Circumnavigating the globe wasn't really all it was cracked up to be.
Until sometime in the late 18th century, explorers were unable to cut down trees or find suitable building materials to repair their ships once they left "friendly" territory, and were forced to just keep sailing in hopes of getting home before their ship sank.
Ships were never actually captured by pirates; naval battles in the period was one of the most lethal forms of warfare known to humanity.
Therefore, no one except one nation, Britain, else Castille, else Holland, ever really bothered to build a navy.
Navies did not actually have to patrol the sealanes, nor even be based at distant ports in order to protect colonial shipping. They just had to exist.
Armies in the period never actually had anything like supply lines, they just had to forage off the local resources and if the number of men in an area exceeded the carrying capacity they started dying.
Soldiers fought by doing some kinda weird synchronized stick waving at each other as numbers on a tally sheet slowly ticked past.
In any given geographic area, 1000 men could interdict and block an enemy army (of any size) just as readily as an army of 10,000 or 100,000 could cover the same area.
Quite a few other shocking surprises about history but that is a good start!
Seriously: it is a fantastic game, and I love it. But it is still fun to point out the limitations created by any abstraction like a sim game
Until sometime in the late 18th century, explorers were unable to cut down trees or find suitable building materials to repair their ships once they left "friendly" territory, and were forced to just keep sailing in hopes of getting home before their ship sank.
Ships were never actually captured by pirates; naval battles in the period was one of the most lethal forms of warfare known to humanity.
Therefore, no one except one nation, Britain, else Castille, else Holland, ever really bothered to build a navy.
Navies did not actually have to patrol the sealanes, nor even be based at distant ports in order to protect colonial shipping. They just had to exist.
Armies in the period never actually had anything like supply lines, they just had to forage off the local resources and if the number of men in an area exceeded the carrying capacity they started dying.
Soldiers fought by doing some kinda weird synchronized stick waving at each other as numbers on a tally sheet slowly ticked past.
In any given geographic area, 1000 men could interdict and block an enemy army (of any size) just as readily as an army of 10,000 or 100,000 could cover the same area.
Quite a few other shocking surprises about history but that is a good start!
Seriously: it is a fantastic game, and I love it. But it is still fun to point out the limitations created by any abstraction like a sim game
