Age of Sail is a game of Napoleonic naval warfare. It installs and runs straight from Windows 95 or Windows 3.1, and is supplied on CD-ROM and I had no problems at all setting it up and running it on my machine. When you start AoS you are presented with an options screen allowing you to select a single scenario, a campaign or the scenario designer.

AoS plays in real-time. This means that at soon as the scenario starts, your ships start to move and fight. How quickly this actually happens will depend on the speed of your PC, and the game speed you select. It is possible to pause the action, which gives you time to see what is happening and issue some orders.

Scenario Starts

When a scenario starts you are presented with a 3D view of the playing area; for some strange reason the program often seems to select a completely empty part of the sea to show you and leaves you to scroll around to find the battle.

The view can also be zoomed out to give a 2D top-down view, which I found a lot more useful when fighting larger battles.

The 3D view is nice, especially when ships are firing broadsides and changing sail, but is not large enough to allow you to observe enough of the action to keep control once there are more than a few ships on each side.

Various options allow you to select a grid to be superimposed, guns arcs and ranges to be shown for the currently selected ship (very useful), and to allow auto-scrolling to follow the action.

Orders

Giving orders to a ship is very easy. Clicking on a ship selects it a brings up details of speed, direction, guns in each broadside and what they are loaded with (ball, grape, double-shot), crew and sails remaining. Command Buttons along the top of the screen then allow you to order changes in direction, speed, sail and loading of gun batteries at the click of a button. Orders can be issued to entire squadrons and even fleets in a similarly easy manner.

Ships can also be ordered to fire at will, which means the program handles all the loading and firing decisions, and is almost essential in larger fleet actions.

AoS comes with three training scenarios which are worth playing once to learn how to move and fight your ships. Then there are lots of scenarios covering single ship actions and most of the well known squadron and fleet actions of the period.

I soon discovered that scenarios with just one or two ships on each side are not really very interesting to play, and should be treated as extra training or practise.

The larger squadron and fleet actions are far more interesting and challenging to play. The way the game has been designed and plays gives a surprisingly realistic feel to the battles. At the start of a scenario when all the ship are in nice neat formations it is quite easy to issue fleet and squadron orders and generally retain control of your ships. However as they close with the enemy and the firing starts, control breaks down. As the ships become more intermingled it becomes less possible to issue group orders.

Because of the real-time game-play there is not enough time to control all of your ships in detail when they are closely-engaged. This means that you tend to focus on the fights of a few ships at crucial points of the action, whilst leaving the rest to fight for themselves. This period of intense action lasts for several minutes, but then you tend to find that some of your ships become disengaged and it then becomes possible then to issue sensible orders to recommit them to the fight before losing control of them again.

Again, quite realistically, there is too much going on when there are lots of ships fighting for you to monitor the damage done to your ships, or the enemies, in any great detail, so it is not until the 'smoke clears' that you really find out which ships have been captured or badly damaged.

A Criticism

One criticism I do have is the lack of a historical aftermath for the scenarios. It would have been nice to find out what really happened and to assess ones performance against our real-life counterparts.

AoS also includes a very comprehensive scenario designer. This allows you to pick ships from a huge database and position them on the playing area. Each side can be grouped into squadrons, and can include ships of different nationalities (the Spanish and French at Trafalgar for instance). Once on the positioned, the speed, direction, sail and gun loading can all be set for each ship, along with a crew quality rating.

The wind direction and speed can also be specified, along with the chance of them changing during the battle.

I'm afraid that I didn't have sufficient time to take more than a cursory glance at the campaign system. It seems to allow you to start as a Captain of a small frigate and fight a series of actions, get promotion etc.

AoS is a good, easy to play game that gives a realistic impression of the chaos and confusion of naval warfare of this period. There are plenty of scenarios, and the option to play either (or both) sides gives plenty of playing time for your money.

Age of Sail Screen Shots (slow download: 250K)

This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web.
Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com