they'd be more interested in destroying than capturing enemy ships.
You can't pick up many healthy slaves from a blazing hulk...
You're right about that. Although.... and alternative would be to wait for them to jump ship as their inferior vessel breaks apart around them, then use the big mechanical arm and nets on the deck to scoop the helpless and pathetic new slaves effortlessly out of the water and drop them directly into the hold below decks. All without ever having put a Chaos Dwarf in jeapordy of being injured or killed and without sullying one's mitts with the stink of slave flesh ;)
I’d imagine with the shipS burning and going down there would be hundreds, if not thousands of potential slaves in the water. Launch a dozen or so slaving rafts (with mechanical claw of course). Only the strong will survive and they will make the best slaves.
Thousands? How big do you think the average Medieval-era ship is?
There’s also salvage to think of. Burned up materials aren’t much use for recycling - for building or even as fuel. Better to capture a ship in a swift, decisive action. That’s how real navies operated in the age of sail. Most ships would essentially act as pirates most of the time, a little navy unto themselves, the only difference being that they took their booty back to their nation and tried to only prey on the people they were supposed to. Quite a lot of ships were “recycled” like this, being captured from one side in an engagement, refitted back home and then sent out to fight their previous owners. Most sailing nations even hired pirates to do their plundering for them, giving them license to attack ships belonging to enemy nations. They were called privateers.
So boarding actions are really a very vital part of the “feel” of historic naval warfare. Just as knights and men at arms would earn their fortunes in medieval battles by capturing and then ransoming rich prisoners, so too would ship captains earn renown and money by capturing enemy vessels.
War, for most of history, has been about the participants becoming wealthy rather than ideology or patriotism.
The What’s New Today thing mentioned the Heldenhammer crew being around 1800. The Bloody Reaver being over 1000.
So if you have say 10 ships per side, even if the rest are only half that size there’s bound to be many hundreds if not a thousand people in the water (dead or alive).
I should have pluralised the reply above *editing now.
The crew is 1800?! Those ships must be far bigger than they look then. Were there any ancient/medaeval ships that came even close to that without having row upon row of oarsmen?
No, they’re grotesquely oversized. That’s Warhammer for you! If you look at the little ships, in fact, you can see they’re actually full-sized galleons. It’s “Battlefleet Gothic…AT SEA!” which is weird, since BFG was "The Age of Sail…IN SPACE!"
And even with the numbers involved, it’s vastly more complicated to fish people from the a burning hulk than it is to just overrun and capture a functioning ship which you can then use yourself. As I said, this was a major military tactic for centuries: capturing enemy vessels was pretty much the objective in naval warfare. Building a ship was (and is!) so expensive that being able to get a free one (as well as deny it to the enemy…) was too tempting to ignore. Warhammer shouldn’t necessarily always follow historical precedent, but it’s part of the flavour of the period, especially for pirates who, after all, made their living from boarding ships and taking their stuff.
No, they're grotesquely oversized. That's Warhammer for you! If you look at the little ships, in fact, you can see they're actually full-sized galleons. It's "Battlefleet Gothic...AT SEA!" which is weird, since BFG was "The Age of Sail...IN SPACE!"
Thommy H
That's actually pretty hilarious when I think about it.
Why not oversize & crew ships by a factor of 10-20... The Empire somehow produces enough people to send vast armies against every single Chaos invasion despite being completely ravaged the year before by the previous one. And that's discounting how you can't farm anything in the Empire and they all live in the middle of the forest.
Warhammer Economics. Makes about as much sense as most sub-prime loans.
And even with the numbers involved, it's vastly more complicated to fish people from the a burning hulk than it is to just overrun and capture a functioning ship which you can then use yourself. As I said, this was a major military tactic for centuries: capturing enemy vessels was pretty much the objective in naval warfare. Building a ship was (and is!) so expensive that being able to get a free one (as well as deny it to the enemy...) was too tempting to ignore. Warhammer shouldn't necessarily always follow historical precedent, but it's part of the flavour of the period, especially for pirates who, after all, made their living from boarding ships and taking their stuff.
Thommy H
And yet that's where again Warhammer is Warhammer. You talk about the differences and then ignore them the next second!
Unlike reality one races ships would seem to be utterly useless to another race. Elfs couldn't do squat with Dwarf ships, Dwarfs would at best use elven ships as firewood.
Empire and Bretonnia seems the only ones (well, let's throw in the other human factions too) where the ships would be roughly analogous. Warhammer after all is a really weird place where even though you'd understand the how and a why a cannon works it somehow makes sense to keep using a spear thrower powered by cow-intestines. Or whatever fantastical creature gives flavour.
I really don't think the cost/benefit/risk equation is in favour of capturing ships (FWIW that's the exact problem most pirates had). I'd expect CDs just as DEs have learned to attack coastal settlements instead.
You talk about the differences and then ignore them the next second!
No, I don't ignore them - I just point out where it probably should follow real-world history. There's no point making a game about naval battles or pirates that doesn't have some kind of resonance with reality, or why have it follow those themes at all? Like in Warhammer, there's no need for gunpowder to exist (because magic is everywhere) but it's part of the flavour of the Renaissance setting, so it stays in even though it's hard to imagine why anyone would bother to invent it in a world so saturated with magic.
On the other hand, we happily suspend our disbelief and pretend it's possible for a powerful nation modelled after 10th - 14th Century Europe, whose most powerful weapon is a trebuchet, to exist alongside the aforementioned 15th - 19th Century black-powder powerhouse without being conquered or at the very least importing all their technology. This is because knights are cool, and you wouldn't want to ignore the archetype just because it doesn't quite "work".
So you can have giant mechanical kraken submarines fighting galleons with a crew of 2,000 men, but the second those galleons sprout wings and start firing laser beams you lose what makes it work as a setting. It has to be just historical enough to be recognisable. You can only suspend disbelief so far.
I’ve got to say I have a feeling the Skaven ship probably IS shooting laser beams.
And I was thinking about High Elfs who still persist in brining a bloody Scorpion to a gun fight.
Nor am I exactly happily suspending disbelief anymore. For my money they jumped the shark long ago. I’m not sure if it was the giant moving wooden fighting robot or the “automorial of Middenheim Delivered form Darkness”.
I’d still maintain that Chaos Dwarfs have no business boarding other ships. There’s no real gains for them there.
Except slaves, which is the whole reason they go to war in the first place. And boarding is a way better way to obtain them than blowing up the enemy ship and hoping you can pick up a few injured, half-drowned survivors from the water (remember, you have to subdue all the enemy ships before you can start sending in rafts/using giant mechanical grabbing claws).
Board ship > overwhelm vital areas with savage fighters > remainder of crew surrenders > loads of healthy slaves and free ship.
That’s how it was done historically, because it worked. It’s also more interesting, in my opinion, because it allows you to explore a subculture of barbaric, piratical Chaos Dwarfs.
