hey all. i don’t know if the subjects has already been exhausted, but i wanted to throw out some ideas to make water play more appealing.
i think water should be as similar as possible to land, which means there should be various generic units, multiple counters to a single unit, gold units and trash units, and multiple buildings and techs. so here are some examples
Multiple naval buildings: like Chronicles did. one for eco and one for military. military dock (Arsenal?) could garrison military ships and shoot arrows. You could even add a water fort to act like a beefy tower/small castle on shores, costing a bit of stone but having more firepower and range, available from castle age. each of these building could train different ships, or have access to different techs, so that all 3 are needed to achieve FU on water, requiring a better investment
new techs: some ideas could be “remove minimum range from all water buildings”, “ships can slowly heal while garrisoned”, a “loom-like” tech for fishing ships, and so on. if we implement the Scout ship, we could even have 3 mutually exclusive techs each tailored to make this ship a counter to one of the 3 main ship lines (Galley, fires, hulks) giving some trash counter potential but for a specific unit.
rework unit upgrades: right now is too easy to just spam 1 unit to counter the spam of your opponent, since all units upgrades with 1 single tech. this is silly imho and not at all in line to land balance. make every ship upgrade on its own, allowing for different balance in upgrade cost and training time, for a richer environment and timing potential and reward.
new ships: create a Scout Ships (random name) that can be train in dark age in the dock and only cost wood, with little damage or even no damage in dark age, and slowly get up with upgrades in later ages. create a Mangonel Ship, available from caste age (maybe from the water fort) functioning like a smaller dromon. lesser damage, lesser range, lesser cost, able to push docks and Arsenals but not Water Forts, exactly like mangonels can push TCs in castle. that would also allow for some comeback potential and stop a snowball, a big water problem atm, where one player gets the lead in 1 big fight and the game is basically over, a mangonel ships could damage multiple ships at once giving a loosing player a shot at defense. We could also have a Boarding Ship, or a tanky transport ship with increased armor and HP and ability to do damage based on how many unit there are inside, similar to a ram but against other ships, making its damage ranged or melee depending on what devs wants it to counter, or depending on which units are inside of it, the tradeoff being that if you lose the ship, you lose the units inside. Making it possible to have a easier landing, or fight off with your transport ships a bit, or giving them a unique ability like slowly healing close allied land units when on a shore…
i kwon it’s a lot of things and probably nothing like this would even see the light of day, but i’m curious to hear other opinions. i surely would love a deeper naval balance that makes water map a bit closer to what we have on land
I think landing can be made more crucial for naval fight. It will be way more fun than fighting with hulks.
Like there should be multiple small boats in medieval ships when the ship was sinking. Perhaps allow infantry/foot archers to garrison in the boat and then the boat can garrison in the transport ships. If the transport ship sink, the boats emerge. Transport ship will be way more useful.
To encourage a bit transport ships maybe they could make that if the enemy destroys your transport close enough to a shore the units reach land automatically, perhaps damaged or not the entirety of them. Right now I think it’s too much of a rigid “win or lose” situation where if you can land you’re super good otherwise everything is lost (this can have its charm too but maybe locking this ability behind a tech which not all civs get could work). It’s also unrealistic that no one survives when the boat is destroyed at two tiles from a shore.
Another thing about transports is that the current behaviour where they try to help you embarking troops is more annoying than helpful.
The point of the post is not specific on transport ships tough, but on a naval rework as a wider concept. Transport ships and landing can be improved sure, but i think many other things are of higher priority when it comes to water gameplay
Still at the end of the day we are going all the way back to Chronicles balance for navy. I still dont know why they tried to do their weird experiment with navy instead of copy pasting Chronicles?
The main issue witht the current water construct is that it isn’t really thought through from a strategic balance game perspective. At least it’s not understandable for me.
It’s either too clear against and at what timings which types are best and really hard to put some counter strat against. Or just random interactions that are favorable or disfavorable for certain ship types. Which maybe are chosen by “what makes sense” or “just occurs by the way we designed the ships without specific armor classes”. But the issue is, there is ne plan, no concept behind it. So it’s not really feasible to wire together specific strats there or counterstrats, these things just occur and in most maps there is just one dominant strat that is figured out over time.
Then we have the garrisonable fishing ships which made water even more snowbally than it was before, because you get away with way more greed - even if the initial fish boom has been reduced a bit (which is a positive). There is also still no possibilty to add any extra land eco to strategically “give up water”. Even if it was heavily limited and/or way more expensive to do so, this could make especially hybrid maps way more interesting because of the different strategies clashing.
One easy thing that can be done actually very fast is to make the current 3-legged water balance a 4-legged one with 2 different “army comps”. Just make Demos countering Hulks (hardcounter!). Fires could get some special bonus damage (possibly on siphons) that makes them softcountering demos. Reduce the countering of Hulks by the standard Galley line a bit.
Then we would end up with 2 comps of Galleys + Hulks vs Fires + Demos, similar to Archer + Spear vs Skirm + Cav. This could make it way more attractive to play water with the different lines special timing advantages and other interactions like map layouts, defensive structures, land units and so on. Ofc then it need to over time figured out how to tweak them their different other interactions lead to interesting gameplay. But at least we would have a solid streucture, a root on which the tree could grow on.
On fishing ships yeah, they can be used to scout, bu that’s like using a villager to scout. Ships are eco units and should be used to gather resources, while another ships could fill that role and add uniqueness, new strategies, and more options to create new counters.
Maybe if fishing ships could build palisade and towers on shallows, then scout ship could be a sort of outpost on water, or something cool.
On mangonels ships, i don’t see the problem if the unit is appropriately priced and has counters. For example, a mangonels ships would be good against gallery but bad against fires, and maybe could take bonus damage from demolition ships to give them a useful role. It would also solve the problem of mass galleys being the undesputed meta for every civ on every water map in late game, since they have no counter atm
But the devs ARE doing this already. You think the addition of the Hulk came out of nowhere? They are trying to spice water up and Chronicles was their testing ground.
Also no, prior units still had all in 1 upgrades. The only difference now is that demos have their own upgrades, but the 3 main always upgraded with 1 tech, which is silly. I think demo’s treatment to all naval units would already help water balance quite a lot adding timing, strategies, and new builds
Adding new ships would solve nothing? That’s like saying the game would be ok of there were only knights and xbows and militia…more units means more strategies, more counters, and more fun. If that’s true on land, why would it be any different on water? Currently water is inferiore exactly because It has no variety
I get your point on the UI but that’s a problem the devs could easily fix with another page. They could add a “naval buildings” page on the villager related to all naval buildings. On techs, they could simply be out into the new naval buildings, since dock would only have eco ships and Scout ships, and eco upgrades, and other 2 naval buildings would have the rest, so that’s a non-issue
That’s why my ideas went on the direction of adding more strategic depth, adding possibility of new builds, new timings, new counters, and so on.
I get that’s a lot of “new” stuff, but i believe water is the worst part of this masterpiece of a gakme and it has been since forever and at this point i would like to try something more then just tweaking something. Water need a big shake-up to become a core part of the game
I also added ideas for “giving up water” if you don’t mind that part. The “Water Fort” building i suggested, in my mind is a building that has potentially a lot of range and can range even galleons (depending on upgrades), giving you a strong foothold on water, giving you a comeback potential if you lost water but can Attack ONLY water and cost stone, so it hinders your Castle production, and is very vulnerable on land. Again, adding strategies
Maybe it’s too much changes all in one, but frankly i think water kinda needs it to actually be good even on a competitive perspective, even for tournaments engagement and the like
What i refer to is to not making initial docks and therefore not fish booming. The strat shouldn’t be the best and especially be punishable when the opponent scouts it early. But we are missing out in a lot of intersting games if we basically FORCE people to fish boom on every map that features water. (see BF)
I agree on that, even if i think that fish booming on something like BF is not that bad because it creates a huge eco target, similar to how the enemy team trade is a target. Attacking an opponent pond usually means there is a massive investment in 1 tiny place that a Onagers shot can wreck, but yeah, i do agree that it could be better, but on such a map you could end up nerfing fish boom so that it becomes useless and not worth, which would not be fun imho
Bu yes, water could be much more interesting on so many aspects
For example, asyde from Eco, we could add different tipes of water then just deep and shallows, that gives bonuses to ships, like Hills in the Land game, or some terrair, like Dangerous Waters, that maybe damages ships over time like some seas in campaigns, which could also be used in BF to create spaces where fishing ships would take damage over time and prevent a too easy fish boom
That would also create spaces for a new naval tech that makes ships immune to that kind of terrain, to require and additional investment for a safe fish boom, and strategic depth, and micro potential
I really don’t are any negatives, there is so much potential, besyde the usual “let’s not change everything the game has been like this for 20+ years” kinda argument that has 0 sense
One possible solution to make fish-booming less powerful is this:
Fishing Ship:
Can carry 1 villager, generically.
Can no longer work unless garrisoned by a villager.
Moves 40% slower unless garrisoned by a villager.
Work rate when garrisoned by 1 villager set to 27.8 food per min (about 8% faster than a fisherman alone or about 50% faster than a forager).
Cost reduced from 75 wood → 30 wood.
Train time reduced from 40 → 20. (Villager is 25)
HP increased from 50 → 65.
Carry capacity increased from 15 → 35 (can be upgraded further).
No longer takes population space.
Overall, it should give fish-booming much more clear tradeoffs: do you stay in dark age longer (minimum 180 wood investment) to take advantage of the increased work rate or do you rush to the next age to get military on the field faster?
A side effect would be it would make surprise early landings a bit more viable.
Additionally, this may actually be modable already by taking advantage of the relic pickup mechanic, but it would be unbelievably janky.