Realism and Strengthening of Unit Importance

To the point, should or shouldn't rivers in the interior of the continent be navigable by ships? Interior trade through rivers was certainly what made New York so powerful in the early years with the fur trade with the Iroquois Confederacy and the inland seaports because of the rivers extending into the Atlantic Ocean. Also, shouldn't diplomacy be much more complicated for historical reasons? The games treat it as though, even in ancient times, George Washington could just call up Elizabeth I to talk to her. That's obviously not the case. Diplomacy with a leader should only be possible, if you actually send maybe an explorer to travel across the land to a nation's capital. That, or you could establish an embassy, in which case a unit you station in there could run all the way back to your civilization to inform you of a message from that civilization. Of course, after you get the telephone or something of the same nature, you should be able to contact a leader instantly, but I don't see the logic in it being an always available feature for everyone.

Not only would realistic diplomacy make more sense historically, it also would have great gameplay ramifications as well. Not only would it make decisions with other civilizations more valuable, but it would also ensure that you would have to be more strategic during a state of peace, because you never know when a rival nation is mobilizing an army. Navigable rivers and limited diplomacy would also make trade be a much more important part of the game. It would in general make the people who want more realism happy and the people who want more focus on gameplay happy with more strategy, tactics, value in contact with leaders, and complexity in the games.

Prior to the historical invention of the telegraph, 1 turn takes 5 or more years. Trading from one side of the world to the other doesn't even take that long, so diplomacy is abstracted away as "instant".

Of course, I've had swordsmen march for over a hundred years just to reach an enemy city before...

adam_grif said:

Of course, I've had swordsmen march for over a hundred years just to reach an enemy city before...

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Perhaps some of those swordsmen graphics in the unit should be changed to a wagon train to depict the sidekicks of the marching army? :cute:

About your idea for rivers; i can see certain ships being able to navigate rivers but by no means all of them. I mean you can't sail the Nimitz up the Mississippi, at least i don't think so.

But it would make things interesting for non combat missions. I would love to be able to build river boats that work like caravans on rivers.

To the point, should or shouldn't rivers in the interior of the continent be navigable by ships?

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Obviously the answer is "no" because it doesn't fit the scale of civ. You'd have to play on absurdly huge maps or create/play scenarios that represented tiny slices of the usual world maps to have rivers of the proper scale to be properly navigable.