Naval battles | Battle TW: Rome II Guide

Last update: 11 May 2016

Interface and controls

Both the interface and controls during naval battles are almost the same as in case of battles fought on the land. The biggest change is replacement of the run button with the one allowing you to switch between ramming and boarding.

In the left information panel, in addition to basic information about the crew, such as melee attack or weapon damage, you can find more information about the ship, such:

• Ship health - how much damage can it take
• Ship speed - means both speed and maneuverability of the ship

As the ships can't run, you accelerate them in a different way. You use a special ability for that: row hard for X strokes which accelerates the ship for a while. This option is useful both during the escape and during the pursuit or ramming attack.

In order to board the enemy ship, you have to remember about one more thing - your troops can jump to the enemy ship only if both ships have contact side-to-side. Unfortunately your troops can't fly so jumping from the ship bow to the enemy ship stern is impossible.

Mechanics

Commanding ships is a bit more challenging than in case of infantry or cavalry. First of all, naval units are quite big and slow, so it is impossible to rapidly change their course. In addition each ship has its own crew - when it is defeated the ship gets useless. For this reason there are two methods to eliminate the units: you can defeat (by shooting or boarding) all sailors on the board or damage ship's hull, causing its sinking. The ship can be damaged either with crushing attacks such as ramming or by stones shot by ballista and damaged by fire: flaming torches, javelins or Greek fire sooner or later will strain the wood and the ship will go under water.

Tactics

In case of naval battles it is hard to use any formations, because the situation changes very fast. Light units carrying projectile units on their boards should always avoid fighting with slower boarding ships - they should use their mobility and speed to sail around enemy formation, throwing javelins or arrows at them. In the meantime your artillery ships should fire at heaviest and slowest enemy units. A few hits from ballista will sink any hostile ship.

Fast board ships should attack and block heaviest enemy units. The fight on the board of the artillery ship will block its ability to carry on fire. If the enemy ship gets blocked like this, you can focus the fire of your units with war machine on this unit (although you risk hitting your own troops). You can also try to ram the immobile opponent - even a slow artillery ship will deal huge damage with its ram, thanks to its enormous weight.

To make life easier, I suggest using the pause button very often and give orders to single units. Unfortunately it requires a constant attention, but thanks to that you'll have no problems in defeating even larger enemy fleet, not to mention a horde of transport ships.