[FT] Morale (was: Re: [SG2] weapons)

> On Thursday 20 November 2003 7:53 am, Damond Walker wrote:

It's a very difficult question. To my mind, the "quality" of a
Captain should reflect his/her tactical ability and judgement - but
then tactical ability in FT is very much a PLAYER function rather
than a rules-driven one. I suppose it MIGHT be possible to introduce
some (very optional!) system of rolling against captain quality to see if a
ship or flotilla actually follows its written orders exactly (which represents
the ship exactly following the plans of the commanding admiral) or if they
suffer some random change to the written orders (meaning that there was a
communication breakdown or misunderstanding between Admiral and Captain,
resulting in some ships
NOT doing exactly what the Player/Admiral intended).

This might be interesting in certain scenarios - eg: convoy escort

> At 2:24 PM +0000 11/20/03, Ground Zero Games wrote:

That is a valid thing. The Escorts in WWI and WWII did have some trouble
keeping some of the merchant men in formations and up to speed. It wasn't
quite as bad as herding cats from what I've read, but nearly so on occasion.
Especially
if there was a U-Boat on the prowl.

> convoy suddenly scatters while the escort commander is

ISTR a Brit commodore in WW1 with 4 cruisers was supposed to wait for a
battleship to trudge forward and support him against a German BC and escort,
but went ahead and engaged on his own. IIRC, he was too dead to court martial.
This was off the coast of South America.

Also, around Guadacanal, US DD's were supposed to stick with the main battle
line, but sometimes went forward and mixed it up with the
IJN--either intentionally or by accidentally not conforming to a turn.
They
also tended to be on the receiving end of blue-on-blue.