Merchant vessels

[Mewtarthio]

I have an idea to make naval warfare much more important: merchant ships. They would randomly spawn out of cities with harbors, then travel to another city with a harbor. You'd need to protect them with your fleet until they reached their destination (obviously, you'd be told their destination beforehand). Other civs would try to plunder the ships using their Privateers (well, they could use normal military vessels, but that would obviously be a declaration of war, not to mention a PR nightmare). If successful, they would gain the Gold plundered (as with Barbarian camps). The negligent civ that failed so miserably to protect the innocent merchants would suffer weakened commerce in the two cities as other merchants become afraid to travel. If the two are unconnected otherwise, this may even sever them entirely (temporarily, mind you)! Once you discover Flight and get some Airports up, this would gradually disappear as more people use cargo planes (which may bring up possibilities to intercept enemy planes en route to another location, but that would be better in a different topic).

 

[Merc]

This sounds pretty good. The ships could just move by themselves, and you could attach warships to them during war.

 

[Dom Pedro II]

I think that allowing the establishment of trade routes and then the ability to blockade or piracy said trade routes would be better than actually having all those ships racing around the game. A revamped version of the Piracy feature in CtP2 would be good.

 

[Lennon]

I had virtually the same idea posted in this thread: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=85496

I don't really like the idea of an abstract trade route. I find naval blockades in the game somewhat weird, but if there were actual merchant ships you'd be able to put much more emphasis on your navy and how to compose and use it. If we had a mere trade route, how would it be interupted? By an enemy sub just going over a line on the map, leaving you forced to search the whole route to get rid of it? No, I'd be very happy to see these merchant vessels, because finally the ocean would actually become an important part of the map, instead of just a big Zone of Ignorance. You'd be forced to escort these ships and at the same time pose a threat to enemy vessels.

 

[Waiguo_Chaoren]

I personally miss the thrill of landing a caravan on a demanding city for big rewards :wistful: Like organising a military expedition, organizing trade convoys was its own fun (not to mention the thrill of killing an enemy's caravans enroute)...

 

[Jake5555555]

I think that when you set up a trade route ships (or on land, caravans) should immediatley depart from where the resource is, all the way to your trading parteners cities. One of these should leave every turn, so that once the first arrives trade goes smoothely. If A third civ attacked one of these ships, then they would plunder it for a certain amount of gold, and for the turn that that ship was going to bring the resource to the player, they wouldn't get any of it.