Naval strategy

[Sammydakid]

Im starting this thread for people to explain how they like to fight naval battles and share and discuss strategy.

Sailing gets you your first naval unit, the trireme. This ship is mainly an exploration tool and not a truly useful warship. I do use it ocationally to harass enemy fishing boats as it is quite good for that. Also if I'm worried about hostile archers, spear men, and the like crossing water with optics a few triremes will scare them off.

Navigation is when naval combat really takes off. I like to have a navy with mostly frigates sprinkled with 2-3 privateers. The frigates do the bulk of the fighting while I always try to land the last blow on an enemy ship with a privateer to abuse the convert chance as much as possible.

Ironclads dominate industrial era fighting and are nearly as good as destroyers. Some times I will make 3-4 and swiftly overwhelm a poorly defended costal city.

In the modern era naval combat hits it's peak with subs, ACs, battleships and destroyers. I field a balanced fleet, with subs and battleships screened by a front line of destroyers. The destroyers protect other ships and spot subs while the my BS and subs fire away. I'm not big on aircraft carriers but I try to have one or two loaded with planes.

 

[Unresolved]

Naval combat: Scout with Triremes -> Beeline Navigation -> Win the game.

 

[Ryoga]

Like you said I usually wait until navigation before starting a naval conquest. I build five frigates and 2 privateers and then dominate the sea. I always try to get the +1 range on frigates as fast as possible. The when I convert them to battleship it's a slaughter fest.


There was one time however where I started with galleases. It was an archipelago map and I was mad at Alexander that sneak attacked me and conquered one of my cities. I didn't care about my plans anymore and I spammed galleasses with the intention to zerg rush him.

It wasn't bad, but that's mainly because in archipelago maps there's a lot more shallow water that you can use to move around. It's feasible but you need a lot of ships to make up for the wounded and the inevitable losses.


I almost never use ironclads. In the end I don't care that much about melee ships and I prefer to use my coal for factories.

 

[nanomage]

If you start your rampage with galeasses, by the time frigates time you'll allready have them at 3rd promotion, which is huge.

 

[cmorganuk]

Spam as many frigates as you have iron, I like to have 8 initially, then increase as and when you can.

I prefer to go logisitcs first in the main, with a couple of range to help take cities.

If you are rolling frigates by turn 130-135, go double xp in honour, the game will be pretty much over before battleships.

 

[nanomage]

btw someone has to play 1 ot two city Byzantine game on a water map, starting with Dromons

 

[Kakdaddy]

I always start with Galleass war. Its very easy to get that ranged promotion up there just by trading blows with the cpu for a few turns. 3-5 ranged Galleass armadas are unstoppable that early. When you get the Navigation promotion forget about it, game is yours.

 

[docbud]

I just finished a game as the Netherlands. Liz was close by and never attacked until later in the game. She attacked with at least a dozen Ship of the Lines. I had my sea beggars and frigates AND--I had a half-dozen subs. I let my subs do all the work and wiped out her navy. She kept building/buying more SOLs and kept sending them over. I must have wiped two dozen SOLs by the time the war ended.

I had thought of trying to capture a few of them, but I was enjoying myself too much sinking them all.

 

[Catan_Settler]

If you're playing archipelago or small continents, start farming XP with Galleas to upgrade to Frigates and, if necessary, through to battleships. It is possible to clear a standard sized map in the Frigate age if you have some level 4 & 5 ships working for you, and pretty much trivial to do so with battlehsips.

Now if you're on regular continents map, Galleas are not quite as useful since most of the cities won't be coastal nor reachable until you have frigates. The main thing to realize is having a fleet of Frigates or Battleships with Logistics (2 attacks) is pretty much game over for the AI. Because you can move into range with your ship, shoot the city twice, then move back out. You can rotate tons of ships through the firing line and literally drop cities in one turn while hardly taking any counter fire. So, yeah, the main strategy for naval for me is to get those ships. Which means a lot of leveling them up on barbs, or city states, or drawn out attrition fights against AIs. Just straight up farming experience to get that 4th promotion. Once you have a handful of those, it just keeps getting easier and easier to knock down cities, and eventually you'll have enough of those double attacking frigates you can split them up into two attack forces. That's how you end the game with frigates.

 

[IkM]

Play as Ottomans. problem solved.

 

[azzaman333]

With enough iron, Frigates are floating death machines that'll effectively conquer the cities of enemies at technological parity. Battleships are Frigates on steroids.

Submarines are an extremely cost effective way to tear an enemy navy to pieces.

The AI is clueless about naval warfare, so it doesn't take much to crush them on the high seas.

 

[OwlRaider]

Well, it very much depends on the map. For Archipelago/Small Islands maps I like to take civilizations with early naval UU/UA, especially Carthage and the Ottomans, get my navy going early and getting it promoted early on to create a beastly navy later on. While the Byzantines have the best Trireme replacement, it's ranged so it can't keep its initial promotions once upgrading to Caravels, which makes the Dromon a short term investment rather than long term, which I like less, but it can still be extremely powerful to conquer 1 or 2 neighbors with Dromons. Ottomans don't have a unique ship, but their ability to convert barbarian ships produces huge navies. Unfortunately most of the barbarian ships are Triremes so you'll have a ton of melee boats and almost no ranged ones, which will make conquering cities that much harder, but you can still dominate the open sea with them easily enough. If you're playing on Large Islands/Continents than I much prefer the English or Dutch since getting their unique ships later gives you enough time to conquer your island/continent quickly with a standard CB rush and than get your powerhouse ships to conquer the other islands/continents. As far as the actual strategies go, pretty much the same as land battles Imho. Get your ranged ships in range, shoot and rotate out when damaged enough. Get your melee ships to swoop in for the conquest. Naval combat is even easier than land combat because you don't have limiting terrain, and once you get the range promotion on your ranged ships you don't even care about the position of the coastal city, so even if it only has 1 exposed ocean tile you can still beat on it easily thanks to the additional range.

 

[nanomage]

It upgrades to galeass, dromon I mean

 

[Catan_Settler]

Do a lot of you take ranged promotion before logisitics? I always take logistics first since it allows your ships to rotate out after they fire. I find with archipelago the landmasses are kinda awkward shaped so sometimes there's only one or two suitable tiles to bombard from, and with range instead of logistics you'll have ships just sitting in the way all the time since they used up all their movement points to shoot. The other advantage of logistics first, is that it essentially halves the time for that next promotion since the ship can now get two hits of XP per turn. (or three if it gets counter attacked)

 

[OwlRaider]

Do a lot of you take ranged promotion before logisitics? I always take logistics first since it allows your ships to rotate out after they fire. I find with archipelago the landmasses are kinda awkward shaped so sometimes there's only one or two suitable tiles to bombard from, and with range instead of logistics you'll have ships just sitting in the way all the time since they used up all their movement points to shoot. The other advantage of logistics first, is that it essentially halves the time for that next promotion since the ship can now get two hits of XP per turn. (or three if it gets counter attacked)

As you said, it depends on the map, but yes generally more attacks>more range, that goes for both ranged ships and ranged land units. However restricting terrain can always tip the favor for range, did I mentioned it's map dependent?

 

[nanomage]

Do a lot of you take ranged promotion before logisitics? I always take logistics first since it allows your ships to rotate out after they fire. I find with archipelago the landmasses are kinda awkward shaped so sometimes there's only one or two suitable tiles to bombard from, and with range instead of logistics you'll have ships just sitting in the way all the time since they used up all their movement points to shoot. The other advantage of logistics first, is that it essentially halves the time for that next promotion since the ship can now get two hits of XP per turn. (or three if it gets counter attacked)

Logistics is surely better than range, but range comes as 3rd promotion while logistics is 4th.

 

[HeraldtheGreat]

Just today I went tall-tradition early game as England, and then went for a galleass rush with naval tradition. Destroyed Aztec's, and on my way to destroy Ethiopia's sole Capital with ships of the line and Longbows. I was using the plate tectonics map script mod.

 

[knighterrant81]

Galleasses can be a nice way to work into Frigates. Ranged is king (just like, or even more so, than on land), but it is nice to have a few naval melee units to soak up the attacks of your enemy before you unload. Submarines are interesting, if situational (that situation being that you haven't crushed everyone else' navy into submission before the industrial/modern era!). Some of the melee UU's can do decent damage to cities and are interesting, but for the most part:

Galleass-->Frigate-->Battleship-->its over!