Great job!
I’m the one who originally requested this unit, so I’ll provide a little info as to the type of ship upon which this unit was based, as well as similar ships.
I requested this unit because, even with the available player-created ship units, Civ III lacked a good ancient sail-based cargo ship unit. There were a number of cargo ship units based on the galley unit, but these were all the wrong shape, being deckless and much too narrow in the beam.
Ancient sail-based cargo units were the principal bulk load carriers in the Mediterranean for at least a couple thousand years. They were variously known as round ships, corbitas, holkades, pontos, and navis oneraria, but they all shared the common features of a broad beam, a shallow draft, a deck (usually), and one (or at most two) large square sails.
The typical Mediterranean merchant ship of antiquity, generically referred to as a round ship, changed relatively little from the Bronze Age onward, except in terms of size. Evidence from underwater excavations of shipwrecks and from ancient art reveals that these ships featured rounded planked hulls with raised bows and sterns. They usually sported a single mast placed in the center of the hull and were rigged with a single square sail. In Roman times, some vessels had a second mast situated forward of the main mast. Cargo was typically carried within the vessels, under the deck, and sometimes also on top of the deck.
The oldest of these sorts of ships would probably be the Phoenician round ships. These were sturdy, durable cargo vessels that traveled throughout the Mediterranean and beyond, even transporting tin from the mines of Cornwall, England back to the eastern end of the Mediterranean as early as 1350 BC. They generally sported a wicker fence along the sheerstrake to protect the cargo carried on deck.
The acme of ancient sail-based cargo ships was probably the Roman Merchantman, which Orthanc has been kind enough to create for us. Many of these merchant ships, commonly referred to as “grain ships,” traveled between Alexandria, Egypt and Ostia, Italy to supply the vast amounts of grain needed to feed Rome. They were also used to carry passengers. In 62 AD, Saint Paul was wrecked on Malta while voyaging towards Rome in a grain ship with 276 persons on board.
I plan on using Orthanc’s unit as a general round ship unit representing all of the ancient sail-based cargo ships. For game purposes, a good successor unit would be
Aaglo's Cog unit.
In real life, this ship wouldn’t have any kind of effective attack capability. However, Civ takes some liberties with real life for game play purposes, as it should, so I think the basic arrow attack provided by Orthanc is appropriate.
Thank you for a much needed and wonderfully done unit, Orthanc!
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