Europa Universalis IV: Wealth of Nations – Dev diary 3: Naval Improvement

[milkan]

The issue is that now that fleets focus fire, the enemy runs out of ships before it runs out of morale and shatters. This would be solved by the player and AI retreating when they are losing a battle, but the AI is seemingly incapable of doing that at the moment. Even on land battles. The player has no excuse, if you know that you are losing a battle and you do nothing you are an idiot.

Or in most cases its because the player doesn't even know when a naval battle suddenly takes place. In war almost all of the land troops are in one central theater of war so player can easily take note of when fights break out but navies are mostly spread out in various trade routes making it difficult to keep track of when a naval battle suddenly breaks out.

Often times I only realise my navy is being sunk at the fag end of the battles when either I am close to stack wiping them or being stack wiped myself.

 

[AgentPaper]

All ships should be able to be assigned to "protect trade."

They already can. As long as there's at least one light ship, you're free to assign as many other ships to that stack as you want. It's just not usually useful to do so.

Transports should have the best rating for producing income when protecting trade -- BUT -- if they are protecting trade alone, without any other form of escort -- they should not prevent the spawning of pirates in the zone. They might be able to fight off the pirates, or then again, they might be sunk or even captured.

So, basically dedicated transports go away, and are replaced by light ships being able to transport troops? Why? This doesn't really seem to add anything to the game, if anything it removes interesting decisions from the player, since they no longer have to decide how many transports they need. Do they need to be able to move their entire army? Or just a small force to protect islands?

Light ships should have the next-best rating for protecting trade income.
Galleys should have the third-best rating for trade income, but their rating might be doubled, thus better than light ships, in inland seas.
Heavy ships should have the worst rating for income.

It sounds like you're trying to give the player interesting choices for which ships they want to build, which is fine, but you're missing the fact that it's already an interesting decision for which ships you want to build. All these changes really do is make things needlessly complicated.

If Paradox really wanted to hit one out of the ballpark, just as they are doing blockade values based on how many ships you have blockading, you could do pirate suppression based on the total "anti-piracy" values of your patrol, vs. the "lucrativeness" of the route -- which would be attracting pirates. Again, transports would get you zero anti-piracy value. Light ships would get the best. But a fleet of galleons? They might do quite swell to keep pirates away from your trade routes too.

Dear god no. First off, protecting merchant ships from pirates is exactly what light ships are doing when they protect trade. I mean, it's in the name and everything. Adding a "pirate suppression" value to the node that you have to make sure you meet just adds an absurd amount of busywork and micromanagement as the player need to keep checking to make sure that his trade fleets have enough combat vessels as the trade value moves up and down and other countries add or remove their own ships, changing how much suppression is there.

 

[andriy.gerasika]

& you hope to sell this stuff?

Better make Caspian true sea, let us have epic maritime battles there

 

[Balesir]

If you are going to make blocakdes harder by requiring more ships are you going to do anything to make them involve less micromanagement?

An extended supply range where they don't take attrition would be useful (or a way to rotate ships off station in those cases). At the moment I will blockade 3 of the 4 sea zones of an enemy but leave the 4th one that is out of supply range alone because it is too much micro to have to remember to rotate ships to cover the blockade before they sink from attrition. An auto blockade feature, which sends a few ships back to the closest friendly port and then brings them up to replace damaged ones would be very useful...

This seems a bit complicated. I would suggest instead that "transport" ships added to a fleet be able to extend its range. The common way to support fleets on blockade was with supply ships, and transports are essentially cargo vessels and appropriate for such work. Have the ratio of transport ships to total ship "weight" in a squadron modify the supply range and you can get longer range at the cost of endangering your (weaker) transport ships on anti-piracy patrol or blockade duty.

 

[krisslanza]

Trade patrol behaviours
Personally I hate when you find yourself at war with a bigger naval power and they quickly sink your trade fleets. As a free part of the expansion we are adding the option of setting your trade fleets to automatically return to port at the outbreak of war. After the war is over though, they will return to whatever they were doing at the start of the war. Since its an option, you have a choice to make, is your trade-fleets strong enough to fight of possible attackers or should they always hide at the outbreak of hostilities.

Oh god, I can't wait for this. I have lost so many trade fleets because I figure they're safe, or their trade routes won't take them that far...

 

[Zusk]

Wealth of Nations is a dissapointing DLC to me mainly because I never engaged in trade in any of my EU games. Usually provinces give me enough basetax to handle my nation anyway.

Even with more centralized DLC like Rajas of India and Conquest of Paradise at least that changed a important aspect of the game in the nations on the map themselves. A game run with WoN and a game run without will play pretty much the same except maybe for ducats going to different places and Venice being a bit stronger then before.

I think I will pass on this one.

 

[unmerged(1823)]

Wealth of Nations is a dissapointing DLC to me mainly because I never engaged in trade in any of my EU games. Usually provinces give me enough basetax to handle my nation anyway.

Even with more centralized DLC like Rajas of India and Conquest of Paradise at least that changed a important aspect of the game in the nations on the map themselves. A game run with WoN and a game run without will play pretty much the same except maybe for ducats going to different places and Venice being a bit stronger then before.

I think I will pass on this one.

There will be quite alot of thongs that will change dramatically for all nations.

 

[Zusk]

There will be quite alot of thongs that will change dramatically for all nations.

I hope so!

 

[Haftetavenscrap]

When it comes to detaching obsolete ships, will it automatically detach all obsolete ships no matter what? Because I find that while very old ships are a waste of your forcelimit, twodeckers are close enough to threedeckers that I keep them around. And when it comes to transports, I don't care how old they are, because they still carry troops and never enter battle if I can avoid it. Thus I'd like to be able to only detach ships that are truly obsolete, by some definition.

 

[RaptorCommander]

No from what I understand is that when they are marked as privateers the inherit the properties of regular pirates in EU4. Meaning they can be sunk.

Cause then you would just attach 2-3 Heavy ships to your trade fleets and sink all of them very quickly. Maybe even capture a few

 

[StelarCF]

Will it be possible to scrap the ships for money? I'm sure each ship would have enough valuable things to monetize...

 

[Fryslan0109]

Two Dev Diary #3s!? It's Christmas early! XD

 

[Fryslan0109]

On a side note: disappointed not to see anything about naval rally points - or am I not reading this closely enough?

 

[CrazyHeadGamer]

Still no release date for this

 

[aramael]

There will be quite alot of thongs that will change dramatically for all nations.

I'm pretty sure thongs first appear way after the EU4 time period.

 

[Konair0s]

I get the distinct impression Privateers is going to be one of those additions that "sounds" good but in practices nobody will ever use it much. Kind of like spies.

Just wanted to write the same.

Also, spies in EU3 were much more usable and now it is like of regression. "Espionage" ideas group does not worth it at all.

 

[Atlanteax]

Still no release date for this

Polishing Efforts =)

 

[PeterCorless]

I am really hoping that Paradox utterly scraps the ideas of making "privateers" into a "pirate faction." I never saw a response to my objections in this thread, but really -- seriously -- they should not be making this the "Pirates of the Caribbean" expansion.

Again, privateers were generally commercial ships platooned into an ad hoc militarized merchant marine. They were given letters of marque to attack specified nations. I again suggest reviewing the War of 1812 to see how privateers were employed by the U.S. to expand naval operations, as well as other historical uses of privateers.

It's now supposedly only a few weeks away from release of WoN, but I am gritting my teeth in dreadful counter-anticipation of this "feature."

 

[I_AM_King_Midas]

I'm pretty sure thongs first appear way after the EU4 time period.

And what a glorious day it was when they arrived.

 

[I_AM_King_Midas]

There will be quite alot of thongs that will change dramatically for all nations.

Thanks Johan!!! Man Paradox is the best!!