naval battles?

[Pedro]

hi just i wanna know if there is gonna a be any of naval battle? becuase in mtw2 you cant fight naval battles but in the empire total war you can, so the eBIII in empire total war would have naval battles? or what? and if you need some help wiht ships you call me ! its an honor to help in the EB i like the historical games not the fantasy units!

[Omegoa]

If I recall correctly, the team is not planning on making an EBIII -- but I'd love to see triremes duking it out on the Mediterranean! Alas, the limitation of the M2:TW engine . . .

[Pedro]

yeeahhh would be awesomee!!!!!!!!!!!!! i think they should try to do the eb III its the last wish !!! y reallly enjoy the idea of fight with triremes and see the roman army boarding other ships or see the greeks ship throwing fired arrows OMG !!!! that make the naval battle intersting and make sence recruit ships beacuse in the rtw and mtw2 the ships are only for carring people! it makes boring and useless the navy!!

[TheLastDays]

Well, since the team has alread said, they aren't making an EB for Empires it will probably not happen...

And, since naval warfare in the EB timeframe was very different from naval warfare in the 17th century, I doubt it would be easy to portray it correctly within Empire's naval battle engine...

[fomalhaut]

lots of ramming, boarding, fighting

I always wanted Marine Hoplites as a special unit, but is that like asking for flaming pigs?

[TheLastDays]

Yep and iirc the Empire Engine doesn't include ramming...

[Rahwana]

well, if they decide to make EB on Empire's hard-coded all world map, that indirectly means there must be some researches on America, well, India and Central asia is allready covered by some mods and can be used easily, but it's crazy prospect to see America delibrately skipped and you'll get invaded by USA army fight with muskets when you're playing as Romans

[TheLastDays]

Yeah which is probably why they said that because Empire can't really be modded, they won't use that enigen for an EB project

[fomalhaut]

Empire is a pretty crap engine though, i wouldn't want EB on it. There are no significant graphical differences between it and MTWII, but the resources necessary to run it are exponentially greater. I can run Medieval II perfectly but Empire stutters far too much. Empire sucks as a game anyway : P

and i don't quite understand CA's fixation with limiting the longetivity of their products through super hardcoding every aspect of their games. RTW has lasted for a decade because of mods, Empire kind of fizzled before it even came out

[TheLastDays]

I am with you on this... the great modability of RTW and M2TW is what made these games so enjoyable, on top of that even vanilla they were decent... Kinda like The Elder Scrolls Series...
Now limiting modability by hardcoding everything is definitely not a step to make games last longer, although, probably, if you want to sell your newest title, making your last one last longer might not even be the best idea, from a marketing point of view...

Anyway this is going off topic at fast rate ;) - let's conclude that, because Empire sucks, EB will have no naval battles ;)

[fomalhaut]

Yes certainly absolutely, hey i agree, with you on that one, no disagreeing here, etc.

how decisive were naval battles anyway? seems most navies were used for transporting and many just get destroyed by storms (Athens v Syracuse, Xerxes v Athens)

[bobbin]

Empire is actually the most "open" game they have made, it just that working everything out has proven so difficult that mods are limited to basic changes.

Poor ETW modding = No EBIII = No naval battles

[Ca Putt]

what about Shogon 2? I'm not suggesting here, I'm just curious how moddable it is ;)

[TheLastDays]

That's something I was curious about too ;) - since I have no idea about modding I don't know though

And thanks for the clarification bobbin

[bobbin]

Shogun 2 basically uses the same engine as Empire, so the same applies for it too.

[moonburn]

so what you´re saying bobbin is that once modders get the hang of empire and they start sharing the knowledge it´s doable ? maybe a transcript from mtw2 eb2 into shogun 2 can be done authomatically

anyway alot of people here are talking crap about hardcoding i love eb as much as everyone else but if you don´t hardcode the time it takes for a game to load and the turns to pass make the game unplayable for the teenager generation the creative assembly are trying to get

furthermore a proper maketing strategy is based on making the consumers faightfull to that product what you people are calling marketing is just dumb short term capitalization that a few companies make when they think they´re going under

[TheLastDays]

Sure I'm not saying that hardcoding is bad in general, I just thought, that the hardcoded features were increased from the RTW/MTW Enginge to the Empires Engine, which was just what I have read out of other people's post as I myself, as stated before, have no clue about modding. So that point of view is not applicable anymore, since bobbin has already corrected us when he stated that in fact Empires is more "open" than previous games but from my old point of view I was questioning the decisions to "lock" more features of a game that comes out of a series with a thriving modding community that made the previous games so much fun ;)

And my uneducated guess would be, that you can't just transcript eb2 from m2tw to shogun 2 as the engines are different... and there are features, like naval battles, the subject of this thread, that would have to be developed from the start for EB...

[bobbin]

There is not a chance in hell that EBII could be ported to S2 automatically, it has a different engine and even the basic format of simple files is completely new.

This is not even taking into account the many differences in gameplay mechanics between the M2TW and S2 engines which would render vast parts of the mod unusable.

[General Aetius]

fomalhaut

Re: naval battles?

how decisive were naval battles anyway? seems most navies were used for transporting and many just get destroyed by storms (Athens v Syracuse, Xerxes v Athens)

Like land battles some naval battles were complete slaughters while others not so decisive:

Salamis-
Greeks- 300-500 (378 Herodotus) ships. around 40 ships destroyed.
Persians- 500-800 ships. 200-300 ships captured or destroyed. Estimate 40,000 Persians killed.

Aegospotami-
Spartans- 180-200 ships, unknown but minimal losses.
Athenians- 170-200 ships, 150-190 ships captured or destroyed. 3000 Athenian prisoners
were also executed

Drepana-
Romans- 120-130, 93 ships lost, 8000 killed 20,000 captured.
Carthaginians- 120-130, minimal losses.

Ecnomus-
Romans- 330 ships, 24 ships sunk
Carthaginians- 350 ships, 30 ships sunk and 64 captured.

"seems most navies were used for transporting.."

Most of the above battles were fought with dedicated warships. Many early Athenian triremes were without decks and thus pretty useless as transports especially with most of the hull occupied by the 170-174 oarsmen. The Greeks used Special triremes(Stratiotis, Hoplitagogos and Hippagogos) as transports. Because of their different designs and crews they were not considered "fast triremes" (combat triremes) and thus not generally used in battles. Hippagogos , horse transports, were old triremes rowed by 60 oarsmen. Some (Lionel Casson, H. Wallinga) have suggested that of the 1,000 ships Aeschylus (Persians, 341-43) says Xerxes had, only those that were "arrogant for their speed" were fully crewed combat ships (The other 800 been manned by reserves and skeleton crews).

However later ships of the Hellenistic Age (polyremes- "fours", "fives", "sixes" and bigger) could accommodate many more soldiers, some carrying whole regiments:Explaining why Hellenistic fleets were used as transports as well as warships. But even with the advent of larger warships auxiliary ships (using both sails and oars) continued to be used as transports for many non-marines and land units.

General Aetius