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

[Maltz]

Conclusion: Naval Battle Wrap-up

Naval Battles in STW2 is quite enjoyable and tactically challenging, but there still exist problems. Let's discuss the problems first to take it out of our minds.

Current Problems of Naval Battles

(1) Generals losing stars: new problem introduced by patch 5346

Every general is a 1-star naval commander. This makes spending points down the naval path completely pointless. Hopefully this is because I did not start a new campaign upon applying the new patch. Need to verify this later.

(2) Defending ship does not even move to engage our fleet: new problem introduced by patch 5346

Before the patch, the enemy ships always sail straight to us, which is stupid but guarantees some action. The patch corrected this - but not much - now they do not move at all in a defence battle. And unfortunately all of our previous discussions on naval tactics, such as trapping, wall of arrows, etc., instantly become obsolete for naval attack battles. It should remain useful in defence, though.

For naval attacks, now there is a mindlessly easy way to win. When we have a ranged advantage, we only need to circle to the side of an enemy formation and eat it up one by one from there.

(3) Ships that are ordered to move in groups often have problem finding their targeted location and miss it, and then row in circles for eternity: new problem introduced by patch 5346

This happens extremely frequently when we ask the group of ships to turn. The workaround is to order individual ships to row to their targeted location. This could be a tedious process. And even so some of the ships will still miss their spot and start turning in circles.

(4) Boarding is unreliable: existing problem

It is difficult to control the timing of the boarding command - we have to issue the command a few seconds before the optimal distance and orientation is reached. And the ship's relative position and orientation matters a lot. If we issue the board command while the ship is far away, in 90% of the cases no boarding will ever occur, as the boarder will just row in circles endlessly trying to get to the target's past location. Multiple boarding commands might make the boarding fail, too.

(5) Fire Bomb Kobaya needs to be manually ordered to attack.

A tiny inconvience. We have to row them up close and right click to attack. If the target rows away, we have to manually row them up and manually attack again.

(6) A ship on fire spreads its fire to its boarder, but the boarder has no option to extinguish the fire and could only watch its ship sink probably before the fight is over.

This might be an intended feature, but it would be unreasonable if the boarded ship, which was already on-fire, might last longer than the boarding ship, which just caught the fire. It is a little unfair for the boarder especially considering successful boarding is so rare.

This leads to the question that do we really want to set ships on fire with Bow or Fire Bomb Kobaya? In many cases we want to capture the ships.

(to be continued)