Is there a name for war game campaigns that split the difference between hard and fast orders of battle and pure narrative driven play?
Because it’s working out really well in the Mauritius campaign. The tall ships are evenly matched, and I’ve been tracking their location, damage, and movement meticulously. But the overall supply situation has developed into a hand-wavey abstraction.
With supplies abstracted away, you can focus more on the ship to ship battles, while injecting a little bit of “off table” influence for things like poor morale for hungry sailors, or slower moving ships with hulls covered with barnacles because they’ve been on station just a little too long. This allows for the usual war of attrition that occurs in wargame campaigns, with each side hoping to lose forces slower than the opposition until the war grinds to a halt with only one force capable of continuing the fight.
Of course, with the ability to take ships as prizes and put them back into service, each fight becomes more of a zero-sum game in naval campaigns. If you lose your ship to me, you’re going to face that same ship later on down the road. This doesn’t happen in land based campaigns to nearly the same extent. It changes the nature of things, and really helps make Mauritius feel unlike anything I’ve ever played before.