Storms at Sea

[Red Harvest]

I've been reading a bit more about war at Sea during the Punic Wars. Storms were more "decisive" than the naval battles. Rome lost several large fleets to storms in the first Punic war, despite being very successful in actual naval combat. The Carthaginians fared better weather wise because they were more experienced with weather at sea.

Boats in port were generally protected. Wouldn't it be nice if all those lovely stacks all over the water were subject to frequent destruction by storms? It would be nice if there were something to encourage boats to stay in safe waters except when launching some sort of attack or defense. A mission based approach to naval warfare would be interesting. The AI would have to be programmed to work with a new system.

In battle or storms losses should primarily be loss of the boat, not just fractions of the crew.

Additionally, it should be much more challenging to move armies by sea. 1 unit of infantry per boat (actually they would probably be towed) and probably 2 boats (or 3) per cav unit. Cav was logistically difficult to transport by sea.

Blockades would be more challenging if it took some number of boats to conduct them and depended on port level etc...not just a single unit. With that the AI would need to get instructions to actually use those fleets.

And the grouping of admirals bug would need to be addressed as well.

Oh well, fun to dream...

[ghostcamel]

Hey i read somewhere on this or another site that you can increase the frequency of storms. Ive tried to search for it but cant find it.

Anybody know the secret?

[Siris]

A rain dance! You know, go outside, your back yard, and dance around an open fire! That could help... mabye... I'll have to get back to you on that one.

[Khorak]

A rain dance! You know, go outside, your back yard, and dance around an open fire! That could help... mabye... I'll have to get back to you on that one.

And Spartans are all trained dancers too! What a coincidence!

[Red Harvest]

Hey i read somewhere on this or another site that you can increase the frequency of storms. Ive tried to search for it but cant find it.

Anybody know the secret?

On the strategic map or tactical? On the tactical map for cities in the northern half there is precipitation partway through nearly every battle, regardless of starting weather. Only in very short battles do I not note the transition (there is a very short pause when the weather changes.) It's MTW's weather all over again.

If there is a separate trigger for weather on the strategic map that could be very useful.

[Es Arkajae]

Bah, I'm peeved that I wasn't warned that storms affected land aswell.

Lost half an army to damned flash flooding in Thrace when a storm popped up right on the coast, talk about miserable luck.

But yeah storms do seem to be very infrequent.

[Satyr]

I got a fleet crushed by a storm on my very first game and thought they were SO cool. Haven't even seen one since and that includes about 6 more games! Too bad, I really liked them.

[Es Arkajae]

They do indeed look cool.

[*Ringo*]

Bah, I'm peeved that I wasn't warned that storms affected land aswell.

Lost half an army to damned flash flooding in Thrace when a storm popped up right on the coast, talk about miserable luck.

But yeah storms do seem to be very infrequent.

OMG, this happens? I've never seen anything like that!

Mind you, i've only seen a couple of storms anyway. Guess the sun likes shining on me!

*Ringo*

[Alexandr III. Biges]

I've been reading a bit more about war at Sea during the Punic Wars. Storms were more "decisive" than the naval battles. Rome lost several large fleets to storms in the first Punic war, despite being very successful in actual naval combat. The Carthaginians fared better weather wise because they were more experienced with weather at sea.

Boats in port were generally protected. Wouldn't it be nice if all those lovely stacks all over the water were subject to frequent destruction by storms? It would be nice if there were something to encourage boats to stay in safe waters except when launching some sort of attack or defense. A mission based approach to naval warfare would be interesting. The AI would have to be programmed to work with a new system.

In battle or storms losses should primarily be loss of the boat, not just fractions of the crew.

Additionally, it should be much more challenging to move armies by sea. 1 unit of infantry per boat (actually they would probably be towed) and probably 2 boats (or 3) per cav unit. Cav was logistically difficult to transport by sea.

Blockades would be more challenging if it took some number of boats to conduct them and depended on port level etc...not just a single unit. With that the AI would need to get instructions to actually use those fleets.

And the grouping of admirals bug would need to be addressed as well.

Oh well, fun to dream...

You are certainly right, however, would it be as it was in real history conditions, the factor of random occurance of storms would be too strong and decisive. Games are designed to be won by wits, not a randomize function :)) (To some degree)

[Red Harvest]

You are certainly right, however, would it be as it was in real history conditions, the factor of random occurance of storms would be too strong and decisive. Games are designed to be won by wits, not a randomize function :)) (To some degree)

True to some extent, but as you will note, historically the better sailors avoided getting caught in the storms. So admiral/crew quality could impact whether or not losses are incurred. Weak crews would be more likely to lose their boats, and weak admirals would be more likely to be caught in a storm.

Randomization is good when historically representative, esp. when you still have some chance of influencing it through proper tactics/strategy.

Right now there are insane numbers of boats in the water doing very little. Being put to sea should carry quite a bit of risk.

It would be interesting to see the boats staying in port except to conduct missions. Blockades would bet more challenging! Fleets presently have little purpose. I conduct all my senate missions and invasions with a grand total of four boats (in two fleets)...and I really don't need two of the boats, they are just overkill. I finished my Julii without failing at a single senate mission, and in most cases succeeded on the 2nd turn after it was assigned. Repeating sequence: blockade some Carthaginian fleet, blockade one of Gaul's ports, sieze the port's settlement.

I've still never seen a storm on the strategic map.

[Red Harvest]

I found the descr_disasters.txt file for the campaign. Anyone know which way the storm index works? Does frequency increase if the value is higher, or lower?

Interesting that the only disaster I've ever seen in all my many campaigns is the volcano... It has the highest value (50), I guess I'll try higher values for storms. Wonder what the "horde" at sea is?

[Red Harvest]

Ok, I've tried changing the "frequency" of storms "at sea" from 4 (original) to 0.01, to 100 and 1. None of them have produced a single storm in 10 year (20 turn) tests wth Carthage where I built up a ~20 boats and spread them around the western and central med. I haven't tried negative values or zero...yet.

I also tried adding a copy of the file into the imperical campaign folder (where it was absent) and editing it from there.

Conclusion: the feature is badly broken.

[ghostcamel]

Nice work findding the .txt file for it at least. Closest i found was the climate series. Disasters...go figure

[Kraxis]

The Carthaginians fared better weather wise because they were more experienced with weather at sea.

Possibly, but the real reason behind the Roman losses in storms was the Corvus. It was heavy, making the ship topheavy and thus very unseaworthy. Not a good thing in storms. Besides, the Romans being landlubbers and all didn't trust the sea all that much so they often sailed in close formation, not good when a storm comes by.
But I doubt the Carthies did better because they were better sailors. At the time of the storms the Carthies had suffered horrendous losses at sea. Basically all their experienced crews had died or been captured.

[Red Harvest]

Kraxis,

In the 1st Roman storm disaster the corvus most likely was a prominent component (live by the corvus, drown by the corvus...or something like that.)
Goldsworthy suggests the 2nd Roman storm disaster happened with quinquiremes that lacked the corvus. As an example he turns to the naval battle of Drepana that preceeded the 2nd disaster. The Carthaginians out sailed the Romans under Claudius and effectively rammed and sank the boats. They probably wouldn't have been employed so aggressively if the corvus was still in use.

In the 2nd storm off Cape Pachynus, the Carthaginians under Carthalo saw the storm brewing and withdrew to safety, while the Romans stayed close to shore and lost their entire fleet. The Romans did not want to engage with their 120 ships since they were escorting 800 transports.

[Red Harvest]

therother,

I'm going to try making storms possible in both summer and winter as that showed. However, I think there is something else that is the trigger. In fact I suspect their mgiht be a switch in some file...or it could be the map mod.


Not sure on the effect of the boat build times on armies yet. The fleets are much more reasonable! I did several other changes at the same time: using the suggested modified strategic AI faction traits, fixing the "heat" errors, deleting "hardy, very_hardy" altogether since they work in reverse. I also deleted the Roman ships to give the Carthaginians a more historical chance at fighting like they would have in the 1st Punic War. Taking all the Roman boats out of the water at the start helped. This kept the Julii and Scipii from attacking Carthage in the first few turns (which would not have been possible since they lacked a navy when war began.) Carthage had sea mastery, just as it should at the time preceding the 1st Punic war. Plus I set the Julii to be at war with Gaul, and Carthage, Numidia, and Spain to start out allied. (Yes, they probably should be having a low level conflict with Spain/Numidia during the time of the 1st Punic War, but with 4 Roman factions and Gaul to contend with as well, Carthage just gets overwhelmed if it is left with no allies.)

I played this modification as Scipii for a few hours. Carthage is only getting hammered because the Senate keeps ordering me to take their cities (and I'm not using 1 boat per army unit for transport as I should and as CA should make the rules require.) Otherwise Carthage would still be doing well. The main problem with the AI is not lack of armies, but the fact that it will keep individual units nearby and never merge them into an army that can do something.

An illustration of the effect of the strategic changes: Interestingly, I couldn't take Lilybaeum when ordered, the schizophrenic senate told me to take Syracuse immediately, then changed their mind on the same turn as soon as I besieged it and told me to take Lilybaeum instead . I couldn't exactly withdraw from the Syracuse siege and with its hoplite defenders it was too strong to storm. I lacked ships because of 2 turn build time and port build so I couldn't reinforce from Capua, and I was short of money because of the need for military build up
...so I had to wait for the successful end of the Syracuse siege, and lacked resources to take the Carthaginan city. It was surprisingly realistic and satisfying in a strategic sense because these are precisely the kind of problems the Romans should have faced at this stage.

Note: I did leave the Scipii in control of Messana even though they shouldn't take it for several more years historically. It would weaken the AI Scipii too much if they didn't have Messana AND lacked a fleet. Plus they would need some way to be ordered to take Messana immediately. I think I might try putting their army near the city, with a small rebel garrison in Messana and give the Scipii more money to compensate. I suspect the AI Senate will order them to take the rebels immediately, and that would make good historical sense.

[Kraxis]

In the 2nd storm off Cape Pachynus, the Carthaginians under Carthalo saw the storm brewing and withdrew to safety, while the Romans stayed close to shore and lost their entire fleet. The Romans did not want to engage with their 120 ships since they were escorting 800 transports.

Ah yes, now I remember. The Romans were at that time equally good at seamanship compared to the Carthies, if not better. The battle of Drepana was lost only because Claudius was a fool, other wise they actually had the Carthies in the bag and could have picked them off easily as they exited the harbour.
The storm on the other hand was actually bad luck combined with a sound tactical consideration. The Carthies came rushing with all due haste from the storm, which to the Romans only looked like a bit of bad weather, not easily weathered where they were but doable. So the 'real' concern lay with the enemy fleet rushing at them. Were they coming to engage? The Romans believed so, and their fleet was a bit smaller IRC, so to them it was quite possible that the Carthies could/would detach a squadron to do over the transports. Better to lay still for the moment and wait for the Carthies to go away.
Only too late did they understand that the Carthies were running for their lives and could not leave before it was too late.
The choice to lay were they lay was not foolish at all, but hindsight is always 20/20 (as they say in englishspeaking countries), so it is easy to say the Romans were worse as sailors.

Granted on the corvus.

[Red Harvest]

therother,

I have it partially figured out. The settings you showed DO work by themselves! I was able to get storms in 267, 264, and 261 all without fog of war disabled. Then I saved the game and tried a 1 setting. No more storms. Ditto for 2. Ditto for 3??? Huh? It was working before. Well, this was all from the same save at 261...must not have liked me changing the file OR it doesn't like to load from a save OR all the sea combat effects the liklihood of a storm. By that time there were a number of Roman boats plying the water and we were having sustained warfare every turn. The warfare might prevent storms... Many possibilities.

Notice how regular the storm frequency is...it is hitting on every beat, and always in winter. That is why the default game setting didn't work. For some reason the .exe didn't like having the storm restricted to one season. Perhaps it is "spawned" the turn before and this interferes with it. There is that warning function switch to consider.

I've seen storms, hurrah! It is still rather artificial the way they are set up. Kind of looks like a placeholder on something they had not gotten back to tidying up yet.

[therother]

Ah, all very interesting. It does seem that the game is a little temperamental with events in general. I have not seen a flood or an earthquake in the vanilla game. Just another bug for the patch to sort out, I suppose.

I wonder how the RTR modders came across these settings?

[Kull]

Just curious, but are the settings different for the "Sons of Mars" prologue campaign? I played that all the way through to victory, and storms were a frequent occurence. Better yet, many of them occurred over land, producing at least 4 flood events (cool graphic!).

By contrast, I've NEVER seen a storm in any of my "standard" campaigns, and just once had the Aetna event (which fried some nearby troops).

[Kull]

Curiouser and curiouser:

1) There are three "descr_disasters.txt" files in the game

2) They can be found in the following folders:
"Rome - Total War\Data"
"Rome - Total War\Data\world\maps\base"
"Rome - Total War\Data\world\maps\campaign\sons_of_mars"

3) The format of these files is significantly different. The one in the "Data" folder looks like this:

disaster Brighton
{
type storm
year 0
position 272 227
size 10
}

The files in the other folders look like this:

event storm
frequency 4
winter true
summer false
warning false
region the sea
min_scale 2
max_scale 5

4) Maybe what we're seeing is the difference between scripted events and random ones, but it seems odd that the formats would look so different.

5) Oh, and to answer my own question: No, there's no difference between the sons_of_mars file and the one in the "base" folder.

[ghostcamel]

Perhaps theres a bug somewhere else in the game. The Sons_of_Mars does seem to have proper storm activity, and the entries are exactly the same. Maybe the campaign 'script' doesn't do a lookup to this disaster file, so it doesnt show up.

So the problem might not be modding the settings, but getting the imperial campaign to read the settings it has already.

[Kull]

Perhaps theres a bug somewhere else in the game. The Sons_of_Mars does seem to have proper storm activity, and the entries are exactly the same. Maybe the campaign 'script' doesn't do a lookup to this disaster file, so it doesnt show up.

So the problem might not be modding the settings, but getting the imperial campaign to read the settings it has already.

I'm beginning to think so. therother reports that he changed these setting without any noticeable effect, and I'm currently running a test in which ALL disasters have been reduced to "frequency = 1". I also changed all disasters so the "Warning = True", which will confirm whether changes to this file actually do anything.

Hmmmmm. Come to think of it, the only disaster I had ever experienced in my earlier Campaign Games was a volcanic eruption at Etna. And I'm pretty sure (though memory could be faulty) there was no warning. However, of the 8 disasters listed in the unmodded "descr_disasters.txt" file, Volcano is the ONLY that has warnings toggled "true", so I SHOULD have been warned!

So. Has anyone out there ever gotten a 1-turn warning prior to experiencing a volcano event? If the answer is "No", then we've conclusively proven that this file has no effect.

To follow up on Ghostcamel's thoughts, there is one other test we could perform - make changes to the sons_of_mars "descr_disasters.txt" file and see if that has any impact on the Prologue campaign. If there ARE changes, than we'll know the file is used, but somehow the Campaing link is broken. If nothing changes (just toggle all warnings to true, and look for warnings prior to storms and floods), then we've confirmed that this file has no utility whatsoever, and that disasters are handled in some other fashion (which, sadly, may not be moddable)

[Red Harvest]

Kull,

The "base" disaster file does work in the campaign, at least for awhile. For some reason it doesn't work with defaults but the frequency of "3" combined with no limit on season works. It seems to stop working if you change it again and possibly if there is any combat, etc. Yet it does work repeatedly at times.

The other disaster file you mention is actually a misnamed event script. Obviously, CA didn't have time to clean up any of this.

I'm not sure why the warning doesn't show up... If I were laying out the working rules, I wouldn't allow a warning for storms or floods. Volcanoes, probably since they usually start rumbling and smoking well ahead of a major eruption; major quakes perhaps, although major quakes often follow long periods of zero tremors--the build up to a major one. It might be that the warning text, graphics, or dialogue was just never implemented so it doesn't appear.

Etna's eruption is predetermined in another event file (as are some others such as plague in Macedon.) I'm not sure that it always happens though. I could have sworn I've seen it erupt both in 263 and in 261 (but not both in the same campaign.)