Redoing Merchant Navy

[ArcaneSeraph]

The reason I have the production at +1 is because I assume you'll be getting an average of +2 (two sea resources) from the harbour per city. Yes, this is a temporary improvement if you would have built the harbour anyway, but the buildings themselves are worth many turns of the few that a new city would have (especially those one-tile-islands with a resource, or polar sites), and is maintenance free - worth 3 per turn per city - not insignificant. The harbour isn't normally a top priority building given its fairly high hammer cost and the other options available, this makes it a viable route for those far-flung resource-extracting settlements.

I actually didn't realize when you said free harbours you meant free upkeep as well as free built so yeah that makes some difference too.

I don't know that I'm right or not but... compare coastal to non-coastal. For coastal cities we have:

PROS:

2-3 (on average) sea resources that can be upgraded to fairly decent tiles
Sometimes cheaper trade routes
A bunch of very marginal sea tiles that really don't get much better

CONS:

I have to build work boats
I have to build a bunch of buildings to make those sea 2 or 3 sea tiles efficient
I've lost a bunch of tiles (forests, hills, riverside, plains, grassland) that all could very easily be made superior to a generic sea tile with workers that I already have

For a non-coastal city, your workers can already upgrade the tiles to become good (resources) to decent (regular tiles). I don't have to waste time building any of those coastal buildings. I don't have to spend upkeep on them. I don't have to waste extra time building work boats as I already have workers.

So basically you save a lot of production and get a lot of benefits just by being non-coastal. I'm not convinced that getting one of those coastal buildings I have to build for free and 1 extra production is enough to justify accepting all the other extra cons I have to for being on the coast. The 1 extra gold per sea tile is nice but again TPs are just as good and if you take certain policies / techs better.

Unless there's a luxury I don't have in the sea or I'm otherwise forced to, I won't go out of my way to get coastal cities, commerce or no commerce.

To make coastal cities more attractive IMO there has to be a way to boost those regular sea tiles up to give you something decent as otherwise I'd rather have land tiles that can be made superior.

 

[Roxlimn]

ArcaneSeraph:

My own suggestion was to take Option 2, with the free Harbors and free Harbor upkeep, and increase the sea tile bonus to +2 gold for an end tile output of 2/0/3 with Lighthouse.

It's not quite as Gold-mediated as my own suggestion, but it distributes the benefit among Gold and Hammers, so the devs might find it more palatable.

 

[ArcaneSeraph]

Roxlimn:

It might be better than I think. Like I said it's hard to tell hypothetically but there's a big barrier to overcome for coastal cities to be relevant.

It might be too much but I'd like to see those generic sea tiles around 3/0/3 so they can at least grow the city efficiently.

There's a fairly popular mod, Thal's mod, that improved the lighthouse, harbour, seaport, etc with +2 production. That helped a lot to encourage coastal settlement so combining that with some of the above suggestions might be a very good step.

 

[KrikkitTwo]

Actually, how about

Naval Tradition:
+1 move +1 vision
Naval units have +25 v. cities

Merchant Navy:
+3 hammers
Coastal cities give x2 Trade (that effectively means +1.1 gold per Coastal citizen... more if you have a large Capital)

 

[Roxlimn]

Kirkkitone:

I like the Naval Tradition bonus against cities - though it can make England's dominance of the seas even more beneficial for England than it already is.

Your Trade change makes Coastal Cities more powerful, but brutely, without any change in focus. My point in increasing Gold per tile in Coastal Cities so drastically was to encourage a profoundly different playstyle. Instead of relying on hammers at all, you go down both sides of Commerce and maintain an empire primarily powered by and built by Sea Tile Gold.

The point of having so much gold is to put value on sea tiles, and hand-in-hand to remove hammers from the Coastal Cities. You don't build stuff by hammers at all! You work the sea tiles, then buy Maritime CS's for extra food, extra units, and purchase any building you need in the Coastals. With so much Gold (and not that many hammers), Big Ben becomes a cornerstone Wonder for the Commerce Empire - very suitable for England, I think.

 

[Camikaze]

I don't have anything greatly profound to add to this, just to say that I think it's a good idea. The 'sea-borne empire' aspect of the game could do with some improvement, and so could the commerce branch.

I don't think that increasing hammers in coastal cities is too blunt a buff, or too much of an abstraction for the sake of balance. That could be one aspect of it a boost. Ideally, though, the power should lie in the gold side of it.

 

[KrikkitTwo]

Kirkkitone:

I like the Naval Tradition bonus against cities - though it can make England's dominance of the seas even more beneficial for England than it already is.

Your Trade change makes Coastal Cities more powerful, but brutely, without any change in focus. My point in increasing Gold per tile in Coastal Cities so drastically was to encourage a profoundly different playstyle. Instead of relying on hammers at all, you go down both sides of Commerce and maintain an empire primarily powered by and built by Sea Tile Gold.

The point of having so much gold is to put value on sea tiles, and hand-in-hand to remove hammers from the Coastal Cities. You don't build stuff by hammers at all! You work the sea tiles, then buy Maritime CS's for extra food, extra units, and purchase any building you need in the Coastals. With so much Gold (and not that many hammers), Big Ben becomes a cornerstone Wonder for the Commerce Empire - very suitable for England, I think.

Well the weakness with Coastal cities is their low production, and making that up with pure gold would be complicated... I guess
+2 sea tile gold,... and then Coastal buildings+Workboats 1/2 cost? (similar to the Courthouse in Police State)

 

[Roxlimn]

That's exactly right. The weakness of Coastal Cities is poor production. Instead of directly countering that with pure hammers, we reward the Commerce Civ with Gold instead. It's not too complex of an estimate. For instance, Stables in a city with 3 Pasture resouces allows the Land Civ to convert 1 gold to 3 hammers on a turn by turn basis. Forge is likely to get a 1:2 or so conversion factor.

Working off the tile outputs, we are replacing 3/1/0 tiles and 1/3/0 tiles (common Plains and Forests respectively) with 2/0/4 tiles, allowing the Coastal Civ to essentially "buy" 1/1 food/hammers with 4 GPT. This is a little bit of a loss for the Commerce Civ, as the conversion factor for hammers at the purchase menu varies from x3 to x5 (but often x5) but he can defer costs by 25% going the opposite route, and by 40% overall if he pairs it with Big Ben. This is competitive with the land tile outputs even when they're boosted by Rationalism or Freedom Policies, taking into consideration that purchases are instant benefits, and that purchases can be concentrated whereas hammers generally cannot. Gold can also be used for a wider variety of purposes, so a teeny little bit of a premium is to be expected.

If you want an feel for how powerful this is, take a gander at your gold output during a Golden Age. That's about how strong the Gold input will be, while you will obviously be taking major hits on productivity. As an alternative, imagine if the land you were given were Grasslands mostly sprinkled with Cotton and Silk (but one on every such tile!). Your Gold output will be remarkably high, but as a downside, you're forced to buy pretty much everything of note, and you'll be hard-pressed to make any Wonders (since Wonders cannot be bought).

As yet another comparison, think Cottage vs. Specialist play in Civ 4, though this Commerce play won't allow you to convert gold to Science directly (but there are still ways and means!). A more conservative player might take the Commerce Tree and plunk down one or two Coastal Cities to fund his expensive inland production powerhouses - exactly like a Bureau Capital in Civ 4.