Navy preferences?

How do you build your navies? Masses of biremes from everywhere or corvus quinqueremes from your major cities? I've been going the latter route and found out there are some advantages and disadvantages:
Advantages:
-Easy to keep fleet together, never lost a battle w/ 3-4 quinqereme fleets.
-Virtually unsinkable, so less fleets required = less support cost.
Disadvantages:
-Can only be retrained in your major cities! Very annoying to move fleet 5 turns just to be repaired, not a problem in the Med. but in the Atlantic and English Channel it is a pain in the ass, so I keep mostly biremes there.
-Takes 3(or 2? forgot) turns to build, also very annoying.

My tactics are to keep "ferry" navies on major areas I may transport troops to and fro(i.e. one in sicily, one on east coast Italy, one west coast, one in gibraltar, one in Aegean, one in Carthage)+ 2 "blockade" fleets i use to send to the ports of whatever factions i war with, each fleet is either 4 Triremes, 5 biremes, or 3 quinqueremes, most dead ships I've been replacing w/ quinquremes.

Share your naval strategies. Do you have masses of biremes scattered all over the place? do you have 10+ ships parked in the central med?

One bireme to complete short hops across the sea if necessary,. If the sea journey requires more than one turn, go by land - there'll be a closer province to take, without the risk of a naval engagement. Otherwise, I let the AI have free reign over the seas. Not going to do it much good when I've stormed all it's cities.

Only need them for Brittania, Crete, Palma, Sicily, Rhodes, Cyprus. And possibly to cross the Straits of Gibralter and the Adriatic. Otherwise, who needs em?

Use them a lot....

Usually mixes of triermes (sp?) and quinqueremes since they are quiet easy to build and my strategy which is oportunism requires me to have a strong navy since otherwise new opportunities might be missed...usually I have two types of navies small ferry fleets of one or two ships which ferry troops in steps from land to land...and full stack battle fleets which circles around my sphere of power sinking anything hostile...

hardly build ships really. I do the large fleets of quinqueremes once i get the tech but i've never pursued naval dominance, I normally keep a few ships in most cities ports though, their used for ferrying short distances with the occasional fleet of quinqueremes to guard armies on the move or maybe attack a few other civs smaller fleets. For the most part though i avoid naval combat just making sure i at least have some options in that area though.
Anyone actually controlled the seas yet? was it worth it?

Since I've only played Julii so far I don't have access to the Corvus Quinquireme or Decere, else I'd use them, instead I use Quinquiremes plus whatever Biremes and Triremes that I have left over from the early years.

I prefer to group my Quinquiremes in squadrons of four ships, finding that this gives enough combat strength against most enemy fleets. If I come across a large enemy fleet, too much for one squadron to handle, then I bring in 3 or 4 of them, surrounding the enemy before attacking with the last squadron; the other squadrons get dragged in as reinforcements, giving me the firepower I need.

My Quinquireme squadrons are also used to transport my main combat armies and any worthwhile family members that're travelling alone - I don't like to risk such important units.

To avoid the need to pull entire squadrons off-station to retrain after a few battles, I transfer men among the ships so that all but one are at full strength, and then send only that one to be replenished. Sometimes that ship will merge with other squadrons en-route, either to transfer men to them, or to pick up other ships due for replenishment so that they get the safety of numbers as they travel back to base. When up against a navy-heavy enemy, I sometimes oversize a 'flagship' squadron, adding a couple of extra ships as spares to keep nearby squadrons continuously at full strength.

My older Biremes and Triremes usually get used as scouts, lurking near enemy and neutral coastal cities and ports, and as couriers for agents, the occasional reinforcement unit and the low quality family members that I use for building watchtowers, etc.

Other than prologue I've not played a Roman factoin to benefit from the later ship advances, however the tatic I've employed very sucessfully to date is a mixed combo of bireme & trireme core.

In the early stages the biremes spread out individually from the core fleet (to around half their max distance), so as to maximise the sea area you can see, when any enemy shipping moves into this area I can close the individual biremes on the enemy then attack with the core triremes, so you have the entire fleet attacking at once. Then make good any ship losses by drag-n-dropping damaged fleets onto one another so you still have a full complement while sending the damaged fleet back to retrain.

As Carthage this has stopped the Romans ever landing an invasion force in North Africa.

Another advantage of this is that you very soon have a fleet with very high experience, as drag & drop seems to bump up the fleets overall xp.

One major town upgrades the armoury & you can then produce small fleets that can be retrained to gain max armour, & as your area of influence increases you can have fleets in the different area's that you want to control, using the same "spread" tactic.

This allows you to use 1 bireme to blocade while having the bulk of your fleet on the look out for a potential threat, that can group quickly when required.

Carthage, long campaign, H/H

I eventually built up 4 fleets. I did not use single ships much.

Fleet 1 – West Med, 10-12 ships – fight Spanish, Gaul, Numedian fleets
Fleet 2 & 3 – Central Med, 12-18 ships – Fight Romans, all of em
Fleet 4 – East Med, 12-15 ships – fight Egypt and Numedia

I build Fleet 2, then 1, then 3, and 4 was last. Mix was 25% level 1 ships, 50% level 2, and 25% level 3. The big level 3 ships more concentrated in Fleets 2 & 3.

Eventually, I destroyed all navies in the Med but mine. I would actively hunt down small AI fleets and fight often at 4-1 odds or better. I lost very few ship units. I would try to end every turn in a port (Carthage) to refit. I would take my most experienced ships and use them to replace losses on newer ships to put veterans in them. I would then refit the under strengthen ships. I soon had fleets with gold chevrons. Took a long time for my first Admiral with stars. Got him from building level 3 ship in Syracruse.

One tip, try to have your fleets end their move next to each other when you spot a big enemy fleet. In the central Med, when a big Roman fleet attacked, they often found two fleets defending.

I try to use a stack consisting of multiples of 1 quinquireme to 2 triremes. Now that I have Deceres, I substitute one of those for a quinquireme. It's true that quinquireme-only fleets do alright by themselves, but they seem to take a lot of losses. That seems to be mitigated by using more mobile triremes to support the heavier ships.

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Originally Posted by Mori Gabriel Syme

I try to use a stack consisting of multiples of 1 quinquireme to 2 triremes. Now that I have Deceres, I substitute one of those for a quinquireme. It's true that quinquireme-only fleets do alright by themselves, but they seem to take a lot of losses. That seems to be mitigated by using more mobile triremes to support the heavier ships.

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Really? Do you have any idea how the AI calculates manueverability?

Navies? In this game? Snicker. I played my first campaign trying to compete with all the little boats floatin' around. Spent mucho dinero all for nothing. Still had no results at the end. I've played my last three campaigns building ONLY TWO Biremes or Triremes per port. And that's exactly where I keep them--in port. Only use them to transport when needed, or if the Senate keeps insisting I blockade someone. I don't blockade people I'm trading with, regardless what the Senate thinks. I therefore spend almost nothing on navies. I build my warchest and spend it on land troops. They ARE decisive. Unless, or untill CA changes this game and forces me to try to compete, why bother? Sea warfare is no fun, and extremely costly. I think of my fleets more like fairies than warships. NO! Not that kind of fairy. Though, there was this one cabin boy.....

Deceres are nigh unstoppable.

In my Scipii campaign I only built a few quinqueremes. I built huge number of Triremes.
The advantage is that these are only 1 turn to build, versus the 2 turns quinquiremes take. So you can quickly crank out an entire fleet, then go back to producing other units. Plus you can repair these at any city with only a shipwright, whereas a dockyard is less frequent, Egypt can't even build them! And since you'll probably get into some nasty naval fights with Egypt, the ability to repair ships (your whole stack of ships even) in a city you have conquered is very nice.

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Originally Posted by Lord Ovaat

Navies? In this game? Snicker. I played my first campaign trying to compete with all the little boats floatin' around. Spent mucho dinero all for nothing. Still had no results at the end. I've played my last three campaigns building ONLY TWO Biremes or Triremes per port. And that's exactly where I keep them--in port. Only use them to transport when needed, or if the Senate keeps insisting I blockade someone. I don't blockade people I'm trading with, regardless what the Senate thinks. I therefore spend almost nothing on navies. I build my warchest and spend it on land troops. They ARE decisive. Unless, or untill CA changes this game and forces me to try to compete, why bother? Sea warfare is no fun, and extremely costly. I think of my fleets more like fairies than warships. NO! Not that kind of fairy. Though, there was this one cabin boy.....

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Actually blockades are very useful. After the damn Egyptians dow me for no reason, I had my land forces stretched and didn't feel like expanding to that region of the world at all, so i blockaded all their ports. within 5 turns or so, they've stopped their expansion into Africa and at least 2 port cities are revolting. A few turns later they came begging for a ceasefire.

I really don't build ships much. The AI builds frickin zillions of them and I'm always at war with every damn country in the world at once so my navies are pretty disposable.


I basically put a ship or two in every port and only use them when I really want to transport myself somewhere. If I'm sending a big army a long distance across the sea I try and mass a bunch of good ships so I can make it across. I usually just let my ships die since they're a pain in the ass anyway.



What I find completely ridiculous is how many ships the AI builds. The Crazy award goes to Egypt, who built maybe 70 ships in their own little private lake that didn't border a single enemy faction. Great job, guys.

As the Greeks your trade is really important - so Naval dominance in the Aegean is equally so. Blockading the Roman ports nicely keeps them from doing anything out of the ordinary in the Adriatic or invade your provinces. I find the Scipii is the only Roman faction that showed much interest in invading by sea - which was pretty scary for a little while. At this point in the game I don't think anyone matches my naval supremacy. I don't stray too far out of the Aegean and any ships that come near to there or the Adriatic will be leaving sorely defeated from my 3 Gold Chevron bearing fleets.

However, I don't think that ships are that important to other factions that aren't really in need of a navy to unite their provinces.

On VH/VH building boats is suicidal. You can't fight the battles, so you just bleed tons of money this way. The AI is programmed to build masses of boats, so why fight it on its terms using autoresolve? Autoresolve is nutty and unfathomable. MTW's naval warfare made more sense...and that is really scarey.

I keep a few boats around just for moving armies or blockading ports for a turn if needed. I might even use them to remove a particular factions boats from the area. I use the approach of only building them when I have a strategic task. Other than that I don't build them.

I just thought of something simple since sometimes the game leads up to 20 naval battles a turn. Transport ships ca'nt attack but can be attacked. you can have an unlimited amount of transport ships it's just how much do you want to spend on upkeep.

You can have unlimited admirals but they have a high upkeep, the first one is free on upkeep and all others after that you pay the upkeep on. The A.I can easily be programmed to buy a second admiral at x amount of territories. You can only train a ship with an Admiral in the port but to compensate maybe you can train up to 3 ships at a time.

Plus since the comp pumps out ships like crazy my only solution is to pump them out too. Then once sea dominance is accomplished what happens to the poor A.I. they get completely blockaded at every single port. Now this could make it very costly to blockade all there ports and would definately fix the clutter in the water


How's that sound!!!!! Expansion pack of course!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!