How do you feel about Naval mechanics in strategy games?

[Saldrone]

Everytime i go around a strategy game community i've noticed certain adversion to it. For example Arabia is technically the most popular map in AoE 2, most of the time you see people playing Civilization with a Pangea world type, It's often agreed that naval combat in Paradox games such as EU4 and HoI 4 just sucks, and even Warcraft 3 ditched the naval warfare of it's predecesor almost completely due to the focus on Hero units.

 

[The Brazilian Slaughter]

I like boats, but yeah naval combat usually leaves something to be desired in most RTS.

I think the problem is that most naval combat in RTS is so... blobby. Its essentially two groups of high HP units placing attacks upon each other until loses. Terrain matters little because 99% of games treat water as one simple homogenous terrain, there's no weather, no nothing.

I think AOE2 probably has the best naval combat. You had Galleys/Galleons, Fireships, Demolition Ships and Cannon Galleons. Knowing how to manage them properly was the key to winning naval combat.

Earth 2150 had naval combat, but I do not recall any mission where I actually built naval units. AFAIK Naval Units are the only units you can't bring back to base, I do not see the point of wasting limited minerals on units that can't go back to base, when I can build air units which can do the same job AND be airlifted back to base.

Also, in games where naval combat is a thing, I think a mistake is making naval units use the same population cap as land and air ones. You can build a large fuck-off fleet... or you can build a large-fuck army.

 

[Arrowgrab]

I think it's a fundamental conceptional problem, regardless of what kind of strategy game you're playing.

Land war and naval war are fundamentally different in real life. Most of the time, land war follows the pattern of "resources exist in enemy land -> we send our guys there -> we kill the enemy guys there -> now it's our land -> our resources."

In contrast, most naval wars are not fought for resources, but for access and denying access to the enemy, which in turn greatly affects land war - Mahanian doctrine and all that jazz. Very different "mechanics" in real life. It's fundamentally different, therefore it translates into games fundamentally differently. And, well, game developers have limited energy, money, time and knowledge, and they'll sacrifice a deep, convincing naval war experience in favour of a (hopefully, lol) deep and convincing land war experience.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Yeah, there's kind of two main problems as I see it. First, since it's probably going to take up less than a quarter (or even a tenth) of the gameplay, it gets very little resources dedicated to making it interesting. If you have access to 15 land units, you've probably got access to 2 or 3 ships, and you know which ones to build before you even get started.

Second, as pointed out above, naval warfare is about access to land wars. But you don't need access to land wars in RTS or any other strategy game, because your resources just magically teleport across the water as soon as you get a villager there. Why bother with a costly, irritating, complex naval war in a game when you can just build a barracks on the opposite shore and have an entire army pop up out of thin air?

To have proper naval warfare, you'd need to make that impossible, and even if you went to the considerable trouble of making a game like that, I'm not sure players would go for it. It'd certainly be novel, at the very least, and justify a game revolving around a lot of naval warfare. Not sure how you'd frame it. Maybe some fantasy setting where you're warring over an archipelago or something. Or a sci fi one, and do the whole 'space is 2D for some reason' thing. Come to think of it, Starsector is kind of halfway there with the mechanics around colonies requiring shipping lanes and resource chains. Copy something like that perhaps, throw in surface/land wars to make the colonies matter, and you'd have an interesting game I think.

Also, minor extra complaint- the fact that transporting an army means putting them all in a defenseless bucket that can be picked out and sniped by a handful of warships firing over/past an escort 3 times their size, is fucking nonsense. I'm no history buff, but I'm pretty sure that wasn't a thing that happened, partly because the ships themselves are way, way more expensive than the soldiers on board.

 

[Hellraiser]

I think AOE2 probably has the best naval combat.

Supreme Commander did it best IMO, especially thanks to the multiple weapon types the boats were equipped with at the same time (this unit has cruise missiles, weak guns and decent T1 AA etc.), the radar and sonar mechanics, point defence and shields, air units and AA capabilities, and fairly "realistic" ranges (they were still like 20% of real life ones considering the map sizes, but that's order of magnitude more than in every other fucking RTS game ever made). Also the sea units worked well together with air units and you really felt like this was this grand combined arms struggle for naval dominance, a war in the pacific just with more futuristic weapons. Plus SupCom missions always played as a tug-of-war where you needed to secure an area with patrols/emplacements etc. to push the front line forward and pound the other base. It helped that the game was heavily designed around air, naval and ground units being used together to break through defences, and likewise the defences were also designed with that in mind (who doesn't like building elaborate firebases/artillery emplacements in SupCom both on defence and offence?).

Total Annihilation was no slouch here either and many of the same mechanics came from it after all. But it has been years since I played naval missions in it.

Red Alert 2 while blobby had decent RPS built-in into the naval game (that is for the Soviets and Allies, Yuri has only the Boomer subs) so you needed a mixed force to succeed. It also gets bonus points for the soviet and allied units not being mirror images and needing different things to counter. Take the soviet flak boat, it can shut down the ospreys of the allied gunboat, defending your subs from their hard counter, but if those same gunboats flank past the subs and use their guns directly on the flak boats they're screwed. Likewise you could try to take one sub, lure ospreys away (they're failry slow) while the rest of the sub wolfpack slams torpedoes into the gunboats.

 

[wwsd]

I quite liked how in Rise of Nations, you start with a concept similar to AoE2, but then you have the dichotomy between light ships and heavy ships, and eventually you also get carriers, but they immediately take 9 of your pop (1 for each carrier plane). A bunch of light ships can completely destroy an amphibious invasion if you don't have the ships to protect it, destroying tons of investment in the ground units. It's not incredibly deep but you do need to mix and match your units. Battleships can reduce a city within seconds, but they can be sunk in a heartbeat by subs and attack helicopters.

 

[anvi]

I usually don't like ships in RTS. I think because I don't like having to learn about a bunch of units that can only work on a small part of the map. I would rather focus on getting good at using land armies that can just drive over to the enemy base and win.

Also I like more depth in RTSs and I love stuff like stealth trucks or radar blocking things that can cover a bunch of units. Especially if you have a portable radar unit as well. Then you need some anti air units and some anti infantry, and only with all this protection can your tanks safely head to the enemy base. With ships it is usually just a few big pew pew ships and none of that extra stuff.

I liked in SupCom (cant remember which in the series, maybe all) you got ships that could walk across land on big robotic legs. Very slow but still cool. Also in Beyond All Reason you get ship versions of all the land units. So you can have stealth ship and radar ship and AA ships, submarine hunters, and then your big ships. So they at least have the same depth as land units. But a downside is that they spent all that development time and resources on just duplicating land units in ship form. I would prefer to have no water and those extra 10 ships be ground units instead. More defense towers or something.

I really miss the spark of creativity that Westwood had. Without them I feel a bit like RTS is just going nowhere forever. 20+ years ago Tiberian Sun had stealth, subterranian attacks, land deformation, EMP towers, Sam sites, Cyborg Commando, Ion Cannon, Cluster Missile, that strange thing that flies from your base and randomly targets an enemy building, APCs, engineers could caputre buildings, multiple resource types, green tiberium, blue tiberium, and the orange weeds you could harvest to power up a chemical missile. Firestorm Defense! Multiple aircraft too. Also independents were interesting, those monsters that could wreck your tanks by spitting spikes at them or something.

EA molested the games industry beyond all recognition.

 

[JarlFrank]

I think AOE2 probably has the best naval combat. You had Galleys/Galleons, Fireships, Demolition Ships and Cannon Galleons. Knowing how to manage them properly was the key to winning naval combat.

lol actually the AoE2 community has been arguing about how to fix naval combat for years now, and the recent campaign-only DLC that adds ancient Greece had a completely new experimental naval system with more ship types to make it more interesting.
Also the Definitive Edition has made changes to naval combat long ago, too, in order to make it more balanced and interesting - but instead it just led to a different kind of spam.
Usually you only had the arrow galleys in Feudal Age, now you also get fire galleys. But instead of a mix of the two, now people just spam fire galleys because they easily beat arrow galleys, then switch in the later ages when the regular galleys become stronger. Ultimately it's still just whoever pumps out more ships wins.

The problem with water is that there are much fewer options, no matter the amount of different units you can choose from.
There is no terrain with different heights, and no obstacles. No forests, no hills, just flat water. On land you can exploit height bonuses and try to establish chokepoints, on water you can't.
There's also no building on water. No quickwalling to lock in an enemy or give yourself a quick defensive bonus. No towers. No production buildings. No resource dropoff buildings. On land, you'll fight over a gold mine, place a tower there, kill enemy villagers, have yours take refuge in the tower, etc. On water, there's fishing ships but they have to return all the way to the shore to drop off their food, it's not like little mini-bases can spring up around a source of fish.

Water at its best has maybe 10% of the strategic depth of land, and if one side wins water, it will pretty much keep it because there's few ways of coming back from losing water control.
If they got more ships, they win unless you get more ships, but if they already beat you back you won't out-produce them.
The only eco damage ships can do is kill fishing ships, the villagers on land remain untouched as most maps have enough landmass that villagers don't have to come close to the shore. Anything outside of ship firing range is safe.
The only buildings ships can reliably destroy are docks, everything else is out of range inland.
So the entire water gameplay is basically: one side builds more ships and wins, the other side ignores water from that point onward. That's it.

And there's not much that can be done to make it more interesting within the existing mechanics of AoE2.

 

[Blutwurstritter]

Naval units are simply not needed in most rts games. The pacing is too fast and the maps too small. They worked in Supreme Commander, where you have enough room for them, but in smaller games they are often redundant, and there is next to no reason to include them.
I think naval units could be interesting if they had some gameplay mechanics of their own, but as long as they are mostly land units with restricted movement, they are not of much interest. I prefer their omission, unless someone finds a genuinely interesting way to include naval strategies and mechanics.

 

[Dark Souls II]

I love IRL naval combat, my favorite part of reading about conflicts. From the first punic war to WWII. Never saw it done in a fun way in a video game.

HOI4 was the greatest disappointment. No matter what you do you can't mog the Goy Britain into submission by the means of ubootwaffe. Even if you autistically prioritize uboots from the very start of the game (which is what Hitler should have done irl by the way), the only way the game expects you to actually use uboots is to secure a naval invasion aka put some dudes on transport ships. LAME. It should have been possible to literally starve the english"men" to death by completely cutting them off from their oil soy gibsmedats from the US.

Don't even get me started on ancient naval warfare. I don't think it will ever be done in a video game in a plausible way. Take something like the battle of the Aegates, you have about 200-250 ships on each side, and each of these ships is maneuvering to outmaneuvre the other ships at over 8kn. Would be really hard to give it justice to in a video game. But who even cares? When normies think about the punic wars they think about Cannae and Zama, not the Aegates. Fucking landies with their pleb taste.

The most fun I had with ships in a game is probably Civ IV. I always start with a bunch of coastal cities and prioritize naval techs. Just putting your dudes on galleys and colonizing islands early on is fun, colonizing another continent way before the other players is fun, and corsairmaxxing to destroy everyone's ships is also fun.

 

[Darth Roxor]

I always like naval combat, and I'm always sad that it's almost always half-baked. I think that to work properly, it has to be similar to how air units are typically designed. That is, air units are never 'stuck' in a layer of their own, you can use them for quick harass, bombing runs, airdropping land units, etc., so by contrast when naval units are essentially useful only on sea, they're obviously going to be underwhelming. An example of how to do it properly is in the already mentioned Red Alert 2 - soviet dreads are tougher, double V2 launchers with a different plane of mobility, allied aircraft carriers can keep wrecking a base that is even heavily defended with AA, while shit like aegis cruisers is actually the best AA money can buy, and sea transports are hovercraft that work on both land and sea.

But funnily enough I think the best approach to naval combat was done in Red Alert 3, where you have lots of multi-purpose units that can swim and which have different applications on different gameplay planes. IIRC Japs have a fighter craft that can dive and turn into a submarine, Allied destroyers are tracked and can crawl out to land to act like tanks, engineers have little inflatable boats, and so on and so forth. I remember there was a shitton of breadth in that game when it came to the scope of use for all units.

 

[Jaedar]

But funnily enough I think the best approach to naval combat was done in Red Alert 3, where you have lots of multi-purpose units that can swim and which have different applications on different gameplay planes. IIRC Japs have a fighter craft that can dive and turn into a submarine, Allied destroyers are tracked and can crawl out to land to act like tanks, engineers have little inflatable boats, and so on and so forth. I remember there was a shitton of breadth in that game when it came to the scope of use for all units.

RA3 Does a lot of things right with the naval stuff. They put goldmines in the water so you have resources to fight over, and the only true long range units in the game (at least until the expansion) are the boats, so the navy is also useful for dealing with land units. And as you mention, lots of units are amphibious.

Personally I feel like naval stuff just tends to feel like bad air units. It would be cool if an RTS managed to feature the logistics side of warfare, which could easily make the naval side super relevant, but so far all RTS I know about use magic logistics.

 

[Higher Game]

I hate naval stuff because I'm a incel, not a fag.

 

[Beastro]

Major issue the video covers is how ponderous naval combat can be. You spend a great amount of time and resources to build a navy that could be lost in a single decisive battle, especially with how blobbing Paradox combat can be.

I think the other major issue, as mentioned aboce, is that the AI doesn't understand Mahanian concepts. Fighting no battles, but keeping the enemy away from your transports that are used to land forces in crucial strategic locations is something they can't grasp, as is dispersing their forces in large enough, but numerous task forces to actually do things.

Victoria 2, for example, could be good, but the AI just blobs everything they have into one mass resulting in you exploiting the AI taking time to do things in, say, East Asia until Britains blob arrives from Northern Europe, forcing you to hide until it gets far enough away to sneak out again.

 

[Raghar]

I think AOE2 probably has the best naval combat.

Plus SupCom missions always played as a tug-of-war where you needed to secure an area with patrols/emplacements etc. to push the front line forward and pound the other base. It helped that the game was heavily designed around air, naval and ground units being used together to break through defences

Do you mean this?
(Satellite was horribly imba.)

 

[Ba'al]

I like the ships in Cossacks. You have special siege ships but otherwise the bigger the ship, the stronger it is (and more expensive), so it's very basic. They are costly to make and costly to maintain (Cossacks has upkeep cost for all units) but if you have control over the sea you can shell the ever living shit out of the opponent's town. Most of all, I like them because they're beautiful - you can tell someone on the dev team took special care to model them.

 

[vota DC]

But funnily enough I think the best approach to naval combat was done in Red Alert 3, where you have lots of multi-purpose units that can swim and which have different applications on different gameplay planes. IIRC Japs have a fighter craft that can dive and turn into a submarine, Allied destroyers are tracked and can crawl out to land to act like tanks, engineers have little inflatable boats, and so on and so forth. I remember there was a shitton of breadth in that game when it came to the scope of use for all units.

RA3 Does a lot of things right with the naval stuff. They put goldmines in the water so you have resources to fight over, and the only true long range units in the game (at least until the expansion) are the boats, so the navy is also useful for dealing with land units. And as you mention, lots of units are amphibious.

Personally I feel like naval stuff just tends to feel like bad air units. It would be cool if an RTS managed to feature the logistics side of warfare, which could easily make the naval side super relevant, but so far all RTS I know about use magic logistics.

Amphibious units seems too weak in naval combat while they were strong against land units. Maybe should have better stats and a damage and armor handicap against ground units.
For example tsunami tanks cross the water but you need to spend at least 4X if the enemy Is building naval units.

 

[Lagi]

I think AOE2 probably has the best naval combat.

Plus SupCom missions always played as a tug-of-war where you needed to secure an area with patrols/emplacements etc. to push the front line forward and pound the other base. It helped that the game was heavily designed around air, naval and ground units being used together to break through defences

Do you mean this?
(Satellite was horribly imba.)

OST art of war

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nywHJUe5MJg&list=PLMKXvJmOq5n3sTV0fJXEe9lY812DId1XF&index=5

 

[Lagi]

I really like both in rts and 4x games where you can fully commit to water base/cities. and conduct warfare to the land. f.ex. in Total Annihilation Escalation or BAR you can stick to water.

This creates lots of cool options to transport troops (also in Escalation you could lift with air transports small boat and transport over land to another water pond).
Interesting niche for units: amphibian that can cross rivers, could be a weaker unit. But it gives you the edge to capture points that heavy tanks cannot.
Air units could counter submarines - I love dropping torpedoes from air planes.

Here i put little disclaimer: in macro RTS like TA, Supreme COmmander, BAR... it's not a valid strategy to focus on micro transporting of your units. Because if you are not improving your conga lines, then you are basically losing. Which result with all this toy being a noobs trap and game being simplified to bomber rush or long range artillery (to cross water).

I am very upset when water game is dumb down, because AI cannot handle it. F.ex. unit automatically convert to boats when entering sea hexes (like in Aow4 or Beyond Earth).

-----------

in Fantasy games, i think i didnt encounter any good example of navy game being developed as well as land combat. Maybe except Dominion?

There is usually no options to build anything on water. There are no water cities. There are no points to capture on the sea etc. And even if they are, they are just to tick off the box : "here you can put a flag on this water node. Be happy with water game".

The fuck you except in medieval technology except floating ships?

You could hire sea creatures as submarines.
You could have Cthulhu monsters as amphibians that assault land towns (Nagas).

Spoiler

You could make underwater towns, or floating towns.
There could be water plants (mangrove forest, coral reef)

Spoiler

there could be underwater map layer
You could have jumping fish attacks to hit flyers: whale jumping out of water.

Spoiler

You could have bird units that dive underwater to hit mermaids.
to transport unit underwater - you could have some warcraft like steam tech. Or friendly leviathan is swallowing your units. Swim under enemy ship blockade. And then spit them out on the shore.

Spoiler

.... i would check blue cards from Magic the Gathering for more inspirations.
https://edhrec.com/top/blue

 

[Hellraiser]

Do you mean this?
(Satellite was horribly imba.)

Nuke spam also being a legit strategy, particularly before FA or some early patch castrated the build rate (the Seraphim experimental nuke launcher in FA is still way way slower than release nuke launchers were), was one of the other many great things about SupCom.

 

[Raghar]

I think a lot of problems is that developers have no clue about actual naval combat, strategic planning, and ship design.
Ship design was nice in Warship Gunner 2. You could design guided missile submarine, and then launch barrages of anti-ship missiles from VLS cells.

I analyzed HoI4 ship combat model, and well while it's nice they improved simulation of submarines that makes them not as useless as they were in HoI2. They also annulled gun ranges in naval design DLC. And they screwed up by not modeling submarine warfare properly. Thus submarine instead of having to return to base after using 8-20 torpedoes. It has infinite ammo, fuel is delivered continuously from abstracted global warehouse, and submarine can remain on station indefinitely.
They simulate by naval combat by firing "standard attack" in every hour with some small probability of hit. And they fire standard torpedo with 4 or 3 tick delay to simulate difficulty with making torpedo attack and reloading at sea.

So basically there are better algorithms that allows efficiently simulate naval combat without needing to simulate every large caliber gun projectile. (Considering there are relatively few carriers and heavy cruisers or heavier ships, it's not impossible to simulate into that depth on modern PC. But there are fewer benefits from adding more details when simulation is decent simulation. Computing power requirement increases significantly with each minor improvement.) It's basically about skill and talent to create sufficient simulation, but not too computationally expensive.
Paradox is doing fuck all, and carrier battles are basically based ad hoc decisions of developers. Thus we are lucky that carriers at least losing airplanes during naval battles. If they had to return to port to replenish these aircrafts, that would be even better.

Transporting troops. Escorts for invasion forces. Creating surface groups to kill enemy ships in the area. Creating carrier groups to fight over naval dominance. Creating light carrier groups to screw up shipping in the area. Launching patrol aircraft from land bases to screw up cargo transfers. And if we had WWII simulation we would have HEAVY mining everywhere and fuel shortages even for UK. Nuclear powered carriers do have advantages of moving from point A to B without worry about fuel. But when they get sunk, I wonder what nuclear reactor would do under sea. Fish might become bit radioactive as a consequences.

HoI2 to some extend simulated transport ships as invasion forces, and used an automatic convoy generation to transfer fuel, resources, and ammo + other supplies around.

War in Pacific infamously simulates WWII Japan vs US, and one tick can be one day daylight, then one day night. Basically it's a multiplayer about sending files like 10x a day just to have decent pace. (IIRC there is also coarser simulation where tick is two days.) If it was a freeware game, it would be totally amazing. But it's for money AND developer didn't bother to return to it to improve interface and update it for modern OS. Thus it's basically stuff that abuses copyright law protection and is sold by inertia.
In WiP they manage to simulate carrier warfare quite nicely. Japanese carriers are massively starved of torpedoes and heavy anti-ship bombs, and they have limited capabilities to stay on station. When someone capable plays Japan, and someone less skilled plays US and IS WILLING to take risks. The war looks quite nicely. US carriers are exploding. Japanese ships are experiencing problem that theirs crew doesn't know into what direction they should pump water when there is fire or flooding.
In addition, it simulates minimum size of port facilities that are needed for repair of heavy ships. Thus capturing of Singapore isn't just a capture of strategic location that is needed for fights in India area and to protect Malaysia and oil sources. It's also critical for having a repair facilities that can repair heavy ships without need to go back to Japan.

Gunnery combat in WIP isn't that great. They basically let ships close distance, and then expand the distance again. Then they simulate chance to hit. They also simulate ammo stocks (probably as ammo expenditure per hour). But it allows for situations like when US carriers are low on anti air ammo, and then sunk because of that. Or when victorious Japanese battleships with next to zero remaining ammo for main gun encounters enemy heavy cruisers before they can return to base to replenish ammo.

There were only 175 Fletcher-class destroyers in USN, which can be easily simulated as 175 unique ships with decent damage model.
Japan started with 113 Destroyers (most of them were kinda crap and Japan needed to get serious with convoy escorts). And 63 were build during the war. Matsu class was the needed convoy escort. And Akizuki was the needed decent multipurpose Destroyer with heavy anti air ability.

HoI4 players who are roleplaying and who gets into war with allies by an accident, these player are HEAVILY building ASW specialized light destroyers to fight against submarines to have at least some safe sea lanes. They typically manage churn out 30 per year. (equivalent of Mutsu class) Which is what Japanese should be doing in 1941 as well. Then players are building carriers and screaming murder how they can't have enough steel and manufacturing capacities to make needed anti air fast long range destroyers AND light cruisers.

So yea. HoI4 is at least simulating naval manufacturing. But the naval combat is lacking. And I blame developers for not making better naval stuff because they don't have a clue about real naval operations.

Imagine if Paradox developers would have skills and knowledge of Harpoon Classic developers.

 

[Galdred]

I think it's a fundamental conceptional problem, regardless of what kind of strategy game you're playing.

Land war and naval war are fundamentally different in real life. Most of the time, land war follows the pattern of "resources exist in enemy land -> we send our guys there -> we kill the enemy guys there -> now it's our land -> our resources."

In contrast, most naval wars are not fought for resources, but for access and denying access to the enemy, which in turn greatly affects land war - Mahanian doctrine and all that jazz. Very different "mechanics" in real life. It's fundamentally different, therefore it translates into games fundamentally differently. And, well, game developers have limited energy, money, time and knowledge, and they'll sacrifice a deep, convincing naval war experience in favour of a (hopefully, lol) deep and convincing land war experience.

I agree, the difference between ground and see combat is pretty extreme:
Land and naval warfare operate at very different scales, both logistically, and strategically.
That is, you cannot really "establish control" at sea as firmly as you'd do on land, let alone having frontline, but on the other hand, you can also "soft control" a much larger area.
The issue is that very few games can afford to have totally different mechanisms for both.
World in Flames and World at War: a world divided both managed to have a very differently feel for land and sea battles:

As you can see in WiF, land has a ton of hexagons, but in sea, you just stack ships in one of the sea area and that's it. So a single fleet can control one third of the Mediterranean, while an army corp will control a single hexagon and its direct neighbours. The numbered squares are for "ship speed/scouting". The higher the better(slow ships are limited to lower tiles, as are ships that had to move from another port, or remained at sea for an, extensive period of time), but if you split your fleet, and the opponent manages to get surprise on you, he can decide to engage only one box at a time.
However, enemy naval units can coexist in the same seabox, and fail to find each other (or one can succeed in its search check, while the other might fail, which will usually happen when a fleet with carrier/land based air support fights one without it).

World at War is much less extreme in that land units control much larger areas, but Sea units can move a lot, and have limited detection capabilities so you need to guess where your opponent is (you commit all moves at once), while land units will never attack in the dark.

Some sea only games are also pretty cool(rule the waves, or even games like Port Royal/Patrician 3...), but it's a lot easier if you don't have a ground component, or a minimal one:

in OG Warplan Pacific (the one from 2014, I haven't tried the new one yet), you and your opponent both give order simultaneously, so you have a good chance to miss the opposing force, but you can guesstimate where it can go depending on where the fleet is based, and where it has land air support.
Ground combat is heavily abstracted, though.
In a way, it is the same with most space 4X: ground combat is very abstracted, while fleet combat is way more detailled.

These 3 games sadly have some issues:
- WiF is a board game first that takes 100h to play (and quite a few square meters), and the PC adaptation is still lackluster, without an AI...
- WaW: A world Divided is pretty good, but mostly in MP, and I am not sure there is still a community left given how old the game is.
- OG Warplan Pacific was pretty sluggish last time I tried it.

 

[Khor1255]

There was an old Sega game called Pirates Gold where the naval combat (though crude because of the technical limitations of games back then) was really fun.

The thing that made it cool is that you had to account for the direction and speed of the wind against which kind of ship you were on (usually smaller less armed ships had by far the greatest maneuverability). Then you also had to calculate range of your cannon and even which way your ship was tilting before you fired.

With today's mechanics and graphics engines they could make a truly awesome looking game that also factored in things like rain etc. I have no idea if anyone has done much in age of sail type games but the potential for a lot of fun is certainly there.

 

[mondblut]

I think AOE2 probably has the best naval combat. You had Galleys/Galleons, Fireships, Demolition Ships and Cannon Galleons. Knowing how to manage them properly was the key to winning naval combat.

*Laughs in Rule the Waves-ish*

 

[Raghar]

Well, I might write another post about theory.

Looks like lot of developers read some books and came to conclusion that "guided missile battleship can't exist", "AI shouldn't build new capital ships, with perhaps exception of carriers". And various other stupidities.

Lets look at a some common naval combat situations:
-You are Japan and you need to use aircraft to spot US submarines. You use escort carriers and these light weight easy to build ships can deal with a solitary US submarine, or at least make it screaming like a little girl. (Coincidentally all three Japanese CVE were killed by submarine.)
-You need to park some airfield at striking distance from island and launch air support for invasion forces.
-You need to kill US patrol aircraft before they kill that submarine or convoy. You launch few airplanes and typically kill them before they attack possibly even without losses.

An aircraft carrier that has between 20-30 aircraft and which is 9800-20000 tons large ship which can move at fuel economic speeds can be cheap, it can be build in numbers, and it can counter small attacks with ease. And this is why US build 50 of them for its own use, and then they made 19 of upgraded class. (Then they were faced with major problem called too many small aircraft carriers.)

Examples are:
Taiyo which has 21 kts speed, 23+4 aircraft, and 18116 tons. (It's basically light aircraft carrier with CVE speed and CVE number of aircraft, because Japanese are...)
Casablanca 19 kts speed, 27 aircraft, and 11077 tons. (And crap AA.)
It's interesting that US decided to either have supercarriers, or slow escort carriers with decent number of airplanes. US light carriers were just cruiser conversions with the same number of airplanes as CVE. They probably didn't want to make ANY CVL, but FDR ordered them to make some light carriers, thus they bite the bullet and instead of paying 2x more for salaries and maintenance of BIG carriers, they had some completely usable fast light carriers. Considering when Japan or US needed fast carriers they also typically needed big carriers. Slow CVE were perfectly functional alternative to CVL.

From point of view of current HoI4 developers the above could be well simulated by creating and placing about 50 CVE task groups on world map and set their airwings to operate in the sea region. Considering they broken HoI4 naval system because they wanted to improve automation and make navy less micro intensive, it kinda counters the original idea. I actually had 2 CVE with 2-3 ASW DD to accompany them to protect them from submarine attacks. And that complemented about 100 naval bombers that were flying ASW patrols day and night around the critical area between China and Japan. I could use 6 groups of CVE. Thus if player damages himself by playing worse on purpose, player can make navy that is behaving like real world navy. But, they made that difficult.

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So yea, proper naval simulation is doable in strategy games. But, developers are either believing random absurd ideas regurgitated by historians and book/movie writers, or developers don't want to waste effort. (Developers not wasting effort is weird consequence of mature computer games industry that is making games for profit, and paying developers to write a commercial product.)