Johan twitter poll: remove sailors?

[fred.erick]

Yes ships never used manpower. Sailors was/is intended as a mapower-like mechanism for navies.

I think the concept is great, just that the implementation is lacking. Indeed, sailors are pretty meaningless at the moment, but it doesn't have to be.
I 100% against a complete removal of sailors without something else to compensate. I could get convinced by the people here arguing for the use of manpower for navies. But I would still prefer to keep sailors and tweak them so that they have a more significant impact.

A lot of people recommended manpower (including on Twitter, albeit more rudely than here,) and I thought of it, but I think this will have a detrimental effect on the naval gameplay:
A) In a choice between conserving manpower for land warfare and naval warfare, land will always be more important.
B) Casualties from land battles will impact your navies, to the point of crippling them entirely if you're at 0 manpower.
C) Huge land empires will also automatically hold an advantage at sea, which I think is what sailors were created for in the first place: i.e France dominates the continent, but GB holds the power at sea. Should a rich Russia create a fleet of 100 three-deckers, manned by serfs?

Logically speaking, manpower is better than gold alone, but I thought the idea is to encourage more naval warfare (and more interesting naval warfare) - not less.

Also, how does the idea of docks increasing naval tradition sound? To simulate the availability of higher quality seamen.

 

[Granathar]

They should make it able for sailors to occupy one coastal province for each thousand sailor in the ships in the adjacent sea province. Also if you have enough sailors/guns in a siege of a coastal fort you should be able to even get a plus 1 to siege pip to the siege or get siege ability based on fort vs guns/sailors. If two or more forts are blockaded by the same ships they will naturally be split between ongoing sieges.

This could also be tied in some way to the new devastasion system announced for 1.20. Based on fort level vs sailors you will devastate the coastal provinces of your enemies. This will differ from blockade somewhat since blockades are based on ship speed and isn't(as far as I am aware) based on how damaged the ship is.

And this way they would make Great Britain great again. Of course we need to increase number of sailors on ships (and of course hull and number of sailors are different stats). Number of sailors should increase with ship upgrades. Also ships should have much more "elastic" upkeep. What I mean - ships can be "overpopulated" a little. Normally a big ship of the line would store 600 people, but for short time you could "pump it" up to even 800 sailors. In game mechanic it should mean higher attrition over time, but it would still be worth to "overpopulate" them if we have our ports close enough and want to block and siege enemy ports, or to fight enemy navy. Another thing - heavy ships and light ships should have it's own maintenance bars. Heavies are like main battle tanks. In times of peace they would be used with like 30% of max sailor pop. It's enough to maintain firepower and mobility, but they would lack manpower to board other ships and would rather not do it, also - too low numbers for sieges etc. Light ships should follow the same mechanic, but their no-penalty upkeep should be at like 50-60%. Then why would we increase their upkeep? When hunting pirates or privateering of course. Usual trade protection would be enough with like 50% of crew, but to privateer or hunt we need to pump them a little. Sooo... maintenance bar should be for every fleet, not global! Also - transport ships are pretty much "trade ships" yet they provide no trade. Merchants would rather gladly pay for transporting their goods on royal ships with assistance of frigates. That's what actually "trade power" should mean in the first place. But it should also give some ducats from transporting merchandise when there are transport ships with patrol fleet. And then we have them useful in times of peace too.

And if we had all of the above - why we need high sailor pool? Because in times of peace our fleets are half-disbanded and when we are hit by war we can increase their upkeep to the max, up to overpop levels meaning that our navy will suck many thousands sailors at once - and if we don't have them... well, let's better avoid enemy on seas if they are pumped to the roof and ready to battle.

 

[durbal]

A big part of the reason why sailors are meaningless is that losing a ship to hull damage is so much more devastating than the loss of sailors it causes. The limit on naval power is therefore still the total number of ships, nothing else.

 

[fred.erick]

A big part of the reason why sailors are meaningless is that losing a ship to hull damage is so much more devastating than the loss of sailors it causes. The limit on naval power is therefore still the total number of ships, nothing else.

If you lost sailors even without losing ships (as was suggested, during the shock phase of sea combat, for example) - would that make them matter more?
Extreme case: if you lose 600 sailors on a three-decker, but the hull is intact, for whatever reason, would that make sailors matter?
We'll have to assume that having 20% crew also reduces the ship's effectiveness in combat.

 

[Pugman]

It's useless. Take it out. It's just clutter. Unless you're going to vastly improve upon naval warfare overall this isn't adding any value.

 

[durbal]

If you lost sailors even without losing ships (as was suggested, during the shock phase of sea combat, for example) - would that make them matter more?
Extreme case: if you lose 600 sailors on a three-decker, but the hull is intact, for whatever reason, would that make sailors matter?
We'll have to assume that having 20% crew also reduces the ship's effectiveness in combat.

I don't see why it has to be so complex with phases and such. That's a pointless distinction since the only thing that affects it would be leader pips (would you re-roll admirals to try to get max shock pips to cause sailor attrition? I wouldn't.)

The core of the problem is that once a navy loses its ships (or really one battle) it's usually over. Naval warfare is also not omnipresent like land warfare is, so manpower is always a useful resource whereas sailors are only occasionally used. There's no function of navies besides blockading and battles so the only sink to the sailor pool is during naval battles. I find this odd, since blockading historically was very taxing on the nation doing the blockade since attrition was high so ships and crews had problems maintaining a blockade. This would be a perfect chance to introduce a sink to sailors when performing a blockade, but first blockades need to become relevant and their numbers need to be greatly increased across the board (affect on WE, income, etc. as well as probably introducing new mechanics) for the blockade to be worthwhile.

 

[fred.erick]

I don't see why it has to be so complex with phases and such. That's a pointless distinction since the only thing that affects it would be leader pips (would you re-roll admirals to try to get max shock pips to cause sailor attrition? I wouldn't.)

The core of the problem is that once a navy loses its ships (or really one battle) it's usually over. Naval warfare is also not omnipresent like land warfare is, so manpower is always a useful resource whereas sailors are only occasionally used. There's no function of navies besides blockading and battles so the only sink to the sailor pool is during naval battles. I find this odd, since blockading historically was very taxing on the nation doing the blockade since attrition was high so ships and crews had problems maintaining a blockade. This would be a perfect chance to introduce a sink to sailors when performing a blockade, but first blockades need to become relevant and their numbers need to be greatly increased across the board (affect on WE, income, etc. as well as probably introducing new mechanics) for the blockade to be worthwhile.

The phases was just a suggestion.
Right now in the game usually one navy retreats - maybe without losing any ships at all. Would such a retreat that still costs some amount of sailors be felt more than one where you only need a minuscule amount of sailors for "repairs"?
The AI used to suicide its entire navies up until Mare Nostrum - at the same point sailors were introduced, so simultaneously a system to limit rebuilding new ships was added, while very few ships were now sunk in combat.
I understand that decoupling hull damage from sailor loss might be difficult from the developer side though. From that perspective it's an effort for no real reason, especially if sailors are not popular among most players.

Anyways, like you said, blockades should become more potent for players to bother investing sailors just to keep them. Unless the resource is virtually limitless (like it is currently,) I don't see anyone bothering to waste them on a seemingly pointless economical penalty to the other side.

The idea of invading islands and/or coastal provinces sounded pretty cool to me. Might simplify warfare in distant areas - not having to transport troops around.
I can't think of anything else at the moment.

 

[Fluffy_Fishy]

Uh, what? By what metric? The Ottoman Navy was a fairly powerful navy for much of the EUIV period, and it pretty much dominated the Mediterranian/Arabian Seas until the last century or so of the period.

If you actually look at Ottoman naval designs they are for the most part incredibly poor, they frequently lost battles they should have won due to poor seamanship and naval technology, they did however invest huge sums and resources into their navies, which is why I was talking about how much they tried but never became dominant at sea. Yes there were frequent coalitions against them but their successes at sea are very limited and tend to appear in small clusters under very impressive admirals such as Barbarossa. It doesn't really matter what period you go for, if you look at their galley designs in their rise or their ships of the line much later in their timeline they never compare to the combative ability of their European counterparts, if you don't believe me I would gladly go dig up some naval plans for you. To make the answer simple, even at the height of power the Ottomans never managed to successfully create their objective of a naval based invasion of The Kingdom of Naples, despite investing hugely into the campaign.

Which just meant that it takes longer to train sailors than it does foot soldiers or artillerymen...which is already represented by ships taking substantially longer to build than regiments. And higher reinforcement costs, although ships could also use some longer repair times.

The build times don't really reflect training times for the sailors at all, they only reflect the construction time for ships, which was at this period usually between 6-12 months per ship, except for the incredible feats of the Venetian Arsenal who could build a new ship from scratch in a week. Reality is most of the training for a crew was on the job training that happened at sea, much more so than the camped training received by standard armies. Naval gun drills and sailing can't be practiced on land, they have to be something that happens as part of a ships routine at sea.

Sure, just like running out of manpower or not having adequate manpower to field an adequately sized army was an issue, especially for the large naval powers that needed to devote significant amounts of manpower to either the navy or the logistical tail end of the navy. I mean, impressment doesn't show much other than that manpower shortages existed, and they existed as much in armies as they did in navies. Impressment, while largely a naval phenomena, was by no means an exclusively naval phenomena, and happened with armies as well, although to a lesser degree for a large variety of reasons.

I can see very little reason for having sailors be their own dedicated pool that suck up mechanics and ideas when manpower does the job more than adequately. If anything, manpower does a better job because it also helps to ably represent that nations had to *choose* between army primacy and navy primacy, because they only had a finite amount of manpower manpower and they had to focus on either one or the other unless they were, comparatively speaking, massive. Instead the manpower/sailor divide allows the navy and the army to exist in their own little world where a nation doesn't need to focus the distribution of its manpower and where, for some strange reason, not being born in a coastal town somehow makes you inherently inept from knowing how to sail.

If we want to add manpower pools there are significantly better pools to focus on (e.g. officers), and if we want to enhance naval gameplay, there are significantly better ways of doing that too (e.g. actual fleet mechanics).

The thing is the conditions of naval recruitment didn't cross over much with standard armies, so actually its more historic to have unique pools for the two of them and really the officer quality and pool is more represented abstractly through Army and Navy Tradition. I never claimed that impressment was wholly a naval thing. The reality is that we have looked at the idea of sharing a manpower pool for land and sea and its not only in reality ahistorical, but also in gameplay, with the mechanics we have in its current state would sensibly pick to waste their manpower pool on significant naval investment. We could go back to having the old EU3 slider system that could make a more interesting compromise but again, reality is that its a strange choice to pick naval over land based forces with navies as insignificant as they are currently.

 

[Fluffy_Fishy]

And this way they would make Great Britain great again. Of course we need to increase number of sailors on ships (and of course hull and number of sailors are different stats). Number of sailors should increase with ship upgrades. Also ships should have much more "elastic" upkeep. What I mean - ships can be "overpopulated" a little. Normally a big ship of the line would store 600 people, but for short time you could "pump it" up to even 800 sailors. In game mechanic it should mean higher attrition over time, but it would still be worth to "overpopulate" them if we have our ports close enough and want to block and siege enemy ports, or to fight enemy navy. Another thing - heavy ships and light ships should have it's own maintenance bars. Heavies are like main battle tanks. In times of peace they would be used with like 30% of max sailor pop. It's enough to maintain firepower and mobility, but they would lack manpower to board other ships and would rather not do it, also - too low numbers for sieges etc. Light ships should follow the same mechanic, but their no-penalty upkeep should be at like 50-60%. Then why would we increase their upkeep? When hunting pirates or privateering of course. Usual trade protection would be enough with like 50% of crew, but to privateer or hunt we need to pump them a little. Sooo... maintenance bar should be for every fleet, not global! Also - transport ships are pretty much "trade ships" yet they provide no trade. Merchants would rather gladly pay for transporting their goods on royal ships with assistance of frigates. That's what actually "trade power" should mean in the first place. But it should also give some ducats from transporting merchandise when there are transport ships with patrol fleet. And then we have them useful in times of peace too.

And if we had all of the above - why we need high sailor pool? Because in times of peace our fleets are half-disbanded and when we are hit by war we can increase their upkeep to the max, up to overpop levels meaning that our navy will suck many thousands sailors at once - and if we don't have them... well, let's better avoid enemy on seas if they are pumped to the roof and ready to battle.

I'd like to see the elastic upkeep but sadly its too complex for the EU4 model we have to deal with. To deal with a few little niggles I have with the post, a heavy isn't so much a main battle tank as its a floating fortress. I also find the lack of distinction between the different ship ratings fairly frustrating, id love to see a system that represents more variety in naval game play, even clumping together 1st and second rates, 3rd and 4th rates, and then 5th and 6th rates, then having Galleys, Galleasses, trade ships and finally transport/support ships. This would leave a nicely balanced model, but again I feel like it might be too complex for EU to handle. This would leave us with 7 different types of ships and roughly group together the role of these ships in a sea. The option to mothball ships kind of leaves us with some options when it comes to maintenance but really it would be nice to see maintenance spread out individually for Armies and Navies as a whole, because how often do you find yourself being forced to keep your investment high while at peace because you are exploring the new world...

When it comes to transport and trade ships, they are subtly different, trade ships were built on much weaker framing which made them a lot more vulnerable in a fight. Their planking is thinner and their internal structures are set up in a different way, they also tend to have much simpler rigging, while you can fit out a ship to change from one to the other it won't ever be as good as one purposely built for the task, I'm not wholly against having trade ships being transports and support ships but I don't really like it as a suggestion, mainly because I like having trade ships as trade ships, being forced to move them around between war and peace is just going to add unneeded micromanagement.

 

[Fluffy_Fishy]

If you want to look at naval history a bit deeper I would recommend the historians Rif Winfield and Robert Gardiner

There are also some useful websites that can be very useful for a variety of reasons, here are a few that can serve for some nice introductions.

http://threedecks.org/
http://collections.rmg.co.uk/collections.html#!cbrowse
http://forum.game-labs.net/index.php?/forum/62-naval-action-age-of-sail-historical-discussions/

These two videos from Military history visualised are also very useful.

 

[Freeeeeeeeeeeeeeeedom!]

Would anyone be open to the idea of ships drawing out of manpower? Able bodied men are able bodied men, and many military positions need specific training.

 

[Quaade]

The build times don't really reflect training times for the sailors at all, they only reflect the construction time for ships, which was at this period usually between 6-12 months per ship, except for the incredible feats of the Venetian Arsenal who could build a new ship from scratch in a week. Reality is most of the training for a crew was on the job training that happened at sea, much more so than the camped training received by standard armies. Naval gun drills and sailing can't be practiced on land, they have to be something that happens as part of a ships routine at sea.

Wasn´t aware that the venetians was so fast at building, which sort of makes sense since they were so maritime But was that galleys or ship of the line or whatever you would call heavies ;-)

Would anyone be open to the idea of ships drawing out of manpower? Able bodied men are able bodied men, and many military positions need specific training.

Yes... But only if they do two things... Up the count somewhat much... But make it a fixed amount, in that you don´t regain manpower into that pool unless you delete a unit (return it) or he is destroyed... That way, manpower would make up the army and you could decide whether to have a large army of all able bodied men, or a smaller army that can reinforce

 

[Fluffy_Fishy]

Wasn´t aware that the venetians was so fast at building, which sort of makes sense since they were so maritime But was that galleys or ship of the line or whatever you would call heavies ;-)

It was a mix of galleys and round ships, although they were more adept at making galleys, the peak of production for the venetian arsenal was around 1560-70 and they were constructing quite a few galleons suited for both war and peace during this period, the round ships tended to take them slightly longer but it could still be done at staggering speed, "heavies" would take around 2-4 weeks depending on their size. It's also important to realise that venice wasn't just a maritime state but an incredibly important centre of production between around 1400 to 1600 and a staggering amount of various factory style processes came out of this time, especially in the Arsenal where major breakthroughs like standardisation, division of labour and the production line were first seen, the industrial scale of the Venetian Arsenal was so ahead of its time that nothing matched it's productive capacity in the mid 1500s until the industrial revolution was in full swing during the late 18th century and when talking about shipyards it wasn't overtaken in scale until 1908.

By the time of the emergence of ships of the line really took off venice's place in the world had declined somewhat thanks to costly wars with the Ottomans and the loss of the majority of the Stato da Mar. They did experiment with line ships between 1666 and the 1720s but they were still using advanced galleys and galleass to compliment their line fleet. Beyond the 1720s they focused more on developing super frigates, which worked much better when combined with the galleys, although they did develop a one off 74 in 1711 for they most part their first rate capital ships were around 60-70 guns, similarly to the dutch, not like the vast 100+ gun behemoths we know sailed by nations like Britain, France and Spain.

 

[Ketilsen]

I wouldn't even notice if the mechanic disappeared.

Naval stuff needs a rework, but it's going to have to be something huge and fundamental, so I can't really see that minor tweaks in how sailors work is going to do anything relevant. Maybe let blockades sting a lot more or let navies occupy coastal provinces in some way, idunno.

 

[Jetstreamed]

- What about if sailors just affected how many ships you can have? So if you have 200 sailors, you could build 1 heavy and that's it. You can't build anymore because those 200 sailors are being used to manage a ship. It would mean that you'd have 'sailors' and 'available sailors'. The mechanic would work different to manpower.

At least this way you need to gain more sailors if you want larger navy.

- Sailors would Affect the attack power and maneuverability of ships and would only die from time out at sea or damage to ships.
- When sailors die, the pool will replenish the lost amount so that more ships can be built from that.
When shios repair (out at sea or docked) it would use the sailors pool.
- there would be new modifiers which increase the effectiveness of sailors. Now, sailors would scale the effectiveness of a ship from 20% to 100% at max crew. There would be modifiers to improve sailors so that ship quality is scaled from say 40% to 100%. The modifiers would represent the elitness of the sailors in that the ships could still function near maximum efficiency even with a reduced crew. Which means that during battle, a ship with better sailor modifiers will consistently fight better than one without. Durability would still be the health, morale would be morale, and sailors would be something like tactics.
-the sailor pool would be massively increased, because you need the extra sailors since now ships persistently use a portion of the sailors pool.

This would make sailor related ideas more worthwhile since they would now boost the effectiveness of your navy. It would also mean that there's an actual reason to build docks - in order to build more ships you need more sailors.
It would also mean that you won't get scenarios where a nation like burgundy could use their entire naval limit on heavies so that they could defeat English navy so that, say France with only transports, could then raid. They would simply not have enough sailors to pull off such a feat.

Sailors could have a bunch of modifiers now, where better sailors increase the values:
-ship repair
-combat damage bonus
-ship morale
-fleet speed
-Privateer efficiency

That would mean changing some ideas so that maritime now gave a 20% sailor efficiency modifier instead of global ship repair, which would increase a bunch of things about ships. It would still give sailor limit bonus. Things like leader stats, blockade efficiency, combat width, etc won't be affected by sailors.

 

[Nazarow]

I don't have twitter, so thanks for bringing this up here!

Both before release as well as after, I wrote this about this on the forums: Mare Nostrum was such a wasted opportunity when it came to the naval overhaul. Such a shame, especially given the importance of fleets during the time period of the game. I'd love to see a new, more ambitious rework of naval mechanics, potentially including sailors if they find a good reason to keep them in. But without such an overhaul: yes, please remove them.

 

[CharlesII]

What if you could build ships without sailors, so for the future you can make use of them when you fill them with sailors?

 

[Fluffy_Fishy]

What if you could build ships without sailors, so for the future you can make use of them when you fill them with sailors?

I believe part of the problem with sailors is suddenly your crew just vanish off the face of the planet when you decommission them in harbour, or worse yet, when you upgrade them suddenly the crew vanish there too, this just feels horribly buggy and needs addressing, but this is just an issue where people blame sailors as a mechanic, not that sailors is a poorly utilised mechanic which needs considerable reform and improvement, with a bit of time and effort sailors could become a really nicely integrated part of the game, not the current almost gimmicky feel they are right now.

 

[Dracolithfiend]

So what were the poll results for those of of who don't use social media?

 

[Viperswhip]

I don't have Twitter because I am not a 12 year old girl, I am a cranky over 40, but umm, lol, sorry, I don't like the concept of sailors either, it has crushed a few strats I used to use.