Quite a few ships for 1652
I always micromanage. Play very slow and pause a lot. Each game takes loads of my time. But in game time I get things done early. I had lost four other ships prior to this. 3 Snows and a Schooner. First Snow had gone raiding for captives in Sep1650.
I had been playing this one absolutely fairly up to July1652...no always gouge em scam, and no pirate house demolish/rebuild, and no demolish/cancel demolish scam to empty full entertainment buildings. And no save prior to cruises. I then lost a whole days play (July and Aug 1652) due to my first ever in game crash. I couldnt bear to replay so slow again and know all the time I could be working scams. So after the reload the demolish house scam came into play. Relieved pirates of cash and worked that hoard up to the 12,000 winning mark.
My point though is that there was no scamming to get the ships built this early.
What combat options were you using? All Board 'em?
With Captains costing $2000 a go and no cheating - it was cash I was always short of. I was using a black market to equip ships. I never brought cannons as they are expensive and can be captured on raids. Cutlasses usually - but some also had muskets to make use of their +2 Marksmanship bonuses. So ships were initially limited to 'board em' settings until they plundered some cannons. I later switched to harass or poundem if I remembered and they had enough to allow the other cruise options.
The 'Big Spender' setting was in use most of the time. Thats supposed to win over enemy during encounters. So with little ships going into a dangerous 5 cannon area I reasoned I needed that benefit. I assume its a benefit during the encounter combats and not just in the number of scum you get at the end of the encounter.
The Schooner 'Schnel Trouble' that beat of the French Frigate single handedly was on Boardem/Big Spender. Calico Jack, 2 Officers (one named 'el Coco'), and 4 crew (one named 'Sixx'). Weapons 7 out of 7 Cutlass, 2 out of 8 cannons, and 7 out of 7 Muskets. Ship overall weapons skills 3.4 Cannon/4.6 Muskets/3.6 Cutlass.
What are you using to make the tables
Pen and paper during game play. Later its recorded into excel from each ships individual log thats displayed only when it docks. Finally - after the game I made a new workpage in this fleet view. Once I had the data in I abbreviated as much as possible to make it as compact as possible. But that still wasnt enough. So changed the view/zoom setting in excel to 75%. This made it look like this smaller font but its still my default font of Ariel size 10. The table is still too long downwards to fit onto one screen shot - so did two shots - a top half of table and bottom half - and joined them up in mspaint.
I have tried using the table commands built into this YABBC site but failed dismally.
On the ship names - I hadnt done much of that before Sea Scourges 'ship naming' thread. Had usually tried to work in something about the theme/scenario. Now im naming them so they tell me the type of ship and if still possible the scenario. 'Schnel Trouble' I liked best. Fast
schooner that gonna cause trouble in this 'Local Troubles' scenario. It won a place in my history books as helping take out a naval sloop and, singlehandedly killing a frigate. Going to use that name again as well as Sloop spelled backwards for some more 'Pools' of something or other.
