Please please please reduce ships ramming capabilities? I can't play naval combat.

[largejack]

Is there any chance you can nerf ramming or even better only equip certain high level ships with rams as a unique ability? At the moment fighting a naval combat it seems it doesn't matter how full your ships are to the enemy they just ram you to death. It's all about ship number supremacy not troop numbers. Can you imagine a land battle where you had a unit of say 300 men and whenever the AI charged into that unit with say 40 men your 300 unit just shattered every time. Well that's what naval combat is like! The AI never seems to board, and it's just impossible to multitask all your ships like the AI can. Even if you manage to sink an AI ship the AI has already finished off 5 others while you're focusing elsewhere.

[Alu10]

Let me guess you use transport ships for naval battles

[Krieg_Boy]

Let me guess you use transport ships for naval battles

[largejack]

Let me guess you use transport ships for naval battles

Sadly they're not, they're proper naval ships and the AI's ships are the same.

Just like artillery ships ramming ships should be specifically recruited imo, it would create a more varied and interesting combat experience.

[Ivan_Moscavich]

Sadly they're not, they're proper naval ships and the AI's ships are the same.

Just like artillery ships ramming ships should be specifically recruited imo, it would create a more varied and interesting combat experience.

Like it or not, about every ship from biremes up were equipped with rams in that era. If you don't like the ramming, you're in the wrong era of naval warfare to be playing.

There was boarding too, but it was mostly ram, ram, ram.


If you're having trouble with the enemy ramming you all of the time, approach them from the sides or rear where they can't ram you.
Use smaller ships like pursuit and raiding hermoria to bait the enemy into chasing, then hit them in the side with boarding parties or ram them from the side.

As for the artillery ships, sadly, they do far too low of damage to kill enough ships to make them worthwhile during a played out battle. It takes over 8 hits to sink a transport ship. So unless it's only 1 or 2 ships per artillery ship, you'll simply be overwhelmed before you can sink the enemy ships.

I've manually controlled ballista ships and sunk half a dozen enemy ships only to have the rest of the fleet overwhelmed by the enemy (20 stack vs 20 stack, 6 ballista ships in my navy).

I feel like the damage of siege ships needs to be upped heavily to make them worthwhile in ship combat. With as high of health as ships have, you simply can't sink them fast enough.

[cherryfunk]

If you're having trouble with the enemy ramming you all of the time, approach them from the sides or rear where they can't ram you.
Use smaller ships like pursuit and raiding hermoria to bait the enemy into chasing, then hit them in the side with boarding parties or ram them from the side.

This is sort of what I've discovered myself -- however, I just don't find it fun, it feels more like busy work. I miss the naval battles of Empire TW. Even Shogun 2 was more fun. Could it be that trireme combat is just inherently dull?

[Ivan_Moscavich]

This is sort of what I've discovered myself -- however, I just don't find it fun, it feels more like busy work. I miss the naval battles of Empire TW. Even Shogun 2 was more fun. Could it be that trireme combat is just inherently dull?

I certainly liked FotS naval combat more than any other Total War naval combat experience, but that's probably mostly because I could never stop smiling when sending the Warrior class into an entire wooden hulled ten stack enemy fleet and loading explosive shells and watching everything around said Warrior class die.

That being said, I actually found Empire's Naval battles lack luster (I bought it and napoleon mainly FOR the naval battles). It seemed to turn into a turning fight constantly. I was never getting big lines of battle like what happened in Fall of the Samurai.

And I do have fun with Rome II naval combat. There just needs to be more descisiveness. Big heptaremes need to instantly destroy small ships they ram. Little biremes need to take more than a few rams to destroy a larger well built ship.
The AI needs to stop being able to board a ship from the enemy ship just coming near it.


Other than that, it can be fun when it all works right.

[Dudok22]

Well they are planning to overhaul naval combat in 1.1!

[largejack]

Well they are planning to overhaul naval combat in 1.1!

Then I shall endeavor to autoresolve until then, or beget me some artillery ships and blast them to bits before they get near me. lol

[Butan]

Like Dudok said, the naval part of R2 hasnt yet been heavily touched. It should be in future big updates, until then you're stuck with average naval battles.

[Krieg_Boy]

I think I saw one or two mods that change the naval battle mechanics. Take a look in the Divide et Empera Sub-mod section.

[Goffredo85]

Strange i've never experienced ai trying to ram, they always go for boarding. It makes things far too easy, you just let them try to board your cheap ships and once they are locked you gangbang them from two sides with your rams and they're gone. And i'm fairly certain that it only takes two ballista flaming shots to sink a troop transport...

[Ivan_Moscavich]

Strange i've never experienced ai trying to ram, they always go for boarding. It makes things far too easy, you just let them try to board your cheap ships and once they are locked you gangbang them from two sides with your rams and they're gone. And i'm fairly certain that it only takes two ballista flaming shots to sink a troop transport...

Exactly two, yes. But the damage to actual warships from flaming ballista shots is negligible.

Fighting in a normal battle with no mods that effect units stats (besides DeI of course), it took eight flaming ballista shots from a light artillery ballista ship to destroy a Carthaginian assault quadreme.

Even if, even if you could argue that eight ballista shots wouldn't sink a ship, it should have caught on fire by the fourth or fifth shot.

Perhaps just adjusting the ignition threshold of warships would do the trick.

[meerkatology]

wait ppl actually play naval battles? in all the time I've played this game never once i had actually needed to fight a naval battle.
save the occasional time where after anihilating a faction on land they have the small decaying stack of ships raiding me... where I just had to recruit a few naval units and autoresolve.

I've also disbanded immediately any naval units i had at start of a campaign and never needed to rebuild them.
under what circumstance do you actually need to fight naval battles with real naval ships?

[Ivan_Moscavich]

wait ppl actually play naval battles? in all the time I've played this game never once i had actually needed to fight a naval battle.
save the occasional time where after anihilating a faction on land they have the small decaying stack of ships raiding me... where I just had to recruit a few naval units and autoresolve.

I've also disbanded immediately any naval units i had at start of a campaign and never needed to rebuild them.
under what circumstance do you actually need to fight naval battles with real naval ships?

You could probably get away with an entire campaign never manually playing a naval battle.
Though in some cases, such as having a small navy and a 20 stack of transports is on the water. Auto resolving loses your navy, and you have a 20 stack now on your shores.
If the only chance you have to stop an invasion from hitting your unprotected shores is to play a naval battle, you're probably going to play a naval battle.
This happens a lot in the med with me as Rome playing against Carthage.

It gets to the point where it is completely impossible to have every city reasonably guarded, and once and a while the AI will play smart and try to take a coastal city.


But I actually find them fun, when they work right.

Maneuvering small biremes in to ram and pin ships while artillery ships fire at the enemy, moving big missile quadremes into position to pelt the enemy with javelins.

That satisfying crack of ramming a warship and sinking it in one solid smash.


It really can be very fun.

[geala]

Naval combat is indeed flawed in several points. On one hand boarding is much too easy, a slight touch is enough and immediately it is static combat. Especially annoying with transport ships. On the other hand the TS is right that ramming is perhaps a bit too effective. In the 3rd c. BC ramming was no longer the state of art like in the times of the trieres some hundred years earlier. The problem with ramming always was that the ship that rammed often got stuck in the other vessel, in perfect distance for close quarter combat aka entering. So the ships became bigger and bigger to have more soldiers on board and it became more and more difficult to disable or even sink bigger ships by ramming.

I think all ships should be able to sink transport ships by ramming (to simulate the relatively big helplessness due to bad manouvre abilities) but smaller war ships (below tetrere perhaps)should have great problems to sink bigger ships.

[KAM 2150]

In current form ships are using vanilla values until we will introduce full navy revamp in 1.1.

Although is sucks that you could have mixed crews in Shogun 2, but in ancienct warfare where it was even more important you can't....Of course that is because of landing so only single unit will depart from ship, but this caused this lame melee/missile/arty division for ships.

[gornoviceanu]

In current form ships are using vanilla values until we will introduce full navy revamp in 1.1.

Although is sucks that you could have mixed crews in Shogun 2, but in ancienct warfare where it was even more important you can't....Of course that is because of landing so only single unit will depart from ship, but this caused this lame melee/missile/arty division for ships.

Hmm.. can you work around it by placing troops with javelins on ships and maybe increase their ammo count? I'm thinking that just like you can toggle Hastati fire at will on a ground battle, is it possible to do the same for navies? I know it's not the same thing as mixed troops but it's closer to it.

[KAM 2150]

We will have custom marines that will replace current melee/missile division and will also make fleets more deadly when used in port assaults.