Modern naval combat is borked.

[Stromko]

The capacity for aircraft, especially carrier-based, to completely decimate rival navies has been a key principle of modern naval warfare. As it is right now in Civ 4 with Warlords and BTS, you need at the very minimum a 2:3 ratio of warships versus your enemy or you cannot be a naval presence.

The advantage of knocking down your foe's hitpoints to 50% is inconsequential unless you can get your own warship, damaged by the fight, back to port before a counter-attack. You can have an enormous fleet of bombers and fighters, but if the enemy sends two destroyers and you have only one, you're best off staying out of the water.

You've got a good chance to destroy one damaged ship, but the second has an equally good chance to destroy yours. If they've foregone aircraft to create more destroyers or battleships, this will be far more advantageous than a mixed-forces approach.

Carriers are worthless when you take into account their necessity for escort. If you have warships to spare for defending your carrier and their defenseless fighters, you could've just as readily overwhelmed the enemy navy with sheer numbers. The above point that taking out 50% of the enemy is useless unless you have numerical equality also stands to make carriers a total waste of production capacity.

It is true that the recon capabilities of aircraft can be helpful, but beyond building a single fighter and stationing it in the nearest city to the action, this still doesn't necessitate a real mixed-unit approach to modern intercontinental warfare.

If aircraft either a) completely sink ships, or b) decimate them to the extent that a comparable warship will destroy them without heavy damage, then I feel naval combat would be expanded greatly.

The gimping of aircraft versus naval units is entirely unnecessary when transports and their escort fleets can readily move from 'way the hell out of range' to 'on shore' within 2 turns. If you're running recon sorties every turn and placing multiple aircraft within your coastal cities, I think you've earned every right to sink a ship or two.

I feel that naval combat is further broken in that, unlike tanks, destroyers and battleships don't get blitz. If the enemy sends a crapload of galleys at you and your sentry'd destroyer encounters them before they reach shore, then a crapload -1 is going to reach your shores and the invasion is on.

It all seems especially unfortunate because they certainly saw the use of effective fighters and bombers in the 'Final Frontier' mod. The squadron doctrine is an entirely viable path to victory. An escorted carrier fleet, or a fleet of cruisers and destroyers, or a fleet of battleships with destroyers to deal with enemy fighters, are all viable strategies in that mod. But in normal Civ IV, the only fleet that's smart to build is lots of battleships to achieve naval supremacy.

[Blake]

Mass air (land based) + mobile/stealthy ships would tend to beat the crap out pure battleship (a damaged battleship is easy to kill with a (stealth) destroyer or sub). You want to bring along a carrier or two with defensive fighters.

Purely offensively, carriers are pretty weak. You're probably better off with cruise missiles and tactical nukes for purposes of softening up land targets (and sea units/stacks for that matter). But don't underestimate the benefit of having the cover of intercepting fighters.

[Stromko]

I tried submarines against 50% damaged destroyers, the subs still had a 1 in 2 chance of being sunk themselves. Mass air really has no purpose, a fighter or two can max out the damage on a ship and the rest of the airfleet won't even take off. "Hey they've got a damage decal on, what more do you want from us?"

My air units do a fairly decent job of softening up cities, at least enough that my infantry can defeat air-damaged knights and musketeers, but naval units for some goofy-ass reason can't be damaged nearly as much as land units can, by air. It's funny because naval units are in reality the most vulnerable to air attack.

(edit) The issue I have with this is it really seems like your only option if your opponent goes all-out making lots of destroyers or battleships (whatever technology allows), your only choice is to do the same. In the game I was just playing before I quit in disgust over this issue, all I'd gotten for my combined-arms approach to conquering the seas was a lot of wasted production that should've gone to pumping out destroyers.

Carriers have some purpose in land invasions (excellent for softening up cities), but their rightful status as queens of the sea is usurped. Why should battleships be the dominant naval ship instead of carriers? I realize that fighters could be too powerful with the currently very low rate of deadly interceptions, but why don't they just bump up the interception odds and fatalities of aircraft instead of rendering them a footnote in naval conflicts? Sure they make a difference, but not enough to make a mixed force as good as a full-warship force.

[Micah Goodman]

I have to agree, naval combat is not modeled very well at all. But let's face it if you want a detailed naval combat simulator Civ IV will never be the game for you. Carriers are a compleate waste of hammers as far as naval combat is concerned. Naval combat boils down to who has the most ships.

[PrinceBimz]

Battleships - Can sink ships, bombard cities and in BtS blockade.

Carriers - Can recon, bomb cities, intercept planes, damage ships, damage ground units, destroy improvements and attack at much further range. Hint - move carrier, then attack with fighters, thats your range.

Not a waste of hammers. So you guys can use battleships, its like... give... me... carriers! Anyday!

[PrinceBimz]

Re: Modern naval combat is borked.

Originally posted by Stromko
The gimping of aircraft versus naval units is entirely unnecessary when transports and their escort fleets can readily move from 'way the hell out of range' to 'on shore' within 2 turns.

Just 2 turns? It all depends on the map and where those ships are headed. If you play a water heavy map, it can take twice as many turns or more for a ship to get onshore. Then flying recon with carrier fighters you can find them easily. I play archipelago maps mostly so I guess my experiences are different then others.

[LDiCesare]

Just 2 turns? It all depends on the map and where those ships are headed. If you play a water heavy map, it can take twice as many turns or more for a ship to get onshore. Then flying recon with carrier fighters you can find them easily. I play archipelago maps mostly so I guess my experiences are different then others.

You can still chain transports in Civ IV: Line one of them at one turn's move distance from each other and use them to ferry your troops over any distance in 2 turns (1:get in the ships safely at home and move all the way to "near landing point" where your escorts are, 2:land). That's a bit ludicrous, but you can effectively move over any distance over the seas in 2 turns if you have enough transports.

[dregor]

When trying to blockade enemy cities, it definitely pays to have some carrier groups in the area offering intercept defense for the blockading ships.

[Stromko]

It all comes back to that aircraft can't sink ships, aircraft can't even =badly damage= ships, therefore aircraft have no bearing on naval combat. They're pretty handy when you're invading, they can pretty well decimate city defenders giving you very good odds of victory if you take the time to let them do their work. On the other hand, if you've enough naval power to kill 50% damaged ships without your own vessel being damaged enough for the enemy to come right up and finish them off, you probably have close to a 1:1 ratio on warships anyway.

Therefore, the way it is now, naval warfare come back to a simple contest of hammers expended. You might have enough of an economic advantage to have both parity of warships and the ability to bring aircraft to the fray, they would certainly help, but they won't tip the scales much.

On the other hand, far as I've seen, aircraft are rather unlikely to actually get shot down. Now and again if I'm sending them against destroyers they might get intercepted, sure, but I just have to let them heal a few turns and they're ready for action again. If they were balanced by being more fragile rather than just being useless, I'd be happier with that. Losing a fighter or two and sinking a destroyer sounds fair to me, and sinking an undefended transport or battleship with a fleet of fighters and bombers seems fair too.

I don't find aircraft set to intercept missions to be useful right now. They're as likely to get shot down as the enemy is, they increase what I have to protect by needing a carrier in the area, and for all that protection all I'm getting is my fleet doesn't get knocked down to half-health. Well boohoo, ships get sunk all the time anyway. If I have twice as many ships because I didn't waste my resources on carriers, fighters, and submarines, I'll have enough destroyers and battleships to come out on top anyway.

(edit) I think this fix would be best in a mod, but I'm kind of clueless about how to get started. I'm only able to get a simple 'slow tech' mod working about 50% of the time, with no idea why it sometimes refuses to work. If I could, I'd make it so aircraft could reduce land units to 20% and naval units to 10% (or sink them entirely), but they were twice as likely to get intercepted. I think I'll take a look and see how difficult this would be.

[Wiglaf]

Carriers are worthless when you take into account their necessity for escort. If you have warships to spare for defending your carrier and their defenseless fighters, you could've just as readily overwhelmed the enemy navy with sheer numbers. The above point that taking out 50% of the enemy is useless unless you have numerical equality also stands to make carriers a total waste of production capacity.

Carriers are critical for overseas invasions.

A stack of destroyers (5 or so) takes down a city's defenses to 0...then a stack of fighters (6, on 2 carriers) can bomb the units to about 40% strength each. Then some marines (8 on 2 transports) can quickly take and raze a city.

if there's an overseas civ trying for a culture win, 2 carriers, some fighters and a transport will end it right there.

If you just want an anti-navy armada, then carriers aren't very useful.

[Solver]

Carriers are actually not critical enough, IMO, I'd like to see them even more important. They're critical for taking that first city, but of you establish a beachhead, you can base some aerial units in there. The air unit limit makes Carriers more important in BtS, but the importance could be increased even further.

[Stromko]

I tried my hand at modding aircraft to be a bit more realistic, just modding unitinfos and gamespeedinfo(for an unrelated change) but it turned out rather crashy. I'll probably take another stab at it, maybe it was checking for custom graphics because I grabbed the config file out of the 'Next War' mod directory.

I thought I was testing it again and it was running fine but it turned out it was either not doing anything or I forgot to load the mod.. hate that. Once again I'm at the same impasse, I'm at war with the Vikings who have enormous numbers of destroyers, not doing as badly as before as I do have a number of destroyers and battleships myself, but for the sake of land invasions I now-- or rather did-- have 4 full carriers with large defensive fleets.

I just suffered the indignity of getting chased across the ocean by a handful of destroyers and finally having my greatest fleet sunk, my fighters unable to do anything against said ships because they were already at 50%. My battleship and destroyer escorts were worn down slowly but surely by the half-damaged attackers. It's just further proof that aircraft are irrelevant to naval warfare, a slap in the face to anyone who's a fan of Midway. :P

The Vikings, the rather powerful nation I'm going up against, don't seem to have a single air unit, and yet they're taking over the archipelago. They've been kicking everyone's rump by attacking with big stacks of trebuchets and now artillery. Despite never having aerial superiority, they're going to win. That's just broken and I refused to play any further.

I'm going to take another crack at modding it, and hoping that it won't become crashy again. I'm getting so frustrated I'd rather just uninstall it though. Putting 16 hours into a game and having it degenerate into a broken mess is seriously giving me intestinal spasms(and those things freaking hurt).

[Wiglaf]

It seems like it should be easy to mod aircraft to be able to do 100% damage..? How are you going about doing it?

[Kuciwalker]

What Wiglaf said - just remove the limit. Simple, no?

[Stromko]

Well it crashed like crazy the first time I tried to mod it. I've no idea why. Seems to be working this time.. at least, it isn't crashing yet. I've yet to get air units but the tech-speed change I implemented seems to be in force.