ocean going vessels?

[hrhj2]

Hi all,

Have been playing civ4 for some time now (but not that often). I have been lurking here anonymously for some time, just thought I'd register because I was curious about something.

Is it just me or does the capability to build ocean-going vessels come rather late in the game ? I mean, when I'm researching optics I'm usually in the late(r) middle ages or even early renaissance. (To be honest, I just checked the tech tree and noticed that actually optics doesn't come that late. Perhaps I'm just giving it a low priority, will check whether I do next game I play.)

Probably it's all historically correct and such, but it still feels quit late to me. Perhaps also because there's nothing between building primitive vessels confined to coastal waters strictly and suddenly getting ships capable of traversing the world's largest oceans. I think I would like an intermediate tech, allowing to build vessels capable of crossing a moderate distance (say 5-10 tiles). As it is now, if I've rolled a small island as a starting position, I have to wait very long before I can expand to other land, even if that other land is only 3 water tiles away (at least, in earlier civ versions, you could generally still end your turn in non- coastal tiles at a risk- now you can't even leave coastal tiles at all). I also seem to remember that civ3 (only played it a few times) had coastal, sea, and ocean tiles. Anyone knows why they did away with that ? Gameplay balance reasons, perhaps ? Any thoughts on this ?

 

[Valivator]

You can build galleys with sailing and tiremes with metal casting. If you build a city on the coast and it expands into its BCF then you can go to the other island with a galley and drop off a settler

 

[hrhj2]

mmmm... didn't know that, interesting. Just to be sure: this also works if there is at least one ocean tile that must be crossed ?

 

[AmazonQueen]

mmmm... didn't know that, interesting. Just to be sure: this also works if there is at least one ocean tile that must be crossed ?

A citys cultural borders can expand into the first row of ocean tiles. Since even triremes and galleys can enter ocean tiles that are within your cultural borders this can allow you to cross to another landmass if only 1 row of ocean tiles seperates the 2 landmasses.

 

[Bushface]

Which, no doubt, is why on the maps I get the islands are always at least 4 tiles from the nearest mainland. Well, almost always.

 

[Yared]

Try playing as Joao II, Portugal.

 

[Birdman6]

To the OP, it's not just you. Ocean ships only show up with optics, which isn't that far on the tech tree but it feels like a painfully long time. Even then, you must have astronomy before you can move settlers and military units abroad. Partly for this reason astronomy is one of the most important techs in the game.

The exception is if you're playing Portugal, as yared noted.

 

[AmazonQueen]

To the OP, it's not just you. Ocean ships only show up with optics, which isn't that far on the tech tree but it feels like a painfully long time. Even then, you must have astronomy before you can move settlers and military units abroad. Partly for this reason astronomy is one of the most important techs in the game.

The exception is if you're playing Portugal, as yared noted.

You can get optics fairly quickly, but unless you're isolated or Joao its not worthwhile IMO. Too much of a sidetrack from more immediately useful techpaths.

1 fortunately rare but annoying thing is when an AI civ can reach you but you can't reach them (due to their cultural borders touching the coastal tiles of your landmass). Happened to me once with Shaka and resulted in a centuries long war where for a long time I could only defend. I won eventually but the game was lost. I was lucky to survive to the end.

 

[wioneo]

You can get optics fairly quickly, but unless you're isolated or Joao its not worthwhile IMO. Too much of a sidetrack from more immediately useful techpaths.

Don't forget about locking up the circumnavigation bonus. That bonus will give you a distinct naval advantage for the rest of the game.

1 fortunately rare but annoying thing is when an AI civ can reach you but you can't reach them (due to their cultural borders touching the coastal tiles of your landmass). Happened to me once with Shaka and resulted in a centuries long war where for a long time I could only defend. I won eventually but the game was lost. I was lucky to survive to the end.

In that case do your best to spam culture in the nearest city to control that tile, if that is not a viable option, just stuff any connecting coasts with triremes. Four per tile should stop any landing attempts.

 

[CivIVMonger]

Hi all,

Have been playing civ4 for some time now (but not that often). I have been lurking here anonymously for some time, just thought I'd register because I was curious about something.

Is it just me or does the capability to build ocean-going vessels come rather late in the game ? I mean, when I'm researching optics I'm usually in the late(r) middle ages or even early renaissance. (To be honest, I just checked the tech tree and noticed that actually optics doesn't come that late. Perhaps I'm just giving it a low priority, will check whether I do next game I play.)

Probably it's all historically correct and such, but it still feels quit late to me. Perhaps also because there's nothing between building primitive vessels confined to coastal waters strictly and suddenly getting ships capable of traversing the world's largest oceans. I think I would like an intermediate tech, allowing to build vessels capable of crossing a moderate distance (say 5-10 tiles). As it is now, if I've rolled a small island as a starting position, I have to wait very long before I can expand to other land, even if that other land is only 3 water tiles away (at least, in earlier civ versions, you could generally still end your turn in non- coastal tiles at a risk- now you can't even leave coastal tiles at all). I also seem to remember that civ3 (only played it a few times) had coastal, sea, and ocean tiles. Anyone knows why they did away with that ? Gameplay balance reasons, perhaps ? Any thoughts on this ?

I too, have pondered the exact same question. Sadly, they did do away with sea tiles and docking at risk. As for the lateness of ocean going vessals, sustaining a decent beaker rate helps, worked cottages is part of the solution. Basically, grade and trade. Study a tech, trade it for more valueble techs from someone else, and you end up being less backward. Be careful as to trade a tech that they could use against you! On Prince, I got optics without b-lining in 660 AD, so it's not THAT late. Anyways, goodluck out there!

 

[TheMeInTeam]

It's possible to get optics and astro by the early AD's most of the time, but not necessarily advisable. Then again, maybe the trade routes would make it worthwhile...

 

[Xellos-_^]

personally unless you are playing with a lot islands i rather research something else then then trade for astro. The Ai has a bad habit of making a beeline for astro then not bother chemistry until much later.

 

[frekk]

I think I would like an intermediate tech, allowing to build vessels capable of crossing a moderate distance (say 5-10 tiles). As it is now, if I've rolled a small island as a starting position, I have to wait very long before I can expand to other land, even if that other land is only 3 water tiles away

No, you can cross a short distance across ocean like that. All you have to do is build a city at the closest point and build lots of culture there; because you can venture into ocean that's within your cultural boundaries (at least, you can in the latest version of BTS). So short hops like that are eminently possible, technically as soon as you have galleys though for practical purposes it will take a bit longer to build the city and expand the cultural boundaries out some.

That bit doesn't bother me, but I agree that it does seem a bit much to go from galleys to caravels. The whole of medieval shipbuilding is completely ignored and you just jump from ancient Greece to the late 1400s, just like that. It's like having spearmen and archers one turn, and muskets and cuirassiers the next. At the very least, they should throw the single-masted cog, such as used by the Hanseatic League or the Crusaders, in there somewhere. It's a coaster - not meant for deep water sailing - but still a signifigant development. Or even a Roman merchantman, pretty much the same thing without the fighting decks:

http://www.the-romans.co.uk/g5/04.merchant_ship.jpg

http://www.ssplprints.com/lowres/43/main/30/109341.jpg

The caravel bugs me too. It's not all that useful in the game, and you could really merge all that 15th/16th sailing technology together (to have more room for other stuff), since galleons appeared only a few decades after Columbus made it to the Carribean. I'd just dump caravels altogether.

My ideal evolution for transporter ships would go something like this: galley - cog - galleon (first ocean vessel) - clipper - steam packet - freighter.

 

[Sincro]

I personally think the best way for the problem to be rectified would be a two-fold solution.

Step 1, change salt-water squares to 3 different types: Coast, Continental Shelf, and Deep Ocean.
Coast would retain all the current limitations and food/gold values.
Continental Shelf would be a two tile deep section between Coast and Deep Ocean. It's food/gold values would be what Ocean currently provides.
Deep Ocean would provide no food nor gold. Consider it dead area like desert or mountains. (But due to it's distance from land, this point is moot, it would never be in the fat cross of any city.) Ocean tiles could in theory provide fish/whale resources, but I think the code would need an additional modification to allow culture borders to spread out that far. I don't know enough about the code to know this. Nor do I really think such a complication is necessary.

Step 2, add a new class of ships to the Compass tech. These ships could travel freely in both coast and Continental Shelf. Compass itself would provide the transport/exploration ship. If Mathematics is also known, the 'attack class' ship would become available. (Picking an arbitrary tech, it doesn't have to be math, it's just an example of mechanics.) The additional tech would not provide any new ships without compass, just like chemistry alone doesn't provide frigates, you also need Astro, yet Astro alone allows Galleons. These new ships should probably have the base move of 2, like their coast-bound predecessors.

Caravels and all subsequent ships would remain the same, and the two new ship types would be placed in the appropriate sections of the unit upgrade tree.

For extremely large fresh-water lakes, the deepest the water would get is 'continental shelf' allowing total movement through all freshwater lakes with the second tier of ships.

And, incidently, large freshwater lakes should allow cities to build lighthouses and harbors. One need only look at the Great Lakes to see this in real life.

-Sinc

 

[frekk]

The thing is, ships that can't safely venture into the open sea (in the real world) can't safely venture into the open sea, whether on a shelf or otherwise. Continental shelves don't necessarily provide any particular protection from the kind of conditions that sink these ships; in fact, some of the worst conditions in the Atlantic occur on shelves. And if you can't see land, you can't see land; it doesn't serve as a landmark at all if it's over the horizon, no matter how far or close it may be.

One of the flaws of civ is that it assumes navigation was the crucial element in straying far from shore, but that's not the whole story - it was certainly important that vessels didn't get lost beyond the horizon, but it was also a matter of building ships capable of travelling through rough water. Improving the efficiency of vessels so that they could be operated by smaller crews relative to their size, and thus carry more supplies per person, was also crucial for straight transits, though not so much for hops like Polynesian exploration or the Viking crossing.

Nevertheless, it should be possible to sail out beyond the horizon, with a chance of sinking that would be lesser or greater depending on what sort of craft you have. Galleys and triremes would almost always sink very quickly; a cog (if there was one in the game) might fare a tiny bit better, but still be very risky; caravels would stand a chance of making a crossing, but still flounder on occasion; galleons and up would rarely sink, and modern ships would almost never sink (but still would, just very rarely). Plus, all ships should have a definite range; sailed and rowed ships ought to be able to travel coastlines without expending any range (as they can take on supplies and water from land); coal ought to have a short range and require refueling in a port; oil ought to allow a great range, but still require occasional trips to port; and nuclear ought to be more or less unlimited.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Astro bulb:

1. Get early great scientists. If you have marble go great library but otherwise just farm them out.

2. Get alphabet, math, and other things scientists will bulb.

3. Do NOT get meditation or either tech that unlocks paper.

4. Use 2-3 scientists to bulb optics/astro (you need 2 for astro, if you really want it hella fast you can bulb optics also.

5. If you're philo or something and can get them fast enough you might even be able to trade for things like currency using compass etc . I don't recommend trading optics/astro if you do this...try to abuse the trade route advantage over the AI as long as possible.

 

[Malchar]

If I remember correctly, historically it was much harder for ships to travel East/West than North/South. This is because traveling East/West the ship would move into different time-zones, which would mess up astral navigation. Sailors were unable to create reliable clocks that could work on a topsy-turvy ship.

 

[davelisowski]

Don't forget about locking up the circumnavigation bonus. That bonus will give you a distinct naval advantage for the rest of the game.

That is true. But it can be accomplished without ocean travel. As long as every horizontal position has been 'crossed' by the player.
I'm not really explaining that well...

I find it annoying to know that there is a good plot of land somewhere, but I cannot access it because of lack Astronomy. Then when I finally research Astronomy and build a Galleon and get it there, the AI has been there for a couple hundred years.

 

[Spiceweasel]

I think the tech restrictions work the way they are. They model the ability to *reliably* get where you're going, and know where you are. It's assumed that some ships are out there exploring, seeing wondrous new sites, and coming back with amazing stories. But from a gameplay perspective, it needs to be repeatable to be of use to the empire.

Think how hard it would be to build uncertainty of location into a game played on a grid. You could do it - have a special case screen for ships in unknown waters, and make those ships move at variable speeds, and so forth. But that's introducing fundamentally different game mechanics.

One of the earlier civs had ships that could enter the ocean but had a 50% chance of being destroyed if they ended their turns there. Neat, but error prone and micro-managy. The Civ4 team clearly wanted to streamline a lot of mechanics like that.