Best strategy for getting maximum concessions

[voelfgar]

I never played RTW2 and have only been playing RTW3 for about a month. What is the best strategy to get the maximum concessions, aka possession value points?  Do you always just select going for the all-out win whenever peace negotiation events occur?

thanks for any insight and help.

[ewaldvonkleist]

From my experience a clear VP lead, demolished enemy fleet and high enemy unrest increase the chance of you getting a lot of concession points. To achieve this you need a long war, so always take the hard option in the peace event.

At the same time, you need a good negotiation position yourself, so keep your unrest low to avoid a premature compromise peace.
Invasions are often a better way to get more clay, especially for high value colonies which often are too expensive for peace treaties. 

[voelfgar]

But how can I invade a territory? or do I just have to wait for the game to give me that option, if it ever does?

[cabalamat]

Aug 28, 2023 13:26:36 GMT -6 voelfgar said:

But how can I invade a territory? or do I just have to wait for the game to give me that option, if it ever does?

Basically, yes.

I feel the biggest flaw in RTW3 (and RTW2) is that invading is too hard, and when you can do it, your new territory is worth hardly anything so it's pointless anyway. And since a large part of naval warfare is about protecting your territories and conquering others, that makes the whole game pointless.

When I first got RTW2 I was very enthusiastic about it as it was one of the best games ever as it allowed you do design realistic warships (i.e. ones that behaved like real ones did) and fight them. I even wrote a mod manager so I could add my favourite mods.

But I gradually got more disenchanted, mostly for the reason given above.

When RTW3 came out I was pleased. Looking at YouTube videos I liked the new ship designer as you could manually place secondary/tertiary turrets. "Great", I thought, "I can design Yamato-type ships with secondary turrets on the centerline!". But unfortunately it transpired that the placing of turrets was purely cosmetic: it didn't alter the behaviour of the ship at all.

Frankly, the new ship designer is crap. The idea was, I presume, to make the ships look better, but to do that properly you'd have to have proper 3D graphics (which incidently is possibly on a small-budget game as NavalArt has done it). At least with the old ship designer you got sensible drawing that looked a bit like old diagrams from Jane's or Brassey's, and were thus useful for quickly seeing a ship's armament at a glance. The new top view just looks like a grey greyness.

A better strategy would have been to keep the old ship designer. Or, if changing it, make the new things you can change actually do something.

For example, there's a check to prevent you from putting 3 or 4 gun turrets on fast ships. This is artificial and better would be to allow the user to place the turrets anywhere they fit (as turret could have rectangular bounding box such that nothing else can be in that box. Then the turret can go in if it fits the width of the ship. Of course, short fat ships need more horsepower to go at a particular speed than long thin ships, so that's a trade-off (and trade offs were a very important part of ship design!). And allow players to place their guns where they like -- and that determines fields of fire.

Another feature added is officers -- I find that a lot of micromanaging hassle which overall detracts from the game.

Manually created divisions is a good feature -- but it would be a lot better if, when the player is initiating a naval action, they get to manually choose which ships to send on that action. Oh and raiders should be more than one ship, it should be possible to send a whole raiding fleet to fight together against the enemy's convoys.

But the simplest things NWS could do are (1) to make invasions easier (trigger more often, allow longer range, and allow them to jump off from an ally's territory), and (2) make colonies much more valueable. Or at least, make it easy for the player community to change them by changing the save files.

[voelfgar]

I'd just like to be able to move my fleet to a sea zone and order an invasion. I've had to defend 2 invasions but haven't been given the opportunity to do one.

As to your second point, you can by modding the mapdata file in your save folder.

[cabalamat]

Aug 28, 2023 16:34:44 GMT -6 voelfgar said:

I'd just like to be able to move my fleet to a sea zone and order an invasion. I've had to defend 2 invasions but haven't been given the opportunity to do one.

As to your second point, you can by modding the mapdata file in your save folder.

My understanding is that if you change the file to make colonies more valueable, it also makes them uninvadable, which defeats the point. I don't think there should be anywhere that's uninvadable except perhaps home territories.

[ludovic]

Wait, you can no longer order invasions like you could in RTW2? I'm definitely not picking up 3 then. If it's random on the part of the PC, yet the enemy invasions are still more powerful, then that is the worst of both worlds. Before picking up 2, I had feared that I would be running around guessing where my enemy's next invasion would be, and without a robust tactical and strategic intelligence system I would not have a realistic chance of finding out my enemy's plans before they could invade while I was weak. Thankfully, while that was true in 2, it was not that important a drawback.

I am okay with colonies not being worth much money. They gave you a lot of income but they cost a lot to defend. Then again I could see them giving you a temporary boost to your naval spending since it might increase the naval budget while not increasing your country's budget overall.

However, I think a generic victory should be worth a lot more. There are plenty of country pairings, especially on continental Europe, where if one nation totally defeated another to the point of collapse, the victor could be able to take adjacent territory populated by people who share the ethnicity of the victor. The combination of these factors would tend to make integrating them into your main homeland easier and more lucrative. And for reasons of game balance, and not having to keep a map and/or matrix, and to make room for alternative history, this bonus should be applied to everyone not simply some countries in Europe. The pushback to this has always been that a purely naval victory would not lead to such a victory on the ground, which is true for a treaty, but not a collapse.

[ewaldvonkleist]

You can still pick invasions manually. Go to the map, click on a >10 value enemy possessions, and if you are within range you can order an invasion.
It can sometimes take a while until the invasion happens, but in general the system works.

[ewaldvonkleist]

Aug 29, 2023 1:37:46 GMT -6 cabalamat said:

Aug 28, 2023 16:34:44 GMT -6 voelfgar said:

I'd just like to be able to move my fleet to a sea zone and order an invasion. I've had to defend 2 invasions but haven't been given the opportunity to do one.

As to your second point, you can by modding the mapdata file in your save folder.

My understanding is that if you change the file to make colonies more valueable, it also makes them uninvadable, which defeats the point. I don't think there should be anywhere that's uninvadable except perhaps home territories.

One option is to split colonies in several smaller colonies which can be invaded one-by-one. Is a bit more effort though. 

[ewaldvonkleist]

Aug 28, 2023 16:34:44 GMT -6 voelfgar said:

I'd just like to be able to move my fleet to a sea zone and order an invasion. I've had to defend 2 invasions but haven't been given the opportunity to do one.

As to your second point, you can by modding the mapdata file in your save folder.

You must manually order an invasion by clicking on launch invasion in the possession window you can reach via the map, which then will semi-randomly start a few turns later. Did you do this? 

[Nicholas]

Aug 29, 2023 10:42:29 GMT -6 ludovic said:

Wait, you can no longer order invasions like you could in RTW2? I'm definitely not picking up 3 then. If it's random on the part of the PC, yet the enemy invasions are still more powerful, then that is the worst of both worlds. Before picking up 2, I had feared that I would be running around guessing where my enemy's next invasion would be, and without a robust tactical and strategic intelligence system I would not have a realistic chance of finding out my enemy's plans before they could invade while I was weak. Thankfully, while that was true in 2, it was not that important a drawback.

I am okay with colonies not being worth much money. They gave you a lot of income but they cost a lot to defend. Then again I could see them giving you a temporary boost to your naval spending since it might increase the naval budget while not increasing your country's budget overall.

However, I think a generic victory should be worth a lot more. There are plenty of country pairings, especially on continental Europe, where if one nation totally defeated another to the point of collapse, the victor could be able to take adjacent territory populated by people who share the ethnicity of the victor. The combination of these factors would tend to make integrating them into your main homeland easier and more lucrative. And for reasons of game balance, and not having to keep a map and/or matrix, and to make room for alternative history, this bonus should be applied to everyone not simply some countries in Europe. The pushback to this has always been that a purely naval victory would not lead to such a victory on the ground, which is true for a treaty, but not a collapse.

You can still order invasions like in RTW2, don't worry about it. We haven't regressed to RTW1 with random invasions or added in tonnage requirements like in Ultimate Admirals, as far as I know.

[voelfgar]

I assume I first have to be at war with that nation? I must have missed that part on manually starting an invasion.
.

[Nicholas]

Aug 29, 2023 14:57:33 GMT -6 voelfgar said:

I assume I first have to be at war with that nation? I must have missed that part on manually starting an invasion.
.

Let's take it from the top. First ya gotta start a war with that nation, yes. For example, I side with Germany and start a war with Russia. Then ya go to your map and select a possession that ya want to invade. In this example, I decide I want to take the Baltic States, so I go to the map click on the Baltic States and select invasion target. After that it'll take some time before the battle generator actually generates the naval invasion battle where ya gotta escort some transports to the invasion site. Don't rightly know all of the factors in getting that battle though, weather being disagreeable is one and another being you don't have superiority over the area being another, though ya can at least do something about that.

[voelfgar]

Yes, I tried it real quick. made the war more fun but for my second invasion of the war, weather delayed it, then it settled on a peace deal that only got me 8 possession points.