Comparing Rules Systems, Warhammer Ahoy! Gen'l Cmpdm and LotHS

Overview.
General's Compendium--I've been playing Seahammer games with the General's Compendium rules set since it came out. In practice this hasn't resulted in all that many games since any ship battle takes a bit of preparation, but I have played at least 10 games with the system many of them within the last year. Although my first battle included Skaven, Dark Elves and Undead I have really played most of my games against Empire and Orcs and Goblins.

Warhammer Ahoy!--As I mentioned on the Warhammer Ahoy! thread I have recently included ship battles in our ongoing Mordheim campaign. I decided to use Warhammer Ahoy rather than the General's Compendium in order to familiarize myself with the rules system. Six players have now fought in ship duels in one evening! Great stuff, high adventure and all that! At the start my friend supplied all the ships necessary from his fleet. This allowed us to use similar ships which is nice for learning things and keeping things fair. Last week I brought my smallest ship as well. The next time we meet I hope that some of the other players will have completed their ships or at least be able to bring the work in progress since I don't want to play with templates or other such silliness.

Legends of the High Seas--I was really excited for this supplement to come out, since it is an 'official' rules system. I have not been disappointed. I have heard that several people were discouraged from buying the rules by reports that it did not translate to Warhammer. I did not find this to be the case, however, I am a ship nut and I intend to play the game itself as well. I will say that it is a bit pricey if you pay retail as it costs about the same as the General's Compendium did and only covers one subject.

Price.
Lets start here. Warhammer Ahoy! is a free online rules system. Thus you pay for the paper it is printed on. The General's Compendium is I believe out of print, thus its price varies depending on where and how you can find it. For a hobbyist it is a priceless work at this time. Find it and buy it. Legends of the High Seas is relatively recent and can still be ordered. It is a solid rules system for a specific skirmish game and it can be applied to Warhammer or Mordheim skirmish games as well. I am more than willing to adapt rules, if you are not don't buy it.

Scale of Game.
Both Warhammer Ahoy! and LotHS are written for skirmish games. The General's Compendium rules are written to be used with any scale of Warhammer game. So far the highest points value game I have played was 1500 per side. It was great fun for me and hard work for my opponent, who was trying to control 5 separate ships. I tried to help by sinking some and boarding others.

For large scale multi-ship per side fights the General's Compendium rules have many advantages. The disadvantage lies in finding the space and time to play such games. The General's Compendium rules are written with flexibility in mind for the Warhammer system not just the Warhammer Skirmish subsystem.

Game Balance.
Only the LotHS has points values for all of the components of its system. The General's Compendium and Warhammer Ahoy! do not assign points values to ships, upgrades to ships or ship's armaments (although the GC does offer values for cannon for races that normally can't acquire cannon). Since LotHS is written for historical pirates with its point costs in Gold it is of limited use (but not no use) in attempting to determine what fair points values may be for certain things. For example should a sailing ship cost the same as a rowed ship or a steam or warp powered ship?

Warhammer Ahoy! has rules for the use of swivel guns but does not indicate a points cost or wether all races can or should use them. Warhammer Ahoy! assumes that most battles will be between ships armed with cannon.

The General's Compendium assumes that the points values and restrictions on unit and war machine choices from a player's army book will be followed. Warhammer Ahoy! does not deal with the issue at all that I can see, although that may because the authors made the same assumption about using army points and composition. Warhammer Ahoy! also mentions Mordheim which has its own rules for warband choice.

The General's Compendium and LotHS do place restrictions on the number of war machines per ship size. The General's Compendium includes the concept of 'decks' in its rules without defining what a deck is. This is an unfortunate omission. (See the Flame on and Emperor's Rogues threads for how our groups have dealt with the issue.)

Style of Game.
By style I mean shooting or melee. Maneuver is also part of all of the systems but mostly depends on which side has the wind and what they do with it.

As conceived I believe that the General's Compendium rules are geared toward boarding action. War-machines will be limited by points and composition thus a ship will rarely sink from hostile fire. The exception to that are Empire ships which rule the seas because of the amount of damage a Great Cannon can do with one shot. Dwarfs are able to equal that in 7th edition. Warhammer Ahoy! has no rules for purchasing its cannon but one assumes they are intended for use with all Warhammer armies(?)
(Heresy!)

The GC has the most extensive boarding rules and has some rules for combat resolution as well.

Since Warhammer Ahoy! is skirmish based the boarding action can be just as important to the game. In our Mordheim games the big guns have only forced one crew to strike its colors. However, many ships have surrendered because of the effectiveness of small arms fire.

More later,
js

Nice comparison. We have played Ahoy from the start and have a number of games under our belt. The largest fielded 2 large sailing ships manned by Empire and Ogres against a large ironclad and 2 medium ironclads crewed by dwarves and a large sailing ship crewed by greenskins. We ran this game with the original, unmodified rules as obtained from the web site and, in hind sight, witnessed the following:

1. Game took 5 hours.
2. With so few guns on each ship, it took forever to cause enough damage to qualify for critical damage (a big deal in terms of damaging your opponent).
3. Turrets malfunctioned to much (1/3d of the time).
4. To many crew made for crowded decks and uneasy combats between ships.

Likes:
1. The use of scaled ships was awesome! (Just got to love the realsim!)
2. The ability to avoid a ram and the potential damage that comes from it on a leadership role was great. It led to some tense moments.
3. The managing of a limited crew to fight fires, sail the ship, and fire the artillery was also great, especially as the game went on and the number of crew dwindled. Many an Admiral sweat the decisions.

Post more later. I'm going to take another look at the CG and see if I can overlay the two games with a single set of rules. May have potential.....

More on Warhammer Ahoy!
--Points values. I have had the rules set bookmarked for a year or so. And I printed it out about 2 months ago. What I did not realize was that there are several subsets not included in the main rules. These include Orcs, Dark Elves, Artillery and Magic. The Dark Elf subset has points values for ships, upgrades and armament although these are apparently in some Warhammer Ahoy! code since they don't equal the Warhammer army points that similar items or troops would cost.

This may be necessary because of the nature of ship to ship combat or copyright law, but it adds another layer of complexity that I wasn't looking for. I do want to use my army book to choose my crew. I want to use my rule book to look most things up. I was comfortable with the GC's a bolt thrower is a bolt thrower.

Unique Things About Each Rule System.
The General's Compendium--Sea monsters. Shark infested waters. Undead ships. The melee combat system. I said above that I wanted to just use my rule book, but I do like the assisting attacks in boarding actions. It makes a boarding action a mass combat. I also like the GC's rules on using spear and pike for assisted attacks. It makes these weapons very useful. None of our crews would sail without their boarding pikes.

Warhammer Ahoy!--Fire! Striking the Colors and cannon hit automatically within 10 inches if you do not misfire. I also like the allocation of cannon hits only to the hull and I might like the roll for hit location if I can find out what that is.

Legends of the High Seas--Has rules for upgrading your ship, capturing a new ship, ship repair, etc. In short it has a complete rules system for campaigns using Warhammer scale ships!

Things I do not like about a rules system.
The General's Compendium--The rules are incomplete in areas that don't seem to require incompleteness. Damage from cannon--with one cannon shot you can hit the hull, the crew and one special target on the ship if the bounce of the cannonball covers it. Thus we always target the enemy guns. It is possible to disarm an enemy ship with a lucky broadside. Its too predictable. Also we never shoot down the masts.

Warhammer Ahoy!--I really dislike the Lead test to avoid a ram. It makes ramming most races really unlikely with a game mechanic that is fairly unrealistic. Once you read the rules for ramming you decide not to ram, which means those pages could have been used to explain the missing random hit location!

Legends of the High Seas--Its not written for Warhammer!

Actually, as I specified, the rules for ramming are actually not to bad, although I can see your point on the race-specific thing. Isn't it likely that those races with higher leadership can more easily see how the battle is developing in fornt of them, see the enemy captains intention to ram and take the steps to avoid it? It would be hard to ram an elf ship or, perhaps a chaos ship or Empire while to ram an orc ship or beastmen war raft might be easier as those captains are not as skilled. A ram in a commitment and a gamble no matter how you look at it.

Parhaps we should come up with a similar rule but one that increases the likeliness of the ram in order to facilitate the boarding action? Actually, if you look at the rules for the ram and see the potential damage that one can cause, maybe the ability to avoid one is not such a bad thing. You could lose all your damage points from a good hit from a ship with a ram on the front.

I;ll give it some thought. By the way, I like the idea of repairing the ship while in combat (needing to allocate men to the task) or during a campaign, I think it'd be a good idea.

Good insight.....

Great comparison! Thanks for taking the time to do it.

It's funny that you say it's heresy to give all races cannons. I am thinking that it's not really a great ship to ship combat without everyone having cannons. It's just more thematic. If there were decent rules for everyone to have different war machines and those with only bolt throwers not to be at such a disadvantage, it might be better.

I do like making the whole thing more about ships maneuvering and firing on each other with war machines rather than it all about boarding actions.

I've only played Warhammer Ahoy once, but I know we dropped the whole Mordheim bit about stunning opponents and if you took a hit, you were dead. That kind of got rid of the whole skirmish side of things. I also felt that it was geared towards mass combat and wouldn't be a problem to have a large scale fight with those rules. We did use those modified rules that I posted in the Warhammer Ahoy thread.

I think if we could come up with a system that made it balanced, it would be quite cool. Being able to assign points to various options would be quite cool. I wouldn't mind rules and point being different from the main army books if it lead to a balanced game. Like, maybe OnG could use cannons, but it would cost a lot of points. I'd love to see some rules for various crew. Maybe OnG won't have cannons, but they would have more goblin crew to man the ship, fire weapons, and put out fires. I'd also like to see rules for trolls and other creatures.

Please understand that although I am coloring my response with my experiences and opinions, I am trying to compare the rules as they are written in their unmodified forms. We've house ruled the Compendium rules to death and the Mordheim campaign I'm in has several campaign modifications to the Warhammer Ahoy! rules.

Groznit--I say heresy just 'cause that's what the Empire player in me thinks! My friend's orcs and his Ogres always use cannon because in our house rules each ship comes with its maximum armament in cannon. But one of the rules (and the fluff) of elves is that they do not use gunpowder. We've only played with a Dark Elf player once before and his ship was sunk by the first shot of the game (bad call by the GM).

We balance the game with house rules by reducing the strength of the "free" cannon to 7. (The infamous Zombie Pirate carronades.)

There are differences in ship Toughness by class and hull points by class between each of the systems as well. LotHS for example has weaker cannon and more hull points than any of the other systems (and you can increase the hull points of your ship through upgrades!)

Skavenwarlord--Ramming. I'm reporting the experience of my group. We are playing max Ld 9 warbands at the moment with the exception of the Dwarf and the Elf. It is not worth the lost round of shooting for us to attempt a ram.

I should note that this is because of the size ships we are using (Ahoy mediums). If we were using larger ships there would be no issue because large or huge ships can not avoid a ramming attempt.

Perhaps a modification of the Ld test to evade rule would help.

As to the difference of focus between gun duels and boarding action--the games I am playing at the moment favor boarding actions because our goals are to capture the enemy ship. Sinking it means no plunder.

Not sure I'm making sense, must sleep!

I have all three rule sets at home, and in my first Seahammer game, I tried using LOTHS rules, although I did use the GC rules for the swivel gun (and to devastating effect, I might add).

Of course, I was running all small ships, with the two pirate vessels being REALLY small ships. Realistically, they were jolly boats, but it became apparent that the rowers would have NEVER caught the dhow. Good thing I had plan to rig them with a sail.

I will be trying a cannon battle with two small ships this week, and I have three medium brigs ready to go as well. I would like to get somewhat comfortable with the LOTHS rules and then try some of the others.

Perhaps we could glean the best out of each as you are suggesting Arrg. I will say that the GC's definition of ships based on lenght is not quite realistic. Small boats are 3" max? Eh? How many times is that dingy going to need to transfer da boys to shore?

It is a heck of a lot of fun though!

Goomb

Size of ships.

The 3" dingy is kind of a joke. We've made a couple of attempts at modeling such a boat that will hold 6 models. The resulting boat doesn't look like it will float.

Classifying ships by their size is a time honored tradition and all systems use ship size to differentiate ship classes. If the Compendium did not throw in the odd 'deck' rule I would like it best. (Its what I am most familiar with.) In general all of the systems use similar terms and measurements.

I have yet to play a LotHS game, but I have another player interested in the game...

I think picking and choosing among the rules is the way to go, especially because we can!

Don't forget adding in stuff we like!

Has anyone looked at or tried magic in games? It would be interesting to see it done, but not make it so powerful that it just ruins the game.

EDIT: From the other post in the Warhammer Ahoy, I just got thinking and figured it's better to discuss stuff from here.

What are all the various Toughness differences between all the systems? Are they different?

What about the Strength of all the different weapons? How are they in all the different games?

I'm sure if we look at these two items and compare, we can come up with something that really makes sense. We can also discuss the ideas of ship crew and ship casualties. That way, certain weapons make more sense (repeater bolt throwers being more about taking out crew). We can also go into damage and critical hits and all that so that we can figure out a great overall system.

This post has been edited by Groznit Goregut on Apr 16 2009, 05:03 PM

Magic--yes we include it in almost every game although in Mordheim games it is totally anti-crew. I warhammer there are potential problems with movement spells and some other spells but we have mainly played with O & G and Empire so we haven't had too many problems come up.

Toughness of ships I'm not sure if there are copy right issues or not. I guess I could PM you. As an overview let me say that LotHS and the General's are very similar assuming that Toughness is similar to Defense Value (which is called Toughness at one point).

What I love about Warhammer Ahoy! is that T starts at 6 for small ships and progresses to T9 for huge ships. In general you are dealing with ships that are easier to wound with regular war machines.

As I've said somewhere in these threads LotHS has more hull points per ship than any other system. Also cannon do less damage per hit. There are a lot more cannon available in general though. (4 on a small ship!)

Cannon strength is more varied in LotHS which you would expect from a historical game system.

Ahoy introduces the St 9 cannon.

The General's Compendium uses the strength of cannon available to your army or in the case of the cannon that are available to arm ships the cannon from the main rule book. Note that the standard cannon is NOT the Empire Great Cannon. I see that mistake made a lot.

I think my biggest quibble with Ahoy! rules is the fact that they really are rules for a separate game since force organization is not dependent on an army book.

Now should we start another thread for a ship battle rules wish list or just mix it in with this thread?

What are the differences between the systems for the size of ships? Maybe we can hammer out that aspect early on? Figure out what is a medium ship, etc.

In general terms LotHS and the General's Compenduim are very close. LotHS does not advocate ships bigger than 24". Warhammer Ahoy! has Huge ships as a class. Also since it has more size classes, similar sized ships are classed differently. For example most medium ships in Warhammer Ahoy! are a small ship for the General's. A Large Warhammer Ahoy! is a Medium in the Compendium and the Huge ships of Ahoy! are Large size.

I don't see the need for Huge.

I do!

Zelophahad's Le Sanglier is a Huge ship! With points values for ships Huge ships are either very lightly crewed/equipped or face fleets of enemy ships alone.

I agree. Huge ships are epic. Don't forget that epic rules are going to be coming out for WHFB soon-ish. I say it's exciting to have something that size. OK....maybe the sizes need to be messed with so that Huge is even larger than it is in Warhammer Ahoy. Maybe not.

I've recently had another idea. What about Man o' War? These are official GW rules already created. I'm sure it's already settled a lot of issues and defined what time period to set things in. How much damage should be done by war machines. How many boarding actions are there? How can elves compete against black powder weapons?

Has anyone tried or looked at Man o' War rules?

But there is no useful difference between a Large General's Compendium ship and a HUGE Warhammer Ahoy ship. Both are the same size. The General's Compendium Large as written can carry over 100 crew and 9 warmachines. There may be differences added by house rules, but that's not my point.

For Man o' War used in Warhammer scale you have to talk to Kaptain Blacksquig--

http://z3.invisionfree.com/Orc__Goblin_War...opic=22350&st=0

My short answer to your question is that it was a naval combat game with rules that did not reflect the Warhammer game. In Man o' War a cannon is basically equal to a repeater bolt thrower, although I believe the Reaper had an advantage when killing crew...

Have you guys revised your house rules again? By your old house rules his ship would cost 300 points...