Large Fleets blocking sea areas

[Il_Don]

Greetings,

There have been a lot of proposals about how to save Venice from being blobbed into Byzantium.
Although the most common would be to remove it from the ERE de Jure empire, i have another idea.

The strength of Venice laid in its position,and in the protection its navy could offer it.
In the game, this is simulated with a massive landing penalty and a 50% cut on morale, but this is barely enough, granted the usual Byzantine military superiority.

And then there's the fleet.
Now, there is very little fleets can do at the moment, except for transporting troops. They have absolutely no strategic potential.

This could change, simply by allowing larger fleets to prevent smaller fleets from entering an area of sea.
Example: You got 55 ships guarding the entrance to the Adriatic - unless you got 56, you will not be able to transport troops.

A few implications:
1 - If a fleet is forced to move, it will retreat to the next free area.
2 - If it is in a cul-de-sac (like the Adriatic, or the Sea of Azov), it will retreat to the nearest port.
3 - If there is no port, the fleet is destroyed, and only a reduced number of ships return to the respective ports (like when it is disbanded outside a port)

I really have no idea whether or not this is really feasible, code-wise, and i know it sounds like a table-top mechanic.
But i think it would be really, really great for people who are playing in the Mediterranean or the Baltic, or wherever there is water.
Think about it.
It would give a meaning to the merchant republics, give a strategic significance to the straits and the sea of Marmara, better simulate things like the Crete-based Saracen piracy in the ninth century... possibility are endless. Well, not really endless, but very numerous.


tl;dr: larger fleets should prevent smaller fleets from entering an area of sea, and it would be great.

 

[omega20056]

The team said they want to do proper naval battles at some stage.

 

[Il_Don]

That would be even better.

 

[AchedTeacher]

The team said they want to do proper naval battles at some stage.

Mehh... Not exactly sure about that.

Fine, they can have their naval battles if they first fix some priorities

 

[klopkr]

I would mind if there was no battle until they can make them proper like eu4 and instead if a larger fleet of someone you're at war with is in that province you cannot land your fleet unless you own an open port connected to the sea province. This could also be expanded to stop strait crossings if a larger enemy fleet is in the seazone between the strait crossing.

 

[AchedTeacher]

I would mind if there was no battle until they can make them proper like eu4 and instead if a larger fleet of someone you're at war with is in that province you cannot land your fleet unless you own an open port connected to the sea province. This could also be expanded to stop strait crossings if a larger enemy fleet is in the seazone between the strait crossing.

Problem is can you name various ship types like in EU4? An ERE exclusive Greek fire ship, Viking-exclusive longboat and regular galley come to mind... No real range of ships.

 

[Talq]

Problem 1: Medieval fleets didn't work like that. Leaving aside that 200 ships may seem like a large number, but is a small bunch of ships in a big sea zone, medieval ships basicly couldn't blockade consistently because they would tend to drift off station (as sail technology wasn't that good, and galleys in particular needed to land regularly for resupply.

Pretty much the only sea zone you could blockade effectively would be the bosphorus.

Problem 2: The Byzantines would crush the venetian fleet (and everybody elses fleet) on sheer size anyway - it has a lot of provinces, and nearly all of them are coastal.

(As an aside, this is also among the reasons why I think naval battles are a waste of dev time)

Ironically, the reason for Venice's impregability wasn't so much its fleet (which was actually sailing around the med for most of the one serious siege it suffered), but its position - the lagoon it was in meant it needed to be blockaded by both sea and land, and you couldn't easily land troops in the city proper (both because you needed to disable the outer defenses, and the channels shifted). Difficult to model, but Paradox's standard model of 'cities are easy to siege because...' is starting negative territory.

 

[Il_Don]

I know.
But i still think a similar mechanic would allow for a better strategic and military depth, regardless of historical accuracy or medieval naval technology.
Republics already have a lot of ships, and tend to be quite vulnerable and eventually disappear in less than a century in game (at least, that has been my experience so far). Focusing on the ships and giving them some military capability would give them some more chances.

But again, it is not just the republics. The first example that comes to my mind is the Andalusian-Cretan pirate state (sort of a misnomer, i know) that developed in the ninth century, and contributed to the Abbasid-Byzantine struggle for the eastern Mediterranean.
It would be nice to recreate a similar situation, maybe in the TOG start, and the mechanic i proposed is the easiest and fastest way to do this.