Overpowered naval battery

[SneakBug8]

5% naval attrition from 200 gold building is just stupidly overpowered as it makes blockades nearly useless: ships die from such attrition in 20 months on average.

Such overpowered and cheap building not only proves naval blockades to be useless but also makes whole naval countries' playstyle (which was always an alternative to building army strength) unviable as anyone can annihilate naval power by building 1-3 batteries which cost 0 upkeep.

Either such batteries should have an upkeep like a fortress does (as they have similar effect but for naval superiority) or have much lesser effect (something like 1% attrition should be acceptable).

I'm sure noone wants to micromanage blockading units to rotate them with repairing ships just to gain ticking warscore for trade conflict (for example).

In 1.30 devs not only nerfed blockade effect by deleting trade power debuff (new blockade income mechanic doesn't benefit blockading country more than it did before but only takes money from the blockaded country and that expense is not harsh to the economy) but also made impossible to blockade provinces effectively.

 

[SneakBug8]

And a bit of historical overview:

Usually naval blockades were performed from a distance so no coast artillery could actually shoot the ships (or the ships could shoot too) and a cost of a regular fort was a lot bigger than a ships it was able to shoot. It's literally unhistorical that a fort with a cost of 200 can damage infinite amount of ships (15 carracks for example, which would cost 750 and 7.5 upkeep).

That's a whole point of naval blockade - to deal hit to the economy (limit imports and exports) without suffering almost any losses from it. With new buildings blockades are more like a joke than a serious thing you should be afraid of.

In 1653 British blockade of Dutch coast caused an economical crisis in the country. After a British blockade of US in 1812 States had "virtually bankrupt treasury which was forced rely on loans from its citizens to finance the war in its last two years."

 

[Lysenkoite]

I agree, you can completely negate the risk of blockades now without much investment with naval batteries. The first level are alright, but the naval batteries are too cheap and easy to exploit.

 

[PyroMegaManZ]

If you get Maritime ideas you completely negate the effects of those buildings (or Quality to reduce the impact by 25%). All nations that historically imposed blockades would have feasibly had "Maritime" ideas. The buildings add a way to:

• Have a money sink that doesn't make profit
• Encourage nations that really care about having a strong navy invest in the appropriate ideas
• Allow nations that have a weak navy to at least not be completely ruined by GB or other Island nations if they are willing to invest the money and those other nations don't have Maritime ideas

If you don't invest in the appropriate ideas then you will just have to swap out your ships once a year and let them repair up for half a year and then put them back on etc. If you have enough ships you can swap them out (in fact historically running a blockade was often so tedious that most nations would regularly rotate their navies around to ensure the blockade didn't collapse).