Stranded monarch!

[ziphnor]

Hi,

Im playing a byz. campaign at expert. The year is 1230 and just a few years earlier everything was great. Now it just so happens that my king is stranded on the islands west of italy with a pretty big army. This has caused revolts all over the place and messed up the economy beyond bankruptcy. The army that was rallying to defend against the horde is now stretched thin destroying small revolts.
I have huge fleets of ships around the islands, and im being blocked of by just 2 ship in two regions(i just need to sink one ship to get him back to the mainland), but whenever i attack with my fleets, nothing happens, no battle takes place. Im wondering if its because he is swapping the two ships back and forth. Is there anything i can do about this?

Well at least it has brought a good challenge to the game, lets hope it isnt to much of a challenge ;)

[katank]

not much at all. this is very painful

therefore, try and get your king killed somehow.

disband all units with him on the island, destroy happiness buildings, and jack up the tax to the max.

watch insuing rebellions and get your king killed

hopefully he has an heir.

naval system sucks in not alllowing your ships to chase across multiple sea zones.

[ziphnor]

Oh well, at least i can move the army to the other island(both islands are blocked but there is a crossing between them), and leave him to be lynched by rebels without disbanding it.

Thanks for the advice.

[octavian]

another thing you might want to do, assuming that you are having trouble hanging on to some of your other provences, is consolidate and disband your weaker troops. i might hurt a lot to watch your territory go, but it is better to lose a part than lose everything.

[Lord Ovaat]

Make sure you have a viable heir, remove any spies from the island, destroy the watch tower and border forts, then hit him with about 15 assassins at once. Should work.

[ziphnor]

Thanks for all the tips, ill see what i can do about it.

[motorhead]

To catch small fleets you need to break your larger fleets into smaller pursuit groups. Naval battles are in two phases: pursuit and combat. Equal speed fleets have just a 50% chance of making contact (pursuit phase). The speed of a fleet is based upon the _slowest_ ship in that fleet, so stack of 9 barques(speed-3) and 1 caravel(speed-1) has a speed of 1. Break your large stack into smaller groups, each having at least an equal chance of defeating the enemy ship if they can catch them.

For example: you have a stack of 12 caravels, your enemy has a stack of 2 caravels. I'd make 6 stacks of two ships, now you've got 6 fleets, each having a 50% chance of making contact, an average of 3 fleets will make contact, each having roughly even odds of winning. A single stack of 12 has only a 50% chance of making contact, but an overwhelming chance of winning.

[Ironside]

As the Byzanties get a large stack with dramons (dromons?) to get those fleeing ships.

It's the fastest ship in the game.

Or you can use only one dramon, cause if one of your fleet has gained contact then all your fleets will engage the enemy fleet.

[ziphnor]

Thanks, thats really valuable advice, ill get right to it

[katank]

BTW, for combat, you should have firegalleys by now which are the best coastal ships ever for combat

[ichi]

Great post by motorhead about chasing and fighting ships. Very informative.

I remember when I first learned the lesson: never take you King to an island. Never. My Byz King went to Malta and the damn Sicilians did the same thing as the Itals in this story - while I cleared them out in a few turns my empire went to pieces.

Never.

ichi

[andrewt]

I only use my king early on, if I need to. Once I get heirs, or decent generals in the case of some factions, I use them after that. I've learned that a king besieging a castle counts as stranded for some reason and my lands get hit by the no path to king penalty. I'd rather not have massive revolts.

[Ulair]

Quote[/b] (ichi @ April 11 2004,18:31)]Great post by motorhead about chasing and fighting ships. Very informative.

Seconded

Wish I'd understood this better during my "rise and fall of the Egyptian caliphate" campaign. I had two dhows in every region of the eastern Med, an eight-star Nur al-Din plus crack troops over in Greece and a Spanish crusade coming through Tunisia - and there's one little Byzantine shi* flitting between Rhodes and Crete messing up my sealanes and holding up my reinforcements bound for north Africa. Could I catch the darn thing? No. Mind you, even if I had I'd probably've lost due to the flaky naval combat (although I'm gonna try katank's patented "sacrifice the peasants" method for winnning at sea http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/smile.gif )

Cheers,
Ulair

[Leodegar]

it is very annoying if the ai moves its fleets each turn and you can´t catch up with them...

but i found out, if you have ships at the same sea as an enemy, you can move them to an neighbouring "sea square" and then (during the same turn) drop them on the enemy fleet in the primary sea.

for better understanding an example:
you, the italians, have 4 ships in the adriatic ocean. your enemy, the sicilians, have one. now you can make 2 2-ship fleets. one moves to the ionian sea, the other stays. now you drop BOTH on the sicilian ship in the adriatic ocean.

i must admit i don´t know what are the precise effects and how this is calculated, but it works

[katank]

that's very interesting leodegar.

did it always work for you?

BTW, may not be too practical in circumstance in which there are many provinces the enemy ship can move to.

[motorhead]

@leodegar - you can do that because those fleets haven't officially moved yet - they're still in the adriatic. If the neighboring seas are empty, use the 'v' key and then do the ship shuffle. You'll see that those seas won't show green (controlled by your ships), but the adriatic (technically empty of your ships) will be green (or still red if enemy ships are there too) - you get the idea. When you move ships to another sea, the moves don't officially happen until your turn ends. If you zoom in you'll see that ships on the move have billowed sails and a wake.

edit: you can also see that ships haven't really "moved" when you get attacked. say u have 2 ships in the adriatic, along with 3 neutral sicilian ships. you move them to another sea then end turn. sicilian's attack your ships but lose, your 2 ships will still be sitting in the adriatic - their move to another sea was nullified by the sicilian attack.

[Oaty]

I think they made the ships that way to try make the game harder when it really just makes the game more annoying. What I do with an annoying faction with ships is find the ship producing territories and put all resources into conquering it, wich sometimes means that nation loses over half their territories to this and in turn makes my trading empire that much stronger and the game that much easier

[katank]

I like hitting their ship producing provinces too.

What I do though is to conquer it, raze it to the ground, and leave.

I do this with opposing crusade or jihad origins too to make their killing that much faster and easier http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/bigthumb.gif