Ferry system

One thing that's always bugged me about nearly all strategy games is the way that transporting land units across sea is handled. It's labourious to load each unit onto each transport, move the transport, and then unload the unit(s). It gets worse the more land units you have. Civ4 has an additional, specific problem: missionaries. You can set missionaries to auto-spread their religion when they're built. This is very useful, but if you want to spread your religion to another continent you have to control the missionaries manually.

I propose to kill these two birds with one stone. You should be able to put transports into ferry mode. This would work be selecting the transport, left-clicking the 'ferry' button (i.e. just like any order button) and then left click on any land tile. When any land unit is in the transport's tile, loading them onto the transport will automatically cause transport to sail to the overseas continent and unload its 'cargo' into the designated land tile. If the destination tile is a city, the transport will sail into the city and unload (thus the transported units will able to move that turn), or if the destination tile is not in a city the transport will just move adjacent to it and then its cargo will move onto the land tile.

The missionary AI would have to be altered to take advantage of this. A missionary (or corporate agent, for that matter) on auto-spread orders should be able to board a transport in ferry mode move to the overseas and continent and continue on its way - all without human interaction.

Ideally, selecting a transport in ferry mode would also show dotted lines along its path to its designated drop-off point.

I believe that this would take the chore out of handling inter-continental movement.

Opinions?

Personally I think that if it's only 1 tile of water than after a certain point in tech we should be able to build a bridge or a tunnel.

Or let's add two buttons in the missionary menu: auto-spread religion and auto-spread religion outside borders. Clicking the second on will open a new screen, where you select the land, where the missionary should spread religion.

How about the units simply ferry themselves? There was some RTS game I played a few times that did this. If you set your units to move across water, they changed to ships (just the graphics) over the water and back to their usual selves when they hit land on the other side. If you wanted to protect these units in ferry-mode, then and only then, would you have to step in and move your navy around to do so.

alms66 said:

How about the units simply ferry themselves? There was some RTS game I played a few times that did this. If you set your units to move across water, they changed to ships (just the graphics) over the water and back to their usual selves when they hit land on the other side. If you wanted to protect these units in ferry-mode, then and only then, would you have to step in and move your navy around to do so.

Click to expand...

I bet that was "Rise of Nations"

I like CUTLASS' idea.

I'm all for the bridge notion; the problem with ferry mode is, if it's a long journey to a continent you are invading, is it not likely that the situation on the continent might change so you would want to redirect the ferries half-way across the ocean anyway, so you might as well be manually steering them ?

You should have the option of using some kind of Ferry AI, or doing it manually. That should satisfy everyone.

It's a fantastic idea.

To make things even more interesting, Nations would have resupply channels to attack & defend meaning that you would have to think about your strategy even more as well as have backup routes & fleets.

Bennett said:

You should have the option of using some kind of Ferry AI, or doing it manually. That should satisfy everyone.

Click to expand...

I'll believe a ferry AI smart enough to do what I want it to when I see it and not before.

Remember, it took three versions of Civ before a simple "go from point A to point B" command worked well enough to be reliably usable.

why the port doesn't function like the airport?

It would mean that you get a Ferry Icon, and it would take the same number of turn that a boat (the best transportation avalaible: galley, galleon, transport with bonus associated (circumnavigation, promotions?)) need to link the two cities (if your galley needs 3 turn going from city A to City B, your unit will be avalaible in 3 turns...).
It would be only possible between cities with trade route: Your cities, or other civ with which you have open border.

That would mean that declaring war needs a fleet
That would mean that a blocking ship needs fleet to pass the blocus
That would mean that beyond a certain level of tech going between two cities separated by few tiles of water would be done in one turn
That would mean that going in and out of the ship from/to a non-portuary city tile would need a fleet (think of D-DAY, there was no harbour and they needed a fleet to get to those beach, it was painfull. Embarking from the port was much nicer...)
That would mean that airport would still be the king of transportation
That would allow much less micromanagement of ship in home redristibution
That clicking on a different continent and the unit going for it way be possible
That producing a unit on the continent it will be used is still the best solution when the sea travel is long

WTH stick radioactivemonkeys rofllmao

Lankou is onto something. However I still think convoys should be made more important, think about the battle for the Atlantic in WWII. Convoys should automatically run back and fourth along trade routes and you should have the ability to add your own ships to the trade route. Also if someone is importing or exporting a product this would cause a convoy to run, if the convoy is captured by the enemy then they get gold or access to the resource for x number of turns.