Ancient fleets-project.

Since I finished the Roman Warship plastic kit last week,a few people have asked if I intended to buy more and build up a fleet,to have sea battles with them.Well, two things determined my answer-firstly,the cost,at £24 pounds each it would be out of my price range(poor old pensioner and all that!) and secondly,the storage space needed.However I still thought that large fleet sea battles would look good,so started to think how I could achieve this goal-and another project had started!!!!
I have a few books on Ancients,and they all contain sections on ships and sea warfare,so I trawled(sorry about that!) through them,and came up with an idea,that if I could find an illustration from a "birds eye view" I could photo copy it and have a ready made "deck",so to speak.

This was ideal,but only one side is shown with oars-so I carefully drew the other side's oars in with felt tip pen,photo-copied it a few times,and my decks were ready.

I then drew around the deck and made a template from hardboard,and then drew "hundreds" of the shapes onto a piece of foam board.The next stage is obvious-I then cut them out using a stanley knife.

The pile of ship-shapes,awaiting.......................................

The cut-out deck shapes!-these were easily stuck on using water and PVA mix.

The first three,just to see how they look,and then onto the fleet..........................

This shows 48 of the 64 I have made-to identify the bigger ships,I simply placed two decks on top of each other!!!

Using different coloured craft card for each squadron,and fixed with a cocktail stick for the mast,the fleet looks ready to go.

Another view showing two squadrons about to attack each other.
Having read all I could from the books I have,I knocked up a set of simple rules.................

I used an Alternate move system to play the 4 trial games,and two things came up straight away-one,the ships were too light(foam board!) and two,the rules made the games fast,furious and vicious!!!!-the second thing is good,but a solution was needed for the first thing,so............

A cash injection of £5 bought me 100 washers,to fix onto the bottom of the ships,which solved the problem,however we'll have to go on half rations for the next week!!!!

Another trial game(with washers attached!) we will be using our tried and tested Measuring Stick(shown in photo) which is 300mm long.

In this shot the purple ship has rammed the red ship,and has thrown a 2,which is a "sink!" and red ship is removed from board!

In this shot the red ship has rammed the purple ship,and thrown a 3-the purple ship isn't sunk and a melee,using the points allocated,ensues-simple!!
I wonder what kind of game we will be having on Sunday????
Any comments/-good or bad,I'll take them all on board(did you see what I did then?!!)