Naval Battles: What could work better in the demo

[Fisherking]

The Naval battles seem to have a few issues I have not seen brought up.

There is no command for a turn about. This is important when ships have taken damage to only one side and turning the whole line back on its self is slow and cumbersome…not to mention masking fires and even the needless loss of ships.

The ships seem to have some path finding issues. I have seen the ships try limited maneuver to avoid striking but usually it is too little too late. Many of the collisions could be avoided if it were slightly better. Once they have collided the best thing to do is stop the ship and try to turn it. Sometimes they are fouled or stuck and one ship or the other has to sink to get underway.

Reclicking or double clicking the line ahead does not reposition ships in that formation. It usually results in chaos with ships going every which way. It usually straightens out when you give a group move in a particular direction but the movement arrow could start from some unexpected location and leading ships may turn around to go back, resulting in casualties or the loss of ships.

The attack ship order results in some strange positioning and is not very effective.

This is only meant as constructive criticism and not an attempt to trash a very enjoyable part of the game. It could just use a bit of fine tuning.


As skill lever improves players can avoid some of these pit falls but I also think that they should be pointed out to the developers.


What have the rest of you found?

[Beskar]

There is no command for a turn about. This is important when ships have taken damage to only one side and turning the whole line back on its self is slow and cumbersome…not to mention masking fires and even the needless loss of ships.

There is. The turn buttons on the UI.

[Dogfish]

I agree with a lot of that.

Also, I may just be missing something, but it would also seem that when you've moving a group the +/- on the sails button is inactive?

And I would've prefered if they would've made it realistic where you can't sail into the wind. They could've maybe done auto-tacking handled by the AI when the player moves the ships upwind.

[Fondor_Yards]

And I would've prefered if they would've made it realistic where you can't sail into the wind. They could've maybe done auto-tacking handled by the AI when the player moves the ships upwind.

They used to have that, but their testers said it was too confusing for new people to have their ships start moving in a different direction then they said.

[Fisherking]

There is. The turn buttons on the UI.

A Turn About Maneuver is one in which the entire fleet executes a 180° turn and proceeds in the opposite direction.


If each ship is turned individually they will reverse, that is true. But it is not the same as reversing the sailing order of the fleet.

The flagship still wants to lead and you have a jumbled mess. There are work-around but it is something that should be a quick smooth command that is easy to execute and not something that you have to do individually breaking out of a group and reforming.

I won’t say it isn’t in the game before I get the manual and read up on it, but it has not been anything I have been able to discover.

[Polemists]

Boarding...in my view could be quicker or better implemented.

As it stands, I click on a ship, my ship then takes the long route. Then when it pulls up, there are about 3 or 4 salvos before our ships ever actually get together to board.

I don't know about you, but 1-2 salvos is enough to make a ship consider surrender, so the fact you can fire once, twice or four times before actually getting to boarding seems silly to me. It may be realistic, but it eliminates boarding as any kind of viable option.

Just my two cents.

[Sir Beane]

Boarding...in my view could be quicker or better implemented.

As it stands, I click on a ship, my ship then takes the long route. Then when it pulls up, there are about 3 or 4 salvos before our ships ever actually get together to board.

I don't know about you, but 1-2 salvos is enough to make a ship consider surrender, so the fact you can fire once, twice or four times before actually getting to boarding seems silly to me. It may be realistic, but it eliminates boarding as any kind of viable option.

Just my two cents.

It's not even that realistic. Many ships wouldn't have risked a point blank barrage into a ship that close to it in case they blew it up, set it on fire, or dropped one of its masts onto themselves. If that many salvos could be fired before boarding then pirates would have had a much harder time of it. Hopefully it goes faster in the proper game .

[Polemists]

I hope so to,

Though judging by the screens I saw of the last superior tactics video, they still got a shot in edge wise.

Though that had to be by far the worse video of naval tactics I have ever seen.

"Today we are going to show you boarding"

*5-6 minutes of battle*

"Now I pull my ship around, over go the hooks"

"Now I rake a shot of grapeshot across his bow"

"and........Victory"

What happened to the boarding? :P

[Tsavong]

I find the Naval battle on the demo quite diffract from the land battle, which is probably true in real life I doubt many generals from the 1700s could be put on a ship and sail it to glory. Which is probably a problem France had in the 1800s if we assume some the officers were royalists.

I find the best strategy early on is to sail in a line past the 1st French fleet then stop the fleet when I'm in a position to cross the T of the 2nd fleet which allows most/all of my ships to fire into the disorganised mess of French ships. After that I then have to move the ships around 1 at a time to react to the damage they take and to where the AI sends it ships.

The sea battles are much batter then the ones in Imperial Glory. I like that in ETW you can put your ships on fire at will in a large fleet but in a small say single ship action you could get in and micro a bit hopefully it will be fun in the full game.

[Zenicetus]

I find the best strategy early on is to sail in a line past the 1st French fleet then stop the fleet when I'm in a position to cross the T of the 2nd fleet which allows most/all of my ships to fire into the disorganised mess of French ships. After that I then have to move the ships around 1 at a time to react to the damage they take and to where the AI sends it ships.

The mind boggles... you can just stop your ships at will, in the middle of the ocean.

That isn't a tactic, it's an exploit of a silly arcade game design. I'm still holding out a remote hope that the actual naval battles in the game will be something different from what we're seeing in the demo. If not, this game had better include an auto-calc'd sea battle that doesn't penalize the player for bypassing sea battles, in order to enjoy the rest of the game.

[Fisherking]

Zenicetus, you seem to have some knowledge of naval tactics.

Other than the sailing into the wind part, what recommendations do you have regarding the sea battles?

Are there other fleet maneuvers that have been overlooked?

[Tsavong]

From what I know of naval battles of this time the two sides would line there ships up and sail past each other shooting there guns. There was the tactic of braking the line which Nelson employed at Trafalgar I believe it works by cutting the line isolating some ships down wind of the others allowing the attacker not to fight the whole enemy fleet at once. It also lets the attacking ships fire into the bow and stern of enemy ships as it passes though the line. The downside is your lead ship or ships has to endure the fire-power of the enemy fleet as you close in with only your bow guns shooting back.

You can try this in the demo if you just leave your Royal Navy fleet alone and let it sale on at the French and it dose work well you just have to react right after you pass the French fleet. It is quite nice to see the 100 gun flagship fireing at close range into the two smaller French ships on each side.

The Royal Navy web sight dose have some info on battles in the age of sail

http://www.royalnavy.mod.uk/server/show/nav.3926

[bscssc]

Boarding action does take a long time, although it might help campaign balance. If capturing were easy, one could simply steal a large navy early on.
I agree that the ability to stop is ridiculous, and that reaches should make more of a difference. I would certainly be interested in mods that address those issues.

As for tactics, I've had success forming a line astern, turning off fire at will, sailing past the first French line, and manually having everyone open up on their admiral. He shouldn't be hiding 3 or 4 ships back, that coward.

[Fisherking]

The thing about boarding that bugs me is that you can’t send a second ship to help. It will not allow it.

You can disengage from the boarding action and send a different ship but it is complicated and takes time. Also ships have to be beam on to fight a boarding action, if they accidentally ram you can’t then order your ship to board…

[Zenicetus]

Zenicetus, you seem to have some knowledge of naval tactics.

Other than the sailing into the wind part, what recommendations do you have regarding the sea battles?

Are there other fleet maneuvers that have been overlooked?

Well see, that's the problem.... anything I know about naval tactics and real-world sailing (and I've never sailed a ship "in anger" other than water balloon fights)... is basically useless in the current game engine. Apparently there is no tactical advantage to the weather gage (attacking upwind from the enemy), and you can't force the enemy into disadvantaged positions because they can steer and move in any directions. That results in a chaotic "anything goes" battle, where you might as well just use game exploits like that anchoring trick. Why bother trying to learn real naval tactics when the game doesn't support it?

From what I know of naval battles of this time the two sides would line there ships up and sail past each other shooting there guns. There was the tactic of braking the line which Nelson employed at Trafalgar I believe it works by cutting the line isolating some ships up wind of the others allowing the attacker not to fight the whole enemy fleet at once.

And see, this is what I mean. Take a look at this tactical map of Nelson's famous "breaking the line" maneuver at Trafalgar:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikiped...gar_1200hr.svg

The wind direction isn't indicated here, but it's blowing from the northwest. Nelson wanted to avoid the kind of indecisive battle that resulted from ships passing each other in parallel lines (wind abeam). He wanted a dust-up in close quarters where the enemy couldn't escape. So what did he do? He used his weather gage advantage to approach from a roughly upwind direction, which forced the enemy fleet to either remain in a line (because they couldn't turn towards him) or flee the battle. The enemy battle line doesn't have the option of an envelopment, with the lead ships and tailing ships turning to the left and trapping Nelson's fleet in the middle. They can't do that, because they'd be sailing directly into the wind! They would be forced to come about (move their bow across the wind) which is a dangerous maneuver in battle because you lose forward speed and you're an easier target for cannon fire. That's why Nelson was able to break the line and force close-quarters combat on his terms. The enemy fleet was forced, by the wind, to remain in that fixed line of battle.

By the same token, Nelson's tactic here would not have worked if he had approached the enemy battle line from the right side of that map. Then the enemy fleet would have the weather gage, and Nelson's only options would be to form another parallel battle line for a traditional battle, or flee the scene (being downwind is an advantage if you want to cut and run). The wind determines the available tactics, period.

None of this would work in the current game engine. The AI will just point upwind whenever it wants to, in order to get its cannons on the targeted ships. So what you get is just a chaotic hodge-podge of a battle with no structure imposed by conditions. It's exactly like having a land battle where there is no tactical advantage to being on high ground. Land battle enthusiasts would howl in protest, if CA modeled land battles without that feature.

[bscssc]

I'd like to think that if they removed weather gage to make it simpler, that one might be able to mod it back in. Somebody smarter than me will have to work on that.

[Zenicetus]

It might be possible to mod the weather gage and enforced taking back in, since they apparently started with a more realistic model. But it would just be a massive player exploit, if the AI can't handle it. I don't know if that can be modded. I guess we'll see. Maybe the final game will be different from the demo, but from CA's posts on this, it seems this is the direction they wanted to go.

Right now I'm mostly interested in finding out whether there is a penalty in the campaign game for bypassing (auto-calculting) the sea battles, so they can be approached on a purely strategic level like the earlier TW games.

[A Very Super Market]

Auto-calc usually results in a lot of the enemy getting away...

[Calmarac]

@ Zenicetus - very nice explanation of the tactics at Trafalgar, and how they were dictated by the wind factor.

There are a couple of good accounts here and here

This animated map of Trafalgar is quite good fun too.

[Tsavong]

Oops i maide an error in my post i said isolate up wind not down lol

[Elmar Bijlsma]

I was somewhat surprised that a fleet in Line Astern isn't capable of changing to line abreast in one smooth move.

What happens is:
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becomes:
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while I would think would be more desirable to have the following happen:

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become:
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the latter is much faster to execute.