I think 200 might be overdoing it, surely just one box will do. Merge fleets?
AUTO-MERGE. No thanks.
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I think 200 might be overdoing it, surely just one box will do. Merge fleets?
I just had another way to think about this:
Auto-merging fleets leading to entire trade fleets getting wiped is only an issue if you put your entire fleet in the same node, which is pretty unrealistic on the face of it. Granted, the way trade power propagation works does give a pretty massive incentive to do that, but this leads to some new possible solutions to people who don't like the idea of not being able to split fleets.
1) Change your mindset. Sometimes changes to a game break previously good strategies, and that kind of change is not necessarily bad. Instead, you need to adapt to the fact that the game has changed.
Maybe now the inherent risk of getting your entire trade fleet wiped actually outweighs the economic benefits of having all your ships sitting in one place, and you now actually have to make a strategic choice about whether you're willing to make a nice, vulnerable, juicy target that most efficiently nets you lots of money, or a less efficient but far less vulnerable network of trade fleets all around the world.
2) Change how trade propagation works so that you can't, say, completely dominate all the trade in Africa and the western Mediterranean despite having no naval presence there just by having a couple hundred light ships mosey around Sevilla.
Auto-merging fleets leading to entire trade fleets getting wiped is only an issue if you put your entire fleet in the same node, which is pretty unrealistic on the face of it. Granted, the way trade power propagation works does give a pretty massive incentive to do that, but this leads to some new possible solutions to people who don't like the idea of not being able to split fleets.
1) Change your mindset. Sometimes changes to a game break previously good strategies, and that kind of change is not necessarily bad. Instead, you need to adapt to the fact that the game has changed.
Maybe now the inherent risk of getting your entire trade fleet wiped actually outweighs the economic benefits of having all your ships sitting in one place, and you now actually have to make a strategic choice about whether you're willing to make a nice, vulnerable, juicy target that most efficiently nets you lots of money, or a less efficient but far less vulnerable network of trade fleets all around the world.
2) Change how trade propagation works so that you can't, say, completely dominate all the trade in Africa and the western Mediterranean despite having no naval presence there just by having a couple hundred light ships mosey around Sevilla.
If you're Scotland the North Sea is the only node you can protect. With all your ships in one province you're just a click away from being wiped by English navy. Trust me it happens even with go home button. You start with 5 light ships which generate an extra 2 gold per year ( don't laugh) after that you enter the law of diminishing returns, I think that at about 10 ships ( which takes about 3 years to get to anyway) the upkeep equals the trade value brought in ( i may be wrong ) anyway the North Sea trade zone goes as far as iceland which during the winter causes attrition and your ships have to dock to repair occasionally ( having them altogether means they all suffer attrition at the same time ( whether that's good or bad I don't know). But the size of the trade area means it's unlikely you'll be caught especially if they are in separate fleets.
While I like the change and am happy that I can auto-merge fleets, I think the interface argument is a red herring. There's two solutions that would be very simple.
1) Add a Join button next to the Send button after you click Protect Trade on the fleet if there is another fleet already protecting trade. Really simple spot, and plenty of room.
2) When you click "Send" for protecting trade, have a pop-up that asks if you want to merge with other fleets. On the pop-up have 3 radio buttons for "Ask me", "Always merge", and "Never merge". This will make it so that the pop-up is less intrusive since you only have to see it one time if you always go one route or another. In addition to that, have the 3 choices in a dropdown in the Options menu. This will make it so that mid game when you change your mind or accidentally tick the wrong option you can still update the setting.
While these options might not trump a better solution that deals more directly with the concerns people have who don't merge trade fleets, I feel there are plenty of UI options that are mostly non-intrusive and could allow for the option to merge or not to merge.
I'm not sure what you're trying to say here. It sounds like you're saying that trade just isn't effective for Scotland, in which case I'm honestly not sure why you're bringing it up because who cares if your trade fleet gets wiped if it's only making you 2 gold per year? If Scotland has such poor trading prospects then investing in trade at all seems like a poor choice until you're in a position where you can actually make money from it.
An extra button for every single trade node you can protect trade in on that screen? That's not going to be cluttered at all.
If that's going to be the route taken, I think it would be better to have it work like sending merchants: you click a button and then get a dropdown or something. But I think you're right about this being a good place to put stuff related to merging fleets.
I'm not the biggest fan of this. Still runs into the same problems of it being an actual game option in that it's clunky to change later, and it's at least slightly intrusive on top of that.
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I don't think that the possibility to micro-manage your trading fleets into smaller ones is the good way to fix this. I would rather keep the auto-merge, and rebalance naval combat. Having one fleet getting wiped out is not fun nor reallistic. If a trading fleet get caught, but only loses say 25% of its strenght, then the benefits to split your trading fleets would be close to zero. Problem solved, more fun, less micro.
Yes potential obstacles,
"wow. Who cares about that right? Let's have 200 new boxes for each action in the game! Because THAT'S FUN!"
And yes, I've been reading the thread in a regular basis and the "counter-arguments" are absurd. "The fleet UI is full of buttons hueuheuheuhue no more space I dont care if my fleet gets insta wiped I mean i dont even know how trade works hueuheuhe" PLEASE.
I've said it should be optional, it is dev's work to decide the best possible solution. I don't care if it's a pop-up, a button, a option in the menu whatever I even proposed putting the fleet in exhile mode if it has the "go home at war" button enabled so pls don't lie.
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No, not lying, I have just confused you with your topic "co-owner", spinoza.
And by the way, since we're commenting on the behavior of others, please learn some manners.
Act like an adult for a second. Just one. Try it. It'll be good for you. Join the rest of us in a reasonable discussion instead of just hurling insults like you think they're going to do anything aside from make you look like a child.
Explain to me why you think space considerations on the UI are not important. I bet you won't be able to. Hell, the devs themselves have said that it would be difficult to implement certain features people wanted simply because there's no room on the interface. This is something that has to be taken into account. Maybe there's a way to squeeze a button in, and maybe there isn't. But you can't just dismiss this as not a problem simply because you don't understand anything about design or presenting information. Implementing any feature takes some kind of cost, and in this case the biggest problem to deal with in making auto-merge an option is that you need to find a place to put that option.
Again, the issue with that is something you can learn by making Powerpoint presentations. Dense screens are a terrible way to convey information or options. Similarly, squeezing a button into an already crowded screen is a terrible way to give a player control over options.
But hey, this is all moot because someone's already found a good place to put the option. But you'd know that if you'd read the thread, or even just my last post.
Also, you really didn't read (or at least bother to comprehend) the thread if you think anybody is claiming that getting any fleet wiped is insignificant in every case like you're portraying it. A large fleet, yes, obviously a massive setback. But 6? No. No it's not. That's not a significantly worrying investment lost for even an OPM. It's easily recoverable in a few years after the war is over if you just manage your economy like an intelligent person. Sometimes you have to drop your military maintenance and take out loans. That's exactly what those are for.
Insulting others is unacceptable.
Make your point respectfully, or do not post.
Offensive posts and those which quote them have been deleted
Make your point respectfully, or do not post.
Offensive posts and those which quote them have been deleted
If you want to change the option later why are you arguing that everything should be auto-merged? lol
For me if that option was there I'd set it to auto-merge once and never think about it again.
Just to make sure I'm not overstating my stance here, I'm not saying that that's the greatest solution in the world. There are some valid concerns people have though, and I think those deserve to be addressed by Paradox as much as my want to avoid the tedium of merging my trade fleets every single time.
Commenting on or disregarding an official moderator post is one of the quickest ways to receive an infraction
I was never against the idea of an option. I've said this explicitly. At the time, my concern was that I did not think there was a good place to put it. An option implemented poorly is hardly any better than no option.
Definitely agree, in some cases it can even make things worse.
I did not suggest it when you have 6 ships. Personally, if I have 6 ships they will more likely be 6 transports or 6 galleys because they provide a much greater tactical advantage than the negligible income 6 trade ships gives. In addition, if you can only field 6 ships then nothing you do will save them if someone decides to kill them, splitting them will make no difference.
Where adding combat ships is worth it is at fleets of 50+ ships, where I frequently sent large military fleets along with them in order to protect them. If I can field 50 light ships then I should have a sizable military fleet anyway.
Scotland's trade may not be great at game start but it is effective. It can generate enough income to pay the interest on a couple of hundred worth of loans if you need to hire mercs for example.
My main point was that as there is not much trade value in the North sea you get less by having a larger fleet ( law of diminishing returns) . A smaller fleet therefore is vulnerable to wipe. I also pointed out that you suffer attrition in the North sea so there will be periods where your entire fleet is out of commision repairing. Splitting your fleet can mitigate these risks.
Now considering it would take between 5 and 10 years in trade income to replace 1 light ship I hope I can demonstrate losing your entire fleet instead of say half of it actually becomes a concern.
You wanted examples of how having a compulsory merge function could be disadvantageous. I've just given you one. If you don't think it's a serious enough concern then that's only your personal valued judgement nothing else.
My main point was that as there is not much trade value in the North sea you get less by having a larger fleet ( law of diminishing returns) . A smaller fleet therefore is vulnerable to wipe. I also pointed out that you suffer attrition in the North sea so there will be periods where your entire fleet is out of commision repairing. Splitting your fleet can mitigate these risks.
Now considering it would take between 5 and 10 years in trade income to replace 1 light ship I hope I can demonstrate losing your entire fleet instead of say half of it actually becomes a concern.
You wanted examples of how having a compulsory merge function could be disadvantageous. I've just given you one. If you don't think it's a serious enough concern then that's only your personal valued judgement nothing else.
I still don't think that extreme examples are good to use when trying to argue a point. Sure, they exist, but they're hardly convincing in general.
Also, this sounds like you're only collecting from your home node as Scotland and transferring trade power from elsewhere. But while that works beautifully for nations where their home trade node is a rich end node, it's probably not the optimal way to make money off trade if your home node is poor. Even though you can't possibly dominate trade in a different node and will have a penalty to collecting there, you might make more money just by sending your merchants to collect in the English Channel and Lubeck and sending your trade fleets there - where they shouldn't have attrition.
And I hope you realize that your comment about subjectivity applies to you as well.
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Yeah, just loaded up the game and did a Scotland start. Collecting from English Channel and Lubeck and protecting trade in the North Sea gives me .93 trade income/month. Protecting trade in the English Channel shot it up to 1.36, which is over a 25% increase.
1.36 is about 1-2 years to build a light ship on trade income alone, and trade income is not the entirety of your income.
I don't really know what you were doing to get the figure you said earlier of 2 ducats/year of trade income.
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I was subtracting the fleet upkeep from trade income. Plus it was a rough estimate from memory. I don't know the ideal amount of ships/node for maximum efficiency. I also wasn't factoring in merchants as my argument wasn't to demonstrate the viability of Scotland's trade it was to show that having a large fleet ( which could possibly defend itself having been forced into one place) was counter intuitive from an economics point of view.
I would hardly call the starting point of a semi major nation in Europe an extreme position either. There's plenty of Scope for Scotland to become a major trading power by the late game. From small acorns grow mighty oaks so it helps to have as many acorns as possible and try and keep them safe.
EDIT: just checked (no merchants factored just fleets) with 5 Light Ships you can generate 4.32 ducats/year but with 7 Lights Ships it drops to 2.52 ducats/year. Thus having a larger fleet adds no defense and lowers profits.
5 Light Ships versus 14 English Heavy Ships = wipe = 100 ducat loss = approx 20 years of trade profit.
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