Confirm Thalassocracy: A discussion about the naval system in EUIV

[GC13]

Introducing some kind of manpower for navy. Currently the great issue with navy is the fact that it relies on no resources, unlike army - you can lose fleets and infinitely build more. Historically, losing experienced sailors and officers was very painful as training new ones was really hard.

I don't know how to solve that, maybe Officers count = manpower/100 + naval forcelimits + naval tradition?

Maybe remove naval force limit for a Seamanpower (see what I did there?). Any province that produces fish produces a lot, any province that produces naval supplies produces some, any coastal province produces some, as do any province modifiers that give +trade power bonuses. Then, of course, you can build Docks (or whatever they're renamed to) the same way you build barracks. To top it all off, Naval Tradition either increases the maximum or the recovery rate.

Once this is in, we could finally have a system like Victoria 2 does where a galley and a galleon are not just as strenuous on our naval infrastructure. (Why is it even like that? The galleon is much more expensive, yet counts towards the cap the same as the galleon.)

 

[paulatreides0]

Diversify ship types to make navies more dynamic. Add trade ships that must be defended in order to protect trade and make navies continually vital and critical for trade focused nations. Make battles more indecisive as they were historically, so that you have an actual naval conflict, and not one or two fights and then the end of the naval war.

 

[vfmikey]

You misunderstand - the Spanish Armada wasn't even the entire Spanish fleet (although a very large portion of it, admittedly). Spain had more than just the Armada, numbering around ~200 ships at the time. For another comparison, England in 1754 had over 300 ships including 88 ships of the line (heavy ships in EU4). There is no way you can support 88 heavies and ~250 light ships as 1754 England in EU4. The heavies alone are about 10 over your force limit.

1754 start Britain has 119 naval force limit, with one policy it's 141. After playing for a month I'd say they can support around 50 heavies? But they don't even have full trade ideas, so there's room for improvement income wise. I'm pretty sure that playing rather historically it would be possible to maintain around 300 boats total as Britain in second half of XVIIIth century.

(6/6/6/1 general? Damn, game...)

5) Making fleets matter more:
*painful blockades
*painful for warscore and WE
*painful for trade and able to steal more cash from the enemy
*colonial income dependent on them
*very prestigious

I think that this is what should be done, in some fashion. Very prestigious - modifier to prestige for having grand, non-obsolete navy, for example.

 

[CrabHelmet]

GB 1754 is better than what the AI does with GB by 1754, though. It's true the player can do it fairly easily and that the later start-dates (although they're rubbish in many other respects) happen to get this right, but the AI will never match history. Also GB 1754 still isn't close. 50 heavies and nothing else compared to 88 heavies and around 250 light ships is a bad comparison.

I also think that arbitrary bonuses like prestige are pointless. Navies weren't inherently prestigious, they were prestigious because they were *useful*. Just making them give a prestige bonus will change literally nothing about whether I use them. I barely care about prestige, excepting when I have a PU. Make navies useful!