Possible Changes to Admirals, Ships and Fleets

[Squid]

As many of you have noticed, admirals appear not to be stacking anymore. The problem was of my own creation and I've put up a fix for it for patch10.

This issue has presented us with a possibility of redefining how naval warfare happens in RTW.

If you haven't followed the fix I posted in the other dev forum, then currently all of your new ships are unable to merge with existing ships. This came about by accident, but we could make use of it to our advantage.

We can make a single ship represent a fleet led by an Admiral. In which case a few things will need to happen:
- I'll add an aging trait to Admirals
- The cost, upkeep and construction time of ships needs to be increased to reflect that it represents an entire fleet instead of an individual ship

I'm sure there are other ideas of how we can use this to provide unique and interesting content to RS.

[dvk901]

The issue I have with this idea is that winning and losing sea battles is so arbitrary in RTW....and the Rebels and Free People are very active in building ships. You lose a large investment if your 'fleet' is attacked by them and they win, and there's no way to actually build a 'winning' fleet. The odds would always be even, given matched ships, and on harder settings, I think the player would be at a great disadvantage all the time. I'm also thinking of a way to make ships more fun....like creating a 'unit' that actually has a very high cost; calling him 'Trade Goods' or 'Wine' or something on that order, which you have to deliver to one of your cities and 'disband' for a profit. I don't know if this is possible, but it's just something I've been thinking about a long time. The ships to transport these 'goods' would be 'Merchants' with very little strength, and you might want to protect them.....

[Spartan_Shame]

yes, I hate hate how the AI has a massive advantage at sea. Everytime damn time I want to send an army overseas, I have to build like 5 separate ships, can get annoying,.

That sounds good, DVK. def make it more interesting. Do you think it might be possible?

[dvk901]

Only if I can figure out where the 'disband' costs are, and if they aren't hardcoded percentages. So far, I can't find it.