Naval Battle PBEM NorthAmerica or similar times

[ChrisiusMaximus]

I tried to post this earlier then the forum went down and could not submit my reply.

I was thinking would it be interesting to mod the game, so that we start in the modern era, this way the naval game is a modern naval game.

Using the seafaring civs but swithching off the free tech benefit to scientific civs, so no one gets a jump start in the new era. Alternatively start in the industrial era, perhaps then we could make good use of Ironclads.

If we switch off Space ship Culture and UN then we have a slug it out situation, disable airlift so one has got to ship in units for any invasion and be able to keep shipping in in order to maintain a beachhead. Airlifting makes invasions way to easy and we want a naval game right.

We could also start the game with several settlers to enable us to get up a few cities quickly, and enable accelerated production to pump out the ships faster.

AI ? Im not fussed either way whether we have them, see how many sign up first.

A large Archipelogo with hundreds of islands and ithmus's would be fun for this, with plenty of naval chokepoints.

My only problem is Im ****e with the editor, so these are just my daydreams

[ChrisiusMaximus]

more rambling, reduce the capacity of transports meaning more needed to convoy troops over seas, is it possible to make transports capture able, same as workers ?

Slave transports, that wont sail as far, or at least need to be securely escorted, to prevent capture.

BTW Paddy is interested, just has not been able to post with poly being down all day

[Paddy]

woo hoo - can I play?

[ChrisiusMaximus]

Maybe we need to have lethal bombard off as well so its a naval game not an air power game ?

[snoopy369]

Sounds intriguing. I'd not penalize Scientific civs, seafarers will have enough advantage as it is I would say tho that we could just do a full-blown scenario (just with conquest as the sole goal), with say 8 starting cities each, and identical mini fleets to start with (like 4 transports, one worker per city, two defenders per city).

I'd suggest either starting in the Industrial Age at the very beginning or in the middle of the industrial age researched up to Combustion or Mass Production. Put science as +100% harder to develop or even more, which makes the game progress slower (particularly if we go towards the end of the ind. age). For that matter, science for a naval game is sort of pointless after that anyways, so definitely penalize science advancement. Perhaps no wonders either, certainly none of the pre-Ind. Age wonders. (Or we could have a wonder Draft! ) Definitely lots of small islands, maybe one big island each for our "home base" and then dozens of 4-12 square islands and a few 30 square peninsular islands.

Airlifting isn't a problem if basically none of the islands are more than one city big unless it's your home island (in which case you're either screwed, or you have plenty of fighters nearby to mess with the airlifts). At the same time it doesn't matter much either, except as a defensive strat. It would probably be good to leave in tho as it would help people who were in worse situations survive a little longer (thus evening out the game a little).

Lethal bombard, well, I'm of the opinion that a naval game requires air power as well (ie carriers), but I'm not a big fan of Civ3 air power, so it's not a big deal either way. I could see leaving lethal bombard in but weaking the strength of the planes a little (like 75% of bombard strength, or giving ships higher bombard resist). That way if you went with the carrier strat (ie americans WWII) you could still do it but you'd need a lot more planes. Heck, playing with just ships is pretty tough - transports are hard to find with ships. However, I'd be tempted to put in lethal bombard for ships as well ... would that imbalance things?

Finally, I'd like to see no AI, I don't like them much. If we have just 3 players I suppose we could go with a faster startup and no alliances locked in anyways ... would be a fun fast game But more players would be grand ... I'd like to wait a couple of days to see if anyone else wants in. I'll start working on a scenario, I think I could write this one up (and will post). It'll be a revealed map, or at least shown to all players ahead of time (and perhaps thereafter enshrouded again with promises on all sides not to keep a saved copy .

[ChrisiusMaximus]

revealed map would be best any way, we are simulating an already advanced world Thus already explored

[Paddy]

starter packs are great fun - like your ideas on the 8 cities.

this has the makings of a good game

[snoopy369]

cool I have a 3 player map in the making, is easy to fix for 4 players (add a fourth big island, or I may just make one anyway for a good battleground)

[ChrisiusMaximus]

Snoopy you are probably right about airlift, its a fair point, but perhaps increase the cost of airports to decrease on usage ?

[ChrisiusMaximus]

Here I am again, is it possible to make an airlift cost gold, say 1 gold for every lift ?

Or even better scaled to distance travelled

[snoopy369]

Certainly I'd think the first is possible. Second is probably a hard coded thing, since there's no such thing as a pay-per-use item in civ3. Only way to do that would be to require somehow a unit to be present to airlift, which I'll look into, but probably not possible. Or require a second building be built that is instantly destroyed, also unlikely but a maybe. Probably are better people than me to ask tho, i'm fairly new at editing (like 2 days )

[Beta]

Spain, please.

[snoopy369]

lol Beta can't resist the naval game I gather

Anyone else taken a civ yet? Feel free to post civs you want. I'll make a 4 player map now, anyone else joins i'll work them in somehow.

[Paddy]

England please

[snoopy369]

So I wanted to initially post a few changes I wanted to make, so people can criticize them or honor them or tell me i'm an idiot that doesn't know how to make a civ game. (Cause I don't. )

Here goes:
1. Added two units, "midshipmen" is a 7-5-1 amphibious attack unit requiring navigation (which we all start with), and "Navy SEAL" is a 20-12-2 invisibile amphibious attack unit with two attacks, requiring Robotics and Rubber and Aluminum. I basically wanted to have a few more amphibious units since we're doing a primarily amphibious game. Might have made the latter one too strong, let me know what you all think about having these at all and about strength. Used "Musketeer" for the first and "Bismarck" for the second, so if anyone's planning on being France I'll change that (if you really want musketeers anyways ).

2. Gave everyone every civ advance on the list down to Combustion. That means Transports, Cruisers, Battleships, etc. Can stop at Navigation (essentially stop at beginning Industrial age) if you think that's better, but I like these kinds of ships I think better. (Besides, takes away from that huge advantage the English have with that frigate thingie of theirs ... don't want Paddy running away with things )

3. Reduced War Weariness to 0 for all gov't types. Unless you think this makes Democracy too strong, I think since we're fighting a primarily conquest-oriented scenario, war weariness is just annoying.

4. Increased "optimal number of cities" from i think 17 or 19 to 25 (decreasing corruption by a little bit). Again, this is made to switch strategy away from maintenance towards war, but isn't a big deal either way (and isn't a big change in this instance).

5. Increased "Tech Rate" to 400, effectively doubling the difficulty of civ advances (as far as I understand that anyways). Making the game presumably last a little longer on the probably more interesting cruiser level of tech before we get into the AEGIS cruisers and nuclear weapons and supertanks.

6. Removed the "Airlift" flag from all units. I think I will (but have not yet) compensate by making the helicopter slightly more useful, and/or making an airliftable transport unit that's really expensive and only holds one unit. That's basically the only way to make a "cost" for airlifting that I can imagine. What do you think about either of these? (And by all units I do mean only the ones we'll actually use -- if you have a persian immortal or something cruddy like that, airlift it all you want. Unless you think I should change ALL of them, but that would take forever. I just did the ones on gunpowder level and up.

7. For the moment left lethal bombardment on, but decreased bombardment strength by air units 33% each (12 to 8 for bomber, etc.) This makes it a little harder to do a massive air campaign, but leaves the option if you want to try it.


The map is the subject of next post.