Yee-Yee-Oh!: Mori (Legendary, Domination)

[Maltz]

Naval Tactics #2 Chaos Begins

Most conventional naval battles will end up in a shoot-out stage, when the AI ships no longer moves forward, and simply stand and shoot. If we do not do anything, our superior ranged damage will eventually win us the combat, but most routed ships will simply run away. We want to capture them before they run away!

A big difference between naval and land units is that ships turn very slowly. Therefore, if we block their front and sides, they are pretty much stuck! When they are stuck, they become very easy board targets. For medium ships and above, boarding is a much faster way to capture them than shooting them to rout, then capture.



In reality, this phase of combat will probably end up a huge chaotic mess especially on Legendary mode, where we usually are too busy to tell individual ships to go to a specific spot and orientation. But the ideas are the same.

The AI ships have a tendency to form clusters. If the AI ships form multiple clusters, or one large clusters at front and scattered ships in the back, we can simply ignore the others and focus our attention on one cluster, defeat it, and move to the next. All we need to do is to use our ships to surround this cluster and block their front and sides to block their escapes, and pour our superior ranged damage to them. Once they are damaged and weakened, even routed, they can be boarded and captured easily.

Since enemy's fires are also quite concentrated, protect your weaker ship in the back of the net, or they may be killed very quickly.

The key of boarding at this stage is to be flexible. At this stage, the enemy ships should be weak enough so any of our medium or better ship can easily capture them. So it does not really matter whether we use a designated boarder to capture ships - of course, it is a lot safer if we do.

Avoid sending a board command when the target ship is still far away from your boarder. This is because that once a board command is issued, your ship will attenmpt to row to the side of the target in their CURRENT location. If the target ship moves, your ship will have to change their position - and often this results in your ship turning endlessly on the same spot and accomplishes nothing.

Worse, since you can only issue One Board Order per target ship, this also PREVENTS your other ships from boarding the target even they happen to be right beside it! If this happens, you will have to cancel the board command of the original boarder, then activate boarding from the closeset boarder. So we should have a habit of ONLY issuing a board command if the ship is going to come in very close contact with a target ship. Otherwise don't - it often makes things worse.

There seems to be a glitch for Kobaya - from time to time, after successfully surrender a routing ship with the boarding command, the boarding command is not canceled, and we have to manually cancel it, or the ship cannot be ordered to manually do ranged attack (as it will try to board it instead).

On Legendary, things could be chaotic especially because you cannot pause to issue command. When there are lots of actions going on, and when you click on ships, you not necessarily gain control of the new ship! This control is not very responsive probably due to the slowed graphic response. So we will from time to time order the wrong ship to do things. This contributes greatly to the chaos factor, unfortunately. It is easy to say "double check whether it is the right ship!", but in reality there is probably too much going on to check.

But since we have suprior ranged power anyway, it is just a matter of the time that individual enemy ships gets boarded and captured. Don't feel too bad if you let one or two run away. You can use your many captured ships, which should have full movement left, to chase down the fled ships and easily kill them all in auto-combat.