EU4 - Development Diary - 6th of October 2020

[sekelsenmat]

So combat width is down to 0.5 for galleys. Meaning that you can have 6 galleys against 1 heavy.
AKA in 1444 you have 72 cannons for galleys against 40 cannons of your heavy. This doesn't seem balanced
Or am I forgetting something?

Maybe they will have different cannon number? If not I am also suspicious that it is unbalanced.

Or maybe in later techs they will change heavy ships to have proportionally more cannons?

But I'm mostly worried about the change making Light Ships useless in combat....

Heavy ships especially early on in the period were often repurposed trade or transport ships.

So we should add transport capacity for Heavy ships and maybe even Light ships to a smaller degree.

 

[anduls]

"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. "

So, what's the point ?

 

[Sete]

From what I know Portugal used Carracks for boarding or sweep the decks of lower ships with their breach loading swivel guns, besides transport of man and cargo due to their large size.
They also used them to bombard walls.
Caravels, and square rigged caravels for combat and patrol due to the cannons being closer to the water line, which they used to sink enemy ships quickly.

Although Portuguese commanders preferred boarding.

For example:

Battle of Diu - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

 

[anduls]

It’s historical, ships of that size had 800-1000 crewmen (including ship staff and officers)

Yes, but the number of sailors in real world were sligthly larger than in the game.

 

[sprites]

Coastal Defence and Naval Batteries will block slave raiding in 1.31

Nice! the AI just had built them one patch early

 

[catfed]

Some changes vis a vis naval aspects I would like to see are;
1. different land units should have different transport needs, a Calvary unit of 1000 men and horses requires 3 to 4 times as much transport capacity as an infantry unit of 1000 men, and an artillery unit of 1000 men and the cannons/ammo/limber/horses would require even more transport capacity than the Calvary.
2. As the transport ship models improve with technology their transport capacity should increase.
3. I would love for all the adjacencies to disappear or have the amount of troops that can move across them greatly limited. This alone would make navies vital and be much more realistic.
4. Fleets would not try and go through a canal if there was an enemy fleet on the other side since you can only get one or 2 ships in each lock and they would be sitting ducks for the enemy fleet coming out or in the last lock - especially if you haven't built any fortifications to protect the entrances yet.

For land units as well as naval units I would like to see them not just reduce manpower when built, but should also reduce it slightly constantly as replacements for injured/retired/end of enlistment/desertion/etc - as it stands right now, I could raise a unit in my capital at the start of the game and so long as I never do anything that will cause it attrition or loss from battle, in 300 years it still has the same soldiers in it that I recruited 300 years prior.

There is a limit to the number of Calvary quality horses that you are going to be able to get your hands on because, 1 not all horses are good enough for the Calvary, 2 if you take away all the good horses in a system where goods are moved by wagons then your economy grinds to a halt and the people will rebel.

 

[Rule Britannia]

And the merchant marine is not represented at all in the game, which means all the sailors on those ships are neither. The number you have on top of the screen are only for the fighting navy.

Merchant Marine sailors is actually a very good proxy for unused sailors in game as it gives an idea of what pool of sailors a nation can draw on.

 

[holyvigil]

It is a massive issue though. In Manchu it was said that they targeted for an about 66% chance for Ming to collapse, since 1.30 it happens maybe in 10% to 20% of all games. And a stable Ming is uniquely problematic because it turns half of Asia into a no-go zone.

buying down WE has certainly changed those percentages.

 

[generalis Julius Caesar]

Looks great so far.

 

[Cancerofthehead]

Coastal Defence and Naval Batteries will block slave raiding in 1.31

For just that province the state or the sea tile?

Because building them in all coastal provinces would still be an issue and since the primary issue is the devastation killing prosperity, you can’t just skip the low dev provinces.

 

[Fluffy_Fishy]

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.

Galleys under oar really weren't very fast vessels, with a typical cruising speed of around 5kn with most finding a sprint of 7 and in some cases 8kn which could be held by experienced and well exercised and provisioned oarsmen for about 15-20 minutes, at which point the crew would be exhausted. The idea that they are somehow faster than their sailing counterparts is kind of ridiculous @Titanius Puffin has gone into a very nice basic understanding of sailing from a modern perspective and during the galley based era combative round ships would at least match the sprint speed of the average galley for roughly 220 degrees to the wind, although they might struggle to keep up with the smaller more lightly armed variants.

I don't understand why you are trying to sell the Galleass as a defensive style ship, they were used combatively in a very similar way to tanks in ww2 era. they were very much offensive breakthrough ships meant for breaking formations of the enemy for smaller ships to then take advantage of this aggressive disruption of the line with their role most fitting their aggressive shock value. The galleass also has very little to do with large merchant galleys and we much more a modern take on the research and restoration of technical skills used to build and power what is effectively a resurrection of the quinquereme and while some technical skills came from the practical skills needed to build effective large merchant galleys it was much more to do with ancient shipbuilding theory being expanded and experimented on in the era.

Looking at perhaps the most famous galley battle in history, Lepanto you can quite clearly see the Christian fleet, especially the Spanish had taken significant numbers of large sailing warships, mostly galleons with the intent on using them as they proved their effective combative ability at battles such as Djerba and Preveza despite for various reasons the Christian combined fleets still losing, denying the intent of use of these large powerful vessels isn't something that really makes sense for some of the most major engagements of the 16th century or the transition to sail warfare over the period and Preveza especially proves the point you made wrong about the Iberians not using their ships in the Mediterranean. Lepanto as an example doesn't really show the vast numbers of fighting sail ships because they didn't take part in the engagement due to wind conditions and the nature of the battle taking place in the geographic area it did but they were still a hugely significant part of the fleet.

On the comments made about the polacca and xebec again show some real lack of understanding, the high period of the xebec saw some real monstrously sized vessels of that type sailing the Mediterranean some of which fielding around 50 guns during the early to mid 18th century easily capable of attacking the typical 12 pounder frigates of their contemporary patrol navies and swift enough to avoid larger ships, especially into the wind. The polacca on the other hand was not a low sided ship at all, the entire point of the polacca was that it was built up high for a ship its size purely to deter boarding and make it easy for a merchant crew to fend off much larger pirate/corsair crews.

Round ships weren't really more open ended than their oared contrasting navy vessels, the very prevalence of the Lantern galley proves this, huge by design and the centre point of many fleets, again something that contrasted into the ancient world where you'd see much more common use of the hexareme and even octaremes as capital ships. Rounded ships were in no way more open ended, design principles still severely limited the scope of what you could achieve and was very limited by technological progress of the era. The round ship eventually won out in the main theatre of being much more weatherly and being much more easily fitted with heavier and later double hulled systems, this however wasn't really something that helped much in sheltered areas, proving difficult to sail in sheltered coastlines and not really available for much more expansive military duties until there were significant improvements to rigging available.

Galleys weren't just made outdated by the reasons you have suggested either, the situational advantages of sailing warships vs oared is one that comes into an interesting question outside of the Mediterranean, you see some interesting examples happening in the Caribbean during the mid to late colonial period again used for the same reason they were maintained within the Mediterranean, even the young USA had a small galley collection at one point, this also extends to the popularity of half galleys and archipelago sloops, with smaller warships of the 17th and 18th century fighting with square rigs but also adopting oars in a hybrid set up to give them greater advantage in coast and island hopping in areas with high rates of raiding or maritime theft.

Taking the example of movement away from Galleys during the Cretan war again this doesn't hold up to evidence, as the Venetian navy did exercise building a number of large sailing warships, even dedicated major sheds in the northwest part of the Venetian arsenal to these ships which had originally been set up to build galleass but became the core of the hybrid fleet. The Cretan war did however see a shift of Venice moving more aligned towards typical European naval thought after the successes of the Giove Fulminante class warship, despite this its still important to stress that Venice like other navies still didn't stop producing galleys in the 18th century, something that would prove incredibly useful to the Venetian fleet in the last 3 wars fought before the dissolution of the republic, the 1st Morean war, 2nd Morean war and the Venetian Tunisian war all of which involved heavy reliance on galleys in the conflicts. You even see this example from the records of ships captured from Venice by France in 1797 with 24 galleys, 17 Xebecs and 13 Felluca falling into french hands, this also doesn't count the numbers stationed at Corfu which fled the port escaping capture which would likely estimate another 8-10 Galleys, 10-12 xebecs, and 5-8 Felluca.

Another point made about the high number of cannons puts no effort into judging effectiveness of guns, with the Venetian 74 and 76 gun ships Corona and Leon Trionfante being no doubt the most heavily armed warships of the 18th century, despite being launched in 1711 and 1716 respectively. However on a more standardised point of costing, producing, equipping manning and maintaining the large heavy fleets of the late 18th and early 19th century was vastly more costly during say the Napoleonic era than the massive fleet eras of say the height of the Galley in the 16th century or the massive fleet battles of say the Anglo Dutch wars during the 17th century, something that becomes most evident with merchant shipping costs as the European navies with large expensive and expansive fleets of ships of the line and frigates etc being able to transport goods at much lower prices due to the safety ensured by these expensive warships compared to the much cheaper galley centred fleets of say the Italian nations.

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.

I can also strongly recommend this book to those wanting to understand naval warfare of the era, it is however by no means the most detailed source available because its a book written to be accessible for the keen reader, there are plenty more intricate and fine detailed sources on the topic, especially those written as PhD theses or papers opening up state archives and recordings to those who don't have access to them. The best books on galleys proper I've found are pretty much unanimously written in Italian with some good sources in Spanish, although fewer and further between. Gunpowder and Galleys is still a fantastic opening book and I'd still recommend it to people of all levels of knowledge.


Apologies for the wall of text I've written here everyone.

 

[Beagá]

Spain's role in stopping the ottomans in the sea is criminally forgotten. Without them a victory like Lepanto would bê way more difficult. The organization part in particular.

 

[Grand_Strategy_Gamer]

Welcome to another Europa Universalis IV development diary. Today we’ll talk about some major game-balance changes that we are doing regarding the naval game in 1.31.

I’m not really all that great at writing long detailed development diaries, but as this one is filled with gamebalance changes, I hope you can bear with me.

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.


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.

View attachment 637905

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.

We introduced marines with 1.30, but they were a bit too weak and situational, so they are getting one major change in that their penalty has been changed from +25% shock damage taken to only +10% shock damage taken. We also increased the amount you get from naval ideas from +5% to 10%.

Finally, we also made it impossible for nations to slave raid on any territory that they have a truce with, so now you can actually protect yourself efficiently against the raiders.


Next week Groogy will take you through why hedgehogs are holy.

Coastal Defence and Naval Batteries will block slave raiding in 1.31

@Johan, I appreciate your attention to this area! It would seem someone might have been reading through my massive "Master & Commander Complete Naval Overhaul" thread: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/the-master-commander-complete-naval-overhaul.1163150/. I can see a lot of the changes I suggested there being adopted at least in part.

1) More Sailors from development (+30->+60): I suggested this and I'm happy to see it adopted. It's both more realistic and helpful in the early game.
2) More advanced/larger ships require more sailors: Huge thumbs up on this! It's both more realistic, should make naval warfare less static and is something I suggested earlier.
3) Galley combat width halved: To be more historical and give incentives to not spam galleys all game, I kindly suggest that you up the combat width of mid & late-game galley types. For instance, have it go from 0.5->1->1.5 to simulate galleys eventually becoming outdated by game's end.
4) Increased naval combat width over time (5/25->75) : Great change! This should allow more Trafalgar-like battles by late game and will give countries with Diplomatic Tech advantages a much bigger advantage on the high seas. I also recall suggesting this.
5) -20% naval combat width in coastal sea zones: I like this change as well! It's realistic too given the dangers posed by shoals around coasts.
6) Naval Maintenance change: It's definitely a change in the right direction, though I'll wait to see it in action.
7) Faster Ships over time: both more realistic and makes gaps in naval tech matter more in catching or escaping outdated enemy fleets. I particularly like that galleys will only get 25% faster.
8) Separate Naval Leader pool: I couldn't agree more with this change! Finally I can have an admiral as France while still beating England with generals on land.
9) Naval Strength affects overseas subjects' liberty desire: I like the change and look forward to seeing it in action.
10) Improved Marines: Several steps in the right direction! I would suggest giving them a coastal combat bonus or at least removing the shock damage penalty in coastal provinces. I would also suggest upping the amount you can have and having them act as a force bonus rather than be counted as part of the army.
11) Raiding changes: Having the truces and coastal fortification buildings stop raiding is a definite improvement! I would also suggest the ability to mount a naval quasi-war against raiding fleets. If I'm Castile and getting raided by Tunis, it would really be nice if I could outright sink the offending fleet without escalating to full-scale warfare. You could penalize this with a granting casus belli and malus to relations to Tunis, but it would be a fun option.


I'd like to suggest a few additional high-level improvements:

A) Make it harder for the player and AI to get military access: this alone would make fleets and marines more valuable!

B) Further naval morale changes: changing the morale hit from losing a ship to curb snowballing is worth a look. I have detailed suggestions in my overhaul thread.

C) Make transports more valuable or ditch them: To make transports more valuable I would suggest actually allowing their use as merchantmen on trade missions to make money. Giving other ships limited transport capacity should also be considered and may make ditching them altogether a worthwhile idea.

D) Overhaul Trade Companies: turning them into the rapacious, militarized quasi-states they were in history could make Asia far more interesting. Imagine being the UK and getting called into a war by the East India Company against an ally of the Compagnie française pour le commerce des Indes orientales, which then drags you and France into an epic war. It's both historical and should be a lot of fun! I have a whole section in my naval overhaul dedicated to this idea.

E) Medium Ships: a lot of people are complaining about the cost of late game Heavies in terms of sailors. As it happens, this was a historical issue! The Royal Navy and many other countries got around it by building smaller ships of the line. To replicate this in-game, give players the option to build a new ship type called "Medium Ship". They would cost 2/3rds of a heavy in ducats and sailors, have a combat width of 2, be slightly better fighters per combat width than heavies (very historical) and could be 20% faster to boot. I've got a detailed proposal in my thread.

F) Doom stack penalties: It would make naval combat more nuanced and historical if there were penalties to simply putting your entire navy into a single 100-ship fleet. After all, the Battle of Trafalgar happened because France was trying to unite its Mediterranean and Atlantic fleets!

 

[Titanius Puffin]

Apologies for the wall of text I've written here everyone.

I'm enjoying it.

[edit: this quote was added later to provide context of the debate taking place]

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.......
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...

Another point made about the high number of cannons puts no effort into judging effectiveness of guns, with the Venetian 74 and 76 gun ships Corona and Leon Trionfante being no doubt the most heavily armed warships of the 18th century, despite being launched in 1711 and 1716 respectively.

I completely agree with the point about the number of cannons. The effectiveness of cannon, and a ship's use of them, changed a lot in EU4's timeframe.

An old English example, the Mary Rose (completed in 1512 and sunk in 1545), had quite a lot of 'guns' - 78 to 91. But those guns varied a lot... here's a table of the armaments. (Source wikipedia Mary Rose, which is sourcing 'Your Noblest Shippe: Anatomy of a Tudor Warship' by Peter Marsden (editor).

If you look, you can see anti-personnel guns are removed over time, while anti-ship guns are added. This shows naval tactics changing from boarding ships, to sinking them.

Type of guns[32]

Date	Total	Carriage-mounted	Ship-supported	Anti-ship	Anti-personnel
1514	78	20–21	57–58	5–9	64–73
1540	96	36	60	17–22	74–79
1545	91	39	52	24	67

These categories in the table weren't well standardised either. Old copper cannon lived next to newer iron ones. They didn't accept the same projectiles, or fire the same way. The lack of standardisation increased cost, overspecialised ammunition supplies (and gunnery skills) within the ship, and suggested unfocussed tactics. The ship-supported guns tended to be small - meaning they were short-range weapons. The carriage mounted guns were heavier, and required the carriage to absorb the recoil. It was difficult to make such diverse weapons attack a single target.

However, half a century later, some Elizabethan ships boasted completely uniform armaments.
But that didn't mean cannons were the same from then on....
[edited for proof-reading, cause I can't help myself]

 

[Chazb5046]

And I hope the navy contributing to liberty desire of a colony is balanced properly. So it doesn't get hidden by the overly dominating trust modifier and that it can't go negative and make building a large trade fleet from all the New World money make every colony have 0% liberty desire.

What new world money? Serious question. You loose all of your trade power in nodes to the newly spawned colonial nations. The money you get from tariffs is crap. What money?

 

[Chazb5046]

These changes look great! Thanks for all the hard work!

I don’t understand why marines need a penalty, at all. There’s a huge opportunity cost to getting marines for most nations in the first place. Why would they be inherently worse at absorbing shock damage?

Exactly! Aren’t marines in most nations a slightly more elite fighting force than regular infantry (alright that’s modern marines but still) why on earth would they be worse at fighting? What is the point to them? If I’m sending an army around the world, I would rather loose some to attrition, then have them arrive whole but take 10% more shock damage?

 

[Piotrzeci]

What new world money? Serious question. You loose all of your trade power in nodes to the newly spawned colonial nations. The money you get from tariffs is crap. What money?

You still get 50% of their Trade Power, a free merchant and New World trade goods can fetch a good price and contrary to TCs CN can build prosperity in their states, and they also pick plutocratic ideas for bonus goods produced.
Just because it gives more money to expand into TC doesn't meant there is no money in New World.

 

[Albert I]

I would put this picture, for everybody who can not understand.
The capacity of the galley to use the sails and the oars. a sail ship need the wind to maneuver on the battle, the galley, can use the oars and shot the rear of a ship. with o without wind.

With this picture we can see also, the worst problem against the heaviest ships, the low number of big guns on a galley. The velocity and maneuverability it's not enough against the fire power and resilience of a heavy ship.

 

[TheDungen]

That's fine early on, but they're buffed for the entirety of the game. Will have to see how it works in practice but I wouldn't be surprised if they're at least a match for, if not better than, heavies even in the late game. Unless late game heavies were also buffed and/or late galleys were nerfed.

Although the worst thing about this buff is the huge difference in cost. Heavies cost over 10 times galleys in monthly maintenance yet galleys will be more effective in battle? That seems a bit ridiculous. Surely either heavy maint should be reduced or galley maint increased to make them a bit more balanced. As it is choosing galleys over heavies will be a complete no brainer. Why pay more for a unit that's less effective in battle?

They are through their speed, late ships are very quick, while late galleys are not.

So we should add transport capacity for Heavy ships and maybe even Light ships to a smaller degree.

We should use a HoI4 esque system for moving armies across water.

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

Yes if you can mass your doomstack to catch them but remember galleys are low in open ocean so if the man-o-wars don't want to fight there is no way for galleys to catch them.
At least that's how it should work, at least early in the period. Later on dedicated combat vessels for the high seas were built, but I would remind you that many pirates operated out of warms of longboats and still managed to capture way larger ships.

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



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.

View attachment 638309
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 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.
View attachment 638362
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.


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.


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


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!
View attachment 638384

Modern ships aren't the same as historical ones, there were plenty of space to stow oars on galleys heck there's plenty of space to stow oars in rowboats and there's even a manoeuvre where you remove the oars and hold them in one hand floating in the water beside the boat, as long as the blade of the oar is parallel with the surface of the water it will float, of course galleys are to high to do that but a trick they could do is pushing the oar to the other side of the boat the oar is almost exactly the same length as the the boat itself so when fully pulled it only the blade of the oar sticks out. Again this is done with longboat rowing (something I have personal experience of seeing the Swedish navy still trains it's sailors in longboat rowing as a teamwork exercise) when you need to retract oars quickly. With a skilled crew this process takes about ten seconds.

Oh also there are plenty of examples of mass deploments of galleys look up the Battle of Svensksund where Sweden used galleys against the Russian sailing vessels to great effect.
This picture is kind of bad but it's of a model at the national maritime museum of Sweden (worked there a s tour guide for several years) showing that battle and the formations being used.

I would put this picture, for everybody who can not understand.
The capacity of the galley to use the sails and the oars. a sail ship need the wind to maneuver on the battle, the galley, can use the oars and shot the rear of a ship. with o without wind.

With this picture we can see also, the worst problem against the heaviest ships, the low number of big guns on a galley. The velocity and maneuverability it's not enough against the fire power and resilience of a heavy ship.

Tell that to pirates who used smaller ships to take over larger ones with great success through this entire era. You're thinking about sinking them, but instead think about boarding larger harder to manoeuvre ships and simply killing the crews. As fir firepower ships like Carracks and Caravels didn't have much of that.

 

[Guruthos]

First, as mentioned several times already historically 900 men for a 1st rate is reasonable. The Santissima Trinidad was crewed with 1500 men in the battle of Trafalgar.

If marines would be accessible for all nations in a larger amount their malus of 10% would be reasonable. Right now they are useless especially considering that if I ship them with artillery that artillery is still eating attrition and so after landing still freaking vulnerable.

As aswell others said get rid of the role of transports and let them be the most efficient for protecting trade. (their names already suggest that)

Make the current light ships a mix out of the current light ships and current heavys. Their role being decent combat ability but still being able to “protect trade” with a bonus on hunting pirates maybe. Something between 3rd and 5th rates. (small lineships, heavy and normal frigates, corvettes)

Current heavy ships then could represent ships of the line (maybe even not being available from game start) with huge combat ability but aswell huge costs. Maybe even include a penalty when they exceed a ratio of 80% towards heavy frigates like cav/infantry ratio.

Finally make all ships be able to transport 1 troop each. That would help non naval focused nations to at least have a slight chance to move their troops. Right now in a multiplayer game it is basically impossible to move troops around by sea.

If these changes would been made smaller countries actually have a reason to build up a navy and can have ships with combat ability and still move around troops. During peace time they can use their ships aswell for something.

Considering the reduced engagement with in coastal i understand the idea behind it but as far as i am aware all major battles in history happend more or less in sea tiles that are coastal in eu4 and due to the naval attrition mechanics open sea is never a good idea to be in.