Fire at cities from a ship?

[Darkarbiter]

my guess is its a cool concept but sadly no. Cannons would in no way be accurate enough to fire or even have to the range without being in danger of the MUCH MUCH higher number of cannons on the shore

Not necassarily. Perhaps you could sabotage them earlier? Or maybe you have just lost the city and they haven't installed canons there yet.

Well, historically there were plenty of battles between ships & shore batteries in this period & as far as I know, the ships managed to win reasonably often, though fairly often the ships got seriously mangled too.

Not too read up on this particuler subject but I'm pretty sure this guys right. At the very least it worked some of the time... and it isn't exactly less historically correct then canon elephants.

something that forts have that ships have loads of trouble with is the ability to fire hotshot... red hot shot meant to start fires.

Ships of the line had about 74 guns for the most part. The true giants went up to 120 main guns but this includes both sides, bow chasers and stern chasers if these were full size guns. So only half or less can fire at the same time at the same general target area.

It would be foolish for a single ship to try and take on a fort alone but a fleet might manage it. Another practice was to put Marines ashore to assault the fort from another side while the ships kept them busy but in the end most harbor defences were eliminated from shore. That doesn't mean that they didn't shoot up towns to damage infrastructure etc.

All of this is pretty complicated and it will be interesting to see how much and how well CA can pull it off.

Even the ship types will be interesting to see as there were so many and each country had different ways of putting it all together. The English and later the Americans had the best crews while the Spanish and French often had larger ships and thus more guns and larger crews.

It will be fun just to see what they come up with and no matter how good it is we will still complain about what got left out! ROFLOL

It would be good if we could have a battle where it's like "Quickly defend the canons" so that the ships were not able to get in range and fire. From what's been said it's obviously a situation where the ships are at a defenite disadvantage however I'm sure theres going to be at least one port thats poorly defended or you can take care of the guns.

Some cities would be built around the port and some would be inland (like in RTW/M2tw) I don't see why this would be a problem. I also don't see how this is much harder to code? It'd just be a
-Select troops
-Attack town where the enemy is
-Select to have the nearby ships appear on the battlemap on the reinforcements screen.
-Destroy the crews of the enemy canons so your ships can come closer.

Or possibly even more cool is a situation where the port is the best position to land the troops so it's a matter of the ships coming to shore and landing the troops before the canons can take out the ships.

Why would this be hard to code? I'm not going to act like I know much but in theory....