Naval Warfare

[Goatse_Mare]

Hey guys. What are people's thoughts on the state of Naval combat in the mod right now?

I have had a recent string of large naval encounters in my current campaign and the combat seems nearly broken to me... Switching between ramming mode and bearding/melee mode is pretty buggy and half the time my ship just ends up getting stuck in front of the enemy ship, getting hit by missiles, unable to move and refusing to carry out the attack. Furthermore, there are times when my marines will successfully engage in melee with an enemy ship, but after the enemy ship surrenders, my ship is unable to disengage and is stuck to the enemy ship for the remainder of the battle with the balance of power bar appearing 100% yellow above the two ships...

Just wanted to see if this is maybe an issue with my install or if others have had similar issues. I am at the point now where I only autoresolve naval battles to avoid the headache, which is a shame because I like the cinematic nature of naval battles in this time period and every time I autoreselve against a large enemy navy its my best ships that take nearly all the casualties.

[KAM 2150]

This is an issue with the game.

[Butan]

Yeah the ramming detection is FUBAR at times, and boarding can stuck you (sometimes your boarding party also jump in the water and dies). On average I have 1/5 of my ships losing it to bugs per battles but then its the same for the opponent.

[Basilius]

I would practice naval battles in the "Custom Battles" menu for a bit. Naval combat is much better under DeI, but still stupid. However with a bit of training you can minimize the bugs.

Ramming was historically very difficult anyways; the Romans ended up avoiding it altogether for purely boarding strats. Try and find an in-game reason for the bugs (bad seas, troops were ill-experienced, ramming your boat caused it to sink too, etc.) Just a way to make the issues more digestible.

[hoho96]

Funny enough I've found out that if you plan to play a naval battle, one great way to do it is to have quite a good contingent of missile ships (archers and slingers) and just engage from range^^
And if you intend to auto resolve, make an arty strong navy since arty ships get a huge bonus in auto resolve.

[Lord_Arcanto]

If you specialise on ramming only, both with the fleet and the admiral, and have 120-140 troop size ships you can basically one-hit smaller enemy ships. For the larger ones you lock them with boarding and if possible ram them as well. Big naval battles are an absolute mess though and bugs are guaranteed.
This leads to that I can end the naval battle as quick as possible, definitely intented.

[geala]

The naval maps are too small, the starting positions are too near together and ramming is far too easy in the game.

If you have an equal number of ships, your heavier ships (tetreres and above) can usually just frontally approach the enemy and ram. No need to try complicated "periplus tactics". They can also quite easily row away from the rammed ship, which was not always possible in reality as both ships got entangled.

There would have been much potential for naval combat but unfortunately it sucks. Ramming for example was nearly quite as dangerous for the ramming ship as for the rammed because if the ramming ship did not have a certain (high) velocity there was good chance for bouncing of the planks and loosing parts of the bow. CA could have made this an interesting feature with some skill necessary to master. But that would have needed different maps and a different design.

[Butan]

Couldnt agree more on your conclusion

I think if they just added "reflective damage" to ramming (if worst angle, 100% reflect damage, if best angle 25%) and destroyable oars (+ possibility to retract them (before ramming/being rammed)) the naval battles would be already much better.

That + having sails and oars speed + wind direction like in Empire... I really struggle to find a reason why they removed that in addition to the extreme lack of game design ideas.

[geala]

Good ideas. Ever thought about a career in the game industry?

[Butan]

Would be the dream but the only thing I do is tester in DeI and thats already a responsability I quite neglect maybe one day I will give modding a real go, there is tons of real patient and awesome people in the community here! Too bad the Warhammer games offer near no opportunity to do something DeI-like. Maybe after Warhammer 2 we will see something interesting.

[valky]

The AI handles ramming perfectly too well and once your opponent is in the ramming animation you can't board that ship most of the time (or you click/abort like crazy and sometimes it works .. kinda).
So I further reduced the ramming damage and now only transport ships are one-hits in my game and heavy against light with almost all upgrades. Makes naval battles much more enjoyable and more in line with shogun 2.

Also the AI tries to engage in melee combat more often that way.

tbh, Rome 2's naval battles are a huge step backward compared to what they have done in E/N/S2:TW, but we all know that