Adapting "Seaways" from DoaNE [ACCEPTED]

[raystuttgart]

Well, to be honest I never really played DoaNE.
So I cannot really say a lot about its features and gameplay.

But there was one feature I remember to have liked: "Seaways"
(Maybe we already have a ticket for it but I am currently not sure.)

If I remember correctly it did allow you to "mark" locations on the map on Europe Plots only (Ocean Plots that allow sailing to Europe) that where then selectable by your Ships
in "Go-To-City-Popup" and in Europe Screen as "Travel Destinations".

This seemed to be a very useful improvement for automated travel of Ships.
(Not for full Trade Automation or anything like that of course.)

Spoiler :

Theoretically it would be possible to mark Land Plots as "simple Go-To" destinations as well, but I never had a need / usecase for that since "Go-To-Plot" (Shift + G) or just by Mouse works nicely enough.
For large distances I almost always use Ships anyways and Land Units cannot cross Ocean by themselves.

Since DoaNE has also shared its source code, we might adapt that feature.
Since I have not checked their source code yet, I cannot say if it is implemented well or how much effort it would be to adapt.

Of course we might also simply code our own version.

We might also need one new button for "Mark Location as Seaway". But that should not be a problem.
And yes, we also nees some visualization (e.g. a Text Marker) for the Map Screen - which I think is alreay possible - need to figure out again how it was done though.

By the way:
Let us please not use this thread to start discussions on other DoaNE features.
We should discuss feature by feature in a separate thread.

 

[Schmiddie]

I ever liked this feature but was never able to implement it in RaR.

 

[ConjurerDragon]

The problem with seaways always is that it shortens the time of ships on the map. If a player enjoys going full privateer on the other european navies, then it shortens the way for the merchantmen to move from colony to "seaway" to vanish to Europe and lowers the chance of interception.

And once the Barbarian faction changes from wild animals to spawning pirates, having seaways lowers the number of squares that a player would need to escort his merchant fleet across.

That is, if you mean "seaway" as being the transportation point where a ship travels to to be teleported to Europe.
If you only mean a waypoint in the middle of the ocean I see no problem.

 

[raystuttgart]

That is, if you mean "seaway" as being the transportation point where a ship travels to to be teleported to Europe.
If you only mean a waypoint in the middle of the ocean I see no problem.

Those Seaways - I was thinking about - would be allowed only to set on "Europe Plots" (the Ocean plots where you can sail to Europe as now).
Thus they would not become an exploit to avoid Privateers or anything like that.

Thanks for pointing this out again.

 

[raystuttgart]

Hm, I am a bit surprised that there are quite a few people against "Seaways".
To be honest, I never really played DoaNE but that concept always sounded nice.

Is it that the concept itself is flawed or simply considered "not worth the effort"?
Or is it that the implementation in DoaNE caused problems?

If the concept itself is flawed, we just forget about it.
But if just implementation caused problems, we can try to implement a better solution.

If we do it right, it should be nothing else than a "comfort function" to improve usability.
There should be no exploit, no dramatic game change, no performance issue and no potential balancing issue with it.

 

[devolution]

I think there is a bit of misunderstanding here. Seaways would just function as "rally points" (already supported in BTS for land units, not sure about COL) and they've got nothing to do with the Europe access points.

Seaways would probably help the AI since combat ships could prefer to stay on or near these plots which would help protect the merchant fleet. This automation could also be exposed to non-AI players as well. I actually implemented the AI side of this about a year ago but I never pushed the branch.

 

[raystuttgart]

I think there is a bit of misunderstanding here. Seaways would just function as "rally points" (already supported in BTS for land units, not sure about COL) and they've got nothing to do with the Europe access points.

Oh ok, I thought that "Seaways" in DoaNE were actually just used for Europe_Plots (Ocean Tiles allowing to sail to Europe and back to them from Europe).
And that was actually also what I was suggesting. (Because this should be quite easy considering "Sailing Back from Europe".)
--> This I do not consider a feature really useful for AI.

"Rally Points" would be an improvement considering usability as well, but those would not directly be related with sailing to Europe and back from Europe.
We should just call it "Rally Points" if we want to introduce it.
--> And yes, there might be use-cases for AI where this could become handy.

 

[devolution]

I actually never played DoaNE so I wouldn't know I just inferred that they should work more like a rally point. LOL

 

[raystuttgart]

Thinking of it again, a general "Rally Point" feature would be much more useful.
(Without having anything related to sailing to Europe/Africa/Port Royal triggered automatically.)

And also, if those are in Water reachable from Europe/Africa/Port Royal we could still display them as Travel Destinations in the "Sail back to New World"-Pop-up.
(Basically just like the current list of valid / reachable Port Cities.)

Thus I suggest:
Let us do "Rally Plots" and also make those reachable from Europe/Africa/Port Royal be valid / displayed Travel Destinations in the "Sail back to New World"-Pop-up.
There should be no exploits like that and we would have the best of both solutions combined.

To prevent confusions:
Let us also just call them "Rally Points" then.

 

[Nightinggale]

Seaways would just function as "rally points" (already supported in BTS for land units, not sure about COL)

BTS rally points are present in the engine and can be set accordingly. I think it's selecting a colony and then control click on a plot or something like that. The problem is that in BTS it affects all new units while in Colonization it only affects newly constructed units. By not including population growth, it becomes much less useful while at the same time it might not be as useful if it included population growth. Also this has nothing to do with seaways.

I thought that "Seaways" in DoaNE were actually just used for Europe_Plots (Ocean Tiles allowing to sail to Europe and back to them from Europe).

That's how I remember them. You get the option to place them on the plot a ship is one if it's on a Europe plot. In Europe you can order ships to go to the new world or you can order them to go to a specific Seaway. For this reason they all have names as this makes the list in Europe much more readable.

Thinking of it again, a general "Rally Point" feature would be much more useful.
(Without having anything related to sailing to Europe/Africa/Port Royal triggered automatically.)

We can have both if we want. In fact we can do something where we can assign names to plots and use them as seaways if they are on Europe plots, though if we place them elsewhere, they will still be names for plots (kind of like signs)

The idea came up for Medieval Conquest at some point and was debated. It added two features (none of those were ever created though). First of all, traderoutes would have to be able to do some classic colonization approach where the player sets a list of colonies. Transports can then be assigned to a route and it will get the entire route. Adding names plots would then make it possible to add named plots as waypoints as in "I want you to go the long way around here to avoid going through a location with animals/pirates/whatever".
Thinking further on this, I came up with the idea to make a route where non-transports can be assigned. This would allow setting up a route for say a frigate to patrol for pirates.

The patrol feature would be even more useful if used together with some self spacing feature as in it takes 6 turns to complete one round. Two ships patrol. They detect this and one intentionally delays itself to match one ship every 3 turns. If one gets delays, a ship delays itself again to match the 3 turns between patrols. Adding another ship will fix the spacing to turn it into one ship every second turn. I have an idea on how to make something like this, though it wouldn't really work unless all units move at the same speed. If one unit is faster, we should either ignore spacing or delay the slow one to allow it to be overtaken.

 

[Schmiddie]

Another feature we already talked about which is interesting...

 

[raystuttgart]

Oh, I almost forgot about this here ....
(Should put it on the list so I do not forget again.)

Most likely we will however create an implementation of our own.
(We will see how we will actually implement, once we start working on this.)

 

[raystuttgart]

Just bumping "ACCEPTED" old concepts so they get further up in the queue again.