Will they ever fix the port blockade bug?

[Philippe]

Not to defend the underlying game design, but if you think in terms of the game's time scale the blockade mechanic probably works correctly.

Could just be advancing age, but I am having great difficulty remembering a single medieval blockade that actually ran more than six months during the period from 1050 to 1500. I would really love it if someone could call a few of these medieval blockades to my attention.

In the context of two year turns, a port blockade looks a whole lot like someone is exerting a protracted policy of commerce raiding, rather than organizing a standing fleet and keeping it on station for two years.

Viewed in that light it makes perfect sense that a hostile naval force could continue to do economic damage for more than a few months. And that to make it stop you would have to hunt the hostile ships down and bring them to battle. And because that force of ships is not really sitting en masse outside your harbors, it seems entirely consistent that you should be able to sail in and out at will.

Venice and Genoa actually did that kind of thing to each other from time to time, and the result of one of these incidents was Marco Polo's extended stay as a guest of the Genoese state (during which he supposedly dictated the memoirs of his travels to an unscrupulous redactor).

You can keep a fleet on station for extended periods of time when you're playing a game like Diplomacy, but prior to fairly recent times it just didn't happen. Mediterranean-type sailing ships need to stick pretty close to land, even if they don't actually get beached at night (which most of them did in antiquity). Staying at sea for protracted periods of time is a different kettle of fish, the kind of thing you associate with the Anglo-Dutch Herring Wars of the 17th century, and even those had a strong flavor of commerce-raiding about them. The ability to stay at sea is a characteristic of Atlantic ocean-going vessels that was perfected after the period of M2TW, rather than a characteristic of Mediterranean galley fleets.

[andrewt]

It's not a big deal but it does have some material affect on naval strategy. Ships in ports can't be attacked so this means you need to split your stack and completely surround a port to prevent a fleet from escaping. That, however, would make other fleets be able to take on your fleet more easily. A fleet can just transport units and agents from port to port if it can easily escape a blockade, especially those ports where you can reach the other in the space of one turn.

[Temujin]

Not to defend the underlying game design

Why, then?

Your argument, and the current implementation, is essentially saying that naval action in the medieval period was solely of economic, as opposed to tactical, importance. It is my opinion that this argument is flat out wrong, and that the moving of troops and defense of the coastlines against enemy invasion was far more important.

As an example, take the war between the Sicilian Normans and the Byzantine empire, right at the start of the period covered in the game. The lack of byzantine naval forces in the adriatic was a major motivation behind the Sicilian invasion, and the Byzantines regaining naval superiority (with Venetian help) was what finally ended the conflict. A proper Byzantine naval presence would have stopped the invasion before it even began, and this is not modeled in the game.

The real problem isn't that blockading ports don't work, though, but that you have no way to stop enemy fleets from delivering an invasion force if they can make the trip in one turn. This is a side-effect of the turn-system coupled with the map-type, and was actually modelled better in the first MTW. That design had many short-comings too, but at least fleets could be used for coastal defense, making them relevant and useful.