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Thread: Increasing Campaign Ship Movement distances?

  1. #1

    Default Increasing Campaign Ship Movement distances?

    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

  2. #2

    Default Re: Increasing Campaign Ship Movement distances?

    I looked into this for a while and came up with the best way to cope is to run 3-4 turns per year and live with the vanilla rates.
    Ships in the vanilla game are way way way way too slow on the map but any more speed / turn would make keeping track of a navy nigh on impossible.
    As it stand the ballance (for my liking) on 4tpy is fine as it is, any faster and you'll have ships zipping around like missiles and your fleets getting attacked once every turn which could get a bit boring.

    Of course you could go nuts and go for 12 turns / year

    As far as tech is concerned they are % increases iirc.

  3. #3

    Default Realistic Navy

    I would like to see navies made realistic for the time period. Ships of the Line, or Frigates, where expensive peices of equipment. The nukes of their time. The loss of a single ship was a big deal. A few things in ETW should be changed:

    1) Ship cost should be drasticly increased (to reduce large fleet stacks, and make each ship more important.
    2) Ship movement range should be inceased
    3) Ship production and cost should be based on the availability of timber in home regions
    4) Ship regeneration outside of home ports, possibly at a controlled trade node. (to allow damaged ships to stay in the theatre) This would be realistic considering naval vessals of the time had a ship's carpenter aboard.
    5) No more massive pirate fleets, this is ridiculous.
    6) Oh, and naval invations would be nice.

    Realistically in this time period the ONLY time large stack (fleets) where gathered was for major operations such as an invation, or a blackade. The rest of the time the navies of a nation were spread out, protecting the interests of their nation. The largest groups where perhaps 3-5 ship squadrons for particular missions. I would like to see this reflected in ETW, fewer ships (no AI full stacks) allowing for much more realistic (and imo more exciting) smaller 1vs1, 2vs2 engagments. Why does the AI never run from a battle no matter how bad the odds are stacked against him? With ships being much more important, perhaps this would be effected?
    ~Loyalty always, but honor first.~

  4. #4

    Default Re: Realistic Navy

    I'd like to see light ships able to act like agents, e.g. you use them to "shadow" enemy fleets to know their strength, much like rakes on the land.

  5. #5

    Default Re: Realistic Navy

    Times to build also need extending.

    1st rate ships took 10 years+ to finish
    Even common 3rd rates could be built anywhere from 2-8 years

    (samples taken from over 20 real ships and their laying down times to launch)

    Sink rates need to be reduced as well - focus damage on sails/masts and crew - when round shot hit a ships side 2-3 meters above the water line it killed the crew, not sink the ship ...

  6. #6
    Bob the Insane's Avatar Semisalis
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    Default Re: Realistic Navy

    Quote Originally Posted by Rugin84 View Post
    I would like to see navies made realistic for the time period. Ships of the Line, or Frigates, where expensive peices of equipment. The nukes of their time. The loss of a single ship was a big deal. A few things in ETW should be changed:

    1) Ship cost should be drasticly increased (to reduce large fleet stacks, and make each ship more important.
    2) Ship movement range should be inceased
    3) Ship production and cost should be based on the availability of timber in home regions
    4) Ship regeneration outside of home ports, possibly at a controlled trade node. (to allow damaged ships to stay in the theatre) This would be realistic considering naval vessals of the time had a ship's carpenter aboard.
    5) No more massive pirate fleets, this is ridiculous.
    6) Oh, and naval invations would be nice.

    Realistically in this time period the ONLY time large stack (fleets) where gathered was for major operations such as an invation, or a blackade. The rest of the time the navies of a nation were spread out, protecting the interests of their nation. The largest groups where perhaps 3-5 ship squadrons for particular missions. I would like to see this reflected in ETW, fewer ships (no AI full stacks) allowing for much more realistic (and imo more exciting) smaller 1vs1, 2vs2 engagments. Why does the AI never run from a battle no matter how bad the odds are stacked against him? With ships being much more important, perhaps this would be effected?

    All good ideas IMO...

    1. Agree, but we have to be aware of the impact this has on the AI...

    2. Agree

    3. Sort of agree, we would have to add a few more timber resources to the map. It would have been realistic to limit the building of larger ships unless you had access to timber (this is representing specialist timber, such as for masts) through direct ownership or trade of timber resources (thus why the Dutch had to stay on the good side of Scandanavian countries). It would have added a nice bit of depth. It would appear that CA considered this but did follow through, the timber resource does nothing but generate additional wealth, it is largely pointless but they still added it in with text that hints it is related to ship building.

    4. Totally agree, these carpeters where the rocket builders of their day. A naval carpeter had served many years in the ship yards building the vessels in the first place. Given time and resources they could repair almost any amount of damage (provided the ship didn't sink first)...

    5. Agree, pirates should be small stacks constantly pirating sea lanes, attacking merchant vessels in trade hubs and occasionally blockading an undefended port. Ideally pirates should spawn with slight modifed versions of brigs, sloops and trade vessels (extra guns, extra crew)...

    6. We are waiting on CA for that one...

    As for not running when hugely outnumbered, this has to be a bug, it happens in land battles too...

    Quote Originally Posted by Midknight View Post
    Times to build also need extending.

    1st rate ships took 10 years+ to finish
    Even common 3rd rates could be built anywhere from 2-8 years

    (samples taken from over 20 real ships and their laying down times to launch)

    Sink rates need to be reduced as well - focus damage on sails/masts and crew - when round shot hit a ships side 2-3 meters above the water line it killed the crew, not sink the ship ...

    HMS Victory was built in 6 years (7 years if you include building the dry dock) with a 3 year delay in the middle? 10 years seems a little extreme?

    The British Navy (and I assume others) kept enormous quantity of timber in store yards seasoning for many years, so when time came to actually build a ship there was plenty of good seasoned wood for the purpose. Is that process included in your timescale?

    I do agree with your last point, but I am not sure what can be done about that. Personnally I have tried modding Darth's mod to increase the morale impact of ship damage to encourage ships to rout and surrender sooner. But there is some other mechanisim at work here, I still often seen ships that have surrendered with limited hull damage spontaniously sink later in a battle. There is definately a "sinking" condition, in the same way as there is a "Fire" condition. And like the fire condition acn lead to an explosion, the sinking condition can lead to the boat sinking. I also believe a boat can spontaniously sink in much the same way as it can spontaniously explode when under fire. I further believe the the crew do not fight fire or sinking once the boat has surrendered, thus if a boat enters one of these conditions while surrendered the outcome is unavoidable. However I can't find anything linking damage to sinking in the tables...
    Last edited by Bob the Insane; April 14, 2009 at 02:59 PM.
    "They are the devil's vegetable" - Captain Keeble, HMS Bulwark

  7. #7

    Default Re: Realistic Navy

    No, construction only.
    HMS Royal Sovereign (another 1st rate) was 1774-1786 which is 14 years. It's an unbelievably long time but there ya go - perhaps 10 years is too long but other large ships (2nd rates) also took ages to finish depending on their needs.

    Most of the ships at Trafalgar were 3rd rate ship of the line - from the 20 or so I ahve looked at you are looking at an average of 5-6 years to build !
    Some took only a year, others took 8+ years to finish so I just took a middle park value. The other thing I wanted to do was make the loss of a fleet absolutly devastating.

    I haven't looked at the damage side of things either.

  8. #8

    Default Re: Increasing Campaign Ship Movement distances?

    merged similar threads.

  9. #9

    Default Re: Increasing Campaign Ship Movement distances?

    merged similar threads.

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    pirates become huge fleets as they always Capture in battle - the pirate AI seems to have extreely high liklihood of capturing so it snaffles all of the spanish and UP and other ships in its area and becomes too powerful too quickly.

    ------------------------------

    I spent some time today playing Imperial Splendour which has far higher recruitment costs for ships: it has good and bad points.

    What was most obvious was that there are practically no navies at all - in the first 40 turns i fought about 3 battles, all with pirates who had by far and away the largest naval forces haivng done their usual trick of capturing everything that spain and the UP have in the Carib.
    it is exhorbitantly expensive to run a fleet and maintain it... in the long turn this may pan out in th longer game, but it struck me in the early game that the AI simply has no ships so the naval portion of the game is almost entirely absent..which is rather dull, as i say though, this may pan out to work better in the later game.


    A similar issue will arise with extended build-times.. although I think that extended build times will be a better approach that excessively high recruitment costs.

  10. #10
    priam11's Avatar Campidoctor
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    Default Re: Increasing Campaign Ship Movement distances?

    Anbar,

    That is exactly what I am experiencing so far. If the cost to build is too high, the AI does not build fleets. What you will get groups of smaller fleets of trade ships, brigs, sloops and maybe 6th rates and usually they are in the Med. The rest of the oceans are a pretty barren place. This is the norm in 1780 so it never really changes.

    I do believe it is the AI priority that is the problem. In my current campaign as Austria, Spain was no fleets but they have masses of armies sitting in Gibraltar, in Belgium, and in Portugal (playing IS).

    The AI seems to go after the cheaper units regardless of the strategic or tactical situation.

    I have not tried and Darth mods yet and I will. I am just trying to finish one campaign before I do.

  11. #11

    Default Re: Increasing Campaign Ship Movement distances?

    If the build times would be increased, maybe also slightly raise the prices....and maybe give bonuses for having Timber in the region, it could have benefits, also having 10 on 10 ship battles is dull...I mean...in those times.....only when raiding ship caravans was the time that more then 3-4 ships met in battle, usually the battles were among 1-3 ships tops....depending, since building them was a pain and losing was even worse......I would love to see the naval battles improved in this way...having smaller 1-3 ship fleets and duel naval battles 1on1 2on1 3on2 etc....not 10on10......also....have noticed..that AI only uses Admiral 5th rates.....other than that it is simply stacking up Brigs, Sloops, 6th and sometimes Galleons or Fluyt/Indiaman......

  12. #12
    Syntax's Avatar "Veni Vidi Vici"
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    Default Re: Increasing Campaign Ship Movement distances?

    To the poster of the treat - I totally agree with you, the range of the ships should be increased on the strategy map! This gives the AI more variations, consider he understand to use ships at all, which had not been addressed jet by CA.

  13. #13

    Default Re: Increasing Campaign Ship Movement distances?

    It would be nice if we could split the naval forces into two distinct categories:

    1: Battle-ships (ships of the line and their ilk)
    2: Trade ships and 'support' ships, sloops, brigs and similar.


    If there was some method onthe campaign map to then prevent group 1 from being able to attack group 2 - then we would have a system whereby you could put the Pirates into Group 2 and actually have more meaningful small-scale combat around trade-zones and trade-ports.

    No more of this 14-galleon fleet pirate hordes charging around the Carib and so forth.

    Having to defend your trade ships (i.e. indiamen) against pirate sloops would be much more fun (and a lot more historically accurate).

    I doubt there is a way to split the naval ships up like this though.

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