Why do Navies suck so badly in Civ?

[Agathon]

Originally posted by lajzar
ok, I've been persuaded of teh virtues of having a separate dreadnought class. Id write more, but a bycicle accident has pit my right thiumb out of action.

It's basically just the battleship, although I wouldn't complain if they were upgradeable. After all WWI Dreadnoughts appeared in WWII after substantial refits.

And "Dreadnought" is such a cool word.

[lajzar]

That strikes me as being more of an issue of ships in general being to little too late. It doesnt seem to be a problem specifically with teh age of steam.

[Agathon]

But the ironclad in Civ3 is basically USS Monitor, a ship that was useless in the open ocean.

Later ironclads were much more like modern battleships with the exception of being slower, due to reciprocating engines and having smaller guns at varying calibres. They could not engage in long range gunner duels, due to lack of effective fire control.

Here's a piccy.

[Agathon]

Notice the monitor-like gun turrets, as opposed to the later turret design of Dreadnoughts like HMS Queen Mary.

[lajzar]

ok, lets have:

Ancient
- Trireme
- Sailboat (transport)

Sailboat is the generic non-combat slow ship with cargo capacity. Civ3's curragh, except with a culture-neutral name. I'd add dugouts and barges, but that would require meaningful river transport for ships. Sailboats can upgrade to caravels.

Dark Age to Medieval:
- Caravel
- Byzantine Fire trireme
- Viking Longboat

Trireme can be upgraded to longboat or fire trireme. No civ should ever have both of these upgrade options available.

Late Age of sail:
- Man o War
- Frigate
- Privateer
- Galleon (transport)
- Korean kobukson
- Chinese Baochuan

Men o War and Galleons are essentially the same hull, carrying either lots of guns or lots of cargo space. It should be possible to upgrade (ie refit) either ship to the other class. The privateer has no nation markings. It can be upgraded to a frigate (which is slightly more heavily armed), and vice versa. The age of sail ships should be available earlier than they are currently. On the civ3 tech tree, I'd place the earliest ones at Invention, and maybe have an extra tech or two.

Age of Steam
- Dreadnought
- Ironclad
- Monitor
- Clipper (transport)

Monitors in this model are slightly heavier and slower ironclads that are limited to the coast. Players should be forced to choose Ironclads or monitors as part of a boolean tech tree. Dreadnoughts can be upgraded to battleships.

Edited to add: Monitors, ironclads, and dreadnoughts should all have a fuel limit (perhaps 6 turns), in the way civ 2 air units had. This reflects their short legs due to their fuelling requirements. They do NOT make sail ships obsolete.

Early Modern:
- Battleship
- Destroyer
- Transport (transport)
- U-Boat
- Carrier

Note that I dropped the cruiser class. While it has a role in a fully detailed naval model, it doesn't really fit in here. At each age, I have tried to include a light/fast and a heavy/slow combat unit, plus others where they have an interesting strategic twist.

Late Modern:
- Aegis Cruiser
- Missile Frigate
- Submarine
- Heavy Carrier

Any obvious classes I missed? Note that except where I wrote it in, ships cannot be upgraded to other classes. Not having upgrades should also help ensure that sailships remain in use for longer. It never made sense to me that a trireme could eventually turn into a modern transport.

[The_Aussie_Lurker]

OK, I know I've said this a hundred times but, there IS a way of making the age of sail longer-within the confines of Civ3!!
Firstly, you WILL need to adjust ALL of the movement points for naval vessels UPWARDS (should be done anyway-in MY opinion )! Next, increase sea Move Costs to 2MP, and Oceans to 3MP (or even 4, if you're REALLY cruel)!

Step two is to give vessels from the age of sail an 'Ignore Movement Cost' flag for Sea and possibly even ocean (though you might want to restrict this latter flag to Late Middle Ages vessels). OTOH, you give Ironclads the 'IMC' flag for Sea ONLY!!! What this now means is that ironclads are almost USELESS for projecting naval power beyond the land mass you built them on! They remain limited to 'coastal surveillance', defence and harrassing your near neighbours! Frigates and Ships of the Line remain the lords of the Oceans, then, until the advent of the 'DREADNOUGHT', a vessel which is both STRONGER than the frigate and S of the L, and is also able to ignore MC of Oceans. It would become available sometime in the mid to late industrial age! 'Modern' naval vessels, such as cruisers and battleships, would have the added advantage of a 'treats all terrain as roads' flag-making them an order of magnitude faster than the lumbering dreadnought class!!
So, what do you reckon, am I one to something or what?

Yours,
The_Aussie_Lurker.

[lajzar]

Sounds like some good ideas. You might want to try posting them on the civ 3 forums. I don't play civ 3 enough to matter, as I feel the default game is broken in too many ways, and I am not a talented civ 3 modder.

[Agathon]

Originally posted by lajzar
ok, lets have:

Ancient
- Trireme
- Sailboat (transport)

Sailboat is the generic non-combat slow ship with cargo capacity. Civ3's curragh, except with a culture-neutral name. I'd add dugouts and barges, but that would require meaningful river transport for ships. Sailboats can upgrade to caravels.

I reckon that the trireme should be the new Greek UU. My reasoning being that colonization and seafaring were characteristic of the greatest age of Greece. I think the current game downplays that, when it is one of the reasons why their culture ended up being so dominant.

What's wrong with having a shabby looking Galley for the other scum.

Dark Age to Medieval:
- Caravel
- Byzantine Fire trireme
- Viking Longboat

Trireme can be upgraded to longboat or fire trireme. No civ should ever have both of these upgrade options available.

Yep/

Late Age of sail:
- Man o War
- Frigate
- Privateer
- Galleon (transport)
- Korean kobukson
- Chinese Baochuan

Men o War and Galleons are essentially the same hull, carrying either lots of guns or lots of cargo space. It should be possible to upgrade (ie refit) either ship to the other class. The privateer has no nation markings. It can be upgraded to a frigate (which is slightly more heavily armed), and vice versa. The age of sail ships should be available earlier than they are currently. On the civ3 tech tree, I'd place the earliest ones at Invention, and maybe have an extra tech or two.

Agreed, although there needs to be a special English Ship of the line which is much better than the rest.

Age of Steam
- Dreadnought
- Ironclad
- Monitor
- Clipper (transport)

Monitors in this model are slightly heavier and slower ironclads that are limited to the coast. Players should be forced to choose Ironclads or monitors as part of a boolean tech tree. Dreadnoughts can be upgraded to battleships.

I don't see why, ironclads like the monitor should be dumped IMHO. I think that seagoing ironclads should replace them, but be much slower and less powerful than dreadnoughts.

Early Modern:
- Battleship
- Destroyer
- Transport (transport)
- U-Boat
- Carrier

Note that I dropped the cruiser class. While it has a role in a fully detailed naval model, it doesn't really fit in here. At each age, I have tried to include a light/fast and a heavy/slow combat unit, plus others where they have an interesting strategic twist.

I favour making the destroyer a sole sub killer with limited range unless stacked with other units. I like cruisers, I think they should be kept for long range scouting, much as the Germans did in WWII.

Late Modern:
- Aegis Cruiser
- Missile Frigate
- Submarine
- Heavy Carrier

Any obvious classes I missed? Note that except where I wrote it in, ships cannot be upgraded to other classes. Not having upgrades should also help ensure that sailships remain in use for longer. It never made sense to me that a trireme could eventually turn into a modern transport.

Isn't the AEGIS Cruiser a missile frigate? Or am I wrong?

Good ideas anyway.

[Agathon]

Originally posted by lajzar
Sounds like some good ideas. You might want to try posting them on the civ 3 forums. I don't play civ 3 enough to matter, as I feel the default game is broken in too many ways, and I am not a talented civ 3 modder.

I might try this sort of thing and see if I can get it to work.

[okblacke]

I'm not really into the naval thing; I really don't know if I'd end up loving or hating more powerful navies in CivI generally like the boosts done in C3C, though.

So, let me ask this:

Isn't the real problem with representing "The Age of Sail" in Civ that the Age was really very short, and pre-industrial?

I mean, it's less than 200 years at a time when turns are going by at about 5 years per turn, right? (Or is it 4?)

So that's 40-50 turns, assuming everyone enters at the same time. Shave off a few turns if the Ironclads start coming off the line by the time your spiffy caravels are rolling into enemy harbors.

If navies were better, in general, that might be a good thing. (Like I said, I don't know how I'd actually feel about it in practice.) But isn't the larger problem that of Civ's "telescoping" effect?

I mean, if you think it's hard trying to relive Drake's high seas privateering in an epic game, try staging the Trojan War. (Just try getting Odysseus back in 20 years.)

Is it asking to much of the epic game? I guess we won't know unless someone comes up with a good mod.

Interesting topic, though.

[ok]

[lajzar]

Yes, all these navy ideas are useless without something for the navies to actually shoot at. We need a trade model that encourages shipping. CTP has the best trade model for this purpose of those that I have seen.

Alternate idea: Each special resource generates a caravan unit every N turns. Get a caravan back to your capital, and you earn 100 gold.

Certain city improvements that require a special resource could generate additional caravans. Forex, a cigar factory might require the tobacco special resource in the city radius to build, and generates an additional caravan every N turns.

Caravans sufer extreme movement restrictions. They gain no special movement bonus for roads (highways give a movement bonus as if they were roads), however, they cannot travel away from road tiles at all. In addition, they cannot use airports or other instant movement devices. These rules should encourage road building for trade, as well as making transport ships have a viable part in the game economy. Unfortunately, someone is going to scream MM.

[AroSch]

Originally posted by okblacke
So, let me ask this:

Isn't the real problem with representing "The Age of Sail" in Civ that the Age was really very short, and pre-industrial?

I mean, it's less than 200 years at a time when turns are going by at about 5 years per turn, right? (Or is it 4?)

Well, I personaly would love a longer "Age of Sail". Or any other solution, wich makes the "Age of Sail" more important. If ou think the AoS has to be 200 years, it's okay.
But that isn't the point. I think, naval strategies have to be improved in general. Navys should have more impact to the Game, not being simply units with or without attack/transport ability. Blocking harbors, "pillaging" trade routes or fighting in fleets should be in a Civgame too. In history ther were lots of sea battles with deep impact on mankind (Salamis, Mylae, Lepanto, Trafalgar or the Armada Battle etc.) so this shoul be reflected in Civ too. Just my opinion.

[okblacke]

Originally posted by AroSch
In history ther were lots of sea battles with deep impact on mankind (Salamis, Mylae, Lepanto, Trafalgar or the Armada Battle etc.) so this shoul be reflected in Civ too. Just my opinion.

And not one I'm inclined to disagree with. BUT.

(There's always a but. And it's usually a big one.)

Civ is a huge game. There are many things it represents poorly for the sake of gameplay.

Let's say we were to introduce GalCiv's mini-freighter into Civ 3, as so many people have suggested. It works fine for GalCiv where trade is simply money, and every turn, beginning or end-game is one month. What would it do to Civ?

First of all, it would drastically complicate the two most important impacts of trade in Civ: resource effects and diplomacy.

My guess is that the diplomacy would end up being too complicated to implement, period. Civ right now assumes the worst of the player (rightly) and broken trades count against the player, no matter what the context. Trades would be a lot easier to break and manipulate if they were physically represented.

The luxury/strategy resource issue, on the other hand, becomes mind-bogglingly complex. Right now, as long as the trade route exists, you get the resource in question, instantaneously.

Introduce a caravan/freighter unit, and you now have to answer all these questions, like:

1. How much is in the freighter? If it's one unit, enough to supply the entire civ then:

2. How long does it supply the civ?

3. If a caravan is destroyed or delayed, at what point is the treaty cosnidered broken. (I guess that's back to diplomacy.)

4. How many of these caravans can the civilization produce? And how quickly?

5. What happens to caravans in transit if the trade is broken?

A lot of people have been saying (rightly, I think) that naval power is largely an issue of trade. But, in reality, trade is typically a constant back-and-forth flow that maybe doesn't really scale well to the higher level that Civ operates on. From what the list above, it seems to me that trade units (naval or otherwise) would break Civ's trade model completely.

So far, I think the best idea I've heard for making navies more powerful is simply the idea that you can march your troops into the water from a harbor by commandeering private vessels. I can really see that streamlining things.

[ok]