Can you link the source for that? Was it in a DD i don't remember seeing that.
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I'm NOT on a boat!! Navy/Naval/Transport [MEGA-THREAD]
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regardless of its *military* use, we need a naval system with republics, as the maritime power and trade was what created the economic behemoths of the italian city-states and their families. and their constant competitiveness with eachother over that trade, and ships capable of trade.
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I don't have a dev quote to hand, but here are some of the preview screenshots that were posted earlier in this thread that show the cost of embarkation being reduced by innovations, indicating that there is a cost in doing so
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Their is also gameplay footage from the preview clips that have been posted on youtube by all the Gaming News groups that got preview copies, some of the clips show embarkation, taking about a month.I don't have a dev quote to hand, but here are some of the preview screenshots that were posted earlier in this thread that show the cost of embarkation being reduced by innovations, indicating that there is a cost in doing so
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Here's one. Pause at 5:27 and we see this particular embarkation takes 29 days. Shortly thereafter, disembarking takes 35.
The player also loses 2 gold at this time, though I can't be sure if that's due to embarkation or some unseen expense.
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Good luck implementing the Maritime republics in the game without naval mechanics.
If wealth, income, navies, are all an abstraction we ought to put ck3 in a modern art gallery.
I can wait for a DLC but I'm convinced something about navies must be done.
If wealth, income, navies, are all an abstraction we ought to put ck3 in a modern art gallery.
I can wait for a DLC but I'm convinced something about navies must be done.
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I think we can all agree that it would have been better if they had improved on this broken system instead of just deleting it. For me it's just not great that land and water provinces are practically unseperatable in terms of strategic movement which removes the reason of implementing sea provinces, if you can just get across them without any further limitations like through land provinces. Btw I don't think the old system was bad. People tell me when I ask them what they consider bad about it that it sucks that you have limited boat capacity and it takes some time. Boat capacity is essential for me and brings a whole other aspect to travelling the sea. You could say that the current levy amount is limiting you in your conquest and makes things slow and more challenging but I think that exactly is the point of such a mechanic. Things taking time is another construct every Crusader Kings mechanic is building on so I don't see how this is a problem either.
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What was bad about it:
You couldn't raise just the number of ships you needed to transport an army without a lot of micromanagement. You ended up raising far more ships than were needed - but your vassals paid for it. Similarly if you had any reasonable amount of coast the fleet capacity was utterly irrelevant.
Early on if your ships could carry 1000 men, and your holding produced a stack of 1001 men you couldn't just leave that extra one man behind, and thus couldn't move the army. If you had boats for 1000, and 3000 men in 5 stacks of 600 you needed 5 trips to move the army, not 3.
You could have huge fleets sat in port, and didn't pay a penny in maintenance when they were apparently and anachronistically dedicated transport vessels. The transports also "just appear" rather than having to be paid for, since they're created out of thin air by shipyards.
The fleet was largely built by your vassals, and paid for by your vassals, which could leave you with a problem in the rare instance they failed to build shipyards.
None of that is exactly good.
There also *are* differences between land and sea provinces - you can't battle at sea; it takes time (a month) to go from land to sea; it costs money to go from land to sea.
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Yet as I'm pretty sure there won't be a trade system on launch such a naval system would then serve no purpose (as there would be no reason to protect non-existent trade).
I don't agree, actually. I think that the simplification is an improvement over the old system. "Here's some coin, see to it that our men are embarked and transported across the channel" is a more immersive (and plausible) scenario than "and we'll take 30 transport vessels from up there and 5 from down there, and then we'll need another 2 from over there".
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CK2 covers 769 to 1453. You'll have to be a little more specific as the Byzantine navy was the powerhouse of the day up until raiding and naval invasions subsided and thus Emperors no longer saw a need for keeping themes dedicated to their own navy, and thus disbanded them or merged them with the Imperial Fleet in the mid 11th century. Even still, the Imperial Fleet on its own was a force to be reckoned with, and its reorganization during the Komnenian Restoration unified its command structure, although as the Empire's navy lost most importance it once had, it continued to shrink in scope.
Well, of course. They were treated as guests and Venetian merchants already had their own quarters in the city. The siege in 1204 was successful primarily because the Crusaders had breached the not-so-impregnable Walls of Blachernae and the Venetians had been able to break through the chain blocking the Golden Horn with a ram (the only other times the chain was breached was when it was circumvented in the 900s and 1453) and breach the sea walls.
If the Byzantine navy was significantly weaker, the empire would've had no chance of recovering Crete or Cyprus, keeping up communication with Italian possessions, and would be susceptible to raiding 24/7. Normans did not set up the same trade fleets as the maritime republics of Northern Italy, and even theirs only became significant in the late 1000s, gaining more traction with the First Crusade of course.
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The same people defending Paradox not including navies in a medieval strategy game are the same fanboys that are responsible for Paradox thinking it could get away releasing Imperator in the state it was at launch. It is easy to go as low effort as possible when every bad decision you take is defended by a legion of white knights
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Well that's a mature addition to the discussion.
Dismiss the opinions of those who hold a different position to you as "fanboys" and "white knights" rather than address any of the reasons why the old system was poor, and why the new system is, in some ways, more realistic to the situation when it came to moving troops.
The Duke of Normandy did not have a vast supply of boats owned by him and his vassals to carry troops to England in 1066. The Kings of England did not invade France with a huge swarm of boats built in His Majesty's dockyards. Instead there was a tendency to hire merchant and fishing vessels for the duration.
" Medieval fleets, in England as elsewhere, were almost entirely composed of merchant ships enlisted into naval service in time of war. From time to time a few "king's ships" owned by the monarch were built for specifically warlike purposes; " Even the majority of the warships were armed merchant vessels pressed into service.
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They released Imperator exactly as advertised. That you expected something else is, as they say, "A 'you' problem."
Now, allow me to touch upon what I keep seeing about merchant republics. I want to preface this by saying that I would not at all mind them implementing naval mechanics for merchant republic DLC. However! That said, I would like to raise a simple alternative that shows such mechanics are not objectively required for merchant republics.
I give to you the premise of resource investment. You could simulate trade lanes and allow lords to invest in passive modifiers for both their trade and the trade of rivals utilizing a given route. Invest in piracy, and you hurt specific realms' income from a route whilst bolstering your own. Invest in protection, and you counter others' piracy against you. Invest in trade, and you amplify the potential income generation you can receive from the route.
You could even invest in patrols within sea regions your territory touches. Set your policy: Presence patrols slow all enemy transport activity in the region, as well as passively diminishing enemy trade income rate, as hostile ships need to navigate your patrol patterns to get through safely. Hunter patrols would increase attrition damage for enemy transports in the region and steal a portion of enemy income that comes through the region, separate from piracy investment.
Naval blockades, line combat, none of this was the norm during the middle ages and wouldn't need addressing. Therefore I feel the above aspects are all that really need to be covered, and this is one possible method of doing so without creating a whole new layer of game that threatens to become tedious, particularly for that multitude of realms who historically did little sea trade.
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That sounds interesting, but I'd expand on the (virtual) patrols function a little, to give it the option to hunt pirates only, hunt pirates *and* harrass foreign trade, or "be the pirates". If you're hunting pirates, everyone gets trade protection on your section of the route. If you hunt pirates *and* harrass trade, your trade (and designated friendlies) get trade protection, but neutral/enemy fleets lose a portion of their income. If you *are* the pirates, then... well good luck to anyone trying to send trade through. Of course, you'd also need to have trade trying to avoid heavily pirated sea zones if there were alternatives (if Dover/Calais is infested, can Spain send trade via Scotland instead if they want to trade with Scandinvia? It's more open to natural disasters, but at least there are fewer pirates...
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Ok, I confess to a bit of hyperbole in my post, but the basic point was solid: people are greatly exaggerating the Byzantine navy during the period compared to most of the other major Mediterranean powers: the Fatimid Caliphate early on, and the Italian merchant states (as well as, yes, Norman Sicily). The Byzantine navy was undergoing a fairly rapid and terminal decline during the CK2 period. It had a bit of a renaissance during the 900s (recovering from the nadir of the 800s, which saw Crete lost and eventually Abbassid raiders sack Thessalonica in 904), which saw it finally recover Crete (after over a century of failed attempts, during which the island literally in the middle of the Byzantine heartland had served as a base for pirates and raiders) and Cyprus (an island which they had already partially occupied), but being unable to recapture the island of Sicily (which was safeguarded by the Fatimid navy, unlike Sunni Cyprus and Crete).CK2 covers 769 to 1453. You'll have to be a little more specific as the Byzantine navy was the powerhouse of the day up until raiding and naval invasions subsided and thus Emperors no longer saw a need for keeping themes dedicated to their own navy, and thus disbanded them or merged them with the Imperial Fleet in the mid 11th century. Even still, the Imperial Fleet on its own was a force to be reckoned with, and its reorganization during the Komnenian Restoration unified its command structure, although as the Empire's navy lost most importance it once had, it continued to shrink in scope.
Well, of course. They were treated as guests and Venetian merchants already had their own quarters in the city. The siege in 1204 was successful primarily because the Crusaders had breached the not-so-impregnable Walls of Blachernae and the Venetians had been able to break through the chain blocking the Golden Horn with a ram (the only other times the chain was breached was when it was circumvented in the 900s and 1453) and breach the sea walls.
If the Byzantine navy was significantly weaker, the empire would've had no chance of recovering Crete or Cyprus, keeping up communication with Italian possessions, and would be susceptible to raiding 24/7. Normans did not set up the same trade fleets as the maritime republics of Northern Italy, and even theirs only became significant in the late 1000s, gaining more traction with the First Crusade of course.
Once the 1000s come around (and I confess, I tend to focus on the post-1066 era when I talk about CK2, as I rarely play the earlier start dates, and they weren't part of the original release), things quickly take a turn for the worse. The decline of the Fatimid threat (as the Fatimid conquest of Egypt and subsequent loss of North Africa/Sicily means they now tend to focus more on the Levant rather than Byzantine territory) and the ongoing loss of mainland Sicily to the Normans mean that the navy is no longer as high a priority for investment, and it results in a fairly rapid decline. While the Komnenid restoration did improve the Byzantine position on land, it did little for their navy, which was much less of a priority. By the 1080s (a full decade before the First Crusade), the Normans, having finished conquering Sicily, launch an invasion of Greece, and the Byzantine navy is powerless to stop them. They eventually are forced to call in the Venetians to use their fleet to defeat the Normans, cut their supply lines and force them to withdraw.* Meanwhile the Normans solidify their hold on Sicily, where they will become a significant naval power in their own right (briefly conquering parts of North Africa, and regularly casting covetous looks at Greece).
Meanwhile, the Italian merchant republics are continuing to develop rapidly in the naval area. Genoa and Pisa spend much of the 1000s fighting with Muslim raiders in the Western Mediterranean, including major expeditions to Sardinia and the Balearic Islands, and I've already mentioned Venice's intervention against the Normans (Venice at this point is a firm Byzantine ally, which dominates its foreign policy during the 1000s). By the First Crusade, all three of Genoa, Pisa and Venice will contribute large fleets to the Crusader cause, which allow the Crusaders to maintain naval superiority during their campaigns in Palestine, and score notable victories against the Fatimid fleet.
The 1100s see the essential disappearance of the Byzantine navy as a major force, as they increasingly rely on the Italian city-states (initially Venice, later Genoa) to protect the Aegean and its trade. Byzantine-Venetian relations fell apart during the reign of Manuel Komnenos, who in 1171 decided to punish Venetian refusal to provide a fleet for an invasion of Sicily by seizing Venetian property and imprisoning all Venetian citizens in the Empire. Venice declares war and launches a naval expedition; notably the Byzantines are completely unable to even challenge the Venetian fleet as it lays siege to Chalkis on Euboea, and instead attempt to stall diplomatically until a plague strikes and the Venetian fleet returns home, never having been challenged by the Byzantine navy. It takes a decade (and a new emperor) for the Byzantines to restore regular commercial relations with the Venetians and release their hostages, and relations remain frosty afterwards, which is why they most certainly were not viewed as guests when the Fourth Crusade showed up. And yet, the Byzantine navy again made no attempt to challenge the Venetian fleet at sea, even after the Venetians literally paraded their ships in front of Constantinople and demanded they overthrow their emperor and install Alexios IV (the Crusader candidate), and even though Venetian control of the sea was (as you note) absolutely critical to the campaign and the eventual Crusader victory.
Another good demonstration of the absence of Byzantine naval power during the 1100s is the fate of Cyprus. Isaac Komnenos rebels there in 1185, and the Sicilian fleet defeats Byzantine attempts to subdue it. Richard the Lionheart stops by during the Third Crusade, captures the island with his fleet and installs a Crusader kingdom, which remains outside of Byzantine control.
After the Fourth Crusade, of course, the Byzantine navy, like everything else about the post-1204 Byzantine empire, was a shadow of itself, but I doubt that anyone is particularly surprised by that. My main point is that even before then, the Byzantine navy was never truly dominant during the CK2 period, generally second to the Fatimids early on, and Norman Sicily and the Italian city states later on.
*This, by the way, is one reason I've always found it funny that CK2 has a strait between Apulia and Greece, as this was one of the few areas that was regularly the scene of naval interdictions during the CK2 period, by the Venetians and the Norman Sicilians, whereas CK2 doesn't even require you to raise your ship levies to cross over (probably because the AI couldn't handle it). A good demonstration of everything wrong with the CK2 model of navies, and why I am glad to see it go.
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There's a conflation of detail and realism common to discussions of strategy games. The CK2 system was more intricate and involved than the CK3 system, but all that detail was completely wrong. But because it was more involved, people assume it was more realistic. You see this all the time.
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You better back that up with evidence. I remember nearly everyone saying very early on in the dev diary cycle that there was huge problems with IR.
The difference between an abstract currency filled, boring mess and replacing a crap system with one that should work better for the majority of people on the map (ai included) and that is arguably more realistic, is worlds apart.
Still you I'm sure that insulting some people felt good right?
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Imperator had almost the exact same issues EU: Rome had. Treating it as a unique case no one saw coming ignores the fact that Paradox have been struggling to make the era interesting and used EU:R and IR mainly as engine tests for EU4 and CK3, respectively.
Also, you are ignoring a vast number of arguments that have absolutely nothing to do with Paradox at all.
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