The Naval Tactical Map

In my last post I referred to the fact that to play a game using VASSAL required images of the playing area over which a hex-grid was superimposed and that these images will, of necessity, be very large and demanding on computer resources.

Well, this is not quite totally true in the case of a map that represents the open ocean which is exactly where our Naval combat will generally take place.

The Vassal Engine allows you to create an empty map-board with a basic background colour. Over this you can still lay a hex-grid. So, in terms of the Tactical Map for Naval combat it is not strictly necessary for me to create an image as long as the combat is going to take place on an open and featureless expanse of sea.

I have recently purchased Naval Thunder: Battleship Row which is a set of Naval Wargaming rules for WW2. More importantly, the rules are designed around playing on a table-top that is in fact 6-feet by 4-feet. The rules also use the basic unit of 1" = 500 yards or 1:1200.

That being the case it is possible for me to restrict the playing area significantly and by using a scale of 1-hex equals 1" it will be a simple task to replicate a 6' by 4' table: it is simply 72-hexes by 48-hexes.

A selection of 1" wide hexes from the Tactical Map. Note that the hexes can be numbered, this is an option. The background is white but you can set this to the colour of your choice.

It was with some relief that this particular requirement for a Tactical map was so easy to achieve thanks to Vassal and to the straightforward use of 1:1200th scale. A real bonus is that many Naval wargames rules work to this scale so that players are not necessarily limited to the rules that I propose to use.

The only drawback that I can envisage is that maneuver space for ships will be somewhat limited but I'll address this by some playtesting on a real table-top as well as within Vassal itself. 

The Task Ahead

Dunn's book, 'Sea Battle Games', was written for the table-top Naval wargamer. Using the popular 1:1200 scale for Naval engagements demands a very large playing area and for the most part precludes using a table-top in favour of a floor - a large floor!

With 18" gunnery ranges reaching out to 92-inches (2.3-meters) one can understand why the average dining table was not suitable for a game involving major Capital ships.

To use VASSAL it was necessary to replicate a surface area that could accomodate such long ranges and also allow for the ships involved to maneuver. VASSAL maps are generally overlaid with a hex-grid to make movement easier and to measure ranges.

At a scale of 1:1200, one-inch on the table-top equates to 500-yards. Movement and gun ranges in the book are all given in inches and the inch is clearly the most basic of units.

Using this scale I decided to set my VASSAL scale to 1-hex = 500-yards. This way I could replicate the 1:1200 scale but not have to find a floor to play the game on!

It sounds very simple in theory but in practice it is not quite as straightforward as it appears. The problem is that for VASSAL you create a digital playing-area. In fact you create an image of the playing area, over which a hex-grid is superimposed. Put simply, the larger the map-image, the more memory is required to display it. replicating a 6-foot by 6-foot table requires a hex-grid that is 72-hexes by 48-hexes. However, we have already noted that a table-top is not of a suitable size.

So, one of the first problems was to create a suitably sized digital playing area for naval engagements. This was for use at the Tactical level.

More problematic was the second requirement which was to create a World-map for the Strategic aspects of the Campaign I envisaged. This had to represent a huge surface area, encompassing vast distances but still had to be created as a digital-image without demading megabytes of memory to display.

The task ahead then was to create or somehow work out how to display Tactical and Strategic maps that could reflect the relative scales utilised for both.

This was to be the start of a protracted effort...