Coastal Guns, and AI fleet divisibility

[Ecthelion]

I've been playing TW games on VH/H since... STW1?

And I am simply not able to finish a FotS game on VH for any faction.

The one and only reason is the ridiculous balance between naval and coastal guns. Historically, the coastal guns of this period were devastating, extremely effective area of denial weapon. Similar to the surface skimming SSM of our time.

Navies needed an overwhelming advantage to even attempt to take a fortified coastal city or port. Here it seems a single gunboat can not only out-range a coastal battery, but bombard the city with impunity.

Now, I know that we can just use our own navy to destroy these pesky 1 gunboat fleets of bombardment death. But at this point, 80% of the game seems to revolve around this. And unless you have one major surface combatant per port, you cannot effectively prevent it, since the AI sends an endless stream of these gunboats.

Solution:

I remember up until RTW, the campaign AI had a extremely annoying tendency of sending out "armies" of 1 or 2 armies, and this was before it was possible to "raid". So effectively, all they did was to throw themselves into a battle with no chance of winning. That was annoying, wasted the players time, but the game was still playable.

By ETW, the finally figured out how to get the AI to group their armies into real armies.

I don't know what was changed in the AI, but that change needs to be done for the navies as well. In regular STW, we also had this problem but it was a non-issue since fleets couldn't do more than raid trade lanes, and their effectiveness at that was minimal.

[Emilio Aguinaldo]

I agree, CA was lackluster and lazy when implementing this feature since they did not take their historical effectiveness to account. Coastal guns should be made stronger as I find them useless against enemy fleets. Coastal defenses however were defeatable by naval bombardments as evidenced in the American Civil War where Union ships would move in a rotating formation and bombard entrenched positions whilst making return fire more difficult for coastal gunners.

[rob-a-dogg]

Word, im a bit sick of my coastal defence doing dick while my towns get blasted back to planet Vegeta like it was a settlement of Tuffles.

[Arksa]

I agree. Lost my Legendary campaign because a single gunboat damaged my French Trading Distrit, while it was helpess in defence...wasn't fun repairing it for 3500 and then getting smashed again by...you guessed it, gunboat.

[SandraDevilGirl]

Totally agree!

[W4lt3r]

I'd say boost the range on all coastal guns by 4 points.
So a trading port would be range of 14, national trading port / military port with range of 16 and drydock with range of 18, effectively outranging fleets.
But then comes in the question the durability of the port.. Imho it should take almost 2 full fleets to bombard the place in one turn to subdue the batteries.

Also I wonder is it possible to change the trading so, that the trading is viable on a port, until it's durability falls below 50% (Ie when the guns stop firing)

[Face_Face]

I've yet to even see port battle. How does one even start? Attack port just blockades it when I do it.
Just wondering since it was a new feature that I've yet to see.

[Rectunator]

If you have ships in port, you can attack them and the coastal defences assits the defending fleet.

[Face_Face]

I see. So it happens after you blockade? Guess that's why I never saw one.

[Ecthelion]

Editing it so that a damaged port can still take income will be quite difficult, it's hardcoded in if I'm not mistaken, basic mechanics of the game.

But lowering the bombardment strength of ships and increasing the anti-ship firepower of coastal guns should be possible.

[cyox]

i completely agree. either have to give ports more range or bring down ship range a bit, at the very least with the gunboats. them out ranging ports, especially the way the AI spams them just makes no sense at all. the strenght of the bombardment isnt the issue, its that they can do it in that situation at all as it stops you from being able to use anything they damage. if its an overwhelming force or even just a few of the larger range ships thats fine, but the gunboat has to change.

[W4lt3r]

Heck, I'd say the bombardment power on gunboats should be nigh minimal.. Low / very low chances to cause low damage, since even a full fleet of them it's only 10 gun barrage. That's less then a single frigate.