Intro
Here is a short short guide on naval actions in the game. Naval combat itself is pretty much like land combat, except that there are no terrain modifiers to worry about, and some of the ship promotions are incredible.
The Basics
The big thing to talk about here though, is moving troops across the water using your ships.
Here’s what you need to know:
- The first ship you can build is the Bireme. Biremes have an anchor radius of seven tiles, extending three tiles away from the ship in all directions, plus the tile the ship is sitting on.
- When you have a ship selected, you’ll see an “anchor” option. Mousing over this option will put an overlay on the map showing the anchoring radius.
- You cannot transport troops across the water on the same turn you issue the anchorage command.
- There’s a 1 turn cooldown, so you’ll need to wait until the following turn.
- Your best bet is to put your troops on the coast the same turn you anchor the ship, and then on the following turn, you’ll be able to move them across the water to attack an island or nearby landmass.
- You can even daisy-chain multiple ships if the initial seven tile anchorage radius proves to be insufficient, and as you research additional techs and unlock more advanced ships, your anchorage radius will increase (you may also increase it with certain promotions to your ships).
In practice, the main use of naval units in Old World is to serve as a bridge to give you access to a nearby island. Only rarely is naval combat an integral part of the game, but it does happen.
When it does, you owe it to yourself to spend some time looking at the ship-based promotions very closely.
While many of them are identical to the promotions available to your land units, ships do have some unique options available that can make them powerful indeed.
“Grappler” for example, gives you the ability to stun an enemy ship in the same way that a Tactician leader can stun enemy units in the field. That’s huge.
The “Lading” promotion increases the radius of the anchorage function by 1 tile, which can be a critical advantage, depending on the map.
The bottom line is that if navy is important in one of your games, then having a squadron of Grapplers and a few transports with the “Lading” promotion will make your navy wildly more effective than vanilla, non-upgraded ships of the line.
Strategy Notes On Anchoring
Here’s a tip/trick I only recently discovered:
When you anchor your ship, you don’t have to include the coastline IF your borders extend into the water.
My habit had always been to make sure my “anchorage zone” touched the shore but this isn’t necessary if your borders extend into the water on the coast. As long as your anchorage zone touches your coastal borders, you’re good, which means that you can often increase the width of your anchorage zone by 1 additional tile, which could mean the difference between needing two ships or just one.
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