Community call to arms: Naval guide

[Nelson]

I haven't done a lot of naval battles but the lowly gun boat does seem to have it's uses even when it's facing far superior ships.
With it's decent speed and it's forward facing gun it can fill in the role that light cavalry does on land. Harrass and chase off routers for a very low cost.

Especially the chasing off routers seems to be a role that needs filling. Ships seems to rout relatively fast but rally easily when out off combat for a little while. Keeping bigger ships from reentering combat with a dirt cheap vessel seems a very cost effective tactic.

Yep. Sometimes you just need a ship to ferry troops or agents around or to block a choke point/crossing. Gunboats fill the bill.

[Sp4]

Torpedo boats are fun. They ships themselves die as soon as anything looks at them, the torpedoes are really slow, so you need to either be close or box in a ship to hit them.

One thing I tried with some success:

Send of a small fast ship (gun ship for example) after a big target (so it is behind the target and out of the way of its guns), all while the target is busy shooting one of your big heavy ships (ideally =P ). Get your torp boat closer and when you feel comfortable, tell your gun ship to board the target. The target will sit still for 20-30 seconds, no matter what happens, so happy torpedoing =D

2 Torpedoes that hit at the same time turn the Warrior into a ton of rapidly sinking scrap metal btw. (I tested this in custom battle, no idea how campaign difficulty affects this).

-E- One more thing... do not fire torpedoes into a bunch of ships that includes your own ones =p I didn't make any painful mistakes myself but I had one of my ships board an enemy ship and started losing the boarding, so I turned one torp boat to launch a torp that way while I still could but my own ship was between the torp boat and the actual target.... No matter.. my ship is going to surrender anyways >:D So the 2 torps slam into my surrendering ship that is right next to the enemy ship, blow up in an epic explosion and the last thing I saw of the enemy ship was a load of blood splattering out of the smoke from the explosion of my own ship XD

The enemy ship surrendered with 4 our of originally 70 some people left. Bit expensive for a naval shrapnel bomb but hey, it works really well. =p

Torpedoes have a potential to cause a lot of pain if stuff ever gets disorganised.