Hi! After having made a thread on reddit and read the feedback onto what people dislike about Navy gameplay in general.
I decided to invest a little time into drafting up a concept of how AOE4 Navy can be reworked and made much more interesting, yet still trying to keep it somewhat familiar to navy.
From what I seem to understand why people dislike navy, looking away from the rather lackluster shallow state AOE4 navy is at.
So from what I’ve gathered, there is a couple of points that needs to be added to the water game:
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More ship diversity
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More content into the water (i.e water is just well… Water, there very little content within it besides you fish and occasional kelp forest)
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Reduce the intensity of ship-to-ship combat. (i.e, a few demo ships can quickly turn the game in the blink of an eye if you have to pay attention to somewhere else briefly).
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Reduce multitasking between land and sea (i.e managing a navy army at one end, and land army at another)
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Better integration between land and sea. (i.e Navy becomes a big inactive pop waste once you wrestled controll of the sea)
Now my idea is to try to alleviate some of these problems.
By adding more content into the water itself, in the form of terrain features, resources, etc.
But as well as reducing the “combat” intensity by introducing “melee” in water.
While Demo-ships are still a thing, they fill more the role of siege rather than a core-counter unit. And thus moved later into the game.
And having ships that serve very little purpose, such as Transport ships, giving them a more supportive role and viable option, even the fishing ships are able to do more stuff than just economy, with the idea behind it being that Villagers on land, even though they are an econ unit, they can still do many things besides eco. (Construction, and even Fighting back.)
Boosting defensive structures, such as keeps and making walls viable coastal fortification, will help the player to be able to focus more on land without worrying and being unable to react in time over a fleet that demolishes their shoreline in the blink of an instant. It also helps give some limited map control by the use of fortifying strategic islands to prevent enemy fleets from simply ignoring and passing by them easily.
I do acknowledge that many people dislike the Navy simply due to having to learn new Build orders, but tbh, I find that an excuse that falls into the category of what a good friend of mine always keeps telling me when I’m having a bad day; Skill issue.
So here is the concept that I drafted. (Sry for the simple MS paint stuff hah)
Please come with your criticism and point out things that you find problematic, or should be changed.
My hope is that the Community can come together and build a Naval Idea that will help bring less hatred towards the water maps and hopefully grow the Navy-enthusiast base larger.
If there is any questions or stuff that is hard to understand, please do ask!
This idea is also open for anyone to make their own idea out of it, do not be ashamed to outright “steal” it, and make your own improved version of it!