How do valor affect ships?

[hotingzilla]

English Wessex have a +1 bonus to Cogs and Cogs have English as their advantage faction. But how do ship works anyway? And where do sometimes ships are built with additiional command stars? Thanks.

[Nerouin]

I'd assume that when the computer autocalcs sea battles it counts valour in the same way in which it does for land battles.

[Sinner]

English Wessex have a +1 bonus to Cogs and Cogs have English as their advantage faction. But how do ship works anyway? And where do sometimes ships are built with additiional command stars? Thanks.

There's no real evidence as to whether the Valour has any effect on ships. The results from the sea combat system are often so peculiar that it almost appears random rather than a system as such.

An easy but tedious way to check would be to mod the carrack, giving it a starting Honour (ie. Valour) of 9 (column 6 in crusaders_unit_prod11.txt), then add a carrack to your startpos file & go find another faction's ship with the same command & pick a fight. Rinse & repeat to try & get a reasonable sample of results. It would be worthwhile modding all ship types to have the same stats of Range, Attack, Defense, Speed & Strength (column 55 of crusaders_unit_prod11.txt) to eliminate that as a factor.

The starting Command of a ship appears to be determined like that of generals of preferred land units, eg. knights, MAA, etc. Based upon your King's influence, & perhaps Command as well, the ship/unit has a chance of starting with a Command rating of 1 to 3; the better your King's stats the better the chance of having the higher ratings, eg. with a Influence 9, Command 6 King most of my ships come out with Command 2 or 3, with the occasional 1 or 0.

The effect of Command on a sea battle also seems to be somewhat random, so it may not be that important an issue. True, higher Command ships do seem to win more often than not, but I've seen enough wierd results to have more than a hint of doubt.

Whether CA chose to cut corners with sea combat, making it little more than blind luck to determine the winner, or whether they gave too much weight to the greater randomness of naval combat compared to land combat - wind and tide have won as many battles as gun and sword - is open to question. I'd like to think the latter, but I know only too well how business concerns can influence us poor programmers to make me suspect the former is true.