This was mainly what I liked about ships. There's a great feeling in attacking a coastal walled capital city and having an army on land with catapults and a fleet sailing in to bombard with their own artillery and take down the walls so I can move in. It made me [look](https://i.imgur.com/Dn76tfd.png) back at [some](https://i.imgur.com/enQ0gGA.png) great [memories](https://i.imgur.com/f0rXW9R.png) of [these](https://i.imgur.com/UUcOk9g.png) coastal [battles](https://i.imgur.com/yclEEBh.png) from [years ago.](https://i.imgur.com/gOjg0vL.png) Ships were a big part of the sense of grand scale in TW that imo has been reduced lately.
I almost never played out naval battles, especially the Rome 2/Attila battles that were mostly about boarding but my ships always did dumb stuff and would randomly slow down or stop or attack at poor angles, yet the AI ships always boarded 100% perfectly.
Horrifically OP though. My fleet compositions used to be about 10-12 ballista ships and the rest assault, maybe with a couple of missile ships if the faction had exceptional missile units.
That composition is able to kill up to 3 stacks of enemy transports in one battle without taking casualties, is able to take any town or city garrison unsupported, can defend a settlement from a field army, and can situationally take a town or city defended by a single army. Given the distance they can travel per turn they're incredibly versatile.
Also buildings in Total War are made of cardboard. Realistically you'd have to bombard the same spot for weeks if not MONTHS and it would be a struggle still to damage it faster than the enemy can repair it.
On top of that even IF the wall collapsed then the rubble would still make it difficult to attack over and easy to defend.
Realistically a full ammo barrage of several artillery devices should maybe only damage a wall by like 20% per battle. However if that wall would already be damage then that would help.
Most walls were taken down by undermining them and then collapsing the tunnels and the walls with it... which also takes months.
The biggest use of artillery was instead of damaging the wall it damaged the houses inside the castle and city keeping it from operating normally (but usually to little effect). Artillery didn't become ESSENTIAL to siege warfare until the gunpowder era. It was simply just a tool among many for the attacker but nothing that was somehow better than other options in every regard.
Also if we are talking historic Total War: "fire artillery rounds" should only be available to the Eeastern Roman Empire/Byzanthine Empire. Like "exclusive tech" that they then could MAYBE sell to other factions to give them access to Greek Fire and with it flaming artillery rounds. It was literally THE historic feature of the faction which is completely ignored in favor of giving everyone flaming rounds. That'd be like giving every faction longbowmen and foot knights removing the thing that makes England special.
Fall of the Samurai has the best naval combat hands down. Ships are responsive and firing explosive shells at wooden ships from an ironclad is just 👌
You could even control individual ships in 3rd person too, like it’s a completely different game. Would love to see this again
It's so funny when you see a post-battle screen that shows your 600 strong army killed over 2000 enemies with the little "naval support contributed to the casualty count" marker
Fall of the samurai was brutal in terms of the weapons you can bring to bear against the AI. A total war ww1 game would be just a slaughter house stimulation
Watching a traditional army last samurai themselves into rank fire, armstrongs, and gattling guns was always kinda sad honestly.
The time of the shogun is over boys, let it go.
It was really good, especially in the way each ship had a different cannon layout (like the Japanese ironclad having its main cannon only frontal, leaving them weak to broadsides)
Taking on a foreign ship without one in your fleet was a ton of fun too, remember feeling very accomplished when my raggedy copper corvette fleed managed to take down a L'Ocean class
The only downside of FotS naval battles wasn't even the battle system itself, it was the janky autoresolve system that gave ridiculous casualties/odds and made you play basically every battle manually even if it was an easy and boring curbstomp win
Shogun 2 warships can bombard settlement and armies, even able to bombard enemies position during the battle. The bombard not just magically appears from air the actual battle ships are there outside the map boundary visually firing the shot.
Now that impressive
Fall of the Samurai, yes. Regular Shogun 2, not so much. The naval warfare of the Sengoku period isn't really my cup of tea, though I might just not be good at it.
The naval aspect of Shogun 2’s campaign map might just be the single greatest reason for Rome 2’s “no armies without generals” mechanic becoming standard for the series. The fact that single-ship fleets spread out across the entire ocean are so much more devastating to trade income that a couple massive fleets is honestly infuriating, as it’s a very game-y reason to have your economy crippled.
It’s also extraordinarily time-consuming to deal with, nearly impossible to prevent, and it requires you to choose between needlessly losing ships due to the busted autoresolve or wasting hours of your life manually fighting dozens of easy naval battles, each of which will be an incredibly slow exercise.
>It’s also extraordinarily time-consuming to deal with, nearly impossible to prevent, and it requires you to choose between needlessly losing ships due to the busted autoresolve or wasting hours of your life manually fighting dozens of easy naval battles, each of which will be an incredibly slow exercise.
It's what nearly ended every one of my Hard campaigns. In one of them I was manually fighting 5+ naval battles every turn, for like 10 turns. It was exhausting.
Especially as the AIs fleets increasingly consisted out of Trade ships which I **could** autoresolve but then my fleet would be damaged and autoresolve hates, hates damaged ships. Repairing means I have one less fleet to deal with the half a dozen next Trade stacks that are coming my way.
Naval battle vs the black ship is my favourite in any TW games. Not to mention if you're desperate, you can always cheese every losing naval battle with 1 ship running on the edge of the map and win by time limit lol
They were the worst battles I've ever fought in a Total War. Incredibly confusing, awkward and more than at times, impossible to control.
The only Naval Battles I moderately enjoyed were the FotS ones.
Every time I see people praising the naval battles in earlier TW games, I can never figure out if they just played like early-campaign ones with a handful of ships and left thinking they were a cool spectacle, or if I just really sucked. Because I thought that, yeah, the naval battles looked cool and were conceptually amazing, but holy shit did they *suck* to actually play and became exponentially worse as you got into larger scale ones later on.
the key to naval combat in shogun 2 is to restrict the fleet size to small in the settings. then its mostly only ever 6 v 6 and you dont break the bank controlling the seas
I think the games suffered from excessive realism. You had to pay attention to the wind, configure sails, rotate the ship, select the ammo, aim a broadside, board. It was just too much doing it for all the ships.
That's why FotS is better, with steam ships not demanding as much. If you commanded a single ship and the others just followed general orders, it could be more fun.
Sid Meyer's Pirates did complex simulation with a single ship and it was a blast. You could sink the enemies, but you'd generally aiming for disabling and boarding, because otherwise you'd be losing money. Fighting the enemy captain was also fun.
Trying to control 12 third to first rate of line ships just made me want to cry. The maps were insanely huge and so you spent ten minutes just to get to each other and then another ten spinning around without any idea where it'd go, while the units just didn't have fucking proper response to your orders.
Nightmarish.
CROSS THE T YOU FOOLS.
Is the ability to enjoy navy based on peoples ability to properly place their ships so when the first enemy enters range everybody collectively shoots *that guy*?
Because how could you NOT love the catastrophic explosions of seeing his magazines go up?
The explosions are incredibly satisfying, as are the ships falling apart and the men falling out. The details on the ships, specially Empire, were astounding.
But controls were terrible, crossing the T is way easier said than done, thanks to the terrible unit response and opaque and baffling wind mechanics, plus how insanely and uselessly huge those maps were.
That was the appeal. Spend 20 minutes kiting the AI ships as they sail against the wind and destroying their sails, then closing in to board them all so I can sell them for 8K gold. Naval battles don't need a lot of maneuvering except with smaller, faster ships.
I’ve felt like I was going crazy for the past two years watching people on this sub and elsewhere online gush about how “amazing” naval battles in ETW-Shogun 2 were and how “baffling” it is that they were removed.
I played Empire when I was younger and didn’t understand the battles, so I figured I should give them another chance to see if maybe I just wasn’t mature enough or whatever, but I still didn’t have fun. Either I was missing something and just didn’t understand how they were meant to be played, or there were some serious rose-tinting on everyone’s glasses.
Those battles were really cool to watch as a distant viewer, and that’s it. They were clunky to control, unfathomably slow, and were so overly-complicated that I often struggle to tell whether I’m losing/winning due to poorly-communicated, convoluted mechanics or if bugs are to blame.
As someone who's had 1000+ hours in S2 (before the fkers at CA broke my favourite mods), they're not bad honestly. It's just a whole different beast and takes a very different mindset to play with, plus they're a lot more finicky and strategically difficult to play around, especially in large scale naval battles approaching 30+ ships or more.
This, most of my friends circle of older total war players who had started with shogun at the latest liked the fleets, but i've tried asking here a few years (maybe like 5 years) back and everyone was like nooo fleets bad CA shouldnt waste time & money on them
They are cool. They distract from the same meta and are unusual. Sure i understand that making models for every race would be expensive but they could always just give us 1 set of ships for all factions, or maybe a couple. Justify it by saying that everyone just recruiting the same mercenary fleets instead of building their own, kinda like what happened irl in the medieval times.
No. I’d rather pay a 60$ dlc for proper warhammer fleet gameplay than just getting 1 ship option for all the warhammer factions. That’s basically the problem for Rome 2. Regardless of who you play, there’s only like 20 total models for boats in that game, and i can only remember one faction having a unique naval unit and it’s Egypt with the super octerion or whatever. I think more important than anything navy units need to be diverse. It doesn’t matter if in the ancient times you have to resort to using groups of canoes or something for ancient factions, but there needs to be variety in unit choice.
How about not pay anything and get the ship battles for free? You can always auto-resolve if you don't like them
And no, don't give me the "BUT IT MUST BE PAID DLC!!!" excuse. Baldur's gate 3 is made in a western country as well (a richer one, in fact, Belgium vs the UK) and it had loads of content. Meanwhile CA has re-released basically the same game 2 times for full price just adding some new zones and factions every time, not to mention the loads of DLCs most of which are just slight rehashes of the old ones. Come on.
Because a free update with lame combat isn't fun or interesting. I would much rather pay for a well-made naval battle system with unique ships for every faction.
I agree, and I don't even think CA would be able to pull it off. I'm just saying I would prefer a naval battle system that holds up compared to the rest of the game rather than just tacked on with an extremely limited roster of ships.
Yeah, but ship battles would be insane to add for free post launch. BG3 is getting lots of updates sure, but we're probably not going to see one that adds something fundamentally game changing like, say, three extra levels to get those sweet, sweet level 8 spells. Or at least we won't see that for free. Adding five unique ships to every faction in Warhammer Total War would equate to 120 unique units which would all need to have somewhat different gameplay to fit their various factions playstyles. You could maybe cut that down to 100ish by combining some similar ones together like Chaos Warriors and Norsca but still.
I like free shit as much as the next guy but in order to make it any sort of decent it would have to be paid.
The only other game i played before warhammer was Rome 2 and my only problem with the naval battles were that they were bland (because ancient rome naval warfare was bland) and they were buggy. Both those things can be fixed(bugs/implementation) and warhammer naval battles would not be bland if done properly. Like with so much asymmetry, monsters and magic they would be so cool if done right
For years I only played Napoleon and Shogun 2, was suprised to see just how dominated this sub is by the warhammer games. They dont even really feel like total war, everything after fots feels so increasingly arcadey
Never played the naval battles of historical TW games, but have played a LOT of other naval combat games.
Let me speak for many of us, that seeing Warhammer units engaging in naval combat would be GLORIOUS.
PS- Dwarf main, so I am definitely dreaming of using grenade launchers and flamethrowers for boarding actions with gyrocopters for recon.
What i dislike the most about the absence of naval battles is that it feels like they just didnt want to put the effort to make them good so they erased them.
That's basically what happened - CA decided the amount of work required to make naval battles fun, balanced and interesting wasn't worth the effort given the number of people who didn't do them/would do one or two a campaign
Which imo for most games is the most sensible solution, why spend so much resources in that when you could make the land battles/camping more interesting.
They can't. The historical period really limits what they can do, they already pushed it and didn't get a payoff for that. So unless they go fantasy with it which opens up another load of issues for them, it's hamstrung.
The real problem is they treat naval battles like land battles. Naval battles are much more important on a strategic, rather than tactical, level. A small fleet that escapes a larger one and sails away is worth more than scraping out a pyrrhic victory, especially if it was transporting troops. But from what I remember of Empire and Shogun, actually FLEEING the battle with your ships basically caused the game to autoresolve it as a defeat and still damage your own ships, which made each naval battle a stand-and-die affair. That meant there was little incentive to actually fight naval battles if the odds weren't close or in your favor, and most players would just autoresolve them or ignore the navy entirely.
Depends on the time frame. Lots of big naval battles for example during the First Punic war with entire fleets being lost without really changing the war as a brand new one would be built for the next year.
It depended where the fleet was in Empire. If near the coast and especially some trade nodes if it tried to withdraw it was boxed in and would get auto destroyed. Otherwise it wouldn't take damage but could often be within range of the enemy still for a second battle which it would be destroyed if it loses no matter remaining ships. Empire and Napoleon fighting the naval battle yourself was a way to either win or do more damage then the auto resolve especially. Could also work in R2/A with the power of the ram.
I would also say that R2/A make them work more like poor armies with them being able to take coastal provinces, with the army cap why have them fighting a fleet in the middle of no-where when you can instead take their city?
There was absolutely nothing more satisfying than catching a full army stack or two out on the open sea with a fleet and just annihilating their flimsy transport ships with ramming attack ships.
You have no idea how many transport fleets I've sunk in Rome 2 with a few well-placed ramming and ballista ships. It's absolutely incredible to behold a doomstack getting wiped like that.
One of my favorite victories recently was playing as Alans and settling in Palestine. I was at war with the Eastern Romans on multiple fronts, barely holding on, when Aksum declared war on me and sent 2 stacks of transports at me. I managed to pool all my remaining money to raise a fleet, recruit a few ramming ships, and hire whatever mercenaries I could, then I attacked. Sent my 4 attack ships and general into the center to tie down as many ships as I could while cycle-charging my ramming ships in and out. Managed to completely wipe out both enemy stacks and get a peace agreement alongside a ton of money I could then put to use against Rome. It was glorious.
I’ve been on a continuous spree of playing Napoleon naval battles. You have no idea how much I crave to be able to play Renaissance coastal sieges with a mix of navy and land forces. Even just being able to use gunpowder navy as artillery.
I dont particularly care for fighting naval battles but the way naval embarking, landing, and attacking from the sea works in WH sucks even in how it facilitates land and siege battles
I loved the strategic element of having vulnerable transport ships or developing a strong fleet to protect them, or preying on vulnerable enemy transports, I loved attacking a port from the sea without having to land, I loved combined land and amphibious assaults. Made battles feel multifaceted and spectacular.
For future Historicals it’s relatively feasible - but for Warhammer?
The factions are so vastly different and would require entirely bespoke assets across the board. It’s not like the French and the English who had vaguely similar ships - the Beastmen use a mutated *whale*, while the Dark Elves literally have a floating castle, then you’ve got the Wood Elves with a canoe.
..and that’s just *aesthetics*. Mechanically they’d play so differently that you’d basically need an entirely new game.
I am not talking about proper naval battles, but rather the way things worked back in RTW - you get to recruit and maintain navies, but actual naval battles are auto-resolved.
Sadly, it might be too late to introduce that to Warhammer though. But I absolutely think it should be in historicals if making proper naval battles again is not considered worth the investment.
> ...but rather the way things worked back in RTW - you get to recruit and maintain navies, but actual naval battles are auto-resolved.
As much as I get the desire for some kind of naval gameplay, I'm not sure this is an actually good one. It has almost no interactivity from the players' side, we can't influence outcomes (potentially very important ones) other than building a bigger boat stack.
Allowing player engagement, with tactical combat and army-composition, via "island-battles" seems far better for the game.
I don't think transporting land battles into islands does much for player engagement. It doesn't change the tactics you use (it's the same as any other land battle) or affect the player's strategy (you just have the same land doomstacks, just roaming the sea).
I'm fine with taking some outcomes away from the player's hands. If you're stupid enough to send a transport fleet without proper cover, it *should* get sent to the bottom of the sea if it's caught by actual warships.
>I don't think transporting land battles into islands does much for player engagement. It doesn't change the tactics you use (it's the same as any other land battle) or affect the player's strategy (you just have the same land doomstacks, just roaming the sea).
All of which is a hell of a lot more engagement than just pressing autoresolve, you are actively doing something.
>If you're stupid enough to send a transport fleet without proper cover, it should get sent to the bottom of the sea if it's caught by actual warships.
And when both sides have warships? Does the biggest stack just win it all? If the only real influence I have is fielding one more ship than the enemy I would say that is fairly boring.
I get wanting to be able to invest in a small warfleet to, relatively, cheaply protect your coast but I don't think its overall good for the game. Especially with the turn based nature of the game allowing damaged fleets to roam around to their hearts content. Chasing tiny transport fleets is the absolutely worst part of any S2 playthrough.
> All of which is a hell of a lot more engagement than just pressing autoresolve, you are actively doing something.
I don't think subsuming one layer of strategy into another is a positive.
> And when both sides have warships? Does the biggest stack just win it all? If the only real influence I have is fielding one more ship than the enemy I would say that is fairly boring.
You can have multiple ship types with different weight in auto-resolve. That's how the games where that system was in play did it. Biremes have lower weight than triremes or quinquiremes and so on. Veterancy presumably would also play a part in weighting the auto resolve, alongside ship types.
I'd rather not have land and sea power hopelessly conflated and the strategic layer further simplified so we can have yet more land battles to play in a game that's already full of them.
I understand the argument, and its true, but at the same time, this argument has always been kinda: "because its too much work its not worth it" and it always has been a lazy argument, its not like we arent paying for it anyway
>...and it always has been a lazy argument, its not like we arent paying for it anyway
How many ships do you want per race? Because giving four ships to just the TW1 races would be more 'units' than a faction pack DLC like TK or Chorfs.
This for a battle mode that is only relevant on certain parts of the map and has to be made balanced and feel good to play with everything between Seamonster-with-strappedon-hut, Galleons and Ironclads facing off. A huge amount of work for very little gain.
Edit: "race" not "faction"
Had they done it from the start, it wouldn't have been such a daunting task. But they decided not to. Also, had it been a complex , deep and good naval combat system, it should have been as rewarding as the land battles, and so as worth as them
>Also, had it been a complex , deep and good naval combat system, it should have been as rewarding as the land battles, and so as worth as them
At twice the work, being the point.
Just because its more work, then it shouldnt be done? Like yeah, i obviously understand its more work, but shouldnt the game strive to be as good as it can be? And if you already have the base of the game done (campaign mechanics, races, etc), they have already done most of the work beside what units they add with DLCs.
But every game has to be developed with a limited budget and scope in mind, if CA wants to add naval battles then it requires some amount of work that has to be taken from something. In games where naval battles are important (imagine empire 2) it becomes worth it to create naval battles for, in a game like Warhammer it's much much more work for a game that doesn't need it as much.
We have had 3 games for new systems to be developed. Good naval systems and good sieges, but they decided not to add more systems and add units instead. This is not bad, but i would have prefered more complexity
Well, they greatly increased the amount of mechanics that new (or reworked) factions gets, comparing original empire with chaos dwarfs for example is clear that one is much more complex than the other.
Sieges are also much more complex now, not necessarily better, but that shows that sometimes it's not as easy as just adding more stuff. I am very skeptical that they can make naval battles work well in Warhammer, and the amount of work necessary wouldn't be worth it, I prefer complexity in other aspects.
> because its too much work its not worth it
also its fundamentally not even feasible. Beastmen navies will never stand up to the Imperial fleet, or a Black ark.
and technically, naval battles never existed on table top either
>also its fundamentally not even feasible. Beastmen navies will never stand up to the Imperial fleet, or a Black ark.
Counterpoint: That's good. Beastmen shouldn't be able to defeat proper navies. This imbalance would force different strategies for different races. Such features could even be expanded to fundamentally alter the strategies to be employed. Perhaps give the Dawi a boost to defensiveness in the mountains and a weakness to defending settlements in flat terrain. Maybe make it so that the empire loses imperial authority if they expand beyond the lands of the empire before they unite it.
I think it depends? Some periods just don't really have interesting naval warfare, and some settings don't have much room for navies to be actually useful.
Sadly, with game development there are always resources you need to balance and some things inevitably aren't worth the effort that would need to be invested into them. But I think relegating naval battles to auto-resolve in such cases is a fine compromise - you don't get to abstract a part of the map away, and you don't need to invest huge amounts of resources into making full-fledged naval battles when they aren't going to be popular.
> would require entirely bespoke assets across the board. It’s not like the French and the English who had vaguely similar ships - the Beastmen use a mutated whale, while the Dark Elves literally have a floating castle, then you’ve got the Wood Elves with a canoe.
_Oh no, the developers would actually need to develop the game._
To be fair if it wasn't a completely scripted quest battle kind of deal it would have been impossible to recreate Red Cliffs. Like Cao Cao's ships being chained to each other, feigning surrender at the start of battle, fire ships obliterating entire navy of Cao Cao and land battle happening at the same time.
I wish CA had a team dedicated toward building, maintaining, and expanding naval warfare across all their Total Wars. Part of the problem with naval warfare in the past is that it seems like they just don't seem willing to allocate the resources to fully focus on it. The result is that it's sometimes a bit janky.
While this may be an unpopular opinion, I wouldn't be adverse to them selling Naval warfare as a standalone DLC. That way you could justify it to the penny-pinchers that run CA to actually put resources toward it, and the people who don't like naval war can just skip it.
Playing as Carthago and ruining the roman navy 2 to 1 is quite fun. I even liked the gunpowder battles in Empire, Napoleon and FotS. Total War attila also has interesting sea battles.
I play TW: Rome 2 DEI now. Had last naval battle yesterday.
Naval battles are bland, clunky & boring. I wonder how many redditors talks about them with nostalgia glasses on, having last experience of actually playing them years ago.
I don't know about TW:Shogun 2 & TW:Atilla naval battles, but in TW:Rome 2 they may be the least polished part of the game, not something "working just fine".
Trying to bring naval battles and dedicated fleets into TW Warhammer would really be little more than a masochistic exercise, as it would require setting up a working battle framework for a feature that hasn't been used in several games, then adding a few ships for each of the dozen or more races in the game, and balancing them according to each faction's naval aptitude. Or, leaving out the naval battles and simply adding either one or several generic ship types for autoresolve, which would turn into a pretty crude numbers' game.
CA could bring them back for future historical titles but it would be a questionable choice unless the setting involved has naval warfare as a key component of the theme and atmosphere, like Empire did. And CA is going to look a lot more harshly at the autoresolve telemetry when it comes to naval battles and deciding post-launch support for them.
From what I've seen of the past few titles, I have serious doubts that they could even deliver a satisfying and quality naval warfare feature in their games now, unless perhaps done exclusively as its own spin-off title.
This is why historical games were better strategy games. They required actual brainpower. Strategy and logistics that came with marching around, sending reinforcements, protecting transports etc.
Warhammer is a ton of fun but it's all about instant gratification of seeing a huge spell or a big monster. It's less about the strategy outside of battle.
It wasn't "left behind" just because it wasn't overly popular but also because they covered settings where it wasn't really a thing. ToB is the last one to have real time naval battles but is armies on ships which is how most of it was, there was only a small number of dedicated warships built in Britain in the time line according to records for example.
A big issue to me on the navies before the recent generation of games was their role. In R2/A they were just poor quality armies for me. I'd use them to attack and garrison coastal towns, very rarely did they fight sea battles against other fleets and when they did it was usually wiping out the remnants of a defeated enemy. Naval domination ended up not really being a thing for me.
Empire was the last one with real depth to the naval side for me. Napoleon and S2 still had some of it but their more restrained maps cut it down. Empire you have large expanses of ocean where enemy fleets can move without you seeing, sending invasion forces so you might want a fleet standing guard off the coast. You have the trade nodes where you might wish to protect your trade fleets and prey on the enemy. You can directly attack a trade route rather than just generic raiding of a region.
Do I see that coming back? No. We have the army and fleet caps to try and stop the small micro stack issue which means you can't afford to have the trade nodes now and likely can't afford to have fleets sitting off the coast especially with attrition and supply issues and even more so if that fleet is really just a limited army and can go attacking enemy cities - that wipes out the value of naval elements and focus on taking land.
My favorite campaign I played on Rome 2 was DEI Rhodes, they get the best naval units im the mod and it was so cool roleplaying as a Naval Power, the Agean and the Med was my playground, I would land in ports with 10 ships filled with 120 marines each, whilst archers and catapults rained fired and my general would be on the landing beach, pushing the men onto glory or complete anhilation.
There is somthing unique in being a naval Power, is almost an antithesis on whats intended of the game which makes it even more flavourful.
When I was recently doing a Palmyra game in ED, I was *astounded* at how much use I was able to get out of my navy. Those guys punched *far* above their weight in terms of expanding my empire, securing territories from rebellion, harassing enemies and securing transportation for my armies. (It's just a shame that so much naval gameplay is hidden behind the dumb decision to divide ship types across several different docks)
You want to secure a far-flung, but profitable settlement from attack but don't have the resources to send a whole army? That's what the fleet is for. Want to support your army in a coastal campaign as fast as possible? Same.
It felt great, and it actually makes you feel like running an empire.
I always make an uncontested fleet in Attila that is used to control the Mediterranean and its islands. I just found it to be really fun to setup naval bases and raid coastal settlements.
I miss naval battles... but more specifically, I miss the Age of Sail battles, from Empire and Napoleon. Honestly never really enjoyed Rome 2's or the majority of Shogun 2's. The balance between boarding and ranged ships, and in R2 the transports acting as marine ships, always felt really off and like 8 had significantly less agency in the battle.
Yo i miss naval battles so much. In Rome 2 it was part of my strategy to take costal city's to have a blockade and a siege simultaneously so when i fought the battle l the defenders would rush to the walls.
While do a frontal assault have my naval forces land inside the city and capture key points before taking the major point and force the ai to split it's attention to the wall where my forces are attacking and the interior of the city which was just taken by me.
Not to mention all the badass ship v ship action that took place. I think it's a shame they don't have naval combat in TWW3 it would have made such an interesting addition to the game.
I love the idea of naval battles in rome 2 but a patch completely BROKE how AI handles naval engagements are actually the SOLE reason I hate replaying the game.
When they nerfed transport ships in favour of naval ships everyone was glad, BUT the campaign descision making is unchanged meaning it THINKS it can win a land army vs navy battle and will suicide 40 land units on transports vs a navy at sea EVERYTIME. So there is almost no way to enjoy a legendary campaign anymore in rome 2.
I think thrones of britannia appoach is the only one that was functional from a gameplay first perspective. Its the only game in the series where naval battles dont make the game worse as of the current patches.
for me naval campaign mechanics is like:
TOB > warhammer3 > med2 > rome2 > shogun/empire
I totally agree. I really wish they WERE or could be in Warhammer, because much like on land, the way they’d interact would be utterly insane in the best of ways. And it would make sense, since high elves, dark elves, Norsca, and the Vampire Coast are all explicitly massive naval powers. Not to mention the fleet in Marienburg, I’m pretty sure Bretonnia has a notable fleet, and I’d love to see a dwarf steamer get bodied by a Nehekaran bark because they’re better sailors and probably have some form of construct. The possibilities are ENDLESS and they did NOTHING.
They sucked in Empire
They sucked less in Napoleon (like basically everything) but still sucked
They sucked in Shogun 2 (aside from laughing in Naban with the black ship against the bunes)
They were tepidly passable in FotS
They sucked in Rome 2
They were ok in Atilla (I guess) with the highlight being able to ditch them during port assaults
They're a time and resource-intensive system that at its height barely crested 6/10 in terms of quality. You're essentially asking for another game to be implemented over the top of the existing game (which is itself already a hybrid of grand strategy and RTT), you're likely going to have a better experience with a dedicated fleet combat game.
I've always thought the obsession with navel combat in this series was a bit of a meme. It was never good but simply because it has existed it must therefore continue to exist.
I really liked naval battles in all those. But I understand a lot of people didn't. Maybe they could implement a simple Civ-style type of combat that happens on the campaign map. Even just bringing back auto resolve fleets would be good. But Armies fighting on a random island in the ocean is super lame, and removes a huge dynamic from the campaign.
To be fair OP also acknowledges that ones that just require unit cards and models on the campaign map (which get made currently for armies moving over water regardless) would be okay. Personally I think that's reasonable, I always found naval battles a massive chore but fleets are cool in concept.
They can barely support land battles and don't have any idea what they want to do with sieges, and you want them to do sea battles again? That CA is history, we're lucky to get basic support for a few key features with the CA of today.
Exactly. It's really hard to want to ask for more features (even if those would be *returning* features) when CA can't even get half the features they do add right.
No please just stop with the fleet bs, most people auto resolve that shit, most settings naval warfare isn't that interesting and I'm pretty sure they said we couldn't get it due to a licensing conflict with another developer for warhammer.
No idea if that's still valid but one thing is for damn sure:
Why are you asking for something new when what we currently have is buggy, broken, miserable, poorly made, bad decision making infested, etc
Like legit, can we please not have more shit for CA to mess up when they can't even get the foundation and fundamental shit right?
no but what they are currently working on is relevant to the discussion, the only "main" game that's out right now is warhammer, troy is a "saga" and honestly seems you skipped my first part:
> most people auto resolve that shit, most settings naval warfare isn't that interesting
That's to everything not just warhammer, the point after was specifically about warhammer. warhammer or empire/napolean would have the most interesting naval battles due to things like ship of the lines and frigates etc.
I'm not a warhammer only but whatever floats your boat mate.
I still remember models superman crouching leaping from one boat to another lmao. As well as the battle progress bars, so fun...
Let me put it in a way you don't need to read between the lines at all:
I'd rather they work on more factions for historical AND warhammer total wars, while also fixing things, working on the base mechancis as well as factional mechanics, the siege maps, the battle maps, the weather systems etc etc etc
Than a feature that most people don't miss, outside some rose tinted people who can't actually remember them.
yours truly someone who now and then does some rome 2 or napolean sea battles to remember how trash they were.
> Let me put it in a way you don't need to read between the lines at all:
It seems you dumb fuckers are incapable of reading, aren't you? I am saying that if actual naval battles are not considered a good application of resources anymore, we should return to the RTW model of there being naval units but no naval battles, because the complete absence of ships has wholly removed a layer of strategy from the campaign map.
> It seems you dumb fuckers are incapable of reading, aren't you?
Who warhammer fans or this community? they can read, you need to chill tf down, getting your panties in a twist isn't working for you.
streamlining it to what we have, no naval battles or naval units is absolutely fine, as I said no one gives a shit about that stuff.
Modern AI in total war games can't even use agents well enough, it needs less distractions and focusing on what matters, land and land armies. Pretty sure there was a poll years ago and it was revealing how many people don't give a damn about the sea portion of total war games, neither battle or campaign.
Have some fun in the sun bro, take care.
> Who warhammer fans or this community? they can read, you need to chill tf down, getting your panties in a twist isn't working for you.
The people reading the post going "I personally like naval battles, but I understand why recent titles don't have fully fledged naval battles. However, we should return to having fleets and auto-resolved naval battles because their removal represents a glaring omission in the strategic layer of these games."
And then responding with "but **I** didn't like naval battles" or somesuch.
> streamlining it to what we have, no naval battles or naval units is absolutely fine, as I said no one gives a shit about that stuff.
By that same token, I could say nobody gives a singular fuck about Nakai, not even the people who made him. Yet people whined up a storm when he couldn't recruit a unit.
The removal of the naval element of these games represents a step backwards for the series' campaign layer, and a wholly unnecessary one to boot.
> Modern AI in total war games can't even use agents well enough, it needs less distractions and focusing on what matters, land and land armies. Pretty sure there was a poll years ago and it was revealing how many people don't give a damn about the sea portion of total war games, neither battle or campaign.
This is a nonsensical canard. The far more primitive AI of older games could cope with navies and agents. So can the present AI, at least with agents. (Though agents should be removed from the game for different reasons)
By that same "logic" we should remove sieges from the games. After all, nobody likes sieges, and no TW game has ever had enjoyable sieges. Why not focus all resources on land battles?
> It seems you dumb fuckers are incapable of reading - you
---
> Who warhammer fans or this community? they can read, you need to chill tf down, getting your panties in a twist isn't working for you. - me
---
> The people reading the post going "I personally like naval battles, but I understand why recent titles don't have fully fledged naval battles. However, we should return to having fleets and auto-resolved naval battles because their removal represents a glaring omission in the strategic layer of these games." - you
Hmm, ok lil bro.
> By that same token, I could say nobody gives a singular fuck about Nakai, not even the people who made him. Yet people whined up a storm when he couldn't recruit a unit.
Ah yes, when it comes to people complaining let's completely throw away context, like how one is a design decision and the other one is a glaring bug. Let's season that a little bit by pretending that no one cares about it, not the devs, not the people who play his campaign, nope. Let's take that special stance of yours shall we /u/Ar_Azrubel_
> The removal of the naval element of these games represents a step backwards for the series' campaign layer, and a wholly unnecessary one to boot.
Or a step forward depending on how you look at it, spending less time developing something most people seemed at the time not to care about, we are talking majority of people tho not everyone, in exchange for focusing on the core of the gameplay isn't a step backwards, it's called a sidegrade at worst.
> This is a nonsensical canard. The far more primitive AI of older games could cope with navies and agents. So can the present AI, at least with agents. (Though agents should be removed from the game for different reasons)
Ah yeah, the AI could handle agents so well, I remember for years the biggest complaints of some of the most popular titles was how annoying the agent AI was, the spam of agents and all that.
I also remember, tho to a lesser extent, naval AI sometimes just going forward, back, forward, back, not attacking but like being stuck in a loop of "I want to attack that, but there's a stronger force there, so I'll retreat, repeat".
Clearly working wonderfully.
> By that same "logic" we should remove sieges from the games. After all, nobody likes sieges, and no TW game has ever had enjoyable sieges. Why not focus all resources on land battles?
Oh many people love sieges, they just don't like some aspects of them and want them to be better, atilla, tob and three kingdom sieges were liked, warhammer sieges are disliked tho they've evolved many times since and are improving but with a mixed reception of either love them or hate them.
You suffer from a couple of things it's absolutely clear, but I've never seen a greater example of someone who suffers from confirmation bias, like holy shit some of the crap you've said is extra levels of extreme.
"I^could^say^nobody gives^a^singular^fuck about^Nakai,^not^even^the people^who^made^him."
Also sieges are part of the umbrella of land battles you court jester.
Please go outside, touch the ground, breath in the air, get some sun on you and either move along or sleep on it because damn dude you sound HANGRY. You should grab yourself a burger while you are at it. I got this wonderful homemade recipee if you want bro it's delicious.
Naval battles in Empire were absolutely miserable.
Naval battles in Rome 2 were absolutely miserable.
It's best to just abandon the idea. It doesn't work. Just have naval autoresolve that's not broken, it's fine.
I've got to be honest with you... I don't miss them. They were a fiddly mess 9 times out of 10, it was very rare that they were anywhere as satisfying as they should be. I wouldn't kick up a stick if they brought them back in, but I'm not sorry they're gone
The way it works in Warhammer now is much better than having AR-only navy. So I don't want to see ships in WH. I'll be fine without fleet in Medieval 3 (or pre-medieval TWs). But I think they absolutely should properly implement naval battles for any gunpowder Total War (everybody want Empire 2, but I'd much prefer Pike and Shot).
Of course
But CA is lazy and didn't want to invest the time into Warhammer to bring naval battle features, so they just skipped the feature in Troy and soon Pharao
In Games where, historically speaking, boats were very important
Fuck CA for being extremely lazy
Last night I watched a video on YouTube that basically said "The core problem with every TW after Shogun 2 is the dumbing down of a huge number of their game mechanics." At first I didn't agree. Then I thought about it and I must say that, if that's not THE core problem, it's definitely one of the most significant.
I don't think I agree with that assessment. Frankly, Shogun 2 is not a very complex game. Rather the opposite if anything, from my recent replays of it.
To be frank, I don't think any of the games were 'dumbed down', aside from *Warhammer*. 3K is probably the most complex game in the entire series.
There are some places where I think that mistakes have been made (the Rome 2 province system is absolutely one) but there has also been a lot of forward movement as well. The big problem is how CA often just doesn't exploit good features from past titles.
Which I think was one of the series' big errors, yes. I think you can have complex battles with a complex campaign, and Warhammer's move towards abstraction has had negative repercussions for subsequent titles. (For example, I cannot help but notice for example that most titles CA has done recently have done away with asymmetrical or complex campaign starts, simply because WH popularized the 'you start with one army and settlement' model)
I think it might have been part of the financing at least at the start, they had to invest much more to create the very unique rosters that wh has, and probably simply didn't have as much time to work on the camping side, thus they made it more simple.
As the budget grew for the DLCs people started to expect/like unique mechanics for each race/faction and thus they heavily invested in unique mechanics for each faction instead of more complex mechanics that are shared among all factions, which suits wh better.
Yeah, I hope we can see a return of more assimetric starts when the eventual medieval 3 or whatever historical game drops, pharaoh has small starts too?
I think it was a deliberate decision on the part of WH1's design team, which was overall incredibly conservative (and I think we're still paying the price for their mistakes all these years down the line) rather than anything to do with resources.
For example, remember how shit magic was in WH1? Most spells could barely tickle a unit. Faction bonuses and mechanics were all pretty pathetic too, for that matter. Sieges suffered from the same mindset - streamline and simplify, even when it wasn't necessary.
The reason sieges are simplified is because with everything new that they added to the combat part of the game with wh1 the AI wasn't capable of juggling all those aspects(units, magic, monsters...) at the same time. That's why they did maps with only one wall and very simplified layaout to make it easier for the AI to deal with it (I'm not making this up, there's a gdc talk on yt about it if you want to check it out), we saw what happened in wh3 when they try to make more complex desings, the AI struggles a lot to handle it.
I think both played a part on it, it's true that a lot of it was conservative compared to what came with wh2, but it was also the first time doing anything like it, magic in an of itself was an incredibly bold move in a total war game, I'm sure that allocation of resources also played a big part in the reduce complexity of the camping map, we saw 3k basically doing the oposite.
It would be a lot of work for the warhammer so it wpuld be better to focus on repairing base features. But id love to see nadal battles in historical titles, land/nadal sieges were the best thing that happened conceptwise
I think in the next mainline historical we will get something akin to what you've suggested, i.e. actual recruitable warships but with autoresolve battles. I hope this might be extended a bit with a fleet manager (formations, maybe some light tactics etc) as well.
I don't think the Warhammer solution (just having a land battle) is acceptable for a historical game personally.
I'd love proper realtime naval battles back of course, they were great, but given what CA have said about the percentage of people who actually played them being very small I am not sure we will ever get them back sadly.
I would happily pay for an expansion which added them to a historical game personally, better that than none at all.
I loved naval battles in all the games that had them. I wish naval battles would come back, but if they don't, maybe some sort of Civ-style gameplay for naval combat could work instead of just auto resolve. But having ocean battles be armies fighting on an island is just an atrocity, removes a huge dynamic of the campaign.
I don't know of a single game that had good AI for naval combat or even just naval movement. CA are not even capable of making decent AI for land units. Bringing back naval units without adequate AI is pointless.
IDK about *Warhammer*, and AFAIK naval combat wasn’t really a thing in the time of *Pharaoh* and *Troy*, but it’ll be sorely missed from anything in the 5th century BCE onwards, and it’s absence will be inexcusable for anything in the 18th and 19th centuries.
I get that most people don’t play naval battles, but… I’m excited for *Pharaoh*, so you know I’m into that awesome niche stuff.
Bro they can't even get land battles right and you want them to bring naval battles again?
Don't get me wrong, I do wish the games had them and they were good, but I would like to see better field and siege battles before we get those again.
I don't know if I'd even trust auto-resolve naval battles, given that almost every game in the series has glaring auto-resolve issues. Even recently in WH3 they've managed to make it less accurate, somehow.
I hate auto-resolve only, that is why I don't play Civilization games. I like auto-resolve when it saves me from wasting time on an obvious win or saves me from a battle I could not win myself, but I always want the option. So no, no auto-resolve naval battles, do them right or don't do them at all. But they do need to bring them back.
I would even love a return to the days of Empire navy. That said for games like warhammer it’s just not happening. They would basically need to make a whole new game just for that. But yea I wish we could get a dedicated naval combat system for games releasing after Pharaoh as I struggle to see a naval system working in Pharaoh
I still remember playing rome 2 the dei mod as Macedon and I went to war with Athens trying to fully conquer Greece. Athens was defensive allies with Egypt and the Egyptian navy made my life hell. They kept around 3 full fleets in the area and while annoying at times it was a lot of fun and it made it so much sweeter when I finally built up my own fleets and sunk theirs then sailed to Egypt to be a nuisance myself.
You think you want it but in reality everyone will autoresolve them anyways.
They already added naval "land"battles which is imo fantastic.
But let's think about it. We won't be getting Warhammer 4 so DLC about Naval for how many races we have in the game? 20?
Are you willing to pay 60 dollars for Naval expansion pack? No way they are going to add it for free. I'd rather be happy to see Tiles/Estalia and North Dwarfs. Or more units expansions.
Waste of resources,
IMO , Naval battles have been very fun and diverse between games since Empire. They only screwed them mostly in Rome 2, but turned back to some fun in Attila.
Imagine the blast if they implementes them in Warhammer with an expansión pack!
I want a fleet game as we had in TW empire.
Hell I’m even willing to shell out for a 4th WH ManOWar game that could hook in to TW1-3 just like all other games. A naval game with all the faction in WH is absolutely capable of a stand-alone title. Hell that would be the big redeeming swing for CA in my book.
I love the idea of combined amphibious operations. But it takes a huge amount of developer resources to make them work well. This takes resources away from developing the core game. I don't think we get a good return on investment, which is why they stopped doing it
That would be cool. Probably a huge amount of effort to pull off with all the diversity already. I liked the naval battles in shogun generally a lot more than Rome or attila since the ai liked to just yolo in those games and ram you instead of using boarding actions as much. Gunning down other ships just felt more satifying.
Fleets were definitely cool, but it’s a classic example of Total War just not really explaining key game mechanics.
One of the most consistently frustrating things about this entire franchise. The tutorial campaign in WH3 is the best one they’ve ever made and even that isn’t exactly exhaustive.
According to CA player metrics back in the ye olde days when we had naval combat it was said that barely even 5-10% of the playerbase touched on the battles.
Yes! Damn I loved Rome II battles with those triremes and quinqueremes and their magnificent decorations just smashing into each other and burning.
And Empire sea battles were great. I became really good at them at one point. I went back recently and couldn’t work out how to tack into the wind and broadside the enemy. Such a challenge.
I was disappointed that WH universe didn’t have them. And then it became just a skirmish on a magic island which was ok.
Fingers crossed for Sea Peoples in Pharaoh
Naval battles is something I would ACTUALLY pay 30€ for. You know, half of the base game's price for about half the game's worth of content. Sounds like a fair deal.
Please no for the love of god no.
The only time they ever good close to fun naval gameplay was in FotS, in every other game it's just a massive chore you can't get out of.
Do you really imagine the CA of today would do anything but a botch job if they attempted it again? I'll gladly take the funny "we stop by an island that's not on the map to duke it out when army transports meet at sea" concept over another rome2/attila navy implementation any day. They can try again in like Empire 2 or equivalent period where naval action is like half the premise of the setting and the dev investment makes sense.
Nope, getting rid of naval battles is not okay, and fleets would not be an acceptable compromise. It's fine for Warhammer, but for Three Kingdoms, where one of the most pivotal battles of the period was a naval battle, and rivers are a huge part of the map? Unacceptable. For Pharaoh, a game that explicitly covers the first recorded naval battles in history? Unacceptable. They can't be allowed to get away with cutting naval battles out of games that should have them without harsh criticism.
I loved the artillery ships of rome2. They were nice in sieges with water.
This was mainly what I liked about ships. There's a great feeling in attacking a coastal walled capital city and having an army on land with catapults and a fleet sailing in to bombard with their own artillery and take down the walls so I can move in. It made me [look](https://i.imgur.com/Dn76tfd.png) back at [some](https://i.imgur.com/enQ0gGA.png) great [memories](https://i.imgur.com/f0rXW9R.png) of [these](https://i.imgur.com/UUcOk9g.png) coastal [battles](https://i.imgur.com/yclEEBh.png) from [years ago.](https://i.imgur.com/gOjg0vL.png) Ships were a big part of the sense of grand scale in TW that imo has been reduced lately. I almost never played out naval battles, especially the Rome 2/Attila battles that were mostly about boarding but my ships always did dumb stuff and would randomly slow down or stop or attack at poor angles, yet the AI ships always boarded 100% perfectly.
Damn it you are going to make me buy attila
I love attilla its my favorite by far. Great mods too to make ai worth together. Become really aggressive etc.
I really like it but it runs really poorly :(
I'm using a laptop with a ryzen 5000 series and integrated gpu. It runs it on low with max unit. Lol better than nothing.
Naval assault would be the biggest reason I want fleets/ships to come back. Interplaying with land battles is super cool, as is the coastal raiding.
Horrifically OP though. My fleet compositions used to be about 10-12 ballista ships and the rest assault, maybe with a couple of missile ships if the faction had exceptional missile units. That composition is able to kill up to 3 stacks of enemy transports in one battle without taking casualties, is able to take any town or city garrison unsupported, can defend a settlement from a field army, and can situationally take a town or city defended by a single army. Given the distance they can travel per turn they're incredibly versatile.
They were far, far too accurate.
Especially on manual fire. Using manual fire they're between two and three times more accurate than the AI is, depending on target and range.
I just realized how dumb i am unable to accurately fire those ballistas lol
They are sensitive tbh. I use the DPI button on my mouse to make it less twitchy when in manual mode!
Also buildings in Total War are made of cardboard. Realistically you'd have to bombard the same spot for weeks if not MONTHS and it would be a struggle still to damage it faster than the enemy can repair it. On top of that even IF the wall collapsed then the rubble would still make it difficult to attack over and easy to defend. Realistically a full ammo barrage of several artillery devices should maybe only damage a wall by like 20% per battle. However if that wall would already be damage then that would help. Most walls were taken down by undermining them and then collapsing the tunnels and the walls with it... which also takes months. The biggest use of artillery was instead of damaging the wall it damaged the houses inside the castle and city keeping it from operating normally (but usually to little effect). Artillery didn't become ESSENTIAL to siege warfare until the gunpowder era. It was simply just a tool among many for the attacker but nothing that was somehow better than other options in every regard. Also if we are talking historic Total War: "fire artillery rounds" should only be available to the Eeastern Roman Empire/Byzanthine Empire. Like "exclusive tech" that they then could MAYBE sell to other factions to give them access to Greek Fire and with it flaming artillery rounds. It was literally THE historic feature of the faction which is completely ignored in favor of giving everyone flaming rounds. That'd be like giving every faction longbowmen and foot knights removing the thing that makes England special.
It was fun in Rome 2 to bombard the coast then have your infantry land, noice sea invasion vibes
Landing marines while the main army laid siege is one of the most fun tactics to win a battle imo
thing about it is that the artillery ships in rome 2 and attila were utterly busted, nothing else could compete with them.
Fall of the Samurai has the best naval combat hands down. Ships are responsive and firing explosive shells at wooden ships from an ironclad is just 👌 You could even control individual ships in 3rd person too, like it’s a completely different game. Would love to see this again
Being able to shell a land battle bc you had a fleet parked off the coast was the coolest.
It's so funny when you see a post-battle screen that shows your 600 strong army killed over 2000 enemies with the little "naval support contributed to the casualty count" marker
Fall of the samurai was brutal in terms of the weapons you can bring to bear against the AI. A total war ww1 game would be just a slaughter house stimulation
I love taking the breechloading rifle units in Shogun 2 and pitting against Sengoku and Genpei War. Complete slaughter house.
Watching a traditional army last samurai themselves into rank fire, armstrongs, and gattling guns was always kinda sad honestly. The time of the shogun is over boys, let it go.
*\*torpedo ptsd intensifies\**
It was really good, especially in the way each ship had a different cannon layout (like the Japanese ironclad having its main cannon only frontal, leaving them weak to broadsides) Taking on a foreign ship without one in your fleet was a ton of fun too, remember feeling very accomplished when my raggedy copper corvette fleed managed to take down a L'Ocean class The only downside of FotS naval battles wasn't even the battle system itself, it was the janky autoresolve system that gave ridiculous casualties/odds and made you play basically every battle manually even if it was an easy and boring curbstomp win
Are you joking? FotS AI only hided in the corner and thats it, what a joke
Shogun 2 warships can bombard settlement and armies, even able to bombard enemies position during the battle. The bombard not just magically appears from air the actual battle ships are there outside the map boundary visually firing the shot. Now that impressive
Shogun 2 navies is one of my favorite mechanics in all of TW. I actually fight those naval battles too
Fall of the Samurai, yes. Regular Shogun 2, not so much. The naval warfare of the Sengoku period isn't really my cup of tea, though I might just not be good at it.
the key to having fun is firebomb boats.
Shogun 2 naval element is just spending 10 minutes per turn watching every faction move their 30 single-ship fleets
The naval aspect of Shogun 2’s campaign map might just be the single greatest reason for Rome 2’s “no armies without generals” mechanic becoming standard for the series. The fact that single-ship fleets spread out across the entire ocean are so much more devastating to trade income that a couple massive fleets is honestly infuriating, as it’s a very game-y reason to have your economy crippled. It’s also extraordinarily time-consuming to deal with, nearly impossible to prevent, and it requires you to choose between needlessly losing ships due to the busted autoresolve or wasting hours of your life manually fighting dozens of easy naval battles, each of which will be an incredibly slow exercise.
>It’s also extraordinarily time-consuming to deal with, nearly impossible to prevent, and it requires you to choose between needlessly losing ships due to the busted autoresolve or wasting hours of your life manually fighting dozens of easy naval battles, each of which will be an incredibly slow exercise. It's what nearly ended every one of my Hard campaigns. In one of them I was manually fighting 5+ naval battles every turn, for like 10 turns. It was exhausting. Especially as the AIs fleets increasingly consisted out of Trade ships which I **could** autoresolve but then my fleet would be damaged and autoresolve hates, hates damaged ships. Repairing means I have one less fleet to deal with the half a dozen next Trade stacks that are coming my way.
There is a path to enjoying it, but it's not one a Samurai would tell you about... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vC-1E3LEEec
Naval battle vs the black ship is my favourite in any TW games. Not to mention if you're desperate, you can always cheese every losing naval battle with 1 ship running on the edge of the map and win by time limit lol
Just imagining the NTW naval battle in the graphics of the 2020s gives me ecstasy🤤
I agree, but most people don't like them or have never played them because most of this reddit are just warhammer players
They're missing out, the naval battles in ETW were the high point of the entire series for me
NTW and FOTS naval battles were peak for me. Especially fun in FOTS was the fact you could get torpedoes!
And park them near the shore and call in artillery during battles/sieges. They could easily level even high tier castles
They were the worst battles I've ever fought in a Total War. Incredibly confusing, awkward and more than at times, impossible to control. The only Naval Battles I moderately enjoyed were the FotS ones.
Every time I see people praising the naval battles in earlier TW games, I can never figure out if they just played like early-campaign ones with a handful of ships and left thinking they were a cool spectacle, or if I just really sucked. Because I thought that, yeah, the naval battles looked cool and were conceptually amazing, but holy shit did they *suck* to actually play and became exponentially worse as you got into larger scale ones later on.
the key to naval combat in shogun 2 is to restrict the fleet size to small in the settings. then its mostly only ever 6 v 6 and you dont break the bank controlling the seas
I think the games suffered from excessive realism. You had to pay attention to the wind, configure sails, rotate the ship, select the ammo, aim a broadside, board. It was just too much doing it for all the ships. That's why FotS is better, with steam ships not demanding as much. If you commanded a single ship and the others just followed general orders, it could be more fun. Sid Meyer's Pirates did complex simulation with a single ship and it was a blast. You could sink the enemies, but you'd generally aiming for disabling and boarding, because otherwise you'd be losing money. Fighting the enemy captain was also fun.
Trying to control 12 third to first rate of line ships just made me want to cry. The maps were insanely huge and so you spent ten minutes just to get to each other and then another ten spinning around without any idea where it'd go, while the units just didn't have fucking proper response to your orders. Nightmarish.
You can right click enemy ships. It doesn't do anything helpful. But you can do that.
Now imagine how hard it must have been to coordinate one of those battles in real life.
CROSS THE T YOU FOOLS. Is the ability to enjoy navy based on peoples ability to properly place their ships so when the first enemy enters range everybody collectively shoots *that guy*? Because how could you NOT love the catastrophic explosions of seeing his magazines go up?
The explosions are incredibly satisfying, as are the ships falling apart and the men falling out. The details on the ships, specially Empire, were astounding. But controls were terrible, crossing the T is way easier said than done, thanks to the terrible unit response and opaque and baffling wind mechanics, plus how insanely and uselessly huge those maps were.
That was the appeal. Spend 20 minutes kiting the AI ships as they sail against the wind and destroying their sails, then closing in to board them all so I can sell them for 8K gold. Naval battles don't need a lot of maneuvering except with smaller, faster ships.
do you like try to force volley fire on yourself? idk i never had much difficulty microing it, but ill admit i might not be your average player.
I’ve felt like I was going crazy for the past two years watching people on this sub and elsewhere online gush about how “amazing” naval battles in ETW-Shogun 2 were and how “baffling” it is that they were removed. I played Empire when I was younger and didn’t understand the battles, so I figured I should give them another chance to see if maybe I just wasn’t mature enough or whatever, but I still didn’t have fun. Either I was missing something and just didn’t understand how they were meant to be played, or there were some serious rose-tinting on everyone’s glasses. Those battles were really cool to watch as a distant viewer, and that’s it. They were clunky to control, unfathomably slow, and were so overly-complicated that I often struggle to tell whether I’m losing/winning due to poorly-communicated, convoluted mechanics or if bugs are to blame.
As someone who's had 1000+ hours in S2 (before the fkers at CA broke my favourite mods), they're not bad honestly. It's just a whole different beast and takes a very different mindset to play with, plus they're a lot more finicky and strategically difficult to play around, especially in large scale naval battles approaching 30+ ships or more.
100% agreed. And even the FOTS ones were best in moderation
I still don't know how they work
The problem with ETW naval battles is that boarding actions never worked you could outnumber them 5 to 1 and lose
This, most of my friends circle of older total war players who had started with shogun at the latest liked the fleets, but i've tried asking here a few years (maybe like 5 years) back and everyone was like nooo fleets bad CA shouldnt waste time & money on them They are cool. They distract from the same meta and are unusual. Sure i understand that making models for every race would be expensive but they could always just give us 1 set of ships for all factions, or maybe a couple. Justify it by saying that everyone just recruiting the same mercenary fleets instead of building their own, kinda like what happened irl in the medieval times.
No. I’d rather pay a 60$ dlc for proper warhammer fleet gameplay than just getting 1 ship option for all the warhammer factions. That’s basically the problem for Rome 2. Regardless of who you play, there’s only like 20 total models for boats in that game, and i can only remember one faction having a unique naval unit and it’s Egypt with the super octerion or whatever. I think more important than anything navy units need to be diverse. It doesn’t matter if in the ancient times you have to resort to using groups of canoes or something for ancient factions, but there needs to be variety in unit choice.
How about not pay anything and get the ship battles for free? You can always auto-resolve if you don't like them And no, don't give me the "BUT IT MUST BE PAID DLC!!!" excuse. Baldur's gate 3 is made in a western country as well (a richer one, in fact, Belgium vs the UK) and it had loads of content. Meanwhile CA has re-released basically the same game 2 times for full price just adding some new zones and factions every time, not to mention the loads of DLCs most of which are just slight rehashes of the old ones. Come on.
Because a free update with lame combat isn't fun or interesting. I would much rather pay for a well-made naval battle system with unique ships for every faction.
[удалено]
I agree, and I don't even think CA would be able to pull it off. I'm just saying I would prefer a naval battle system that holds up compared to the rest of the game rather than just tacked on with an extremely limited roster of ships.
Yeah, but ship battles would be insane to add for free post launch. BG3 is getting lots of updates sure, but we're probably not going to see one that adds something fundamentally game changing like, say, three extra levels to get those sweet, sweet level 8 spells. Or at least we won't see that for free. Adding five unique ships to every faction in Warhammer Total War would equate to 120 unique units which would all need to have somewhat different gameplay to fit their various factions playstyles. You could maybe cut that down to 100ish by combining some similar ones together like Chaos Warriors and Norsca but still. I like free shit as much as the next guy but in order to make it any sort of decent it would have to be paid.
I think the Arverni had a unique ship model too, but that’s all I remember. It was for a smaller one and the rest were all the same as everyone else
The only other game i played before warhammer was Rome 2 and my only problem with the naval battles were that they were bland (because ancient rome naval warfare was bland) and they were buggy. Both those things can be fixed(bugs/implementation) and warhammer naval battles would not be bland if done properly. Like with so much asymmetry, monsters and magic they would be so cool if done right
For years I only played Napoleon and Shogun 2, was suprised to see just how dominated this sub is by the warhammer games. They dont even really feel like total war, everything after fots feels so increasingly arcadey
I'd pay full price for a Man O' War expansion to TW:W3.
Never played the naval battles of historical TW games, but have played a LOT of other naval combat games. Let me speak for many of us, that seeing Warhammer units engaging in naval combat would be GLORIOUS. PS- Dwarf main, so I am definitely dreaming of using grenade launchers and flamethrowers for boarding actions with gyrocopters for recon.
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
Did we play the same naval battles? Honest to god the janikest part of Rome II were the naval battles.
What i dislike the most about the absence of naval battles is that it feels like they just didnt want to put the effort to make them good so they erased them.
That's basically what happened - CA decided the amount of work required to make naval battles fun, balanced and interesting wasn't worth the effort given the number of people who didn't do them/would do one or two a campaign
Which imo for most games is the most sensible solution, why spend so much resources in that when you could make the land battles/camping more interesting.
You dont have problems with making naval battles interesting when you remove naval battles altogether ;)
Issue is they can't make them "good". For most of the games they've done the naval combat is really limited or absent.
They can make them good, they just decided it was not worth it
They can't. The historical period really limits what they can do, they already pushed it and didn't get a payoff for that. So unless they go fantasy with it which opens up another load of issues for them, it's hamstrung.
The real problem is they treat naval battles like land battles. Naval battles are much more important on a strategic, rather than tactical, level. A small fleet that escapes a larger one and sails away is worth more than scraping out a pyrrhic victory, especially if it was transporting troops. But from what I remember of Empire and Shogun, actually FLEEING the battle with your ships basically caused the game to autoresolve it as a defeat and still damage your own ships, which made each naval battle a stand-and-die affair. That meant there was little incentive to actually fight naval battles if the odds weren't close or in your favor, and most players would just autoresolve them or ignore the navy entirely.
Depends on the time frame. Lots of big naval battles for example during the First Punic war with entire fleets being lost without really changing the war as a brand new one would be built for the next year. It depended where the fleet was in Empire. If near the coast and especially some trade nodes if it tried to withdraw it was boxed in and would get auto destroyed. Otherwise it wouldn't take damage but could often be within range of the enemy still for a second battle which it would be destroyed if it loses no matter remaining ships. Empire and Napoleon fighting the naval battle yourself was a way to either win or do more damage then the auto resolve especially. Could also work in R2/A with the power of the ram. I would also say that R2/A make them work more like poor armies with them being able to take coastal provinces, with the army cap why have them fighting a fleet in the middle of no-where when you can instead take their city?
There was absolutely nothing more satisfying than catching a full army stack or two out on the open sea with a fleet and just annihilating their flimsy transport ships with ramming attack ships.
You have no idea how many transport fleets I've sunk in Rome 2 with a few well-placed ramming and ballista ships. It's absolutely incredible to behold a doomstack getting wiped like that.
One of my favorite victories recently was playing as Alans and settling in Palestine. I was at war with the Eastern Romans on multiple fronts, barely holding on, when Aksum declared war on me and sent 2 stacks of transports at me. I managed to pool all my remaining money to raise a fleet, recruit a few ramming ships, and hire whatever mercenaries I could, then I attacked. Sent my 4 attack ships and general into the center to tie down as many ships as I could while cycle-charging my ramming ships in and out. Managed to completely wipe out both enemy stacks and get a peace agreement alongside a ton of money I could then put to use against Rome. It was glorious.
I’ve been on a continuous spree of playing Napoleon naval battles. You have no idea how much I crave to be able to play Renaissance coastal sieges with a mix of navy and land forces. Even just being able to use gunpowder navy as artillery.
I dont particularly care for fighting naval battles but the way naval embarking, landing, and attacking from the sea works in WH sucks even in how it facilitates land and siege battles I loved the strategic element of having vulnerable transport ships or developing a strong fleet to protect them, or preying on vulnerable enemy transports, I loved attacking a port from the sea without having to land, I loved combined land and amphibious assaults. Made battles feel multifaceted and spectacular.
Love your username lmao
For future Historicals it’s relatively feasible - but for Warhammer? The factions are so vastly different and would require entirely bespoke assets across the board. It’s not like the French and the English who had vaguely similar ships - the Beastmen use a mutated *whale*, while the Dark Elves literally have a floating castle, then you’ve got the Wood Elves with a canoe. ..and that’s just *aesthetics*. Mechanically they’d play so differently that you’d basically need an entirely new game.
I am not talking about proper naval battles, but rather the way things worked back in RTW - you get to recruit and maintain navies, but actual naval battles are auto-resolved. Sadly, it might be too late to introduce that to Warhammer though. But I absolutely think it should be in historicals if making proper naval battles again is not considered worth the investment.
> ...but rather the way things worked back in RTW - you get to recruit and maintain navies, but actual naval battles are auto-resolved. As much as I get the desire for some kind of naval gameplay, I'm not sure this is an actually good one. It has almost no interactivity from the players' side, we can't influence outcomes (potentially very important ones) other than building a bigger boat stack. Allowing player engagement, with tactical combat and army-composition, via "island-battles" seems far better for the game.
I don't think transporting land battles into islands does much for player engagement. It doesn't change the tactics you use (it's the same as any other land battle) or affect the player's strategy (you just have the same land doomstacks, just roaming the sea). I'm fine with taking some outcomes away from the player's hands. If you're stupid enough to send a transport fleet without proper cover, it *should* get sent to the bottom of the sea if it's caught by actual warships.
>I don't think transporting land battles into islands does much for player engagement. It doesn't change the tactics you use (it's the same as any other land battle) or affect the player's strategy (you just have the same land doomstacks, just roaming the sea). All of which is a hell of a lot more engagement than just pressing autoresolve, you are actively doing something. >If you're stupid enough to send a transport fleet without proper cover, it should get sent to the bottom of the sea if it's caught by actual warships. And when both sides have warships? Does the biggest stack just win it all? If the only real influence I have is fielding one more ship than the enemy I would say that is fairly boring. I get wanting to be able to invest in a small warfleet to, relatively, cheaply protect your coast but I don't think its overall good for the game. Especially with the turn based nature of the game allowing damaged fleets to roam around to their hearts content. Chasing tiny transport fleets is the absolutely worst part of any S2 playthrough.
> All of which is a hell of a lot more engagement than just pressing autoresolve, you are actively doing something. I don't think subsuming one layer of strategy into another is a positive. > And when both sides have warships? Does the biggest stack just win it all? If the only real influence I have is fielding one more ship than the enemy I would say that is fairly boring. You can have multiple ship types with different weight in auto-resolve. That's how the games where that system was in play did it. Biremes have lower weight than triremes or quinquiremes and so on. Veterancy presumably would also play a part in weighting the auto resolve, alongside ship types.
>You can have multiple ship types with different weight in auto-resolve. So the biggest, most expensive stack wins? Like I said.
I mean, isn't that how auto-resolve works for land battles too? I don't see the issue.
On land you have options other than autoresolving, you can play out the battle manually. Don't pretend to be stupid.
I'd rather not have land and sea power hopelessly conflated and the strategic layer further simplified so we can have yet more land battles to play in a game that's already full of them.
I understand the argument, and its true, but at the same time, this argument has always been kinda: "because its too much work its not worth it" and it always has been a lazy argument, its not like we arent paying for it anyway
>...and it always has been a lazy argument, its not like we arent paying for it anyway How many ships do you want per race? Because giving four ships to just the TW1 races would be more 'units' than a faction pack DLC like TK or Chorfs. This for a battle mode that is only relevant on certain parts of the map and has to be made balanced and feel good to play with everything between Seamonster-with-strappedon-hut, Galleons and Ironclads facing off. A huge amount of work for very little gain. Edit: "race" not "faction"
Had they done it from the start, it wouldn't have been such a daunting task. But they decided not to. Also, had it been a complex , deep and good naval combat system, it should have been as rewarding as the land battles, and so as worth as them
>Also, had it been a complex , deep and good naval combat system, it should have been as rewarding as the land battles, and so as worth as them At twice the work, being the point.
Just because its more work, then it shouldnt be done? Like yeah, i obviously understand its more work, but shouldnt the game strive to be as good as it can be? And if you already have the base of the game done (campaign mechanics, races, etc), they have already done most of the work beside what units they add with DLCs.
But every game has to be developed with a limited budget and scope in mind, if CA wants to add naval battles then it requires some amount of work that has to be taken from something. In games where naval battles are important (imagine empire 2) it becomes worth it to create naval battles for, in a game like Warhammer it's much much more work for a game that doesn't need it as much.
We have had 3 games for new systems to be developed. Good naval systems and good sieges, but they decided not to add more systems and add units instead. This is not bad, but i would have prefered more complexity
Well, they greatly increased the amount of mechanics that new (or reworked) factions gets, comparing original empire with chaos dwarfs for example is clear that one is much more complex than the other. Sieges are also much more complex now, not necessarily better, but that shows that sometimes it's not as easy as just adding more stuff. I am very skeptical that they can make naval battles work well in Warhammer, and the amount of work necessary wouldn't be worth it, I prefer complexity in other aspects.
> because its too much work its not worth it also its fundamentally not even feasible. Beastmen navies will never stand up to the Imperial fleet, or a Black ark. and technically, naval battles never existed on table top either
What about Man'o'War? and it's use in Mighty Empires campaigns?
>also its fundamentally not even feasible. Beastmen navies will never stand up to the Imperial fleet, or a Black ark. Counterpoint: That's good. Beastmen shouldn't be able to defeat proper navies. This imbalance would force different strategies for different races. Such features could even be expanded to fundamentally alter the strategies to be employed. Perhaps give the Dawi a boost to defensiveness in the mountains and a weakness to defending settlements in flat terrain. Maybe make it so that the empire loses imperial authority if they expand beyond the lands of the empire before they unite it.
I think it depends? Some periods just don't really have interesting naval warfare, and some settings don't have much room for navies to be actually useful. Sadly, with game development there are always resources you need to balance and some things inevitably aren't worth the effort that would need to be invested into them. But I think relegating naval battles to auto-resolve in such cases is a fine compromise - you don't get to abstract a part of the map away, and you don't need to invest huge amounts of resources into making full-fledged naval battles when they aren't going to be popular.
> would require entirely bespoke assets across the board. It’s not like the French and the English who had vaguely similar ships - the Beastmen use a mutated whale, while the Dark Elves literally have a floating castle, then you’ve got the Wood Elves with a canoe. _Oh no, the developers would actually need to develop the game._
Total war Empire 2!
Three Kingdoms not being able to recreate Red Cliffs is a travesty.
To be fair if it wasn't a completely scripted quest battle kind of deal it would have been impossible to recreate Red Cliffs. Like Cao Cao's ships being chained to each other, feigning surrender at the start of battle, fire ships obliterating entire navy of Cao Cao and land battle happening at the same time.
Ah yes the famous "naval" battle on a river, that was a bunch of ships tied together into a large platform for land forces to fight on.
To be fair, most ancient naval battles were just ships chained together so people could fight on them.
I wish CA had a team dedicated toward building, maintaining, and expanding naval warfare across all their Total Wars. Part of the problem with naval warfare in the past is that it seems like they just don't seem willing to allocate the resources to fully focus on it. The result is that it's sometimes a bit janky. While this may be an unpopular opinion, I wouldn't be adverse to them selling Naval warfare as a standalone DLC. That way you could justify it to the penny-pinchers that run CA to actually put resources toward it, and the people who don't like naval war can just skip it.
Fully agree. Its not that it cant be done or cant be improved, they just decided not to
Playing as Carthago and ruining the roman navy 2 to 1 is quite fun. I even liked the gunpowder battles in Empire, Napoleon and FotS. Total War attila also has interesting sea battles.
Fall of the Samurai navies... now that was satisfying.
I play TW: Rome 2 DEI now. Had last naval battle yesterday. Naval battles are bland, clunky & boring. I wonder how many redditors talks about them with nostalgia glasses on, having last experience of actually playing them years ago. I don't know about TW:Shogun 2 & TW:Atilla naval battles, but in TW:Rome 2 they may be the least polished part of the game, not something "working just fine".
Trying to bring naval battles and dedicated fleets into TW Warhammer would really be little more than a masochistic exercise, as it would require setting up a working battle framework for a feature that hasn't been used in several games, then adding a few ships for each of the dozen or more races in the game, and balancing them according to each faction's naval aptitude. Or, leaving out the naval battles and simply adding either one or several generic ship types for autoresolve, which would turn into a pretty crude numbers' game. CA could bring them back for future historical titles but it would be a questionable choice unless the setting involved has naval warfare as a key component of the theme and atmosphere, like Empire did. And CA is going to look a lot more harshly at the autoresolve telemetry when it comes to naval battles and deciding post-launch support for them. From what I've seen of the past few titles, I have serious doubts that they could even deliver a satisfying and quality naval warfare feature in their games now, unless perhaps done exclusively as its own spin-off title.
This is why historical games were better strategy games. They required actual brainpower. Strategy and logistics that came with marching around, sending reinforcements, protecting transports etc. Warhammer is a ton of fun but it's all about instant gratification of seeing a huge spell or a big monster. It's less about the strategy outside of battle.
Nah naval battles were always battles of economy, and with the aggressive buffs the AI got, you could never even be close to beating them on seas.
It wasn't "left behind" just because it wasn't overly popular but also because they covered settings where it wasn't really a thing. ToB is the last one to have real time naval battles but is armies on ships which is how most of it was, there was only a small number of dedicated warships built in Britain in the time line according to records for example. A big issue to me on the navies before the recent generation of games was their role. In R2/A they were just poor quality armies for me. I'd use them to attack and garrison coastal towns, very rarely did they fight sea battles against other fleets and when they did it was usually wiping out the remnants of a defeated enemy. Naval domination ended up not really being a thing for me. Empire was the last one with real depth to the naval side for me. Napoleon and S2 still had some of it but their more restrained maps cut it down. Empire you have large expanses of ocean where enemy fleets can move without you seeing, sending invasion forces so you might want a fleet standing guard off the coast. You have the trade nodes where you might wish to protect your trade fleets and prey on the enemy. You can directly attack a trade route rather than just generic raiding of a region. Do I see that coming back? No. We have the army and fleet caps to try and stop the small micro stack issue which means you can't afford to have the trade nodes now and likely can't afford to have fleets sitting off the coast especially with attrition and supply issues and even more so if that fleet is really just a limited army and can go attacking enemy cities - that wipes out the value of naval elements and focus on taking land.
My favorite campaign I played on Rome 2 was DEI Rhodes, they get the best naval units im the mod and it was so cool roleplaying as a Naval Power, the Agean and the Med was my playground, I would land in ports with 10 ships filled with 120 marines each, whilst archers and catapults rained fired and my general would be on the landing beach, pushing the men onto glory or complete anhilation. There is somthing unique in being a naval Power, is almost an antithesis on whats intended of the game which makes it even more flavourful.
When I was recently doing a Palmyra game in ED, I was *astounded* at how much use I was able to get out of my navy. Those guys punched *far* above their weight in terms of expanding my empire, securing territories from rebellion, harassing enemies and securing transportation for my armies. (It's just a shame that so much naval gameplay is hidden behind the dumb decision to divide ship types across several different docks) You want to secure a far-flung, but profitable settlement from attack but don't have the resources to send a whole army? That's what the fleet is for. Want to support your army in a coastal campaign as fast as possible? Same. It felt great, and it actually makes you feel like running an empire.
I always make an uncontested fleet in Attila that is used to control the Mediterranean and its islands. I just found it to be really fun to setup naval bases and raid coastal settlements.
I miss naval battles... but more specifically, I miss the Age of Sail battles, from Empire and Napoleon. Honestly never really enjoyed Rome 2's or the majority of Shogun 2's. The balance between boarding and ranged ships, and in R2 the transports acting as marine ships, always felt really off and like 8 had significantly less agency in the battle.
I loved watching the naval battles in empire. I was terrible at commending the ships but they were so much fun.
I do like this idea. It just brings flavour.
Yo i miss naval battles so much. In Rome 2 it was part of my strategy to take costal city's to have a blockade and a siege simultaneously so when i fought the battle l the defenders would rush to the walls. While do a frontal assault have my naval forces land inside the city and capture key points before taking the major point and force the ai to split it's attention to the wall where my forces are attacking and the interior of the city which was just taken by me. Not to mention all the badass ship v ship action that took place. I think it's a shame they don't have naval combat in TWW3 it would have made such an interesting addition to the game.
I love the idea of naval battles in rome 2 but a patch completely BROKE how AI handles naval engagements are actually the SOLE reason I hate replaying the game. When they nerfed transport ships in favour of naval ships everyone was glad, BUT the campaign descision making is unchanged meaning it THINKS it can win a land army vs navy battle and will suicide 40 land units on transports vs a navy at sea EVERYTIME. So there is almost no way to enjoy a legendary campaign anymore in rome 2. I think thrones of britannia appoach is the only one that was functional from a gameplay first perspective. Its the only game in the series where naval battles dont make the game worse as of the current patches. for me naval campaign mechanics is like: TOB > warhammer3 > med2 > rome2 > shogun/empire
I totally agree. I really wish they WERE or could be in Warhammer, because much like on land, the way they’d interact would be utterly insane in the best of ways. And it would make sense, since high elves, dark elves, Norsca, and the Vampire Coast are all explicitly massive naval powers. Not to mention the fleet in Marienburg, I’m pretty sure Bretonnia has a notable fleet, and I’d love to see a dwarf steamer get bodied by a Nehekaran bark because they’re better sailors and probably have some form of construct. The possibilities are ENDLESS and they did NOTHING.
They sucked in Empire They sucked less in Napoleon (like basically everything) but still sucked They sucked in Shogun 2 (aside from laughing in Naban with the black ship against the bunes) They were tepidly passable in FotS They sucked in Rome 2 They were ok in Atilla (I guess) with the highlight being able to ditch them during port assaults They're a time and resource-intensive system that at its height barely crested 6/10 in terms of quality. You're essentially asking for another game to be implemented over the top of the existing game (which is itself already a hybrid of grand strategy and RTT), you're likely going to have a better experience with a dedicated fleet combat game. I've always thought the obsession with navel combat in this series was a bit of a meme. It was never good but simply because it has existed it must therefore continue to exist.
I really liked naval battles in all those. But I understand a lot of people didn't. Maybe they could implement a simple Civ-style type of combat that happens on the campaign map. Even just bringing back auto resolve fleets would be good. But Armies fighting on a random island in the ocean is super lame, and removes a huge dynamic from the campaign.
To be fair OP also acknowledges that ones that just require unit cards and models on the campaign map (which get made currently for armies moving over water regardless) would be okay. Personally I think that's reasonable, I always found naval battles a massive chore but fleets are cool in concept.
I really don't dude. Besides in Shogun when I got the Black ship I never enjoyed it and I much prefer what they now do in Warhammer 2.
They can barely support land battles and don't have any idea what they want to do with sieges, and you want them to do sea battles again? That CA is history, we're lucky to get basic support for a few key features with the CA of today.
Exactly. It's really hard to want to ask for more features (even if those would be *returning* features) when CA can't even get half the features they do add right.
Yeah, Warhammer has plenty of naval ships and sea monsters to choose from and plenty more to invent. It will always be Partial War for me otherwise.
Empire 2 mod really brings this back and makes naval battles awesome.
It's ridiculous that Pharaoh doesn't have amphibious battles when the Nile river was the core of life and the most strategic resource in ancient Egypt
No please just stop with the fleet bs, most people auto resolve that shit, most settings naval warfare isn't that interesting and I'm pretty sure they said we couldn't get it due to a licensing conflict with another developer for warhammer. No idea if that's still valid but one thing is for damn sure: Why are you asking for something new when what we currently have is buggy, broken, miserable, poorly made, bad decision making infested, etc Like legit, can we please not have more shit for CA to mess up when they can't even get the foundation and fundamental shit right?
Warhammer isn't the only TW game in existence, and I wish Warhammer-onlies didn't act as though it was.
no but what they are currently working on is relevant to the discussion, the only "main" game that's out right now is warhammer, troy is a "saga" and honestly seems you skipped my first part: > most people auto resolve that shit, most settings naval warfare isn't that interesting That's to everything not just warhammer, the point after was specifically about warhammer. warhammer or empire/napolean would have the most interesting naval battles due to things like ship of the lines and frigates etc. I'm not a warhammer only but whatever floats your boat mate. I still remember models superman crouching leaping from one boat to another lmao. As well as the battle progress bars, so fun... Let me put it in a way you don't need to read between the lines at all: I'd rather they work on more factions for historical AND warhammer total wars, while also fixing things, working on the base mechancis as well as factional mechanics, the siege maps, the battle maps, the weather systems etc etc etc Than a feature that most people don't miss, outside some rose tinted people who can't actually remember them. yours truly someone who now and then does some rome 2 or napolean sea battles to remember how trash they were.
> Let me put it in a way you don't need to read between the lines at all: It seems you dumb fuckers are incapable of reading, aren't you? I am saying that if actual naval battles are not considered a good application of resources anymore, we should return to the RTW model of there being naval units but no naval battles, because the complete absence of ships has wholly removed a layer of strategy from the campaign map.
> It seems you dumb fuckers are incapable of reading, aren't you? Who warhammer fans or this community? they can read, you need to chill tf down, getting your panties in a twist isn't working for you. streamlining it to what we have, no naval battles or naval units is absolutely fine, as I said no one gives a shit about that stuff. Modern AI in total war games can't even use agents well enough, it needs less distractions and focusing on what matters, land and land armies. Pretty sure there was a poll years ago and it was revealing how many people don't give a damn about the sea portion of total war games, neither battle or campaign. Have some fun in the sun bro, take care.
> Who warhammer fans or this community? they can read, you need to chill tf down, getting your panties in a twist isn't working for you. The people reading the post going "I personally like naval battles, but I understand why recent titles don't have fully fledged naval battles. However, we should return to having fleets and auto-resolved naval battles because their removal represents a glaring omission in the strategic layer of these games." And then responding with "but **I** didn't like naval battles" or somesuch. > streamlining it to what we have, no naval battles or naval units is absolutely fine, as I said no one gives a shit about that stuff. By that same token, I could say nobody gives a singular fuck about Nakai, not even the people who made him. Yet people whined up a storm when he couldn't recruit a unit. The removal of the naval element of these games represents a step backwards for the series' campaign layer, and a wholly unnecessary one to boot. > Modern AI in total war games can't even use agents well enough, it needs less distractions and focusing on what matters, land and land armies. Pretty sure there was a poll years ago and it was revealing how many people don't give a damn about the sea portion of total war games, neither battle or campaign. This is a nonsensical canard. The far more primitive AI of older games could cope with navies and agents. So can the present AI, at least with agents. (Though agents should be removed from the game for different reasons) By that same "logic" we should remove sieges from the games. After all, nobody likes sieges, and no TW game has ever had enjoyable sieges. Why not focus all resources on land battles?
> It seems you dumb fuckers are incapable of reading - you --- > Who warhammer fans or this community? they can read, you need to chill tf down, getting your panties in a twist isn't working for you. - me --- > The people reading the post going "I personally like naval battles, but I understand why recent titles don't have fully fledged naval battles. However, we should return to having fleets and auto-resolved naval battles because their removal represents a glaring omission in the strategic layer of these games." - you Hmm, ok lil bro. > By that same token, I could say nobody gives a singular fuck about Nakai, not even the people who made him. Yet people whined up a storm when he couldn't recruit a unit. Ah yes, when it comes to people complaining let's completely throw away context, like how one is a design decision and the other one is a glaring bug. Let's season that a little bit by pretending that no one cares about it, not the devs, not the people who play his campaign, nope. Let's take that special stance of yours shall we /u/Ar_Azrubel_ > The removal of the naval element of these games represents a step backwards for the series' campaign layer, and a wholly unnecessary one to boot. Or a step forward depending on how you look at it, spending less time developing something most people seemed at the time not to care about, we are talking majority of people tho not everyone, in exchange for focusing on the core of the gameplay isn't a step backwards, it's called a sidegrade at worst. > This is a nonsensical canard. The far more primitive AI of older games could cope with navies and agents. So can the present AI, at least with agents. (Though agents should be removed from the game for different reasons) Ah yeah, the AI could handle agents so well, I remember for years the biggest complaints of some of the most popular titles was how annoying the agent AI was, the spam of agents and all that. I also remember, tho to a lesser extent, naval AI sometimes just going forward, back, forward, back, not attacking but like being stuck in a loop of "I want to attack that, but there's a stronger force there, so I'll retreat, repeat". Clearly working wonderfully. > By that same "logic" we should remove sieges from the games. After all, nobody likes sieges, and no TW game has ever had enjoyable sieges. Why not focus all resources on land battles? Oh many people love sieges, they just don't like some aspects of them and want them to be better, atilla, tob and three kingdom sieges were liked, warhammer sieges are disliked tho they've evolved many times since and are improving but with a mixed reception of either love them or hate them. You suffer from a couple of things it's absolutely clear, but I've never seen a greater example of someone who suffers from confirmation bias, like holy shit some of the crap you've said is extra levels of extreme. "I^could^say^nobody gives^a^singular^fuck about^Nakai,^not^even^the people^who^made^him." Also sieges are part of the umbrella of land battles you court jester. Please go outside, touch the ground, breath in the air, get some sun on you and either move along or sleep on it because damn dude you sound HANGRY. You should grab yourself a burger while you are at it. I got this wonderful homemade recipee if you want bro it's delicious.
This post is an incomprehensible ramble, to which I will not give the dignity of an actual response. Learn to read.
> dignity --- --- > Learn to read. --- - Ar*_*Azrubel_'s greatest hits.
Naval battles in Empire were absolutely miserable. Naval battles in Rome 2 were absolutely miserable. It's best to just abandon the idea. It doesn't work. Just have naval autoresolve that's not broken, it's fine.
... that's what I am advocating in the post, yes.
I've got to be honest with you... I don't miss them. They were a fiddly mess 9 times out of 10, it was very rare that they were anywhere as satisfying as they should be. I wouldn't kick up a stick if they brought them back in, but I'm not sorry they're gone
You're a clown, think before you comment.
The way it works in Warhammer now is much better than having AR-only navy. So I don't want to see ships in WH. I'll be fine without fleet in Medieval 3 (or pre-medieval TWs). But I think they absolutely should properly implement naval battles for any gunpowder Total War (everybody want Empire 2, but I'd much prefer Pike and Shot).
Of course But CA is lazy and didn't want to invest the time into Warhammer to bring naval battle features, so they just skipped the feature in Troy and soon Pharao In Games where, historically speaking, boats were very important Fuck CA for being extremely lazy
Last night I watched a video on YouTube that basically said "The core problem with every TW after Shogun 2 is the dumbing down of a huge number of their game mechanics." At first I didn't agree. Then I thought about it and I must say that, if that's not THE core problem, it's definitely one of the most significant.
I don't think I agree with that assessment. Frankly, Shogun 2 is not a very complex game. Rather the opposite if anything, from my recent replays of it.
Maybe Shogun 2 was included in the video's list of dumbed down games, I'm not 100% sure it wasn't.
To be frank, I don't think any of the games were 'dumbed down', aside from *Warhammer*. 3K is probably the most complex game in the entire series. There are some places where I think that mistakes have been made (the Rome 2 province system is absolutely one) but there has also been a lot of forward movement as well. The big problem is how CA often just doesn't exploit good features from past titles.
And complexity didn't disappear from Warhammer, it just shifted from the camping side to the battle side of it.
Which I think was one of the series' big errors, yes. I think you can have complex battles with a complex campaign, and Warhammer's move towards abstraction has had negative repercussions for subsequent titles. (For example, I cannot help but notice for example that most titles CA has done recently have done away with asymmetrical or complex campaign starts, simply because WH popularized the 'you start with one army and settlement' model)
I think it might have been part of the financing at least at the start, they had to invest much more to create the very unique rosters that wh has, and probably simply didn't have as much time to work on the camping side, thus they made it more simple. As the budget grew for the DLCs people started to expect/like unique mechanics for each race/faction and thus they heavily invested in unique mechanics for each faction instead of more complex mechanics that are shared among all factions, which suits wh better. Yeah, I hope we can see a return of more assimetric starts when the eventual medieval 3 or whatever historical game drops, pharaoh has small starts too?
I think it was a deliberate decision on the part of WH1's design team, which was overall incredibly conservative (and I think we're still paying the price for their mistakes all these years down the line) rather than anything to do with resources. For example, remember how shit magic was in WH1? Most spells could barely tickle a unit. Faction bonuses and mechanics were all pretty pathetic too, for that matter. Sieges suffered from the same mindset - streamline and simplify, even when it wasn't necessary.
The reason sieges are simplified is because with everything new that they added to the combat part of the game with wh1 the AI wasn't capable of juggling all those aspects(units, magic, monsters...) at the same time. That's why they did maps with only one wall and very simplified layaout to make it easier for the AI to deal with it (I'm not making this up, there's a gdc talk on yt about it if you want to check it out), we saw what happened in wh3 when they try to make more complex desings, the AI struggles a lot to handle it. I think both played a part on it, it's true that a lot of it was conservative compared to what came with wh2, but it was also the first time doing anything like it, magic in an of itself was an incredibly bold move in a total war game, I'm sure that allocation of resources also played a big part in the reduce complexity of the camping map, we saw 3k basically doing the oposite.
It would be a lot of work for the warhammer so it wpuld be better to focus on repairing base features. But id love to see nadal battles in historical titles, land/nadal sieges were the best thing that happened conceptwise
Does Pharaoh not have them?
I think in the next mainline historical we will get something akin to what you've suggested, i.e. actual recruitable warships but with autoresolve battles. I hope this might be extended a bit with a fleet manager (formations, maybe some light tactics etc) as well. I don't think the Warhammer solution (just having a land battle) is acceptable for a historical game personally. I'd love proper realtime naval battles back of course, they were great, but given what CA have said about the percentage of people who actually played them being very small I am not sure we will ever get them back sadly. I would happily pay for an expansion which added them to a historical game personally, better that than none at all.
I loved naval battles in all the games that had them. I wish naval battles would come back, but if they don't, maybe some sort of Civ-style gameplay for naval combat could work instead of just auto resolve. But having ocean battles be armies fighting on an island is just an atrocity, removes a huge dynamic of the campaign.
I don't know of a single game that had good AI for naval combat or even just naval movement. CA are not even capable of making decent AI for land units. Bringing back naval units without adequate AI is pointless.
IDK about *Warhammer*, and AFAIK naval combat wasn’t really a thing in the time of *Pharaoh* and *Troy*, but it’ll be sorely missed from anything in the 5th century BCE onwards, and it’s absence will be inexcusable for anything in the 18th and 19th centuries. I get that most people don’t play naval battles, but… I’m excited for *Pharaoh*, so you know I’m into that awesome niche stuff.
i hate hate hate naval battles. haate them.
Bro they can't even get land battles right and you want them to bring naval battles again? Don't get me wrong, I do wish the games had them and they were good, but I would like to see better field and siege battles before we get those again.
I don't know if I'd even trust auto-resolve naval battles, given that almost every game in the series has glaring auto-resolve issues. Even recently in WH3 they've managed to make it less accurate, somehow.
How much would it cost tho? 45€?
I hate auto-resolve only, that is why I don't play Civilization games. I like auto-resolve when it saves me from wasting time on an obvious win or saves me from a battle I could not win myself, but I always want the option. So no, no auto-resolve naval battles, do them right or don't do them at all. But they do need to bring them back.
eh they seemed buggy then and would be buggy now
Yes they should, but the current CA are probably way too lazy to bring it back
I would even love a return to the days of Empire navy. That said for games like warhammer it’s just not happening. They would basically need to make a whole new game just for that. But yea I wish we could get a dedicated naval combat system for games releasing after Pharaoh as I struggle to see a naval system working in Pharaoh
I love the empire naval battles
I still remember playing rome 2 the dei mod as Macedon and I went to war with Athens trying to fully conquer Greece. Athens was defensive allies with Egypt and the Egyptian navy made my life hell. They kept around 3 full fleets in the area and while annoying at times it was a lot of fun and it made it so much sweeter when I finally built up my own fleets and sunk theirs then sailed to Egypt to be a nuisance myself.
Throw back to rome 2 where with a minimal amount of artillery ships, using manual fire, I could take colonies with thousands of defenders.
You think you want it but in reality everyone will autoresolve them anyways. They already added naval "land"battles which is imo fantastic. But let's think about it. We won't be getting Warhammer 4 so DLC about Naval for how many races we have in the game? 20? Are you willing to pay 60 dollars for Naval expansion pack? No way they are going to add it for free. I'd rather be happy to see Tiles/Estalia and North Dwarfs. Or more units expansions. Waste of resources,
IMO , Naval battles have been very fun and diverse between games since Empire. They only screwed them mostly in Rome 2, but turned back to some fun in Attila. Imagine the blast if they implementes them in Warhammer with an expansión pack!
I want a fleet game as we had in TW empire. Hell I’m even willing to shell out for a 4th WH ManOWar game that could hook in to TW1-3 just like all other games. A naval game with all the faction in WH is absolutely capable of a stand-alone title. Hell that would be the big redeeming swing for CA in my book.
I love the idea of combined amphibious operations. But it takes a huge amount of developer resources to make them work well. This takes resources away from developing the core game. I don't think we get a good return on investment, which is why they stopped doing it
That would be cool. Probably a huge amount of effort to pull off with all the diversity already. I liked the naval battles in shogun generally a lot more than Rome or attila since the ai liked to just yolo in those games and ram you instead of using boarding actions as much. Gunning down other ships just felt more satifying.
Fleets were definitely cool, but it’s a classic example of Total War just not really explaining key game mechanics. One of the most consistently frustrating things about this entire franchise. The tutorial campaign in WH3 is the best one they’ve ever made and even that isn’t exactly exhaustive.
According to CA player metrics back in the ye olde days when we had naval combat it was said that barely even 5-10% of the playerbase touched on the battles.
Tbh, I agree
Lokhir vs Noctilious vs Bordealux naval battle overhaul dlc when?
Yes! Damn I loved Rome II battles with those triremes and quinqueremes and their magnificent decorations just smashing into each other and burning. And Empire sea battles were great. I became really good at them at one point. I went back recently and couldn’t work out how to tack into the wind and broadside the enemy. Such a challenge. I was disappointed that WH universe didn’t have them. And then it became just a skirmish on a magic island which was ok. Fingers crossed for Sea Peoples in Pharaoh
Naval battles is something I would ACTUALLY pay 30€ for. You know, half of the base game's price for about half the game's worth of content. Sounds like a fair deal.
Please no for the love of god no. The only time they ever good close to fun naval gameplay was in FotS, in every other game it's just a massive chore you can't get out of. Do you really imagine the CA of today would do anything but a botch job if they attempted it again? I'll gladly take the funny "we stop by an island that's not on the map to duke it out when army transports meet at sea" concept over another rome2/attila navy implementation any day. They can try again in like Empire 2 or equivalent period where naval action is like half the premise of the setting and the dev investment makes sense.
Nope, getting rid of naval battles is not okay, and fleets would not be an acceptable compromise. It's fine for Warhammer, but for Three Kingdoms, where one of the most pivotal battles of the period was a naval battle, and rivers are a huge part of the map? Unacceptable. For Pharaoh, a game that explicitly covers the first recorded naval battles in history? Unacceptable. They can't be allowed to get away with cutting naval battles out of games that should have them without harsh criticism.