An idea for naval warfare

[Drewcifer]

An idea I've had about naval combat: for pre-modern naval transports (up to galleon) the land units in your transport should be able to attack the units in other transports (board the ship). If you defeat all the other units in the enemy transport you capture the ship. This would accurately simulate the way that naval combat was waged before the invention of powerful, accurate cannons. For this to work the AI would have to be reprogramed to put land units on barbarian galleys (which would be an improvement by itself).

Perhaps there could be ancient and medieval (coursairs) ship based land units that could eventually upgrade to marines.

 

[dexters]

Whose to say that the current combat system doesn't simulate this?

I hate to rebuff your idea since I think it's neat and may be filed under the Civ4 wishlist, but Civ 3 abstracts a lot of things , and while I agree with you with regards to units attacking the units in another ship, Civ 3 isn't a naval simulation and I personally don't see any gameplay benefit (other than pleasing a few fans of historical accuracy) to this.

I personally feel Firaxis should focus work on macro things, one of which is improving the naval aspect of the game by tweaking the AI to become a more capable invading force, and use its ships more logically.

As for barbarians landing units with their galleys, it could be done. The Barbarian AI is a simpler version of the Civ AI and probably would need the landing stuff added on to it. From a design perspective, it looks like the galleys were put there to hamper early attempts at exploration and not to unload units.

Besides, the whole issue about AI being incapable at doing invasions justice is a major AI weakness a lot of people want addressed, as it is a significant limiting factor to the enjoyability of many types of maps... (all of which involve capable AI invasions).

My thread regarding AI naval invasions.

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=56150

 

[Chizzy]

Why not add the ability to attempt to capture naval units, like you were able to back in civ1 with the diplomat? Make it a marine quality, the ability to attack ships, from other ships, or from land, and to attempt capture, or attempt sabotage!

 

[PurplePacifier]

I like the idea of capturing other ships, however I think this could be simplified just by having a probability of capturing the ship after defeating it in combat.

This can easily be done because one of the new features in C3C is the ability to enslave a defeated land unit.