The final & only discussion thread for naval battle mechanics

[Sensei Warrior]

A good theroy, Agent Miles. Some other things to consider:

On the escape thing. I have never noticed a ship escaping combat, but staying in the same region, it always moves to an adjacent region. Which could mean that the fleeing formula might only be applied if the ship you were attacking was just moving through the region.

Since I always stack I can very easily say, I have had taken ship losses, but have not lost the whole stack. I can also say I have destoyed whole stacks (albeit small ones) when attacking as well as destroyed partial stacks while having part but not all of my stack survive.

It's always humourous to watch some advocates of single ship stack assume that only one ship in a stack fights or only one calculation is used, and its an all or nothing deal. Since I have seen every general variation of stack survival I can easily say (although not prove since I am not actively taking screen caps of my naval battles).

I am pretty sure in one of the other threads I pointed to also brought up another theroy. I will sum up the part of naval battles. A stack is ordered from most powerful (meaning valour) to least, the most powerful being the stack's 'general'. In the case of single ship stacks, it works exactly the same simply because there is only one ship. When attacking the lead (aka the most powerful) ship attacks and either wins or loses. If this ship wins then its part in the battle is over and the comp moves to the second ship in the stack if their are other enemies present. If the first ship loses then it is sunk and the process is repeated with the second ship.

In this case the attacking stack can lose all ships when the defenders don't lose any ships by failing to sink the first one. The attacking stack can also wipe out the defending stack while not taking any losses. And the attacking stack could lose some of its ships while the defending ships lose some of their ship as well.

The above outline seems logical and statistically random, and without CA telling us how they programmed ship combat, we could easily come up with 20 different ways on how they might have done it.

With that said, if you found a method that works for you then great, and you should use it.

EDIT: Cut out part of last paragraph.

[Agent Miles]

I play MTW/VI patched to 2.01 with no mods and I have never had a partial stack survive. What version do you play?

[Enigma13]

I play MTW/VI patched to 2.01 with no mods and I have never had a partial stack survive. What version do you play?

I also play MTW/VI 2.01 w/ no mods and have had partial stacks survive multiple times. Often times If I attack w/ a 3 ship stack against a 2 ship stack I can get a result such as: 1 ship lost, 2 ships sunk and achieve victory in that way.

Like I said in my earlier post I have had a much higher success rate on attacks using small stacks. However, defending in stacks seems to carry a much higher risk of losing the whole stack. Has anybody seen that the AI is less likely to attack a stack than single ships, or does it only look to the total number of ships in the region? I know that it will definitely attack isolated single ships at a higher rate.

[Sensei Warrior]

MTW/VI 2.01 as well.