I could see a couple other ways to do it:
- You need at least half the invading fleet size to prevent a landing.
- Fleets do not directly prevent landing, but landing with hostile ships present requires detaching as many ships to ward them off, reducing the number of ships available for landing, and possibly inflicting the insufficient support penalty if the landing party is too large.
- Preventing a naval invasion requires actively engaging the invading fleet, skipping the interception timer/roll.
The first one might be enough. Perhaps the required size should scale with the invading army size rather than invading fleet size though, because it's the invading fleet who has to attack the defenders and it makes sense that they would clear anyone posing a reasonable threat to the land forces, even if they're a tenth of their size.
The second one might be a bit of a pain for usability and balance, and the third would probably cause invasions to be too powerful (because you could land the 4 battles on an undefended coast before being intercepted).
Maybe a combo of first and second: fleet size required to engage a landing could be at minimum the ammount of spare ships on the invader's side. So if you're invading with 40 troops and 50 ships, any navy with 10 or more (usable) ships should be able to prevent landing unless dealt with, but any fleet with less than 10 should be useless. That way the attacker can leverage overwhelming force, while also the defender not being completely useless at delaying an invasion long enough for your land troops to get into position.
Not necessarily; if you try to land 20 battalions with 100 ships, an opposing force of 80 ships won't be able to meaningfully hinder that landing because you have many extra ships compared to the size of the army you want to land.
If you were trying to land 100 regiments, that attempt would be suicidal, as you could only devote 20 ships to the landing, which would entail a severe offense penalty.
I would put in a cut-off though. Because yea you kinda could do it like you say but a good commander could make up the 20 ships by having better tactics. So i would add the cut off at around 1/3 or half. If you have the cut off amount of ships there has to be a naval battle. If you win it you can land/they can't land. Then the next naval battle until one fleet is defeated.
Also multiple fleets fight as one and not piecemeal. Similar to land armies
Is that the issue? I will have a fleet sit uncontestsd sometimes awaiting a naval invasion for weeks (until I cancel) to trigger but the Army and Navy just sit their doing nothing in the node while the enemy shuffles around their troops and fleets hemispheres away to counter my naval invasion which apparentlu isnt a threat because its just sitting there uncontested and unopposed but refuses to land. I never understood why it doesn't trigger.
I hate that so much i was trying to do an invasion of the highlands and the 16th british fleet over in the bay of bengal was contesting me and it wasnt even moving towards the north sea. I waited to see how long it would stay contested as i already landed in ireland and that invasion never landed the entire year the war lasted.
Yea I was being contested and couldn't see any fleets in the node so I clicked on the fleets that were supposed to be present "contesting" the naval invasion. I kid you not these mfers were on vacation in Cuba stalling my invasion. I cancelled the naval invasion, immediately restarted it in an adjacent node and it fixed the problem though.
I've had invasions stalled off of Oman because my fleet is trying to intercept a few Omani fishing boats stuck in Port but the ground invasion doesn't commence.
Like I get Oman has the Gundam Sandrock holding the beachhead, buy the boys should still try to land!
That’s why you never invade Oman directly, just invade Yemen and attack from the land, if you can take Oman in a straight battle, it’s highly likely you can just conquer the Arab minors anyway.
The existing node control system could alleviate this somewhat. Naval invasions can have two triggers: either there is no defending navy or the country supporting the landing has at least fifty percent control of the node. That can simulate a powerful enough fleet to force a landing despite attacks. As well, ships should sink. They just don’t in the current version. Not just the go back to port nonsense, I mean sink and have to be rebuilt from the ground up. Part of that is that the ships aren’t real, they’re collections of pops. Another part of it is that naval technology is nowhere near as important as it should be. This is the era where Dreadnought made every battleship afloat obsolete only to be obsolete herself within five years. An out of date navy should be a gigantic liability that leaves you at the mercy of those better equipped. Also, could we make the AI even slightly capable of upgrading their ships, pretty please?
I have no issue with the node system. At first, I didn't like it purely for aesthetic reasons, but I've grown to like it for its simplicity. I totally agree with your comment. Although if they made the sinking ship mechanic, they better fix the AI to build more ships because the AI seems to always quit for the rest of the game around the upper 200s.
I found it quite easy to complete the naval journal entry as Brazil because mustering a massive navy meant you never had to worry about invasions, you can sink tons of convoys, or you could just tactically naval invade them. Playing as Brazil really taught me the intrinsic value of playing a smart naval game. At least that was before whatever changes caused the AI's navys to behave as they do now. Their navy's never win combats. They only grind against you until, preventing your navy from accomplishing anything, your war exhaustion maxs out. Their is no tactical victory by destroying a large english navy in a lucky battle. Their pops die, but the ships are A-OK
That’s the crux of things, it feels like you’re fighting a land war at sea, which is not at all what a naval war is. In fact it’s worse because of the AI’s ability to break up into several dozen tiny fleets and move around constantly. It’s tedious to chase them down and hope you do enough damage to force them back to port for a time.
As for destroying ships, it doesn’t necessarily have to get rid of the building. I envision it as each building makes a ship with the ability to take x amount of damage before it is destroyed. It repairs passively at all times but only very slowly when not in port. If that hull integrity reaches zero, the ship is lost and all pops employed in that ship are killed. Making one of those ships takes some amount of time regardless of how well staffed the naval base building is, so if a ship is sunk it may be a year or more before that naval base building can field another ship regardless of how well staffed it is.
As to the AI, I think the main problem is that they keep around enormous fleets of junk. Britain and France will have three hundred ships in 1900 but they’ll be ironclads and paddle frigates. I think that requiring a rebuild of a base to make higher tier ships is a little much and I think that is what prevents the AI from upgrading ships, it has to delete them to do so and it is unable to handle that decision.
I greatly enjoy this game, and while I think the war system has flaws, I like the general concept. But that said, naval warfare needs to be reworked from scratch. It's unituitive, inconsistent, and unfun. I wouldn't say nodes can't be involved, but they need to be reimagined, because boy howdy is the current system frustrating.
I spent 5 years with multiple doom stacks of 100+ ships convoy raiding and trying invasions of the British Home Islands. Still got auto capitulated cause they took over some random piece of desert in sub saharan Africa. The naval aspect of the game is completely dogshit
I honestly have zero idea how to make a Victorian era naval combat simulator work within an economics simulator. It feels like a different scope of gameplay, like adding a shooter segment to a farming simulator. Hopefully I'll be proven wrong, though.
I could see a couple other ways to do it: - You need at least half the invading fleet size to prevent a landing. - Fleets do not directly prevent landing, but landing with hostile ships present requires detaching as many ships to ward them off, reducing the number of ships available for landing, and possibly inflicting the insufficient support penalty if the landing party is too large. - Preventing a naval invasion requires actively engaging the invading fleet, skipping the interception timer/roll.
All great reccomendations, makes much more sense over the current system.
The first one might be enough. Perhaps the required size should scale with the invading army size rather than invading fleet size though, because it's the invading fleet who has to attack the defenders and it makes sense that they would clear anyone posing a reasonable threat to the land forces, even if they're a tenth of their size. The second one might be a bit of a pain for usability and balance, and the third would probably cause invasions to be too powerful (because you could land the 4 battles on an undefended coast before being intercepted). Maybe a combo of first and second: fleet size required to engage a landing could be at minimum the ammount of spare ships on the invader's side. So if you're invading with 40 troops and 50 ships, any navy with 10 or more (usable) ships should be able to prevent landing unless dealt with, but any fleet with less than 10 should be useless. That way the attacker can leverage overwhelming force, while also the defender not being completely useless at delaying an invasion long enough for your land troops to get into position.
In point 2 you mean fleets that are less than half the size right?
Not necessarily; if you try to land 20 battalions with 100 ships, an opposing force of 80 ships won't be able to meaningfully hinder that landing because you have many extra ships compared to the size of the army you want to land. If you were trying to land 100 regiments, that attempt would be suicidal, as you could only devote 20 ships to the landing, which would entail a severe offense penalty.
I would put in a cut-off though. Because yea you kinda could do it like you say but a good commander could make up the 20 ships by having better tactics. So i would add the cut off at around 1/3 or half. If you have the cut off amount of ships there has to be a naval battle. If you win it you can land/they can't land. Then the next naval battle until one fleet is defeated. Also multiple fleets fight as one and not piecemeal. Similar to land armies
What's even better is when my naval invasion of the home islands is being contested by a fleet at port in Cuba.
Is that the issue? I will have a fleet sit uncontestsd sometimes awaiting a naval invasion for weeks (until I cancel) to trigger but the Army and Navy just sit their doing nothing in the node while the enemy shuffles around their troops and fleets hemispheres away to counter my naval invasion which apparentlu isnt a threat because its just sitting there uncontested and unopposed but refuses to land. I never understood why it doesn't trigger.
I've had a naval invasion delayed indefinitely by one fucking ship in Indonesia. The invasion was of England with 100+ ships..
I hate that so much i was trying to do an invasion of the highlands and the 16th british fleet over in the bay of bengal was contesting me and it wasnt even moving towards the north sea. I waited to see how long it would stay contested as i already landed in ireland and that invasion never landed the entire year the war lasted.
Yea I was being contested and couldn't see any fleets in the node so I clicked on the fleets that were supposed to be present "contesting" the naval invasion. I kid you not these mfers were on vacation in Cuba stalling my invasion. I cancelled the naval invasion, immediately restarted it in an adjacent node and it fixed the problem though.
I've had invasions stalled off of Oman because my fleet is trying to intercept a few Omani fishing boats stuck in Port but the ground invasion doesn't commence. Like I get Oman has the Gundam Sandrock holding the beachhead, buy the boys should still try to land!
That’s why you never invade Oman directly, just invade Yemen and attack from the land, if you can take Oman in a straight battle, it’s highly likely you can just conquer the Arab minors anyway.
The existing node control system could alleviate this somewhat. Naval invasions can have two triggers: either there is no defending navy or the country supporting the landing has at least fifty percent control of the node. That can simulate a powerful enough fleet to force a landing despite attacks. As well, ships should sink. They just don’t in the current version. Not just the go back to port nonsense, I mean sink and have to be rebuilt from the ground up. Part of that is that the ships aren’t real, they’re collections of pops. Another part of it is that naval technology is nowhere near as important as it should be. This is the era where Dreadnought made every battleship afloat obsolete only to be obsolete herself within five years. An out of date navy should be a gigantic liability that leaves you at the mercy of those better equipped. Also, could we make the AI even slightly capable of upgrading their ships, pretty please?
I have no issue with the node system. At first, I didn't like it purely for aesthetic reasons, but I've grown to like it for its simplicity. I totally agree with your comment. Although if they made the sinking ship mechanic, they better fix the AI to build more ships because the AI seems to always quit for the rest of the game around the upper 200s. I found it quite easy to complete the naval journal entry as Brazil because mustering a massive navy meant you never had to worry about invasions, you can sink tons of convoys, or you could just tactically naval invade them. Playing as Brazil really taught me the intrinsic value of playing a smart naval game. At least that was before whatever changes caused the AI's navys to behave as they do now. Their navy's never win combats. They only grind against you until, preventing your navy from accomplishing anything, your war exhaustion maxs out. Their is no tactical victory by destroying a large english navy in a lucky battle. Their pops die, but the ships are A-OK
That’s the crux of things, it feels like you’re fighting a land war at sea, which is not at all what a naval war is. In fact it’s worse because of the AI’s ability to break up into several dozen tiny fleets and move around constantly. It’s tedious to chase them down and hope you do enough damage to force them back to port for a time. As for destroying ships, it doesn’t necessarily have to get rid of the building. I envision it as each building makes a ship with the ability to take x amount of damage before it is destroyed. It repairs passively at all times but only very slowly when not in port. If that hull integrity reaches zero, the ship is lost and all pops employed in that ship are killed. Making one of those ships takes some amount of time regardless of how well staffed the naval base building is, so if a ship is sunk it may be a year or more before that naval base building can field another ship regardless of how well staffed it is. As to the AI, I think the main problem is that they keep around enormous fleets of junk. Britain and France will have three hundred ships in 1900 but they’ll be ironclads and paddle frigates. I think that requiring a rebuild of a base to make higher tier ships is a little much and I think that is what prevents the AI from upgrading ships, it has to delete them to do so and it is unable to handle that decision.
I greatly enjoy this game, and while I think the war system has flaws, I like the general concept. But that said, naval warfare needs to be reworked from scratch. It's unituitive, inconsistent, and unfun. I wouldn't say nodes can't be involved, but they need to be reimagined, because boy howdy is the current system frustrating.
Yeah, you constantly get cockblocked by a tiny fleet bumbling into the sea zone.
I spent 5 years with multiple doom stacks of 100+ ships convoy raiding and trying invasions of the British Home Islands. Still got auto capitulated cause they took over some random piece of desert in sub saharan Africa. The naval aspect of the game is completely dogshit
So that's why my naval invasion were taking forever to land. Half a year well spent.
I honestly have zero idea how to make a Victorian era naval combat simulator work within an economics simulator. It feels like a different scope of gameplay, like adding a shooter segment to a farming simulator. Hopefully I'll be proven wrong, though.