Pre-industrial Fantasy STGOD OOC/Rules Thread:

[Eternal_Freedom]

Of course, your idea of "bad weather" is other people's idea of "unfit for human habitation," but then that's rather the point...

E_F, could you do me a favor and spell out for me specific answers to the following questions:
1) Aberforth is departing from Hephaestus, yes?
2) Where is Hephaestus in terms of OTL geography?
3) If Aberforth takes a ship and travels up the St. Lawrence River... what is that river called, in your country?
4) If he takes such a ship, will he pass any major cities or architectural features or monuments of note on his way upriver toward Ohioan territory?

1. Yes, departing from Hephaestus
2. Hephaestus is pretty much where Quebec City is IRL.
3. The river is the River Myrddin (assuming the St Lawrence is the river running through Quebec City and Montreal)
4. He'd pass through the city of Ironhold (IRL Montreal), a large city that was once a vassal city-state to Hephaestus and is now a proto-industrial city (lot of ironworks and blacksmiths etc). Just south-west of Hephaestus he'd also pass the Imperial Cemetery high on the banks of the river (basically Orion's version of Arlington, but earlier), which also includes the William the Great Monument (containing his tomb), the first Emperor.

As my history post outlined, there were five main Kingdoms, now Dukedoms. Hephaestus covered Quebec City, Montreal, Ottawa and southern Quebec. Rigel was the other side of the river, covering Maine, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. Bellatrix was the island of Saint Pierre, Saiph was Newfoundland and Labrador and Fenris was the north-western part on the shores of Hudson Bay.

[Simon_Jester]

Minor post addressing travel plans. Suffice to say that the St. Lawrence watershed is NOT open for traffic in February, or for that matter March. Ohio's Grand Imperial Canal had thawed out by late March, but that didn't mean an end to the lake ice or river ice.

[Eternal_Freedom]

Excellent work as usual Simon

[Simon_Jester]

I didn't originally think his travel plans through, very well, but I consulted a good friend- incidentally the same friend who was advising me during the incident with the submarines in our last game.

That was when I realized just how big the icing problem on the Great Lakes is. Lake ice starts forming (as a rule) in, oh, December, and remains a hazard to navigation (mostly in the form of icebergs) clear through April and into May. Rivers and lakes are of course frozen solid through the winter months, likewise.

[madd0ct0r]

Well, Eternal Freedom has turned the thermostat up for his area a little, so it can be hand waved a bit, but yeah. You might have icebreakers on your canals though.

[Simon_Jester]

Icebreaking isn't really practical for my limited level of magic and technology. Sure, an ice sheet a few inches thick could be broken up by some kind of ox-drawn whatever, but there's no way to reliably smash through ice quickly enough to be effective.

The big difference is that the canals are narrow, enclosed waters and are farther south than any point actually on the Lakes...

[Eternal_Freedom]

The raised temperatures point is a good one though. I did specifically change the climate since otherwise most of my territory would be frozen wasteland (though Fenris is like that, the rest isn't). Basically think that on averag it's 5-10 degrees (celsius) than it would be IRL.

[Simon_Jester]

Hm. I had genuinely forgotten about that...

Okay, that being the case-

One, I'm going to suggest that this should have knock-on effects on the climate further south on the Eastern Seaboard, since the most likely explanation would be a stronger warming current or something. May want to explore that when you invade the Chesapeake area- I'm... rather familiar with the basic geography and climate.

Two, what I'd advocate is more in the way of climatic variation than anything else. It's just not Canada without a respectable winter, and a harsh winter helps explain how the hyenorks are even functionally a threat. They're supposed to be able to range far south and wreak havoc during the winter season, they're severely nerfed as a threat without it. At the same time, though, having the spring thaw come ahistorically early and strongly, allowing a warm summer growing season, serves most of your purposes.

So instead of having a land of cool short summers and long hard winters, you get balmy summers and cold, but only moderately long, winters. The St. Lawrence still freezes over, but it'd thaw out a good deal earlier in the year- probably navigable by the start of April, let's say. And the effects on your lands probably don't impact the Great Lakes.

[Eternal_Freedom]

That works for me. Honestly climate wasn't something I gave a lot of thought to, beyond "would be nice if most of my country wasn't frozen."

[Simon_Jester]

Hm.

I don't feel up to writing an evocative travel post describing Aberforth's journey up the Myrddin. So I'm just going to summarize events.

Okay, figure he leaves on or around March 1. By that time the St. Lawrence is starting to thaw but ice floes make it unsafe for navigation. He does take a sleigh for the first few days, but then there’s an unexpected thaw accompanied by spring rain. Sharp thaws are a common enough experience, but they don’t usually happen this hard until later in March.

Warm rain begins to turn snow to mud, and it winds up making more sense to take the royal roads in a carriage, given that the roads are paved and elevated well above the surrounding land. Elapsed time, probably less than two weeks. The roads get worse after crossing the Orion border near Ironhold [OTL Montreal] and the river gets actively colder and icier as he goes inland- it’s as though he’s riding back into winter and out of spring.

The distance from Ironhold to Kingston at the east end of Lake Ontario is significantly further than that from Hephaestus to Ironhold, and probably takes two weeks- probably a few days laid up with the sniffles somewhere along the way.

By now it is late March. Lake Ontario, however, almost never freezes. It is the last lake to freeze in real life, and the least likely to do so even in a cold winter, and with ahistorically warm conditions in eastern Canada and New England it is probably even less likely to freeze. This allows Aberforth to book passage with a rather ballsy merchant skipper who's going to run the length of the lake by sail. Sailing the 200 miles or so takes only a few days- quite the contrast compared to the time it took him to struggle overland from Ironhold to the shores of the lake.

That puts Aberforth near Niagara Falls in late March. More later.

[Eternal_Freedom]

Sounds good Simon.

Beowulf, what is your current fleet strength? You're adding 4 1st rates and 28 3rd rates, but my building program will bring my fleet to be near yours, so I'm assuming you're at roughly 32 ships of the line at present.

Do you fear Orion warships so much that you need a 2 to 1 advantage to feel safe?

[Beowulf]

Sounds good Simon.

Beowulf, what is your current fleet strength? You're adding 4 1st rates and 28 3rd rates, but my building program will bring my fleet to be near yours, so I'm assuming you're at roughly 32 ships of the line at present.

Do you fear Orion warships so much that you need a 2 to 1 advantage to feel safe?

Current ship of the line strength is 5 first rates and 35 second rates. Part of the problem is that you have more effective ships than I, so I need more of them to have the same relative strength. The other problem is that I'm dependant on sea trade for internal and external trade, while you mostly only worry about it for external trade. It's hard to move stuff across Florida, and I have a bunch of islands in my nation. The objective is to keep you from even eyeing the idea of fighting me, not just win the war.

For the purposes of this game, there Everglades retain most of their historic size, which means most of Florida is a giant swamp still.

[Eternal_Freedom]

Sounds reasonable. I came across my OOB document the other day where I listed ships, I'd forgotten that one of my 74's has a heavier broadside than OTL HMS Victory. Or even the 4-decked Santissima Trinidad. God help you if you're in range of a broadside from one of my 3-deckers.

[madd0ct0r]

While the conversation is on ships - what sort of thing would you recommend for the hyenorks? Something robust, probably open topped or at least built size wise for them, but small emough a team could drag up up a slip onto the ice to overwinter.

[Simon_Jester]

The Republic (still having trouble coming up with another good name for the Chesapeake polity, which seems to have fallen to me by default) needs sea commerce less than the Dragon Kingdoms for its internal survival, but relies tremendously on its overseas commerce for economic purposes. Think of it as a coalition of three or four sometimes-squabbling Venices, and you start to get the idea- some of the internal contradictions of that are valid and real too.

That said, I now have a pretty good idea of what a navy-heavy Orion campaign can do to the Republic without too much trouble- and the somewhat more... extensive and challenging... things that would have to happen in order for Orion to secure the submission of the Republic as a whole. Which tie into my own notions for how to counter Orion weight of metal.

[Beowulf]

While the conversation is on ships - what sort of thing would you recommend for the hyenorks? Something robust, probably open topped or at least built size wise for them, but small emough a team could drag up up a slip onto the ice to overwinter.

You're probably looking at something similar to a Six Kingdoms' Korvette or smaller. A corvette, in this case, has no separate gun deck, but mounts it's armament on the uppermost deck. Larger might be doable, but you'd likely be looking more at sticking them in a dry dock instead of pulling them out of the water. The smaller ships tend to be faster, but less durable, which on average, results in a ship small enough to run away from anything it can't outfight. Though Orionian technomagic can screw with that equation a bit. The tricky bit is that in bad weather, smaller ships are affected more strongly, and so will slow down more than a larger ship, which can help a more medium sized ship catch a small ship, even if they couldn't do so in better weather.

[Simon_Jester]

While the conversation is on ships - what sort of thing would you recommend for the hyenorks? Something robust, probably open topped or at least built size wise for them, but small emough a team could drag up up a slip onto the ice to overwinter.

Honestly, given the relative crudity of hyenork weapons, tactics and shipbuilding, their limited access to high-quality timber, and the fact that their naval presence would focus almost entirely on raiding in those rare occasions when sea and river ice conditions permit it without being impossibly hot...

I'd actually bet on war galleys like Viking longships, armed with at most a handful of light cannon. Essentially light, fast troopships that really ARE designed to be dragged up on a beach. Point costs would probably be in the 50-100 point range like the war galleys Ohio uses on the Great Lakes and for river patrol.

The reason these ships would be menacing isn't that they win pitched naval battles. It's that they can enter coastal waters, sail up rivers a ship-rigged three-masted vessel can't penetrate, and carry (proportionate to their point value) large numbers of 'marine' warriors who will devastate coastal settlements. And sheer numbers of vessels makes it problematic for conventional warships to engage them except under favorable conditions- you can catch any one ship and massacre the crew with cannon fire, but you can't stop a swarm, and if you anchor within striking distance of the coast at any time you may wind up with hyenork boarding parties clambering onto your decks in the night.

[Simon_Jester]

Another casual 'travelogue' post. I imagine the country along the Niagara River is cultivated with some number of watermills being present- can't be that many if we're trying to stay "pre-industrial," though.

Trivia:
-Yes, this is the second time I've brought up Atlantis. You don't have to agree that there ever actually was an Atlantis that fell at the end of the Ice Age, or for that matter that there was an Ice Age.
-Orion is a scholarly and scientifically literate country in an 1800-era setting. I'm trying to be true to period scientific thought. As a result, unless E_F objects, the debate among geologists about whether the Earth's landforms are dominated by the effects of single cataclysmic events or gradualistic processes of erosion and uplift is still ongoing... and at the moment the cataclysmists are probably winning.
-Also, for all their technological sophistication, note that there is one important invention referenced in this passage, which I choose to assert that the Orions are as yet ignorant of.

[Eternal_Freedom]

Looks excellent to me Simon.

The "new invention" you reference wouldn't happen to be the sandwich would it?

Also, I'm hoping to have another post up soon, covering the commissioning of the first two of my first-rate battleships, Dreadnought and Defiant. I think Dreadnought is an apt name for the class, since in ship terms they really do have nothing to fear unless someone invents explosive shot in 50-70 years

[Simon_Jester]

Wouldn't it be nice to think so?

[hums quietly while examining a few strategically placed shore batteries in Hampton Roads]

[Eternal_Freedom]

Hence why I said "in ship terms"

[Beowulf]

Looks excellent to me Simon.

The "new invention" you reference wouldn't happen to be the sandwich would it?

Also, I'm hoping to have another post up soon, covering the commissioning of the first two of my first-rate battleships, Dreadnought and Defiant. I think Dreadnought is an apt name for the class, since in ship terms they really do have nothing to fear unless someone invents explosive shot in 50-70 years

/me sails a pair of second rates ships of the line up, destroys Dreadnought. Just because they're big, doesn't mean they can't fall. It's not like they're ironclads...

[Crazedwraith]

Do any of the naval powers have fire magics? I'm thinking heated shot from a ship might be a slightly less suicidal possibility.

[Eternal_Freedom]

Looks excellent to me Simon.

The "new invention" you reference wouldn't happen to be the sandwich would it?

Also, I'm hoping to have another post up soon, covering the commissioning of the first two of my first-rate battleships, Dreadnought and Defiant. I think Dreadnought is an apt name for the class, since in ship terms they really do have nothing to fear unless someone invents explosive shot in 50-70 years

/me sails a pair of second rates ships of the line up, destroys Dreadnought. Just because they're big, doesn't mean they can't fall. It's not like they're ironclads...

Good thing they don't sail alone then.

[Beowulf]

Do any of the naval powers have fire magics? I'm thinking heated shot from a ship might be a slightly less suicidal possibility.

Yes. Heissschuss has inscriptions that cause it to heat up after firing to red hot. It's a slightly more effective form of the historical carcass projectile, which was a shell filled with flammable material.

Looks excellent to me Simon.

The "new invention" you reference wouldn't happen to be the sandwich would it?

Also, I'm hoping to have another post up soon, covering the commissioning of the first two of my first-rate battleships, Dreadnought and Defiant. I think Dreadnought is an apt name for the class, since in ship terms they really do have nothing to fear unless someone invents explosive shot in 50-70 years

/me sails a pair of second rates ships of the line up, destroys Dreadnought. Just because they're big, doesn't mean they can't fall. It's not like they're ironclads...

Good thing they don't sail alone then.

They never do. They're called ships of the line for a reason: because they're almost always found in a line of battle in combat. It's not like my ships would just be the pair either.