Quote from: CessnaI'm looking for a WWI or pre-dreadnought era game.  I'm not a huge fan of "Harpoon" or the Larry Bond approach, but I could make an exception for WWI.  

Or can anyone recommend an alternative?

I recently bought "Grand Fleets" from Majestic Twelve Games at DriveThru.  It covers everything from about the 1890s through 1939.  It looks pretty good, but I haven't had much chance to really look at it.  To be honest I bought it mostly for the crunchy inter-war torpedo data.

It is hex-based (with rules from miniature tabletop conversion), has a simple but interesting command & control system, has good squadron movement rules, and the combat system doesn't look too complex at first glance.

You can get a free demo version here.  Let me know what you think if you take a look at it.


TGA

That could work!

I'll download a copy tonight and see how it looks.  Thanks!

QuoteThe system is decent but not perfect; it is fairly rough around the edges. In some ways the game is very comprehensive; there's quite a bit of detail about stuff like weapons, sensors, and the fiddly hardware of naval warfare. But a lot of the game is quite abstract - damage to ships is rather vague, and crew quality is very loosely handled. Worst of all, there are three time scales, with very sloppy switching from strategic to tactical to, um, "very tactical." In many ways it feels more like a referee's toolkit than a finished, smooth wargame.

The vagueness was the biggest problem I had with the version I have, 2nd edition I believe it is.

There's a lot of detail there, and yet a the same time the rules are still very vague on explaining what the hell to do with a lot of it.  The book as written seems like it's written under the assumption that you know the rules already, and know modern naval combat intimately.  Plus there's a lot of stats in the ship readouts that I just plain don't understand why they bothered with, as they don't seem to have any effect on the game at all.

So for a newbie to naval wargaming, with just a level of curiousity in the concept (I like the idea of big ship fights of all eras, I just don't know much about them), it's a bit harsh really.

I've heard the current version is better than the old one, but when it's something like $50-60, and I'm not likely to actually ever get to play the damn game in any fashion other than attempted solitaire, I've yet to justify the expense.

I did manage to puzzle out enough to do a solitaire game or two of it, but this was running with a very basic training scenario.