Is naval domination viable?

[aegis_23]

I've been tinkering trying to set up a game which focuses more heavily on naval combat rather than land units. As yet I've had little luck in building a game where it isn't essential to have a full separate land army to capture at least half of the capital cities around the map. I've tried with fractal and island plates with varying sea levels and start balances but the game doesn't seem to give everyone a coastal bias. This is further exasperated by the fact unstacking the harbor from the city makes it better to move inland in most cases rendering melee and ranged (until late era) naval units pretty useless in most of the games I've had so far.

Has anyone had any luck generating maps that are mostly navy focused? I'd really appreciate the map seeds or details on settings if so.

Rgds

 

[rschissler]

Even if you get the map thing figured out, naval combat can't be that exciting unless the AI builds ships, which it hardly does.

 

[Victoria]

Umm so incorrect nowadays. It seems if you start building navy so does the AI

I play a fair amount of naval domination. May I suggest trying England, Japan or Norway on the TSL map? There is a thread running at the moment on the TSL with some naval advice in there. I am not sure what you are doing wrong. I always play continents and have no real issue br getting the right start at a river mouth

You can do naval a few ways, early rush or t100 consolidation are good ways.
The key thing is there is plenty of cities by the sea so take them and outgrow your inland opponent. This is where Victoria shines, not in the naval side but as soon as she gets redcoats its gg.
Every city you take gives a redcoat with scary off continent +10 bonus. You just snowball into the centre.

T100 consolidation I prefer, thats where you go standard route to t100 keeping galley and quad non upgraded and build no navy, quite likely because you do not start near the coast. Aim to get a great prod coastal city, even building great lighthouse there... That is the only useful wonder IMO... Ventetisn arsenal can be handy for turning high xp ships to armadas but thats it. The key is build a harbour ideally before your boats so they get +1 movement and +1 for GLhouse
As a small fleet of max promo +2 MP ships just wreck . Too much to write here really, about to play as my son is off. Feel free to ask questions or should I do a guide?

 

[aegis_23]

I haven't tried a TSL game yet, but I'll have a look to see if there's any difference there. I'm fine with the basic concept of building a naval strategy. My point is more that on most ocean focused maps I still have to nudge a land army across the map to do the majority of the work. I can't capture anything with ships alone due to the 1-3 hexs of land separating most cities from my melee and ranged ships. In fact except for exploration and harassing, my ships are usually set to alert somewhere near my home territory and I'd like to have a game where I can really put them to work.

 

[Victoria]

Oh cmon, a couple of 80 year olds armed with sticks will take the city once it has been reduced. Do you want me to specify a unit for you to build?

I really have no issue in MP with this strategy. Mabye because the higher the difficulty the more cities and wuiteca few are on the coast...what difficulty are you playing?

 

[Tacgnol]

Well you aren't going to be able to take every city with ships, obviously, you need to have some sort of land army to take cities.

But on an island plates map, you should be able to cripple every civ, take out their army and every city within 4 tiles of the coast with bombardment and maybe 1 or 2 land units. What's left won't be able to fight you (well, not that the AI was ever really able to fight you in the first place...), it's just a matter of sieging a few inland cities.

So, in addition to your navy, maybe 1 or 2 cavalry units to take cities just off the coast, and a basic force of a melee unit, a couple siege units and one or two ranged or cavalry units for support. Not too hard to build and maintain even with a naval focus.

Or it should be. In my one experience with an island plates map, there was a huge continent taking up half the map, and this was pre Australia patch so it blocked off both ice caps and my navy couldn't get to half the ocean...it turned into a drawn out trudge to build siege units and take the rest of the map but if I'd been able to use my battleships on all the map's coastal cities instead of just like half of them it would have been fine. Most fractal maps have girthy continents but I've seen one or two that were suited for naval conquest. It also always helps to play with high sea level.

 

[Victoria]

I always play continents but then I normally play victoria who is 100% suited for the switch.

 

[magha77]

Even excluding the crap AI, using the Venetian Arsenal to make quick navies/armadas, I have decimated coastal cities with coastal bombardment and an amphibious landing.

 

[Victoria]

The promotions on Naval vessels are so strong you do not need the arsenal, it just seems such a waste amd ship maintenance is not cheap. Get galleys and wuads early and push their xp makes a much more dominating force IMO. Gimme the GL anyday

 

[King Jason]

Unless you face an opponent that is 100% entirely on land, which I find to be a rarity, I personally find a Navy to be virtually unstoppable by an A.I. - Frigates are ridiculously strong. On a continents map, sure, you might not be able to overwhelm every civ with your navy - but you'll easily be able to use it to secure a certifiable winning position by wiping out all of the civs you can reach, while being practically unopposed.

 

[Victoria]

Its changed a bit now @King Jason , I have had 5 quads killed by one of those damn barb caravels. This brings me to the tech advantage at deity. If you start spamming frigates with Venetian arsenal while they have subs you are.... Well, sunk. I have had the same issue with the getting a Brazilian performed on my fleet due to a battle ship.

The combat difference with the different eras can really kill you and the AI is now building them happily. Not enough but if you swagger around without care your whole game can be at least stalled.

Its still a good tactic but thats why I am saying the lighthouse is strong now combined with always building in a harbour.

I fond the +2 for flanking a bit naff and ooooh my admiral can increase that by 50%. Still I guess it all helps. Destroyers are such an important beeline though because those damn subs are sneaky.

You are right though, its still normally GG once you have frigates unless playing Deity where things wre a tad different now.

 

[Haig]

Victoria don't you like Fractal maps, they are even more fun for naval battles (and canal cities!) than continents, in my opinion.

 

[Victoria]

Its not about the best map, or even the funnest map. I like continents because it feels real for me, plain and simple.

There is also I guess the point of continents are the default, I hate changing too many options for a restart and many people play continents so I like to be on a pop map and also its more of a challenge.... But mainly it feels right.

 

[CaptainUnknown]

Continents can be a whole lot of fun because you get a sense of exploration in the mid-game. For Pangaea maps, exploring the game to early can make the mid-game lose some of it's luster, at least for me. I especially like finding new city-states.

 

[Victoria]

Continents can be a whole lot of fun because you get a sense of exploration in the mid-game. For Pangaea maps, exploring the game to early can make the mid-game lose some of it's luster, at least for me. I especially like finding new city-states.

Hear hear....and I guess thats why you are captain of the unknown

 

[Civilopedian]

Sorry to bring up an old thread but I was googling and this thread came up.

I have been playing with Kupe/Maori on Deity on Fractal and I'm having some joy with naval domination. Basically my idea was to try to settle far away from the AI, spam fishing boats, obviously use God of the Sea, put Fisheries every other coastal tile that isn't a harbour or Great Lighthouse (strongly recommend getting) and then build harbours everywhere, preferably with adjacent commercial hub. The reason for doing this is to build a huge economy to support what will be an expensive and large navy (each Frigate costs 4gpt and 15 or 30 nitre). I also build campuses in places with +3 adjacency or better (if adjacent to coast and reef, even better, potentially that's base +2 culture)

I have been doing this with Dramatic Ages (DAs) and I definitely think it would be a lot harder without, but the main reason it works with DAs is Free Inquiry which makes your hubs and harbours give the same amount of science as they do gold from their adjacency bonuses. This means that once you get going, the technological deficit feels much more like it does on Immortal.

Once you get to Frigates, Free Inquiry stops and you lose a chunk of science (probably around 30 per turn), but it doesn't really matter because now your economy is very strong (200+ a turn is pretty strong for medieval/renaissance) and you can buy all that science back and meanwhile you've upgraded ideally 6-8 quads and you've had all the great admirals.

BTW Kupe is very good for this type of game because of the +2 movement in the sea for your embarked units which means you can send both land and sea units exploring and that helps you find a lot of extra city states and tribal villages.

 

[PiR]

unstacking the harbor from the city makes it better to move inland in most cases

How is it better? Adjacent to city center gives +2 bonus.

Has anyone had any luck generating maps that are mostly navy focused?

Archipelago maps.

 

[Archon_Wing]

Obviously depends on maps (not Pangaea), but with galleys having 30 strength it's easy to snipe coastal cities at the start if they're willing to build them.

Frigate push is also pretty typical but better with Indonesian Jongs

 

[Earl of Pembroke]

should I do a guide?

I always learn a lot from your guides @Victoria and would be interested in seeing how you play a naval game.

 

[ShakaKhan]

Speaking solely from a single-player deity perspective...

I'm glad this thread was necro-ed because I think there's a bit of confusion regarding some of the terminology and consequent tactics. The VAST majority of the Civ-tubers exacerbate the issue as they much prefer land-based combat over naval combat.

"Winning a game wherein the majority of combat is naval" and "playing a game where you never build a single land combat unit" are two different things. Yes, for naval-based domination games it's usually necessary to have some degree of a land army. And yes, if the AI settles their cities a tile or two in from the coast, you will need a paper unit to take the city. But despite both of these truths, naval domination is not only viable but (in my opinion) FAR easier than land-based domination. Leading into the second point of clarification...

..."Using combat to basically bulldoze the map and burn down or capture every AI-settled city" and "winning a domination victory" are two VERY different things. If you like steamrolling through AI territory and ROFLstomping every unit that they throw in your way, then have at it; everyone is entitled to play and win the game in whatever way pleases them. But, this is in no way necessary to win a domination victory. A domination victory is triggered by taking possession of every AI capital. Period. It's not necessary to do anything to any of their other cities, and it's possible (however unlikely) to win a domination victory without ever destroying a single unit (unless its in their capital.)

Taking these two points into account, I find naval domination to be much more fun and much easier than land domination. When you decide to share vision of capitals with the AI, you can see where it is and the 6 tiles surrounding their capital (though it gets a little more complicated if they lost their capital and you only get to see their current and unoriginal capital. Anyways...) make a note of which capitals are coastal, you can disregard these civs for now and even establish friendship and alliances with them, boosting your trade yields. The civs that don't have coastal capitals are going to need some bulldozing, but often when you scout out their territory, you can find a path to their capital that involves only having to work through one city if any at all. Then, once the non-coastal capitals are out of the way, build or buy at least 3 naval ranged units and one naval melee unit PER AI CAPITAL REMAINING, and move them into position. Naval rangedunits must not suffer the same penalties attacking cities as land units as I find they melt through city defenses much easier than land units do, even without the support unit bonuses. DoW every AI with a capital remaining and take it in 1 or 2 turns. Domination victory triggered.

Now on coastal maps (particularly island plates and archipelago), this can lead to a very different domination experience as the lack of tiles that are far inland makes for most or all of the AI to settle their capital on the coast. If every capital is on the coast, then you can play peacefully and trade and sim-city your way to incredible infrastructure for the entire game... except the last two turns where you DoW everyone (which may entail waiting for an alliance to expire) and take every capital on the same turn one turn later. I find the advent of frigates to be the sweet spot as they are the last naval ranged unit you can make without having the units consume resources. Naval units also arrive at their destination much quicker as they have more movement and there's no water terrain that slows movement. This is a method of enjoying the fruits of peaceful interaction with the AI for basically the entire game and still be able to trigger a domination victory. If there are one or two AI that settled a bit inland, it'll take a few ,more turns as you move your land army into position and DoW them a few turns earlier to work your way to the capital. Once you get there, don't take the capital (and suffer the consequences of doing so) until you've dowed everyone else and have your navy work ever capital down to 1HP. Then take them all in the same turn.

This is obviously a strategy that doesn't work in multiplayer, but if @Victoria says naval dom is viable in MP games, I'll take her words to the bank.