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Yaq's Shipbuilding Guide
⚓ Yaq's Guide to Shipbuilding ⚓
1. Resources
Ships use wood and iron. A fully armed vessel is constructed using a ratio 2wood to 1iron.
Ships of the Line
First-Rate 100-108 wood, 50-54 iron = 100-108 guns, 3 decks around 67m (e.g. HMS Victory)
Second-Rate 90-98 wood, 45-49 iron for 90-98 guns, 3 decks of 60-65m
Third-Rate 64-80 wood, 32-40 iron for 64-80 guns, 2 decks of 64m to 3 decks of 53m
Fourth-Rate 50-60 wood, 25-30 iron for 50-60 guns, 2 decks of 50-60m.
Frigates
Fifth-Rate Heavy Frigate 40-50 wood, 20-25 iron for 40-50 guns, 2 deck of 40 meters to 2 decks of 50m (e.g. USS Constitution)
Fifth-Rate Frigate 32-38 wood, 16-19 iron for 32-38 guns, 1 deck of 64 meters and up to 12m of fore and aft-castles.
Sixth-Rate Frigates 26-32 wood, 13-18 iron for 26-32 guns, 1 deck of 52-64 meters (e.g. HMS Suprise)
Brigs, Brigantines, Schooners, Barques, etc.
Post-Ship 20-24 wood, 10-12 iron for 20-24 guns, 1 deck of 40-48 meters. (e.g. a small galleon like the Golden Hind)
Others 4-18 wood, 2-9 iron for 4-18 guns, 1 deck of 8-32 meters. (e.g. HMS Beagle, HMS Endeavour, HMS Bounty)
This is not to say you have to build ships that exactly follow this, but it explains how resources relate to ship size and armament.
2. Limitations
You cannot build ships greater than a First-Rate (100-108 wood, 50-54 iron) - the 104-gun Victory was massive for its time (1778), its opponent at Trafalgar, NS de Santisima Trinidad at 112 (later 130) guns and 4 decks was the largest warship ever for its time and only 3 4-deck first-rates like it were built ever - one by Spain, one by France, one by the U.S.. Any bigger than around the size of the HMS Victory is simply unreasonable for this time period.
The number of guns cannot exceed half the total length - or more simply: the maximum you can arm a ship is 1 iron to 2 wood.
A ship of any size can travel the coasts - but crossing oceans is difficult to impossible for tiny vessels. To go into ocean tiles not bordering land (to cross the Atlantic for example) you need a ship to be greater than 16m in length (8+ wood)
3. Ship Build Time
A decent rule is 1 day per 4 wood in build time, rounded down. Your 108-wood flagship will take over a month to build, while a fifth-rate will take 6 to 8 days, and the smallest exploration caravel only 2 days. If the wooden part of the ship is done and you're only outfitting it with cannons, the rule is 1 day per 2 iron, rounded down.
4. I Don't Have Enough Resources!
Say you want to build an oceangoing vessel with 8 wood, 4 iron - a 16-meter 9-gun ship. But wait! Your country only makes 8 wood, 2 iron. How do you build this ship? The answer is simply to wait for your production to catch up - put that 8 wood, 2 iron towards the ship this week, and you can finish the ship next week with your resources that week. The build-time restrictions still apply.
Week one: 8 wood, 4 iron - production of 8 wood, 2 iron = 2 iron needed.
Week two: 2 iron needed - production of 8 wood, 2 iron. Ship finished after 1-day build time, 8 wood free to be used elsewhere that week.
5. What are different ship types good at?
There's no solid rules here, since we'd have to create an entire board game, but these are some guidelines:
- Smaller ships are more maneuvarable - it's a lot easier to turn around the 131 ton, 27m Pride of Baltimore than the 3,500 ton, 57m Victory. This is, I think, self-explanatory. That said, small sailing boats aren't maneuverable enough not to really want to stay out of the way of first-rate.
- Smaller ships can go into shallow water, bigger ships can't.
- There isn't a great variance in ship speeds, most maxing out around 13 knots. Frigates were generally the fastest boats of the era. It takes a long time to accelerate (and stop) a lineship simply because of its great weight.
- Smaller vessels generally had better rigging to go into the wind, and could potentially escape by sailing windward.
- Exploration ships tended to be around 16-40 meters. You need to be big enough to survive the open ocean, but it was extremely dangerous in this time period to sail lineships into the open ocean. The very large ships were extremely vulnerable to stormy seas due to their weight, amount of gunports, and cumbersomeness, and very expensive to replace.
5. [Ship type recommendations
Real-life navies weren't all about big ships. The finest navy in history, the British Navy, was predominately small unrated ships like brigs (3 times as many as any other type of ship), followed by 5th-rate frigates, and then by third-rate ships-of-the-line. During the Napoleonic Wars, the British Navy (once again the finest and largest in the world) had between 5 and 7 first-rates and 8 and 9 second-rates total.
6. Unarmed (or lightly armed) ships?
You may certainly make lightly armed, or unarmed ships. The only rule is that the wood:iron ration must be 2:≤1
10 wood - 5 iron = ok
10 wood -4 iron = ok
10 wood - 0 iron = ok
10 wood - 6 iron = not ok
7. What were the resources again?
Marsh - Produce one wood
Woods - Produce one wood
Grassland - Produce one wood
Farmlands - Produce one wood
Forest - Produce two wood
Jungle - Produce two wood
Hills - Produce one iron
Highlands - Produce one iron
Mountains - Produce two iron
