EU4 - Development Diary - 6th of October 2020

[Balesir]

At the same time, we reduced the naval engagement width by 20% in coastal sea zones.

This seems rather the wrong way around. Battles generally took place fairly near to land, because fleets on the high seas rarely encountered one another. Most broad-ocean encounters were between single ships or small squadrons that met by sheer chance; will there be any mechanism for this effect?

 

[Battlex]

This makes people who build a navy and those that don't light years apart. Naval combat should be addressed by making it more accessible not less so.

? Which is how it should be? So that amateur navies are hard, as they require far more skill than armies do, and so stuff like lepanto is long term devastating

 

[Froonk]

This doesn't explain the 2 Venetian flagships launched in the early and 16th century of well over 100 guns. Galleys were slower than their sailing counterparts and if galleys didn't engage in action quickly tended to suffer from fatigue especially on the free oarsman galleys of the Christian nations. There's no advantage of firing close or at the waterline and this wasn't effective in galley combat anyway, the cannon in galley warfare was a disruptive shock weapon typically unleashed only once or twice in each ship to ship engagement, once as the ship picked a target and then as close to the ram impact as possible.

Its rare to see galleys armed with as many as 7 or even 9 cannons, something only really seen on flag galleys and the later galleass, typical galleys would only be armed with 3 to 5 depending on their size, with one large gun down parallel to the keel flanked by up to two pairs of smaller calibres either side for balance, and if its a 5 gun ship the outermost gun would be fairly insignificant poundage.

The downfall of the galley was much more linked to rigging improvements than that of the ease of production of guns, the various models of galleass were major parts of naval history, with the first ship designed with scientific principles being a galleass, these largest style galleys could quite comfortably have a crew of well over 1000 men and would be used by some nations into the mid 18th century, falling out of fashion with the rise of the Xebec as a nimble sailor, although with galleys being maintained as part of fleets for difficult coastlines.

"Heavies" were not used as support ships, or in strictly defensive roles, while there was a period of galleons and later designs being used to support fleets these were in no way warships, they were very clearly simple sailing cargo ships, something the galleon and other round ship styles was originally developed to be as part of the Italian merchant shipping. The "heavy" style ship was an offshoot of these rounded hulled cargo ships.

Of the three great galley engagements in Mediterranean in gunpowder era, as well as the plenty of naval engagements between Venice and Ottomans, roundships were only used in supportive capacity if any at all until Cretan War. Cretan war is when both Venetian and Ottoman navies switched to roundships. As I said, galleys were used in offensive and coordinated formations much like line formations on land, so "heavies" were only used in support roles because they couldn't keep up with galleys under oars and were an obstacle in galley formations. Galleass in the first place was an innovation that came from Venetians converting great merchant galleys to use in same role as "heavies" as defensive platforms. Xebec or polacca type of low sailing ships were in use since early 17th century and their use was not related to demise of galleys or galleasses because they were not warships but rather raiding or merchant ships. By 18th century not even Venetians or Ottomans were using galleys so end of galley cannot be 18th century while we can see a definitive change in fleet compositions for even Venice and Ottomans during Cretan war in mid 17th.

Theoretical advantages you propose have no examples in 16th century, it's only in 17th century do roundships start to replace galleys and only after galleys became impractical because it became impossible to make them larger without making them uselessly slow and cumbersome. Advantage of roundships were their open-ended development while galleys were always compromise designs that had to sacrifice one advantage for another because of their dependence on oarsmen and their role as amphibious vessels. Because roundships are essentially defensive and because advantages of galleys depend on amphibious abilities and their use in formations, roundships were better in smaller skirmishes and as merchant vessels that wanted to avoid boarding by small amount galiots. Venetians and Ottomans experimented with sailships early in gunpowder era but found them cumbersome and stopped using them, there is a reason why all the great naval engagements of 16th century used all galley fleets. If Spanish and Portuguese thought that their galleons would have served them better in Mediterranean, they would have used them in naval battles. In fact we see the opposite development, where Portuguese started to produce galleys to use in Red sea, Persian gulf and coast of India against Ottomans. Large scale galley warfare became obsolete because it become too costly, impractical and essentially not worthwhile or sustainable for any of the states that pursued them and roundships were more advantageous in smaller skirmishes and because of their ability to blockade.

Later on development of roundships due their more open-ended nature and dependence on sails rather than oarsmen made them big enough to never be troubled by smaller vessels and all naval development became an arms race in amount of cannons. Best way to think about this is the fact that if you have a total of maybe 800 cannons available to you, putting them on galleys and galiots is a more effective use of them while if you can produce up to 8000 cannons then sailing ships are much more effective because of galley's geometric limitations and roundships more efficient use of manpower. Moreover, if you have limited amount of ships in small skirmishes in self-defence you want use roundships because of their better defensive ability and cargo capacity as merchant vessels, while galleys are strictly offensive vessels. We can't conflate skirmishes between 3-4 merchantmen with maybe their escorts and large naval battles involving up to 200 galleys and galiots between imperial rivals in Mediterranean. That is we have to make a distinction between military vessels and commercial or raiding vessels.

As I said, if you are interested in the topic I recommend the book I mentioned, "Gunpowder and Galleys" by John Guilmartin. You won't find any other source as thorough and detailed on the topic.

 

[paulatreides0]

While I totally understand and get where you are coming from, I don’t know if you can really change anything, without making that part of naval warfare utterly infuriating. I have no idea how you could go about balancing gameplay and realism in this way though.

Vicky 2 does this fine by limiting where you can build capital ships like dreadnoughts through buildings (port level), which makes it much slower to acquire them due to the high cost and build time of high level ports, especially when you aren't run-away-with-the-game powerful.

Hence the suggestion to make Shipyard level affect the max "tier" of buildable ship.

 

[Battlex]

Please try to balance it a little, we don't want always superior England no matter what. It would be nice to make some mechanics to alternative actions if your fleet is weaker to make some damage control

The rise and fall of naval powers is a cool mechanic actually, then the porturgese and Dutch can decline organically

 

[insalted42]

Another change we are doing is making your naval power matter as much as your army power when it comes to the Liberty Desire of your overseas subjects. So if you don’t have a strong fleet your colonial nations will definitely start considering independence.

Finally! I love this!!

 

[I'm gaming]

Huh so galleys can stomp man-of-war and frigates in Atlantic ocean?

 

[svennnnnnnnnnnn]

Perhaps marines could have their morale based on naval maintenance instead of army maintenance. That would make them more useful for small overseas wars (native OPMs) since you don't have to mobilize your entire army. It would also make them a more natural companion to naval exploration since they would be excellent (and cheap) explorers. It also makes "lore"-sense since marines were generally part of the navy, not the army.

It would also give them more of a unique identity instead of just being a slightly bluer infantry.

 

[sprites]

First of all, we have changed the amount of Sailors you get from each development from 30 sailors to 60. This will make the amount of sailors you get scale better through the ages.

Secondly we also change the amount of sailors each ship requires, and to make them require more sailors for more advanced models. Galleys now go from 60 sailors to 180 sailors for an Archipelago Frigate, while a Three Decker will require 900 sailors.

We also made galleys more powerful in combat, by reducing their default engagement width to 0.5 instead of 1.

Speaking of naval engagement width, it now starts at 5-25 depending on tech at start, and goes all the way up to 75 at the end of the game, scaling more like land combat does. At the same time, we reduced the naval engagement width by 20% in coastal sea zones.

Two other aspects that changes by technology as well for the naval game is maintenance, which will increase over time just like it does for amies as you advance through technology, and most importantly that more advanced ships will become far faster, with the most advanced ships being 50% faster than the earliest model of the same type. Galleys however, only increase speed by 25%.

All of these fixes are there to make the naval game have more of a natural progress in quality and cost that is not just more guns on a new ship.

isn't it already the case? like levels 3 and 5 diplo increase it by 10%
In 1.30 the heavies take 200, the galleys 100, there will be galley hordes in 1.31...
if you double sailors, but the ships do cost a lot more than double, this will be a net nerf , i guess. for the marines i don't know, never bothered building some, having like 5 special regiments...

One other thing that will make you happy is that we changed the support mechanics for leaders, so now there is one pool for naval leaders and one for land leaders. If you have more than you can support in naval leaders it will now cost you diplomatic power and if you have more than you can support in land leaders, then it will cost you military power as all leaders did before. This will give you more leaders overall, and make it possible for you to have naval leaders as well.

good. now we'll have double the leaders, costing the points needed to their recruitement

 

[Froonk]

Huh so galleys can stomp man-of-war and frigates in Atlantic ocean?

This is indeed an issue, I think they should cut the galley cannons by a third and increase their bonus in inland seas instead. Else they should increase attrition galleys suffer in open seas by a lot.

 

[sekelsenmat]

A cannon regiment also costs 1000 manpower, and im pretty sure there aren't 1000 men worth of gunners in every artillery regiment.

Actually a ww2 Artillery battalion (for everyone in the conflict almost) had 600 man for 12 guns, yep this many man for so few guns. A regiment usually has 3 battalions, so a ww2 Artillery regiment would have 1800 men.

There is no reason to believe that in EU4 timeframe you would need less man since you needed a lot of horses (as opposed to just 1 tractor or 1 truck) to move the guns and people to tend to the horses...

 

[Katsue]

Actually a ww2 Artillery battalion (for everyone in the conflict almost) had 600 man for 12 guns, yep this many man for so few guns. A regiment usually has 3 battalions, so a ww2 Artillery regiment would have 1800 men.

There is no reason to believe that in EU4 timeframe you would need less man since you needed a lot of horses (as opposed to just 1 tractor or 1 truck) to move the guns and people to tend to the horses...

To be fair, I think most WW2 Artillery battalions in armies other than the US army would also have used horses for transport. I remember reading somewhere that more horses died in WW2 than in WW1.

 

[Bandua_of_Gallaecia]

Actually a ww2 Artillery battalion (for everyone in the conflict almost) had 600 man for 12 guns, yep this many man for so few guns. A regiment usually has 3 battalions, so a ww2 Artillery regiment would have 1800 men.

There is no reason to believe that in EU4 timeframe you would need less man since you needed a lot of horses (as opposed to just 1 tractor or 1 truck) to move the guns and people to tend to the horses...

But an "Artillery Batallion" doesn't actually mean a full artillery battalion, "500 out of those 600 men" (give or take) were Infantry soldiers and support units supporting the actual Artillery. The Artillery guns themselves were manned by 3-6 gunners depending on the piece.
My grandfather fought in the Guinean Indepence war as part of an Artillery Battalion, but their artillery pieces never even left the base, their offensive actions were undertaken as an infantry battalion.

Of course, you can make the argument that an Artillery regiment here is precisely that as well, and these 1000 men are not all gunners but regular infantry belonging to the Artillery regiment as well. And that its a perfectly valid argument which i would agree to be the logical conclusion.

 

[Titanius Puffin]

Does this mean that late game light ships will give you 50% more trade power?

They get 150% additional trade power by modernising... Barques have 2 trade power... Great Frigates have 5 by the end of the game.

Simply put, a galley fleet was able to bear more cannon towards a singular direction with much faster speed and agility. When you consider that roundships had 8 to 12 cannons in their broadside in 16th century, on much longer platform, several galleys next to each other had more firepower on their bows.

You seem to be neglecting the oars.
Oars require a lot of width. They'd triple the width of the galley - or galley like craft (see below). These wouldn't be kayaks with little paddles - oarsmen need lengthy oars to get a longer power stroke; a long power stroke means the craft accelerates faster, and has a higher top speed.
So the width of the oars isn't negotiable on a galley. Stowing oars is not feasible in a rowing competition, and it wouldn't be in galley combat either. The term 'dead-in-the-water' would apply. Stopping invites being rammed, boarded, or shot - or all three.

Note the oar length, compared the width of the boat (scull). Competitive rowers use a paired-down scull/shell not unlike a tiny galley. (Thanks https://rowing.at/)

So it's highly doubtful galleys would mass together. They'd get in each others way. The naval term for the result then would be 'fouling the oars', leading to the whole 'dead-in-the-water' scenario again.

I agree, though, that galleys would be comparatively agile in the earlier days of EU4's timeframe.

The downfall of the galley was much more linked to rigging improvements than that of the ease of production of guns,

The scaleless sage is offering a very plausible interpretation here.
The predominant winds in the Mediterranean are northerlies - north-to-south. The seasonable variation doesn't change the direction much. Going back a thousand years or so, a journey from Athens to Alexandria could be something like a week going south, but over a month in going north. People seemed to rely on a convenient tail wind.

This implies that sailing ships weren't good at tacking i.e. they could not get much speed from it. And in combat, the a sailing ship might need to tack to-and-fro quickly - particularly against Galleys. They might have been using lanteens which have a 'bad tack' where the sail has to press against the mast when going in one direction.

Or they could have been just using square sails, with no tacking ability at all.

Either way, an oared ship could capitalise on it's comparative manoeuvrability; getting south of a sailing ship if the wind was a northerly, and cutting off the best line of retreat.
However, once a sailing ship's ability to tack quickly reaches anything like modern-day yachts, galleys become less advantageous.

"Heavies" were not used as support ships, or in strictly defensive roles, while there was a period of galleons and later designs being used to support fleets these were in no way warships, they were very clearly simple sailing cargo ships, something the galleon and other round ship styles was originally developed to be as part of the Italian merchant shipping. The "heavy" style ship was an offshoot of these rounded hulled cargo ships.

I believe the large 'rounded hull' designs were encouraged because they could be refitted for warfare. Commerce and war were pretty closely linked for the Italian maritime powers (if remember rightly).
The 'heavy ship', 'light ship', 'transport' designations in EU4 are fun from a gameplay standpoint, but I don't think they're historical until we get to our 'two decker' type ships which sound more like pure military vessels.
But yes, your fluffy fishiness, please continue.

Later on development of roundships due their more open-ended nature and dependence on sails rather than oarsmen made them big enough to never be troubled by smaller vessels and all naval development became an arms race in amount of cannons.

You're not concerned about propulsion? Seaworthiness in different conditions? Manoeuvrability? Navigation? Not even a little bit?

As I said, if you are interested in the topic I recommend the book I mentioned, "Gunpowder and Galleys" by John Guilmartin. You won't find any other source as thorough and detailed on the topic.

Or you should watch some sailing races? He who cannot move cannot fight. Get a feel for the speed of cutting-edge superyachts! The America's Cup competition begins in March next year - don't miss it!

 

[Johan]

Coastal defenses:
When coastal defenses were anounced I suggested that they should block or diminish the impact of coastal raiding. I still think that this should be the case when balancing raiding. Even more because that building has become very disliked, at least give it more utility.

Coastal Defence and Naval Batteries will block slave raiding in 1.31

 

[Bandua_of_Gallaecia]

Coastal Defence and Naval Batteries will block slave raiding in 1.31

Holy BASED!

 

[Razor Feather]

Huh so galleys can stomp man-of-war and frigates in Atlantic ocean?

Even 6 to one, galleys in open sea are not as strong as they might look, and the comparison is a bit complicated. Because of the way naval damage calculations work, with damage being determined by attacker cannons/target hull size, a heavy ship would have a damage multiplier of 40/8 = 5 against galleys, while a galley has a damage multiplier of 12/20= .6, so even with 6 of them they only have a multiplier of 3.6, doing less damage in total than the single heavy does. However, they also have 6 times the total health to chew through, so the heavy needs 120 times its 5 multiplier to kill them all off, while the galleys need 27.7 times their 3.6 multiplier. They galleys will suffer morale losses from ships sinking earlier though, and will be more likely to take losses before the retreat lockout ends. Galleys do also have the disadvantage of their atrocious strategic speed which can hamper their utility. It will be interesting to see how it plays out for sure, though.

 

[Katsue]

I had a thought in relation to Naval Professionalism, which is that one of the factors that should tank it if it's ever implemented is the use of galley slaves. My understanding is that both ancient Athens and mediaeval Venice relied on free professionals to row their galleys, and that this wasn't because they didn't have slavery or lacked strong administration - a navy rowed by free sailors was simply more effective than one rowed by slaves. So using slave raids or condemned criminals to man your galleys with slaves should probably reduce your Naval Professionalism in the same way that using mercenaries reduces your Army Professionalism.

 

[Kukumarro]

What about increasing the gold cost for ships as well? Rather than the increased naval maintenance, the base cost of ships could be increased for each new model. With how much economy scales, building a heavy ship is a big deal at early game but relatively cheap at late game, while in reality ships of the line were crazy expensive.

 

[Sete]

I agree.
If Marines were a "regular" unit type that every nation could build at will, then a penalty to "normal combat" would be justified to diferentiate it from regular infantry.

But as it stands, Marines are very limited, and require a significant investment to be fielded in significant numbers (Taking Naval Ideas means you will have to give up on some other land military group), so it only makes sense for them to be an elite infantry type, like a unit such as Janissaries, Banners or Revolutionary Guards. I wouldn't give them any penalties, instead I would give them a combat power modifier in coastal provinces. The sailor cost of using them as regular infantry should already serve as deterrent enough to not using them for regular land combat in place of normal infantry.
Its not like this would be a big buff to any country that doesn't already need a military buff. G.B, Netherlands, Portugal and Venice (who get Marines "for free") have sub-par land combat ideas anyway, really only Castile/Spain has decent military ideas among "Free-Marine nations".

Just make Marines a couple ducats more expensive, and proper buff them.
Having a novelty unit with so many drawbacks, only advantage being disembark speed, its counterproductive

Coastal Defence and Naval Batteries will block slave raiding in 1.31

Great news. Tired of having Magreb nation pillaging coast of Portugal even with ships patrolling.