Trash Naval Unit?

I was wondering why there isn’t a naval unit that costs only food and wood so as to be mass produced in late game? How will it affect the balance?

1 Like

Like a dinghy maybe?

Hey, Italians can have a gondola. Then you can put a male villager and a female villager on it and take them for a ride through the tunnel of love. :heart_eyes_cat:

4 Likes

What about “melee galleys”? Like the ones used for boarding in the mediterranean.
It would have no range, would have melee attack and melee armor, but small pierce armor. Could be very weak vs demos and galleons, and kinda meh vs fire galleys.
Perhaps it could be used to remove the focus from fire ships in the very early game - the first to train 2 fire galleys in feudal has uncontested naval control if the momentum is kept - if it gets a sort of bonus.
The weakness to demos could make then less of a meme unit.

No idea about stats, or price, tho. And i support no ramming btw, if anyone is interested.

2 Likes

What about some canoe units for raiding fisheries? We also have some nice editor graphics that can be used.

1 Like

don’t know if canoes makes a lot of sense considering the civs, but a reskin of then could work too

It’s not gold that you run out of in water maps, it’s wood. In that sense, there’s no sense in having a ship that doesn’t cost gold. Gold is never an issue.

2 Likes

Ah, the balance god. And since boats can’t be made of anything other than wood - in the game context - we find ourselves in a tough spot for trash boats.

who said it has to be a ship?

i say we get doplhins and turtles and whales and giant squids… costing food and a wee bit of gold… and all do melee damage. :smiley: :smiley: :smiley:

1 Like

My vote goes to training Sharks.

2 Likes

You guys want to mass produce shark/dolphin in late game???

3 Likes

:heart_eyes::heart_eyes::heart_eyes::heart_eyes:
[need to add some more characters]

Type “catzor” in game chat bar and press enter.

1 Like

Underwater swordsmen!

You could mass produce fishing boats/transport ships as meat shields for your warships, while conserving gold…

Ah, but there’s one in the scenario editor. It’s even called a “junk”

Release the Kraken! #AoMCrossover

3 Likes
1 Like

Let’s go hunt, doo doo doo doo doo doo
Let’s go hunt, doo doo doo doo doo doo
Let’s go hunt, doo doo doo doo doo doo
Let’s go hunt!

Or add the option like in AOE Online to be able to repair your fleet using a few of your fishing ships which would save you resources against replenishing.

So I know this topic is super old, but the Rome at War mod introduced a scout boat (as the name implies it’s basically the scout cavalry line on the water). Only costs food and wood. Fast with a small attack. I think this is a good implementation of the idea.

However as some people pointed out, in water maps, wood can become scarce. I’m going to suggest a couple things. All tangentially related to the above topic. Like pulling on a string.

I haven’t the foggiest idea what would be the historical justification for such a mechanic but if water trade also netted you wood, then not only would that help to resolve the lack of wood on water maps (at least in team games), but would also make trade cogs much better than trade carts, and would make water control that much more important.

Still doesn’t address the lack of wood on 1v1 water maps. Maybe if you also cranked up the amount of food for fish then you’d be less reliant on farms, and wood would last longer. I don’t think you’d need to adjust the gather rate, just the amount of food a fish tile has. Also ensemble dropped this idea during development of aoe2, but they’d thought it’d be cool if deer would repopulate if you left some on the map. More to look nice than as a constant food supply. If you really wanted to maybe you could do the same with fish, but I think just cranking up the amount of fish per tile, achieves nearly the same thing, without introducing a new mechanic for the devs.

Unfortunately with so many advantages of going onto water, you could run into a situation where one side starts getting an advantage on water and it could quickly snowball for the winning player by denying water to their opponent. If you could also build sea walls, gates, and towers to protect your now much more important water eco, then I think that’d help mitigate that snowball effect.

I also think it’d be justifiable to cap the price of wood at the market. Something still expensive (200-400 gold per 100 wood), but not so insanely expensive that the game grinds to a halt. Wood literally grows on trees. There is a finite amount of (easily accessible) gold and stone on the planet. Even agriculture on the level necessary to feed a civilization is a massive undertaking. Admittedly you still need to cut down a tree, but the supply replenishes without human effort. I think it reasonable some minimum amount of wood supply exists, which would be reflected by a maximum market wood price. I suppose you could argue that as prices rise, people are more incentivized to find/create new supply, so not only could capping prices apply to all resources, but that the rise should be logarithmic not linear, but I’m not trying to make aoe2 some macro-economic simulation. Just spitballing easy to implement ideas to get more wood on water maps.

So yeah, trashboats of some kind would be cool, and here’s like 3 ideas as to how to have more wood on water maps for that to mean something.