On water and hybrid maps the guy who wins water will win the game most of the time. The snowball effect is too massive. Adding sea walls / gates to be built by fishing ship would balance things massively
Nearly every single land game now is a wooden arena, so why not extend that to the sea.
No. Because even in reality we did not build giant walls across the sea. Holland. Has very large walls. However they are not giant walls that stretch all the way to Denmark, and beyond. In theory on a diplomacy map of Age of Empires 2 you could build a giant wall that goes across the entire planet.
Maybe in shallow waters it would make sense. To put things in perspective, imagine building a giant wall from Egypt all the way to Turkey. It would look silly.
Alternative solution. Lumber Yard. Unbreakable capturable building (can be taken off you by another player) that generates one wood and gold per second. Unbreakable gaia Trading Port at the edge of the map that generates wood and gold from trade cogs doing trade with it.
The original devs tried that during initial development, but testers just used walls to block off the resources of other players, which was deemed to be anti-fun and therefore cut.
I really like the neutral trading outpost idea. Would make trade ships useful when you don’t have any allies.
Sea walls were built on the shore, as it would be ridiculously difficult to build over the sea. And if you needed a “sea gate”, the easiest solution was a chain to bar a narrow waterway, such as the Golden Horn at Constantinople. As most ports were inlets so that they’d have some protection from the tide and big waves, this allowed to bar the entry to the port.
To be a bit more resilient at sea, place your docks in an inlet to have some ground in front of it to put castles and towers, the enemy will not attack that from the sea before having cannon galleons.
A lot of real harbours were and are protected by walls being build into the water. It’s more of a defence against waves then against enemy ships though.
The sea gate already looks like a chain.
most of the time they used the already existing terrain to reinforce a natural harbor, they aren’t build over deep water.
Most people suggest them being limited to shallow water.
It is not 100% historical but neither is a Hunic Castle or building walls though the entire map (unless you are China).
It would work, provided some map generations are reworked to at least put medium water between islands.