(2-NS) Use Workers for sea improvements instead of Work Boats

[Ranslee]

Problem:

• Coastal cities need to commit more resources to improve their territory compared to their landlocked counterparts, on top of having more buildings they need to build.
• Coastal cities are already disadvantaged due to necessity of maritime defense and poor yields from empty coastal tiles.
• When sea improvements are pillaged, the city has to spend production to rebuild them.
• Work Boats are only taking up space in the unit list after sea improvements have been built.

Proposal:

• Remove Work Boats from the game.
• Allow Workers to build all sea improvements (currently Fishing Boat and Offshore Platform).
  • This would not be an instant process as with Work Boats, but instead take an amount of turns equal to building a farm, with the same building speed modifiers used as for land improvements.
  • It would also apply to sea UIs such as currently passed coastal Polders.

Rationale:

• There doesn't seem to be a good reason to keep sea and land development on separate axes other than the precedent of vanilla Civ 5 having done it.
• Coastal cities can now benefit from the Progress policy that improves Worker production, which, as far as I know, did not apply to Work Boats.
  • This also applies to all improvement building speed increases, which felt a bit lackluster when playing a coastal civilization.
• While Civ 6 has a myriad of issues, they use this approach - and it just feels good.
• Quoting people from the Polder thread:
  • "They [Workers] can be made to. For example, with 4UC (MUCfVP), Indonesian workers can build the UI on coastal tiles." - TakkuPanda
  • "Samurai in BNW can do the same thing." - Rekk
  • "Work boats don’t seem to know what to do with other improvements, but you don’t have to train the worker AI to build coastal stuff; they seem to do perfectly fine at it." - pineappledan
  • "Workers can improve things while embarked. It doesn’t require us to change workers embarkation abilities" - pineappledan

Also, unrelated, I have been gone for a while and wow, I love the VP Congress process!

 

[balparmak]

Controversial, but you make good points and I'm all for reducing micro. One thing needs to be addressed though, iirc workboats are available before workers can embark, so workers will need to be embarked sooner for this to work. On the other hand, that will allow workers to be used for exploration across seas, which would be very gamey. my memory lets me down again

Or we could just stop workboats from getting expended upon building an improvement, but we don't have animations for either option, right? So they would just stand there, and that's the only downside I can see. I don't really have a problem with that tbh

 

[CrazyG]

Controversial, but you make good points. One thing needs to be addressed though, iirc workboats are available before workers can embark, so workers will need to be embarked sooner for this to work. On the other hand, that will allow workers to be used for exploration across seas, which would be very gamey.

Workboats unlock at fishing, when embark unlocks

 

[nekokon]

I'm ok with workboat not getting expended after improving sea resources and take as long as worker does for land resource improvements. Don't really care about animation.

 

[ma_kuh]

Workboats becoming non-consumable has several side effects:

1. Their improvements either gain a build time, or they are too cheap for their efficiency.
   • Polynesia (or whoever we give the ability to) would either lose the ability to quickly setup fishing tiles in new cities as an advantage, or everyone gets that advantage, which is still a net nerf. Solved by making triremes have a special "build immediately" version of the ability?
2. Workboat maintenance would continue to weigh on gold until they are dismissed. The proposal solves this by making them your workers, so there's no "wasted" maintenance.
3. I think they'd be a little under-costed for their up-front capability, but given that you should probably dismiss them soon after setting up the tiles, maybe it's still appropriate?

I think I might go a middle route and give work boats 3 uses or something, and make them x2 cost. Or just try the workers approach, although moving workers across the ocean for later cities still seems like a drawback that should be considered.

 

[Anarcomu]

I find the proposal very interesting, and see no good reasons to downvote it.

As for Polynesia, I think they should keep their ability to build in one turn with melee navals. They would move faster and build faster than workers, so they'd still feel good enough. And honestly, that's a nice part of their UA, but not the strongest part of their kit.

 

[balparmak]

I'm fine with that too, if people think that would be too much, maybe Polynesia could have 50% faster build time instead.

 

[N.Core]

Yeah, I kinda bothered by the fact that you can instantly build Fishing Boats, but not Farm, Plantation, Mine, etc.
But I get it, the building time is handed to the city that train the work boats.

I know workboats are limited by sea resources only, but this could be expanded further for having more sea resource or add a base improvement for sea. Sea tiles just technically an empty tile that gets enhanced by sea buildings.

 

[stii]

It always feels miserable building on fish so this seems like a good change. I don't think work boats really add anything to the game?

 

[Solic]

Would be cool that if this were to be implemented that workers would simply change to work boats once embarked and change back to workers once disembarked similarly to the Great general/admiral of Carthage 4UC.

 

[Stalker0]

Would also nerf goddess of the sea quite a bit, which is probably a good thing.

 

[Rekk]

Would also nerf goddess of the sea quite a bit, which is probably a good thing.

The conceit here is that work boats take more effort and longer to connect your resources, and that switching to workers would make it easier. Doesn't that result in a buff  to Goddess of the Sea?

 

[Stalker0]

The conceit here is that work boats take more effort and longer to connect your resources, and that switching to workers would make it easier. Doesn't that result in a buff  to Goddess of the Sea?

Work Boats do take more effort (in terms of hammers), but they are faster to connect resources.

The reason Goddess of the Sea is so strong right now is because of the instantaneous nature of work boats.

While my settler is moving to my expansion, I build work boats from the main cities and send them over (or buy them at the new city). When the new city settles, I can nigh instantly settle those boats to get my bonuses. That is what makes sea such a strong pantheon, you get instant faith, instant food, and instant hammers the 2nd you get a city up, whereas most pantheons it takes time to get that in place.

Now again, I don't think weakening the pantheon is a bad idea necessarily, its one of my top tier ones for a reason. But yes overall this would be a nerf to it.

 

[Ranslee]

I'm ok with workboat not getting expended after improving sea resources and take as long as worker does for land resource improvements. Don't really care about animation.

This proposal is specifically to remove the Work Boats entirely and make embarked Workers create sea improvements instead.

I find the proposal very interesting, and see no good reasons to downvote it.

As for Polynesia, I think they should keep their ability to build in one turn with melee navals. They would move faster and build faster than workers, so they'd still feel good enough. And honestly, that's a nice part of their UA, but not the strongest part of their kit.

I'm fine with that too, if people think that would be too much, maybe Polynesia could have 50% faster build time instead.

This proposal would add some design space for maritime civs like this. I'm not sure about the instant improvements with boats, but at least we get more options here. There are also other incidental changes, like Denmark being a bit stronger than other civs at coastal development because their workers embark/disembark faster, or delayed acquisition of maritime lux monopolies (particularly powerful with flat yield ones).

Yeah, I kinda bothered by the fact that you can instantly build Fishing Boats, but not Farm, Plantation, Mine, etc.
But I get it, the building time is handed to the city that train the work boats.

I know workboats are limited by sea resources only, but this could be expanded further for having more sea resource or add a base improvement for sea. Sea tiles just technically an empty tile that gets enhanced by sea buildings.

Personally, I would love to have more variety to coast, but this is ofc beyond the scope of this proposal

Would also nerf goddess of the sea quite a bit, which is probably a good thing.

It's not a nerf, more of a tradeoff. Coastal city development will have a different rhythm because it won't be as explosive without pre-built work boats, but at the same time you can contribute to your worker pool instead of creating one-shot consumable units. I'm sure it will remain a powerful choice for any maritime lux monopoly spawn.

 

[Recursive]

AI would need to know how to handle this.

 

[adan_eslavo]

I don't like this.

It's stripping the game from the basic feature.
It implicates AI problems.
It makes balancing problems with modmods.
It makes workers vulnerable for attacks. Instabuild was made for a reason.
It adds another portion of unnecessary code work for devs, while they could do more usefull stuff.
It destroys the flavour.
It breaks the pillaging mechanism on water (aren't sea improvements destroyed after pillaging instead of being disabled?).

Huge no. I hope this will be vetoed.

 

[Recursive]

Proposal failed due to lack of sponsorship.