Nice ideas there! Although I especially want to keep the ability for all units to embark across oceans from the start of the game. There have been some other ideas as well, so maybe we can put our heads together and collaborate...
My idea is for a UU that helps with their wayfinding ability: Outrigger, which replaces the Scout. Can move swiftly across ocean tiles, and has good line of sight when in water tiles...Perhaps it can also move on land, so as not to lose their land-scouting ability? ~ Personally I would much prefer something like this to the Maori warriors we had in Civ V.
Well I gave them the va'a, which is the most common term for a polynesian outrigger. I like the idea that it replaces the scout rather than the galley; forces sea exploration and maximizes ship options.
I would just drop the naval unit production time then and keep the freshwater bonus, which encourages settling on coastlines.
As I mentioned already in the Design your own civ thread, 2K Landen on the 2K Forums suggested the idea of a 5% combat strength bonus to cities that do not share a boarder with other cities. This would encourage players to act more like Polynesia actually was historically, with spreading out into the ocean.
The problem I have with that is how circuitous and unintuitive it is. Not to mention borders can still grow together on islands. I would sooner just outright say that they get bonuses to cities on islands and peninsulas. It's not like you can fit many cities on an island anyway.
He also suggested that at some point the Moai statues could give a +2 culture and +2 gold output when the Moai statues are built adjacent to eachother (but they can only be built on coastal land tiles).
No Moai. I want to keep this as purely Maori and Hawaiian as possible. Both use tikis. Both use va'as (Hawaiian
wa'a, Maori
va'ka). Neither of them built Moai, and Rapa Nui didn't really do tikis or outriggers. And, unlike the Maori and Hawaiians who represent over half of the Polynesian population, the Rapa Nui are extinct, a "ruins" culture.
The Moai don't need to be thrown into a civ that can make both Maori and Hawaii feel like legitimate, specific civs in the same vein as Athens and Sparta. Rapa Nui is perfectly represented by a universal wonder, like the Venetian Arsenal or Kilwa Kisiwani, or, at the moment, Chitchen Itza.
I know that the reason you want them in as an improvement is so that you can make walls of Moai like in V. That's silly and makes Polynesia somewhat of a joke civ. I'm trying to do better than V.
Here's what another member suggested...
I don't like the sound of that, really. Trusting the AI to choose the best adjacency bonuses seems like it will breed a lot of resentment and frustration. A civ shouldn't need a specialized priority tree to consult just for adjacency bonuses; this is too complicated. An easier method of granting inter-island bonuses is to tie it to naval trade routes (which is how the Polynesians
actually benefited from each other's islands).
So, say, naval trade routes between your cities grant adjacency bonuses between all X districts. And then limit the district just to make sure it's not too powerful. I would recommend limiting the bonus to only Holy Sites for my example, for several reasons:
- Faith would thematically fit as a secondary resource for a Polynesian civ, given its strong polytheistic history. The tiki UB is designed to benefit both Hawaii with tourism and Maori with culture, so building more of either naturally suits either leader.
- The design dissonance of Holy Sites fit thematically with my leaders, since Liliuokalani was a devout Christian and Hongi Hika encouraged Christianization.
- Holy Sites are normally encouraged to be built near Mountains/Woods/Natural Wonders; since these are less likely to be found near ocean tiles, they are much less likely to get the additional terrain bonuses, which not only forces a cost-benefit analysis of where to settle but generally limits the number of adjacency bonuses a Holy Site can have.
- Holy Sites tangentially encourage the construction of Campuses and Theater Squares. This can also be justified thematically since both cultures have a strong philosophy of sustainability and scientific research. The Theatre Squares (and Man-Made Wonders) facilitate Hawaii's primary tourism agenda; the Campuses facilitate Maori's secondary military agenda.
You could even set a further limitation saying that Holy Sites do not get adjacency bonuses from their own city, but only from other cities. It could still be possible to get more than 6 adjacency bonuses, but the player would have to work for them and wouldn't get any direct gold, production, or amenity bonuses from it.