Sicily fleet optimal composition and formation

["Lalo" Salamanca]

Hey guys i am a new player, need some pointers on a greek fleet composition and formation.

Something you need to know:

• I am playing a COOP game and my friend is playing Rome he is very powerful and does all the heavy lifting in land battle.

• All ship types are unlocked, i have put a lot of points in Naval military tradition and tech tree. Upkeep, build cost and time are not a problem.

•Carthage is out of the picture

•Beside naval battle, I use my fleet to assault, capture ports and assist sieges

• i am reforming a 100 ships fleet.

• i have no idea how naval formation works...


Hope you guys can give me some pointers thx!

[Razor Feather]

If by naval formation you mean the cohort placements, then the center front row deploys to the middle of the battle, the flanks to either side, and the second row will fill in as other ships get knocked out. If you mean naval tactics, they work just like land tactics. Honestly its fine to just pick one with a high efficency number and call it a day, unless you want to put in the effort of performing probing attacks to find out what tactic the enemy uses.

I mean, if cost is straight up not an issue, then in terms of raw combat performance, 100 megapolyremes will always win. The advantages of the lighter ship classes are in cost, maneuver, and speed. If you always have enough ships to more than fill combat width, the enemy will never be able to use maneuver against you, and when all your ships are the incredibly powerful megapolyreme, you don't really need to worry about using flanking to help speed up ending a battle all that much anyway. Your ships do so much damage they will just trash their opposition outright. The problem of course is that megapolyremes are very expensive, with 100 of them costing you a good 51 a month baseline, and they have almost half the move speed of liburnians, making them bad at catching enemy fleets, and somewhat illsuited for transport.

For a more general transport/hunting fleet, I'd reckon your best setup would be a number of hexeres for the front center cohort, triremes for the flanks, and tetreres for the second line. This gives you enough speed to be able to at least occasionally cut off and catch enemy light fleets, as well as a good ability to move troops around. Hexeres have good overall combat stats, but poor maneuver, and they lack the shear overwhelming power of a megapolyreme, so the battle is likely to last long enough that flankers and reserve cohorts can matter. Tetreres give up some of the resilence and strength damage of the hexere in exchange for more maneuvre, and so make a good ship to help mop up stragglers in the center of the formation once the hexeres tap out. Triremes have quite good manuever, a bit of extra morale resilance, are cheap, and scale well with the right techs, so they can handle flanks, especially since the ai puts out a lot of liburnians.

Liburnians are generally trash outside of cost and speed. If what you want is just fast, low cost transports that don't see combat, they work fine. They are awful in battle though. All their morale damage bonus does is make them *not quite* as outmatched by triremes in terms of morale, and they generally can't hold up.