+Ramming skills, techs, et al are useless for Barbarians

Itharus#3127

This is not a bug, per se. But it is an issue that should be addressed.

Since ramming was removed from barbarian ships (why do they all have viking ships, anyway?), there's a plethora of techs and skills and traits that give all this +ramming strength... that are utterly wasted.

It makes getting or taking those less than appealing, and it looks very sloppy to boot.

Please rework all the barbarian ship techs/skills so that they are actually useful to barbarians.

Thank you.

johanrosen

It's most likely an oversight but I agree that it needs fixing.

Benjin

Agreed, the ramming skill is kind of useless for Barbarians, unless they're a faction with Hellenic ships in their rosters (e.g. Pirates & Raiders - Ardiaei).

Octavius_5#2653

I thought this too in the past and maybe its different now, but when I looked at it previously it isn't quite as bad as it initially seems. I believe most (all?) barbarian factions have a few naval units they can recruit who use civilized ships if they capture a military port building from a civilized faction. I think it is usually available from the military wharf chain. There aren't many ships and I believe different ones are available depending on whether the port is Roman, Eastern, or Hellenic. Certainly the ramming bonuses are not nearly as useful as for civilized factions, but they can be used with these ships and it does give you extra incentive to go out and take over a civilized culture's military wharf which actually fits in nicely with the civilized/barbarian divide and how barbarians would be motivated to take over and occupy more technologically advanced civilized areas.

Itharus#3127

I didn't realize that military buildings of an opposed culture that you cannot build even HAD units available to recruit from.

Which, while a nice surprise, is still kind of worth less than revamping the system entirely. It'd be more palatable if they provided some sort of tool tip or loading screen tip or something that pointed this out.

Is it only shipyards this works for?

Octavius_5#2653

I believe the way it works is each building that provides recruitment has a designated list of units that it makes available. For that building to be of use to you, that list of units needs to match the list of units available to your faction to recruit. You never notice this typically because the list of units your faction can recruit matches the list of units available from your faction's buildings and conversely the list of units available from buildings of competing cultures don't include your units.

The ships are a special case since that is the only way for barbarian fleets to get ships with ramming capabilities. Outside of the ships the place where you will see this the most is when you are playing with mixed-culture, hybrid factions that are able to recruit a blend of units like the Black Sea Colonies factions. In those cases, many times you can use the captured buildings of other cultures to build up decent armies as long as the recruitment list of the building overlaps with a portion of your faction's hybrid unit roster. To a lesser extent I think this also shows up with the Steppe Nomad factions and the standard barbarian cavalry building chain. I believe there are other cases as well, but the unit crossover is limited to a unit or two.

TheShiroOfDalton

Well, they can always hire mercenary ships with rams, so it's not a complete waste.