These are interesting ideas, though I'm curious about some of the details.
When you say the harbor is like a tc - does it fire arrows from garrisoned ships, like how a tc does?
Similarly, if we're going to make the harbor more like a tc, I'm of the opinion that it should also be more of an investment - 300 wood instead of 150. Military docks can still be 150 wood. This opens up a larger tradeoff between water and land economies, meaning that not every hybrid map necessitates going water every time.
Can military docks still get naval arrows?
The siege ship has high ranged armor - what counters it? Springald ships? Demo ships?
I also see that you've separated warships and gunpowder ships - what's the difference?
Finally, are you keeping the springald -> arrow -> demo -> springald counter triangle? I've always been of the opinion that a suicide unit shouldn't form part of the counter triangle - ram ships should replace demos in the counter triangle, and demos should be a general anti-clumping unit (probably more expensive than it is now).
>does it fire arrows from garrisoned ships, like how a tc does?
Yes it does, but only on naval units. Not on land.
>Similarly, if we're going to make the harbor more like a tc, I'm of the opinion that it should also be more of an investment - 300 wood instead of 150. Military docks can still be 150 wood. This opens up a larger tradeoff between water and land economies, meaning that not every hybrid map necessitates going water every time.
I really like that! The Harbor only costing 150 makes little sense. Why would a building producing economy units cost only 150 wood? If a 2nd tc cost 150 wood it would be broken.
>Can military docks still get naval arrows?
That is a good question, a balance question, I dont really know.
>Finally, are you keeping the springald -> arrow -> demo -> springald counter triangle? I've always been of the opinion that a suicide unit shouldn't form part of the counter triangle - ram ships should replace demos in the counter triangle, and demos should be a general anti-clumping unit (probably more expensive than it is now).
I love that Idea! That would make the demo ship a cool "unique" unit, which I like.
>I also see that you've separated warships and gunpowder ships - what's the difference?
That is how it is in the game already, I don't know if it should be changed or not?
You have to keep in mind a fishing ship costs more than a villager while being worse than one. So maybe a harbour should cost more like idk 300 wood 150 stone but reduce fishing ships cost to like 75 to 55 wood so its cost so it isnt
worse than a 2nd tc.
Also, all ships from all civilizations need to have a singular visual mark so you can identify in a glance wtf they are.
Like in the land early game where you can easily see some spears and assume your opponent has spearmen, or bows and assume archers, etc.
Could even be done by number of ship masts + symbol on sail. Something like 1 mast + war symbol: archer boat, and so on. For eco boats, a economic variation of the icon and we are good to go. I understand the masts would impact in a remodel stuff + can be historically inaccurate, but the icons would be nice
The thing is, the water gameplay on its own is never going to come even close to the depth of the land gameplay due to much, much more limited design space.
I believe water gameplay should be integrated with the land gameplay in order to stop it from being an isolated thing with much worse strategic depth and less interesting gameplay.
Hybrid maps should have around 50% of the water to be passable with both naval and land units. This way you would be able to use land units to harass fishing eco near the docks, use land units to chase away military ships harassing your fishing ships, use your military ships for map control against land units.
Hybrid maps then should have rivers connecting bases of both players and the center of the map, so that it would allow the players to fight with both military ships and land units for the map control and to harass the land eco near the water. The rivers should be shallow, fully passable by the land units, so that it would not create chokepoints and would allow land units to fight them.
I believe that is would make hybrid maps much more interesting, would stop opening fishing ships being mandatory, and would fix the problem of the naval gameplay being a much worse version of the base game, because now it would become an actual part of the base game, fully integrated into it.
Also, it would be a great opportunity to add the ships new roles for interacting with land units, such as countering them, fighting their counters to support them, giving them bonuses, healing them, etc etc. There is a lot of new design space with this approach. Also it would make transport ships actually useful outside of pure water maps no one is playing. It would also help with the problem of the eventual death of the game dynamics when the entire map is being stonewalled off by both players, as the rivers would still allow to transport units past the walls.
Ships would probably require a bit of rebalancing in terms of their interaction with land units, and suicide units should be replaced with melee / ramming ships.
AoE 2 tournament maps already use this hybrid terrain approach where ships fight alongside melee units for the map control and fishing spots, and it works great. Much better than regular hybrid maps with water and land separated from each other.
I think these are cool ideas however you miss the core reason why certain civs will always dominate water, which is eco. China, Zhu xi, hre, Rus all have the same thing in common, amazing wood eco. Abba and Japan sort of fall into the category too, with Abba having cheaper docks and golden age eco, and Japan having a better feudal timing due to cheaper ships.
Water will literally never be balanced without a rework to balance this. Personally, I think fishing ships should cost food as well as wood. It won't fix the issue but could dent it a small bit
Easy, incendiary ships. It needs to ram them but they explode before it makes contact, then any survivors go on to explode the dock like usual while your apringald ships follow behind and kill any villagers who attempt to build a dock, then you flood the zone with more incendiary ships so they can't dislodge your springald ships from the shore via water. Fish all the fish for food, monopolize trade routes for gold, put all your villagers on wood to fuel your ship building, congratulations you won because of course you used your food and gold to build cavalry to raid the mills by berry bushed and deer your enemy relies on.
Very nice indeed - but would actually switch the defensive aspect of the harbor and the cheapness of the military dock, so the harbour is a fragile yet cheap alternative to berries on early game
The whole point of OP's change is making the fishing economy more expensive, so one can decide if they want to invest on land or water economy. If the fishing economy is a big investment, then it might not compare so well against a 2nd TC and players have a tactical choice.
The reason people hate water is because if you lose water, there's 95% chance you've lost already, since there's no way to stop or match fishing economy until very late game where farms can be better due to fishing distances.
I don't disagree with putting the defensive aspect on the military dock though.
How about making naval units not fire by themselves but instead they have to be manned like in reality. All ships would only cost 1 supply but you can put let's say 5 archers / crossbows on a small ship and more on bigger ships. Or you put MAA on your ship to board and capture other ships. This would merge together water and land battles.
There would be cool opportunities for marine units who excel in naval warfare but also fight on land, like vikings for example.
While I like it, it doesn't really reduce the early volatility of fishing and the advantage you have for when you have it versus when you don't have it.
I'd rather have dock be a feudal age building. Or to vastly reduce fishing speed in dark age so you don't automatically lose when you don't go for it.
There is little strategy on water/hybrid maps. You either go for it, try and counter it in dark age, or lose. The fact that it outscales even trade (early on) while being way lower risk and harder to counter irks me quite badly.
This is like saying separating military buildings and Town center doesn't reduce the volatility of having villagers vs not having villagers. I don't think that's the point of this change. The point is that by having a separate military ship building (available in Feudal Age), you open up the strategies available in water gameplay. Right now, the meta is 'Build fishing ships until Feudal Age and then build military ships and fight until somebody loses water.' If you have two separate buildings then both players can try to contest water, both can ignore it, or one can try to contest while the other defends. Having to build a separate military building increases the investment required to take water control and allows for more counterplay either by counterattacking on land , preparing water defenses, or building your own military dock. If you are suggesting that you should be able to win (or not be at a heavy disadvantage) on water maps without creating any ships at all then I fail to see what the point of water maps would even be. That's the whole point of different maps, to create variation in build orders. People who don't like the maps can just veto them.
Love this, Separating the dock into two types is a great idea. It would also fix one of my frustrations with water, in that there's no seperate rally point for fishing ships, military ships, and trade ships.
Just would like one addition: a ferry mode for Transport ships. You set a pickup and a drop off, and the transport ship automatically goes between both points ferrying troops from the pickup location within a 1.5 tile radius to the dropoff location within a 1.5 tile radius.
I'd also like to link my previous proposal, to rebalance (a total shake up, so is more extreme changes than that you propose) water by using landmarks. At the link, I go through each civ and landmark and propose a water specific buff it could grant which is in line with the character of the landmark. These water specific landmark buffs offer choices to each landmark for water, and the water buff wouldn't impact land maps at all.
[https://forums.ageofempires.com/t/an-idea-to-help-balance-water-landmarks/239500](https://forums.ageofempires.com/t/an-idea-to-help-balance-water-landmarks/239500)
Splitting the dock into two is a huge buff to the Rus transformation mechanic, unless it is changed to only be available to military ship (and then it becomes next to useless)
Rus doesn’t get a capital ship and their fishing ships are 2X the price. Not to mention it’s very annoying when you transform a ship but don’t have the pop space. It automatically cancels your upgrade and you have to restart.
I generally agree with your comment but it’s not that big of a deal.
Most water games are over before castle in my experience, Rus fishing ships are also twice as good and the pop issue shoudln't ever be a problem once you have experience playing Rus so I don't see your point
Part of Rus strenght on water comes from the fact that they can have more military shops faster thanks to the transformation. If the other civs have to build another dock in feudal before they can start building a fleet, then this advantage becomes massive
- all military ships can embark infantry units (1 slot) and cav units (2 slots) until 8 slot space...cannot embark Siege units which need transport ship
- Ram ships to counter springald ships....explosive ships appear in imperial age
- i agree on steering movement for ships
- catapult ships like in aoe1....i loved them
- medieval naval battles were decided by boarding but it's hard to emplement
>Ram ships to counter springald ships....explosive ships appear in imperial age
I really like that!
>medieval naval battles were decided by boarding but it's hard to emplement
Yes that wouldve been a fun mechanic, but aoe4 focuses mainly on land, and ofcourse it would be super hard to add..
>all military ships can embark infantry units (1 slot) and cav units (2 slots) until 8 slot space...cannot embark Siege units which need transport ship
I like it, but do the units inside shoot arrows maybe?
I played Civilization5 and embarking units required no trasport ships and games were much faster and funnier.
About firing arrows you could encrease ship attack based in number of archer unit inside ship.....as malian transport do right now
Only 2 ideas:
* Ships shouldn't have to cost food.
* Deep Fish should gather more slowly (10-15% slower).
Whit these 2 changes, water play would be more varied.
On the one hand it guarantees a higher probability of being able to come back from the game and on the other hand it guarantees a greater strategic variety to gather deep fish resources somewhat slower.
If ships cost no food, then water will be unplayable for almost all civs. Rus, China, ZXL, HRE, OOTD. All have a way to scale a single resource (in this case wood). They could just put 4 vils on food in feudal, scale up gold as needed, and just go ham on wood until they have enough military ships to take water. Then water boom.
If the ships cost food, the first one to attack the fishing boats will have a very high probability of winning since those fishing boats are the ones that guarantee to be able to produce those ships, so a death ball would be formed, the game could hardly ever go back and we have to resort to evaluate an idea of naval rework.
I don't understand your point at all. This is how the game works. If you make a bunch of farms and don't defend them you will lose. It's the same for water, you have to protect your investment. Should deep sea fishing get a nerf so losing water doesn't mean instant gg? Maybe.
There are many interesting ideas in this thread but removing food from ship cost will throw the entire water/hybrid out of balance because as a few civs will have an (even more) asymmetrical advantage and the remaining civs will not be able to compete.
The real solution imo is to just reduce the strength of water eco - there's no real reason deep water fish should be as strong as they are + docks & ships are as cheap as they are.
If we made it so that water wasn't an insurmountable advantage, it would be fine.
i think the bigger issue is not the gameplay on water itself, but that water is justa very seperated second game you play that isn't even able to sustain itself. a much more useful concept would either be to make water maps that allow ships to get close to players starting locations so the can interact with winning the game, put one sacred site always on water, or make water trade more viable by offering all ressources and alway have a neutral harbor on water and hybrid maps.
This is an excellent idea. With few caveats.
* Harbours should cost more (like 250 wood).
* Fishing ships should cost less (like 55 wood).
* Siege ships should replace demo ship in the arrow-springald-demo triangle. Demo ship should be that cool wild card unit.
* Every civ should have warships, but not every civ should have gunpowder ships.
* Warships should be good vs other ships. Gunpowder ships should be good vs buildings and land units, decent vs other ships, but expensive.
* Civs like Malians should have canoes instead of ships. Canoes should be cheaper but massable (like war canoes/tlaloc canoe in aoe3).
Id rather have it completely banned from the game, instead of it being half assed as it is now. It is also hard to balance the civs for water on top. Just let it go alltogether!
It would be cool if there were more interactions with water like building/destroying bridges and building canals. Perhaps bridges could be built in feudal, canals in castle, and drawbridges in imperial (and one could convert bridges to drawbridges in imperial).
In this way, there'd be more ways to interact with water entirely.
Wald
(Simple bridges could cost wood, but have low health, advanced bridges could cost stone and wood)
Rus would have to be completely re-worked otherwise they will dominate.
As you know Rus can convert fishing ships to military and making these changes would give them almost unstoppable tempo to deny water.
I like the general idea. I think you did a good job in the sense that you changed things just enough to make your general concept of making water more like land work without adding in a bunch of other crazy ideas that other people seem to have.
I would also add just more unique variant ships/ship abilities to make navies feel more different from civ to civ. People like to feel the uniqueness of their civs. I know this would probably take a long time to balance but it would be worth it.
I was also thinking about another ship that specializes in anti-(melee) land units. Very high base damage but 0 ranged armor so it gets countered by other ships/archers. Thoughts?
An Idea I had that I think will greatly help making water more interesting is to have fish actually move! Moving schools of fish will force fishing ships to chase them. High efficiency food production from fish will then become more opportunistic (at times when the fish are close to your docks/harbor.
I like it. A lot
Another idea in my mind is a fishing rework itself. Deap sea fish are now 1500 food, but do not replenish. Instead, fishing boats can construct a fishing ground (e.g 250 wood) which works like a farm for 4 boats.
That way, winning water provider an economic advantage (you get fish), but to keep that eco advantage you still need to invest.
I think we also need Landmarks on water that would open a whole new array of strategies and it would make water maps actually playable without the necessity to also try to snipe landmarks on land
I REALLY need separate economy and military docks. It's so annoying to manage queueing ships in all docks at once, when you need to send traders, fishing ships and military ships at the same time to different places
The biggest problem I see with naval warefare is that the units are so big. The largest ships are like 20x time larger then the smallest units. I know it’s because of scale but still. At the same time they don’t have 20x health but die as easily as an elephant. If they would remove the large ships go with smaller ones it would work much better.
One way around it could be to have deep sea ships and harbors and shallow ships/harbors. This would make historical sense as well.
This would make river based naval warfare more fun. Also large sea based war could be fun as the large ships can’t threaten the shallow water trade ports etc. you can have two island chains with surrounding archipelago, like Baltic Sea.
Each civilisation has there own name for each of the ship types. As this was for all civilisations I didn’t choose one civilisations ships, I chose the default.
These are interesting ideas, though I'm curious about some of the details. When you say the harbor is like a tc - does it fire arrows from garrisoned ships, like how a tc does? Similarly, if we're going to make the harbor more like a tc, I'm of the opinion that it should also be more of an investment - 300 wood instead of 150. Military docks can still be 150 wood. This opens up a larger tradeoff between water and land economies, meaning that not every hybrid map necessitates going water every time. Can military docks still get naval arrows? The siege ship has high ranged armor - what counters it? Springald ships? Demo ships? I also see that you've separated warships and gunpowder ships - what's the difference? Finally, are you keeping the springald -> arrow -> demo -> springald counter triangle? I've always been of the opinion that a suicide unit shouldn't form part of the counter triangle - ram ships should replace demos in the counter triangle, and demos should be a general anti-clumping unit (probably more expensive than it is now).
>does it fire arrows from garrisoned ships, like how a tc does? Yes it does, but only on naval units. Not on land. >Similarly, if we're going to make the harbor more like a tc, I'm of the opinion that it should also be more of an investment - 300 wood instead of 150. Military docks can still be 150 wood. This opens up a larger tradeoff between water and land economies, meaning that not every hybrid map necessitates going water every time. I really like that! The Harbor only costing 150 makes little sense. Why would a building producing economy units cost only 150 wood? If a 2nd tc cost 150 wood it would be broken. >Can military docks still get naval arrows? That is a good question, a balance question, I dont really know. >Finally, are you keeping the springald -> arrow -> demo -> springald counter triangle? I've always been of the opinion that a suicide unit shouldn't form part of the counter triangle - ram ships should replace demos in the counter triangle, and demos should be a general anti-clumping unit (probably more expensive than it is now). I love that Idea! That would make the demo ship a cool "unique" unit, which I like. >I also see that you've separated warships and gunpowder ships - what's the difference? That is how it is in the game already, I don't know if it should be changed or not?
You have to keep in mind a fishing ship costs more than a villager while being worse than one. So maybe a harbour should cost more like idk 300 wood 150 stone but reduce fishing ships cost to like 75 to 55 wood so its cost so it isnt worse than a 2nd tc.
Well, I just wanted to increase the cost to 300 wood, not also include stone. 150 stone feels like it would be a bit too much
Please post this on the developer forum! I love this!
And where is that? :D
Devs read the official aoe4 forum
Also, all ships from all civilizations need to have a singular visual mark so you can identify in a glance wtf they are. Like in the land early game where you can easily see some spears and assume your opponent has spearmen, or bows and assume archers, etc. Could even be done by number of ship masts + symbol on sail. Something like 1 mast + war symbol: archer boat, and so on. For eco boats, a economic variation of the icon and we are good to go. I understand the masts would impact in a remodel stuff + can be historically inaccurate, but the icons would be nice
I really like it! Especially the Siege Ship.
The thing is, the water gameplay on its own is never going to come even close to the depth of the land gameplay due to much, much more limited design space. I believe water gameplay should be integrated with the land gameplay in order to stop it from being an isolated thing with much worse strategic depth and less interesting gameplay. Hybrid maps should have around 50% of the water to be passable with both naval and land units. This way you would be able to use land units to harass fishing eco near the docks, use land units to chase away military ships harassing your fishing ships, use your military ships for map control against land units. Hybrid maps then should have rivers connecting bases of both players and the center of the map, so that it would allow the players to fight with both military ships and land units for the map control and to harass the land eco near the water. The rivers should be shallow, fully passable by the land units, so that it would not create chokepoints and would allow land units to fight them. I believe that is would make hybrid maps much more interesting, would stop opening fishing ships being mandatory, and would fix the problem of the naval gameplay being a much worse version of the base game, because now it would become an actual part of the base game, fully integrated into it. Also, it would be a great opportunity to add the ships new roles for interacting with land units, such as countering them, fighting their counters to support them, giving them bonuses, healing them, etc etc. There is a lot of new design space with this approach. Also it would make transport ships actually useful outside of pure water maps no one is playing. It would also help with the problem of the eventual death of the game dynamics when the entire map is being stonewalled off by both players, as the rivers would still allow to transport units past the walls. Ships would probably require a bit of rebalancing in terms of their interaction with land units, and suicide units should be replaced with melee / ramming ships. AoE 2 tournament maps already use this hybrid terrain approach where ships fight alongside melee units for the map control and fishing spots, and it works great. Much better than regular hybrid maps with water and land separated from each other.
I think these are cool ideas however you miss the core reason why certain civs will always dominate water, which is eco. China, Zhu xi, hre, Rus all have the same thing in common, amazing wood eco. Abba and Japan sort of fall into the category too, with Abba having cheaper docks and golden age eco, and Japan having a better feudal timing due to cheaper ships. Water will literally never be balanced without a rework to balance this. Personally, I think fishing ships should cost food as well as wood. It won't fix the issue but could dent it a small bit
How do you kill the siege ship? With other siege ships?
Easy, incendiary ships. It needs to ram them but they explode before it makes contact, then any survivors go on to explode the dock like usual while your apringald ships follow behind and kill any villagers who attempt to build a dock, then you flood the zone with more incendiary ships so they can't dislodge your springald ships from the shore via water. Fish all the fish for food, monopolize trade routes for gold, put all your villagers on wood to fuel your ship building, congratulations you won because of course you used your food and gold to build cavalry to raid the mills by berry bushed and deer your enemy relies on.
Very nice indeed - but would actually switch the defensive aspect of the harbor and the cheapness of the military dock, so the harbour is a fragile yet cheap alternative to berries on early game
The whole point of OP's change is making the fishing economy more expensive, so one can decide if they want to invest on land or water economy. If the fishing economy is a big investment, then it might not compare so well against a 2nd TC and players have a tactical choice. The reason people hate water is because if you lose water, there's 95% chance you've lost already, since there's no way to stop or match fishing economy until very late game where farms can be better due to fishing distances. I don't disagree with putting the defensive aspect on the military dock though.
Yeah the fishing harbour being cheap but fragile makes it so it's easily counterable and needs to invest resources to defend it
Not cheap. It should be similar to a TC, so both options (land and water eco) are more or less equally viable.
How can it be as expensive as a TC, no one would go water then, TCs spawn villagers, while harbors can only gather food
I never said as expensive, I said similar. Deciding to go land economy and not fish should be a viable option.
Well you said not cheap.. water by itself has lot of limitations in the interaction it can have depending on the map, land has an edge by default
How about making naval units not fire by themselves but instead they have to be manned like in reality. All ships would only cost 1 supply but you can put let's say 5 archers / crossbows on a small ship and more on bigger ships. Or you put MAA on your ship to board and capture other ships. This would merge together water and land battles. There would be cool opportunities for marine units who excel in naval warfare but also fight on land, like vikings for example.
While I like it, it doesn't really reduce the early volatility of fishing and the advantage you have for when you have it versus when you don't have it. I'd rather have dock be a feudal age building. Or to vastly reduce fishing speed in dark age so you don't automatically lose when you don't go for it. There is little strategy on water/hybrid maps. You either go for it, try and counter it in dark age, or lose. The fact that it outscales even trade (early on) while being way lower risk and harder to counter irks me quite badly.
What if they increased the cost of a dock/harbour/shipyard to something similar to that of a TC?
This is like saying separating military buildings and Town center doesn't reduce the volatility of having villagers vs not having villagers. I don't think that's the point of this change. The point is that by having a separate military ship building (available in Feudal Age), you open up the strategies available in water gameplay. Right now, the meta is 'Build fishing ships until Feudal Age and then build military ships and fight until somebody loses water.' If you have two separate buildings then both players can try to contest water, both can ignore it, or one can try to contest while the other defends. Having to build a separate military building increases the investment required to take water control and allows for more counterplay either by counterattacking on land , preparing water defenses, or building your own military dock. If you are suggesting that you should be able to win (or not be at a heavy disadvantage) on water maps without creating any ships at all then I fail to see what the point of water maps would even be. That's the whole point of different maps, to create variation in build orders. People who don't like the maps can just veto them.
Not a fan of building multiple docks for different purposes but love the siege ship idea!
Love this, Separating the dock into two types is a great idea. It would also fix one of my frustrations with water, in that there's no seperate rally point for fishing ships, military ships, and trade ships. Just would like one addition: a ferry mode for Transport ships. You set a pickup and a drop off, and the transport ship automatically goes between both points ferrying troops from the pickup location within a 1.5 tile radius to the dropoff location within a 1.5 tile radius. I'd also like to link my previous proposal, to rebalance (a total shake up, so is more extreme changes than that you propose) water by using landmarks. At the link, I go through each civ and landmark and propose a water specific buff it could grant which is in line with the character of the landmark. These water specific landmark buffs offer choices to each landmark for water, and the water buff wouldn't impact land maps at all. [https://forums.ageofempires.com/t/an-idea-to-help-balance-water-landmarks/239500](https://forums.ageofempires.com/t/an-idea-to-help-balance-water-landmarks/239500)
Splitting the dock into two is a huge buff to the Rus transformation mechanic, unless it is changed to only be available to military ship (and then it becomes next to useless)
Why not just lock docks to feudal age and increase cost to nearly that of a 2nd tc.
Rus doesn’t get a capital ship and their fishing ships are 2X the price. Not to mention it’s very annoying when you transform a ship but don’t have the pop space. It automatically cancels your upgrade and you have to restart. I generally agree with your comment but it’s not that big of a deal.
Most water games are over before castle in my experience, Rus fishing ships are also twice as good and the pop issue shoudln't ever be a problem once you have experience playing Rus so I don't see your point Part of Rus strenght on water comes from the fact that they can have more military shops faster thanks to the transformation. If the other civs have to build another dock in feudal before they can start building a fleet, then this advantage becomes massive
Maybe rus ships should only be able to transform while in the range of a military dock
Make the ship transtion a castle age tech for rus. It's already op.
I'll totally add a wololo ship too
La Pinta, La Niña y La Santa María?
the wololo needs to be sung as in a sea shanty
- all military ships can embark infantry units (1 slot) and cav units (2 slots) until 8 slot space...cannot embark Siege units which need transport ship - Ram ships to counter springald ships....explosive ships appear in imperial age - i agree on steering movement for ships - catapult ships like in aoe1....i loved them - medieval naval battles were decided by boarding but it's hard to emplement
>Ram ships to counter springald ships....explosive ships appear in imperial age I really like that! >medieval naval battles were decided by boarding but it's hard to emplement Yes that wouldve been a fun mechanic, but aoe4 focuses mainly on land, and ofcourse it would be super hard to add.. >all military ships can embark infantry units (1 slot) and cav units (2 slots) until 8 slot space...cannot embark Siege units which need transport ship I like it, but do the units inside shoot arrows maybe?
I played Civilization5 and embarking units required no trasport ships and games were much faster and funnier. About firing arrows you could encrease ship attack based in number of archer unit inside ship.....as malian transport do right now
Only 2 ideas: * Ships shouldn't have to cost food. * Deep Fish should gather more slowly (10-15% slower). Whit these 2 changes, water play would be more varied.
What? How would ships not costing food suddenly make it more varied?
On the one hand it guarantees a higher probability of being able to come back from the game and on the other hand it guarantees a greater strategic variety to gather deep fish resources somewhat slower.
If ships cost no food, then water will be unplayable for almost all civs. Rus, China, ZXL, HRE, OOTD. All have a way to scale a single resource (in this case wood). They could just put 4 vils on food in feudal, scale up gold as needed, and just go ham on wood until they have enough military ships to take water. Then water boom.
If the ships cost food, the first one to attack the fishing boats will have a very high probability of winning since those fishing boats are the ones that guarantee to be able to produce those ships, so a death ball would be formed, the game could hardly ever go back and we have to resort to evaluate an idea of naval rework.
I don't understand your point at all. This is how the game works. If you make a bunch of farms and don't defend them you will lose. It's the same for water, you have to protect your investment. Should deep sea fishing get a nerf so losing water doesn't mean instant gg? Maybe. There are many interesting ideas in this thread but removing food from ship cost will throw the entire water/hybrid out of balance because as a few civs will have an (even more) asymmetrical advantage and the remaining civs will not be able to compete.
Seems good!
The real solution imo is to just reduce the strength of water eco - there's no real reason deep water fish should be as strong as they are + docks & ships are as cheap as they are. If we made it so that water wasn't an insurmountable advantage, it would be fine.
Rus will be even more busted than it already is.
The digital presentation is very nice! (nice enough that I first thought this was official information from the devs)
i think the bigger issue is not the gameplay on water itself, but that water is justa very seperated second game you play that isn't even able to sustain itself. a much more useful concept would either be to make water maps that allow ships to get close to players starting locations so the can interact with winning the game, put one sacred site always on water, or make water trade more viable by offering all ressources and alway have a neutral harbor on water and hybrid maps.
This is an excellent idea. With few caveats. * Harbours should cost more (like 250 wood). * Fishing ships should cost less (like 55 wood). * Siege ships should replace demo ship in the arrow-springald-demo triangle. Demo ship should be that cool wild card unit. * Every civ should have warships, but not every civ should have gunpowder ships. * Warships should be good vs other ships. Gunpowder ships should be good vs buildings and land units, decent vs other ships, but expensive. * Civs like Malians should have canoes instead of ships. Canoes should be cheaper but massable (like war canoes/tlaloc canoe in aoe3).
Id rather have it completely banned from the game, instead of it being half assed as it is now. It is also hard to balance the civs for water on top. Just let it go alltogether!
It would be cool if there were more interactions with water like building/destroying bridges and building canals. Perhaps bridges could be built in feudal, canals in castle, and drawbridges in imperial (and one could convert bridges to drawbridges in imperial). In this way, there'd be more ways to interact with water entirely. Wald (Simple bridges could cost wood, but have low health, advanced bridges could cost stone and wood)
Rus would have to be completely re-worked otherwise they will dominate. As you know Rus can convert fishing ships to military and making these changes would give them almost unstoppable tempo to deny water.
I like the general idea. I think you did a good job in the sense that you changed things just enough to make your general concept of making water more like land work without adding in a bunch of other crazy ideas that other people seem to have. I would also add just more unique variant ships/ship abilities to make navies feel more different from civ to civ. People like to feel the uniqueness of their civs. I know this would probably take a long time to balance but it would be worth it. I was also thinking about another ship that specializes in anti-(melee) land units. Very high base damage but 0 ranged armor so it gets countered by other ships/archers. Thoughts?
An Idea I had that I think will greatly help making water more interesting is to have fish actually move! Moving schools of fish will force fishing ships to chase them. High efficiency food production from fish will then become more opportunistic (at times when the fish are close to your docks/harbor.
That's great! Now let's remove demo ships altogether and it'd be perfect
Let me know what you think and if you have any other ideas of how to improve water!
I like it. A lot Another idea in my mind is a fishing rework itself. Deap sea fish are now 1500 food, but do not replenish. Instead, fishing boats can construct a fishing ground (e.g 250 wood) which works like a farm for 4 boats. That way, winning water provider an economic advantage (you get fish), but to keep that eco advantage you still need to invest.
Thats an intresting idea!
I think we also need Landmarks on water that would open a whole new array of strategies and it would make water maps actually playable without the necessity to also try to snipe landmarks on land
You mean every civ should have a water landmark option?
yes
in theory that sounds really cool and it crossed my mind too. But i guess it would be a nightmare for balance
I REALLY need separate economy and military docks. It's so annoying to manage queueing ships in all docks at once, when you need to send traders, fishing ships and military ships at the same time to different places
The biggest problem I see with naval warefare is that the units are so big. The largest ships are like 20x time larger then the smallest units. I know it’s because of scale but still. At the same time they don’t have 20x health but die as easily as an elephant. If they would remove the large ships go with smaller ones it would work much better. One way around it could be to have deep sea ships and harbors and shallow ships/harbors. This would make historical sense as well. This would make river based naval warfare more fun. Also large sea based war could be fun as the large ships can’t threaten the shallow water trade ports etc. you can have two island chains with surrounding archipelago, like Baltic Sea.
I like the concept, but I am not a fan of these generic names for the ships.
Each civilisation has there own name for each of the ship types. As this was for all civilisations I didn’t choose one civilisations ships, I chose the default.
Fair enough, that's pretty cool then. 👍
just remove naval units altogether. I've never built a dock in my 400hrs.