No matter the patch, Naval Warfare will always be inferior

[seancolorado]

I was thinking about how much I love the water game and water civs in general.

But I also thought about how underwhelming it is, at least in comparison to land warfare.

The devs can patch all they want and improve AI all they want, but it will never be as stimulating as land.

So I was thinking, with BNW mechanics in mind, would altering the seas and oceans cause too much chaos or is it possible to create a happy balance?

I.e.

• On water you have ranged ships and melee ships. On land you have mostly the same, but the variety of types of units is much greater...
  
• ...And that's because of the terrain. You have hills, forest, rivers, etc.

So my question is, what about the prospect of adding "terrain" to the oceans? You could have whirlpools or stormy areas that slow movement or decrease combat strength. Also, you could have certain bonuses for ships near their homeland and certain bonuses to ships in between continents. I'm really spit-balling these ideas as I go, so it's rough, but it's also rough because I'm struggling to see how they could make naval warfare fluid.

 

[Tyrvos]

This is just my opinion, but I think naval warfare is fine right now. It has more importance because of the new trade system. Navy are great for setting up a coastal assault and protecting trade routes. That's pretty accurate for the purpose of real navies. I prefer naval civs, but land forces are always the backbone of a military. I don't think the storms and whirlpools would really make naval combat any better to be honest.

 

[Buccaneer]

I just finished a continents game in which nearly every battle, of what I could see, was naval. The Huns sent several swarms at me and I had to learn how to get naval superiority for the first time. I then watched hundreds of naval battles in the late game all around me and my city-states. I had never seen this much naval action and it was fun do and watch. And I think the AI had come a long ways in this.

I know what you mean comparing to land battles but getting superiority with submarines for quite some time was more exciting to me than the many Artillery superiority I had in previous versions.

 

[Aristos]

I see your point, but one cannot avoid remembering that "wars are won by soldiers on foot". My point is, the Navy is in the end, a (very important) part of the armed forces with a (very important) supporting role. Not more, not less. Some wars cannot be won without a Navy, but NO war can be won without land forces (well, there is Kevin Costner's water world, but... eh ).

Naval forces are now very well represented as supporting/harassing elements; if anything, I would ask them to insist on the AI instead of adding complexity to that part. It's better now, but can be so much better.

 

[Dtekkar]

I was thinking about how much I love the water game and water civs in general.

But I also thought about how underwhelming it is, at least in comparison to land warfare.

The devs can patch all they want and improve AI all they want, but it will never be as stimulating as land.

So I was thinking, with BNW mechanics in mind, would altering the seas and oceans cause too much chaos or is it possible to create a happy balance?

I.e.

• On water you have ranged ships and melee ships. On land you have mostly the same, but the variety of types of units is much greater...
  
• ...And that's because of the terrain. You have hills, forest, rivers, etc.

So my question is, what about the prospect of adding "terrain" to the oceans? You could have whirlpools or stormy areas that slow movement or decrease combat strength. Also, you could have certain bonuses for ships near their homeland and certain bonuses to ships in between continents. I'm really spit-balling these ideas as I go, so it's rough, but it's also rough because I'm struggling to see how they could make naval warfare fluid.

This seems like a great place to pitch the ideas I had a while back:

Currents - Randomly generated Map feature that function as one way naval roads - they double all naval movement in the direction the current moves, half it going any other way. Some will be shallow currents, some will be deepsea currents, and some will be both. Controlling these could be valuable. Perhaps naval trade routes could use them to extend their range, which would make them a haven for high seas piracy and naval battle.
Shoals - 20 damage for ending a turn on one, costs 2 movement to traverse.
New terrain improvement: Canal - Consumes a land tile, converting it into a standard water tile for tactical naval movement, city building, and defense. Only a tile adjacent to the original coastline can be converted.
New Wonder: Panama Canal - Allows you to canal up to 2 tiles in from an original coastline tile in all your cities.
Seaports half the movement cost for friendly naval units moving in water within 6 tiles of the city.

 

[OmniPotent42]

This seems like a great place to pitch the ideas I had a while back:

Currents - Randomly generated Map feature that function as one way naval roads - they double all naval movement in the direction the current moves, half it going any other way. Some will be shallow currents, some will be deepsea currents, and some will be both. Controlling these could be valuable. Perhaps naval trade routes could use them to extend their range, which would make them a haven for high seas piracy and naval battle.
Shoals - 20 damage for ending a turn on one, costs 2 movement to traverse.
New terrain improvement: Canal - Consumes a land tile, converting it into a standard water tile for tactical naval movement, city building, and defense. Only the first tile in from the original coastline can be converted.
New Wonder: Panama Canal - Allows you to canal up to 2 tiles in from an original coastline tile in all your cities.
Seaports half the movement cost for friendly naval units moving in water within 6 tiles of the city.

This, and make it so that trade routes have a variable profitability based on distance and tourism.

 

[Ramenbowl]

I have to disagree, OP.

So long as you have some coastal cities or at least a decent sized body of water, naval units like Frigates with +1 range become absolute terrors; at this point in the game, it is naval units that are required primarily to subdue them and a decent sized combination of Frigates + melee naval takes a city VERY FAST and it can be rather difficult to defend.

Depending on the map type, it can be suicide to neglect a naval army.

 

[wigwam]

I have to disagree, OP.

[…]

Depending on the map type, it can be suicide to neglect a naval army.

You misunderstood the OP. Naval combat isn't unimportant. It's less interesting than land combat because there's less diversity among naval units and no diversity among naval "terrain."

Currents - Randomly generated Map feature that function as one way naval roads - they double all naval movement in the direction the current moves, half it going any other way. Some will be shallow currents, some will be deepsea currents, and some will be both. Controlling these could be valuable. Perhaps naval trade routes could use them to extend their range, which would make them a haven for high seas piracy and naval battle.
Shoals - 20 damage for ending a turn on one, costs 2 movement to traverse.
New terrain improvement: Canal - Consumes a land tile, converting it into a standard water tile for tactical naval movement, city building, and defense. Only a tile adjacent to the original coastline can be converted.
New Wonder: Panama Canal - Allows you to canal up to 2 tiles in from an original coastline tile in all your cities.
Seaports half the movement cost for friendly naval units moving in water within 6 tiles of the city.

Cool ideas. I don't think currents are really that strong/important IRL, but you could change the concept to "prevailing winds" and have it disappear with the invention of Steam Power. It'd be very cool, on Continents maps and similar, to have a situation where one nation was fighting "downhill," as it were, using the winds to add their approach and maneuvering, while their enemies struggled against the same. You could also have Sargasso Sea-like dead zones that pre-steam ships struggle to move through. Those features would both work well with 1UPT.

Reefs, shoals, etc. would also be welcome. It'd be interesting to have naval units take a defensive penalty (like land units in open terrain) if they were in a coast tile in between two land tiles (i.e. a narrow strait) or in between the land and a reef/shoal/atoll/ice tile (maneuvering carefully to avoid running aground). The open ocean would be more like rough terrain.

On a shorter timescale, weather would be a great way to apply a sort of "terrain" to the ocean, but I guess it wouldn't really work when turns cover decades.

 

[newarkinvaders]

With the currents certain types of ships would need to have greater effects . Currents have far less effect now than they would of done in previous eras with sailed ships etc

 

[Gehennas]

In my experience, AI just can't participate in naval wars as soon as submarines appear. AI just doesn't make submarines or destroyers.

 

[mitsho]

In my mind, currents and "sea terrain" needs to wait for a new game itineration so that it can be done realistically and from the ground up.

As for Civ5, naval warfare has the potential to be really overpowering. Even though the need for coastal cities is now less with BNW and in some cases you can restrict yourself to 1 or 2 coastal cities for trade routes, there are still a lot of them. As you can take cities with melee units, if you have naval superiority you can theoretically swoop in and take cities quickly getting all the inland tiles. So they have a high potential for destruction, in theory. It's all in the balancing obviously..

 

[Cicerosaurus]

I suggested a while back that Great Admirals should be able to create minefields the same way a GG creates a citadel. Except until an enemy unit encounters it, it remains unseen to them.

 

[Aristos]

In my experience, AI just can't participate in naval wars as soon as submarines appear. AI just doesn't make submarines or destroyers.

Would you please remind the Brazilian Navy of that, who just launched a nuke sub attack on my yet-to-be upgraded diesels?

 

[Altisma]

Naval Units rule the game in the late warfare period unless its Pangea. The rule it to the point that it is pointless to build a land army to invade another country. Just grabbing his coastal cities will ruin him unless he purposefully avoids the coast with his core cities. Even then attempting a land invasion will drag your gold into the negative, you will lose more units then the defender, and you can't quickly reinforce casualties.

 

[Xichael]

It's ironic, because in MP on anything but Pangaea Frigate rush wins most domination games.

 

[Octonde]

In my experience naval warfare can be just as interesting. Are the units even that much less diverse (in the modern era)? Subs, destroyers, carriers, and two flavors of battleships (5) vs. mech infantry, tanks, artillery, marines, AA, paratrooper, and helis (7). Now factor in the short visibility range, detecting subs, carrier placement, and it gets interesting. Consider the risks and rewards of having planes and missiles on ships and subs that could be sunk easily, but gives a much longer reach than land bases. If you're fighting close enough to the coast I'd say there's not even a clean distinction; they're going to be overlapping with each other, and should, if you want to fight effectively.

 

[Gabriel Pyyrhic]

...SNIP....

So my question is, what about the prospect of adding "terrain" to the oceans? You could have whirlpools or stormy areas that slow movement or decrease combat strength. Also, you could have certain bonuses for ships near their homeland and certain bonuses to ships in between continents. I'm really spit-balling these ideas as I go, so it's rough, but it's also rough because I'm struggling to see how they could make naval warfare fluid.

Well I quite like the naval game as it is, they made it much better after G+K. I would agree that perhaps a couple of more units between Ancient->End of Medieval would be helpful (ie a Medieval Melee ship, or ranged Classical, although this may dilute the benefit of the Byzantine and Venetion UU's).

As for terrain, no not really IMO.

Whirlpools would be silly IMO as they as not a static feature, unless you made them a rare roving feature.

I guess you could add shoals, give say +1 food maybe -10% against ranged or even minor damage for vessels without a shallow draft.

Outside of that, and short of adding weather effects, sea based terrain would be better off being added to a MOD.

 

[Supr49er]

This seems like a great place to pitch the ideas I had a while back:

Currents - Randomly generated Map feature that function as one way naval roads - they double all naval movement in the direction the current moves, half it going any other way. Some will be shallow currents, some will be deepsea currents, and some will be both. Controlling these could be valuable. Perhaps naval trade routes could use them to extend their range, which would make them a haven for high seas piracy and naval battle.
Shoals - 20 damage for ending a turn on one, costs 2 movement to traverse.
New terrain improvement: Canal - Consumes a land tile, converting it into a standard water tile for tactical naval movement, city building, and defense. Only a tile adjacent to the original coastline can be converted.
New Wonder: Panama Canal - Allows you to canal up to 2 tiles in from an original coastline tile in all your cities.
Seaports half the movement cost for friendly naval units moving in water within 6 tiles of the city.

Sounds like a good scenario - Naval Warfare. Add in tradewinds too.

 

[Teleon22]

I sort of like the idea of different “terrain” in the high seas. However, I do not see any need to actually change the Ocean Tiles. Already we have two types of water terrain tiles. We have deep Ocean and shallow Ocean. Therefore, I would suggest rather that we change how certain types of ships behave in those two types of “terrain” and also I would suggest creating a new Classification of Ships Post Renaissance Era; called littoral ships.

Let me elaborate to the real world conditions that real world Navies face: large ships do not move rapidly in shallow waters because it is dangerous to do so, for fear of bottoming out the vessel. Littoral ships are therefore used for this purpose. So let’s extrapolate even just on that fact and apply it into Civilization BNW, ocean combat system.

Let’s imagine if you will how Naval Combat in Civilization would change strategically if given the following conditions during the Renaissance Era; where I believe Naval Combat begins to really come into its own.

Caravel:
-Movement: 4 (no penalty in shallow Ocean)

Frigate:
-Movement: 5 (-2 in shallow Ocean)

Privateer:
-Movement: 5 (-2 in shallow Ocean)

Ship of the Line:
-Movement: 5 (-3 in shallow Ocean)

So as you can see from above, the dynamics can change slightly for Naval combat when the larger more powerful vessels are less mobile in shallow Ocean Tiles; allowing for smaller vessels to either escape them, or perhaps even catch up to them in order to dish out that final blow.

 

[El Caballerion]

There should be an option that if you have a small city on a 3 tile island max, a naval blockade should slowly surrender the city to you. That way, you don't have to lift a finger and get a free city.

Actually, it should be like that for regular city warfare too. Having units close to the city for long enough should make the city weaker (i.e., a long siege).