Convoy Raiding

[Charliedazc]

I have played quite a bit of the game, but I still don't understand convoy raiding. Honestly most of naval warfare is pretty strange. You have zero control of anything and what the orders do is extremely unclear. The only thing that works clearly is convoy raiding, which can also not be countered in any way except for having huge amounts of convoys so raiding has as small an effect as possible. I is very frustrating. Even when you end up "killing" a fleet, it just instantly respawns and starts doing it again, so fighting is completely useless. You can only hope to raid them harder or have more population to lose to attrition when your armies are fighting overseas. On the internet, everyone just assure things as if they were the game developers, even though they don't really know or understand .
Can anyone that actually KNOWS how it works, please explain?

[kgkong]

If you beat a fleet in a naval battle, they are blocked from using naval invasions until they recover.

You can use any other of the admiral commands at any time unless in the middle of a naval battle.

Raiding convoys just means you send your fleet to a sea node that sinks the enemies convoys reducing their trades, and their market access that utilizes that sea node.

Naval functions in this game work just fine. The problem is the UI indicating anything is going on is a pain because it's not fully fleshed out yet and the devs are actively working on ways to improve the visibility of the various naval aspects of the game.

So what exactly are you confused about after I explained this?

[Charliedazc]

Im talking mostly about convoy raiding and escorting. Escorting does basically nothing to prevent raiding. From time to time you engage their fleet, you kill a couple men and as soon as the battle is over, they just keep raiding. If they have 5 small fleets, you are just basically wasting your fleet escorting. You might as well raid yourself or naval invade to get some value out of them. This doesn't apply much to big countries like the UK who have like 100k convoys, making raiding pretty useless too.
Just to give a personal example. As ming, i was fighting in alaska, putting my whole fleet to escort convoys for a 10 brigade army to keep it supplied. A russian 5 boat navy kept my supply at like 20% constantly even though my navy kept engaging it. It just stayed there and kept raiding after every fight like nothing happened.

[kgkong]

Originally posted by Charliedazc:

Im talking mostly about convoy raiding and escorting. Escorting does basically nothing to prevent raiding. From time to time you engage their fleet, you kill a couple men and as soon as the battle is over, they just keep raiding. If they have 5 small fleets, you are just basically wasting your fleet escorting. You might as well raid yourself or naval invade to get some value out of them. This doesn't apply much to big countries like the UK who have like 100k convoys, making raiding pretty useless too.
Just to give a personal example. As ming, i was fighting in alaska, putting my whole fleet to escort convoys for a 10 brigade army to keep it supplied. A russian 5 boat navy kept my supply at like 20% constantly even though my navy kept engaging it. It just stayed there and kept raiding after every fight like nothing happened.

You may have been raided by other fleets as well. It takes some time as well before your escort fleet will meet up with the convoys to protect them too. You won't notice the impact of escorting right away, it can take some time. And sometimes you might be escorting the trade route at the destination but not from the beginning which can cause some issues in defending convoys.

[Charliedazc]

It has nothing to do with the preparation time. You can see when the fleet is still preparing and even if there is only one fleet, they still raid regardless of the defending fleet and even right after they lost a battle. They are not sent back home, and their undermanned navies don't lose any raiding efficiency, they raid exactly as many convoys as they do with full manpower. You can see at the navy info in the node which fleet is raiding where. After naval invading, the fleet automatically escorts convoys from home node to naval invasion node and raiding still happens.

[kgkong]

Not really sure why you're having issues with escorting convoys. I tend to pop out extra convoys myself. When I'm being raided, I seldom need to actually send any admirals to excort convoys myself as whatever raiding is being done to me rarely ever impacts my market prices to any noticeable degree. Mostly because I tend to play as a custom union leader and I ensure that the primary portion of my economy is maintained domestically. My subjects tend to end up dealing with bad market prices from the raiding. Which again, doesn't hurt my economy enough to be a problem for me.

When I raid convoys, I either do it only to distract the enemy navy so I can naval invade somewhere without having to do a naval battle. Or I'm trading with a country, go to war with them, and I embargo them to cut them off from my goods, and then I also raid their other convoys to really pinch their access to goods. Generally works out well for me either way.

[Charliedazc]

I don't think you are getting the point. Again, if you are a UK level naval power, convoy raiding their market is absolutely irrelevant, simply because the numbers are huge. This is also a problem because the mechanic becomes absolutely empty of meaning. The fact that anyone can raid you even when you are escorting convoys with a very superior navy, also makes it pretty random and meaningless. Even more because after engaging their raiding navy, they just keep raiding like nothing happened.
This is mostly relevant for army supplies than for market because any human would obviously make sure to produce first for their own market. As the UK, I've beaten France many times with inferior military technology simply because they can't supply their armies in Africa making them lose hundreds of thousands to attrition (and that with them having a navy bigger than mine, which makes no sense), which is obviously an exploit and yet there isn't anything they could do to prevent it. You can not adjust the number of convoys that supply an army. Raiding for army supplies is very damaging and can't be prevented and raiding for market access is quite insignificant if you have many convoys

[kgkong]

No I don't get it because like I said I'm not sure why you're having issues with this and I explained how I use the features and don't seem to have any issues you are having.

Your convoys have a path they go. They go from your capital port to the neareste sea node and then along it. The further your convoys have to go for trading, the harder it is to have the escorts protect them from my observations of how this feature works in the game. It takes longer for fleets to start effectively protecting convoys on longer destinations. Also, sometimes you need to have admirals in different HQs in order to better use escort convoy as the route they have might be more optimal. IE if you have your capital port in DC as America and you're trading with North Sea nations and South American nations. Sending an admiral from Dixie or New England to escort a convoy to England will only have you protecting that convoy from Dixie/New England to England. Now say you have colonies in South America or Africa as well. They're also often contributing to the trade from your market to England, and you may have to send an admiral to escort to England from those locations to get your trade route properly defended from raids.

When protecting, it's best to send your admirals to further location along the sea nodes where it shows you are being raided on when you check the sea node windows to see which ones are affected.

Again, just from my experience and observations this is how it seems to work. And again, no I don't seem to get your point because if you are trying what I've said I do and you aren't having luck, then all I can think of is your overlooking something rather minor but significant enough to be able to make the proper choices.

[The Gray Fox]

Originally posted by KingGorillaKong:

No I don't get it because like I said I'm not sure why you're having issues with this and I explained how I use the features and don't seem to have any issues you are having.

Your convoys have a path they go. They go from your capital port to the neareste sea node and then along it. The further your convoys have to go for trading, the harder it is to have the escorts protect them from my observations of how this feature works in the game. .

Sounds like bad game design to me.

[Charliedazc]

This is why I started the thread as I did, i wanted someone that actually knows how it works, not someone who makes up theories to defend something they don't understand. If it works like that, then it is still wrong that it isn't explained anywhere what is defended by who. It is pretty clear what the target of convoy raiding is, but the target of escorting is not. On the info of each node, you can theoretically see which navies are attacking and defending and yet the raiding still happens on nodes where you have an escorting fleet. If escorting works something like a percentage chance to intercept, it should still be noted what that chance is. And this has nothing to do with where your fleet starts. When escorting a naval invasion, it goes exactly from origin node of the army to target node and this still happens and you still see raiding happen. They do intercept sometimes at some random frequency, but the enemy fleet just goes back to raiding like nothing happened. You might kill the fleet on a day and get convoys sunk the next day by that same fleet, even if your fleet is escorting.

[kgkong]

If your admirals set to escort convoy and aren't making an impact, the only thing I can think of is that your flotillas under that admiral's command are lacking in comparative offense and defense to the enemy's fleets being used. That's the case when I do see I'm not able to protect my convoys. So one of the things I do to combat this when I can't afford to actually add naval production methods is I'll just use my fleet as distractions to draw the enemy fleets out of raiding convoys. Naval invade, raid their convoys, these things do help. Sometimes the enemy AI doesn't react to your actions right away. But if that's the case, then it usually means they're leaving their capital HQ open to naval invasions, making for easy war wins when at war.

But if you heavily depend upon not having your trade convoys raided, it's a sign that your local economy is lacking as well. You should also be working on balancing your own economy to some degree so that a convoy raid doesn't cause a concern. Yea I get there are situations where this can't always be mitigated in your own states. It's just another area in which you can also use a defense against being convoy raided.

Sure, I don't know the actual calculations around these mechanics. That doesn't mean what I'm saying to try is wrong, just because it's not working for you. I'm going off the info you give. You could provide screenshots of your naval power projection vs the raiding navy, screenshots of your market supplies, the trade routes you have, and the raided sea nodes. That's probably the best way to get the most accurate answer as to what exactly is happening in your case. Otherwise, yea, I don't know what's going on that it's not working for you other than it now sounds like your navy just isn't powerful enough to make a difference in protecting convoys from being raided.

[Zoratan]

The fact that you cannot set admirals to defend a certain region of the sea bothers me the most, i have to guess the connection i would have to protect to cover that one single node in which the enemy blows up my whole supply network.
Network 78000/32000 because italy and china are convoy rading at the java sea (nowhere else)
They have 2 fleets a 100 ships vs 400 of mine in 4 fleets. my ships are more modern so they win every fight but since they have to escort from america to africa to cover that one stupid node the enemy still is successful to block all my troups in china from supply! (not to mention that my whole industry goes nuts because the trading network is at 40%)

[kgkong]

Originally posted by Zoratan:

The fact that you cannot set admirals to defend a certain region of the sea bothers me the most, i have to guess the connection i would have to protect to cover that one single node in which the enemy blows up my whole supply network.
Network 78000/32000 because italy and china are convoy rading at the java sea (nowhere else)
They have 2 fleets a 100 ships vs 400 of mine in 4 fleets. my ships are more modern so they win every fight but since they have to escort from america to africa to cover that one stupid node the enemy still is successful to block all my troups in china from supply! (not to mention that my whole industry goes nuts because the trading network is at 40%)

Patrol coast not useful?
That's how you get an admiral in one HQ to defend a coast belonging to another HQ.