A Huge Thank You for the Naval Combat and Unit Overhaul

[SquirrelP0acher]

Previously, because naval battles were generally pretty bad in Rome 2 in general, I would always auto-resolve any encounter at sea. However after seeing the naval preview some months ago I decided to give it another try for 1.1 and I must say they are far better than before. Not only the combat but the unit types are far more realistic i.e. huge ships only being generals and missile ships being small and maneuverable. Thanks for the great work.

[Dresden]

Glad you enjoy them and that they are mostly working as intended. A change of the unit types was a major part of pushing naval combat toward melee rather than a ranged/fire fest.

[Ivan_Moscavich]

You are very welcome. Naval battles are the first thing i started going on about when dresen first contacted me.

Glad to know my incessant rambling was finally appreciated.


But seriously. The naval overhaul came about pretty quickly because the teamwork in the dei tean was and is just fantastic.

One person has an idea, boom, a day later the expert on that part of the mod has a rough demo of the idea in practical action.

I'm glad to have worked with these guys.


We all worked off of the basic idea that had been on the table, and everything just came together. KAM and Dresden did an excellent job getting the marines and transported troops dynamic figured out and implemented, Litharion made sure the AI was properly recruiting everything, Don_Diego making all the nice marine unit skins and endlessly painting more and more eyes on the fronts of ships , and all I really did was create lists of units and naval recruitment parameters.

These guys are true professionals.

[mrhappyx666x]

You are very welcome. Naval battles are the first thing i started going on about when dresen first contacted me.

Glad to know my incessant rambling was finally appreciated.


But seriously. The naval overhaul came about pretty quickly because the teamwork in the dei tean was and is just fantastic.

One person has an idea, boom, a day later the expert on that part of the mod has a rough demo of the idea in practical action.

I'm glad to have worked with these guys.


We all worked off of the basic idea that had been on the table, and everything just came together. KAM and Dresden did an excellent job getting the marines and transported troops dynamic figured out and implemented, Litharion made sure the AI was properly recruiting everything, Don_Diego making all the nice marine unit skins and endlessly painting more and more eyes on the fronts of ships , and all I really did was create lists of units and naval recruitment parameters.

These guys are true professionals.

How did it feel working and knowing you had to make the Greek ships superior to Roman ships in some way?

[Ivan_Moscavich]

How did it feel working and knowing you had to make the Greek ships superior to Roman ships in some way?

It just made sense. The greek ships had better trained crews and we represented that with better manuverabillity.

Egyptian ships have slightly more health. Carthaginian ships are slightly faster.

You'll notice a subtle difference in performance with civilized ships between culture types.

We tried hard to make them different, yet at the same time they all have strengths and weaknesses.

Heck, barbarian naval play style is almost completely revamped. Now you aren't using them as navies, in so much as a fast raiding fleet. Trying to speed past ships and raid settlements. It can be quite fun.



If you mean from my pro-Roman standpoint (That is actually a running joke btw, I do mostly only play as Rome, but I'd never put that above fair and honest game balance in non-historical situations).

I only have one word to express my feelings about Greek ships having superior speed and mobility.

HARPAX.

[Aeimnestus]

I have to say, the naval battles are a huge improvements, well done! I do have some criticism from a realism perspective only.

- The speeds between ships are off. In DeI it goes from small ship = fast, to large ship = slow. But this was not the case historically: both the liburna and bireme for example may have been very small and light, but the amount of mass per rower was actually higher than with the trireme, which should therefor be able to attain higher speeds. The quinquireme is noted for having a very effective rowing system, making it likely it could overtake many smaller ships (as is evident from Polybius description that Hannibal the Rodian's quinquireme used as a blockade runner was faster than the Roman pursuit ships. And the fact that it was used as a blockade runner is quite telling in itself.)

- It would be very nice if there was a Roman naval 'reform' at the end of the first Punic war, where the poorer handling of Roman ships is cancelled out as Roman crews at this point are pretty much the best in the mediterraneum world.

- Both Carthage and Rome can't build quinquiremes for the first punic war, taking a balanced research approach I can barely build Triremes at Neapolis. Carthage fields fleets of raiding hemiola's and liburna's

I also noticed the ships still become unreponsive when in close proximity to other ships. This bug has been in R2TW since launch, I can't believe this still hasn't been fixed by CA Not DeI's fault of course.

[Ivan_Moscavich]

We are already aware of the historical glossing of ship speeds. But we chose to implement it this way for game balance purposes. That's pretty much the only reason ship speeds are as they are in game.


Well, technically before the first punic war they were just crewed by Greek allies anyways. So Roman vessels actually wouldn't be 'that' poorly maneuverable. It's simply that at first the Carthaginians were better than the Greek allies until the Romans figured boarding was easier than ramming.


Again, unfortunate. I did push pretty hard to have Quints available to both Rome and Carthage very early on, but in the end it came down to game balance.

[Moonflower]

I as a Carthage player have to give praise here too--I barely made use of navies before 1.1, now they're tactically essential to my military survival and exploits overseas. Typically, my citizen-navy will be the hammer to a mercenary anvil can't get closer to historical phoenician role-playing than that can you? lol thanks dei team.

[Andrew1994]

Incredible work is made at this patch.i really liked the new navies.its as strong as it should be for the naval factions BUT i do have a suggestion.maybe i should post it to a different topic but as far i can see the AI doesnt built military warfs to make true navies.So my suggestion is to change the port at the naval faction(ptolemy,macedon,rome carthage seleukids)and give them a military wharf from the beginning.Im currently playing a campaing with ptolemy and i have a full stack fleet mixed with all kind of ships starting from tetreres but i havent found one fleet to opose me

[Ivan_Moscavich]

We'll look into it.

Rome, Carthage, and Egypt could very easily have their capital (Brundism for Rome) swapped for the large military wharf. But that is a bit more difficult with Macedon, and the Seleucids were never really known for their great navies.

[Andrew1994]

Yeah you are right.another suggestion could be to just remove the docks from the game.that way the ai will built military wharfs.docks is just uselles.you can only built dieries and trieres and by that time they were already ancient.also syracuse should have military wharf.although minor cities cannot construct it but i think it could be moddable

[SquirrelP0acher]

Yeah you are right.another suggestion could be to just remove the docks from the game.that way the ai will built military wharfs.docks is just uselles.you can only built dieries and trieres and by that time they were already ancient.also syracuse should have military wharf.although minor cities cannot construct it but i think it could be moddable

That's actually not a bad idea for major port cities and I'm quite sure its possible but they might have to revisit the AI navy comps. Very easy to attach the greek hull bonus to the wharf as well. As stated this could work for major cities but you wouldn't want to do that for the small port towns tho since they can't build wharfs but again thats also moddable.

EDIT: Not sure if there might be some problem down the road in the campaign but if I changed the Macedonian port in the startpos to the wharf I haven't noticed any ill effects in my test campaign.

[Ivan_Moscavich]

Apparently with the new region food effects, it isn't as bad as I thought it might be.

Some major ports may be changed to large military ports in the next update.

[lnrd907]

Yeah you are right.another suggestion could be to just remove the docks from the game.that way the ai will built military wharfs.docks is just uselles.you can only built dieries and trieres and by that time they were already ancient.also syracuse should have military wharf.although minor cities cannot construct it but i think it could be moddable

That's actually not a bad idea for major port cities and I'm quite sure its possible but they might have to revisit the AI navy comps. Very easy to attach the greek hull bonus to the wharf as well. As stated this could work for major cities but you wouldn't want to do that for the small port towns tho since they can't build wharfs but again thats also moddable.

EDIT: Not sure if there might be some problem down the road in the campaign but if I changed the Macedonian port in the startpos to the wharf I haven't noticed any ill effects in my test campaign.

Apparently with the new region food effects, it isn't as bad as I thought it might be.

Some major ports may be changed to large military ports in the next update.

Created a submod based on your discussions. Check it out.

[Dresden]

If you check out the current fix pack posted, it has the new large ports for those 3 factions.

[Don_Diego]

/\ I love that unlike unlike some posters (on other threads) that just whine and moan about things, you took this useful discussion and made a submod to test it! Faith now restored in the DEI community!

[Dresden]

lnrd907 has always done that and made some really great submods. He was the one who came up with the idea of how to have our unit upgrades and he also has a cool public order nightmare/conquest submod. Anyway, I always appreciate your contributions lnrd907!

[Andrew1994]

glad to hear that the suggestions i made are now part of dei
lnrds submod is also very good

[lnrd907]

Thanks Don, Dresden and Andrew. I always enjoy trying to help when I can. Feels good to be back because 1.1 is great.