I´m also rather disappointed with the changes presented here. In my opinion, they are rather uninspired "quick fixes" and will not improve naval warfare.
None of the reasons for the rather dull naval warfare are adressed, as many people have pointed out.
As I´ve done in the past, I´ll try to throw in some ideas to inspire future development in this area - I don´t care if they get adapted or if they just inspire the paradoxians to think about other possible solutions than just tacking something else on top of existing problems and call it solved.
Let´s start by analysing the situation as-is.
Many people have commented how naval warfare is boring.
the only real naval strategy in current version, 1) Put all ships in one doomstack 2) Send doomstack to fight enemy doomstack.
Definitely, Britain's ability to project power with its navy is massively underrepresented at the moment. It frequently would launch raids and capture islands or strategic positions using amphibious invasions with just their ships' companies.
Soooo..how is this changing naval gameplay at all? Seems it will be useless as before.
[...]it does not solve the fundamental problem of how navies are optional, and how naval warfare typically ends in whoever has the smaller fleet stays safely in a port to then end of war.
There are two major problems I currently believe exist in the Naval Warfare area of this game.
- Navy's (unless your Japan or England) are almost useless in winning wars
- Navy size and power in no way affects a countries ability to create a global empire.
Let´s start with these issues and pick them apart.
According to these statements, navies have too little strategic impact compared to land warfare. It´s obvious that navies cannot conquer territory like armies can, so their role has to be something else. In history and even modern times, navies are important for their ability to project power to oversea territories that are out of reach of your land forces.
Wikipedia said:
The strategic offensive role of a navy is
projection of force into areas beyond a country's shores (for example, to protect sea-lanes, ferry troops, or attack other navies, ports, or shore installations). The strategic defensive purpose of a navy is to frustrate seaborne projection-of-force by enemies.
So, which of these tasks are well represented in EU4?
Protecting Sealanes is modelled by Light Ship Influence on Trade Routes (one of THE most innovative features introduced in EU4 in my opinion). In theory, deploying Light Ships along hostile trade node / sea lanes or fleets blocking enemy ports should reduce their trade income and their ability to wage war on land due to lack of financial resources. Unfortunately I have never seen a war in EU4 that was ended due to financial pressure - countries just dip into debt and can easily sustain financial trade income reduction in wartime.
So the issues that need to be adressed in game here is not a naval mechanic, but the economic and diplomatic model of the game. Countries need to suffer far worse from being cut off from sea trade income for long periods, with things getting exceedingly worse the longer the situation remains unresolved. Living a few months without foreign trade income should be unpleasant, but not crippling - but being cut off for years should significantly affect both the treasury and the war exhaustion of the enemy, leading to internal unrest and undermining the war effort of the enemy!
The same goes for Irregular naval warfare - piracy and privateering. Piracy should occur automatically when trade lanes are not protected by sufficient ships. "Sufficient" should be a function of value being transferred down the trade route vs. ships dispatched to protect trade in the area. Hiring privateers should increase the amount of piracy in the region. In my opinion, piracy should be a passive value undermining the trade flow along the node, essentially resulting in a loss to trade flow to the next node.
Ferrying troops and supplying overseas detachments is another major task of navies. In EU4, I feel that deploying troops in overseas campaign is far too easy - just pack your troops into transports and ferry them over - once they are landed on enemy shores, they are fully capable of fighting on the enemy turf. Did any of you ever think about the logistics behind such an operaton? Dispatching troops overseas requires a giant apparatus to supply these troops - even though armies were rather self-sustaining back in the day, they still need equipment that cannot be sourced locally (weapons, munitions, clothes, ...). Landing and sustaining more than a few hundred men in a completely hostile territory for extended periods was probably pretty much impossible back in the day.
In EU terms I could imagine using already existing features like naval supply ranges to model these issues. Having a nearby naval base should make it easier to ferry supplies to expeditionary forces, while landing them far outside your supply range should be an impossible task. The supply limit of your armies in hostile overseas territory should be limited by a function of the range to the next proper naval base (potentially a building?) owned by the invader and the ratio of hostile vs. own ships operating in seazones between the base and the target harbour. This should reduce weird instances of huge maritime landings on areas far away from your homeland - I always found tens of thousands of Ottomans landing in Italy rather weird considering the real world challenges of such operations.
Now, with this backdrop, it is also clear why attacking other navies might be an important task. In order to protect your own commerce and supply lines, you need ships to seek out and destroy enemy vessels that threaten your trade or supply routes. Now it is time to dip into naval combat itself.
In EU, enemy ships and navies are detected and attacked instantly, no matter how big or small. This leads to the inevitable doomstack problems, as small squadrons of ships will rarely stand a chance against a bigger stack, in turn requiring you to turn up with a bigger stack on your own (forcing the enemy to concentrate more ships in his stack... and so on)
or have all ships sit in port and do nothing.
Another problem is again the length of battles that results in a huge escalation as more and more reserves can be drawn into an ongoing battle.
To fix naval combat, I think it is not enough to recude the amount of ships being able to fire. I think ships and fleets should have the ability to avoid detection and combat entirely. It is very very hard to find a single ship or even a larger squadron within an area of thousands of square kilometres. Finding the enemy is much harder than killing him, especially in the vast seascape. Historical naval battles mostly occured when both sides wanted to be found of had little choice of fighting to avoid larger strategic problems like invasions.
In order to represent this, a scouting mechanic (either a battle phase or a pre-battle calculation) is needed - full on naval combat should not be joined automatically, but with a certain chance depending on the size of the fleet relative to your enemy, the amount of maneuverable scouting ships compared to your enemy, your admirals maneuvre and your force morale. This should allow small squadrons to escape easily and resume their work of interrupting enemy sealanes and affecting their trade income. It should take considerable effort to hunt down a number of small squadrons and force them off your sealanes - and it should be time consuming, not just wiping away small stacks with a huge doomstack.
During the real engagement, maneuverability should be a key factor, not just cannons and hull strength. As many posters have pointed out, one of the main features of galleys was high maneuverability, their ability to set the terms of the engagements and their independence from wind. As long as boarding actions, ramming and close combat (i.e. the "shock" phase of the battle) was the main way to engage and overcome enemies, these ships should excell. Only with the advent of long range combat, increasing firepower and improving maneuverability of non-galley ships the balance should shift in favour of the latter. Again, the maneuverability and fire stats of your admiral should be key to determine how the battle is fought. Ideally, naval combat should get rid of the fixed time interval battle phases - instead, the admirals abilities and the state of his ships should decide when the battle switches to another phase. Read:
Wikipedia said:
[...]the gunners fired once and then jumped to the rigging to attend to their main task as marines ready to
board enemy ships, as had been the practice in naval warfare at the time [...] Their determination to fight by boarding, rather than cannon fire at a distance, proved a weakness for the Spanish; it had been effective on occasions such as the battles of
Lepanto and
Ponta Delgada (1582), but the English were aware of this strength and sought to avoid it by keeping their distance.
In this occasion, the shock phase should never occur, because the english have an admiral with lots of maneuver pips, high fire and ships with higher maneuverability.
Note also how ineffective naval warfare was if no boarding action resumed:
After eight hours, the English ships began to run out of ammunition, and some gunners began loading objects such as chains into cannons. Around 4:00 pm, the English fired their last shots and were forced to pull back.
[41] Five Spanish ships were lost.
The English and Dutch wars were also known for very few ships being sunk, as it was difficult to hit ships below the water level; the water surface deflected cannonballs, and the few holes produced could be patched quickly. Naval cannonades caused more damage by casualties to the men and damage to the sails than sinking of ships.
The main goal of naval warfare should be to disrupt enemy morale and cohesion, not to sink their ships. Forcing the enemy fleet into retreat while you can hurt trade income and drive up war exhaustion should be the main reason for sustaining navies. Large naval engagements should be rare and a special occurance, something that a player can follow while holding their breath. They should usually not end with a wipeout or huge losses - even decisice historical battles rarely resulted in massive losses.
Lopsided engagements (doomstack vs. small squadron) should be very rare as the small squadron would usually be able to escape and slip away before the larger fleet is able to form up and hurt them.
If you like and I feel motivated to do this, I could draft a completely different and simple combat model on paper and test it with some hypothetical setups and engagements to show what outcomes a different combat model would produce... but not today, I still got some other things to do
