I, as well as many others, don’t like playing water maps (pure water maps like warring islands or archipelago, not hybrid ones). Very frequently when matchmaking gives me a water map, my opponent just quits. A lot of people are rejecting to play water maps, and I sympathize with them.
One of the reasons is because once you lose advantage in water, it’s too hard, almost impossible to come back from there. The games are decided by early battles, if your first fleet is destroyed, the enemy will just snowball from there. Every single ship you produce will be immediately outnumbered and destroyed. Then they will destroy your docks so you can’t even build ships anymore. And because ships are too effective when hitting land units, villager included, you can’t build new docks too because if your villagers come close to the shoreline, enemy ships will just kill them. Of course there is still a small chance that you can build a sneaky dock, do some sneaky dropping, or even build up a new fleet, but if your enemy is not braindead and they patrol the beach, your dock won’t last long. That also means your economy activities are shrunk down into just the inner part of the island, because enemy ships will kill any villager chopping wood or mining gold near the beach. The only remaining way to win is to build a wonder, but if you do that, they can just take sacred sites because sacred sites countdown is only 10 mins compared to wonder’s 15 mins (unless you can sneakily go cancel one of their sacred sites, as I did pull off once, but I’d admit that’s very hard and had to involve a lot of luck, which is that my opponent forgot to cover one corner of my island with his ships and I rebuilt my dock at that exact spot).
So in short, in water maps, the whole game is likely decided by just a first few minutes. Once you lose the early advantage, you’re done, there’s almost no way back. This makes the game feel very shallow
IMO there are a few reasons leading to that:
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Docks on water are like Town Centers on land, but while Town Center can garrison a lot of units and have defensive arrows, docks can garrison only 3 ships (even ONLY fishing ships), and have no defensive system. You don’t have any way to defend your docks once you lose your fleet.
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Ships are way too effective when dealing with land units, so you can’t do a comeback by focusing just on land. Ships have great damage and great health. More importantly, melee units who have torch damage which is effective against ships can’t get close to ships most of the time because of course the ships can just go a bit far away from the shoreline, torch can’t reach them, while all ships are ranged, and can shoot back. Bombards can deal with ships, but to get them you have to crawl to Imperial Age, and pay an expensive price, while your economy is already ■■■■ when you let them control water (as mentioned above), so it’s almost impossible.
So I’m suggesting these changes (either all of just pick some of these):
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Ship’s damage to land units should be reduced by a lot, except for gunpowder ships like carracks. In history, I don’t think shooting men and buildings on land from a ship was really an effective strategy before we have cannons on ships, so this would also be more historically accurate. Water units should not dominate land units!
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Consider adding bonus damage to ships for some ranged units before age 4, like springalds, so we have at least some way to push back all the ships parking on the shoreline to regain the water.
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Add some defensive mechanism to docks, or better, allow war ships to garrison in docks, so that at least I have somewhere safe to hide my war ships when I’m outnumbered, and wait for the new ships to come and fight.
If none of my suggestions make sense, I would like to hear from a dev, what’s your thoughts about the current state of water maps and your reasonings behind the current water gameplay design.