Tradewinds 2 Ship Special Abilities

[Malva Ferster]

Thespeed values listed for naval units in-game refer to their strategic movement speed, it determines how fast a ship can travel between sea zones on the map. It is not to be confused with tactical speed, which determines the base ship blockade power. Note that the tactical speed is no longer shown in game.

Fleets will always travel at the strategic speed of their slowest ship. Hence, you could use light ships to lead your fleet and catch the enemy while waiting for your main fleet to engage, or be sure to keep galleys separate from your main fleet if you want the main fleet not to be held back.

Note that the blockade impact of a ship (the amount of trade power it steals when blockading) is also equal to its tactical speed value. Therefore light ships are best at blockading (10 per ship) and galleys next best (8 per ship).

with the final value rounded up to the nearest integer. The distance between two sea zones can be found by selecting a naval unit and reading the tooltip that appears when the mouse is hovered over another sea zone or port. Note that the formula above may slightly vary between certain sea zones.

The durability of a ship determines how much damage a ship takes from incoming fire. For example, a 10% durability modifier would mean that a ship would lose 9 sailors instead of 10 sailors during battle (does not affect damage from attrition). A ship's base durability depends on its hull strength. Hence, see hull strength as equivalent to damage resistance (the damage suffered being directly proportional to the number of cannon fire it receives).

Durability is one of the most underrated yet important factors in naval warfare. Both formulas to calculate hull damage (and hence the strength of your ships) and morale losses use durability as the denominator. This means that it one can drastically reduce the overall damage and moral losses of ones navy by pursuing high durability. The simplest methods would be to research the 4th Quality idea and implementing the "Hold the Weather Gauge" policy from Offensive and Maritime.

Ship-for-ship, heavy ships are by far the most powerful in combat. However, they are also the most expensive, especially in terms of maintenance. This makes them the combat ship of choice for rich nations that dream of naval supremacy. They also take up 3 spaces in the engagement width instead of the regular 1. Heavy ships can be used for exploration.

Light ships can increase a country's trade power in a certain trade node and thereby the trade profits by protecting trade, and are also ideal for exploration due to their speed (as long as they are not slowed down by other ship types in the same fleet). This makes them a prime choice in times of peace. However, they perform poorly in battle: they cannot stand up to heavy ships or galleys in combat. Still, they are much better in this role than transports, and they excel in blockading.

These cheap ships are ideal for fighting in inland seas (e.g. Mediterranean, Baltic, Sea of Japan, Chinese coast), where they have a +100% combat ability bonus while also allowing 3 times as many ships to fight at once compared to heavy ships, making for a stronger fleet at a significantly lower price. On non-inland sea they retain a +50% combat ability bonus when fighting on coasts. However, they are far quicker to sink due to the smaller hull size and lack of defensive bonuses, will take up much more naval force limit, and move across the map only slowly. In deep waters, they will only slightly outperform light ships.

Each transport can carry only one regiment (of any type), regardless of the regiment being at full strength or not. Though reasonably durable compared to light ships and galleys, they lack the firepower of combat ships, and should generally seek to avoid combat situations. An exception to this is a late-game western transport fleet fighting against much less advanced foes, where technology differences give transport ships a more evenly-matched fight against even the enemy's heavy ships.

Flagships are unique ships that give special bonuses to all ships in fleet with them. A nation may only have one flagship of their own (not counting captured flagship which lose their bonuses but keep their name and icon). A flagship can be any combat ship type (non-transport). When building the flagship, the nation chooses up to three special abilities for the flagship. Each special ability increases the maintenance cost of the ship. Nations must have 1500 sailors worth of active ships before their navy is large enough to be allowed to build a flagship.

Some countries have access to special naval units which can be unlocked with missions, government reforms and national ideas. They are usually recruited at the ducat and sailor cost of their normal counterparts, but their ducat cost can be reduced by modifiers to Special Unit Costs. This stacks normally with other modifiers for their respective Ship costs.

Galleass are special Galleys, available to nations that have enacted the Merchant Arsenal government reform, available to nations of the Ligurian and Venetian culture.

Additionally they can be unlocked by completing the Italian "Perfect the Galleass" mission.

Man-of-war are special Heavy ships, available to England and Great Britain after completing the mission "Expand the Royal navy"

Also available to the Netherlands if the "Let us make sure both realms retain their freedom." option of the "The Throne of England" event, triggered by the "Glorious Revolution" mission was chosen- while the PU over England / Great Britain persists.

VOC Indiamen are special light ships, available to nations that have enacted the Stadhouder Monarchy, Dutch Republic or Dutch Archbishopric Government reform, available to nations of the Dutch, Flemish and Frisian culture. They can also be unlocked by having the Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie as a Commercial Enterprise subject and enacting the "Increase East Indiamen Construction" subject relation modification. Additionally, the "Fort of Batavia" Province modifier in Kalapa (630) (gained by completing the Netherlands "Founding Batavia" mission) allows the recruitment of VOC Indiamen.

Caravels are special light ships, available to Aragon after completing the Mission "Mare Nostrum", to Castile after completing the Mission "Reales Atarazanas" and to Portugal after completing the mission "Reform the Navy"

Ignoring modifiers, the most import factor determining the outcome of a battle is the relative difference between hull strength (equivalent to damage resistance) and the number of cannons firing on it. The damage suffered is directly proportional to the number of cannon fire it receives.

Therefore, in the table below an Early Carrack applies 2:1 damage (40 cannons vs 20 hull strength) to another Early Carrack than say the 1.5:1 damage (12 cannons vs 8 hull strength) of a Galley to Galley interaction. Note that one heavy ship takes up three engagement width relative to other ships so cannot be compared directly to the other types (for example, it takes approximately 6 galleys to reach parity when fighting a heavy ship).

The columns below from left to right are hull strength, cannons, strategic map speed, and sailors (sailors being the proxy for ship strength). The sequence of the rows is the order of engagement priority in an ongoing naval battle to try and populate the fleet's full engagement width until the limit is reached, the order being heavy ships, galleys, light ships, transports (in inland seas the priority is galleys, heavy ships, light ships, transports). It is for this reason that having a high manoeuvre admiral assigned to any fleet is key since the entire engagement width will be filled first with heavies and galleys - all firing together at the enemy's hopefully narrower engagement width.

Please refer to naval warfare for full details. However, the combination of naval units, admiral skill and the impact of engagement width can be summarised as follows. Generally speaking in a naval battle one could assume that:

Naval combat at the moment mostly feels like a slightly wetter version of land combat, with few justifications for engaging in it beyond the necessity of traversing continents. I don't know what the silver bullet is for making naval gameplay as engaging as land gameplay, but I've come up with some ideas that I think would at least make it different.

The core of this proposed rework is the paradigm that ships do not behave like living units: they're ships. They require no population to build and are quite expensive, in line with an infrastructure of its time. Disbanded ships provide money instead of population. When produced, a ship will have the Unmanned status, meaning it bears a neutral gray flag and is unable to move, fight, or retaliate, though it can be attacked and destroyed. Unmanned ships do not cost Upkeep because they technically do not belong to any player. Ships do not take up a unit slot in the army; rather, they are a container for an army. Therefore they cannot be merged, so each ship takes up its own tile.

Regular land units cannot man a military ship. This necessitates a new unit line: Crew. Crew can be produced from a City Center or Garrison like regular land units, or if there is a ship with available crew space docked on a Harbor, then they can be produced directly into that ship. There are at least three variations of this unit over the eras, with cultural variants.

Crew are relatively cheap units that require 1 Population to train. With each upgrade of the crew line comes an increase in Combat Strength. Each ship type has a target Manpower value calculated by the combined Combat Strength of all Crew on board. If this value is not met, the ship will be seaworthy but will suffer a harsh penalty to Movement Speed and Combat Strength. Additional Crew beyond the Manpower value will not affect the ship's function. The amount of crew space on a ship is equal to the army unit slot cap.

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