Naval Force Limit/Iberian Peninsula Mod for 3.2

[redgreen99]

Decided to put in the new ships which will make the mod only balanced for a 1360 start. The stock game has 18 ships, I'm adding 62 more (3 of which are courtesy of 17blue17) for a total of 80 ships. Just a few are european, the remainder are Japanese, Korean, Chinese and Indian. Two new tech tables are added, these are unique to Chinese and Indian Tech. So I now have the potential to fine tune those navies and even add in there own unique buildings if I wanted. Couple of screens to give an idea. Of course there are no new ship graphics. I did make the fire ship a bit unique by having it move with its sails down. So if they are solo, they can be distingushed in game. Have a lot of rebalanceing to do again.

I've also added 20 land units just for Korea and Japan.

[redgreen99]

I'm wanting to get an additional unique navy in. The trouble is, I can not find enough unique ships available for any one or small group of countries. Like for Russia, only found about 8 ship types referenenced. They don't reference any big ship class until the 18th century. The Dutch also had unqiue ships, again not enough and too dissimilar to throw them into the same tech as the Russian ships which were often stitched planks in medievel times. The unique scandanavian ships, (Vikings) were mostly outdated by the game start.

If anyone knows of a country with enough ship hull types to cover 1360 to 1830 let me know here. Ideally I would need at least 16, (4 per hull class).
I already am using Indian, Korean, Japanese, and Chinese. Whats lacking though, is 80% of countries are still using stock european hulls. From research though, that is accurate. Most of the unique ships tend to be fishing vessels, whale ships, coal ships etc... Which don't really fit the hull classes in game.

Its pointless for me to fine tune the tech balance until I finalize all techs, cause added another tech would reset the tech costs for the pre-existing ones.

I'm stretched for time right now, was hoping maybe Russian ships could be combined with ships from a few other countries to fill out a new navy. Then I'd make a new tech for those countries. Only requirment is that any countires in that tech be fairly equal in game. ANy suggestions for ships that might add into the Russian ones?

Here is a brief article on Russian ships:
http://www.cogandgalleyships.com/blo...dieval-russia/

http://www.abc.se/~pa/mar/rus-ship.htm

http://rusnavy.com/history/middleages/io02.htm

[George LeS]

I would urge caution here. There's a danger of adding types needlessly. The question is their different effectiveness. Are they really functionally different enough to make them part of the game? Remember, the more you add in, the more resources you use.

That said, I am still very interested in your work. One thing, I can't find a link to it. Have you posted it?

Also, as I understand it, this is for IN, right? Despite my complaints, there are some features of DW which would make this easier.

[redgreen99]

Nope, no link yet. I borked the balance when I reworked some things, so although I got more done I need a lot more play testing again. I do hope to get a beta out in 2 weeks in whatever state the mod is in at that point.

Not sure if DW would lend itself any better to how I want to add new navies. Unless DW has a code that can lower tech level to whatever I want, DIdn't see anything like that in EU3wiki.

Thats a good point about using more resources as I play on a laptop and many mods for IN were unplayable for me because they just bogged down the game on my machine. Those mods were event/mission intensive. I haven't noticed a substantial drop in performance from adding new navies. So far I only added 1 new tech, but it only has 2 countries in it. I do have some events at the very start for game balance and the events do seem to slow down the game for the 1st minute. Probably because they are firing for every country in game at the same time. After that, everything returns to normal.

Its actually amazing that Russia has Eastern tech with the same ships as everyone else. There army may have been strong, but it sounds like there navy was 90% for river use only. I just like the idea of having the ability to make countries have stong armies with weak navies or visa versa, something not really possible in the stock game where everyone shares the same navy and the tech the country is given is based more on army str than naval strength.

Even so I can't fully reflect naval balance with just 2 or 3 new navies. If nothing else, it adds a certain fog of war if you will. Where the 1st time through, when 12 armed junks and 6 dhows engage 7 panoksean and 8 gwiseon, you don't really know what you have.

It just bothers me that if you play England, Castile, France, Swedan or a host of European countries, you won't encounter any new navies until maybe 1650 or so. I'm temped to add just England/Scotland and Ireland into a new tech just for naval unit variety. I could simply use european units that the game didn't include for them. The str and when the ships become available can balance the game in the same way that events could. In both cases, performance might be affected somewhat, but I don't think the units would be any more so than new events.

I'm honestly not sure if my machine could handle a modded DW game as I heard there is quite a bit more overhead needed in DW.

EDIT - I can't get another navy tech to work. I mean it is fine except that I get a crash in the advisor page of the ledger. No idea how those 2 are connected, but I've tried it enough times and it is always fine without the Newest tech but crashes with it. Another curiousity I never noticed before as I never read this advisor page... but it lists the tech that the advisors country belongs to, and Oriental is listed. Oriental is not a tech though, not in Inomine, unless its referring to Eastern.

Also odd is in ledger.gui there is no entry at all for advisors. The ledger.gui seams to list everything within the ledger except that. Something tells me perhaps I just reached the max techs allowed in game.

I believe I found a simple way to add unique chinese artillery and also give them artillery before anyone else. The chinese actually had rockets in the 14th century. They were really more like arrows, but they were launched with gunpowder, something like 100 at a time. Had to be disasembled and reassembled once in position.

[George LeS]

...
Not sure if DW would lend itself any better to how I want to add new navies. Unless DW has a code that can lower tech level to whatever I want, DIdn't see anything like that in EU3wiki.

...
Its actually amazing that Russia has Eastern tech with the same ships as everyone else. There army may have been strong, but it sounds like there navy was 90% for river use only. I just like the idea of having the ability to make countries have stong armies with weak navies or visa versa, something not really possible in the stock game where everyone shares the same navy and the tech the country is given is based more on army str than naval strength.

Even so I can't fully reflect naval balance with just 2 or 3 new navies. If nothing else, it adds a certain fog of war if you will. Where the 1st time through, when 12 armed junks and 6 dhows engage 7 panoksean and 8 gwiseon, you don't really know what you have.

It just bothers me that if you play England, Castile, France, Swedan or a host of European countries, you won't encounter any new navies until maybe 1650 or so. I'm temped to add just England/Scotland and Ireland into a new tech just for naval unit variety. I could simply use european units that the game didn't include for them. The str and when the ships become available can balance the game in the same way that events could. In both cases, performance might be affected somewhat, but I don't think the units would be any more so than new events.

...

1. The big advantage in DW is that you can give specific units (that is, specified by unit type) by events and commands. It does help.

2. IMO, it's an error to go too far in giving specific ship types, just for flavor. The key is what their effect in game is. I don't see, in a game as strategic in scope as EU, that it's important to give the EXACT correct unit type, if the capabilities in combat aren't much different.

3. Some of what you're looking at -- riverine forces -- are simply irrelevant to EUIII (or I and II, for that matter). Whether we like it or not, there is nothing representing this in-game. There isn't even any real representation of coastal vs seagoing forces, other than the restricted waters bonus for galleys. So if you want to somehow represent riverine forces, you must do so with the LAND, not the SEA, combat system, as that's the only place its effect can be reproduced.

4. To me, the biggest issue is here "having the ability to make countries have stong armies with weak navies or visa versa." But the idea that this must be represented in the tech tables and unit types is not really the way to go. For all practical purposes, all the important navies of the 18th C (including the Nap wars of the 19th) were of generally similar types. But the really big factor was their navies' sizes, and competence. And the big issue here was simply resources. And the game doesn't give a good representation of how hard it was to compete on both land and sea. It is much too easy to build a French fleet without loss of land supremacy, and while the Turkish fleet was bigger than the Venetian most of the time, the scale of their edge was not close to that represented in the game.

I believe that the single biggest help here would be to make policies and ideas more powerful, collectively, in edging up the size of the fleets, and their fighting strengths. But the key word is "collectively". Rather than just 2 ideas, one of which increases naval limits, the other lowering costs, EACH naval idea should give these benefits. And every step of Naval on the slider should increase the size of fleet you can maintain. The trouble with the game is that it tries to address this with a minimum number of big factors; I believe that ubik was dead-on right in MM, making the combination of several ideas and policies have a multiplier effect.

5. Despite what I said in the preceding paragraph, I certainly don't object to including the differences between, say, the French and British shipbuilding traditions. I do think it is nice flavor. Hell, I love that stuff. But remember that this is not what decided battles, essentially. And its lack is not what is wrong with the naval system, not fundamentally. What is needed is a fix for combat, and for sustainable fleet size. That is central. What interests me about your efforts is that you seem to be attacking the problems in some ways which never occurred to me, or AFAIK, to any one else. So keep that up.

[redgreen99]

1. The big advantage in DW is that you can give specific units (that is, specified by unit type) by events and commands. It does help.

2. IMO, it's an error to go too far in giving specific ship types, just for flavor. The key is what their effect in game is. I don't see, in a game as strategic in scope as EU, that it's important to give the EXACT correct unit type, if the capabilities in combat aren't much different.

3. Some of what you're looking at -- riverine forces -- are simply irrelevant to EUIII (or I and II, for that matter). Whether we like it or not, there is nothing representing this in-game. There isn't even any real representation of coastal vs seagoing forces, other than the restricted waters bonus for galleys. So if you want to somehow represent riverine forces, you must do so with the LAND, not the SEA, combat system, as that's the only place its effect can be reproduced.

4. To me, the biggest issue is here "having the ability to make countries have stong armies with weak navies or visa versa." But the idea that this must be represented in the tech tables and unit types is not really the way to go. For all practical purposes, all the important navies of the 18th C (including the Nap wars of the 19th) were of generally similar types. But the really big factor was their navies' sizes, and competence. And the big issue here was simply resources. And the game doesn't give a good representation of how hard it was to compete on both land and sea. It is much too easy to build a French fleet without loss of land supremacy, and while the Turkish fleet was bigger than the Venetian most of the time, the scale of their edge was not close to that represented in the game.

I believe that the single biggest help here would be to make policies and ideas more powerful, collectively, in edging up the size of the fleets, and their fighting strengths. But the key word is "collectively". Rather than just 2 ideas, one of which increases naval limits, the other lowering costs, EACH naval idea should give these benefits. And every step of Naval on the slider should increase the size of fleet you can maintain. The trouble with the game is that it tries to address this with a minimum number of big factors; I believe that ubik was dead-on right in MM, making the combination of several ideas and policies have a multiplier effect.

5. Despite what I said in the preceding paragraph, I certainly don't object to including the differences between, say, the French and British shipbuilding traditions. I do think it is nice flavor. Hell, I love that stuff. But remember that this is not what decided battles, essentially. And its lack is not what is wrong with the naval system, not fundamentally. What is needed is a fix for combat, and for sustainable fleet size. That is central. What interests me about your efforts is that you seem to be attacking the problems in some ways which never occurred to me, or AFAIK, to any one else. So keep that up.

2.Well while it may be true that ship hulltypes fro most navies in the 18th century were fairly equal, from the 13th - 16th century they were vastly different. ie Portugal hulls vs Indian stictched planked Dhows with no cannons. This can't be represented fully just by Indian having a lower naval tech. The 2 ship hulls were completely mismatched, even some Ottoman galley support could not help the Dhows. China was a bit different, in that its navy was superior to Europe in 1400 and then vastly neglected to being somewaht inferior militarily by 1600.

3. I wasn't adding any riverine navies in, just was pointing out that Russia had no Big ships available at all and there ship building was 90% for the purpose of river trade, so Russia should not really have access to Carracks or any big ship hulls until the 18ty century. On a side note to this, the straight by Sweden to the Baltic Sea, was only 7 to 12' deep in the 14th century, and thus the Haseatic League had a mandate that no ships larger than a certain tonnage were to be built. Big ships would get stuck at the Swedish strait and have to off load there cargo onto smaller boats. Russian's simply had no big ship presence but in game they do.

4. I agree about the 18th century, so the tech tables are more for the 13th to the 16th centuries. I went the other way with ideas. I made them less powerful, especially for naval bonuses. I just felt naval battles get harder to balance further into the game, and I think its partly bacause if one side has an uber naval leader and strong naval ideas, they can totally tip the tables in naval battles. Plus the AI doesn't always use ideas effectively. I try to do anything that will help the AI and perhaps hurt the player a bit to make things more of a challenge.

5. I've come to the conclusion that as it is now, Naval combat can't be fixed or quite balanced properly. Not the individual battles nor the balance overall say between French/English fleets. I was just reading how the Frech naval went back and forth from being powerful to being almost obselete based on unstable rulers, organization and there main threat being central Europe land force attacks. Thus these ebbs and flows can't really be done without straight jacketed naval sliders and stability via events.

I tend to go about things differtly because I am too stubborn. Seriously, I try to be a bit different as there are already many mods out there. The real truth, is I look at tech tables to solve things, cause my coding skills are rudamentory. I only do events that are absolutely necessary casue debugging them can be a pain. My main goal, is do no harm, as I hate mods that crash here and there or have events that fire endlessly with missing localizations. Until I understand how to debug events, I tend to not use many. I think it can all be done via tech tables,

http://www.britishbattles.com/spanis...ish-armada.htm

http://www.thetudorswiki.com/page/Ki...The+Tudor+Navy

[George LeS]

Just a few points:

1. I don'twant to give the impression I'm not in favor of different techs. I think that's a very interesting idea, & am curious to see how it works; how you did it. It never occurred to me that that WAS a possible fix.

2. Remember that we are constrained by the 4 generic ship classes, Big, etc. So whatever you do, must be done within that limit. Further, those 4 classes define on-map (strategic) speed. That is why, in RM, I simply abolished lights from the game for about the 1st 2 centuries. It slows down ship speed, and thus colonization. In my mod, the Caravel is a very weak Big ship, although what I am really representing is a slow Light ship, a type the game cannot have, per se.

3. This is generally what we have to do; use the game constraints to represent, in a distorted form, what the game won't let us do directly. So the 1st question about any new specific type should be "what is the general type it best fits under". The basic constraints are speed, cost, & build time, of which the last 2 are moddable in-game, the 1st not so. Also, observation can show if the AI treats them differently. E.g., I have found that the AI will not explore with transports, although it will do so with galleys, if there is nothing else at hand. Obviously, in dealing with the early Russian fleet, galleys would seem the 1st option, transports 2nd. Although testing could change that.

4. I'm not sure you take my point about ideas. I'm not saying make them stronger, or even weaker. Rather, make them cumulative. If, instead of a single idea reducing ship cost 50%, you have 5 ideas, each reducing it by 10%, you will favor naval-inclined powers. Thus Venice and Holland will have fleets which, if not necessarily as large, are at least competetive with Turkey & France, respectively. You can take this further, and have triggered modifers, which are not themselves in the ideas, but are triggered by certain combinations of policy, ideas, and whatever else one wants.

5. To my mind, the difference in hull types comes down to this: how does it affect the navy in game terms? That is, how does it make the ships move or fight better or worse? Then we do the best we can in representing that.

Finally, I agree, the real problems are in Paradox's lap. And as I've repeatedly said, I grow ever more convinced that they are (a) unlikely to address those problems, and (b) EXTREMELY unlikely to fix them correctly.

On events, the way to go is the validator. A godsend.

[redgreen99]

@George Les.. All good info in your post...
Well running into a few snags with 4 naval techs. Multiple land tables seam to work alright as each country has its specific inf and cav units. With navy, the original units are one size fits all. I had a situation in game where my land tech leveled, only land, not naval mind you, and my level 2 european ships all downgraded to level 0 indian ships in a different naval table. That is a head scratcher. Apparently, the game doen't just read the tech table that just leveled but runs through all the tech tables at that time, and it doesn't like the unassigned generic stock ships mixed with Indian/Chinese assigned ships. Or having units at level 0 might give it a headache. Was about to give in, but took a break and will try a different approach. Its called a sledge hammer. :P

I think I'm on my 6th back up plan by now. This one involves making seperate naval units for every tech in game. I notice if I leave the stock ships in and don't assign it to a tech, any tech will grab it. If I make the stock ships latin, then only latin tech countries will use it. Chinese use chinese ships, etc.. and if there are no eastern ships, no ships will load for eastern. Thats why I need ships for every tech now. Isn't it great then that I made 2 new techs. so I now need a gazzilion ships. Since I may hit another wall, to test I simply am making Eastern carracks, african carracks. If it works I will get more creative later.

Doing it this way means I can go back to just 1 naval tech and cram everything in there. Then I can go back to my siege tech again as I will have more spaces again. With mulitple ship types, sometimes gaps in the tables have caused problems. Not sure if this was because of the undefined stock ships or if its a seperate issue. If I have problems with it, I have an idea of something to try.

This is my last ditch effort to get multiple navies in Inomine. If this doesn't work, then its just one big navy but with twice as many classes. Otherwise the rest of the mod is coming along nicely. If it wasn't for this naval SNAFU, I would likely have a beta out in a week or so. Just this naval issue could take a couple weeks to sort out and it it works. more research is needed to fill out Eastern ships, Muslim ships. I may very well have enough ships, that I can balance more with just ship classes rather than relying so strongly on fire/shock values.

Was having a fun Castile run from 1360 to 1380 when I ran into this naval issue. At least its making me better at coding as I have written events to get a specfic tech level 1 or 2 days into the game for testing purposes. That experience has made me understand events enough, that I could totally go a different route with the naval thing, and rely more on events if need be.

[redgreen99]

The multi navy's idea is dead. It just won't work consistently as the naval unit type would need to be hard coded. It works sometimes but not always and it limits my flexibility with other stuff.
I can get it to always work for the starting ships for the earliest start of 1360. So what I can do, is have a different starting navy for every tech in 1360. In fact, I might be able to pull this off for several start dates, such as 1617 or whatever. Then each navy would upgrade into the standerd stock ship types. The good part about that is the ships that load at game start will remain unique and only newly built ones will be European hulls. So it creates the concept of Eastern navies taking some decades to upgrade their ship hulls to european.

Other good news is I can once again make the mod available for any starting date past 1360. Now I plan to write events to reflect certain advantages specific navies had at given times in history.

I won't post anymore until the beta is out, half the stuff I have written no longer applies because what I envisioned for the mod and what can be modded within game limitations don't always match up. Now that I have finally given up on the multi navy, progress should be faster as I can just get things in place and then balance.
Thanks eveyone for their input thus far.

[redgreen99]

Its coming!!! Mod is done. Just need to do credits, zip it up, and reinstall a fresch version, then unzip the mod to test that I got all the files in place. Mainly the interface. I won't have all the localization files done in this release. minor issue, most ships with no descriptions yet. It wouldn't take that long to do the descriptions, I've just reached a point where I need a break from this and thought it best to release a version of it.

I'll start a seperate thread for the mod release and point a link to this thread if anyone wanted to see how many times the direction of the mod changed along the way. The credits and install instructions will just be at the start of the new thread. I figure, you have to see that thread if you download it anyway.

The mod is a complete overhall of balance, will give a overview of the main changes upon release. Could be as soon as tomorrow, unless I have to track down an interface issue after I do the final test.
The mod is what I would call a mini unbermod. Not quite big enough to be an uber mod, but enough has been reworked that adding a few modules/countries would make it so.