Hello, I have a suggestion for an equivalent of the Demo ship in AOE2. In AOE1 the fire galley doesn’t have a counter and is really strong unless you have a mass of Triremes.
My suggestion is to include some type of ramming ship (like a battle ram in the water). Greeks used such ships against the Persians in the battle of Salamis, iron clad ships used to punch through the enemy wooden ships. It was possibly used in many other battles too. This can be an equivalent or similar to the Demo ship in AOE2 and a counter to Fire Galley. To compensate for balance, it can have slow or medium speed.
Another one is a ship to build sea walls, towers, gates.
And my last one for now is to remove the option for Merchant ships to trade gold for food/wood/stone. The traders sell and resell goods, so I think it makes sense that the trip just generates gold IE profit. Another touch can be that if you kill the enemy trade ship, you get the gold it carried.
Have you tried the Romae ad Bellum mod for AoE2? That has a lot of ship types.
I think a melee ship would generally be nice and a lot more realistic then ranged ships.
Sadly the AoE2DE engine doesn’t support units having multiple attack modes like AoE3 does. So you couldn’t have a ship that can ram other ships but also shoot from range.
The only way to implement that in AoE2DE is by making a manual toggle.
My idea about the sea walls etc. I got from the mod. I haven’t played it but I have seen videos on it.
I had my first two ideas (Melee /ram ship and merchant ship) from before. I had read about some ancient battle (not sure if it is Salamis, might be a different one), where they had used ships with bronze/iron tips to smash the enemy, so I thought it would be fitting in AOE1, fire galleys are quite OP.
Before cannons nearly all naval battles were fought in melee.
AoE1/2/4 are bad representations of how naval battles were usually fought.
Naval battles were basically land battles on board of 2 ships.