Naval game seems badly unbalanced in A24

[yorks_lad]

I'm in the middle of my first naval game on A24, beautiful graphics, and I've noticed that boats seem very unbalanced.

I'm playing Carthaginians against Mauryans. I've got the Reinforced Hull advance and 2 Indian Light Cavalry just sunk one of my Triremes with javelins in very short order.

I've got a fleet of 3 Quinquiremes mounted with extra Ballista and archers that seem to be able to take down buildings in reasonable speed, although one of them was foxed in it's attempt by 3 workers repairing the building at the same time. My 3 Quinquiremes have really struggled to take down a Light Warship. They are still at it after several minutes of game time. I had to pull out one of my Quinquiremes because of the damage caused to it by 2 shore-based archers.

The naval units just seem to be crazily unbalanced in Alpha 24. Javelins and arrows shouldn't be able to sink quinquiremes so easily and they should be able to sink other boats as easily as archers seem to be able to sink them.

I haven't noticed anything too unbalanced in the land game so far. 

[Player of 0AD]

Actually Carthaginians have huge advantages over Mauryans in naval battles.

Garrisoning Quinquiremes with ballistas and soldiers does absolutely nothing. You've got to garrison them with catapults. Can't the devs write that important information somewhere down?

If other warships get garrisoned with soldiers they are much stronger, possibly your opponent did just that. Exception: Fire ship : D

[Alar1k]

Main problem with ships is they get stuck easily and the path-finding around narrow shore is frustratingly hard to manage when you really need your units to follow through with orders to be efficient in battle - when the ship is carrying half of your troops is stuck on your allies fishing boat... it really is annoying to lose a game like that

I would really like to see more maps like continent being played in multiplayer to break the same old mainland spam because on maps where there is no water some civs, like for example Athenians, lose out on some key units (mercenary archers/sword champions in this case), and some civilisation bonuses like Carthaginian naval traiding bonus, really don't give the civilisation to live up to it's full potential 

[Yekaterina]

24 minutes ago, Alar1k said:

I would really like to see more maps like continent being played in multiplayer to break the same old mainland spam because on maps where there is no water some civs, like for example Athenians, lose out on some key units (mercenary archers/sword champions in this case), and some civilisation bonuses like Carthaginian naval traiding bonus, really don't give the civilisation to live up to it's full potential 

Good point. Next time I host I will give continent a go. Can you suggest some good maps that involve water? Currently I have only tried continent and Schwarzwald, but naval tactics don't seem to dominate the gameplay on these maps. Also, due to the small size of land on Continent, 4v4 games feel squashed even on large map size. 

Schwarzwald seems like an interesting map but the initial distribution of resources may not be balanced, so probably not suitable for competitive games. Once when I tried to play on it I got 50 sheep scattered around my cc while my teammates had completely no hunt nor berries. 

[Yekaterina]

52 minutes ago, Player of 0AD said:

Actually Carthaginians have huge advantages over Mauryans in naval battles.

Garrisoning Quinqueremes with ballistas and soldiers does absolutely nothing. You've got to garrison them with catapults. Can't the devs write that important information somewhere down?

If other warships get garrisoned with soldiers they are much stronger, possibly your opponent did just that. Exception: Fire ship : D

Historically bolt shooters could fire from ships larger than triremes, therefore I think the devs should allow triremes and quinqueremes to shoot bolts if garrisoned with it. 

Also we should add a boarding party feature, as one of the main tactics in battle is to send your marines onto enemy ships and slaughter everyone on there (used in battle of Salamis), instead of just sinking the ships by ramming or artillery. Furthermore quinqueremes should be able to shoot normal arrows as well because they typically had a platform on which archers could stand there and shoot enemy ships. Currently the quinqueremes are less effective than default triremes because the single rock thrower fires too infrequently. 

Arrow capacity should also be given to the Tessarakonteres (Ptolemy Juggernaut). This ship needs some rework as it is a wide catamaran (two hulls) but is currently portrayed as a typical single hull ship. Artillery and archers could stand on the platform joining the two hulls and fire, even though this ship was never used in any real battles. 

[Yekaterina]

41 minutes ago, Alar1k said:

Main problem with ships is they get stuck easily and the path-finding around narrow shore is frustratingly hard to manage when you really need your units to follow through with orders to be efficient in battle - when the ship is carrying half of your troops is stuck on your allies fishing boat... it really is annoying to lose a game like that

I do agree with you. I frustratingly lost many naval battles because of stuck ships. I think one way of improving this is to decrease the model size of ships, so that they can fit into small rivers and bays, which is also more accurate historically as no ship is as big as half of the Meditarranean sea. 

[Alar1k]

13 minutes ago, Yekaterina said:

Good point. Next time I host I will give continent a go. Can you suggest some good maps that involve water? Currently I have only tried continent and Schwarzwald, but naval tactics don't seem to dominate the gameplay on these maps. Also, due to the small size of land on Continent, 4v4 games feel squashed even on large map size. 

Schwarzwald seems like an interesting map but the initial distribution of resources may not be balanced, so probably not suitable for competitive games. Once when I tried to play on it I got 50 sheep scattered around my cc while my teammates had completely no hunt nor berries. 

Yes, that continent map is really interesting but quite squished out for a 4v4 - it makes game a bit more intense on the borders but also leaves the potential of naval backdoor at any moment 

About other naval maps - maybe latium, but it has less potential than continent because the water is on far edges of the map - but at least it's somewhat balanced and water is not saturated on one side of the map in one teams' territory - as for naval dominated maps, maybe islands are interesting but since the ships are so laggy/easily stucked - I wouldn't really recommend naval dominated fights - one in 10/50 games sure, not every or every other round though - but all in all, naval dominating map seems like a nice challenge from time to time - kinda like all Kushite challenge I was in in a23 hahaha

[Yekaterina]

Perhaps we can make a 'perfect' naval map in the scenario editor?

Is it possible for me to host a team game on a custom made map?

[Alar1k]

8 minutes ago, Yekaterina said:

Perhaps we can make a 'perfect' naval map in the scenario editor?

Is it possible for me to host a team game on a custom made map?

I think that if you make a custom made map everybody else needs to download it to be able to play it - same as balanced map mod I think

[yorks_lad]

Thanks for all the replies but my main issue was not that the Quinquiremes can't seem to sink a light warship (thanks for the tip about catapults Player of 0AD).

My main issue is that 2 shore-based archers nearly sank a Quinquireme while 2 shore based horsemen with javelins easily sank a Trireme, both with reinforced hulls. This strikes me as not terribly realistic which is why I felt it was a bit unbalanced. Archers and javelins can kill people on ships but there is no way they could sink them. To sink a ship I'd have thought you would need another ship or a siege engine of some sort. This did not seem to me to happen in A23.

[Lion.Kanzen]

@borg-

[Nescio]

Are you sure it's a lot worse than in A23 or earlier releases, though? Yes, a lot has changed in A24, but not that much for ships: ship technologies have been replaced and the quinquereme attack was adjusted as part of the artillery overhaul, making them more effective vs structures and less vs units. However, biremes and triremes haven't been touched.

I ran a quick test in A24 of ten basic cavalry javelineers vs one trireme (no technologies) and to my surprise, the trireme won.

[borg-]

The ships are basically the same as the a23. 

[Alar1k]

I don't see a problem with arrows and spears sinking a ship - sure if you hit the upper deck not much is gonna happen to the ship and you might hit a sailor, but if you aim the lower body of a ship those arrows and spears that stick out of the hull when hit with large enough power (and people can shoot/throw things pretty darn hard when trained) - one needs to imagine those same arrows/spears breaking from the constant moving of the sea - oceans are pretty strong, even the mediteranian sea that is engulfed has strong waves and the sea is constantly moving and rocking the ship - those arrows that are shot break under the pressure and leave holes for water to pass - and even if it does not break the wood is not tightly insulated and can leak large enough quantities of water to indeed sink a ship without the need of fire arrows - those arrows/javelins are not weightless and can, in larger quantities, indeed sink a ship and do decent damage to the wood of the body of the ship

I can't imagine that just 2 javelinires did sink your ship because for them to shoot it they should be pretty close to the ship for the ships arrows to kill them quickly - what is a very short order in the context of your post, can you please elaborate?  Is it 2-3 seconds or 2-3 minutes of constant javelin throwing?

[yorks_lad]

Hi @Alar1k It was about 1 minute of game time. 3 Javenileers were firing from land at a trireme. I saw one of the javelineers killed so I left them at it thinking the Trireme would win. About a game minute later I went back - no Trireme. Since then I've been bombarding land with Quinquiremes, and they are not doing very well against people but okay against buildings as was mentioned above, but I had to keep pulling out my Quinqiremes as archers from the land were inflicting serious damage. I played with ships quite a lot in A23 and never experienced damage from archers like this before. Perhaps I just haven't played enough to see this happening.

[Yekaterina]

4 hours ago, yorks_lad said:

I saw one of the javelineers killed so I left them at it thinking the Trireme would win. About a game minute later I went back - no Trireme.

Hmm I would recommend you to garrison your triremes with some cav and infantry before sending them across, as garrisoning will increase the number of arrows fired per second. The maximum projectile limit is 13 so you can put in about 10 soldiers in each ship to boost your firepower. You enemy definitely garrisoned his ships and researched pierce armour tech. 

[captBluesky]

I think what we're seeing is that anything that threatens  *massed formation combat* philosophy is nerfed to impotence in 24b. Cat's

don't seem to want to target  units anymore. Ships can be sunk with archers (ridiculous). Cat's and bolts are easily killed by archers as well.

I'm seeing others talking about limiting the use of walls because again, it seems to interfere with/mitigates the *mass formation combat* centric

thinking.

This is very frustrating to me as I prefer engineering attacks (using buildings, defensive structures to hold ground), and forts to press into enemy

territory.

With naval landings in 23b one could hold a beachhead with garrisoned ships. With romans, you could build camps, then siege under naval protection. All that's gone now and

such concepts as naval bombardment have been reduced to a bad joke in 24b.

 

I think part of the problem is limited categories of damage. 0ad should have another category of damaged called *structural*. Archers, slingers, and melee would not cause

*any* structural damage. In one of the older 0ad manuals it quite clearly said *only siege could destroy buildings*. Somewhere along the way 0ad departed from that ideal.

If the 0ad really wants to see foot, and horse units cause damage to certain wooden structures, a more thoughtful implementation of *fire based strucutural damage* might

be implemented.

 

In 23b slingers could level stone forts, clearly ludicrous.

 

 

[Nescio]

On 16/03/2021 at 6:26 PM, yorks_lad said:

Hi @Alar1k It was about 1 minute of game time. 3 Javenileers were firing from land at a trireme. I saw one of the javelineers killed so I left them at it thinking the Trireme would win. About a game minute later I went back - no Trireme. Since then I've been bombarding land with Quinquiremes, and they are not doing very well against people but okay against buildings as was mentioned above, but I had to keep pulling out my Quinqiremes as archers from the land were inflicting serious damage. I played with ships quite a lot in A23 and never experienced damage from archers like this before. Perhaps I just haven't played enough to see this happening.

So far it's rather anecdotal. Could you (or someone else) upload a replay showing triremes being destroyed by javelineers or archers? I've been unable to reproduce it; on my end individual triremes easily kill ranged troops.