Ships and Sea battles

[komninos]

Hi all,

I have long used the production files of CA and improved them to reflect what I am building (in this case HTW). The Unit production file is almost finished for the units and I think it can reflect many fighting ways and units.

My constant problem is ship stat calculation.
Ships have
crew - the number of men they carry (this is not always a decisive factor)
marines - fighting crew part of the original crew they should carry an upgraded value i.e.
crew_attack=((crew-marines)+1.2*marines)/crew
this will give 20% significant to marines
Weight
Shape_factor - length/width actually weight and shape factor can give us a good estimate of drag in the water
Power_type - oars or sale
Attack_type - Boarding, Arrows, catapults, ramming, cannons
Openness - closed deck or open deck (crew vulnerability)
....

From these we have to calculate the four factors the MTW engine uses (speed, defence, attack and range)
Any Ideas on this
I will work on this and try to keep you posted.

[Norseman]

Quote[/b] ]
From these we have to calculate the four factors the MTW engine uses (speed, defence, attack and range)
Any Ideas on this

Are you sure? IIRC you can set the values for speed defence, attack and range somewhere in the file UNIT_PROD.txt. I don't think they are calculated by using other values...
I'll find out when I come home.

[Norseman]

If you look in UNIT_PROD.txt on for exemple the Barque, you will find that one of its entries look like this:
"1,1,2,3,0, barque sunk message"

*The first value(1) is range on one turn
*The second value(1) is attack
*The third value(2) is defence
*The fourth value(3) is speed
*The fifth value(0) I don't know. It is set to 0 for all ship types so I don't think it's used.

[komninos]

Well yes,

This is the easy way BUT I would like to calculate it in a unified manner that I can build any ship by putting values on a matrix and I get these values as an output.

The difference with what you say is that this way you get a much more balanced result. Also any ship type inserted will not unbalance the mod or the game since the end result will give also the cost of it and the time-to-build

[komninos]

Hi all till now I have ended up with three areas

1. Ship Data
- Estimated Weight Empty
- Width
- Length
- Num of bottom row Oars
- Num of top row Oars
- Sails
- Large Sails

The bottom row oars giv less power than the ones on a higher level ... why I don't know but in Type 2 birems they deleted this specific row.
Sails give some more power - used also by oar powered ships
Large sails only for the age of sails.

2. Other features
- Deck
- Armour
- Towers
- Boarding
- Greek fire capable

-The top deck protects those at the oars from arrow fire
-Armour placed at the sides (viking ships used the shields)
-Existence of Towers like in Roman ships give better attack to archers
-Special boarding technics like the ones used by Romans, it adds to the marrines
-Greek fire capable adds to the catapults values

3. Weapons
- Crew
- Marines
- Archers
- Ram
- Flat Trajectory Catapult
- High Trajectory Catapult
- Small cannons
- Large Cannons

- Crew are the seamen not much for them in battle
- Marines are combat troops on the ship they get bonus in special Boarding exists I will try to combine it with ready-made units.
- Ram is very effective weapon its ability is multiplied by speed and agility factor
- Flat and high Trajectory Catapults are what they say but I would expect the ships that have them to be heavy ones
- Small and Large Cannons well exactly that.
These last four should have a number and an effectiveness factor that would give the attack and the defence values and also combined with the agility factor.

Any ideas / comments