Fire Ship

The fireship was the desperate weapon of a weaker fleet — a vessel stripped of everything useful, packed with pitch, tar, and gunpowder, fitted with grappling hooks, and sent burning into an anchored enemy fleet while its skeleton crew jumped overboard at the last moment. The tactic was ancient, but it reached its most famous application on the night of August 7 to 8, 1588, when English commanders sent eight fireships into the anchored Spanish Armada at Gravelines. The Spanish, terrified of the ships and the explosions aboard them, cut their anchor cables and scattered in panic — breaking their defensive formation in a way that English gunships had failed to achieve by direct combat. The fireship required bravery from the crew sailing it to the last moment and offered no guarantee of actual ship losses, but the panic it induced could decide a battle. In the game it is a single-use shock weapon that deals devastating fire damage in a wide radius on detonation, best deployed against clustered enemy fleets in harbor.