Ironclads in Action

Continuing my recent efforts to turn some rarely used collections out of the comfort of their storage boxes, I decided to get the 1866 Italian and Austrian Navies out onto the table for the first time in eleven years (although some of these models did masquerade as French warships in my alternate history of the French in Mexico).

I really had forgotten what great models these are, but one of the things that has kept them in their boxes has been the rules we have used. Since the 1990s we have used the Jackson Gamers "Ironclad Gunboat" rules (LINK) for our American Civil War ironclad games. They have really worked well for us, but Civil War ironclads had relatively small batteries (up to ten guns) whereas the ocean-going ships of 1866 had substantially bigger batteries of mixed types - SMS Kaiser carried 108 guns. Working out the damage potential of a broadside from a mix of rifled and smoothbore guns at varying ranges became a tedious task of counting how many guns could penetrate the armour and then calculating their effect, while separating out the guns that could not penetrate and calculating their effect separately.

So I decided to simplify the firing mechanics. Instead of calculating on an gun by gun basis I settled on three battery sizes - large, standard or small - and balanced out the blend of gun types and ranges by weighting those batteries with a higher proportion of rifled guns. The net result was to create a gunnery factor for each ship. That factor is compared to the armour rating of the target and then a dice result against an effect chart determines the damage done. I still like the original idea of a Critical or Lucky hit result that could see greater loss, damage to steering or even a magazine explosion, so I have retained them along with the movement, ramming and boarding rules.

So today we ran a game to test the changes. I set up a simple game with three ironclads and two wooden ships on each side. The Austrians had better armoured ships than the Italians, but the Italian ships were better armed. 

The Affondatore had rammed and sunk the KaiserMax, while Habsburg passed to Afondadore's stern.

Re d'Italia tries to force its way between Kaiser Max and Habsburg

The Austrian ironclad Prinz Eugen steams between Garibaldi snd Gaeta 

Habsburg and Prinz Eugen steaming forward

The Italian squadron

Affandatore

The game was a lot of fun and proved the effectiveness of the modifications.