First, water maps never seem to get picked. Especially pure water maps, and hybrid water maps like bog islands. I think thats kinda sad. The ship triangle with demos → fireships → galleys seems a bit… bland. Also, the ships seem a bit tiny? Like a galley is barely larger than a fishing ship, and fishing ships don’t look trustworthy to seat a single person. And the health of a fishing ship seems remarkably low for what it is, and its gather rater rate seems rather low as well.
Then there is lack of incentive to build near water. I was playing rivers, and I kept thinking how it would look if it were a real world situation. The farms would all be clustered around the river for irrigation. Homes would have been jam packed up against the river, and the entire city would be hugging the river. Human civilization is deeply entwined with shipping, and with the waterfront. There are very very few civilizations that have not had some form of shipping of goods, and wherever shipping pops up, the civilization goes close to the water.
Imagine if aoe2 had incentives to build near the water. I don’t know what these would look like, but in the real world, you would have to build a well for water, and start pumping water if you want to grow crops in arid areas. On the topic of water, think about the dutch. The closest we have to the dutch in game is the burgundians with their flemish revolution. They are not the dutch though. A dutch civ should be able to build farms on swamp, and maybe be able to do something with ##### and changing land and water tile to swamp tiles. Idk. I think what the dutch have done in real life with their ##### is just neat.
On the topic of water maps not getting picked, another issue I keep coming back to is how much effort it takes to repair ships, mostly due to a combination of ship pathing, and a lack of an autorepair toggle on villagers, or a way to heal the ships passively. Monks can heal units passively that just navigate near them. If you want the army healed, go park it near the monks and the monks will figure out how to heal the army themselves. No such luck for the workers.
Another thing I keep coming back to is how cheap and lacking in power the ships are. A ship is not worth that much more than say a paladin in combat. Paladin vs galleon. Pally is better in stats. Irl, the ship is worth 100 pallys at minimum, probably closer to 200 in terms of effect on the map. The pop efficiency of a realistic ship would be insane.
For example, the battle of Cape Rachado in the 16th century. It was the dust east india company vs the portugese. The corporate dutch forces had 11 ships, and the portugese empire had 20 ships. In the battle, 150 dutch were killed, and the y lost 2 ships. Portugese lost roughly 500 men, as well as 3 ships. The pop efficiency for ships here is insane in aoe2 terms. They also cost a fortune.