Fun with Boats (or, You Sunk My Battleship!)

I haven't noticed anyone else giving the naval aspect of RTW a good going-over, so let's have a gander:

Trade

Settlements have no sea trade unless they have ports. Each port upgrade yields one sea trade route and one naval unit. A basic port yields a bireme and one route; a dockyard offers two trade routes and a trireme. I haven't built the third upgrade yet, but I would suspect that it yields three trade routes and a quadreme. But this is just speculation on my part -- can anyone confirm?

The AI handles sea trade, connecting trade goods (which are visible on the strategic map) to population centers without any player input. Little lines in the ocean indicate the routes, with itty-bitty boats plying their trade. I hope that CA will let us know someday how the trade routes are selected.

Movement and Visibility

Moving your boats closely mimics the pattern with land-based units -- a green swathe indicates how far you can move in one turn. A smaller, brighter area indicates how far the unit (and you) can see. Since boats can go pretty far in one turn, you often send the boats packing into a darkened area of unkown. This becomes a real yacht-wrecking problem because of the zones of control (ZOC, if you don't mind an acronym).

Each boat maintains a small ZOC around itself. Neutral and enemy ships will quickly come to a halt in this zone, and must either stop, attack or try to route around. Where this becomes a major pain in the rudder is when you send a fleet traipsing off into the big blue yonder, and it wastes its entire turn butting up against a single neutral boat. Water, water everywhere, but your fleet is incapable of going around anything it didn't see initially. And since there is no undo on the strategic map, this means that you either reload from the auto-save when necessary, or you move to the edge of visibility, and then move again.

Another interesting side-effect of the ZOC is floating gridlock -- I ran into this when the Senate ordered that a Greek port be blocaded. No problem, I thought, since I'd already beat the Greek fleets with a super-sized whuppin' stick. Little did I know that the sea was full of Spartan ships, floating about sort of aimlessly. Before you know it, my two fleets were mixed in with their log-jam of biremes, and the entire western coast of Greece ground to a halt. Almost nobody could move. It took four turns (two years) for the ships to extricate themselves. I'm not entirely clear on the realism factor involved in that.

In even simple situations you can find yourself boxed in by the ZOC issue -- a single neutral boat off your bow when you're up against the coast can paralyze your fleet for as long as the AI wants to leave that boat parked and in neutral. The only immediate way out is to declare war by attacking the neutral boat, which doesn't seem like a great way to handle traffic control.

Combat

As with movement, combat closely parallels the land-based system. You right-click to attack, and any allied boats sitting close enough act as reinforcements. The main difference is that all battles are auto-calc'd.

The number of boats you bring to the fight seems to be irrelevant -- what matters is the number of sailors. Two boats with twelve guys will get sunk by a trireme with 60 seamen. You also get an after-action report which tells you how many boats were sunk by whom, and what kind of victory/defeat it was. However, it doesn't tell you the only thing that matters, which is how many sailors got offed. This seems a little weird to me.

I also have not figured out how to retrain boats -- if anybody has figured this one out, please share.

That's all I can think of at the moment. Please correct/expand/expound on any and all RTW naval issues. Let's see how much info we can piece together!

Nice first post! It is good to see people who provide information like this :)

I forgot a big one:

Blockades

Early in the campaign, the Senate is very likely to order you to blockade some port or another. To block the enemy port, all you need do is move a unit to the enemy port, and then right-click on it. A rope-like symbol will surround the port, and the map will tell you that the port is now blockaded. Simple enough.

What I'm not at all clear on is how to block trade routes in the open sea. If an angry Macedonian parks his trireme across one of my little blue lines, will the teeny-tiny olive oil and ivory merchants stop tranvelling, as they do on land? Not at all clear, and I'm stuck away from home. Has anybody tested this?

You re-train boats just like you do any other unit. You sail the boat into a port, go to the recruiting menu for that city, click on the retrain tab and click on the boats.

Tombom, thanks. I've lurked for so long, I wanted to throw something useful on the table.

Sisco, thanks for the intel. So I guess there's a reason not to merge everything after a battle -- good to know.

Lemurmania,

Good post. Had a laugh at the traffic jam you caused off Greece. Found out the hard way about the ZOC - had a ship stuck on the coast for so long I forgot about him. Found him still there years later safe & sound. For some reason the Greek ships never attacked even though I was at war with them??

At the end of naval battles you can find out how many men were lost same as on land battles - there is a button to press in lower right corner of parchment and will give you detailed information of each offing!!

The naval battle results seem a little buggy.

I fought one battle, 3 of my ships vs one gallic ship with 8 men left.

We fough, it said I won, but 0 ships were sunk. I look at the breakdown, my ships lost 2 men and his lost 7 or 8.

Then I closed the scroll and was treated to an animation of his ship sinking. O.o

I guess they sink anyway without sufficient crew?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Ulstan

The naval battle results seem a little buggy.

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Heh heh, tell us something new. ~;p

No, seriously, I am very happy with all I read here about the 'naval' options you have (like the blockades i.e.).

Also, for amphibious invasions, you have to load the men on the boats and physically sail the boats over.

This is a change from the way you could instantly hop along a long chain of boats in MTW to your destination.

I prefer the new way to be honest. For instance, catching the enemy invading army on their fleets means you can sink the army at sea :D

Also, it just makes more sense than them walking along some 'boat chain' to the destination.

Also: You can load men into ships whever you can find a beach I think. Doesn't have to be a province with a dock.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Ulstan

Also, it just makes more sense than them walking along some 'boat chain' to the destination.

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You can make a "boat chain" for certain parts, for example the Straits of Messina or Straits of Gibraltar. Well actually they would be a "boat bridge".

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Ulstan

Also: You can load men into ships whever you can find a beach I think. Doesn't have to be a province with a dock.

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I know that is correct for agents. I haven't tried with armies although my gut feeling is that you are correct.
Also you only need one ship unit to transport an army.

As far as trade routes go, I believe the route with the highest trade value will be selected. Contrary to popular belief (mine included) you don't need a trade agreement to trade with another faction. A trade agreement increases the value of the trade making it more likely to have trade routes with trading partners.

And I agree, I think the naval aspect much improved over MTW.

So far it appears to me that parking your boats on the line of an enemy's trade route has no effect. The teeny trading boats just pass right through your warships and go on their merry way. (I don't have any data to prove that their way is, in fact, merry, but I feel comfortable making that assumption.)

The subject of what exactly a trade agreement does is one that I would love to see discussed in the manual or the Prima strategy guide, but alas, both are silent on the issue. /sigh