Unfortunately, there is more than 1 design flaw in Civ 3. I'm at risk of posting spoilerish activity here, and I hope my teammates won't condemn me for it, but...
Since your boats are so spread out, we could easily permit you to land just 4 units and slaughter them, and we have discussed that possibility. However, it is obvious that you know a landing party of 4 in a spot of our choosing would get slaughtered, so why spread your boats out so far?
It occurred to us that your plan might be to try to land 1 unit without declaring war which would leave us 2 poor choices. We could let that unit sit there while you then brought as many reinforcements as your boats could carry, or we could declare war on you giving you war happiness. In that case, you could then carry on your merry way and enjoy +25% happiness for the remainder of the game, while we would be powerless to stop that.
Call me paranoid if you will, but in the ruleset discussion you will find this quote:
with a reminder
here. Not a single person spoke in favor of forbidding any sort of exploitation of war happiness, so we have to assume that you would not be above using the lack of a rule in your favor.
In short, given all the circumstances, we made a decision of what we felt would give us the best chance of winning the game. You may disagree and think we made a poor decision, but we will play on and live with the consequences.