Cost of Ships and Siege Weapons

[Rhyfelwyr]

I know its probably historically accurate, but an upkeep of 5,000 for one unit of ships? Even as the Romans with 15 provinces half of which are huge cities with advanced infrastructures, this is costing half my income per turn. I could probably have around 2 full stack armies for that cost! Is it not a bit much?

[O'ETAIPOS]

If you consider that it was 26 ships, about 400 men on each, plus cost of ships repairs?
Calculate: around 14000 men, 26 ships, 26 special buildings protecting the ships.
Hint: mines in Dalminion should give you enough cash for about 4 units.

In reality, except Punic wars, roman ship sqads were around 1 unit of quinqeremes in EB scale plus some smaller ships.

[Djurre]

I agree, these costs are not balanced. Although especially the fleets should be quite expensive

[vizigothe]

I have no problem with it. I make a naval unit when I need to sail across a body of water. I take a few cities and send more troops. Once the offensive is done and my enemy crushed. I disband the fleet. I don't need fleets sitting in my ports.

[fallen851]

I think the bigger problem is that ships don't pay for themselves.

Armies conquer cities, and essentially pay for the themselves, but fleets don't. Maybe if there was a script so when you blockaded a port the player got money from it or something, but as is ships are just temporary transports in the game. If you keep them and want to gain experience, you're going to have throw a whole lot of money at them, and you'll get nothing in return.

[Tellos Athenaios]

Ships do pay off. My ships have forced the Ptolemaioi to accept a pretty cheap ceasefire treaty... I had them blocking their main trading hub, the Eastern Med.

Before:
3 to 4 full stacks of annoying elite units, all those Klerouchia pikemen and the like.
After
Just one stack of elites, and that is a garrison.

Why? The Ptolemaioi didn't have the funds to replace units.

Conclusion:
Ships are terribly effective against enemies whose main source of income is naval trade.

[MarcusAureliusAntoninus]

The problem is that even naval powers don't have naval trade as their main source of income. Scripting is the AI's main source of income.

And I never build ships either, that's why I love land-bridges so much.

[Tellos Athenaios]

Okay: against enemies whose main source of income apart from the scripted income is naval trade.

You have to admit one thing though: ships form an effective way of increasing the mobility of your forces.

[NeoSpartan]

Hey as much as I hate how expensive ships are, in reality maintaining a fleet is a very expensive thing to do.

[QUOTE=O'ETAIPOS]If you consider that it was 26 ships, about 400 men on each, plus cost of ships repairs?
Calculate: around 14000 men, 26 ships, 26 special buildings protecting the ships.
......QUOTE]

I would also add to that regular maintenance, as well as food and fresh water supplies.

[fallen851]

Ships do pay off.

Ships do not provide income. Indirectly they can provide income by transporting an army and if the army conquers the city... but otherwise they are a waste.

Now they may be able to force other nations to submit to treaties, but this isn't exactly a source of income (again indirectly they may provide income by leading to a protectorate or a ceasefire that gives cash or something, or by securing finding a new nation to secure trade rights from) and army can do all of this too.

[Sdragon]

The main problem is that the campaign in best on VH since the rebels siege your towns. This means the autocalc is very harsh and you need a vastly superior naval force to win consistently. You have to be supremely rich to out fight the AI at sea. Its far easier to make 1 fleet and leap frog from port to port to land an invasion.

[Tellos Athenaios]

I still don't agree. My second last remark included, or at least was inteded to include, that the ships enable you to strike at places or at times otherwise impossible. This really speeds up your campaign, and allows for more strategy, and thereby for more fun in the game.

This is something only humans are able to figure out, (with the exception of the Greek Cities in Vanilla), and therefore it's nothing more than sound to make it harder, as this measure only affects the human player.

In other words, it's a good thing that ships aren't dirt cheap.

On the other hand there is the Realism bit, which demands that ships be very expensive.

For me it's fine the way it is, those who consider ships to be rather worthless won't use them, and therefore won't have trouble to pay for them (as they simply don't use them really), and to those who like them they're now a more mature part of the game.

[Foot]

The main problem is that the campaign in best on VH since the rebels siege your towns. This means the autocalc is very harsh and you need a vastly superior naval force to win consistently. You have to be supremely rich to out fight the AI at sea. Its far easier to make 1 fleet and leap frog from port to port to land an invasion.

Wasnt that fixed in one of the patches. Either way, I have no idea why CA decided that autocalc should be defined by campaign difficulty rather than battle difficulty. Odd :nquisitive:

Foot

[-Praetor-]

I find that one of the best uses of the ship is destroying the blockading fleets that damage your sea trade...

For example, playing as Casse , Aedui or Arverni, having a fleet for one or two turns in order to destroy that pesky pirate fleet on the northern sea (the one that every single turn blockades one of your ports)...

In the end, you manage to recover the investment... after like 50 turns...

[Rhyfelwyr]

Ships just don't seem worth it in EB. If I have to get an army across the sea, I get a crappy Penteconterai or something, soom along the sea with the army, and then disband the ship.

There's no great naval battles or fighting for dominance in the sea as there was historically...

[vizigothe]

O ships are very important for any campaign. However I only use them to transport my armies since more often than not Pirates attack my ships and they get wiped out.

[Aut Nihil]

In my Pontos campaigni used my fleet to land troops on Salamis (and get them back offcourse), and to annoy the ptolemaioi in general by blockading their ports, they might be useless to some people and factions but i find them very usefull as my next targets (as soon as i got some more money and am able to build a new army) will be Rhodos and Krete. those islands are easy targets in my opinion as i've never seen the AI try to land an army on one of those islands.

[Fjodin]

NO!!!! DONT CHANGE THE COSTS!!!!!!! its perfect!

[Dumbass]

How about halving the amount of ships in each unit: Half ships, half upkeep!
Or even quarter them , that way huge naval battles will still be in.

I agree with the fact that there is no fight for the dominance of the sea, what if someone wanted to re-enact the first Punic War, they'd just have a small battle with one unit of ships, then go back to be disbanded.

[Aut Nihil]

I would just leave the things the way they are, it's fairly balanced.

[Foot]

Don't quote me on this, but I think 0.8 will have a cheap transport ship and pirate spawning will be massively reduced. Also I think there have been some cost changes, but O'ETAIPOS would know more about that.

Foot

[MSB]

Don't quote me on this, but I think 0.8 will have a cheap transport ship and pirate spawning will be massively reduced.

Will this "cheap transport ship" be able to attack anything or defend itself?

[Tellos Athenaios]

I guess that ship will be pretty much the same as those I have seen among the fleets of the Karthadastim. Pretty low stats, a bit like those of RTW peasants.

So that would mean no cheap vessels to be frequently deployed in sea battles, just vessels to carry your troops with, and that would also mean you have to provide a sort of guard for them too. I think EB simply recreated the ancient Konvoi tactic, by separating the actual guard and the actual target (the troop transport).

[Rhyfelwyr]

Except there's no real need for the guard. I'm not meaning to complain to EB, the problem is with the RTW campaing map you can zoom a ship from one shore to another and just take a path to avoid enemies; whereas in MTW you couldn't pass a region with enemy ships in it. There's not really anything that can be done to solve this problem.

[Olaf The Great]

The one part EB fails in the Gameplay/Historical balance, is the ships, sure, it is historically accurate, but it is almost futile to raise a navy, when you do get enough income to build a fair navy, its destroyed by Uber pirates immediately.

[CountArach]

The one part EB fails in the Gameplay/Historical balance, is the ships, sure, it is historically accurate, but it is almost futile to raise a navy, when you do get enough income to build a fair navy, its destroyed by Uber pirates immediately.

As said, this will most probably be fixed in 0.8

I think it should be futile to build a navy. Basically one fleet of ships would represent our basic navy. Any more than this and you start to get a large fleet's worthof ships.

Playing as Romani I managed to have 2 stacks of troops and 3 4 ship fleets at about 240 BC and still made enough profit to have all of my territories producing a building. I had Sicily, Sardinia, Corsica and Italy below the Barbarian lands.

[MSB]

I personally never really use ships due to their expense. I train the cheapest fleet available if I wish to cross water and then, when I have crossed, I disband it. I also keep a small amount of high/medium quality fleets in rich ports venerable to blockade. This strategy does not erode my treasury; instead it actually stops my treasury from eroding.

[Orb]

The problem, in my opinion, is that it is currently more economically viable for me to ignore three or four one ship blockades than to actually smash them all.

[MSB]

The problem, in my opinion, is that it is currently more economically viable for me to ignore three or four one ship blockades than to actually smash them all.

That is true, however one tactic to avoid the problem of blockade is to take all of the enemy's naval ports off them before you take the rest of their empire. You do get a few blockades at first, but eventually it all stops and trade can carry on as if the war had never begun henceforth you don't have to "smash" any blockades anyway. Even better it stops you from having to use too many ships while you are at war with the naval faction.

[Watchman]

I've found out that for the Qarthies one of the better ways for dealing with any funny ideas the Romani might get is to have a decent-sized fleet of those cheap little low-end warships you can built hovering around Corsica and Sardinia. The AI occasionally gets funny ideas about amphibious invasions there, and the by far easiest way to deal with them is to sink the lot mid-transit (the damn isles can't train jack all troops anyway...).

Sinking every Roman ship afloat on the Med and parking a few of those cheap-ass wannabe warships to blockade each and every port they have tends to convince them to sue for peace right fast. Then you can just leave the blockade fleets there; Qarthies can rake in pretty crazy amounts of trade income (I looked at descr_buildings lately and noticed they as a rule actually get one more point of trade goods and one more trade fleet than anyone else out of most buildings) so the upkeep actually isn't a problem. All the more so as you'll be getting profit from trade with the Romani too.

The next time they start making trouble, bam, harbours closed. They kind of tend to sue for peace pretty soon again. Until you start butting heads with them in Sicily or southern Italy this is a pretty convenient way to keep them out of your hair.

Qarthies pretty much need a few boats for Iberia-Carthage troop and family member transit too. It takes a while to conquer all of the Maghreb coastline, and even after that rebel spawning can create unwelcome and unplanned-for delays in land travel. Ships do the job a lot faster and more reliably.

'Course, if there's one of those annoying pirate stacks with one of those ungodly powerful Huge Pirate Fleets in it a temporary investement in more serious - and way more expensive - warships is probably in order. Not really because the pirates hurt your income - they typically don't even block a harbour every turn - but because they're a damned inconvenient obstacle to naval transports. If I need ships and/or men up in Italy now I don't want to find a super pirate stack in the way...