Ships

[Oaty]

Now if only ships could get those awful vices that generals do. Because way to often that A.I. ship outruns me all the time

[katank]

you need like gluttony or drunk so that they could barely move and hence become a sitting duck for your ships.

[Ulair]

Quote[/b] (oaty @ May 09 2004,05:10)]Now if only ships could get those awful vices that generals do. Because way to often that A.I. ship outruns me all the time

Ain't that the truth...

[octavian]

this is one of the areas where i feel the AI cheats, no admiral, no matter how good, is able too predict an attack 100% of the time, and sucessfully evade it every time. http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/angry.gif

[Xiphias]

Barnacled - The captain of this ship has let it's hull accumulate barnacles. -20% chance to escape from an engagement.

[motorhead]

Quote[/b] (octavian @ May 17 2004,13:24)]this is one of the areas where i feel the AI cheats, no admiral, no matter how good, is able too predict an attack 100% of the time, and sucessfully evade it every time. http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/angry.gif
You have to know how to stalk your prey:
Fleet Actions
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 a 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.


edit: also, unpatched MTW (1.0) did have an uncatchable fleet bug.

[katank]

I think if even one of your fleets make contact, the enemy needs to fight all the ships you have in all the stacks.

thus, it's quite good to have a barque or dhow do the catching up even if they get sacrificed and use the caravels and baggalas to finish the enemy once engaged.

[Sir Chauncy]

One other thing that might be happening is that the AI moves most of its ships around anyway, just like it does the troops on land. That might account for the uncatchable ship thing too. Especially if they have single fast ships with speed 4 That really must have been rocket powered back in the day.