Naval elements of Civ4 still underrepresented!

[binhthuy71]

Something that could make naval warfare more interesting in the age of sail would be if you captured a % of defeated ships rather than sinking them...

Good point; from the Bronze Age to the Age of Sail ships were often captured and reflagged. This would make navies useful for something more than destroying an opponent's measly fishing boats. As would having Sea Lanes of Communication represented by real ships - especially if the cargo vessels were also subject to capture. Through WWI, commerce raiders wrought havoc during war.

Naval bombardment (Or artillery) could destroy improvements in Civ III. Civ IV is a bit less fun for me (Digresses from reality) by the loss of that.

 

[JavalTigar]

I love all of Aussie's Ideas. As a ex-sailor I understand the effective use of sea power, but the civ world has always undermined its place. Dominating the sea has caused many nation to rise above their simple land holding to be world powers both cultural and economic.

I always liked the concept from CTP where the trade routes were represented by lines with boats traveling between them (not unlike Gal Civ 2). Blockading was easy, just distrupt that line. It wasn't destroyed just the cargo could not get thru until you sent out a fleet to destroy the pirates. I don't remember if the pirate nation got anything except denial of goods but that makes sense if the got the trade booty while the ship was in place.

CTP as a whole did not equal the sum of its parts but it had a lot of great concepts (trade, public works, unconventional warfare, nice overall civ interface)

 

[InFlux5]

I think you're asking for too much. The scope of this game is already huge. They can't have 20 different ships, 20 different airplanes, 20 different styles of tanks and artillery, etc. The fact is, the sea-faring part of the game has been improved with every version of civ (though I miss the Seafaring trait from Civ III) and it already plays a substantial role in Civ IV.

I, for one, think it's cool that you already can blockade a city's coast and prevent its citizens from working there. Rival civs' and barbarians' vessels will pillage your sea-based trade if you don't protect it with ships of your own. And sea travel in the early game is only inconsequential if you play a Pangaea or Continents map. The new Continents maps are so totally unrealistic I can't stand to play them - two (or more) blobs of land completely separated by ocean with no connecting archipelagos or anything.

If you want ships to be a big part of the game from Galleys forward, play Fractal maps. I always play Fractal, and in every game it's extremely important to know whether there are islands nearby. If there are and you don't colonize them quickly, another civ (or barbarians) surely will. If you settle it, you will have to defend it by sea. If someone else settles it, you would be ill-advised not to take it from them with a sea-based assault.

Sea-based travel and warfare are already a significant part of the game. It sounds like you want it to be a bigger part, but I think you're asking for too much - at least for this version of civ. They have to balance many, many factors in this game. Land-, sea-, and air-based units are only one part of it. Terrain improvements, city improvements, happiness, health ... all of this has to be included in the game, yet you are complaining about one small aspect. I could easily complain that the happiness simulator is too basic or something like that, but I realize every aspect is just one small part of a much larger whole.

 

[El Koeno]

The problem now is, not that navies are underpowered, or unimportant I think. If an enemy has a lot of coastal cities, going from city to city by ship is faster and safer and you have the benefit of healing on the move. It's just that the AI doesn't really build navies, and if it does, naval battles aren't about tactics; It's really hard to get good odds without a big tech lead.

The interesting thing about land war is, that you need different units and use them intelligently to attain victory. The thing with naval war is that need to build a lot of ships in order to guarantee victory, that's just boring.

 

[InFlux5]

Dominating the sea has caused many nation to rise above their simple land holding to be world powers both cultural and economic.

You can do just that already in civ. If you're an island nation, dominating the sea means you need to build far fewer military units. If an enemy can't land they can't attack. This frees you up to concentrate much more heavily on your economy, and puts you in a good position for a cultural victory.

 

[T.A JONES]

To make naval warfare more intersting firaxis had to do only two things:
-more naval units especially in industrial and modern age
-make trade routes destroyable like in galciv2 and you will have experienced a more indepth naval warfare.
Simply to do but Firaxis doesn't seem to care about it.

Very good. But we are missing one very important thing and thats the AI abilty to conduct D- Day invasions, basicly massive over-seas attack operations. Its one thing the Ai really sucks at and therefor this directly influences the importance of navy units in Civ4

if the Ai could effectly transport vast amounts of troops across the oceans or seas transports would become the ultimate target and therfore ultimaly protected by fleets of warships. I would be trying to control the seas to stop any nation from sneakin up to my shores with a death squad.

As is now we don't fear when the AI Transports drops anchor. All three or four of them. Things would change if 8 to 12 showed up. Only then would I say its time to build a navy right? , so its time to build an AI with that one Oversea invasion aspect capabilty. Only then will the battles lines be redrawn

 

[Aussie_Lurker]

The critical thing is that, with a dedicated promotion system for navies, you wouldn't NEED 20 or more naval units, just around 3 for the Ancient and Classical Ages, 3 for the Middle Ages and Renaissance, 3-4 for the Industrial age and 4 for the Modern age-no more than 12-13 IN TOTAL (i.e. both Vanilla and Warlords combined). For instance, if you wanted a navy specialised to defending your coasts, you might have a set of promotions that grant a bonus to coastal movement and one which grants you a strength bonus when fighting in coastal waters. Other promotions might give you a specific bonus against gunpowder vessels, or grant you bonus cash from the pillaging of coastal improvements-all of which might allow you to fill a whole host of specific niches-much as the existing promotion system does for ground units.
This would also allow for much greater use of TACTICS in naval battles, rather than dumb luck.

Aussie_Lurker.

 

[El Koeno]

The critical thing is that, with a dedicated promotion system for navies, you wouldn't NEED 20 or more naval units

Aussie_Lurker.

My thoughts exactly!

 

[marioflag]

About AI i don't think it would be so much different from land warfare, and i don't think it would be so hard to script AI in a way that they attack you through the sea only if they have 10-15 transports with more than 50 units aboard.
It can be more difficult to script AI to attack trade routes but there are other TBS games which have already implemented it.
HOI2 is a total different game and has a lot more complexity about warfare with multimission tasks for every unit, in CIV4 warfare is really arcade you have only to say when AI should attack your ships, without any specific mission or any complexity.What is so hard implementing these scripts to AI we have games so complex if compared to CIV4.

 

[gunkulator]

Good point; from the Bronze Age to the Age of Sail ships were often captured and reflagged. This would make navies useful for something more than destroying an opponent's measly fishing boats.

In CivIII the English UU, the Man-O-War, could do this and it was a lot of fun.

Naval bombardment (Or artillery) could destroy improvements in Civ III. Civ IV is a bit less fun for me (Digresses from reality) by the loss of that.

Actually, I found naval bombardment to be extremely tedious in CivIII since most of the time it failed. I do like the idea of bombardment though.

 

[binhthuy71]

Actually, I found naval bombardment to be extremely tedious in CivIII since most of the time it failed. I do like the idea of bombardment though.

Agreed; the chances of success were way too low even using Aegis Cruisers at sea or Radar Artillery on land. Even so, for me it added an interesting dimension to the game.

 

[gunkulator]

Destruction of land improvements via bombardment should operate in the same manner as workers creating them, i.e. if it takes 2 worker turns to make a road and 6 to make a mine, it should take 2 and 6 turns of bombardment to destroy them. The game already keeps track of worker turns applied toward an improvement. It could also keep track of bombards against it.

 

[Randolph]

I don’t think more units/buildings is what’s needed. As others have said navies need to have the ability to effect economics. a few more “easy to implement ideas” (I like many of the others):

(1) If a hostile naval unit is in your city radius at the beginning of your turn you lose all trade route income, and the owner of the hostile ship gains half of that income.

(2) The civ with the most powerful navy gains +1 trade route in all costal cities (regardless of war relations; a lot of naval strategy has to do with peace time build up and who would theoretically win a naval war).

(3) If one of your ships starts its turn in a hostile city’s radius, you gain +10% city attack during that turn.

(4) You can't land units in a hostile city's radius if there are any of that civ's (or allied) naval units in the radius (or within their movement range?) (to avoid the "rush across the English channel" thing; if you want to invade Brittan, you have to face the royal navy).

 

[marioflag]

Destruction of land improvements via bombardment should operate in the same manner as workers creating them, i.e. if it takes 2 worker turns to make a road and 6 to make a mine, it should take 2 and 6 turns of bombardment to destroy them. The game already keeps track of worker turns applied toward an improvement. It could also keep track of bombards against it.

You forget that while Rome wasn't built in a day, you can destroy Rome in less than a day.
Destroying is a lot easier than building

 

[Randolph]

One unit that I would like to see return is the privateer, but not in it’s previous incarnation. Keep the stats and hidden nationalities, but add the ability to steal trade routes (as in my last post, but maybe only one trade route for a privateer). That way you could park a privateer in a city radius for a turn or two, and run away before their navy can get there).

 

[T.A JONES]

The critical thing is that, with a dedicated promotion system for navies, you wouldn't NEED 20 or more naval units, just around 3 for the Ancient and Classical Ages, 3 for the Middle Ages and Renaissance, 3-4 for the Industrial age and 4 for the Modern age-no more than 12-13 IN TOTAL (i.e. both Vanilla and Warlords combined).

Not sure I understand your reply. You mean when the AI sends multiple transports "8-12" to your shores your going to sink them all along with there protectors, before they land, and with only 3 highly upgraded warships. How? you can only sink one transport per turn

My point was If the AI changed its war strategy and started massive sea invasions like they do on land, you would need to bulk up on navy just for the amount of turns that are required to sink the majorty threat.
PLus any nation no matter how far away could be expected to deliver a invasion force to your door. You would need to defend the entire sea that surrond you. Not sure what you meant when you said a "dedicated promotion system" can acheive this, please explain Thanks

 

[I_batman]

The critical thing is that, with a dedicated promotion system for navies, you wouldn't NEED 20 or more naval units, just around 3 for the Ancient and Classical Ages, 3 for the Middle Ages and Renaissance, 3-4 for the Industrial age and 4 for the Modern age-no more than 12-13 IN TOTAL (i.e. both Vanilla and Warlords combined). For instance, if you wanted a navy specialised to defending your coasts, you might have a set of promotions that grant a bonus to coastal movement and one which grants you a strength bonus when fighting in coastal waters. Other promotions might give you a specific bonus against gunpowder vessels, or grant you bonus cash from the pillaging of coastal improvements-all of which might allow you to fill a whole host of specific niches-much as the existing promotion system does for ground units.
This would also allow for much greater use of TACTICS in naval battles, rather than dumb luck.

Aussie_Lurker.

A question then about the size of a civ's navy: Why in real life then are navies so much larger and important?
I know that it is difficult to scale CIV armed forces to reality, but the U.S. currently has a 600 ship navy.
Granted, a number of those are tenders, and supply ships, but not long ago they had 78 Los Angeles class subs, more than a couple Ohio class missile boats, and 13 carrier groups.

I am not even going to start on the size of the European fleets during the 1600's-1800's.

What I am trying to say (badly), is that throughout history, any civilization that wanted to project power on a global basis, has tied up a larger percentage of their military resources in their navies than a player in CIV has to in order for that player to be sucessful.

If the intent of CIV is to emulate historical trends, then navies (and air forces) should play a larger role in the Civ game.

Throwing some arbitrary numbers out there, but I would assume that if you have 12-13 warships as per your statement above, you might have 100 land units at the same time. If a land unit represents a division, then I would suggest that the CIV game engine is of whack, if you can be sucessful with that ratio.

 

[gunkulator]

You forget that while Rome wasn't built in a day, you can destroy Rome in less than a day.
Destroying is a lot easier than building

From land, yes. From the sea? Not so much. Bombardment, especially in the early eras, was notoriously innaccurate. The Star Spangled Banner tells the story of an intense hours long bombardment from multiple ships that ultimately did little to no damage.

And besides, how realistic is it anyway that you can destroy farmed land and roads from the sea?

 

[T.A JONES]

Just thought I should I should bring up a comment someone said about AI ocean invasions. They figured making a Sea attack force functional for the Ai should be an easy task. Im wondering why then, it wasn't in Civ3 and then later when it was noticed, still not improved for CIV

 

[dh_epic]

I suspect that one of the reasons they don't focus on modern combat, with flight and more meaningful naval units (e.g.: with bombard abilities) is because the game is often decided by then... that's pretty much the last 1/4 of the game, and any efforts to improve them would only affect 1/4 of gameplay (at best).

That said, giving the naval units much more movement, and big benefits to 'blockading' a city (not just blocking trade routes, but affecting ocean tiles, lighthouses, and harbors)... those are easy things that would go a long way to making navies a 'must have' proposition.