Naval blockades

[artavazd]

will naval blockades weaken the enemy in EB, or does the scripted income to the AI make the strategy of naval blockades useless?

[Duguntz]

one word : useless... no, two... Completly useless. But if you're filthy rich and wanna loose some treasury, build a invincible navy and go hunt the pirates in the baltic sea... you'll have plenty of stacks of 10 + ships to destroy! that's the only use of your ships : draining your coffer (well, appart of shipping your troops and preventing an eventual (and VERY eventual) naval invasion by the AI)

Well, of corse, that's my humble opinion!

cheers!

[Epimetheus]

Actually, in my experience, conducting naval blockades and exercises actually encourages the AI to build their own fleets and launch naval invasions. I remember one game I had a long time ago as Carthage. I was rolling in dough, and at war with Rome, so I decided to build fleets and blockade ever port in Italy. To my surprise, espescially given that this was and this was with RTW.exe, the Romans countered by building massive fleets within the blockades, and annihilating my many quarter-stack fleets, and launching (albeit somewhat weak) invasions of Corsica and Sardinia, and Africa.

[Cute Wolf]

and don't forget, EB navies are.... bunch of expensive woods floating on water without any use than lose to command raised AI admirals, unless using auto_win
I actually have tweaked the navies so they would be much balanced and cheap.... but take longer to build, that way, naval invasions goes better without the AI spamming navies

[Zarax]

Unfortunately it's more an engine fault than a mod one.
In order to make blockades remotely useful you'd need to rebuild the economic system from the ground by massively nerfing land trade while making sure there is still enough money to recruit armies.
Once that is done the other problem is how to balance the script to properly compensate but it's relatively simple as it mostly requires testing.

[Titus Marcellus Scato]

Actually, in my experience, conducting naval blockades and exercises actually encourages the AI to build their own fleets and launch naval invasions. I remember one game I had a long time ago as Carthage. I was rolling in dough, and at war with Rome, so I decided to build fleets and blockade ever port in Italy. To my surprise, espescially given that this was and this was with RTW.exe, the Romans countered by building massive fleets within the blockades, and annihilating my many quarter-stack fleets, and launching (albeit somewhat weak) invasions of Corsica and Sardinia, and Africa.

Wow! That's great to know. So if you have a rich AI opponent, you can make them waste money building fleets of their own to counter yours. All you need are single small, light ships to do the blockading.