There is a lot of water

If your enemy lives on a different lump of land from you then you have two options: 1, swim or 2, sail. Since swimming with weapons and armour is quite hard, sailing proves to be a popular method of crossing large bodies of water. Fleets can also be used for far more but what, is for you to figure out. In battle larger ships have an advantage over smaller ships because of their greater height. This allows one to plunge down missile fire over lower decks while enjoying better cover, and it's harder to board a higher ship than it is to board a lower ship. Small ships are also capable of operating in shallow coastal waters and can make landfall without a harbour much easier.

Ships are measured in their length, crew ratio and armaments. Below is a simple chart the shows ship weight, materials cost, construction cost, crew count and armament slots. Construction cost points are generated by shipyards, they only last for that turn but are re-created each turn. Horses take up 8 transport slots, 9 with a rider. Horse transports are a class apart. About the size of a 250 tons ship they are designed specifically to transport horses and other large animals.

Ship weight	Materials cost	Construction cost	Armament slots	Transport slots
100 tons	0.25	3	0	50
250 tons	1	5	1	130
Horse transport	1	5	0	60 horses
400 tons	3	15	2	350
600 tons	5	30	4	650
800 tons	8	60	6	900

If you do not have a supply of wood to your shipyard then it works at a quarter of it's normal speed. Armament slots hold a ballista or a catapult.

The crew

The price of the crew is part of the ship, they will be armed with bows for ship to ship combat or if you have gunpowder you may specify that they use handguns (it's all free), the crew are also armed with hand to hand weapons (heavy armour is a bad idea). As with the military, you can decide how well trained the crew are, it uses the same training values. As with the military, when you create a ship the crew are deducted from your population but will still want to eat. The crew are all sailors, for effective boarding teams you should use army personnel. Crew quality affects the construction point cost of the ship, not the material cost.

• Untrained: x0.5
• Low standard: x0.75
• Normal standard: x1
• High standard: x1.5
• Exceptional standard: x2

Some examples

Here are some Aggregate ships as examples as if they were written in a military summary. The first number in brackets after the name is the cost in materials, the second number is the cost in construction points and the last the upkeep that must be paid each turn.

Airships

Airships are very crude, it is up to you to define how they are propelled as by default they are simply balloons that go up and then come down again later. Airships are measured by their size, the larger they are the more they can lift. The table below shows the properties of various sizes. The size is the radius of a round balloon, if you are using a zeppelin shape then it refers to the diameter but is 4 times as long as that diameter. A zeppelin is faster but takes up more space. Unlike normal ships, airships do not require any supplies, though they will require a place of storage. They are built using shipyard construction points in the same way as normal ships. The average human weighs about 75kg.

Lifting power	Materials cost	Construction points	Size
160kg	1	20	4m
350kg	3	40	6m
650kg	6	70	8m
1000kg	10	100	10m
1800kg	15	150	12m