Have you tried Daisy Chain Transportation?

[Freddy K]

In order to speed up Transportation in early to mid game, it's possible instead of investing into roads and wagons to commit to a fleet of caravels. Then place cities along the coast with two tiles in between, in the following manner.

-- city -- city -- village -- city -- city

Now you put a caravel into each town and two caravels at one end. Now two colonists can be transported in a single turn from one end of the daisy chain to another. Goods cannot be swapped in a native village, this takes up one additional turn. Then the chain needs to be put back again, or maybe you can close the circle around an island or a continent...

Have you tried this? Does the resulting quick travel, recover the costs for a fleet of crappy ships? Is this simply to laborious to pull off?

 

[dalgo]

No I haven't tried it but I think it would work. CxxC is a good spacing for your colonies (no overlapping tiles) and the colonists would be available to join the destination colony when they arrive, or they could mount up and move a further 6 tiles on roads to inland colonies. However it would add another layer of management to a game which already has plenty of that.