An idea to encourage players to go for water more often

The main reason players go for water is for the eco adventage it gives, but at the same time it will cost population, and if your enemy go all land in and played well, u will be outnumbered.

my idea is to seperate the land units population from water, give water units their own population count & cap
and this population can increase depending on how much docks u have
that way the player wont have to worry about population cost when they invest into water.

Would have massive balance connotations if naval didn’t have to consider population.

Like, I’m not a “good” player. My issue with naval is it’s another thing to micromanage, but by itself it isn’t as deep as land-based gameplay (no buildings, for starters). So the more a map requires naval, the more I have to dedicate to something that isn’t actually advancing my tech level and critical point control (Relics, Holy Sites, resource dumps apart from fish, etc).

I don’t think the game can fix that for me. That’s a me problem.

Similarly, getting out-predicted by an opponent is a basic part of playing multiplayer. It would still be a me problem.

I like the S3 rework for naval; conceptually, I think it’s great. But I think it’s only a starting point and that they should continue to develop gameplay (as well as fix bugs, improve unit pathing / handling, etc). This’ll get more attention.

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Hmm; its an interesting suggestion.
I think that considering how strong fishing is and how good trade economy is there is already lots of incentives for investing into water.

Currently loosing water is pretty much game over and you will often see players resigning as soon as thet loose it because you loose a massive investment while your opponent can continue to increase his economy.

I think that is actually a good thing. It means there is always a risk associated with investing too many resources into water; but at the same time the land push fails you will be far ahead economically.

the main reason players do not go for water is

  1. hotkeys
  2. buildorders //learn x2 buildorders for some maps… If you are not streamer, where you find free time to learn it?
  3. uncertainty of water/further changes etc.
  4. micro: F2 does not work good.

Pop limit issue is issue, when you reached 200 pop.
But what about early stages? It’s not issue at all.

as it was said, there will be a lot of balance issues. And as i explained above- pop space is not the issue.

I have never seen population cost be the reason someone lost or won due to water.

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