Attrition

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TH - The Hunt
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Attrition

Post by TH - The Hunt » Sat Jul 04, 2020 11:44 pm

I've made some other more specific suggestions for new attrition rules, but more general proposal:

Ships could suffer from attrition the same as land units do, a 20% or higher chance of sinking whenever they move through a sea zone. Weaving and Carpentry might reduce this for one ship, per character with the NWPs, but not for a fleet, the way the other attrition-reduction NWPs do for armies. In addition, we'd never again see fleets of more than ten ships parked in one spot all winter, since this would result in them getting destroyed by storms--smaller fleets, more strategic warfare.

This shouldn't interfere with income from trade, since that's averaged over the seasons (like all other income), but it would all but guarantee the loss of some ships when moving troops during any season but summer. As well,

I've found the construction of huge navies has been unbalancing/short-circuiting the gameplay in all three of these past games, and it's always been weird that shipwrecks never happen unless there's a fight. If the reason we don't want to shuffle ships around to safe harbours each year is because it would take too long, we should have fewer of them. This would give a bigger incentive to build large vessels like roundships, which adds more tactical complexity, since they can't use rivers.

More complex, but also interesting--and a way to make the early game more stable and less chaotic, if the baseline attrition rate for ships is increased--would be if different types of ships had different attrition rates, just like the ships in the DMG have different seaworthiness ratings. This would add another incentive to invest in naval technology, and large ships for risky naval transportation.

Basic longships could have a 20% chance of sinking when leaving the coast, even in summer, while the pinnacle of naval technology might be so attrition-resistant that, with attrition-reduction NWPs, they could even safely transit the Thaelassian Sea, unless hit was a Severe Winter. (The Terror and the Erebus come to mind.)
"The Hunt rides. The Hunt protects."

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