Removing work boats

[ahte]

At the moment, to improve a water resource you must build a work boat, send it to the resource, then expend the boat. In contrast, to improve a resource on land, you just send your worker there and build whatever you require - the worker is not expended, you get to use it again and again. Having work boats by contrast be one-use units seems really off by comparison, and somewhat inefficient.

So here's my idea: Civ V gives us the ability to embark units. Why not let embarked workers build improvements on water resources the same way they build them on land? Embark your worker, move him to your fish tile, and tell him to build fishing boats. Four turns later (or whatever), you have your fishing boats and you can send your worker off to another sea resource or land it back on the shore to return to working the land.

This is hardly fixing a glaring issue with the game, but it just seems to make more sense to me than having to build a separate boat for every single water resource. Thoughts?

 

[epicivfreak]

Agreed. There is a clear disconnect between land and water resource grabbing. Whether a worker goes out and builds the fishing nets or a work boat goes out and builds the fishing nets, and is then reusable, I don't care, just sync up the concepts...

 

[Ajuga]

The way I see it is:

You have to have a boat to grab the resource because you fish with boats and hunt wales on boats.
In the same fashion you can't build a mine and transport it to a hill.

So to me it makes perfect sense to build the boats in the city and send them to a certain location.

 

[Kurtbob]

I have always thought the same thing. Why are workboats expended while workers are not? Clearly there are far more jobs for a worker to do than a work boat. It doesn't make sense to expend a worker every time you need a new improvement but it does make sense that a workboat would be expended. In fact, as you indicated in your post, why not just let workers do the job and get rid of work boats altogether? Under the current system, I would not miss work boats and would welcome workers into my fisheries.

However, looking at it another way, the choice to expend work boats is really due to the limitations of coastal and sea tiles and resources. If there were more options for workboats, they wouldn't need to be expended. I would like to reverse your idea. Instead of ridding ourselves of the workboat we give it more jobs to do (with an increased produciton cost).

Some workboat job ideas:

1. Sea Lanes / Trade routes over coastal and ocean tiles. Basically roads on the water. Sea lanes would connect cities, with harbors, to one another establishing trade routes. You could retain the harbor maintenance cost or reduce the harbor's maintenance and give the Sea Lanes a maintenance cost (perhaps .5 gold/turn). Ships could recieve movement bonuses on Sea Lanes as well.

2. Water defensive improvements. Mine fields could be built to slow down / damge enemy ships. Coastal Fortresses (built in Coastal Tiles) can raise the defense of nearby naval units.

3. A plethora of water improvments that can be built without a bonus/luxury resource present. Fishing fleets to increase food output: Ocean Current / Wave Power facilities to increase production: Maratime fleet to increase gold. Etc Etc.

These ideas would require a lot of work to implement into the game, but they would drastically increase the value of workboats and the value of water tiles.

 

[Camikaze]

This is a particular problem with puppets, where you can't build a work boat. It is indeed quite annoying to have to leave those resources unworked because you can't get a work boat nearby without annexing.

 

[elniallo]

Maybe have a worker instead of embarking, become a work boat, with all the functions thereof. Would lose the worker but that's not such a big deal. I get to a point where I have too many anyway.

 

[Light Cleric]

Totally agree with the OP, it sucks having an otherwise decent start that is going to be slowed down quite a bit by having to pump out multiple, one-shot workboats, not to mention that city-states still don't improve their water luxuries sometimes...

 

[epicivfreak]

...not to mention that city-states still don't improve their water luxuries sometimes...

Well that's a bug in the AI code, not really a problem with the work boats themselves