1) Each ship has a radius of fire equal to the number of surviving segments of the ship (i.e. the aircraft carrier starts with radius 5, reducing to 4,3,2,1 as it gets progressively damages).
2) You can only fire at sectors within the radius of fire of at least one of your ships
3) A player may move any undamaged ship to a new location, but must forgo their following n turns.
That means that each shot gives away a small amount about your own deployment, but not too much. Possibly the player should also declare the size of ship used to make any given shot.
(3) is necessary as (2) means that at least some of the board is unlikely to be within range of any ship. I also intrinsically approve of allowing some degree of manoeuvering.
n would need to be set to discourage moving ships except when absolutely necessary, to avoid things getting too frustrating. Or perhaps only one of the ships should be mobile (the submarine?)
One problem here is that the ships with a range of 1 would probably become rather easy targets. I suspect that a simple size+1 range would probably make things sufficiently safe - then again, playtesting might be the best way to determine this.
Also, it'd be important to be able to track the sequence of the other player's shots over time where movement is allowed, and the standard board game set is not really suited to this. A computer implementation would, of course, resolve this one.
But there *are* no ships with a radius of 1 until they've been hit the first time, at which point their location's pretty much known already.
The second objection I think lends itself to the suggestion of having only a subset of the ships be mobile. Say two of them to avoid the game being decided by a single lucky shot.
Possibly the mobile ship(s) should have a lowered radius to make them more detectable - thus there's a real danger to launching a submarine strike. You get one or two shots before you have to move it as you're narrowing down its position too far.
The endgame would come down to a battle between keeping your mobile units out of danger, and having to use them because the rest of your fleet is dead.
I was under the impression that the smallest ship (the submarine?) in Battleships occupied a single square. Perhaps that's just a legacy of some computerised variants? (It's been a long time since I played with an actual set.)
Would it perhaps make sense to limit the mobility to, say, one unit forwards or a 90-degree turn, taken in place of a single shot rather than n turns?
Most sets (and most computer instantiations) have ships of 5,4,3,3,2 made up to look like carrier, battleship, cruiser, submarine, destroyer
I don't think limiting speed and direction of movement is viable - the movement is needed because reducing field of fire means you don't cover the whole board and thus can't find the enemy. Slow movement such as you suggest does nothing to alleviate this.
I think that having a small number of mobile ships with a very small fire radius is better than an n turn penalty - it means that you can move it, but as soon as you *use* it, you're vulnerable.
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How about:
1) Each ship has a radius of fire equal to the number of surviving segments of the ship (i.e. the aircraft carrier starts with radius 5, reducing to 4,3,2,1 as it gets progressively damages).
2) You can only fire at sectors within the radius of fire of at least one of your ships
3) A player may move any undamaged ship to a new location, but must forgo their following n turns.
That means that each shot gives away a small amount about your own deployment, but not too much. Possibly the player should also declare the size of ship used to make any given shot.
(3) is necessary as (2) means that at least some of the board is unlikely to be within range of any ship. I also intrinsically approve of allowing some degree of manoeuvering.
n would need to be set to discourage moving ships except when absolutely necessary, to avoid things getting too frustrating. Or perhaps only one of the ships should be mobile (the submarine?)
Also, it'd be important to be able to track the sequence of the other player's shots over time where movement is allowed, and the standard board game set is not really suited to this. A computer implementation would, of course, resolve this one.
The second objection I think lends itself to the suggestion of having only a subset of the ships be mobile. Say two of them to avoid the game being decided by a single lucky shot.
Possibly the mobile ship(s) should have a lowered radius to make them more detectable - thus there's a real danger to launching a submarine strike. You get one or two shots before you have to move it as you're narrowing down its position too far.
The endgame would come down to a battle between keeping your mobile units out of danger, and having to use them because the rest of your fleet is dead.
Would it perhaps make sense to limit the mobility to, say, one unit forwards or a 90-degree turn, taken in place of a single shot rather than n turns?
I don't think limiting speed and direction of movement is viable - the movement is needed because reducing field of fire means you don't cover the whole board and thus can't find the enemy. Slow movement such as you suggest does nothing to alleviate this.
I think that having a small number of mobile ships with a very small fire radius is better than an n turn penalty - it means that you can move it, but as soon as you *use* it, you're vulnerable.