Largest Navy you've ever fielded?

Had a game with 19 AIs about a month ago on an Earth map where I was England. In this game I've actually noticed 3 civilizations having a massive Navy of 10 - 15 ships, something which I've never seen before or ever again. Anyway at some point in time I was declared war on by 7 different players out of the blue. America & Spain in North America, Brazil and Portugal in South America, Austria & France in Egypt, and my very own neighbour and friend Sweden in Europe. Had no choice but to field a massive Navy to fight a war across 4 continents.

Total naval count was:

24 Battleships (6xLV4, 5xLV5, 4xLV6, 4xLV7, 3xLV8, 2xLV9)
16 Submarines (2xLV5, 14xLV4)
5 Destroyers
5 Carriers
15 Carrier-based Triplanes
5 Great Admirals

Sadly I never completed the game. Managed to cripple America, Brazil & Netherlands (which were the leading world powers) by taking over their coastal cities, but I didn't have the heart to continue because it was a pain controlling at least 50 units each turn.

What's the sense of making a navy like that unless you intend to play with it?

I had a large navy war with Spain on an Immortal game. Map wasn't huge but she had killed the two players on her continent and was gunning for ours. I was playing tall as India and was the only one who had the tech to counter her. When she declared war on my friend Siam I preemptively attacked her fleet and sank 7-8 ships with subs and battleships. Next turn my 15-boat fleet was reduced in half by aircraft and other nearby vessels. Thus began a war that raged 60 turns until the completion of the Utopian project. I sank about 60 vessels including almost 10 carriers and targeted cities and sources of aircraft bombardment destroying about 70 planes. It was nonstop, the entire time my Military Advisor was screaming for me to wrap up the war and that Spain fielded an army that could wipe me off the planet. I got tired of sneak attacks from carriers and surrounded the Spanish coastline with widely spacing nuke subs all having +2 movement and +30% vs. naval units. One-hit sunk everything that came out of the harbors. My navy was about 25-30 so not quite as impressive as yours but I only had about 5 cities to build from (tall game). Her entire coast was crawling with SAM's, tanks, machine-guns and the like so I spent the rest of the game freeing CS's on the coast using destroyers to distract her and bombarding land troops. This tactic kept her from seriously trying to get off continent while I sneakily finished the Utopia Project in the background.

I did a water/archipelago huge map with Venice and fielded my entire army with only naval units and eventually air units. By the end, it was probably 70 naval units strong since I had nothing better to do with all that trade route money than to keep on buying more units, city-state allies to prevent embargoes and rampaging.

I'm playing Venice and get donated troops all the time from my CS's, however anytime I go over 19 units it nerfs production in the city by 10% saying I have too many units to support. My gold is +250 a turn. How did you get around this problem?

Was there a patch that changed Venice's game play? I played that game when BNW was first released and don't remember ever seeing that message. However, I barely cared about building anything but wonders, so I may not have been aware of the effect on production. I just bought all the buildings.

I've been doing the same thing really. It's not a popup but a little red exclamation mark that appears near your resources. The hover-over text says: "your civilization can only support 19 units and you have 1 more than this. Production is reduced in cities by 10%". This modifier does not show up in the hover-over production text in-city though so it's possible that the effect isn't happening. I'll do some experimentation. Never seen it either, but I've never had more than 20 units per city in a game before. If it's not actually affecting the city that would be nice as I've deleted more than 5 useful units already. :-/

By the way, did you do this: when I first started as venice I was sure luxury-trading was gonna suck because I could only trade originals no matter how many duplicates I got from my CS's. I invested in these heavily as they greatly boost science and everything else with patronage. However, I ended up on a continent by myself with several other unique luxuries 4-5 tiles out. My city eventually took them and I got them as well. I was able to claim some luxuries 7 tiles out by strategically using Great Generals to grab up territory I can't work but can reap resources from. I never realized this would work. Great Generals have never been so useful! I now get almost 50 GPT from selling off these extra luxuries.

Yeah, but I used the Great Generals for expanding borders of City-States that I puppeted with a MoV, since Venice was on an island small enough that it could take the entire thing through regular border growth.

okay. I haven't puppeted anyone yet. Puppets haven't been that useful to me on past games since they grow out of control yet still increase science and culture costs and reduce happiness. Is there something special about venice's puppets that make them worthwhile or am I missing something?

You can buy units and buildings in puppets with Venice, so they are definitely useful. You can peacefully take a city state half a world away and then start buying yourself an army to dominate from there. No need to build and then sail all the way across the oceans. That's just one example. The main thing is that you can buy useful buildings for them, so they don't just build barracks and walls and whatnot.

hmmm. thanks. That IS useful--missed that. Another poster that I read said having at least 1 or 2 puppets early is necessary to ship food back to the capital and make it a massive specialist city that much quicker. Might try that since I've put so much effort into making the main city amazing. I have a lot of GP tiles too...

danaphanous said:

I'm playing Venice and get donated troops all the time from my CS's, however anytime I go over 19 units it nerfs production in the city by 10% saying I have too many units to support. My gold is +250 a turn. How did you get around this problem?

Click to expand...

There's a supply limit for the amount of units you can field based on your population and your city count, exceeding it nerfs your production. Venice would be particularly vulnerable because both their city and pop count tends to be quite small.

I find a huge navy usually pointless.

You only usually have enough space to attack with a few ships, and even then, a few with 3 range shooting will do the trick.

And the AI is awful at using ships. A few subs can cripple their entire fleet.

I once had three triremes in the early classical era, as the Inca.
I'm not much for Navies.

direblade99 said:

There's a supply limit for the amount of units you can field based on your population and your city count, exceeding it nerfs your production. Venice would be particularly vulnerable because both their city and pop count tends to be quite small.

Click to expand...

Yup, if you open the military menu it shows the number of units allowed due to pop and # of cities. I think the penalty gets worse when you go over the limit by more units.

I've deleted workers and older/weaker units to stop this penalty.

BTW, I love naval units, sea trade routs have made them relevant again.

Usually skip navies.

But tried it once and built 4 frigate and a privateer

Was pleasantly surprised by how much they contributed-took Berlin and sniped a lot of units-even though in part because the AI is stupid with unneccessarily embaring units.

I play standard size maps.

So I tend to end the game with no bigger than:

1 Aircraft Carrier (fully loaded with bombers)
4 Battleships
6 Destroyers (4 of which started as Privateers, the other 2 having started as the first naval unit for scouting)

I don't need any more as I can use this force to defeat in detail the AI that had more ships but them spread all over the map.

Possibly four.... yeah I think four ships. And I never went to war with them but I always made sure to update them every single chance I got.