NTW3 v9.0 Naval Battles for MP & SP

[Lord Davn]

Single & MP Naval Battles ~new menu screen selection (see below)

The NTW3 Naval Battle mod is now accessed by loading the ~Main 1805 Campaign
then select ~Multiplayer ~Host Battle ~Sea ~Naval Battle map & setup your ships for battle













Have your opponent join your hosted naval sea battle or play the and your off to sail the seven seas
Factions are limited to the historical ships that each one built during the Napoleonic wars





Lord Commodore Wesley has added a number of historically accurate custom ships for several of the factions





Black Serpent has added a number of custom naval uniforms for the British, French & Spanish factions.

[Lord Davn]

Single Player Naval battles



Notes to play the Naval mod are posted here on TWC:
http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showt...-Naval-Battles



Lord Nelson my be looking over your shoulder

[Lord Davn]

Commodore Wesley has reworked the Naval battle stats in our NTW3 mod so they are more historical.
They are very different from the original NTW, so you must change your tactics in order to have successful naval engagements.

~Ships' acceleration and deceleration take longer.
~The ships have significantly reduced turn rates.
~Ships will tend to turn sharper when there are less sails set.
~Cannons are less accurate overall (based on historical data).

These changes have been put in to improve realism. To maneuver a ship may take some skill and knowledge, so it is best to get somewhat familiar with how the ships function before going into a Multi-player battle. I would first recommend to practice against the AI with a one vs. one frigate battle so that you can familiarize yourself with how the ship will operate. Controlling large fleets is very difficult, and again, it will take practice.

[Lord Davn]

No, I did not keep the carronades. The ranges of all the ships are the same but frigates generally had better trained crews than the ships of the line, so they are a bit more accurate. Frigates never fought ships of the line in open battle.

[Saddletank]

I know you've reduced the amount of fires and explosions but is there a means whereby the player can eliminate them completely? Very serious fires and explosions in this period were so rare that the few accounts we have of them are famous (e.g. l'Orient at the Nile) and I prefer to just not see them at all in the small actions that NTW allows in campaigns.

[Commodore.Wesley]

I know you've reduced the amount of fires and explosions but is there a means whereby the player can eliminate them completely? Very serious fires and explosions in this period were so rare that the few accounts we have of them are famous (e.g. l'Orient at the Nile) and I prefer to just not see them at all in the small actions that NTW allows in campaigns.

Historically speaking, ships did not fight to the death and would either try to run away if outmatched or surrender. I have tried to model the crew morale to reflect this. Basically, you will hardly ever destroy a ship, but you can take it out of action and capture it. If it is not worth saving after capture, you can scuttle or disband it. The annoying thing is that I cannot completely take out the fire effect as there are three data tables that you have to go through and then there is the random probability added on top of it. I do strongly agree with you that fires and explosions were rare, if not very rare. An annoying myth that the CA believes in is that wood is always flammable and that cannon shells are so hot that they cause fires, but in reality cannon shells (even explosions) cool off so quickly after the explosion that fires do not start and that the wood due to being at sea is already fire resistant. After making my mod, explosions have greatly decrease (except for sloops, which always seem to be filled with gunpowder, I guess it is their small size the powder hold is easier to hit. Yet on such small ships historically, the powder would be spread around in different locations to prevent that from happening.)

[Saddletank]

Thanks very much. I've since played several more battles and this is easily the best mod of the ETW/NTW naval combat engine I've found to date. A few times the AI has even made me really struggle to gain a victory and the wind direction at last has real meaning. Its a nice job, thanks for all your work.

Its a shame that when you transfer fleets from the campaign map to the battle map the wind direction is completely random so a fleet that's the attacker sometimes begins downwind of the defender which was just a plain impossibilty th eage of square-rigged sailing warships. The attacker has to have the weather gauge in order to attack.

Even with all the sillyness left over from porting what's obviously big chunks of the ETW land battle engine into a sea mode, your mod still manages to give a satisfying (if brief) game.

[Dooz]

Really lovely stuff. Started a Sicily campaign last night, just to see how everything is running, and have a mostly naval oriented game to learn the ropes. Man I don't know what I'm doing out there, landlubber that I am. An easy win over a weak Sardinian fleet bolstered my confidence enough to attack a Danish trading fleet for the precious ivory they were hording. It would be known as the disaster of Feb. 1807 and kick off a crazy naval war with Denmark, who I'd conveniently forgotten were historically masters at sea.

Over the next few months, I'd suffer loss after loss to their main fleet I'd attacked and been decimated by. They'd captured my only frigates, then merchant fleet after merchant fleet fell. BUT, I was learning. Slowly but surely, getting a better handle on things out at sea. Until the crucial time came, when my armies were all several months out of Sicily, having marched up all across Europe making their way to the the Danish homelands, leaving ours all but deserted save for some militia. The Ottomans took this opportunity to declare war on me out of nowhere, and a fleet was spotted off the coast of Sicily with a full army of blood thirsty warriors.

Luckily, my new fleet had JUST been completed, eight 24-gun frigates ready for service. It was glorious. All the lessons I'd learned from months of defeats at the hands of the Danes (who btw are still around with many of my ships they stole, their time is coming), put to use against this most heinous threat. Utter destruction, entire fleet captured or sunk, invading army destroyed, my inevitable destruction staved off for at least a few more months. Now if you'll excuse me, I have a Danish to devour, NO CHEESE

[Saddletank]

Another question for Commodore Wesley. Is it possible to alter the naval mod for my private use to eliminate fires, explosions and sinkings completely? They strike me as so very rare and even with your great mod they still occur too often.

One problem I have found is that while your new speed penalty for sailing into the wind would work well in MP games the AI just can't cope with it at all, and its simple to beat the AI by just sitting upwind of him. Perhaps for the SP campaign a different sub-mod could be created that puts some into the wind movement back? I know its totally unrealistic (your reduced upwind movement ability is still too much BTW, a square rigger could never get closer than 6 points to the wind and would lose leeway even then) but the AI cannot cope and allowing it to move upwind would make SP campaign battles more challenging.

[meme_engine]

I do strongly agree with you that fires and explosions were rare, if not very rare. An annoying myth that the CA believes in is that wood is always flammable and that cannon shells are so hot that they cause fires, but in reality cannon shells (even explosions) cool off so quickly after the explosion that fires do not start and that the wood due to being at sea is already fire resistant.

While I'd agree that explosions in the game do tend to be too common and happen too quickly (pandering to the arcade style too much), from a historic perspective I'd have to disagree with your comment above regarding fires.

Fires were a very real risk for wooden sailing warshps at all times. Which is why a given proportion of all ship's crews were assigned to fire-fighting duties in the event of a fire starting. The reason that more ships weren't lost to fires is probably due to the efforts of these men. The fear from fire was so great that there were occasions in battle where the crews of two opponents stopped fighting each other in order to put out a fire that could have resulted in the loss of both ships.

As for the causes of fires, I don't think that CA believe that "cannon shells are so hot that they cause fires" (not least, because cannon of the period fired solid balls and not shells). The cause of fires would have included the candles and oil lanterns used to light the cabins and decks, stray embers and sparks from the ship's own guns or, if the ships were close enough, from the muzzle flare of enemy guns. These warships were packed with flammable materials (wood, canvas, cloth, rope, gunpowder) and oil from a spilled lamp would be very likely to staturate something flammable, just waiting for an ignition source. In the confusion and violence of battle these all of these items would become scattered about increasing the risk of an outbreak of fire.

As to your final statement that "the wood due to being at sea is already fire resistant", there appears to be little evidence to support your proposition. If the wood were truely fire resistant, why were so many wooden ships lost to fires? If you look at the records from any of the major sailing navies a surprising number of vessel losses were the result of "accidental" fires (i.e. fires that were not related to any enemy action). For example, the British first rate "Queen Charlotte" was lost to an accidental fire off the coast of Livorno in 1800 with the loss of 690 crew. The British Second rate "Boyne" was lost to an unexplained fire while anchored at Spithead in 1795 (and she finally blew up when the fire reached the magazine). If the wood was truely fire resistant, the spread of fire should have been very slow; why would these ships have been lost at anchor when all of the crew would have been available to contain the fires? There are plenty of other examples too and it wasn't only British ships that suffered. For example, the Spanish lost the 74-gun ships "Brilliante", to a fire at Cartagena in 1790 and, "San Pedro Alcantara" to an accidental fire off the coast of Venezula in 1815. Also, if the wood was so difficult to ignite: Why were fireships so feared? How could crews burn their own ships?

Considering losses as the result of action, there are plenty of examples of those too. Both as an direct result of the battle and by the actions of the ships' crews (deliberately burning the ships). As noted above, at the Battle of the Nile (1798) the French 3-decker "L'Orient" was lost to a fire (and subsequent explosions) during the combat. However, it was not the only vessel that burned. The French frigate Artemise was deliberately burnt by her own crew (and she too exploded) to avoid capture. The French 74-gun ships-of-the-line Guerrier, Heureux and Mercure were all burnt by the British.

At the Battle of Copenhagen (1801), the Danish 62-gun warship, "Dannebrog" caught fire and she later exploded after the battle.

In the night action off Gibraltar (July 12, 1801), the Spanish 112-gun ships-of-the-line, "Real Carlos" and "San Hermenegildo" accidentally engaged each other. Both ships caught fire and both were lost as a result.

At the Battle of Trafalgar (1805), the French 74 "Achille" caught fire as a direct result of action with the British ships and she later exploded after the battle. There was also a fire on board the Redoutable (which was contained as a result of the combined efforts of British and French sailors).

At the Battle of San Domingo (1806), the French 3-decker "Imperial" was run aground and deliberately burned by her crew to avoid capture.

While the rate at which ships catch fire in vanilla NTW is arguably too high, to state that it should not be a risk at all is clearly a fallacy.

[Saddletank]

I don't think Commodore Wesley is saying its of no risk at all, he's saying that NTW has far too many instances of fires and explosions. Given how much naval combat there was in the age of sail the numbers of ships burned or blown up compared to those captured by their officers striking their colours was extremely small and for all intents and purposes, given the scale of the battles depicted in the game, they should be basically eliminated. The presence of men alerted to fight fires as a standard practice should reduce the amount of fires we see. Fires were so dangerous that you correctly point out that crews of opposing ships would on occasion cease fighting each other and attend to their own emergencies. In NTW the fire risk is worse because a player has to make the decision to combat it (the 'make repairs' option aids in fire-fighting) while in reality it should not be a fleet commander or ship's captain's decision, it should automatically take place.

Its possible to name the instances of ships lost to fire and explosion caused by fire in the entire period of 1789-1815 on the fingers of two hands. Deliberate burning doesn't count, only accidental burning through combat. Compare to the number lost by surrender which amounts to hundreds and this puts the fire risk in perspective.

The rate at which ships in vanilla NTW catch fire isn't "arguably high" it's stupidly high.

Even the excellent NTW3 naval mod has still too great an instance of fires, which is why I'm seeking to reduce them further, at least in my private play.

[meme_engine]

In NTW the fire risk is worse because a player has to make the decision to combat it (the 'make repairs' option aids in fire-fighting) while in reality it should not be a fleet commander or ship's captain's decision, it should automatically take place.

In the real world, it was down to the ship's officers to make the decision to fight fires (not a difficult decision to make but one that did have to be made). In doing so, they had to take men away from manning the guns and handling the ship both of which put them at a real disadvantage in combat.

Its possible to name the instances of ships lost to fire and explosion caused by fire in the entire period of 1789-1815 on the fingers of two hands. Deliberate burning doesn't count, only accidental burning through combat. Compare to the number lost by surrender which amounts to hundreds and this puts the fire risk in perspective.

You can almost count the number of fleet battles on the fingers of two hands - if you exclude minor actions you can almost do it on the fingers of one hand. Pitched naval battles were that rare.

There were six major battles;

The First of June (1794)
Cape St Vincent (1797)
Camperdown (1797)
The Nile (1798)
Copenhagen (1801)
Trafalgar (1805)

In three of the those six battles, a ship was lost to an uncontrolled fire. So you could argue that the chances of a ship being lost to fire in a major naval battle of the period is 50%. If we add in the minor fleet and squadron actions, that gives 13 engagements in which 4 had a ship lost to an uncontrolled fire. So that's still a rate of about 30%. Now statistically, the sample sizes are much too small to claim that's truely representative or accurate but it's the only data anyone has to work with.

The vast majority of the hundreds of ships "lost by surrender" during the 1789-1815 period were taken in token actions (in which broadsides were traded for honour's sake) which would barely be considered combat. Or they were taken in harbour where there was no "naval" combat to speak of. The kind of toe-to-toe combat that's fun to play, in reality, simply wasn't all that common, usually because the disparity between the combatants was too great. Merchant ships didn't fight warships down to their last gun, they tried to run and if that failed they struck (but how much fun would that be in the game?).

Finally, I don't see why deliberate burning shouldn't count. Scuttling a vessel was a tactic that was used by all parties to deny a ship to their opponents - I can't see why the fires on some ships in game can't be interpreted as this.

[Commodore.Wesley]

First thing, my naval mod is still in beta, so I greatly appreciate your comments! It will help me to improve the game.
Naval fires were mainly caused not by the actual shot of the cannon but from the items inside the ship (like lamp oil or the galley stove). Ships burned from the inside out, as the inside of the ship was dryer. Most ship fires were accidents (and most seem to always happen when near harbor or land) and the larger ships seem to of had more of a risk than the smaller.
Crews however did have high precautions for fire, and when beating to quarters, they would prepare the pumps for firefighting purpopes. However, there is no way for me to truthfully model that except for decreasing the chance for fire.
>>Taking from what you gents have said, I will do some efforts to try and reduce the chance of fire occuring. I will try to reduce it by half from what it currently is.
I have tried to make ships to sail better into the wind, but I think the angle that the ship furls its sails is hard coded, and it automatically slows down the ship. However, if you guys find a way to change this, I will try to add it into the mod.
If you have any more comments, please share them, and I will try to answer them to the best of my abilities.

[Saddletank]

Commodore Wesley - thank you for your response. This naval mod is already the best out there and seeing it continue to improve is very welcome.

In the real world, it was down to the ship's officers to make the decision to fight fires (not a difficult decision to make but one that did have to be made). In doing so, they had to take men away from manning the guns and handling the ship both of which put them at a real disadvantage in combat.

Doing any kind of damage control in a warship during battle, no matter what era you are looking at, is a no-brainer. You are ALWAYS going to do it. Not doing it and ignoring the risk of total loss grow worse is a guaranteed way to end your navy career by court-martial, firing squad or burning/drowning. There should not need to be a player decision to make this choice. Its a badly designed game mechanic. There shouldn't really be even a 'make repairs' button since a ships crew is going to do that on a whatever is necessary basis at any time they have a moment to take a rest from the other critical duties, like fighting the enemy. If a ships officers did make the decisions they would always decide to fight the fire unless it had taken hold so fiercely that the ship was already lost. To deliberately choose not to fight a fire would be the ultimate in stupidity as I've already pointed out. Even if officers did make these decisions it wouldn't be the captain on deck who was commanding his vessel in battle, it would be a below-decks officer assigned to this very duty and could even be the master carpenter whose skillset made him a good choice to be assigned to damage control duties.

No captain of a wooden warship in action is going to be happy when a lieutenant comes up on deck and says to him "There's a fire in the forward rope locker, Sir, should I take men off the starboard guns to fight it?" The answer is a screamingly obvious "Do whatever you need to do to ensure the ship's safety, Lieutenant. And by the way, when we get back to port I'm transferring you off my ship for bothering me with completely stupid questions."

You can almost count the number of fleet battles on the fingers of two hands - if you exclude minor actions you can almost do it on the fingers of one hand. Pitched naval battles were that rare. In three of the those six battles, a ship was lost to an uncontrolled fire. So you could argue that the chances of a ship being lost to fire in a major naval battle of the period is 50%. If we add in the minor fleet and squadron actions, that gives 13 engagements in which 4 had a ship lost to an uncontrolled fire. So that's still a rate of about 30%. Now statistically, the sample sizes are much too small to claim that's truely representative or accurate but it's the only data anyone has to work with.

You are misreading - or massaging - the statistics. Why are you looking at only fleet battles? The most numerous actions in the period 1790-1815 (as before and since) are 1-on-1 encounters. Squadron actions were rare and fleet actions (as you correctly point out) rarer still. Your method of arriving at percentage chances is completely in error. To gain useful statistics about how often a wooden sailing warship might burn to destruction in action you need to examine every single combat loss over the whole period and then come to the percentage of those losses caused by fire. By far the most common cause of loss was surrendering and being captured. After that was foundering by loss of watertight integrity and third, by a large margin, fire.

Since you've listed six battles, I'll make my point by examining only those and none of the many other hundreds of naval actions of the period, squadron and single ship sized (of which we get the majority in NTW as in reality).

Let's try this:

The First of June (1794) 25 RN SoL vs 26 French SoL. 6 French taken, 1 French sunk after the battle due to damage to her bottom, no fires.
Cape St Vincent (1797) 15 RN SoL, 5 frigates vs 24 Spanish SoL, 7 frigates. 4 Spanish taken, none sunk, no fires.
Camperdown (1797) 14 RN SoL, 4 frigates vs 11 Dutch SoL, 8 frigates. 14 Dutch taken (7 SoL, 7 smaller) none sunk, no fires.
The Nile (1798) 13 Rn SoL, 1 frigate vs 13 French SoL, 4 frigates. 9 French taken, none sunk, 2 SoL and 2 frigates burned.
Copenhagen (1801) 12 RN SoL, 5 frigates, 7 bomb vessels vs 35 Danish SoL, frigates and others. 12 Danes taken, 2 sunk, 1 exploded.
Trafalgar (1805) 27 RN SoL, 4 frigates vs 18 French and 15 Spanish SoL, 5 frigates. 21 Combined Fleet ships taken, 1 sunk, 1 exploded.

Note that there were fires on board both Franklin and Bellerophon at the Nile, prior to and independent of those started by falling wreckage from l'Orient, but both were extinguished.

The fire on l'Orient was seen to start about 21:00 and Swiftsure's captain ordered his gunners to direct their fire at the blaze. This would have hindered the French crew in fighting the fire. The cause of the fire on l'Orient is unknown but it is known that jars of oil and paint were left on the poop deck during the battle, the ship having been repainted that day. Burning wadding from a British shot could have been the source of ignition. The ship was freshly painted in oil-based paint which may not have cured and was still somewhat flammable. Although six ships, three French and three British all moved away from the burning ship, three of these suffered fires from blazing wreckage, but in each case the fires were extinguished, despite a secondary explosion aboard Franklin.

Artemise, Serieuse and Timoleon were all set on fire by their own crews and abandoned, to prevent them being captured by the enemy. They were NOT in combat at the time.

Thus we have in those six battles a total of 76 ships lost to the British by their enemies. Of these 66 were taken as prizes, 4 sunk as a direct consequence of damage suffered in battle and 6 were burned or exploded. However of the latter 1 SoL and 2 frigates at the Nile were burned by their own crews in order to prevent them being captured, so the actual losses from fire in the six most significant naval battles of the period is 3 from a total of 76 and thus 4%. Your statement that it can be said that the chance of a battle containing a ship being lost to fire is 50% is totally erroneous mathematics. The chance of a battle having a ship burn in it is clearly a function of how many ships are engaged.

In addition to all that, 2 of the three ships that exploded were part of a fleet that was anchored and had no chance to escape. l'Orient in particular was pounded by up to six British ships for an hour and one can only imagine with horror what her below decks conditions were like. Her crew being unable to sail the ship away or contain the fire (which may have been caused by unusual circumstances peculiar to her being at anchor and unprepared for battle) makes her inclusion questionable.

In fact in conditions of open sea battle (the only kind NTW lets us fight) only 1 single ship, Achille, at Trafalgar burned and blew up out of all the other open sea instances of ship loss.

Compare this to the rates at which ships burn and blow up in vanilla NTW and the situation is clearly heavily skewed in favour of an unpleasant ailment that affects much of todays computer games industry and which I call "Hollywoodism". It's meaning can be summed up with this sentence "S--t blowing up looks cool, so regardless of what real naval sailing battles were like, lets have lost of s--t on fire." The same nonesense pervades Rome II as well and has prevailed in all CA's TW games.

Even with the risk of burning heavily suppressed by Commodore Wesley's mod, there is still too much s--t on fire. Way too much.

A ship that might surrender after a token exchange of 'honour fire' is still a combat loss and to try and ascertain where such political actions end and real military combat begins is too subjective to be useful. The fact that so many French ships may have surrendered after so little resistance is still a significant factor of naval combat of this era and to exclude such actions from your statistics is disingenious. You seem to want loss by fire to be more significant than it was and you are manipulating the statistics and the permitted categories of events to massage the numbers in your favour.

If an officer is going to surrender his ship, the point at which he makes that decision doesn't tell us that this was a battle or a non-battle and thus makes such an action a worthy example of something to exclude from your percentages, it tells us only that the NTW game engine lacks subtelty. A game engine designed to cope with these kinds of events, common in this period of naval warfare, would have correspondingly far fewer fires, wouldn't it? Because battles would end much sooner, with far less damage to both sides and with one side surrendering quickly. This fact indicates one possible reason why this period of naval warfare saw so few ships lost to fires.

The kind of toe-to-toe combat that's fun to play, in reality, simply wasn't all that common, usually because the disparity between the combatants was too great. Merchant ships didn't fight warships down to their last gun, they tried to run and if that failed they struck (but how much fun would that be in the game?).

This is a failing of the NTW game engine. It doesn't necessarily follow that had all ship combats been fought to the death that there would have been a greater percentage of ship loss from fatal fires.

The game allows you to win sea battles against merchant ships without engaging them if you want. You just sail circles around them. You'll find even fewer ships blowing up in such battles of course.

Finally, I don't see why deliberate burning shouldn't count. Scuttling a vessel was a tactic that was used by all parties to deny a ship to their opponents - I can't see why the fires on some ships in game can't be interpreted as this.

Except it doesn't count and we both know it doesn't. We both know that the only reason there is too much s--t blowing up in NTW is because CA thinks it looks cool. Come on, be reasonable.

A crew would burn their own ship only after a battle when it was crippled or grounded and its capture was a foregone conclusion. Usually they could get ashore easily as well (Artemise, Serieuse and Timoleon at the Nile). I have never once heard of a European crew actually in battle and deliberately setting their own ship on fire as a means to end the fight! That's preposterous. A crew will surrender before doing that.

Also many ships were deliberately burned by their captors after a battle (e.g. Copenhagen) because they were too badly damaged to take home or an enemy was still in the area and threatened to retake them. This mechanism is taken care of by the add/don't add captured shuips to my fleet option after you win a battle.

So taking the stats from the six big battles we get a 4% chance of a ship exploding, a 4% chance of it sinking and the other 92% of losses should be surrenders.

I don't know for certain why you are continuing this argument. Are you suggesting that the amount of ships being lost through explosions in NTW is about right? If we both agree it isn't I am not sure why we're discussing this. We both surely acknowledge that the number of ship explosions has got to be reduced from the vanilla game. A lot.

I'm delighted I finally found a mod that does this, and it seems Commodore Wesley intends to reduce it even more which is great news.

[Commodore.Wesley]

Just to let you all know, in the unit_stats_naval table, there is a an column for fire_risk_modifier. Originally before I modded it, it was at .9. What I think that it means is that there is a one percent chance for a shot to cause a fire, but when you are talking about firing broadsides of fifty guns or more, the odds of causing a fire is pretty high. So I reduced it to .4, which lowered it some, but now I am changing it to .2. Also with the reduced ranged accuracy I put in earlier, this also lowered the risk as there are less shots hitting the hull of the ship.

I hope that this reduces it enough. There may be a few things I can change in the projectile tables to reduce the chance, but I will need to look up what each column does (the Pack File Manager only gives titles to about a third of the columns). Fires will still occur however, but they should be rare which is backed up by the information that you have compiled.

Once again, thanks for your support!

[Saddletank]

That's hopeful news. Can the number of ships that sink be reduced as well? I guess that would need a lot more work as it involves gun attack/hit strength and ship hull defence strength.

About the only other issue I now have with the naval combat is with the zero speed directly to windward rule you've introduced. I fully agree with this as the vanilla game was woefully inaccurate with regard to sailing upwind. The problem we have now though is that because the BAI is so stupid and has no concept of wind direction, if you sit your fleet directly upwind of the AI it just sits there, pointing straight at you and doesn't move. With a human opponent the new wind direction and speed limitation would be fine because a human player knows how to tack upwind. I think you may have written this change with MP battles in mind but with the BAI it doesn't work too well.

Might I respectfully suggest that you probably need 2 versions of your naval battles mod (submod?), the existing one that would be used in MP games and MP campaigns and an SPC campaign version that allowed ships to move at least at some speed directly upwind. I agree its completely incorrect but from a gameplay perspective I think its needed (sadly). The only other way round it I can see is to reprogram the BAI to get closer to an enemy but to not necessarily do it by pointing his ships straight at him. If the BAI could be coded so it could cut off the enemy's direction by approaching him at a tangent, life would be awesome but I suspect CA's AI can't be recoded to think this way.

[Commodore.Wesley]

That's hopeful news. Can the number of ships that sink be reduced as well? I guess that would need a lot more work as it involves gun attack/hit strength and ship hull defence strength.

About the only other issue I now have with the naval combat is with the zero speed directly to windward rule you've introduced. I fully agree with this as the vanilla game was woefully inaccurate with regard to sailing upwind. The problem we have now though is that because the BAI is so stupid and has no concept of wind direction, if you sit your fleet directly upwind of the AI it just sits there, pointing straight at you and doesn't move. With a human opponent the new wind direction and speed limitation would be fine because a human player knows how to tack upwind. I think you may have written this change with MP battles in mind but with the BAI it doesn't work too well.

Might I respectfully suggest that you probably need 2 versions of your naval battles mod (submod?), the existing one that would be used in MP games and MP campaigns and an SPC campaign version that allowed ships to move at least at some speed directly upwind. I agree its completely incorrect but from a gameplay perspective I think its needed (sadly). The only other way round it I can see is to reprogram the BAI to get closer to an enemy but to not necessarily do it by pointing his ships straight at him. If the BAI could be coded so it could cut off the enemy's direction by approaching him at a tangent, life would be awesome but I suspect CA's AI can't be recoded to think this way.

I am thinking about increasing the amount of hull armor (perhaps double from what it currently is at the moment, I'll think up of a good ratio) but right now school is starting up again (I am a senior in high school) so my time is starting to get limited again.

It is possible to go upwind, but it must require tacking. How I had to module tacking in this is get a ship going at a good or decent speed then shorten sailand try to turn swiftly through the wind to the opposite tack then open sail again. The wind direction speeds were not created by me however as they were borrowed with permission from the Grand Fleet mod. The biggest thing I changed was the turn rates and acceleration of the ships.

Unfortunately for the AI, I cannot teach it how to tack (and even for me to make a fleet tack is a challenge in its own right). NTWIII was designed more as an multiplayer mod than a single player mod so we never had anyone who specialized on programing the AI or BAI. I understand what you are saying to give the AI a little bonus in the campaign, but it would also give the player that bonus so it would not really balance the tables. We hope however that in the future, we can get SP stable enough to be played for multiplayer campaigns (and I have heard a few rumors that it is getting close to that point though).

Also I can't completely eliminate fires because people would also complain that would not be historical as well. I did a few tests earlier with the reduced chance, but I still had a few fires. They only to seem to happen during the very large ship of the line battles, probably due to the amount of shot, but in single ship actions it has not happened to me.

I hope this answers some of your questions, if not I will try to explain a bit more if I need to.

[Saddletank]

Thanks, your replies are helpful. I appreciate it. I think the main issue here is that the NTW3 mod was created for MP games. I am encountering things in the land campaign that I do not think would be there, and would not be problems if the mod has been designed from the ground up as an SPC mod, with the MP battles bolted onto that rather than vice versa. I'm aware of how the Lordz started out with NTW1 and their goal has always been an MP battles game, but I think this has caused some issues to creep in. My (respectful) suggestion would be for the Lordz have 2 mods existing side by side, one is the present one for MP play (including MP campaigns) and the second is very similar but supports the SPC. The two would be very similar but would need to differ in a few critical aspects. There are changes you can make in a mod that while improving the vanilla game for MP actually cause harm for SP and that is where your mod lies now, sadly (both naval and land combat, and CAI).

I also wanted to mention another issue that is a result of this and that's the wider turning circles, especially for the larger ships. I often see the AI trap its ships against the red line edge of the battlespace and it does this because it can't turn them in time. I think its aggravated by the fact you made turning circles related to speed/amount of sail carried and like the land battle AI the naval Ai likes to "run" its units everywhere and so its carrying full sail, making turning harder. The AI is at another disadvantage in that its formations stick behind it's lead ship almost always when on the approach to contact, so if the lead ship traps itself against the red line, the whole fleet sits behind it, looking somewhat pathetic. A human player could break his formation and extract most of his ships from such a predicament. The starting Spanish fleet that's led by the Santisima Trinidad is one of the biggest victims of this for some reason.

[Lord Davn]

My (respectful) suggestion would be for the Lordz have 2 mods existing side by side, one is the present one for MP play (including MP campaigns) and the second is very similar but supports the SPC.

That's EXACTLY what we have right now
The MP file is 1.6mb and SPC patch file is 189mb the majority of which is to run the campaign AI. The separate data files we do share are for uniforms and the localization table. The few data files that run the MP battle mechanics are embedded in our SPC files which give it the superior battles that you enjoy. The other mods you consistently refer to have been out for YEARS, with many improvements to the Campaign AI. Our NTW3 SPC mod has been out for 5 months now, it will get better, but it will also TAKE TIME.

[Lord Davn]

We have adjusted the British & French fleets to reflect naval units that are more historically correct.