Navies: I just don't get it. What am I missing?

[Aypse]

It goes back MII, my first TW game. Naval battles were not fun because they were just a dice roll and frankly they were not worth the resources spent on them. It was better to just drive forward with another stack. Full stacks were transported with a single cheap naval unit and very rarely did I get punished for doing this recklessly. In Empire, trade coins were broken (it still blows me away how they released a game with a central feature so obviously broken) and so there was no reason to build a navy to compete for them. Eventually the trade coins were fixed, but the AI was so hyper focused on them and navies took so long to travel between colonial areas and trade areas that you had to have multiple fleets constantly bouncing between areas to defend them. It didn't take long for me to realize that I wasn't really making much money from trade when I factored in the cost to defend/replace trade fleets. The naval battles were fun, but there was too much micromanagement of fleets without an appreciable net effect. In shogun II, there was again trade coins. They generated some income, even when factoring the cost to defend them but the damn AI would never honor trade agreements for very long. It was a never ending annoyance of hustling fleets around and going down a list of other nations begging them to trade with me. So much time was spent just annoyed that another clan refused to trade with me even though it was in both of our best interests. Again, I abandoned navies.

One final gripe before I move onto Rome II....the money bonuses the AI got at the hardest difficulties made naval blockades pointless. I could blockade every port of a water-locked nation and they would still pump out full stacks. It just never mattered that the AI should technically be broke and unable to pay for its current soldiers, much less continue to produce more...they cheated. Maybe this has been fixed in RII, I haven't bothered to test it yet because this has been an annoying 'feature' of every TW game I have played. I would hope that this has been fixed, but frankly it has been going on for so long I doubt it.

That brings me to today, with RII. I again am trying really hard to like navies and find reasons to produce them, but it just doesn't seem worth the effort. Naval combat is clunky, I have a hard time getting ships to ram, board, or have anywhere near the depth of combat available on the land. I understand that they can be used to support the assault of a major city, but frankly they are too weak and too expensive for this to be a good option. Why spend the same amount of gold on a naval fleet that is half strength when assaulting land when I could just make another army stack? Navies are just too expensive and raiding generates too little gold for them to be cost effective in supporting land armies.

Now I understand that navies are necessary in certain specific scenarios, and I do use them occasionally in mid game when gold isn't tight and I can blow money on whatever I want. I am not saying that they are completely useless, I am trying to say that they have much less use than an army stack that costs the same gold so in the early game I never use them and the mid game I just build them because...well why the hell not. I really want to love navies. I want to enjoy the naval focused factions. It just doesn't seem like a strategy that benefits me. So, what am I missing? Shouldn't navies be much cheaper than land based equivalents considering their limited use, mobility, and strength?

[King_Porus]

I agree, he naval component of Rome 2 is completely broken and navies are next to useless. Why build an expensive navy when my army full stack can defend itself on the water?

In my opinion, the naval component of TW games has been broken from the start and they seriously need to rethink it. Empire naval battles were decent, but it near impossible to micro-manage a full stack fleet, especially when you have to take things like wind into consideration. Shogun 2 naval battles were crap, but I seriously enjoyed FOTS naval battles with the massive iron ships, which is why I had high hopes for Rome 2.

I don't even know what CA could do to fix this whole mess, the naval component of TW is rotten in the core IMO and only enjoyable in a few specific scenarios.

[Pheidippides]

Why didn't anyone tell Spartacus that he didn't need to negotiate with the Cilician pirates? He could have just found a beach and *bam* magic transports.

But seriously, It would be much better if:

(1) transports could only be created at port cities.
(2) transports cost money- maybe 100 per ship or something
(3) transports reduce the income of the city they came from
(4) transports were essentially the "mob" version of ships in terms of speed, ramming power, vulnerability to fire
(5) in deep sea, you can lose ships to storms

The actual mechanics of the naval battles don't bother me, since naval combat was essentially platforms of men throwing stuff at each other and getting close enough to poke each other with sharp sticks. It's ludicrous that if you attacked 20 transports of archers with six raiding triremes you'd expect to win. But planning a naval invasion should be a huge risk, not a routine gameplay function.

[GnaReffotsirk]

There's also nothing that factors into it such as weather conditions, tide, etc. The seas are not an easy thing. Taking to the seas had costs. Storms are one of them. Disease is another. It's a risky business.

And as was stated before by a fellow here, not all had naval traditions. Expert sailors are required, and there are not many of them. Certain routes were known and established, but they were still risky. You cannot just go this way or that like we have in the game.

Making transports are also not easy. Imagine having to ask your merchants to lend their boats because you had to invade by sea.

[Aypse]

Is there a mod (or a tutorial on how to create a mod) that would roughly: Keep build cost the same, quarter the upkeep cost, and quadruple the gold generated during raiding? Seems to me that would make navies valuable without them dominating the combat. Hell, is there any modding tutorial available for Rome II? I have no idea on how to create a mod, but this sounds like a simple one and I am willing to do the research/work if I had some kind of guide to get started.