I would like to put forward a discussion about the increase to the movement of ships on the campaign maps, the reasons and issues as follows:
Important note: Upon the assumption that the imminent AI fix from CA remedies a number of key issues such as:
1) Naval Invasions (even if few, need defending against)
2) Competition for trade nodes (will require ships for defence)
3) Improved naval aggression by AI (will require ships for defence)
The above issues are likely results of the Naval AI fixes intended by CA. Of key importance will be the AI competing for trade nodes and attacking and destroying human-faction ships sat on Trade Posts.
This will be a radical departure from all previous experiences in ETW as the player has never had to defend any ships on a Trade Post.
With the increases in ship costs within Darthmod (and most other mods) the overall number of ships produced by both the player and the AI has been decreased (which is fine) however I believe that this will raise serious gameplay issues with the AI changes - namely that the player will have difficulty providing support for ships on trade posts from attack by the AI (factions and pirates).
In the vanilla game state it seems likely that the low cost of ships meant that the design regard was to allow the player to support a large number of ships, thereby allowing them to defend (or attack) in multiple areas/zones at once.
In such circumstances the extremely short range of ships on the campaign map was of negligible importance due to the high number of ships, and thereby fleets, which could be supported.
By increasing ship costs (recruitment and upkeep and repair) the overall number of ships readily available to the player is lower – this is no bad thing in and of itself. However, if the AI does become much more aggressive as suggested above then the combination of lower ship numbers and the limited campaign movement will result in a potential debilitating situation: the player having a very few number of ships/fleets and unable to protect the trade zones.
It should be said that a part of this will be desirable as a good element of gameplay: you don’t want things to be too easy.
On the other hand things should not be too difficult in gameplay terms or absurdly unrealistic in historical terms.
As we have seen in the history section countries such as Great Britain supported massive fleets: based on the phenomenal amounts of money secured via overseas trade. The relationship is direct and reciprocal: the fleet is needed to keep the trade coming in; the trade is needed to pay for the fleet – this is both historically accurate and an important gameplay element.
What is both a-historical and potentially damaging to gameplay (imo) is the number of turns required to move a fleet from one zone to another. F.ex TO move a fleet a fleet from Plymouth to the East Indies requires 8 turns to achieve: four turns to get the fleet from Plymouth to the exit zone sough of the Canary islands, then four turns to move along the trade routes to the East Indies.
In the East Indies themselves are five trade posts with, at most, 1 turn between each post (it is actually far less than that, but let us take the “best case” as the example).
This means that an AI force can deplete all five trade posts before a fleet can move from Plymouth to the East Indies – indeed it will not even turn up for another 3 turns.
I believe that this will create a situation whereby the protection of player fleets on trade posts may become self-defeating i.e. the actual cost and upkeep of a defensive force in the trade zone itself, especially on every post, will be economically unviable: it will cost more to protect every post than the trade can generate.
As stated earlier this may well be desirable; we need to push the player into making difficult choices, so let us suggest that having a single small fleet in each trade zone is desirable to protect all trade posts in that zone.
Do the current costs and upkeep generate enough revenue to support such fleets? If they do not then there are a few available options: either decrease ship costs, upkeep and repairs, or increase the ship movement on the campaign map and between Zones.
In the standard 2-turns to a year (historically) a ship can move from Plymouth to the East Indies with relative ease; in the game it takes 4 times as long.
Is this desirable?
Secondly let us then consider the issue of ship repairs – these cannot be done in situation and ships must be returned to port for repairs. If we consider a typical European power in the area of GB then they will require 16 turns to firstly get to the East Indies (f.ex), then fight, then return home for repair – then another 8 turns to get back. a staggering 24 turns in all or 14 years: as opposed to the realistic 1-1.5 years at most.
Ignoring historical possibilities for a moment do we consider that this is a realistic challenge in terms for gameplay? There are, of course, 4 trade zones to be protected across the globe, as well as homeland defence, troop transportation, fleet-actions and blockades.
If the time to move ships from one area to another is so limited as to make mobile-defence impossible (i.e. one or two fleets to protect everywhere), then our only other option is to balance ship costs against numbers (probably by decreasing them).
My overall concern is that the situation we may find ourselves in is one whereby the desirable gameplay situation of not being able to afford massive and numerous fleets may push us into a situation whereby we cannot have enough ships to effectively protect the areas in the game that we should be able to do.
This will not be because we do not have the ships to do so, but because they cannot be moved to where we need them in a timely fashion. And that fashion is strictly governed by the movement distance on the campaign map and the time to move (in the background) from one trade zone to another.
What I would like to discuss and investigate is whether or not we can pre-empt some of these possibilities:
a)Is it possible to extend the movement distance of ships on the campaign map “directly”
b)How does this affect the effects of modifications on ship movement distances through technological improvements? (Does this offer us an alternative method to increase ship campaign map movement distances?)
c)How quickly do we feel that we should be able to respond to AI attacks on our forces in different parts of the world?
Do we feel that having a fleet for each zone is a suitable aim/goal or do we feel that the human player should have very limited numbers of ships/fleets