battle ships iterations

After playing a basic game of battle ships i decided to change a rule to help speed things up as battle ships can take quite a while and an easy way to help was if you got a hit on a ship you could have another go.

hit = extra go:

this did speed things up defiantly because once you found a ship you could potentially destroy it straight away, providing you correctly guessed where it was facing, of course this didn't happen every time as you don't always hit it at one end and then work across the ship every time but it did happen once.
this also added a small element of strategy which could be exploited by hitting the ship once and then taking a random guess to find another ship and doing the same next time until the ship was destroyed and playing again as normal.
the only flaw i found was that it made the game even more one sided when a player wasn't doing so well but i guess that happens a lot in the game anyway, this added mechanic just speeds things up to get to a winner.


I did try the complete opposite too because after all destroying the ships doesn't take too long, its finding the ships that does.

miss= extra go
as soon as i suggested this change i saw the flaw, the person going first could be there forever so I made a 3 guess limit.
this did speed things up but as each guess is so strategic it made the game even more boring for the first few turns and by the end it was just a bit ridiculous and unfair if one player was doing very well, but how do we level the playing field in a complete chance game?




another idea was if you ship got sunk you got the opportunity to shoot a area of effect bomb type weapon on a spot which also hit he other spots which surrounded it, like how minesweeper works.

I also had the idea to be able to move one of your ships a single spot instead of shooting, but not moving onto spots where the enemy has already shot at, this probably wouldn't have worked too well as shooting is essential to finding and sinking the enemy ships. This might have worked in conjunction with the 3 shot each turn rules by maybe making it 2 shots each turn but you can move one spot and shoot once if you wanted to.
this would have been very handy in the later part of the game because you can normally figure out where there longer ships are by looking at the spaces that haven't been hit and seeing where it could fit.


Like always my most ambitious idea is always my first and this really wouldn't work without a lot of work, my idea was to have both teams of ships on the same board and the explosion of your own ship could hep find the enemy ships, this is where the idea for the bomb weapon evolved from.
this would not work at all unless both player drew their ships onto a bit of paper and then a referee was to take both and make master map and then he/she told players if they had it.
Another way for this to work was if one team was ships and the others were submarines. the ships could shoot bomb type weapons and the submarines could shoot missiles that followed a line forward in a chosen direction from the submarine until it hit. This idea was defiantly too ambitious and would not work as the ships would avoid their own spaces thus telling the submarines where they were and the submarines would be forced to reveal their own spaces because of where the missile starts.
this could maybe be fixed by adding a referee and numbering each submarine and saying if it is shooting north, east, south or west but what if the ships where directly on top of the submarines? and the ships would still have the same problem of having to avoid their own ships and after a while would always show where they are.