Do you like the new embarkation?

[timtofly]

Hey, it's a gorillagogo.

I don't mind it. I don't have to build train units to use railroads or freighters to trade resources either.

Don't your guys have to go back to your own territory to get the "embark" ability?

A unit created before Optics cannot embark. It has to be upgraded to the next available upgrade in your home area, a CS you are friends/allies with, or an AI you have open borders with.

I like to watch the battle between a barbarian archer and my horse or knight when it attacks from embarking. You may watch one of your ships sink, but still know that you will win and get the gold from clearing the encampment.

 

[DaveGold]

You should probably be screening with destroyers (to detect submarines) and use battleships and destroyers in combination in a convoy system. At some point, you should probably have smashed the enemy navy before hand and blockaded major ports.

Quite true. The downside is that moving a formation of ships around a formation of embarked units in perfect order or 1upt is incredibly tedious. You can also never be sure the sea is safe because any barbarian camp on any piece of ice can build a fast moving destroyer.

Just how dumb is it that the barbarians can build destroyers anyway? Can anyone remember London or New York being blockaded by barbarian oil powered ships in the 21st century?

 

[niall78]

It's another great immersion breaking feature of the new game. And as for simulating supply lines maybe they should have brought in a simple supply system to get rid of big stacks instead of the other great 'improvement' known as 1 unit per hex. Now in this new Civ that was supposedly built with a heavy military focus it is impossible to recreate any major battle in history without the sense of immersion being thrown out the window.

Want to recreate D-Day? Impossible.
Kursk? Impossible.
Hastings? Impossible.

Transports were not a pain to me, they did a good job of simulating naval invasions. They are just another feature stripped from the game for so called ease of use. Why not go the whole hog a get rid of all units? That would make the game easier to use with less micro management.

 

[UWHabs]

Big point about embarkation was in a talk someone posted here by Soren Johnson, embarkation makes AI naval invasions somewhat feasible. With game AI, it's really hard to coordinate how many transports to bring, how many ships to keep around them, etc... But embarkation, it doesn't change the pathing algorithms too much. Really, even if it's a bit worse for us players, if it makes the AI more competent, it's worth it.

Water combat is tough to program. So many tiles, and so many moves makes it tough to coordinate. If they throw on some sort of sea "zone of control"/sea patrol type functionality, that might improve things. So I can set my battleships and destroyers spaced out in the ocean and it will create a sort of net that halts opposing ships through. Then I could set up my ships in a big lane, and know that my embarked units have a lane that will be safe from invasion. That'd be awesome.

 

[Asylumer]

I would like it more if not for the fact that movement across sea is highly buggy at the moment, requiring lots of micromanagement.

...

The upshot of all this is that when you are launching a naval invasion, you need to micromanage every single unit, every turn, in order to get them to move to their destination properly and safely. It gets quite annoying after a while.

Actually in my opinion it is a good thing that you need to send frigates/destroyers to patrol and scout the water in advance. You should have total sea control if you want to launch a sea invasion, so you should send warships in advance, clear all opposition and protect the flanks.

VS.

I love it.
Minimizes tedious micro-management and apart from that, adds immersion.

So which is it? Does the new system reduce micromanagement or is that simply a soundbite that caught on and is now repeated despite the state of things being quite the opposite?

When I see certain people arguing both at once I have to question the consistency of their reasoning. Somehow the requirement to carefully manage the movement of units overseas so as to prevent insta-trimere-death is a good thing whereas building a transport fleet before being able to cross an ocean is super tedious.

 

[Sonereal]

Quite true. The downside is that moving a formation of ships around a formation of embarked units in perfect order or 1upt is incredibly tedious.

You don't have to do it in perfect order though. With a screening force and ships not constantly riding the edges of the transports, its pretty simple. (I've never surrounded an embarked unit with ships on adjacent hexes).

Just how dumb is it that the barbarians can build destroyers anyway? Can anyone remember London or New York being blockaded by barbarian oil powered ships in the 21st century?

By this point of the game, how often are you attacked by AI Destroyers anyway?

 

[SammyKhalifa]

Transports were not a pain to me, they did a good job of simulating naval invasions. They are just another feature stripped from the game for so called ease of use. Why not go the whole hog a get rid of all units? That would make the game easier to use with less micro management.

You know, if the Civ franchise had started its life without sea transports, and they added them in in this version, I'm willing to put down money that you'd be mad about that too.

Despite all of the hype around this change pre-release, I'm pretty indifferent about embarkation TBH. It was fine the way it worked before, but this new way's okay too. Nothing to get too upset or too joyous about. There are legitimate criticisms concerning CivV--this just doesn't happen to be one of them.

 

[Rohili]

Big point about embarkation was in a talk someone posted here by Soren Johnson, embarkation makes AI naval invasions somewhat feasible. With game AI, it's really hard to coordinate how many transports to bring, how many ships to keep around them, etc... But embarkation, it doesn't change the pathing algorithms too much. Really, even if it's a bit worse for us players, if it makes the AI more competent, it's worth it.

Except that it doesn't. The AI seems even less likely to launch naval invasions in Civ 5. I'm never afraid to declare war against a larger, strong neighbour on another continent, because the AI never bothers sending troops to attack me.

Don't get me wrong, I prefer the embarkation system over the transport system, but I think it still can be improved.

 

[niall78]

You know, if the Civ franchise had started its life without sea transports, and they added them in in this version, I'm willing to put down money that you'd be mad about that too.

Despite all of the hype around this change pre-release, I'm pretty indifferent about embarkation TBH. It was fine the way it worked before, but this new way's okay too. Nothing to get too upset or too joyous about. There are legitimate criticisms concerning CivV--this just doesn't happen to be one of them.

No if sea transports had been added in this version I would see it as an improvement. Taking them away I see as a down grade.

 

[greggbert]

I like the new embarkation. It is easier for the ai to cross water and the weakness of these units puts more importance on a navy. Having a barabarian tireme destroy your knight is very frustrating thus the lesson is to build an escort next time. Now, with the latest patch, the ai is building more ships but if we can only get them to apply them in a more logical manner but that's another issue for another day. I like embarkation.

Btw, travel over water was, at one point, the fastest mode of travel.

I just ignore barbarians that are not threatening me. I have ranged units and my own triremes if they send them my way.

 

[gorillagogo]

But having to build actual transports and stack units on said transport were less micromanagement somehow?

You know what else is completly unrealistic? The linear tech tree. The limited choice of units (which, in reality once you factor in every possible combination of weapon, armor, tactic, etc, should add up to being a few....thousand different units). The fact that there's no visible supply lines to cut. Etc.

Yes of course there was a different type of micromanagement with the old transport style. Requiring the player to build a boat and load or unload passengers was the type of micromanagement that was based in reality.

Similarly, yes there are countless other "unrealistic" aspects to the game. Does it seem realistic that injured troops can remain stationary on some hill in the middle of nowhere for a century and be restored to full health? Of course not. There are always going to be tradeoffs between something that's true to life and something that makes the game playable. I happen to fall on the side that thinks allowing players to cross the ocean without the benefit of having a boat is a step too far.

That said, I understand why they made it work this way. It's obvious that the old transport system would never work in a game built around 1upt. Like you pointed out elsewhere on this thread, you'd have a logjam of units trying to load any given boat if a transport could carry multiple units. I'd add that it would likely be 10 times worse trying to unload them, particularly in hostile terrain. Alternately, you could require one boat for every unit that needed transported, which would be ridiculous. Embarkation allows the game to work around these issues. I just think it's an ugly work around, but I doubt there's a better solution.

 

[Sonereal]

The only, and I mean only realistic idea I could think of to calm people's desires for more realism is to make embarking take an extra turn to finish "constructing" the ship.

 

[SammyKhalifa]

The only, and I mean only realistic idea I could think of to calm people's desires for more realism is to make embarking take an extra turn to finish "constructing" the ship.

It already takes them like 50 years!

 

[GeneralMayhem]

although i like some aspects of individual embarkment, I use a mod that creates transport ships (little glitchy but works great for what it is).

I like the ability to move individual units. And I use the transport mod for more units (less micro management and faster movement) and invasions (yet still vulnerable). I don't know why 2k did not give us the opportunity to have something like this in the original game.

thank god for modders, otherwise I think I wouldn't play CiV at all.

 

[killmeplease]

The only, and I mean only realistic idea I could think of to calm people's desires for more realism is to make embarking take an extra turn to finish "constructing" the ship.

i can thought out a little more.
1. number of simultaneously ebarked units is limited to number of harbors. say harbors*4.
2. to embark a unit, that is, to move it to a sea plot, that plot has to have a connection by sea with any city with harbor.

 

[Rohili]

I like the ability to move individual units. And I use the transport mod for more units (less micro management and faster movement) and invasions (yet still vulnerable). I don't know why 2k did not give us the opportunity to have something like this in the original game.

I think that is by far the best solution. Clearly some people prefer embarkation, while some people prefer transports. Each method is useful for particular situations. So why not make both options available in the game?

That way, players who are launching a full scale naval invasion with multiple units can build transports to ferry their troops, while players who just want to move a worker/scout past a strip of water to a nearby island will not need to wait 5 turns to build a transport just for that purpose.

 

[killmeplease]

That way, players who are launching a full scale naval invasion with multiple units can build transports to ferry their troops, while players who just want to move a worker/scout past a strip of water to a nearby island will not need to wait 5 turns to build a transport just for that purpose.

i agree

 

[Wombleburger]

2. to embark a unit, that is, to move it to a sea plot, that plot has to have a connection by sea with any city with harbor.

I HATE the embarkation in Civ5. As others have said, it's one of the things that breaks the immersion/suspension of disbelief that I usually enjoy in Civilization-type games.

I like the idea of having units move to the water through a coastal city...

(And, for the record, I would have loved some implementation of supply lines that could be cut by enemy troops, perhaps the option of having troops re-supply themselves in foreign territory by pillaging farms and cities, etc.)

 

[killmeplease]

(And, for the record, I would have loved some implementation of supply lines that could be cut by enemy troops, perhaps the option of having troops re-supply themselves in foreign territory by pillaging farms and cities, etc.)

there are a number of threads on it in Ideas & Suggestions subforum

 

[Tatran]

When a city acts like canal you'll notice another annoyance.
All ships are moving through the city without losing movement points,
but a transport embarks the unit in the city and the next turn the unit has to be embarked into the water again.