Peacetime Sailing
A ship cannot stay in one place for three months (unlike a land unit
which can). The ship must periodically sail back to base to replenish,
replace worn equipment, discharge crew and take on new crew, etc. Thus,
during a peace turn, a ship has two locations - its station and its
base. Players control both via the peacetime ship order form.
During the three-month peace turn, the ship is staying on station as
long as it can, but periodically returning to base to reload. None of
this is explicitly modeled in NWOL. Instead, at the end of the peace
turn, the ship is randomly placed either at base or at its station. The
chance of being on station depends on how far the ship is from its
base. If the ship's station is only one or two sea areas from its base
(eg, a French ship based at Toulon and on station in GOL, TYS, or WMD)
then the chance that it will be on station at the end of the turn is
high, as much as 85% or 90%. If it's far from its base (ie, if it's
based at Brest but its duty station is in the Caribbean) then the
chance that it will be on station at the end of the turn is much lower;
it can be as low as 25% or so in the extreme case of a Russian ship
based at St. Petersburg or Sevastopol and on duty in the western
Caribbean. This gives nations an incentive to have bases near the
places they want their warships to be, so they can be sure of having
most of their navy on station if a campaign starts.
Ships that end a peace turn in their base will have 24 stores on board
at the start of the next turn. Ships that end a peace turn on station
will have a random number of stores on board. The farther they are from
their base, the fewer stores they will tend to have on board.
(Eventually players will have some control over how often the ships
return to base. The more often they return, the more likely they are to
be at base at the end of the turn, but the more stores they will have
aboard if they end the turn on station. This has not yet been coded,
however.)