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Naval Warfare Quickstart Guide

(this wiki page is a draft)

Overview

This is a brief quickstart intro to the experimental naval warfare feature. As this feature is expected to change a lot before it can be declared stable, no tutorial has been written for it yet. This wiki page documents it in the state it is in version 1.2 of Widelands.

Naval warfare lets players conquer enemy ports and port spaces even when they are not reachable from land. It makes games with the Autocrat win condition winnable on maps with islands.

As it is an experimental feature in version 1.2, it is disabled by default. You can enable it on seafaring maps in the New Game window under Game Options.

The main concept of naval warfare is the warship. A warship can carry soldiers, who can attack enemy ports or even portspaces that are occupied by other buildings. Warships can also fight other warships, but they can not attack anything on land themselves.

Details

You can refit any transport ship to a warship and vice versa using the Refit button in the ship's window. Refitting takes place at a port and is free.

Warships can garrison soldiers. You can control the capacity and hero/rookie exchange. Soldiers can only be exchanged while the warship is in a port.

You can control warships much like expedition ships.

Warships can attack other warships in range. Click on an enemy warship to open an attack window.

The mechanics of naval battle are much like for soldier fights.

All soldiers on a warship give the ship's attack strength a bonus (heroes count more than rookies); the bottom bar below the ship's health bar indicates how much of a bonus the ship gets.

Ship-to-ship fights always end with one ship getting sunk.

Damaged ships heal when in a port.

There is no kind of training for ships.

There are no battle animations yet.

When a warship finds a port space, regardless of whether the space is owned by an enemy player or unowned, and regardless of whether the owner has a port there or not, it can launch an invasion. Click on the port space to open the invasion attack window.

Any enemy warships in range will defend against the invasion. If there are no defenders or if your invasion can defeat them all, the selected invasion soldiers land around the port space. If your soldiers land successfully, they go around conquering nearby enemy militarysites (as well as ports and HQs).

You can use the attack window for those sites if you want to destroy instead of conquer.

Any invasion soldiers who do not occupy conquered militarysites will conquer the port space and guard it indefinitely until you build a port nearby or otherwise connect it to your economy.

  • Warehouses and ports now have garrison settings (accessible from the Soldiers tab), so you can make sure they don't remain undefended.
  • Expedition enhancements, also available to warships: set ship destinations to ports, other ships, pinned notes on water, or previously discovered port spaces
  • This also allows you to group multiple ships into armadas
  • Fleet targets for ships and ferries: you can set the number of ships and ferries to be built, so you don't have to start and stop ship- and ferry yards manually. To do so, click on the shoreline within the work area of a yard, and in the field menu, you will find the fleet target icons.