Naval Combat Possible Solution

[Sfwartir]

Any progress, dopp?

[dopp]

It works, sort of. Recommend increasing the morale of all naval units to 40 in the 'export_desc_unit' file. Interestingly enough, the original morale value for all the ships was 8, more than double that of normal troops and on par with stuff like legions.

Single ships will still try to escape when confronted with vastly superior forces, which means that only one ship in your pursuing squadron gets a 'free shot' engagement with it. However, the increased morale will keep the enemy vessel in the fight longer, resulting in more casualties. It used to take anywhere between four and six attacks on a lone ship to sink it. Now it's just two for biremes and triremes and up to three for quinquiremes, just one attack if you're a bit lucky. That's with a hunter fleet of five silver weapon/armor quinquiremes with three bronze chevrons each. More equal odds that do not trigger the 'automatic flee' response will sink the loser immediately.

At least now I don't have to worry so much about attacking a lone enemy ship, have it flee for the umpteenth time AROUND my fleet towards my capital and then blockade my main port the following turn. Now I hit them once when they leave port and once more if they get away and end up on my doorstep.

[Sfwartir]

Excellent work mate, I'll try it out right away

[Epistolary Richard]

I tried with a Quinquireme against a bireme with the bireme at morale 1 and morale 31. At 1 it lost 6 out of 60 ships, at 1 it was sunk. Unfortunately the first test I got splashed by pirates on the way there and so I only had a half-stack, so I'd like to hear other people's results.

[dopp]

According to the hardcoded thread, the morale limit appears to be 63. Try setting it to max and see what happens. Of course, you must start a new game to see the effects. Existing units from savegames will not have the increased morale values. Last night three quinquiremes from Egypt with 30 morale sank five out of twenty of my old morale 8 quinquiremes. And managed to get away. However, two subsequent attacks sank the stack, whereas before it would have taken at least four.

[Sfwartir]

I've set the morale of all vessels to 40 now, and it seems to increase the toughness of each fight, as you've already pointed out, more casualties on each side and thus more realistic.
The enemy still bugger off quite fast (as far as the number of remaining enemy ships indicates, anyway) but it seems like the battles "last longer", if that can be said about auto-resolved battles.

I don't want every naval battle to be a back-against-the-wall, die hard battle with total annihilation of one side as the common result, but at least sinking a vessel or two in a battle would be nice.