Hi all,
So the past few days, I noticed that my subs and destroyers, which I use quite extensively for patrolling and scouting at sea, were engaging and causing war with multiple (previously) neutral nations, causing me to unwillingly go at war with them.
After reporting what I thought was a glitch, much to my surprise it was revealed to me that this is part of a semi-recent update, the details of which I have verified and confirmed today.
Here's my take on the update which makes your units engage neutral units they cross paths with :
IT'S TERRIBLE.
While I can understand the concept applied on land, because if you are crossing paths with neutral units that most likely means you're infringin on the sovereignty of the resepctive nation anyway, it's a deeply misguided idea when applied at sea as it compromises a whole aspect of naval travel and combat, for the following 2 reasons :
At most, if the devs insist on keeping it, they could restrict its application to when you're on an embargo with a country. that way you could still set up naval blockades without being at war with someone. With realtions set on "Peace" this makes no sense. Peace means Peance and the game should not arbitrarily force you to go to war with a nation you're not at war with. But as it is right now players like me who like to extensively use naval units will be faced with constant casi belli just for using naval units, which is penalizing.
EDIT : I know about the Hold Fire command. However, this option is limited to members of the High Command, who pay for that status. That means that the game just got less practical/more restrictive for players who don't spend money to play CoW. Without wanting to sound like an alarmist, I can only see that as a very bad precedent.
So the past few days, I noticed that my subs and destroyers, which I use quite extensively for patrolling and scouting at sea, were engaging and causing war with multiple (previously) neutral nations, causing me to unwillingly go at war with them.
After reporting what I thought was a glitch, much to my surprise it was revealed to me that this is part of a semi-recent update, the details of which I have verified and confirmed today.
Here's my take on the update which makes your units engage neutral units they cross paths with :
IT'S TERRIBLE.
While I can understand the concept applied on land, because if you are crossing paths with neutral units that most likely means you're infringin on the sovereignty of the resepctive nation anyway, it's a deeply misguided idea when applied at sea as it compromises a whole aspect of naval travel and combat, for the following 2 reasons :
- The sea doesn't have a nationality attached to it. It makes no sense that two vessels from nations that are respectively at peace would fire at each other just because they cross paths, especially when taking into account that CoW sea travel works by "nodes" and thus forces you along certain paths. If we did this in real life we would've had WW3 on our hands a long time ago.
- This compromises the entire patrolling or scouting aspect of naval gameplay in CoW, since now you'll have to be careful when approaching a nation's coast or a much-travaled waterway for fear of causing war with someone. It also almost completely nullifies the stealth element of subs because they will now reveal themselves and attack at the slightest encounter. Subs thus lose a huge portion of their strategic use.
At most, if the devs insist on keeping it, they could restrict its application to when you're on an embargo with a country. that way you could still set up naval blockades without being at war with someone. With realtions set on "Peace" this makes no sense. Peace means Peance and the game should not arbitrarily force you to go to war with a nation you're not at war with. But as it is right now players like me who like to extensively use naval units will be faced with constant casi belli just for using naval units, which is penalizing.
EDIT : I know about the Hold Fire command. However, this option is limited to members of the High Command, who pay for that status. That means that the game just got less practical/more restrictive for players who don't spend money to play CoW. Without wanting to sound like an alarmist, I can only see that as a very bad precedent.
The post was edited 1 time, last by VIRVCOBRV ().