War and Victory points

[Aslan Stark]

hey guys, i am playing Prussia and i have literally destroyed the french army in 1870 and conquered half their cities including Paris but i still need 100 VP to demand the lorrine province i am not sure if i need to conquer more land or just hold the lands i already have with more forces? I had the same problem with other wars....

[loki100]

probably a mixture, if you hold objectives over time you gain extra VPs (and also the enemy is more likely to offer you a peace that is worth more than the notional warscore). Taking and holding the capital though is probably the best way to gain WS and to see it steadily grow.

[Kensai]

It is as loki100 said. In these kinds of war, only a convincing victory will allow for a "core province" claim exchange. This happened in real life as well. The de jure exchange of Lorraine between Germany and France happened only after the siege of Paris and the armistice.

[Aslan Stark]

So i won the war and yea taking the capital really helped but now i noticed something interesting. i am able to create steam merchantmen but all my commercial fleets are wooden sailing soo i started to disband them but i noticed they cost victory points? soo do victory points stay with you throughout ur game? Even if that is so, i cannot think of any other way to replace sailing ships with steamers other then disbanding them? thoughts?

[loki100]

the issue around what ships upgrade and what ships need to be replaced is one of PoN's darker secrets --- at least to me.

For warships, there are (I think) 'generations' and within that small tech inventions will allow ships to upgrade (passive stance in a naval base) but they will not jump generations - so sail battleships will not upgrade to steam battleships.

There are two differences. One is that merchant ships do upgrade when a new model is discovered, and will do so at sea (don't know why but this is my observation). So make sure you have enough replacements and they will look after themselves. The other is that if, say a sail battleship is sunk (so there are only 3 out of the 4 ships left in the squadron), if it is in passive stance at a port (as above) and you have replacements, then the replacment will be of the new type. This way, slowly, a squadron of sailing ships might become a squadron of more modern ships (odds on it will be some sort of hybrid).

Yes, you lose VPs on disbandment as the game engine seems to treat this as losing them. I recall a discussion that 'obsolete' ships should not cost VPs but my experience is that they do. Think of it as some grumpy newspaper editor running a 'what a waste of taxpayers money' style campaign when it is announced that these expensive ships will just be scrapped. If you find this unrealistic, easiest is to write a short event that returns the VPs to your stock.

[Kensai]

You know, this thing is almost accurate. Nations back in the day (and even today) were much reluctant to scrap old ships just to build new. So think of it as an abstraction of your government, parliament, advisors, etc not giving the ok to build new ships before the old ones are somehow destroyed (in battle or in scrap), and the population feeling demoralized when you do that.

[Random]

One other aspect with the passing of the wooden ships was the loss of the wooden shipbuilders and the trickle-down economic effects in the textile and forestry sectors, something that made the guilds and forest-holding landowners (many of them Lords) rather unhappy. Later, remembering that sailing ships could serve for decades the taxpayers were suddenly seeing their supposedly mighty ironclads often placed in reserve after their first commission since they were already obsolescent as naval technologies were advancing so quickly.

Britain kept many of her first generation ironclads into the 20th Century and even then there was a huge outcry in the press and parliament when Jackie Fisher sent several hundred outdated and useless ships to the breakers as the opening salvo in his 1904 naval reforms. These ships had been laid up costing money, manpower and resources even though for the most part they had zero fighting value.

For a more modern example, see the recent hand-wringing and negative media coverage that followed the decommissioning of the USS Enterprise (CVN-65) and the announcement that she may be scrapped if it's determined to be impractical to turn her into a museum. I would submit that there's more right than wrong in the way PON handles this but might suggest that morale should accrue with building new naval construction as a balance. Shiny new battleships were cool...

-C

[Aslan Stark]

ok well then i am going to put my commerce fleet in passive at sea and at port and see what happens? but isnt wooden to steam impossible just like you said?

[Jim-NC]

Commerce fleets still perform their function even if they are wooden sail ships.