Naval Warfare Zerg's style

[ZergMazter]

Hello guys

I've been thinking about a way to make naval warfare in my mod more like the 'Battleship' game.

That means that im trying to change the way naval battles happen like this:

1- Instead of using your ships to engage in a one time battle deal in which you could either live or die, you will just rely on bombardment as your main attack which will make dynamic fights as you will not necessarily die from one strike.

Here are some general rules I'm planning to change:

1- Keeping movements from 6 to 9 movements, but with 'treats all terrain as if roads' flag on, and your actual movement value being either 2-3 which would translate to 6-9 with the mentioned flag on. This is so that when engaging enemy ships, or firing your cannons, your movement gets limited by losing a full 1 (3/w flag) movement point and cant run off so far away from the battle area, giving the damaged ship a chance to find you and bombard you.

2- Increasing bombard range from 2 to 3-6. This helps feed the idea about 'battleship' style combat. You will have to use on board ship radars to scan territory before you run out of movement points in hopes to getting close enough and fire at them once your target has been found. The AI wont use radars but its ok as they already know where you are.

3- Increasing movement cost of naval tiles by certain amounts except for coastal tiles to make it harder for ships to hit and vanish from your coast into to ocean.

4- Adding a drone technology to allow humans to build scouting drones that can be loaded into ships, giving humans a bit more expanded recon capability, as the AI has 100% recon advantage over you, since they always know where you are. This is to even it up a little bit ( If you work hard enough to get the resources, and research the tech of course)

Some of the things still working on:

1- Trying to decided the best amount of movement on roads (2 or 3). So far I'm thinking 2 might be better, down from 3.

2- Trying to figure out how to best manipulate the AI into only bombarding with naval units.

Some untested examples are:

A: 1 attack, 20 defense, high bombardment?
B: 0 attack, 20 defense, high bombardment?
C: Still working out some other ideas.

I will post soon if this is achieveable or not. See ya soon!

 

[Lionic]

I am not 100% expert in game mechanics, but:
- Keeping movements from 6 to 9 movements, but with 'treats all terrain as if roads' flag on,
and
- Increasing movement cost of naval tiles by certain amounts except for coastal tiles

is no use to apply at the same time AFAIK

 

[ZergMazter]

Oh yea lol... I kept mentioning ''treats all terrain as if roads' and I got my thoughts crossed. I'll try and come up with a solution.

 

[Civinator]

The real difference in the use of "All terrain as Roads" (=ATAR) and movement restriction/Movement Bonus in naval warfare long-range bombardement is the combination with the blitz-flag (see the setting of aircraft carriers in CCM).

A carrier with MV 6 could bombard 6 times with the blitz-flag if the unit isn´t moved, while the carrier with MV 2 and the blitz-flag can only bombard twice (when not moved and road movement is 3) - what is mostly more realistic.

Unfortunately it is not always so, that the unit with the high bombardement and a very low attack-rating always uses the bombardement option. I made a lot of tests with these settings when creating SOE. To use the bombard-flag, the naval unit needs the Naval Power tactics setting in the editor - and that means they need an attack factor of at least 1 and therefore they have the possibility of a normal attack. I have seen normal attacks of carriers with an attack factor of one and a high bombard rating to simple destroyers - and in such a combat the destroyer sinks the carrier without any problems.

So the "bombardement-ship" also needs a considerable normal attack power to sink at least smaller ships in a normal naval attack, too (for WW2 naval battles my formula for carriers is, that they must be able to sink at least destroyers in a normal attack).

Another problem with "bombardement-ships" can be that, they are used much too quick for the defense of a stack. So with the use of carriers (which in my eyes are the most complicated bombardement ships in Civ 3 - but they must be set as bombardement-ships, as the AI doesn´t use the aircraft carrier-flag properly) they were frequently used as defence ship of stacks against attacks of simple destroyers - and of course were sunk by them. Here the king-flag can help, that sets such ships as the last defender of a stack.

 

[ZergMazter]

Very nice Civinator. I was just testing and it works as you mentioned. One thing I noticed though is the use of the recon ability uses up all of your movements which was a boomer, but I guess it works to have specialized scouting ships in a stack for that sole purpose.

Also I think I am making my carriers and transport ships independent of escorts. I dont like how the AI uses so many units as escorts and doesnt even attack me with those. I might just give them enough defense, no escort flag, 1 attack.

If this turns out too good for the human player, then I will have to give me a unique set of naval units, and also a unique set for the AI. The human set will be more limited by introducing ammo to them. That means that I'll remove the bombard ability from human ships and instead I'll have to load them up with ammo to attack.

I believe I can have 3 unique ammo types using certain flags (Can carry only foot, air, or tactical missile), maybe even more by making combinations of those flags, then assigning each ship type to one ammo type for its specialized role. Since late in the game I end up having excessive gold per tun, then this could be a good usage of it, by making all those cheap ammo units.

And I dont mean as in cruise missile type of ammo units as a human could also abuse those by using them well as cruise missiles. I mean as modules for your ships (Aircraft).

This means that for example a human destroyer unit built by itself will not have any way to attack an enemy unless you load a missile module to it which you will use to attack. This will give the AI another edge over humans. They might be able to defend against your attack by shutting your missile down since it is an air unit technically, and you will have to load up another one.

This might even up the dumb AI with us humans and make it much more challenging and fun to fight AI navies and not just stomping them in half a turn

 

[Kirejara]

4- Adding a drone technology to allow humans to build scouting drones that can be loaded into ships, giving humans a bit more expanded recon capability, as the AI has 100% recon advantage over you, since they always know where you are. This is to even it up a little bit ( If you work hard enough to get the resources, and research the tech of course)

I have tried that by adding the ability to transport Seaplanes and Helicopters on my Cruisers and Battleships (marked as both aircraft and foot unit).

I works for human players, but the KI is unable to handle a ship with both strategy marks as "naval power" and "aircraft carrier". Even without planes on board they just sit in the ocean and do nothing.

So basically only human players are using these recon planes, as my capital ships now have the "naval power" mark only.

Also it seems to me that the KI prefer to bombard if a melee attack offers only a low chance of success (For example a KI Frigate will allmost never went into melee combat with an ironclad).

I have also increased the range for naval bombardment. Battleships have now a range of 3, Cruisers have a range of 2 and Destroyers, Light Cruisers and older ships have a range of 1. Also Battleships can kill land units with their attack.

 

[ZergMazter]

Kirejara thanks for the info. I'm now confident it will work. Also I was planning to give all this complex stuff to humans as the AI is too dumb and besides they already know where you are without even exploring hehe.

 

[ZergMazter]

I'm really liking this different approach to naval bombardment. Instead of the normal naval bombardment, I've redefined what naval bombardment means for humans while leaving the AI with regular naval bombardment.

The best way to go imo is to split mechanics apart from humans vs AI giving the AI a different set of mechanics that work similar to humans, but they actually can use efficiently.

What I did:

1- Left the AI with core naval mechanics
2- Removed core naval mechanics from humans:
A: No more anti aircraft value on ships.
B: No more bombardment value on ships.
C: Gave 1-3 loading space to most human ships except for destroyers as destroyers I actually
left with the core mechanics for humans that want to use the core naval bombard ability on
cities to clear up coastal air forces, and destroy coastal checked improvements. I also
turned on the coastal improv flag on all economical improvements, so they could be
destroyed by destroyers giving them a good spot in a fleet.
D: Gave most human ships, weapon (aircraft flagged) modules to install/load:
- Defensive missiles (air superiority only missiles), offensive missiles (bombard only),
recon modules (recon only), detect radar modules (Detect invisible only)
E: Lowered attack values of all AI and human ships to 1 so no one would hopefully engage in
the old fashion one time battle.
F: The bigger the ship, the slower it moves, so I changed mov values accordingly.
G: And finally I forgot to mention I also removed the radar ability of all ships as there is a
module for that now.

Basically these modules allow humans to customize any of their ships as they want taking into consideration their size (bigger ships got more modular space), or their speed (faster smaller ships got less modular space).

One could have for example fast moving ships with anti aircraft missile modules moving quickly to strategic naval positions to protect ships or assets, or one could have a capital ship with multiple anti aircraft modules for defending a fleet.

I'm loving this idea, so far, and it works well if you take the AI out of the picture by still giving them these core functions, but in the way that they can understand such as the core mechanics work.

All in all this is very fun for the humans, and makes it even and challenging as well as a human player cannot defend against incoming normal naval bombardment, but your new bombard abilities can be countered by the AI. Its not always an instant kill with this set up.

After I work out some minor calculations im gonna pass this idea over to my mod.

UPDATE:

I noticed also that if I disable the bombard ability on special actions for a ship, the AI still bombards, yet humans are not allowed. That makes it even easier as I can modify the current ships to use my modules, and AI might not bother messing with the modules at all since I'm not giving it any strategies.

 

[timerover51]

So the "bombardement-ship" also needs a considerable normal attack power to sink at least smaller ships in a normal naval attack, too (for WW2 naval battles my formula for carriers is, that they must be able to sink at least destroyers in a normal attack).

That is an interesting idea. I will have to think about that. For some of the larger carriers that would work, but for the smaller ones, it would not.

 

[ZergMazter]

Yea civinator and Kirejara are full of awesome ideas.

Thanks to you guys I've done something new completely by accident. In a test scenario I gave the AI my simulation ammo.

Each cannon fired from the AI ships was actually an air unit that was doing the bombard, instead of the regular bombard.

I had one of those defensive modules I created active on my battleship, which in essence is a missile with only the air superiority action, and it fired to defend the battleship. Even thought it was destroyed because it values were attack1/defense1 this gave me an idea.

This could be defensive disposable missiles like the ones naval ships have in real life. They fire look for their target, explode and destroy it, or at least got the enemy missile's target confused by it.

So many applications! In a space scenario you could replace the missile pcx for some kind of plasma shield pcx simulating a shield defending your ship. Your ships defense strength mechanism would depend on how many loading spots you have on your ship. The more spots, the more shields.

So you could make an upgrade path along with resources to simulate armor upgrades on ships. The more loading spots, the better armor you got since you can load more 'armor'. This also gives the new opportunity to make armor piercing rounds, which would be bombardment that ignores air units, ignoring armor.

At the moment I'm trying to figure out if somehow I can make normal bombardment somehow hit air units inside of a naval ship using a combination of flags. Just as it works when a naval ship bombards a city with air units inside and they get hit first. That would be dope, and would make it easier to implement with the AI.

Im also trying to figure out if by disabling all airport airlifts, and the AI has no place to airlift units, but naval ships, maybe they'll actually Re-base them to their navies helping my whole navel thing for a small sacrifice.

 

[ZergMazter]

Kirejara by the way those are some awesome looking mines in your pic. Where can I get them?

 

[Kirejara]

Kirejara by the way those are some awesome looking mines in your pic. Where can I get them?

Please look here: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=21871

These villages are much better looking then the usual swiss cheese countryside.

 

[ZergMazter]

Ha old thread I see. Thanks!