Ruler of the Seas: which kills count?

[cuavas]

This is an achievement I still don’t have, as I tend to go for scientific or cultural victories with England. I was looking at the achievement statistics (it’s ESTEAMSTAT_BRITISHNAVY in achievements_debug.log), and I discovered that ships destroyed with atomic bombs don’t cause the count to increase.

Are there any other conditions on it? It definitely counts ships destroyed by submarines, and presumably all other naval units. Do enemy submarines destroyed count? Does it count ships destroyed by ranged land units? What about sinking ships with air strikes? Do barbarian ship kills count? Are there other exclusions?

[Washell]

https://civilization-v-achievements.fandom.com/wiki/Ruler_of_the_Seas

[DerEider]

Originally posted by Washell:

https://civilization-v-achievements.fandom.com/wiki/Ruler_of_the_Seas

Thanks for that link, Washell

[cuavas]

That provides nice tips for farming the achievement, but doesn’t actually give a list of things that don’t contribute to it. Embarked units counting is interesting though, I wasn’t aware of that.

[Killmeister]

I usually adopt the honour doctrine which gives up gold for each kill, but not when killed with a nuke. I can't answer your question directly, but it seems that any buff from killing only comes when a conventional unit does it as opposed to a nuke. I'm not aware of any other restrictions like this.

[cuavas]

Originally posted by Killmeister:

I usually adopt the honour doctrine which gives up gold for each kill, but not when killed with a nuke. I can't answer your question directly, but it seems that any buff from killing only comes when a conventional unit does it as opposed to a nuke. I'm not aware of any other restrictions like this.

That’s probably as close as I’ll get to an answer – nuke area damage isn’t considered a “kill” as such.

[Tymgosi]

Having gotten that achievement recently, I'm pretty sure it has to be A) a naval kill (IE, you can't be a defending Warrior on the sea) and B) a naval target (so you can't target embarked armies). But in terms of victims, it can be anyone on the sea so Barbarian or major power, they're all fair game.

When I got it, I ran mostly the Advanced Continent map (the Island maps are better, but they didn't work for me so well) and had the Raging Barbarians option enabled in Advanced Setup. From there, it took a *little bit* of luck: I had to find a Barbarian camp that was out of the way, but could still spawn naval units. After that had happened I parked 3 naval units to keep the actual camp in the fog of war (dark edge), but the water was visible. Leave them on alert and come back any time you get notified. That was probably half my kills. The other half came from me just wanting to annihilate my neighbors.

I would point out that if you were intending to use the Island/Archipelago maps, make sure to use the Advanced setup to keep out AI opponents who are advantaged by it away (on random I keep getting Polynesia and Songhai, who both have Embark by default).

[cuavas]

I got over 70 kills in an immortal level game on a standard continents map just by declaring war on the Maya who were on the next continent over late in the game. They just kept sending waves of units to their death. (I won a science victory.) I only need about a hundred more. I’m not too desperate for the achievement to want to farm it.