Navy preferences?

[vodkafire]

How do you build your navies? Masses of biremes from everywhere or corvus quinqueremes from your major cities? I've been going the latter route and found out there are some advantages and disadvantages:
Advantages:
-Easy to keep fleet together, never lost a battle w/ 3-4 quinqereme fleets.
-Virtually unsinkable, so less fleets required = less support cost.
Disadvantages:
-Can only be retrained in your major cities! Very annoying to move fleet 5 turns just to be repaired, not a problem in the Med. but in the Atlantic and English Channel it is a pain in the ass, so I keep mostly biremes there.
-Takes 3(or 2? forgot) turns to build, also very annoying.

My tactics are to keep "ferry" navies on major areas I may transport troops to and fro(i.e. one in sicily, one on east coast Italy, one west coast, one in gibraltar, one in Aegean, one in Carthage)+ 2 "blockade" fleets i use to send to the ports of whatever factions i war with, each fleet is either 4 Triremes, 5 biremes, or 3 quinqueremes, most dead ships I've been replacing w/ quinquremes.

Share your naval strategies. Do you have masses of biremes scattered all over the place? do you have 10+ ships parked in the central med?

[Somebody Else]

One bireme to complete short hops across the sea if necessary,. If the sea journey requires more than one turn, go by land - there'll be a closer province to take, without the risk of a naval engagement. Otherwise, I let the AI have free reign over the seas. Not going to do it much good when I've stormed all it's cities.

Only need them for Brittania, Crete, Palma, Sicily, Rhodes, Cyprus. And possibly to cross the Straits of Gibralter and the Adriatic. Otherwise, who needs em?

[Lord_Winter]

Use them a lot....

Usually mixes of triermes (sp?) and quinqueremes since they are quiet easy to build and my strategy which is oportunism requires me to have a strong navy since otherwise new opportunities might be missed...usually I have two types of navies small ferry fleets of one or two ships which ferry troops in steps from land to land...and full stack battle fleets which circles around my sphere of power sinking anything hostile...

[troymclure]

hardly build ships really. I do the large fleets of quinqueremes once i get the tech but i've never pursued naval dominance, I normally keep a few ships in most cities ports though, their used for ferrying short distances with the occasional fleet of quinqueremes to guard armies on the move or maybe attack a few other civs smaller fleets. For the most part though i avoid naval combat just making sure i at least have some options in that area though.
Anyone actually controlled the seas yet? was it worth it?

[Sinner]

Since I've only played Julii so far I don't have access to the Corvus Quinquireme or Decere, else I'd use them, instead I use Quinquiremes plus whatever Biremes and Triremes that I have left over from the early years.

I prefer to group my Quinquiremes in squadrons of four ships, finding that this gives enough combat strength against most enemy fleets. If I come across a large enemy fleet, too much for one squadron to handle, then I bring in 3 or 4 of them, surrounding the enemy before attacking with the last squadron; the other squadrons get dragged in as reinforcements, giving me the firepower I need.

My Quinquireme squadrons are also used to transport my main combat armies and any worthwhile family members that're travelling alone - I don't like to risk such important units.

To avoid the need to pull entire squadrons off-station to retrain after a few battles, I transfer men among the ships so that all but one are at full strength, and then send only that one to be replenished. Sometimes that ship will merge with other squadrons en-route, either to transfer men to them, or to pick up other ships due for replenishment so that they get the safety of numbers as they travel back to base. When up against a navy-heavy enemy, I sometimes oversize a 'flagship' squadron, adding a couple of extra ships as spares to keep nearby squadrons continuously at full strength.

My older Biremes and Triremes usually get used as scouts, lurking near enemy and neutral coastal cities and ports, and as couriers for agents, the occasional reinforcement unit and the low quality family members that I use for building watchtowers, etc.

[Prodigal]

Other than prologue I've not played a Roman factoin to benefit from the later ship advances, however the tatic I've employed very sucessfully to date is a mixed combo of bireme & trireme core.

In the early stages the biremes spread out individually from the core fleet (to around half their max distance), so as to maximise the sea area you can see, when any enemy shipping moves into this area I can close the individual biremes on the enemy then attack with the core triremes, so you have the entire fleet attacking at once. Then make good any ship losses by drag-n-dropping damaged fleets onto one another so you still have a full complement while sending the damaged fleet back to retrain.

As Carthage this has stopped the Romans ever landing an invasion force in North Africa.

Another advantage of this is that you very soon have a fleet with very high experience, as drag & drop seems to bump up the fleets overall xp.

One major town upgrades the armoury & you can then produce small fleets that can be retrained to gain max armour, & as your area of influence increases you can have fleets in the different area's that you want to control, using the same "spread" tactic.

This allows you to use 1 bireme to blocade while having the bulk of your fleet on the look out for a potential threat, that can group quickly when required.