Naval Units Rework Project

1. Destroyers are far too strong. I know this has been said before, but you have to admit it's gone quiet here... Strength 24-25 with a hefty bonus against wooden ships and a decent one vs. subs would be far more like it. Currently "capital ships" do not get built. Which leads me to the other problem here: Everything after the Sloop of War upgrades only to the Destroyer. Pre-Dreadnought/Dreadnought/Battlecruiser should be options for most if not all of them.

2. Sloops of War are better at bombarding city defences than Destroyers or anything in between.

3. There should be a steam pirate ship/privateer. Privateer(ish) tactics played a role in WWI eg. sinking of the HMAS Sydney.

4. Where are the 20th century's Armed Merchantman and 'Troop Ship' ie. commandeered passenger liner?

Yudishtira said:

4. Where are the 20th century's Armed Merchantman and 'Troop Ship' ie. commandeered passenger liner?

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Not yet played into this Era. But Yudishtira is right. During the Falklands conflict the QE2 cruise ship was converted into a troop carrier.

All of those things are planned to be fully addressed with this review. We're still IN this review. At the moment, there's numerous bugs that have priority over the review. The main hangup here is art but there's also some coding issues to address to do things properly still. Troop ships are one of my favorite planned elements - as mentioned about the QE2.

Since the change with coast costing 2 movement, some ships have quadruple move in coast (ie. 1/2MP per tile) and double in ocean (1MP per tile). It may be from Nav III promo (ie. they may all have that in common), but the promo's mouseover doesn't mention it.

That's a lot of moves!!! (15-17 x 2 = 30-34 along coast in early modern)

it's not navigation, but the other one, the one that removes 1 movement penalty and adds bonus versus wooden ships.

Yeah, promos need some reworking and many techs need to lose the +1 naval mvmt still.

Just want to remind folks that this is still one of the core works in progress I'm continuing to strive to achieve completion on. The last two versions have done a lot to pave the way for this project's final implementation.

For example, movement rules have been smoothed over to the point that it's now possible to easily code new unit interaction rules for cases like depth and tunnels and hovering. Only a little work to make a generic Z placement in map space is necessary for the hover units now, that and making it possible to have Sea domain units that can use land tiles (like hover can use sea tiles.)

I also want to make it so that hovering units must end the turn back on the last transport or land space they left if they end their turn over the open ocean.

Some merchant plans still need to be implemented. Some additional programming for naval landing attack dynamics is still necessary. And some combat factors for energy weapons and defenses are some things I'd like to accomplish as part of this implementation. But all in all, we're very very close to having all this project come into play.

This project inspired the healer changes we have, completely guided the development of hide and seek (and will make dramatic use of it as well) and did wonders for planning with the extended tech tree.

Thing is, there's so much imbalance and poor AI on a much more important sector of the game, land military, that some of this stuff still needs to wait before further development.

I tied to find the closest topic to this and this is what i found. So ...

I recently added +1 Movement to the Gyrocompass tech. I wondered how many other techs do this and I found ..

- Weather Lore (Classical)
- Compass (Medieval)
- Astrolabe (Renaissance)
- Navigation (Renaissance)
- Naval Tactics (Renaissance)
- Sextant (Renaissance)
- Screw Propeller (Industrial)
- Refrigeration (Industrial)
- Gyrocompass (Industrial)
- Sonar (Modern)

Mostof these make sense. Refrigeration is questionable. But I suppose it means you can cross without supplies going bad? I don't know.

Also its off there are note more modern or beyond. So perhaps some should be added for later eras. Some ideas ....

- Unmanned Naval Vehicles (Information)
- Internal Shockwave Engine (Nanotech)

That's about all I could find that even remotely relate to naval speed.

Hydromancerx said:

I tied to find the closest topic to this and this is what i found. So ...

I recently added +1 Movement to the Gyrocompass tech. I wondered how many other techs do this and I found ..

- Weather Lore (Classical)
- Compass (Medieval)
- Astrolabe (Renaissance)
- Navigation (Renaissance)
- Naval Tactics (Renaissance)
- Sextant (Renaissance)
- Screw Propeller (Industrial)
- Refrigeration (Industrial)
- Gyrocompass (Industrial)
- Sonar (Modern)

Mostof these make sense. Refrigeration is questionable. But I suppose it means you can cross without supplies going bad? I don't know.

Also its off there are note more modern or beyond. So perhaps some should be added for later eras. Some ideas ....

- Unmanned Naval Vehicles (Information)
- Internal Shockwave Engine (Nanotech)

That's about all I could find that even remotely relate to naval speed.

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Read back on this thread. We're hoping to slash these dramatically... bring them down to maybe 3 or 4 techs that do this only. Units themselves, as they upgrade, increase in speed so this on top of that is causing naval units to be WAY too fast in the later eras. I suppose the alternative is to hardly have naval units increase in speed as a base and just let these stages apply to all naval units... but this doesn't help with the variations of ship speeds much.

Whatever HAS to get this benefit, is what we should be looking at, and removing the benefit from these techs that don't absolutely need it, not trying to find where to add more.

Well then my vote is remove it from Refrigeration. Here are my tiers ...

Absolutely make sense ...
- Compass (Medieval)
- Astrolabe (Renaissance)
- Sextant (Renaissance)
- Gyrocompass (Industrial)

Sorrta make sense ...
- Weather Lore (Classical)
- Navigation (Renaissance)
- Naval Tactics (Renaissance)
- Screw Propeller (Industrial)
- Sonar (Modern)

Not sure why ...
- Refrigeration (Industrial)

Refrigeration is obvious - you don't have to put into port every couple of days to get new supplies of perishable food.

Hydromancerx said:

Well then my vote is remove it from Refrigeration. Here are my tiers ...

Absolutely make sense ...
- Compass (Medieval)
- Astrolabe (Renaissance)
- Sextant (Renaissance)
- Gyrocompass (Industrial)

Sorrta make sense ...
- Weather Lore (Classical)
- Navigation (Renaissance)
- Naval Tactics (Renaissance)
- Screw Propeller (Industrial)
- Sonar (Modern)

Not sure why ...
- Refrigeration (Industrial)

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Dancing Hoskuld said:

Refrigeration is obvious - you don't have to put into port every couple of days to get new supplies of perishable food.

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While I can now see the logic in DH's position on Refrigeration, we still need to reduce this as far as we can. I think Screw Propeller is one that makes too much sense to lose but everything else from 'Sorta makes sense' and below should go. Weather Lore makes a LOT of sense too but it still gets to be too much unfortunately. None of those have this as their 'only' benefit, do they?

Why Screw Propeller? You won't outfit your remaining sail ships with a Screw Propeller, and your need ships have this techs anyways. So it should be removed from this one; the speed benefit is already "in" new ships.

Faustmouse said:

Why Screw Propeller? You won't outfit your remaining sail ships with a Screw Propeller, and your need ships have this techs anyways. So it should be removed from this one; the speed benefit is already "in" new ships.

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You wouldn't HAVE wooden ships by then (well... you shouldn't if you're able to upgrade as you go) and actually, historically yeah, a lot of ships were retrograded after this invention, as it was considered one of the most profound inventions to improve ship speed ever, and many of the ships that later used the screw propeller were ships that were invented long before it otherwise.

Ah ok, I didn't know.... Well ok then, I can see that Screw Propeller fits great.
Is it possible to make ships having movement penalties within foreign boarders? If so, this would allow ships to cross the Atlantic easily, but when they reach the coast they slow down enough that you can prepare to stop them. Also, you could then give gallys a bonus to movement within your own boarders.

But then Weather Lore is the only Classical Era tech that gives that.

In fact the more we analyze these the more I want to keep them all.

A lot of those (e.g. sextant, refrigerator, compass, radar, sonar, etc...) should be replace by forthcoming equipment changes.

Equipment changes?

Some future plan of TB's (where units improve or have different/additional functionality as their equipment does).

Although rethinking it, I would presume major pieces of integrated equipment (Sonar, Radar) would be equipment while small things (improved maps, compass, Sextant) should stay as universal tech improvement as they are negligible production wise and easy to distribute.

Maybe a good idea to make these +1 Movement changes promotions then?