HOLF Players' Guild Forum

As you may have seen in the rules, when ships in a sea area do not sail during that sea area, then they have a chance to detect, and move to, any other ships in that sea area at the end of the turn. There were substantial concerns at the end of NWOL-3 that this was broken. It'll be something we'll want to test carefully in the upcoming game.

Here's how it appears to be working at the moment (which is not necessarily correctly). Any ship that is in a sea area, didn't move during the turn, and is not already in contact with hostiles, has a chance to detect each other group in the sea area. (The chance is usually fairly high, over 50%, so if there are 3 or 4 groups in the sea area, your odds of finding one of them are quite high, 90% or better.) Each ship in the sea area that is eligible to do this gets its turn, in a random order.

In that random order, the ship that is trying to detect moves through the other groups until it detects one of them. When it does, all ships in its tac area move to the other tac area, unless they are in evade mode, in which case they don't, or all ships in the other tac area are not hostile and the ship has Join Allies turned off, in which case it doesn't move. The ships that it moves to have no chance to evade.

I am aware of one problem. Consider this case: one French ship in evade, one British ship in evade, two Dutch ships in accept, all neutral, all have Join Allies on. The British ship gets the first chance and finds either the French or Dutch, doesn't matter which - it's in evade mode, so it doesn't move. The Dutch get second chance and detect the French ship. They're in accept, they have Join Allies on, the French ship being in evade is irrelevant, so they join up.

Last the French ship gets its chance and it detects the British ship. The French ship is in evade, so it doesn't do anything, but the Dutch ships that are with the French ship are not in evade, so they join the British ship, which means they've moved twice, and leave the French ship behind.

This isn't actually a bad outcome, since the Dutch have in fact found someone, but it feels weird. Perhaps what I should do is have ships in evade mode not try to make contact in the first place. Or somehow mark the Dutch shps so they can't move twice. Gotta work through it. Comments and suggestions are welcome.

If instead the order is Dutch, French, British, then if the Dutch find the French, first the Dutch move to the French, second the French find the British (only choice left) and the Dutch move to the British, third the British find the French (again, the only ship not in their tac loc) and the Dutch move back to the French again! Oooof. But it does end up with the Dutch in contact with someone so it's not so wrong.

I have not yet tried to replicate the problem of the last game, which I understand to be that five British ships, in different tac locs, with Join Allies off (so they'd stay in separate tac locs) and not in evade mode (at least I think they weren't) could not detect French ships in the same sea area. But that's on tommorow's agenda. If anyone out there (John V? Dave? Jim V if you have reappeared?) thinks I have the parameters of the problem wrong, please let me know ASAP (email preferred).

Steve