Naval Combat Possible Solution

[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.