Can I trap quicker enemy ships?

[Grand Duke Vytautas]

Hi there, MTW gamers! I'm playing as the Byzantines on early/hard and want to dominate the eastern Mediterranean, but face an obstacle of Sicialian fleet (I'm currently at war with them). I have a larger fleet, but Sicialian ships seem always to escape. So can I trap those vessels and sink those bastards? Thanks for advice!

[ichi]

Fleets travel at the speed of the slowest ship, but, all of the ships in a sea region engage in battle once it starts, so . . .

I break up my fleets into groups of one or two, never combining a fast ship with a slower one.

Dhows can be hard to catch but if you get the fastest ships available and persist you will catch them.



ichi

[Alexandr III. Biges]

Don't fight with fleets, always use single ships, attacking once with fleet of three is much less effective than three attacks with a ship. The same for defence.

[Ash]

Don't fight with fleets, always use single ships, attacking once with fleet of three is much less effective than three attacks with a ship. The same for defence.

???

I must be missing something here.

When I attack with stuff like Barques and Caravels one by one, they have a real high chance to sink against any ship.
If I attack with a stack, I always win unless the stack of the enemy is bigger.

The only thing is there's only one ship getting the valour while the others don't.
Then again you are guarenteed a sure win 9/10 times.

[Ludens]

When I attack with stuff like Barques and Caravels one by one, they have a real high chance to sink against any ship.
If I attack with a stack, I always win unless the stack of the enemy is bigger.

The only thing is there's only one ship getting the valour while the others don't.
Then again you are guarenteed a sure win 9/10 times.

It is a bit of a dilemma: each fleet has a separate chance of catching the enemy fleet thus the more fleets you have, the smaller the chance that the enemy escapes. However, the more fleets you have, the smaller your individual fleets will be and the greater the chance that you will lose the sea battles. The best solution is to use fleets of about three ships against a single enemy ship. You will probably lose one or two ships, but that would have happened anyway and the trade revenue ought to compensate for that. Remember that a fleet is as fast as its slowest ships so don't put slow ships together with fast ones. The faster a fleet is, the greater the chance that they catch the enemy fleet.

AI ships get an unfair advantage against the human player: if you don't attack with overwhelming odds (say two or three to one), chances are that they will win. However, it seems that this is a sort of compensatory mechanism: if you are winning land battles, sea battles will turn out in the computer's favour. A number of players has tried to turn this the other way round by sending a unit of peasants on a suicide mission (thus losing a land battle) and then fighting the sea battles. They reported that this allowed them to defeat much larger fleets, something that is almost impossible otherwise. I must say I have never tried it myself, but perhaps this is a way to win sea battles.

BTW there is no such thing as ship valour, only command skill of the admiral.