Sailing the Harmless Seas

[WhitewolfIV]

It would be also nice if you could tie the ship to the city, but I think that would be too hard to code. I think it would have to settle on the great merchant mechanism of the great merchant, where gold is given from the distance from the capital? I think you would also have to add in code so that it could trade at your own cities.

It would be nice if like real trade the other civilization would get a bonus also from trading with you. Say you would get 100 gold and they would get 1/5 that amount too. (It shows that trading isn't a zero sum game) while trading with a Mercantilism civilization would garnish an opposite effect and at a lower rate, if you trade with a civilization running mercantilism, they would gain 100 gold from the trade will you would only get 10 (this shows that they are running high tarrifs), and when they trade with a civilization they would gain 10 the gold and the other civilization would gain 100 gold. (To show that the other civilization is punishing the Mercantilism civiliation for running high tarrifs) Thus completeing the system as you would really not want to trade to a foreign civilization. I would give it a very small bonus for trading with your own city, but not much. (I think this sums up Mercantilism well, try wiki it. Yes, yes this is the layman's dictionary but it does give a quick and dirty answer)

To avoid micro management I would also make free trade increase the base amount for the trade by a percentage (so both you and the other civ get more gold) while consumption would give you more gold when you trade (as you enjoy the goods more)

Another thing that could increase more sea vessels is a village/lair equivalent on the seas with Marnok's explorable lair system. Then you could have more fun exploring sunken ships, underground caverns, islands, fishing grounds, and trading post (thus if you really hate everyone, you could just trade at a trade post for a little bigger bonus then trading at your civ's cities) I believe there has to be some resource on the sea that would make more competition. Like parking a boat over some other resource will net you (an automatic) 1 gold a turn but have a 5% chance per turn that it will be destroyed. Ocean tiles have a 0.1% turn of spawning it per turn (a renewable resource!). You woud have to make sure that it has scares placement compaired to other things (like monster lairs) but worth searching for and easy to harvest (No special ships!).

 

[loocas]

@WhitewolfIV
I want to see some sea-trade changes to the civics too. I like the idea of trade ships, and the suggestions to make them as much micro-management-free as possible are good.

You mentioned sunken ships, and at the very least a graveyard-style sunken ship improvement should be set up, granting gold, spawning drown, or whatever.

Another gripe I have about the harmless seas are the number of fishing boats I see doing the naval exploration in so many games. I don't think fishing boats should survive very long outside one's borders.

 

[Bad Player]

I really like that idea, but I suspect it would be hard to implement well, would add a lot of clutter (and possibly micromanagement), and be awfully hard on a lot of peoples' cpus. If it could be made to work, I would love it.

re: WhiteWolfIV's idea of spawning merchant ships every x turns and my idea of de-abstracting sea trade routes:

Could the set rally point function be used to make automatically created trade vessels continuously travel from one city to another and when they arrive then they get exchanged for gold? Surely this wouldn't be too hard to code...

 

[Marnok]

Trade Routes:
Civ4 doesn't seem consistant to me in how it treats some things as abstract and some as concrete. Trade is one - we have diplomatic trade, where resources are traded, but this is a perfect trade (can't be blockaded, doesn't suffer loss, other civ gets all of the material they need but never a drop more to trade on). And we have "trade routes" which are city bonuses, independant of anything and if you didn't look, you wouldn't know they were there.

To work better we would need proper Trade Routes all the time - like lines drawn from point to point across the map. This is Iron going from Xville to Ytown, this is meat from Aopolis to Tor B. These lines could then be interrupted by an enemy, and redrawn via a different route. There could be loss of materials or extra cost based on how long the route is. The route could be Taxed if it passes through another player's land, or captured by an enemy to give them the resource.

But the Civ4 system doesn't really encourage that sort of thing, it would take a lot of work. I mention it because it was on my "this isn't helping my immersion in the game" list, but I realised modding it would mean modding almost everything else. Perhaps if I just mention it, someone will come up with something.

Imagine, I agree to trade Iron to an ally, first I have to move a trade ship from one of my iron-rich cities to a rival city, then trade automatically follows the same route unless pirated or blockaded.

I like the idea of moving trade ships (or caravans?) around for profit. These could establish a trade route... ships could sail repeatedly from source to destination, but we would want longer routes to be worth more money, and I was thinking they ought to be worth less the longer the route (costs more to get there), so it would be a fine balancing act to get right.

Water Lairs:
Yeah that Marnok guy ought to do those.
(Actually I had pencilled in a while back that sunken ships would be good, I'll try out a few ideas and see what results I get)

Edit:

I realise I am rambling quite a lot today

 

[Immaculate]

They had that (little ships moving on the water- also caravans moving on roads) on the campaign map in Rome Total War... the more ships/caravans, the more trade you were doing. You could get a feeling for how much trade income you were making by looking at how many ships/caravans were involved.

 

[Bad Player]

I like the idea of moving trade ships (or caravans?) around for profit. These could establish a trade route... ships could sail repeatedly from source to destination, but we would want longer routes to be worth more money, and I was thinking they ought to be worth less the longer the route (costs more to get there), so it would be a fine balancing act to get right.

If I get my pirate campaign running I would like to try having all coastal cities auto-build a trade vessel every turn which automatically sets a rally point for a random, valid, coastal city and heads for it. When it arrives it is destroyed and converted into 1 per tile distance (i.e. length of rally point route).

 

[WhitewolfIV]

This thread had a lot of good ideas. I think something needs to be done to sea so that instead of it being just a barrier between contenants it would lead to greater exploration and such.