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Radiospace's Suggestions #2: Naval Development

radiospace

Approved user
Joined
Oct 4, 2015
Messages
37
NAVAL DEVELOPMENT


Too Long Didn’t Read Version:

Do the Rise of Nations thing with the water.



Full Version:


Redraw the map to make the river an ocean. Make the overall map larger, if possible, to accommodate a somewhat larger area of water.

There should be two new sources of food and gold that are gathered from the sea — fish (food) and whales (gold). Each of these sources also gives up new trade goods in the same manner that mines give up metal, etc. Those are pearls (from fish) and whale oil (obviously from whales). These new resources are necessary for the building of war ships and the hiring of privateers (see below).

Two new buildings accommodate the building of ships: the Dock (economic ships) and the Naval Yard (military ships). Just like land buildings and units everything is introduced slowly and is upgradeable.

Economic ships are upgraded to both bring home a larger haul, and to increase their hitpoints.

There are four classes of warships: Anti-naval ships that are best against other ships; bombardment ships that are used to bombard the coast, destroying fortifications; marine ships, which carry marines and drop them on the coast; and, not available til much later, submarines, which are anti-naval ships that hide under the water.

Cities are able to build coastal batteries starting with the Gunpowder Age that have pretty long range and are fixed to point out to sea. A third new building, the Naval Base, launches defensive ships in the manner that a garrison spits forth infantry. (Though the Naval Base should probably produce only one wave of defensive ships, more like the Command Post produces a single wave of unique national units on defense).

Starting in the Industrial Age, the Naval Base would also launch anti-naval aircraft. Attackers might similarly be allowed to develop and bring an aircraft carrier starting in this era to offset the defensive aircraft encountered.

Attackers can use their navy to do the following on a raid:


— raid fishing and whaling vessels for loot and oceanic trade goods (pearls and whale oil, which would only be gotten in this manner, and not by invading land troops).


— battle any defending navy that comes out to meet them

— bombard city defenses and buildings which are near the coast, including the coastal batteries which, if present, will be directing fire at the ships, all in support of a full land invasion taking place.

— land reinforcement troops on the shore from a marine ship


Resources gathered by fishing and whaling vessels should not be gathered by the player by clicking on them in the same way one can do with farms and caravans. Instead, when a ship’s hold is full, it must sail back to port to unload its wares. Ships automatically return to port when they are full, or the player can order them to port early to disgorge their goods. However, sailing to port should take quite a while (1 hr? 2hrs?), so that returning to port early regularly would be costly in terms of lost time fishing. The goal here would be to give the player a meaningful choice when signing off for a while as to whether to return the ships to port to protect their goods from being raided. Do you leave your ships at sea for maximum efficiency, or bring them home early to protect the goods already onboard? Goods on board a ship would be 100% vulnerable to raiders, unlike land-based resource storage.


Things should be balanced such that it is a reasonable tactic for players to launch purely naval raids for the sole purpose of capturing loot from fishing and whaling vessels. If a player destroys all of the targets’ defensive ships, he should not have to rebuild any ships that survive a raid (even if there are still land-based defenses standing, including naval batteries). There should be a small chance that the last enemy ship taken by either side is captured rather than destroyed.

Allies might be able to donate a single defensive ship, just as they are able to donate troops to defend your city.

The defensive ships produced by a Naval Base might stay at sea, near the fishing and whaling vessels, to make defending those ships possible from a quick raid. (This could also be an ability that is gained via library research, i.e. Vitamin C, which allows sailors to stay out to sea longer, or something like that).

Finally — the Privateer Base is a naval version of the Mercenary base, where one can hire special ships with a combination of land and sea trade goods (i.e ‘cider’+ pearls) to take on raids. It would be cool if the Privateers had some special abilities that are not afforded other ships, such as they can sail first into an enemy port without being fired upon until they open fire themselves. Or perhaps Privateer-only raids should be possible even against players who are under a peace treaty.

Lastly, I would suggest the possibility of an island off the coast of the player’s city, that can eventually be developed as both an additional site for anti-naval batteries, but also as a site for additional resource generation, such as an extra mine, and a couple of extra fruit trees. In other words, a colony. Perhaps the colony must store all its resources until there is a full galleon-load, and then the galleon automatically ships these resources back to the mainland where they can be spent. The galleon would travel extremely slowly (6 hrs?) to cross back to the mainland, making it vulnerable to sea raiders. Here is where privateers would come in handy, as a city under a peace treaty could still have its galleons captured by privateers and lose large quantities of colonial loot. (The galleons would be armed themselves, though not enough to defeat a full-strength Privateer fleet). Also, raiders could instead bring a fleet including marine ships and try to raid the colony for the goods stored in its markets and mills. Only through such naval invasions of marines would colonies be vulnerable to such land attacks.



 

misterwheatley

Approved user
Joined
Jan 29, 2016
Messages
37
Naval sounds like a bit much, as air was hard enough to balance as it is, and not to mention the PITA it is to get raided by industrial players at the enlightenment age with planes and zeppelins. If they could make this fair, I would be all for it.
 
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