Naval Combat Possible Solution

Many attempts have been made to increase the rate of ship sinkings in RTW. It seems that tweaking the ship statistics file does absolutely nothing as the data is not used. Likewise, decreasing the defense or increasing the attack of the soldiers on board does not seem to help very much.

After attacking the same Scipii bireme for the tenth time in an attempt to sink it, I noticed that out of five quinquiremes only the second ship actually took or caused any casualties. Obviously, only the second ship was actually engaging the enemy vessel. Now, when I break an enemy army on the battlemap, I get the option to continue or end the battle. Of course, I usually opt to continue and run them all down with my cavalry (always have 4-6 shock cavalry units in army, plus elephants, more if I'm Parthia). But if you defeat an enemy in autocalc, the battle is ended the moment all enemy units flee, letting the survivors run to fight another day. That's why it is comparatively difficult for an army to be completely destroyed through autocalc. Since naval combat right now is simply an autocalc between units of soldiers representing the various ships, I suspect what is happening is that the lone enemy ship is running almost at first contact, the way badly overmatched AI armies do on the battlefield.

Anyway, I increased the morale value of the various ships in units_desc to 30, hoping to keep them in the fight longer. Initial tests produced heavy casualties on both sides, but now all my ships have time to engage the enemy and the losing fleet is usually wiped out. Have not experimented with very big fleet battles (computer is not cooperating) or with large fleets trying to corner single ships. Testing continues.

This sounds interesting. I look forward to your results.

I second that. Naval battles really need to change in this game.

Any progress, dopp? :2thumbsup:

It works, sort of. Recommend increasing the morale of all naval units to 40 in the 'export_desc_unit' file. Interestingly enough, the original morale value for all the ships was 8, more than double that of normal troops and on par with stuff like legions.

Single ships will still try to escape when confronted with vastly superior forces, which means that only one ship in your pursuing squadron gets a 'free shot' engagement with it. However, the increased morale will keep the enemy vessel in the fight longer, resulting in more casualties. It used to take anywhere between four and six attacks on a lone ship to sink it. Now it's just two for biremes and triremes and up to three for quinquiremes, just one attack if you're a bit lucky. That's with a hunter fleet of five silver weapon/armor quinquiremes with three bronze chevrons each. More equal odds that do not trigger the 'automatic flee' response will sink the loser immediately.

At least now I don't have to worry so much about attacking a lone enemy ship, have it flee for the umpteenth time AROUND my fleet towards my capital and then blockade my main port the following turn. Now I hit them once when they leave port and once more if they get away and end up on my doorstep.

Excellent work mate, I'll try it out right away :bow:

I tried with a Quinquireme against a bireme with the bireme at morale 1 and morale 31. At 1 it lost 6 out of 60 ships, at 1 it was sunk. Unfortunately the first test I got splashed by pirates on the way there and so I only had a half-stack, so I'd like to hear other people's results.

According to the hardcoded thread, the morale limit appears to be 63. Try setting it to max and see what happens. Of course, you must start a new game to see the effects. Existing units from savegames will not have the increased morale values. Last night three quinquiremes from Egypt with 30 morale sank five out of twenty of my old morale 8 quinquiremes. And managed to get away. However, two subsequent attacks sank the stack, whereas before it would have taken at least four.

I've set the morale of all vessels to 40 now, and it seems to increase the toughness of each fight, as you've already pointed out, more casualties on each side and thus more realistic.
The enemy still bugger off quite fast (as far as the number of remaining enemy ships indicates, anyway) but it seems like the battles "last longer", if that can be said about auto-resolved battles.

I don't want every naval battle to be a back-against-the-wall, die hard battle with total annihilation of one side as the common result, but at least sinking a vessel or two in a battle would be nice.