Navy in Civ7: Pirates and Torpedoes

[Lonecat Nekophrodite]

One thing that's not really in tune in Civ6 is that. Pirates (Privateers) of Earlymodern era can be upgraded into Submarines. and that also means it has the same promotion class. Sure Sumbarines are historically deployed to sting enemy freight shipping lanes. but doing so the attacker DOES NOT recover any freight of a sunken freighter. Likewise privateers share the same 'TWO HEX' ranges as Civ6 Frigate (also placed in a wrong class. but that's a different discussion) and can even attack land units! IRL while pirate ships may shoot anyone standing by shorelines. their primary mode of combat is boarding actions. and in addition of piracy. their secondary profession is smugglings, anything taken from enemy freight ships and can be sold is illegally sold. or... in case of the Confederate States of America in American Civil War. Privateers are blockade runners and they're purely smugglers--carrying cottons and other cash crops out of Confederate domain into textile mills in Manchester and even in Europe. While piracy still lasts to this day, 'pirates' now becomes more of smugglers (arms, human traffickings, and narcotics for example) and less of robbers (and it is illegal worldwide. the only usefulness in war or geopolitics are that it can sting opponents... note that Soviet (and later Russian sponsored) FARCs in Colombia periorically sting American society with Colombian Cocaine (and other narcotics, including Ganjas), and situation becomes so serious in 80s particularly in Coastal California (where LA and Hollywood are, and guess who influenced Cocaine hookings worldwide? Celebs of any kind there, actors, entertainers, as well as Modelswomen) and that intensified Colombian Civil War as well. See? Soviet Premier in Kremlin would be mused watching TV Reports that their rival is in trouble at home now.). Submarines on the other hand did not have any ability to attack land targets, and their attack mode is always ranged (and probably long range) but torpedoes are anti-warship weapons but rarey used against buildings.
What should it be in Civ7? Pirates and Submarines shouldn't be in the same class anymore.
A. Pirate Class: Liburnia->Xebec->Brigantine->Merchant Raider->Motor Boat
Units of pirate class is heavily associated to Barbarians (they're outlaws, basically), and only barbarians can produce ones by default (and is the ONLY Barbarian naval powers they can make. they ain't no capable of building sophisticated 'Battleships' of any kind, and even simple light cruisers are well beyond them except improvised combat vessels made out of captured civilian ships). On the flipside, No Civilizations can 'produce' any, they have to be hired (purchase by gold). City States on the other hand, can PRODUCE Pirates. (And Players can only earn privateers by hiring ones , one such methods is to visit CS and recruit ones).
Their special abilities are consisted of
1. Prize Ships: any defeated enemy warships changed hands if units of this class finished one off. Barbarians can only earn 'regular' warships with this method.
2. Piracy: Shipping lanes may be plundered and cashes earned.
3. Smuggling: Srategic Resources may be pilfered from different players.
4. Black Flag: Other players only see this unit flying neutral flag. in smuggling mode this unit may appears as a regular freight ship to other player
B:Torpedo Class, consists of Torpedo Boat->Submarine-> Missile Sub (can be diesel powered or nuclear powered).
1. They cannot attack land targets (Except missile subs). but exceptionally strong against all other naval units without Antisubmarine ability.
2. Can be produced regularly.
The use of Pirate class unit can incur diplomatic repurcussions. just like spy, if a pirate is captured and interrogated, he could reveal his ties to any player using it. even as smuggler. heavy use of pirates in peace time is a lawful casus beli. and the the war can end with one roguish player is totally conquered. If the war ended with peace treaty, there will be penalties on merchant tradings (fewer profits).... The use of piracy can also incurs Emergency race.
Colombia and Mexico are such examples that smuggling activities incurs wrath of Global Superpowers.

 

[Evie]

Some observations:
-Pirates did indeed conduct operations against land, raiding and pillaging settlements along the coasts. The North African corsairs were infamous for this, but many settlements in the New World were similarly raided and pillaged during the golden age of piracy. So pirates having land attack capabilities is what we should see.

-Torpedo Boats into submarines is dubious. TB were a short-lived (twenty years) experiment into a craft that had little staying power at sea (so unable to do the submarine's job or to have any commerce raiding impact). It was a experimental hiccup, a prototype on the way to designing a much enlarged version that would both be good at torpedo attacks and fighting off torpedo attacks: the destroyer. So if it's in the game at all its upgrade path should lead to the destroyer. But given its massive limitations and short lifespan, it could be left off. The submarine line should start at the submarine.

-Frigates are hard to place properly, due to the game's silly distinction between ranged and melee units at sea. Frigates were no more (or less) boarding-centered than ships of the line, and used much of the same weapons, just less powerful, so having one be a melee unit and the other a ranged one makes very little sense (something that works much better with the torpedo-heavy destroyer vs the big gun battleships and cruisers).

The idea also of the frigate as precursor of the destroyer is iffy - if anything, the historical frigate was the precursor of the cruiser: the long-legged ship that could be deployed in missions (including escort) around the world and counter most sirface threats that did not involve an enemy's main fleet. But we don't even have cruisers or a role for them in the game.

 

[pineappledan]

I would just do away with the privateer class, personally. Units in civ games are more than capable of doing the things privateers did, like pillaging trade routes and attacking land targets etc. The utility of privateers etc were their ability to hinder and disrupt enemy nations’ economies with at least some plausible deniability for the original civ. Their advantages were political more than strictly military, which is something a pared down game like civ can’t handle very well. Along with stuff like irregulars and civil wars; it’s just not something I can imagine being very fun for the players, or that easy to make feel fair or usable by the AI.

I like the idea of Torpedo boats as a precursor to submarines, and starting the unit line in industrial. TBs we’re short lived as a design, but the idea of small maneuverable ships that could get in close and land a big hit against a capital ship had legs. You can see the early submarines as a combination of the TB’s armament and doctrine with the concurrent advances in submersibles.

In a game sense, this gives Industrial era a unit line unlock and unstacks submarines unit line unlock from planes, which will unavoidably unlock in Modern. In civ 6 they tried to do this by emphasizing commerce raiding as a thematic through line, and merging privateers and submarines into a line. As OP says, it’s a weird fit, but I think the sentiment is correct.

 

[Evie]

As I said, the bigger problem is that TB are one of the clearest cut case of a unit with a successor (and upgrade path) in history,

That successor is the destroyer, not the sub. They're the fast maneuverable torpedo attack craft of later years.

(Small maneuverable ships is also very much not the sub's wheelhouse)

 

[pineappledan]

I TBDs we’re not a successor; they were a counter. That’s like saying flak cannons were the successor to airplanes.

The fact that TBDs secondarily became so useful as just general-purpose surface combatants of a certain size and speed class notwithstanding, they were designed as escorts to defend all-big-gun capital ships from TBs, not to replace TBs. The roll of Torpedo boats as small craft that could trade up against a massive capital ship with a lucky punch was carried forward with submarines, as was the destroyer’s roll in hunting them.

 

[Evie]

Except that's just not how it played out. The destroyer did not end up countering the TB: it ended up obsoleting it, because it could both destroy pre-existing torpedo boats and do their job of carrying out fast torpedoes attack (The IJN, especially, specialized in this later use).

The fact that French destroyers were at times (including the first world war) known as Torpilleurs d'escade ("Fleet torpedo boats") illustrate the lack of clear line between the two categories (thanks to the Destroyer assuming the torpedo attack role of the TB).

The "destroyers were originally a counter for TB, and eventually became a counter for submarine, so that makes the two of them successor" line of thought ignore a key point: for most of the early twentieth century (after torpedo boats fell into obscolescence at the end of the nineteenth), destroyers weren't a major anti-submarine platform - that mostly came around World War Two. Prior to that anti-submarine warfare mostly fell to smaller escorts. That'S a nearly 50 years period between the anti-TB role and the anti-submarine role, which was largely the golden age of the tin can.

 

[pineappledan]

Yes, the TBDs ended up being so effective and flexible in their roll they rendered TBs — the thing they were designed to counter — obsolete. That is true, but that doesn’t make destroyers an evolution of the torpedo boat. The lack of clear line, and ships existing that blur what counts as a frigate or a cruiser or a corvette, etc. isn’t material here. There are always hybrid ships that blur rolls and armaments. A destroyer with a couple torpedo tubes on it doesn’t make it a TB, unless you’ve decided you’re just going to be obtuse for the sake of it. There are exceptions to every rule. Civ games don’t engage in those blurry lines; they have hard categories for units.

I’ve already pointed out the advantage of making that distinction wrt destroyers and TBs. Drawing a clear line between the two allows destroyers to carry forward the naval melee unit line while TBs can fill the roll that privateers fill (awkwardly) opening the “raider” line earlier, and away from other unit lines like planes, which otherwise will unlock at the same time as subs unless you can add in a precursor unit to fill that roll.

 

[Evie]

Pretty much all early designs of anti-torpedo boats crafts were based on the TB, until the need for a faster, longer leged ship forced new designs to be built around more powerful engines. There is very much a development line from TB to TBD.

Which is why Torepdo boat as *raiders* is an absolute no-go: they simply never had the ability to operate at long range or indepedently or main naval units that is essential to raiders.

Also another reason not to have them at unit. They just never had the capability for far-ranging operations.

(Plus torpedoes are the closest thing to a "melee" weapon in post gunpowder naval warfare, so surface torpedo units should be surface melee units).

 

[BuchiTaton]

The use of Pirate class unit can incur diplomatic repurcussions. just like spy, if a pirate is captured and interrogated, he could reveal his ties to any player using it. even as smuggler. heavy use of pirates in peace time is a lawful casus beli. and the the war can end with one roguish player is totally conquered. If the war ended with peace treaty, there will be penalties on merchant tradings (fewer profits).... The use of piracy can also incurs Emergency race.
Colombia and Mexico are such examples that smuggling activities incurs wrath of Global Superpowers.

Where is this supposed "wrath" of Global Superpowers?

USA government provides funds, intelligence, militar equipment and training to Colombian and Mexican governments to fight cartels. Beyond American far-right political speech there are not official blame or actions against those governments, on the contrary USA used this as a pretext to help those regimes to destroy far-left revolutionary movements claiming these were the source of the drugs, resulting in the creation of paramilitar groups involved in civilian massacres and the massive smuggling of guns from USA (also drugs to USA, once again like the American founding of islamic groups that turned against them ).

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

Ahem. A brief foray into the Rat's Nest that is late 19th century naval developments. A Rat's Nest caused by rampant technological change accompanied by no major fleet batt les to prove or disprove all the theories, so just about everything was tried, at least once, by somebody.
First, the basic Upgrade Line:
Frigates were replaced by Steam Frigates, a hybrid steam and sail ship starting to mount the new exploding shell guns. The largest of these, built in the USA for the Russian Navy, was the General Admiral, and it weighed in at 5669 tons, or about 50% heavier than the first rate Ship of the Line HMS Victory of just 50 years earlier! - She was also more heavily armed, carrying 60 60-pounder shell guns compared to Victory's 104 guns, the largest of which were 42 pounders firing solid shot. Launched in 1858, she was also referred to as a "steam cruiser", which fortold the next upgrade:
After 1876 ships started being built with steel hulls instead of wood and wrought iron hybrids, started losing their full rig of sails as steam engines became efficient compound types (and also became fuel-efficient enough to actually steam long distances without stopping every few days to re-coal) and the frigates were replaced by Cruisers - unarmored types quickly known as Light Cruisers, and armored types known as Protected Cruisers and, by the 1890s, Armored Cruisers.
The self-propelled torpedo was invented in 1864 specifically as a coast/harbor defense weapon: the prototype was originally labeled the Salvacoste - "coast saver". In 1876, the first specifically-designed craft to carry such a torpedo, the HMS Lightning, was a short-ranged coastal craft that carried 0 guns - it's only armament was a single torpedo tube.
Within 10 years, by the mid-1880s, larger torpedo-carrying boats were designed and launched, called Torpedo Gunboats, which carried 40mm to 100mm cannon in addition to 1 - 4 torpedo launching mechanisms. First of these was the HMS Rattlesnake, launched in 1885, and designed specifically to fight Torpedo Boats.
Almost everybody built or bought torpedo boats, because they were cheap and relatively easy to maintain, and potentially a single torpedo could sink any capital ship for a tremendous 'return on the investment'. Consequently, Torpedo Boat Destroyers (the term seems to have been in general use by 1892) were also built by every navy that had Battleships, to protect against such a return Not in their favor.
Torpedo Boat Destroyers could carry more torpedos than the smaller torpedo boats, also guns big enough to destroy the latter, and were big enough to carry enough fuel for real open ocean operation, not just coastal work, Also, they were faster than the torpedo boats - much faster, as in 14.5 knots for the average torpedo boat, 27 knots for the Royal Navy's first Torpedo Boat Destroyers.
In the Russo-Japanese War of 1904 - 1905 both sides used torpedo boats and torpedo boat destroyers, and in the Japanese Navy the torpedo boat destroyers were simply larger types of torpedo boats ("Class One Torpedo Boats" was their other designation). After that war, the Torpedo Boat was relegated to strictly coastal patrol work and the larger vessels were referred to universally simply as Destroyers.

So basically, here's the Civ problem with the naval developments:
1840 - the first Steam Frigates. 36 years later:
1876 - the first Cruisers
1876 the first Torpedo Boats. 9 years later:
1885 - the first Torpedo Boat Destroyers. 20 years later:
1905 - Torpedo Boat Destroyers become Destroyers.

Note that the Submarine appears nowhere in any of this: it was a completely separate development, built around electric propulsion and the self-propelled torpedo - and the first such boats were also coastal craft because of the extremely short range of their powerplants: the first submersibles had ranges from 100 to 150 kilometers. Real ocean-going submarines came quickly: the German U-19 class, first built in 1910, had a range of 8000 kilometers with steam engines on the surface and electric batteries underwater.

Given that by the late Industrial Era the game usually is at 5 years per turn, every 2 - 7 turns you have to upgrade or rebuild just about every ship smaller than a Ship of the Line - and ships of the line, between 1840 and 1905, also get at least 3 major rebuilds from wooden hulls to ironclads to steel hulled Battleships, and then a major change to the Dreadnaught Battleship after 1906.
Lots of luck cramming all that into a Civ game's timescale without driving the players into screaming frustration.

 

[Lonecat Nekophrodite]

Where is this supposed "wrath" of Global Superpowers?

USA government provides funds, intelligence, militar equipment and training to Colombian and Mexican governments to fight cartels. Beyond American far-right political speech there are not official blame or actions against those governments, on the contrary USA used this as a pretext to help those regimes to destroy far-left revolutionary movements claiming these were the source of the drugs, resulting in the creation of paramilitar groups involved in civilian massacres and the massive smuggling of guns from USA (also drugs to USA, once again like the American founding of islamic groups that turned against them ).

But after the Cold War (or Escoba to be precise). Colombian cartels are FARCs.
What about Pirates as underhanded naval units?

 

[BuchiTaton]

But after the Cold War (or Escoba to be precise). Colombian cartels are FARCs.
What about Pirates as underhanded naval units?

I dont want to turn this in that pointless discussion of "the ones who killl the most are the bad guys", but colombian right-wing paramilitars control most of the drug traffic and kill more people than left-wing guerrillas. Still neither of those groups are officialy recognized as Colombian goverment agents by American authorities, so there is not point on see them as in-game "black-flag" forces. The drug cartels are a problem than neither of these countries can control, they corrupt all of those goverments of course USA included, or are we expected to believe that those big shipments of drugs just teleport to the final consumer when they reach America's soil or all that lucrative smuggling of guns to SA.

 

[Lonecat Nekophrodite]

^ So 'smugglings as playable geopolitic tricks' shouldn't be introduced as Pirate alternate ability at all? as well as 'barbarian' mechanics that should now also included not just terrorism but also organized crime they involves? like Black gangsters in GTA or Italian Mafias in the next Mafia IV (If 2k chose to continue Mafia franchise, with or without F'xis help of course)... what to do with them??

 

[Evie]

Yeah. The industrial period involved much manure thrown at the wall and a lot of it didn't stick for long.

I'm vaguely, very loosely thinking three lines + submarines and carriers, very roughly the recon, melee and ranged lines.

Recon: Galley - Liburnian - Caravel - Sloop - Destroyer - Missile Destroyer
As the recon/exploration/visibility unit, picking up the ability to find submarines at later stages make sense.
Recon units prior to the destroyer have the ability to become privateers, hiding their nationality and allowing them to attack and be attacked without starting wars. Destroyers pick up the ability to see invisible units instead.

Melee: (none) - Quadrireme - Galleass - Frigate - Steam Frigate - Light Cruiser - (missile Destroyer)
The standard surface combatant, fast enough and powerful enough to deal with barbarian and privateering recon ships. Later in the game sea melee units pick up anti air abilities. With the post-ww2 era the melee and recon units merge to create the chief defensive and surface combatant in the missile destroyer (really a cruiser, size-wise).

Ranged: (none) - Polyreme - Carrack - Ship of the Line - Ironclad - Battleship - Missile Cruiser
The big gun units able to destroy enemies on land and at sea with firepower. Slower, but pack a wallop at a range.

Submarine: Submarine - Nuclear Submarine
Invisible units except to recon units. Later pick up the ability to deploy ICBM.

Carrier: Carrier - Nuclear Carrier.
Carrier of planes. Upgrade from basic version to the larger nuclear carrier with greater capacity.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

Yeah. The industrial period involved much manure thrown at the wall and a lot of it didn't stick for long.

I'm vaguely, very loosely thinking three lines + submarines and carriers, very roughly the recon, melee and ranged lines.

Recon: Galley - Liburnian - Caravel - Sloop - Destroyer - Missile Destroyer
As the recon/exploration/visibility unit, picking up the ability to find submarines at later stages make sense.
Recon units prior to the destroyer have the ability to become privateers, hiding their nationality and allowing them to attack and be attacked without starting wars. Destroyers pick up the ability to see invisible units instead.

Melee: (none) - Quadrireme - Galleass - Frigate - Steam Frigate - Light Cruiser - (missile Destroyer)
The standard surface combatant, fast enough and powerful enough to deal with barbarian and privateering recon ships. Later in the game sea melee units pick up anti air abilities. With the post-ww2 era the melee and recon units merge to create the chief defensive and surface combatant in the missile destroyer (really a cruiser, size-wise).

Ranged: (none) - Polyreme - Carrack - Ship of the Line - Ironclad - Battleship - Missile Cruiser
The big gun units able to destroy enemies on land and at sea with firepower. Slower, but pack a wallop at a range.

Submarine: Submarine - Nuclear Submarine
Invisible units except to recon units. Later pick up the ability to deploy ICBM.

Carrier: Carrier - Nuclear Carrier.
Carrier of planes. Upgrade from basic version to the larger nuclear carrier with greater capacity.

Nice collection! Just a few tweaks and comments:
Recon:
The Liburnian was such a quintessential Pirate craft throughout the Classical period that it cries out to be a specific Barbarian Boat. Lembos, on the other hand, was a generic (Greek - in Latin it is Lembus) term for 'any light warship' - specifically, lighter than any polyreme, including the Trireme, so a nice term for the lighter recon types we want to depict.
Melee:
The Quadrireme was the main warship of the eastern Med for less than 70 years, and as a 'melee' ship was completely outclassed by the Quinquereme, which could carry more marines (120 to 75) and was more stable, better protected, and had a higher deck giving a tactical advantage in boarding actions. The Quinquereme was the definitive Melee Warship, used extensively by Rome, Carthage, and the Hellenistic Greek states for 400 years (399 BCE to Augustus' time).
The Galleass was primarily a design to mount a gun deck above a rowing deck of oarsmen, providing relatively heavy cannon broadside with the use of either oars or sails for propulsion. It's a bad choice for a Melee ship, then, because it's metier was firepower - and that's how they were used in their most famous action at Lepanto in 1571 CE. The Carrack, on the other hand, was a true 'melee' ship from the late 14th century (1380 - 1410: first illustrations and mentions). Examples from the 16th century carried only 5 - 22 'anti-ship' cannon, but also 64 - 79 'anti-personnel' swivel or large hackbuss-type guns and large contingents of troops to board and take enemy ships: classic Melee Tactics.
Ranged:
The larger-than-Quinquereme Polyremes (Deciremes, Heptiremes, Octaremes, etc) all are shown with towers fore and aft for missile troops and were stable enough platforms to mount catapults on them for siege work against coastal cities, so a good choice for the Classical Ranged Ship.
Instead of the Carrack, however (see above), the two better candidates for a Ranged ship are the Cog (Medieval: 13th - 14th centuries) or the Galleon (mid-16th century). From at least the early 14th century the Cog mounted towers for missile troops fore and aft and at Sluys (1340 CE) English Cogs swept the decks of the French galleys with arrow fire, turning the battle into a massacre. On the other hand, the Galleon hull from 1530 CE on was the first hull designed from the start to carry large 'ship killing' cannon and the 'race-built galleon' developed in England later in the same century was the hull that developed into the Ship of the Line after the middle of the 17th century.
"Missile" ships:
The terms Missile Frigate, Missile Destroyer and Missile Cruiser are essentially interchangeable. The Ticonderoga Class Missile Cruisers are smaller than later Missile Destroyers and ships and classes of ships have been reclassified constantly for the past 30 years. The only distinct type is the (Missile) Corvette, a much smaller ship which, at east in Swedish service, uses a collection of stealth techniques to be invisible or nearly so while carrying a formidable array of anti-ship, anti-submarine, anti-aircraft missile systems. This would make a good alternative 'Recon' type for the Information Era, complete with a submarine-like ability to be invisible unless you are adjacent to it.

 

[pineappledan]

@Boris Gudenuf beat me to the punch. My current wishlist for naval units:

Note: Melee ships always unlock late in the era while ranged units would unlock at the start of the era.

A polyreme seems oddly specifically Mediterranean. I've never been satisfied with how the civ franchise just takes overtly Mediterranean boats and nomenclature as the baseline.
I'm also undecided if a fast, quick raider unit that emphasizes maneuverability over ramming, or a massive ship that can act as a platform for siege weapons is the best base substrate for a default ranged unit. The Chinese placed mangonels on ships during the Three Kingdoms period, similar to Alexander's assault on Tyre, but Byzantine Dromons emphasized ranged combat and avoiding boarding, and they used a Lembus galley as their base design. Otherwise, the emphasis on melee combat is so firmly established until cannons that merely being a ship that's not designed for ramming or overt melee action seems like the best one could do for a pre-renaissance ship.

Regardless, from my own playtesting and experience with the franchise, there just isn't a need for 2 naval unit lines until at least medieval anyways. You rarely have the economy for it, ranged units can't easily maneuver to strike at enemy ships until they are allowed to enter deep ocean, and there is very sparse historical justification for it.

I can't imagine what value separate recon line would bring to the standard melee/ranged dichotomy. I just don't know what they would even do. Civ 6 already has the general problem of navies being virtually useless; it's hard enough finding a decent reason to build boats in most civ games, let alone 3 separate lines worth of them.

The submarine line would be suitable for that 1 range attack slot. As you said yourself, torpedo ranges are relatively short. I would give the line less mobility than the standard naval and melee lines, no ability to attack land (obviously), but a large 1 range attack and a chance to critical hit.

 

[Evie]

That list is...a bit weird. The frigate-ironclad-destroyer transition makes no sense whatsoever (the ironclad is a largely short-legged ship

Atomic age being post world wars, both battleship and the first carrier model have no place in it (they should be in modern, which covers both world wars). Supercarriers have existed since the Atomic at least, and decidedly exist in the Information Age, making them future makes no sense.

"Galley" is an incredibly generic term which is equivalent to having one unit called "sailship" in the game or "steamship". That's why the mediteranean terms can and should be used: because they're the best known terms to distinguish between the wide varieties of galley, and the many roles they played. Lumping all pre-medieval oar-powered ship into a single category is just completely misunderstanding what "galleys" is as a term.

Naval recon units would serve at least two roles: exploration, and sub-hunting (being the unit able to see invis attackers).

Boris - I agree missile ships are kind of a merger, and I like going for the lighter missile corvette while having the battleship and cruiser line merge at a missile cruiser/destroyer. Of course the terms destroyers and cruisers have themselves become meaningless, just marketing labels for political approval.

 

[pineappledan]

Atomic age being post world wars, both battleship and the first carrier model have no place in it (they should be in modern, which covers both world wars). Supercarriers have existed since the Atomic at least, and decidedly exist in the Information Age, making them future makes no sense.

Depends where you split the eras. I would set Modern going 1871-1930 and Atomic is 1931-1970 That captures the transition to all-big-gun capital ships (eg dreadnoughts) and splits it from the WWII era battleships up until those ships' retirement and obsolescence in the late 1900s.

"Galley" is an incredibly generic term which is equivalent to having one unit called "sailship" in the game or "steamship". That's why the mediteranean terms can and should be used: because they're the best known terms to distinguish between the wide varieties of galley, and the many roles they played. Lumping all pre-medieval oar-powered ship into a single category is just completely misunderstanding what "galleys" is as a term.

Generic terms are good for base units. Civ 6 also used the term Galley for an early melee ship. You also used the term "Galley" in your own list, so this is the pot calling the kettle black. Your list also has Quadrireme, Polyreme, Liburnian, and Galleass, which are all different subtypes of galleys while my list only has 1 other Galley type ship: Lembus, which itself is a category. So who is completely misunderstanding?

Naval recon units would serve at least two roles: exploration, and sub-hunting (being the unit able to see invis attackers).

And I suppose melee naval units will just sit on their hands for an era being unable to explore in that time? This oversplits the tasks of naval units too much. You would need to make each individual ship type all but useless in order to make these narrow applications stick. The end result will be that ships just aren't worth building as a category.

 

[Evie]

My issue isn’t with use of the term “galley” for a specific unit. It’s lumping over two thousand years (galleys appears long before the classical) of very diverse naval design to a single unit just because you dislike the Mediterranean terms.

While still having the torpedo boat that died out in twenty years, one might add. And insisting on distinguishing between two battleship designs thirty years apart.

Also while canoe as a worthwhile sea going warship did happen, it is just as geographically specific (more so I’d argue) than the Mediterranean diversity of galleys. Moving galleys to the classical to have that unit as the ancient eta naval unit does not make much sense to me.

 

[pineappledan]

Canoes are not geographically delimited in the least. Canoes were independently created almost everywhere. Archeological finds of canoes are found on every continent.

The timelines in those later eras are very compressed and it is perfectly reasonable to place the two world wars into different eras, and has been standard practice in the civ games for a long time. If modern is defined as between 1870 and 1930 then 30 years is half of an era.

Your use of Steam Frigate is a similarly brief episode in naval warfare. Your insistence that using ironclad as the naval unit for that era makes no sense, even though there are several cases of ironclads getting into short range knife-fights and even the revival of ramming tactics in that era of naval warfare.