Shrapnel Games Blog

It’s been a long time since I wrote the last blog entry about Galley Battles, so first of all I would like to apologize for this inconvenience with the people interested on the project. It is not related with any problem to the development, but I have been so busy that I didn’t got time to sit and think about how much of the game has been done and how much still lacks to be done.

Some months ago I started to work on a PhD thesis, winning a grant to work on it during 4 years. This fact has eaten most of my time, because I work on the research group where I do the thesis a lot of hours each day, take some class hours, read some important books for these classes, etc.

Fortunately the topics of my research are related to military history and games, so I’m able to take some knowledge about the research and apply it to the game, in order to make a more interesting experience. Now the mechanics of the game are richer IMHO, and I think that some topics like morale, combat and formation will be treated on a historical (and entertaining!) way.

Talking about morale, I realized that the way this important concept is used on the vast majority of games is quite different of the historical results it had. You must read “the Face of War”, of John Keegan, a classic and revolutionary book of military history if you want to try to understand how a soldier of any era would act on a battlefield. I’ve tried to apply some basic axioms to the way morale is represented on galley battles.

Morale is not a static indicator of the quality of a soldier, because it will change with what he sees (and listens) about the battle that is evolving around him. Moreover, the psichological factors of combat are not individual, because a soldier goes to battle forming inside a group (a line of infantry, a squadron of cavalry or a fleet of galleys), so the standard way of giving each unit a morale that will degrade with losses is not certain (at least in my opinion, of course!). Finally, a soldier is not a suicide on the majority of battles, so any suicidal order (typical in wargames to slow the enemy) shouldn’t be possible, because the unit should break off before the clash (a ram attack, a melee, etc.).
I’m trying to add these kind of thoughts in the game, while not adding complexity to the interface. The result, I expect, will be a game where the player will be able to play since the first time he starts a battle, but where he will try to think before each order is given if it is rational, and if he expects too much of his sailors or they can got the task done.

Anyway, we are finishing the combat and movement engine, and starting to update the code of the editors, PBEM and other tools. I don’t know how much time I will need to finish it (due to the reasons given before), but as you can see we are advancing every week as much as we can, and we expect that the result will be as good as we imagine.
Xavi