Am I missing something about how ship battles work? As far as I can tell, when two ships battle or when a ship attacks a city, it is just like a land battle, with the armies on the ships doing the fighting independent of the type of ship. If this is the case, why do ships have strength and hit stats? The only practical difference I can see between the ships is movement. Are ship battles influenced at all by ship strength or hit points?

Razer,

The answer is yes. The Ship strength/hits represents the maximum value that armies on the ships will have when fighting.

So a Barge with a 2/1 (2 strength, 1 hits) rating means that armies on Barges fight at a maximum of 2 strength, 1 hit. If they have less (say a Giant Rat at 1/1) then they fight at their normal value. So armies on Barges are obviously very weak/useless when in combat.

KGB

Thanks, KGB. Should I start a new thread for every question I have? I'm wondering how to get the ai players to fight each other (I turned diplomacy off but all the ai players still declare war on me after I capture a few cities and never attack each other, just me). I'm also wondering if I can play multi-player on the same computer (when I set all players to human the game just ends immediately with an allied victory, and when there are only a few human players, if I attack the other human players it asks if I really want to attack my allies). I'm playing on random maps right now to learn the game.

Razer,

The AI players normally attack each other. I have never seen them not attack other AI players. The AI tends to attack it's closest neighbor so some AI's must be close to each other if you have a lot of them in your games. Are you sure the AI isn't attacking itself. You normally can't see AI battles and can only tell when a city changes from one owner to another. What size maps are you playing?

You can definitely play multi-player on the same machine. If the game is ending immediately when using all human players it means you have set all the human players to be allied with each other. Normally you start all neutral (not at war and not allied). So you must have allied them all together.

The game always asked if you want to attack your allies unless you declare war first using the diplomacy screen. Attacking with out warning is considered treachery and the AI views that very dimly. So you get the warning message but all it means is you aren't at war yet.



KGB

Thanks again. For some reason I thought that when diplomacy is turned off, all players have to be enemies (no alliances allowed at all), but it seems it really means that human players must be allied against ai players that must be allied (with no alliances between ai and human players allowed). Is there a way to make sure no players ever form an alliance?

If AI is turned off then yes by default all AI players are allied with eachother against the human player. However one can still create wars between AIs by setting their starting scenario diplomacy to be at war.

The only way to tell diplomacy status with diplomacy off is to right click on another player's unit. But you can't tell diplomacy status between AIs, which is why most people leave diplomacy on.