I think there could be more done with the sea game..

[meltone1]

Granted, with the seafaring trait and several other gameplay additions, I have been doing quite a bit more naval battle than I ever used to. However, I find it can become very tedious. The reasons I believe this is so are mainly attributed to the fact that it is so hard to find enemy boats! There is no way to reveal a portion of the sea map without moving your ship around to constantly scout the waters. I can't count how many times I do this, and I end up blowing right past an enemy boat when I left click mine to a destination! (I probably should just move them with the arrows, but it takes soo long) Anyways, late game when I have a bunch of ships, I just give up on trying to find enemy boats because I have to move all of them.. every turn.. so tedious.. and often times, like I said, I blow right past an enemy ship. It is also quite easy for an enemy to go past you while staying unseen, unless he is very close to you.

Here's what I think could be done. Have the ships able to build an "outpost" equivalent for the sea. Maybe some sort of buoy (sp?) or something, that would need to be guarded. That way, you can guard an area and have a little better view of what is going on around that position. The way it is now, I find that if you keep a boat still, say on fortify, it might as well not be there, because you will most likely not see an enemy boat pass you, and if you have the more powerful ship, the AI sure as heck isn't going to attack you.

Also, I think giving later game ships radar would be a good idea as well. Say, from ironclad on or so. Maybe the next version of ship, if that's too early.

One final possible suggestion. Give ships a command similar to explore, except they will just wander, and if they see an enemy ship they will attack it. Perhaps you could have them patrol a specific area too. This will help take some of the tedious micromanagement of never-ending sea exploration out of the game.

Thoughts? If anyone has some tips on how I could improve my naval scouting tactics or whatever, I welcome them.

 

[IglooDame]

Hmmm... the closest approximation to "outpost buoys" I can think of is the seabed passive sonar nets that exist across chokepoints primarily to track submarines but I'd imagine also do a pretty good job tracking surface ships. In general, intelligent air/naval unit patrol is one of the things I'm most hoping to see in Civ4 (and while I'm thinking about it, AWACS aircraft would be nice, too). In the meantime, I generally put a patrol frigate or destroyer on Fortify which gets them an additional square of vision, or if it's a narrow chokepoint where I don't need the additional square they go on Sentry-Wake On Enemy Contact.

 

[meltone1]

fortify gives them an extra square of vision? I didn't know that.. is that the same for all units?

 

[ybbor]

no, just ships

 

[Naval Power]

For the Modern Age just send jets out the recon the area.

 

[derekroth]

I think the biggest problem with the Navy in Civ is the insane amount of time it takes to get from one place to another. Modern navies are eiter used to protect the coasts (this can be done in Civ), or project power.
Projecting power is so slow because of the amount of time it takes to get to a new threat. I have noticed that besides coastal defence the navy is only useful when I am the orriginal agressor. This is because I pick my next target and give myself time to move my navy before actually declaring war. But if the AI declares war on me unexpectedly, my navy might as well not exist because it takes an ungodly amount of time to get to their coast. The only thing I have found that works is to station large task forces about ten tiles of every enemy coast. This of course takes huge amounts of time and resources and is quite impracticle.