I’m going to try to explain how I approach trying to win a game of *Oak & Iron*. I by no means win all the time, so take this as one journeyman perspective on the game. ## Theory of Victory Everything comes back to this: you win when your opponent has more strike points than they have ships, and you don’t. Let’s say that again: > **You win when your opponent has more strike points than they have ships, and you don’t.** Every action you take should be oriented towards this fact. You should develop a *theory of victory* based on this. The smallest force in the game is a 2-ship squadron at the Patrol level. The largest is a 10-ship squadron at the Engagement level. This means you will need to take between 1 and 4 ships out of action (discounting scenario objectives as a source of Strike Points), as your quickest way to victory. Obviously, no plan survives contact with the enemy, and your shortest path to victory may change over the course of the game, but you have to start out thinking “how can I destroy X ships more quickly than they can destroy Y of mine?” ## Four Decision Points There are four decision points which will influence your chances of winning: 1. List building 2. Table set up 3. Deployment 4. Play At each point, you are shaping your options for the later steps. You need to start thinking about your theory of victory from the first step, and through each subsequent one. ### List Building While list building, you want to balance two factors: fewer ships means they have a shorter path to victory, but your individual ships will be tougher. With more ships, they’ll have to do more, but it’ll be easier at each step to do that _more_. I like to think about this in terms of a few facets: how efficient my point-spends are, and how I anticipate playing, and what the faction I’m playing supports and strengthens. As an example of point-spend efficiency: a sloop has Broadside 3, Crew 1. You can spend 4 points on Skill 2 for it, but on _most_ rolls, you won’t be able to use both points of Skill, either because you have fewer than 2 misses, or because you’ve taken enough Fatigue that you aren’t even rolling enough dice to have 2 misses! Admittedly, such a sloop could have 4 (or if you’re French or Dutch, 5) dice for close combat, and you could use your Skill there… but are you expecting to spend that many turns in a boarding action? Similarly, upgrades like Swashbucklers or Corsairs that give you exploding dice will work best when you are rolling more dice—so put them on the ships that give the biggest dice pools, to maximize their efficiency. An example of supporting how I anticipate playing: if I expect to try to close and board, Additional Crew is worth more to me than Additional Guns. If I’m French and Additional Guns are discounted, maybe I take them anyway, but I take them _last_, when I’m trying to fill out my points. If I’m expecting to play mobile, I’ll take Swift and Weatherly where I can. If I’m planning to stay in strict formation, I’ll only take that to equalize my squadron’s speeds, to make my formation easier to maintain. As an example of playing to my faction’s strengths, if I’m French, I’m hard-pressed to _not_ take free Swift upgrades, and that means I should take ships where those free Swift upgrades won’t make my speeds radically different. If I do so anyway, I’ll want to keep my line of battle on a beam reach, so I can choose to go faster or slower without a roll. If I’m Dutch, I will focus on Fatigue management and boarding bonuses first, before gunnery, because I know my faction’s inherent powers and initiative cards support me closing and boarding. Initiative card selection is also part of list building, and while it doesn’t cost points, the same ideas apply. I like to have a card or two for mobility to play early on and help me get into the position I want, and then a few cards for increased attacks (whether that’s Rolling Broadsides, Elan, Effective Fire, Careful Aim, or whatever), and a card or two for action economy support (Reload, Take Courage, etc.) But I always want to select the ones in each category that support my intended mode of play. ### Table setup There are three big questions when you start to set up the table, one of which you may not have a say on: 1. Am I the attacker or defender? 2. Do I need the weather gauge, or not? 3. Do I want a lot of terrain, or not? The higher admiral rating gets to pick whether to attack or defend. If you have the choice, it really comes down to this: would you rather control the distance of the engagement (as the attacker) or let them come to you as much as they want to (as the defender)? The question of the weather gauge pertains to deployment cards. Only one of the five in the game really denies you the chance of being upwind of your opponent, so you usually have a fairly free choice of whether to try for it. Having the weather gauge typically lets you close or not; having the lee gauge means you have to mostly accept the distance your opponent sets. Finally, there’s terrain. Do you want a lot or a little, and of what sorts? If you want to play keep-away, place islands; blocking line of sight and constraining mobility is great for you. If you want to shoot and board, avoid them. If you want to shoot but not board, place rocks; you can shoot over them without risking the enemy closing. If you want to board but not get shot a lot, choose fog; it lets you close with less risk. If you have smaller ships (or are Dutch or a Pirate) and want to have greater mobility than your opponent, choose shoals. ### Deployment The defender places all their ships first, and then the attacker places theirs outside of cannon range of the defender’s ships. This is mostly a disadvantage to the defender, but not entirely. You must guess where you think your opponent will be, but you can push them to the edges sometimes. You should place your ships with their trajectory in mind. Each ship will tend to move forward each turn, so imagine a cone of possibility extending forward from where you place your ships. You should also think about where you can bring fire to bear; islands _and other ships_ produce shadows where broadsides can’t reach. A line of battle forming a gentle arc will allow concentrated fire in the focus of the arc, but expose gaps on the other side of the arc. A double line will protect the individual ships from receiving fire from both sides, but constrain their mobility and ability to provide supporting fire to each other. An enemy that deploys entirely on one side of your double line will bring all their ships to bear against half of yours, to their advantage. You should also think about the wind; the cone of possibility is constrained by both the wind direction and wind speed. Neither tend to change often in a game, but changes can be incredibly powerful when they happen. Remember that you can and will move further to lee than to weather. In situations where you want to hold station and not move, being to lee of your opponent and angling slightly to weather to slow yourself (or being abeam and choosing to go your windward speed) can be useful. If you want to come down on the enemy “like the wolf on the fold”, start to weather. And that leaves one more section, but it’s a big one so let’s go up one heading level again, as we dive into… ## Play Obviously, this is the longest and most involved part of the game. So let’s get into it. ### Points of comparison I find that there are two activities that I reach for most often when thinking about how I play *Oak & Iron*: go (as in 碁, the board game) and fencing (foil or épée, for me, because I never fenced sabre). If you don’t have a frame of reference for these, I apologize. I will try to provide the needed context as best I can, in any case. In particular: In go there is a concept called *tenuki*, which describes a situation where you leave a part of the board until later, because there’s not a risk to you if your opponent acts there first, and you can gain an advantage from acting first somewhere else. In fencing there are two relevant concepts: forte and foible, and *sentiment du fer*. The first is a pair of words that describe the strong part of a blade, and the weak part. You generally want to apply your strong part to their weak part whenever you intend to capitalize on an opportunity, but you sometimes want to use your foible to provoke them and _create_ an opportunity. The second, literally “feeling of the iron”, refers to feeling your opponent’s reactions and predispositions through the contact of your two blades. I’ll be referring back to these three concepts (*tenuki*, forte and foible, and *sentiment du fer*) in the later sections. ### Pursuing your theory of victory When I outlined the basis for a theory of victory at the top, you’ll note something that was absent: the size of the ship taken out of action does not matter. You can take their first-rate out of action, or a sloop, and it counts the same towards victory. This is critical. A first-rate ship of the line is clearly part of that squadron’s forte; a sloop is almost certainly part of that squadron’s foible. Therefore, bring your forte to bear against their foible, and concentrate fire as much as you can on their weakest ships. One to four of them, depending on the game size, is all it takes! Of course, each squadron will have a foible, and that includes yours. You don’t want them to attack _your_ weakest ships, but keeping them hidden won’t avail you, either: you’ll effectively be playing down some number of points. Remember “spending your points efficiently”? That applies to play, too: you have to bring all your points to bear. I think of it like this: I want to maximize the total dice worth of broadsides, plus some constant times total number of attacks (because more attacks is more Fatigue), divided by the number of turns the game lasts. I know the first turn or maybe two will usually be maneuver more than broadsides, but that’s okay. If I can get into position to start pouring dice worth of attacks at them, and ideally at the smallest possible number of their ships, then that maneuver is worthwhile. ### Taking turns Each turn, you have an initiative card that does something, and, critically, determines order of alternating play. Do you want to go first or second? This relates to the idea of *tenuki* (and the related go concept of *sente*, “taking the initiative”). Sometimes, it’s more useful for you to know where your opponent will be and to know that they have committed to that location, than it is to ensure that you shoot them before they can shoot you. In general, I prefer to try to go first if I am shooting rather than boarding, and if I can predict where they will have to be. When boarding, it is useful to move second so that they cannot immediately cut free during their activation. When it comes to taking turns firing, remember that there is a maximum amount of Fatigue that will impact your ship’s fighting effectiveness. For broadsides, that number is your Broadside rating minus your Crew rating; for everything else (partial fire, seamanship, and close combat), it is your rating in that thing, minus one. If you are at (or sometimes even just near) that amount of fatigue, it won’t matter if you get hit first; it won’t make your attack any worse. So when it comes to the shooting phase, look at all the possible exchanges: which of your ships can attack which of their ships, and how (rake, normal broadside, partial fire). Figure out your optimization of dice of attack rolled, reduction in their dice of attack rolled, and your ability to concentrate fire on their weakest ships. Delay situations where you can’t be reduced further and where you can’t reduce them further to the end of the phase. ### Formation or not The era in which *Oak & Iron* is set was an era when line-of-battle formation was starting to be used, but was not entirely standard operating procedure. The game reflects this: formation is sometimes useful, but not always a dominant strategy. Formation gives you two things: +1 die to broadside and partial fire attacks, and the ability to use certain initiative cards. It costs you one thing, sometimes: ability to bring arcs of fire to bear on the enemy. It is up to you to evaluate the tradeoff between these. Because certain initiative cards require formation, you may need to plan before you even deploy your ships whether you intend to rely on formation or not. It is also possible to be flexible, especially with higher value admirals, and include a card or two that requires it, but not build your initiative strategy around those cards. But once you start moving, you quickly will have committed to formation or not, or the in-between of “a small core of formation, plus a few ships around it that aren’t but can corral the enemy”. Having just written that, guess which one I really like, when I can afford the ships for it? It is, in fact, possible to split the difference and shape your opponent’s movement with your foible, forcing some of their fleet into your forte. The better you are at predicting their movement, the easier this is to do. This comes largely from experience, but you will need to track which ships have *Swift*, *Weatherly*, *Fast*, *Yare*, and which have spare actions available for Adjust Speed. You should be able to move first and still lay out arcs of broadside fire that they will have to contend with, either accepting (and then you fire first) or being moved into places they would rather not be. ### The Long Game or the Short Game In *On Protracted War*, Máo Zédōng lays out an important generality: the stronger force wants the fight to be quick, and the weaker force wants the fight to be slow, for each to have the best chance of victory. Now, Máo is applying this to the level of logistics and entire wars, but it applies as much to a game about a single naval engagement. Of course, we play with equal point values, but that does not mean that we are strong *in the same ways*. The Spanish will have more Stout ships, the French more Additional Guns, the English a slightly better long-range game. But the big differential is this: does the scenario give you strike points on your opponent from quick decisive action, or from running out the clock? In the former, you will want to do what you can to close to your optimum range (boarding included as an option here), and hit your opponent hard. In the latter, you want to keep distance as long as you can. Turns wasted _just moving_ are not wasted for you; they bring you closer to victory. Turns spent with some long-range cannon fire, especially against *Small* ships, are likewise to your advantage. In either case, of course, it is good to have the weather gauge, but even moreso if you want to play the long game: along the axis on which the wind blows, travel distance is asymmetrical, and the upwind player is closer to their opponent than their opponent is to them. ## Conclusions I dunno. I should probably have some. I should also refer back to *sentiment du fer* and *tenuki* again, because I said I would. ## Appendix: Theories of Victory Here are the quickest paths to victory, based on how many ships your opponent starts with: | Starting ships | Primary route | Secondary route | | -------------- | ------------- | --------------- | | 2 | 1 OoA | | | 3 | 1 OoA + 1 C | | | 4 | 2 OoA | 1 OoA + 2 C | | 5 | 2 OoA | | | 6 | 2 OoA + 1 C | | | 7 | 2 OoA + 2 C | | | 8 | 3 OoA | | | 9 | 3 OoA + 1 C | | | 10 | 4 OoA | 3 OoA + 2 C | “OoA” means a ship out of action; “C” means a ship crippled (though a scenario objective strike point works just as well here).