum
I'm feeling this would be a med-large map, not as big as the Napoleon one, but larger than like 45-50 terits

Unfortunately I cannot offer any real expertise as I am not a map-maker or a naval officer (I read a book about naval warfare though )

I like the idea of several large boats for bombardment and many little ships for actually moving between the larger ships.
The only problems I can forsee is depending on the restrictions you place on bombarment... If all the big ships could bombard anywhere (I'm picturing like 6-10 for each side) that would effectively turn the entire board to neutrals in a few turns. I would make it so that only certain ships can bombard certain other ships, like battleship4 can bombard battleship1, battleship3 and cruiser6.

Imo, I wouldn't let cap ships be bombarded by other ships, unless the cap ships are split into several terits, then you could bombard parts of it, but the control room (assuming this is what needs to be eliminated to conquer another player) would remain safe from bombardment.

Have you considered submarines? I'm not sure how they might work, but they could be creatively used somehow...

Have you considered aircraft? Maybe launch from the cap ship or an aircraft carrier and are allowed increased bombardment, but they should respawn with neutrals if held after a turn or something like that.

As for the problem with the cap ship being allowed to bombard little ships (or any big ship bombarding any little ship) I wouldn't allow it. I'm just trying to picture an enormous battleship or even a good-size cruiser attempting to point its guns down at another smaller ship (if it's a boarding party type of ship, it would be very small, probably smaller than most destroyers, again not an expert, just a hunch), and I can't see it happening.

What types of ships will be on the board? Destroyers? Battleships? Cruisers? Air-craft Carriers? Helicopters? Aircraft? Submarines? Boarding Ships?

Depending on what you want, this could be a very detailed map or something that is completely simple and straight-forward. (My personal pref. is to more detail, but obviously not so much it hurts gameplay and keeps others from playing)

Thanks for the interest!

I like your image of the big battleship tryin to hit the little floater... In any case, I want this to be a Spanish Armada type map - wooden masts and hemp rigging.

That being said, while subs would be cool, I don't think they would fit in the timescale.

Ironclads might work. If we were doing a civil-war era battle.

I also like your idea of capital ships (the big ones) not being able to bombard other capital ships - you have to take them with boarding parties. Makes sense. Or maybe they respawn with like a hundred neutrals - it sank, after all.

Tons of ideas. We need a list.

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOooooooooooooooooooooooooooook

I thought this was gonna be a modern navy (probably from the comparison to battleship)

Let me get back to you with ideas on that...

I'm glad u like some of my suggestions, now that I know the theme, I'm gonna do some research *cough* wikipedia *cough* and see what I come up with

I kinda like the civil-war era idea, but idk... let me sleep on it, I really like the concept u have

And I agree with lomonster, a picture, even hand drawn or a modest representation of what u have in mind would be great.

I like this idea so much, I might have to start learning xml and all that jazz just so I can help u get graphics done

Unfortunately, I really really suck at drawing. I oculd do something on graph paper, but seriously...

Hey, I'm still thinking about gameplay, but when it comes time to start putting together an image and xml and all, I found this:
http://www.conquerclub.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=1410

You may have already seen it, but if you haven't it has a lot of info other experienced map makers have put together to help out the noobs. I've taken a look at it and it doens't look to challenging... then again, I've never worked with xml or anything.

If you would like, I would be happy to help w/ xml or graphics or suggestions or whatever you need to get this map quenched. Although, my helpfullness with xml will most likely be limited.

Ok, here are my ideas so far:

Ship types (from smallest capable of bombardment to largest):
Caravel
Galley
Galleon
Iron-Clad
And you could actually go into tremendous detail on the specific names of ships depending on the era, so the first question I have is:

I know you were thinking along the lines of wooden boats and the Spanish Armada, but what era specifically? ‘Cause you could do Civil War, Ancient times (Greece and Rome), Medieval times, the Far East (Chinese Junkers and all that), you could even theme it after the Spanish Armada vs. the British in the Battle of Gravelines. A themed battle would (depending on how much of a nerd you wanna be) require you to make different types of ships, because the Spanish and English or Greeks and Persians or Japanese and Koreans all designed their ships differently.

If you wanted to do a themed battle, it could be very interesting, however a generic battle would be just as interesting because they’d have similar gameplay (bombard w/ big ships, invade the cap ship w/ boarding parties) I think themed vs. generic would simply come down to a choice of ease vs. aesthetics and isn’t all that important. It might look nice, but could end up being unnecessarily difficult. However, if you wanted to make it theme based, there are a variety of naval battles from history that would be interesting to use.

There are several things you can do to add variety to the bombardment, like you could have massive galleons that are able to bombard other ships far away, you could have smaller ships w/ flamethrowers (I don’t know if they stopped doing this after the ancient times of Greece) bombard closer ships. You could even have bombarding simulate the different types of ammunition on board ships on that time like: round shot, chain shot, and canister shot.

For instance: to simulate canister shot, one ship could bombard several smaller ships that are very nearby; or to simulate chain shot one ship would have the ability to bombard another ship’s bombard points (assuming that you are splitting up the ships into several terits rather than having one terit per ship and that one terit can bombard) to simulate the loss of control and function when a ship’s mast gets hit by a ball and chain. Round shot would be bombard points that are allowed to terrorize far-off targets.

I would suggest that the ships that can bombard further away be allowed to bomb fewer ships, and the ships that can bombard close-up, are allowed to bombard several other ships.

What kind of deployment options are you considering?
You could make it dependant on autodeploy, you could have it be normal terit bonuses plus continents, you could do just terit bonuses, or just continent bonuses. You could have a combination of all three…
Just off the top of my head, I’d have a limited terit bonus, with several small “continent bonuses.” This makes the most sense to me, because in a naval battle u’d have an objective, and once you accomplish that objective, you get a reward. So, like hold a galleon +2, hold four galleys +3, two iron-clads could be +5, one of each type is +8, or whatever.

As for boarding, the main craft for boarding was the rowboat, so you could have several rowboats dispersed throughout the map, which it sounds like is already the plan.

By the way, how big do you want this map to be? Max and Min terits? And are you comfortable with the idea of some, but not all ships containing multiple terits?

Inhuman14 wrote:Tons of ideas. We need a list.

Yeah, I agree with you, there should probably be a list of ideas on the first post, and after time you could write down whether you accepted them, rejected them, or are still considering.

So, anyways, those were the ideas and concerns I came up with after a little sleep…

Inhuman14 wrote:Unfortunately, I really really suck at drawing. I oculd do something on graph paper, but seriously...

Yeah, that’ll work, even if it’s several round blobs with lines connecting them and two large blobs on either side with the words ‘cap ship’ inscribed in them, it atleast gives people something to look at, although I think I’ve already got a pretty good picture in my mind of what it looks like, but that could change.

Again, awesome map idea, and I hope it gets quenched.

joe cool 360 wrote: I know you were thinking along the lines of wooden boats and the Spanish Armada, but what era specifically? ‘Cause you could do Civil War, Ancient times (Greece and Rome), Medieval times, the Far East (Chinese Junkers and all that), you could even theme it after the Spanish Armada vs. the British in the Battle of Gravelines. A themed battle would (depending on how much of a nerd you wanna be) require you to make different types of ships, because the Spanish and English or Greeks and Persians or Japanese and Koreans all designed their ships differently.

How about all of the above? We need to make it even for eight people anyways, so why not have it based on ancient cultures?

joe cool 360 wrote:If you wanted to do a themed battle, it could be very interesting, however a generic battle would be just as interesting because they’d have similar gameplay (bombard w/ big ships, invade the cap ship w/ boarding parties) I think themed vs. generic would simply come down to a choice of ease vs. aesthetics and isn’t all that important. It might look nice, but could end up being unnecessarily difficult. However, if you wanted to make it theme based, there are a variety of naval battles from history that would be interesting to use.

Historic Naval Battles could work well, but not in conjunction with the previous idea. We need to decide the direction before we decide the timeframe.

joe cool 360 wrote:There are several things you can do to add variety to the bombardment, like you could have massive galleons that are able to bombard other ships far away, you could have smaller ships w/ flamethrowers (I don’t know if they stopped doing this after the ancient times of Greece) bombard closer ships. You could even have bombarding simulate the different types of ammunition on board ships on that time like: round shot, chain shot, and canister shot.

For instance: to simulate canister shot, one ship could bombard several smaller ships that are very nearby; or to simulate chain shot one ship would have the ability to bombard another ship’s bombard points (assuming that you are splitting up the ships into several terits rather than having one terit per ship and that one terit can bombard) to simulate the loss of control and function when a ship’s mast gets hit by a ball and chain. Round shot would be bombard points that are allowed to terrorize far-off targets.

Can the XML handle that? And would it be too confusing?

joe cool 360 wrote:I would suggest that the ships that can bombard further away be allowed to bomb fewer ships, and the ships that can bombard close-up, are allowed to bombard several other ships.

What kind of deployment options are you considering?
You could make it dependant on autodeploy, you could have it be normal terit bonuses plus continents, you could do just terit bonuses, or just continent bonuses. You could have a combination of all three…
Just off the top of my head, I’d have a limited terit bonus, with several small “continent bonuses.” This makes the most sense to me, because in a naval battle u’d have an objective, and once you accomplish that objective, you get a reward. So, like hold a galleon +2, hold four galleys +3, two iron-clads could be +5, one of each type is +8, or whatever.

I was intending a feudal war type deployment (all things considered the ideas are similar) where each player gets one capital/ironclad/whatev ship by default. For bonuses, I think they should be relatively little - You don't get reinforcements much in a naval battle. I think the starting armies should be fairly large instead. Good idea with the long range (bigger only targets) big ships and close range small ships.

joe cool 360 wrote:As for boarding, the main craft for boarding was the rowboat, so you could have several rowboats dispersed throughout the map, which it sounds like is already the plan.

By the way, how big do you want this map to be? Max and Min terits? And are you comfortable with the idea of some, but not all ships containing multiple terits?

I was thinking that each group of ships (for each player) would have in the neighborhood of ten to fifteen ships, with a network of 30-40 smaller rowboat type ships inbetween. ISLANDS! We should have some.

Awesome post. Thanks for the great interest. I hope I've addressed everything.

Updated the main post on ship classes and such.

Multi-sided naval battles:
Siege of Syracuse
- Rome
- Syracusians
- Carthaginians
- Archimedes’ death machines
- Spanish?
Crazy all-eras naval battle
- Modern ships
- Medieval ships
- Asian ships
- Ancient ships
- Pirate ships
- Space ships
- Ninja ships
Revolutionary war-era
- British
- U.S. (although very small at the time)
- Spanish
- French
- Portuguese
- Chinese (I know Japan and Korea had large fleets, not so sure about China)
- Japanese
- Korean
Ancient era
- Rome
- Greece
- Persia
- Sicily
- There are others, but I can’t think of them…
WWII era (I know you want to do wood ships, but I thought I’d suggest these anyways)
- U.S.
- Britain
- Germany
- Japan
- Italy
- Russia
WWIII era (just for kicks)
- U.S.
- Britain
- China
- Switzerland
- France
- Germany
- Russia
- Martians
idk, these are my ideas, my personal fave is Revolutionary War Era ‘cause it has eight sides and it appears to be in the time-frame you want. The others are here just in case you liked something else better.

Inhuman14 wrote:Can the XML handle that? And would it be too confusing?

I’m pretty sure it can…. We should talk to a map-maker though, but I’m pretty confident that you can make bombard points bombard specific points and no others. I know there are some other maps that do that, like Waterloo.
It could get confusing because you’d have to write in the legend which ships bombarded where…

Inhuman14 wrote:I was intending a feudal war type deployment (all things considered the ideas are similar) where each player gets one capital/ironclad/whatev ship by default. For bonuses, I think they should be relatively little - You don't get reinforcements much in a naval battle. I think the starting armies should be fairly large instead.

Ok, I like that, keep in mind that reinforcements don’t have to represent only troops, they can be representative of supplies and ammo as well… once we get a map up and learn how to do XML, then we can open it up for discussion, right now it seems to be just me and you bouncing ideas off each other.

Inhuman14 wrote:I was thinking that each group of ships (for each player) would have in the neighborhood of ten to fifteen ships, with a network of 30-40 smaller rowboat type ships inbetween. ISLANDS! We should have some.

So 10-15 for each player plus 30-40 rowboats/islands…
=110-160 terits
So this will def be a VERY large map. (Waterloo has 104 terits and ConquerMan has 151 terits)
We might want to consider scaling this down a bit…. Maybe 5-10 boats for each player and 20-30 rowboats/islands.
=60-110 terits
I think I’ll draw out a map on a piece of paper to help me think better of how this is gonna look, and if I can I’ll see if I can post it, never made a map before, so… no guarantees.

Inhuman14 wrote:Awesome post. Thanks for the great interest. I hope I've addressed everything.

Absolutely, this is a sweet idea, I can't help but be interested.

Sweet, a map! Anyhow, yeah, more like 7-8 terits per player.

3 for the cap, Battleship (2 for this one? It's useful), scout (or maybe scouts could be winnable prizes? That'd be cool.), Gunnery, ironclad.

If we assume that it's a network and not like lines of boats, probably 20-25 boarding ships. Plus nine or so for the island. So 29-34 ships in the "middle". With my excellent math skills that's 85 - 98 terits. Yowch! That is a lot.

Okay, I sat down and started drawing the map and as soon as I started drawing the battleships, it began looking ridiculous.
No self-respecting navy in the world would engage seven other fleets simultaneously...

I'm thinking maybe we should scale this down to one navy versus one navy.
As for how it would work with 8 players, I'm not sure yet, I have to think about it. But one thing is for sure, 8 seperate navies is gonna look pretty funky.

I like the central Fortress Island idea, I'm gonna get some sleep and see if I can come up with a 1v1 navy that would allow for 8 combatants and incorporate an island into it.

Let me know if you've got any ideas as well.

Hmm, maybe everyone starts on the main island?

I've come to a conclusion.
I can't do the graphics for this map.
I have an amazing picture in my head, but I can't transfer it down to paper....
Unfortunately you will have to get someone else for graphics, but I'm still willing to help with XML and/or gameplay.

It's ok, dude. I suck at art as well. :-/ I guess we can wait and discuss gameplay.

Capital Ships

• Every player starts out with one (XML will need to work out what happens with less than 5 players - does everyone get two?)
• Is comprised of three parts - Bridge, Battery, and Deck - If you lose the Bridge, you lose the game,
• Can bombard all other Capital ships' Batteries, and Decks, and the central island from the Battery (might pose balance issues)
• Can invade all neighboring ships from the Deck

This seems to work well, although I was thinking, what if it was one-way attacks onto the cap ship?

Auxiliary Ships

• Every player will have several types of auxiliary ships.
• These ships are yet to be determined but may include gunnery ships (will be able to attack a significant portion of the boarding parties), battleships (+8 bonus on the ship every turn + very long range of attack), ironclads (can't be bombarded, must be invaded, medium range of attack), and scout ships (full range of sight on fog of war maps, can't be bombarded, must be invaded, **May cause XML problems if you have to be able to attack something in order to see it in Fog. Maybe a -20 bonus at the beginning of the turn.), among others.
• These ships would be boardable by the boarding parties and attackable by destroyers and possibly other Auxiliary ships.

So the gunnery ships are able to attack several of the rowboats nearby?
I like the idea of how the iron clads can't be bombarded and must be invaded, makes a lot of sense.
If I were you, I would change battleships to galleons, it's more historically accurate.
The problem I have with the scout ships is it sounds like they don't really serve any purpose in a sunny game.

Boarding Parties/Island

• Boarding Parties bridge the sea between the eight factions.
• Based around rowboats, a player will be able to use them to physically board an enemy fleet.
• The central island will have a fortress with a battery located in the middle. Maybe. Optional strategic gimmick that sounds fun.

I like the central island in the middle of the map...
The picture I have in my head is of several cap ships, galleons, and ironclads connected by one or two rowboats... the rowboats all converge on the island, and the island would be divided up into about 5-9 terits. (4 for the beach, one for the bombard area, and maybe a terit for each wall?)

Inhuman14 wrote:Hmm, maybe everyone starts on the main island?

That might be interesting... the idea I came up with this morning at work was to have four cap ships for each side (somehow evenly spread out) and each player would still be able to start on their own cap ship, only instead of 8 navies all circled around one island, it would look more like one navy w/ 4 cap ships sqauring off against one navy w/ 4 cap ships.

joe cool 360 wrote:

Inhuman14 wrote:Hmm, maybe everyone starts on the main island?

That might be interesting... the idea I came up with this morning at work was to have four cap ships for each side (somehow evenly spread out) and each player would still be able to start on their own cap ship, only instead of 8 navies all circled around one island, it would look more like one navy w/ 4 cap ships sqauring off against one navy w/ 4 cap ships.

In that case, we could call it the battle of Gravelines... except there was a significant fleet size discrepancy there.

Inhuman14 wrote:In that case, we could call it the battle of Gravelines... except there was a significant fleet size discrepancy there.

Yeah, but there is such a wide variety of sea battles to choose from, I'm sure we could find one with the opponents somewhat evenly matched. I wish someone else would start posting comments on here as well...
I'm putting a link to your map in my sig, maybe attract some attention that should do it

Read through your discussion and thought i'd just throw you guys a couple ideas to discuss whilst I pass through.

The historical battles idea is a nice one the only problem is most of them did have enormous fleet differences after the British really started building up in the 1400s-world war 2 basically. So if you found one where the British weren't involved it'd work better, or you could use the Naval Battle in WW1 between Germany and Britain where things were fairly even in the North Sea.

You could also work with one of the great naval battles of the Napoleonic Wars off of the coasts of France and Spain between France and Britain and Britain's allies.

The other option could be an ancient world battle, such as between the Athenians and the Persians. That Naval battle is one of the greatest in history really and would involved a lot of your boarding party ideas and bombardments with Greek Fire and such.

The other option I see is perhaps doing the idea where you use several nations Navy's set during one time period, such as Europe during Colonial Times or WW1 or WW2. Then you could have some kind of inlay on your map for capitol cities that run the fleets and allow fleets to bombard cities when you'd taken their ships connecting to their coast. Under this idea you could set people in starting locations with a capitol and a Capitol ship and it'd be similar to a feudal war thing where they could take their countries navy and then fight their opponents navies as well.

Those are just some ideas for you to work with hope it helps.

Could someone get a rough drawing of this? Even if you just draw it on paper that scan it it would give a better idea. I'm having a hard time visualising this.

I posted a Paint file of it on the main page. I'll add attack lines soon. It looks awful though.

Yay! fresh insight
yeah, any of those battles work for me, do you have a preference inhuman?

I'd have to say that what appeals the most to me is a new direction - Pirates! Eight pirate factions fighting for the big prize. Control it and you win.