Ok, so this is the 45 point French fleet I've been using lately, and met some degree of success with against the players in my group.
This is a fairly straight forward arrangement:
We have Le Soleil Royal as our flagship, crewed by a captain, a helmsman, a cannoneer, Monsieur LeNoir (a canceler) and the reviled Vicomte Jules de Cissey, our zero point limit ransom buddy.
Le Soleil's support vessel is the PatOE incarnation of L'Afrique with a skeleton crew.
For treasure ships, there's L'Artesien with an explorer and Le Coeur du Lion with a helmsman.
So that's the sum of the parts - what does the whole look like?
We have a five-masted flagship with respectable guns that moves S+L, can move+shoot, cancel captains and the like, kills crew when it hits their ships and gets a re-roll on one of her shots. Backing her up is a two-master with the same speed and comparable cannons.
While my opponent is dealing with this, my two treasure runners are moving at S+S+S each turn, with combined cargo space for 5 coins - more than enough room to clean out each island they visit. L'Artesien always arrives first, so that the island is explored when Le Coeur arrives. (I suppose it's worth explaining that a house rule at my game shop states that once a ship has explored a wild island, it's considered explored for your whole fleet, not just that ship.)
The rest is just good tactics. Wait for your opponent to move into range before striking, keep your fleet as close together as possible while trying to isolate your opponent's vessels, be opportunistic with cancelers and captains, grab as much gold as you can and know when to cut and run... stuff most everyone here knows.
Feel free of course to comment, critique or leave any feedback at all; anything is appreciated.
Miniature Trading
