Will they ever fix the port blockade bug?

[rvg]

I mean come on, this thing has been around since RTW and it makes an entire strategis element of the game redundant. With naval combat already being a non-tactical war of numbers (which is admittedly not a big deal) makes any bugs in the strategic element of naval warfare that much more visible and that much more embarrassing.

[Frederick_I_Barbarossa]

Not sure I know what bug you're talking about. Elaborate?

[rvg]

Ships are free to leave the blockaded port without having to fight the blockading fleet, unless the port is completely surrounded.

[Frederick_I_Barbarossa]

Hmm...never noticed this one...guess I never tried...lol

[Bijo]

Never noticed it myself either. I'll have to do that and check it out. I automatically thought my ships at port couldn't move away unless I routed their fleet first. It's something one could typically expect but now that I read this....

[Goofball]

Ships are free to leave the blockaded port without having to fight the blockading fleet, unless the port is completely surrounded.

Meh...



Big deal. Your port is still blockaded and not earning you any money, which is the point of the blockade. Yes it's slightly unrealistic, but if you think of it in terms of function, it really makes very little difference to gameplay.

[Agent Smith]

Ships are free to leave the blockaded port without having to fight the blockading fleet, unless the port is completely surrounded.

Oddly enough, I just noticed this the other night. I was able to move a fleet into my blockaded port, too.

At the same time, I've been playing RTW and MTW for some time, and the first time I noticed it was a few days ago. Maybe it really isn't that important

[Csargo]

Never noticed it probably never would have if you wouldn't have pointed it out.

[IrishArmenian]

Same with Ichigo.

[HoreTore]

I really, really cannot see how this makes "an entire strategis element of the game redundant"...

Ok, an enemy can leave his port with a ship? The only instance I can see this important at all, is when he has loaded an army onto that ship. And it can be fixed by simply having a second ship blockading the port at another angle...

[Nebuchadnezzar]

I don't think this was a confirmed bug. Didn't ships run blockades?

Strange how this can be affecting the entire strategy of the game and other more important things are not.

[Whacker]

Doubtful I'd classify this as a bug, but I support rvg's position. If you've got a blockade going, the only way that ships made during the port siege should be able to get out is by lifting the blockade through battle. If unsuccessful or a draw the blockade stands and the ships stay in port, if successful then it's lifted and you can go your merry way. As for "drastically impacting gameplay" I gotta disagree, but in principle I support rvg's stance.

[Temujin]

I too agree that this is a problem for the strategic game. Since patch 1.1, the AI is happily conducting naval invasions, and this brings the problem to the fore.

I'm currently playing a game as Milan, and fighting a war against Sicily over Sardinia and Corsica, and enemy armies are everywhere over the islands. Even though my fleet is vastly superior to the Sicilian, I cannot use it to prevent them reinforcing their invasions, or conducting new ones. Even sinking everything bearing the Sicilian banner, and blockading the port of Palermo, the Sicilians will simply build a single boat in that port, load it with a stack of troops, and sail straight through my blockade to land those troops near Cagliari, in a single move. Splitting my fleets up in smaller chunks is no solution, as the pirates or the French (Sicilian allies) would then take it apart with ease. The florins I paid to build that fleet now seem wasted. *sigh*

[Captain Pugwash]

not quite sure whether this is in the same vein. i have several ports mainly aquired from the Spanish which have no visible 'structure' unlike everywhere else. Currently upgrading them to docklands but is this a bug or is something wrong as i have a couple of ships in the port and unable to work out whether they are safe.

[fenir]

hmmmm this was one of the first problems reported.

Yes, CA know......hopefully they fix it.

fenir

[alpaca]

Believe me, such stuff is so far down on the priority list for bugs (which has hundreds of entries) that it won't be fixed, ever.
We can just hope they won't forget it in the next installment, when they will have written a new engine

[ASPER THE GREAT]

No bug, Yes ships would often try and run blockades for what ever purpose even just to disrupt or cause damage to the blockading fleet.

[diotavelli]

No bug, Yes ships would often try and run blockades for what ever purpose even just to disrupt or cause damage to the blockading fleet.

I agree this isn't a bug and, historically, ships managed to run blockades on a regular basis. However, the success of such ships wasn't automatic and many of them had to turn back or were captured/destroyed by the blockaders.

It would be more accurate that ships attempting to run a blockade should have only a percentage chance of success, based on the skill of the admirals involved and the relative size of the fleets.

Your mention of causing damage is a point in case: you can't do that without fighting and that means a battle....

As has been already mentioned, however, there are more significant issues which CA need to address before this.

[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.

[todorp]

No bug, Yes ships would often try and run blockades for what ever purpose even just to disrupt or cause damage to the blockading fleet.

Agree it's not a bug.

[PseRamesses]

In RTW there was a command like ctrl-alt-click or something which allowed you to attack a ship in port. Is there a similar command in M2?

[Agent Smith]

Just for fun, although it was late 1500's, this is a good read for what happens in a huge naval battle:

Battle of Lepanto

Although it doesn't have to do with blockading ports, it does show the difficulty of naval enagagements at the time in general. I think some are overestimating the abilities of early medieval naval fleets.

[John_Longarrow]

To me, how blockading works seems to be pretty accurate. If you want to keep ships in a port, you have to surround the port and, normally, have more ships available than the port has. In some cases, such as Antwerp, it is easy for a relatively small fleet to keep the port blockaded. Other ports require multiple stacks which is realistic.

Think about it for a little bit from both the realistic and the game mechanics points of view. For realism, if you were to blockade San Francisco all you need to do is have ships about where the Golden Gate bridge is. For New York, you’d need a much larger force as it tends to be more open. From a game mechanic, the ships have exactly the same kind of zone of control as other military units. If you can’t park a single stack of troops next to a castle and keep everyone in, then you shouldn’t be able to with ships.

Unlike a siege where pickets surround the castle, a port requires the ships themselves to remain on station to intercept outbound ships. This is a big difference between a castle siege and a naval blockade. This is also fairly accurate. In both cases you’ve got a single spot that you really need to keep an eye on. For an army, it is easy to have a half dozen soldiers go out and keep an eye on the castle to see if anyone is trying to get out. Ships can’t send out scouts like this. As such, I don’t see this as a bug. It is just something that you have to take into account.

If you want to blockade a port, send a couple fleets to keep them in. If you don't have the ships to surround the port AND beat their fleet in a fight, odds are you wouldn't be able to blockade them in the real world either.