*Oak & Iron* with FourCartridge on Tabletop Simulator. The scenario was “Raze”, with the French attacking the Pirates. It was a slaughter, and I cannot reasonably write it in first-person! ![[july_19-1.jpg]] --- The French operated within established doctrine, taking the weather gage and operating in a line of battle. To change up my approach, I had taken as many ships as the points limit would allow, which required taking a few of them with some negative-point “upgrade” cards (to allow for all the Additional Guns and Skill upgrades that I see as mandatory). The pirates began in a decidedly _not_ line-of-battle formation, as anticipated, but the final effect was certainly more potent than I could have foreseen. Rather than go for the objective (razing the objective marker, and possibly getting into a landing party to landing party fight), I opted to try to sink enough of them to settle the matter. They adopted a position that would allow them to either swiftly move in to protect the objective, or keep most of their force engaged in a battle upwind of the island, as circumstances required. ![[july_19-2.jpg]] My lead ship, a corvette, was quickly hammered by broadsides, which did very little damage but a surprising amount of fatigue. The Pirates had taken Spanish initiative cards, and Aggression and Heavy Musket Volley managed to often do no damage, but fatigue. Once the corvette closed to fire, a pirate corvette managed to quickly come in to board it. I veered my flagship off and tried to protect my corvette with a broadside on the boarding pirate corvette, but the skill test I needed to turn just a _little_ bit more and get a raking shot failed, and then failed again when I retried it with a fortune point. So, there was a broadside, and while it crippled the pirate ship, it did not do enough fatigue to settle the matter. ![[july_19-3.jpg]] As my flagship continued forward, another pirate ship crossed its bows and boarded it. My other corvette came up to support the now-captured corvette, intending to sink the pirate corvette and maybe recapture mine. But in the event, I did not have the turns available to do this. The pirates boarded and took my flagship, and that was four strike points to two remaining ships, while they only had two strike points to (factoring in captures) five remaining ships. ![[july_19-4.jpg]] And that was it! Turn four and the matter was settled. We estimated that, between their ragtag formation and their Spanish initiative cards, they managed to get in approximately four or five shots to my one; getting in three to two can be decisive, so it’s no surprise that this was brutal and rapid. We each had one ship that did nothing (or close to it), one ship that did a hair more than nothing, and then the remainder was between two ships in each of our squadrons, and mine could not match the rate of fire even remotely, so when they were boarded (and in the flagship’s case, boarded over the bows) they were so fatigued as to have no hope. It was a very satisfying, and very interesting, game, and I hope I’ve learned from it! Formation gives you more impact with each shot, but potentially many fewer shots, as you spend time maintaining formation and not bringing each ship in to its best firing arc. It might also do to put my hardest-to-damage ship in the fore, but in this case, with fatigue being the point of each shot, I would have had to have brought a ship with High or Very High Freeboard to have a chance of entering the fray without dangerously high fatigue levels, and I just didn’t have such a ship. ![[july_19-5.jpg]]