Confused about naval combat

[corsair831]

Hello, I've been fighting some naval battles recently (in the past I've wholesale avoided them because of how bad naval battles are in Rome 2 in general), and I've noticed that some of my ships seem to one shot enemy transports with a battering attack, and other's don't ... do different ships have different battering strengths etc? As I can't find this listed in the stats anywhere

Additionally, is there anything you can do to influence battering speed, e.g. hit the enemy ship at a certain location, build up speed before hitting, etc.?

Thanks,
Corsair

[Dresden]

I believe the med/heavy ships do more ram damage if I remember. We did our best with the movement/mechanics/ramming, but to be honest the naval battles are a bit of a mess in the game itself. They are sort of broken at their core with a lot of the base mechanics so we did what we could. Sort of like slapping lipstick on a pig

[Augustusng]

Yeah, I think there is a mechanic where the mass and speed of the ships factor into how much damage is dealt, but I'm not sure how it works, and ships have a tendency to stop moving sometimes even with an attack order given. It is a bit of a mess.

[Daergar]

I've found that the naval combat works very well once you understand a few things.

Speed and impact location does matter. Prow vs prow at full speed will see the maximum damage, alternatively hitting them in the side.

Initial impact "stops controls". I treat this as the entire ship being staggered briefly (rather logical to me) and drifts backwards. It actually regains control fairly quickly and you can ram again to finish off the weakened enemy ship.

My tactic, until the need arises for a proper melee assault fleet, is to spam the costliest pursuit ships, set them all to fire arrows (if available) and melee. Put all of them in a line as close to the deployment zone border as you can, select every other vessel and move them backwards a decent distance.

Start the battle, select all units, move them forward with the arrow key. Once everyone is moving and you get close to the enemy formation, double-team every lead enemy vessel with two of your own ships and once it lights up, hit the "row harder button". Your second line is there to help clean up weakened enemies quickly or go after their own targets through any gaps that have formed. Mop up stragglers.

Same deal with pure assault ships, except with the right tech and ships you can "one-shot" the weaker enemy naval units.

All in all it's good fun (as much as it can be, it's no Empire w. Darthmod precisely) and ten times more reliable outcomes than the auto-calc will ever give you (unless massively outnumbering the enemy).

[Tenerife_Boy]

Just ram ram everything you find infront of you, don't try to engage in battle nor even try to skirmish at a distance...nothing, just ram.

[nunz]

naval battles?

all i hear is ... AUTO RESOLVE

[Felius]

Only major problem I generally have with them is that some ships apparently get stuck after winning a boarding action (well, only kinda of a problem since I don't board, just ram, so it's my enemies who get half-dozen transports just stuck unmoving in the sea, and that's after losing some 5-10 ships to ram before managing to board mine, instead of landing to fight the rest of the garrison)

[Dresden]

You could argue that is sort of realistic, though, as many times naval battles turned into one giant quagmire mess.

[corsair831]

yeah, i understand that the naval battles in base rome 2 at launch were just utterly awful, i've tried messing around with it a few times over the years and i've always been surprised they never fixed it

regarding the auto resolve, it seems a bit wonky vs transports, it says i was going to lose vs 20 transports with my 8 medium boats, and when i played the battle i only lost 2 boats, so i think sometimes you have to play them out unfortunately .. as i'm sure others have said it really is a shame because the naval battles in empire darthmod were so much fun

[Kolaris8472]

It can help to team your boats in pairs. Split them up a bit and then converge on the same enemy, which should go down in one tandem hit.

Unfortunately if you try to use maneuvers and historical strategy, you're going to have a bad time. Don't bother trying to approach from astern, just row dead ahead, hit, back row, and hit again.

[RollingWave]

Yeah, if it's against transports (or really most situations ) just line up your ships and ram as many target at once as possible then figure out the rest. surely if you sink half their fleet with initial ramming you'll be alright regardless.

what I tend to do is to have my melee heavy ships in the first line, have some gap between ships, and a second line of support ships, they can follow up the first line if they need and if not they can shoot fire arrows etc.

[Sonny WiFiHr]

Transports are quite fast (2). They are merchant ships and they do not have 1:10 ratio like warship. Should be slower like 0.5

[geala]

I can only speak from experience with DeI 1.1, don't know wether it changed or not. Ramming usually works fine, if the ships do not decide to do nothing after ordered, which sometimes happened to me. In general I like it. However, the ramming success with the effect of sinking is not overly historically accurate in my opinion because ramming was also dangerous for the active ship and not seldomly resulted in both ships being stuck together. That's one reason for the rise of bigger and bigger ships in the 4th and 3rd c. BC, I think. Ramming means getting into enter distance, bad for a small ship if it could not row back immediately after the first hit.

I made transport ships to have lower speed in 1.1, I'm curious how it works in 1.2.

[Daergar]

Transport ships are sitting ducks in 1.2, as they should be.