Treat ship as aeroplanes

[KaiserIsak]

Let me start with an example:
Vasco Da Game anchored up in Calicut in 1498, and he was the first european to sail from europe to India.

In civ, this is completly messed up because you can travel from europe to asia by ship with tiremes, because there is coast all the way around.
This is one thing that have always been irritating me, not only can you travel to asia so early, you may also actually controll the ship from your capital (where you, the emporor sits) when it is on the completly other side of the globe. This is ok in modern ages, but not before, so my suggestion is that ship, like aeroplanes, have to go back to one of your cities after x turns outside. This is completly logical, since the ship needs fresh water and so on, and it makes the game much more realistic since ship can not travel around the globe as they do now.
The best would be to implement the system that you have in Europa Universalis, where the ship gets "attrition" after a while, and that "attrition" gradually raises, and makes the chance bigger for it to sink. Like this, you could travel all around the world with a tireme in theory (and with loading), but the chance of it sinking would be so high that it would not be possible in practice.
You could now also remove the difference between ocean, sea and coast (which is really not so logical, because the coast is often more dangerous to sail on then the sea/ocean).
So, let us say that every tireme had a start "attrition" of for example 5%. Then this % would improve wih 1% every turn the ship would be out of harbour, but go back to 5% again if it entered a harbour.
A caravel could for example start with 4%, and only gain 3/4% for each turn and so on.
With this system your ships may always sink (which is realistic), and there will be no stupid "send them around the world" missions with early ships.

To compensate, all ships would have to be cheaper to build, because they would sink more often. But this would only be fun, since you could see early mass navies more often.

In Europa Universalis, your ship can not sink in your own national waters, which is, ofcourse, not realistic, but good, because you may then be able to patrol your own coast without thinking about your ships sinking. I would suggest that this should be implemented as well.

What do you think?

[MJW]

To late for Play the world. Nice stuff for civ4 though.

[Zero]

a rather nice idea, but remember, this doesnt just apply to ships... it applies to all units. imagine placing a unit on 16x16 tundra terrain which happend to be surrounded by enemy territory... how does the unit survive? You are asking a logistics questions and many civ fans have been asking for logistics feature to add realism. The question is upto wat point should we value realism when we will have to tediously manage little things like logistics and stuff.. apparently firaxis decided that having no logistics would be the best way to go and will win majority's approval (or maybe it was due to time). Next time when you play with trieme, just imagine that they have to stay close to coast so that they can get have access to supplies... thats the best you can do i guess for now

[KaiserIsak]

I agree that it applies for land units as well, but i wanted to start easy (=

But i really can not imagine that it can be difficult to implement that ships have to be back in harbour every 5th turn for example (or they sink). Its already there with the planes, why not with the ships?

By the way i never travel far with my triemes anyway, but the ai does (aaaaargh)

Hope they implement something like it in civ4 then

[Palaiologos]

Yes, logistics should somehow be implemented in the game. Ships even of the Modern era must enter harbour sometime. Troops deep into enemy territory will one day run out of ammo and fuel. In civ2 units were supported by cities so taking the city would sever the supply line and force the unit to surrender.

[JtheJackal]

If they did this we'd have to be able to be able to "refuel" ships at any friendy harbour.

[Palaiologos]

Yes, as German warships and Submarines refueled in Argentinian and Uruguan cities, in WW2, and in Greece and Chile in WW1.

[KaiserIsak]

That is completly right. A new diplomatic option should then be "open harbour" for each others.

[Palaiologos]

In civ2, units were able to repair at allied cities.
Something else civ3 left out.

Yes, diplomacy should allow that.

[Caliban]

Originally posted by Palaiologos
In civ2, units were able to repair at allied cities.

I also miss that! But all other suggestions about unit support will increase micromanagement - not everybody will like it...

[Kull]

Lot's of good ideas here! Naval travel and warfare has to be the most poorly implemented aspect of Civ3. But a few relatively simple changes could fix that:

1) Travel Damage: The idea of damage slowly building up should be simple to implement since that's EXACTLY what happened to helicopters in Civ2. In this case, ships at sea should slowly incur damage that can only be fixed by sitting in a friendly port OR gaining access to a foreign one. KaiserIsak's idea of a new type of Diplomatic agreement is wonderful. I'd extend it further so it functions as the naval version of "Right of Passage". They should actually be two different agreements, with perhaps the AI more inclined to grant the Naval version. The "Foreign Port" benefit for your ships should also apply only to cities with harbors (likewise your home cities shouldn't be able to repair ships without having a harbor). Rather than entering the foreign harbor, your ships would sit adjacent to it for "X" number of turns. In modern times, damage shouldn't be seen as actual ship destruction (as it truly was in earlier eras) but rather the need for fuel, munitions, and other supplies.

2) Naval Combat: As many others have mentioned, the idea of ships charging into one another, winner-take-all, is totally ridiculous outside the trireme era. Much better would be a "Bombardment-only" attack capability for all non-triremes. Smaller and older era ships should have a harder time scoring hits on larger or newer ones. Further, bombardemnt strength should diminish as damage is incurred. Thus two red-lined ships would rarely sink each other, but a healthy destroyer would have a good chance against a sinking battleship. This would be very realistic since Naval Combat winners are usually those who get the most damaging hits in first. Another interesting possibility would be to allow the capture of certain naval vessels. Up to modern times, the victor often captured the ships of the loser. This could be reflected with a "probability roll" at the end of most naval combat. If successful, the defeated enemy ship (red-lined) now belongs to you! This wouldn't be available for air-based victory, land-based victory, submarine-based victory, or modern-naval victory (although you could make a case for modern ships capturing enemy transports - healthy - without firing a shot)

3) Travel distance: The change from sail-based to powered warships is TOTALLY screwed up when it comes to travel distances. If sailing ships could move 4 spaces, modern ships should jump to 3 or 4 TIMES that! It should not take TEN YEARS to move a modern invasion fleet across the ocean! Most people "solve" the troop transport problem by "jumping" them across from one ship to the next, but this requires timeconsuming micromanagement and is totally unrealistic. Of course, this could be implemented by the average player (just change your internal game settings), but I'd go further and hard-code a ban on transport jumping.

4) Carriers: These would dramatically increase in importance (and reduce micromanagement) if they came with the following "built-in" recon abilities:
1) Carrier (Empty) = 1 tile (same as normal ships)
2) Carrier w/prop planes = 2 tiles (Aegis vision)
3) Carrier w/jets = 3 tiles (greater range)
4) Carrier w/stealth = 4 tiles (AWACS era)
Recon beyond these distances would still require the dedicated use of a plane, but now it's not as important.

5) Micromanagement: As Calc II correctly points out, anything that leads to additional micromanagement is inherently a bad thing. Once you leave the "exploration era" and enter the period in which your fleets are just patrolling certain areas, the need to rotate ships in and out of port would be infuriating. The solution would be to incorporate "way points" and set up automated patrols. Set it up once and then forget it. This would also work for airplanes on "recon patrol" over enemy terrtory or off your coast. Put 'em on recon, give them one or more way points and then forget about it.

6) Privateers: Could there be a more useless unit? Well here's a way to change that AND make the British UU a lot more valuable. Make the Privateer a "submarine", give it Bombardment capability, and provide the "Man-O-War" with "can-see-subs" ability. This suddenly makes the privateer a LOT more useful (especially if they could capture other ships as suggested above) and it makes the British UU MUCH more valuable since they are now the one civ best able to deal with pirates (and makes "British Privateers" more successful than others - also historical). Most of this could be implemented without help from Firaxis, but it would work better if Soren made the AI more likely to build Privateers (it could even be as simple as an "era-based" rule that tells the AI to maintain a 1-1 ratio of Frigates to Privateers until the discovery of Industrialism (on a civ-by-civ basis). As this suggests, the entire "Age of Sail" is ridiculously short, but that's another story!

[Zero]

it all boils down to realism VS fantasy. Super real game will not necessarily be fun. After all would you play a FPS game that is so dedicated to reality that one lucky shot will likely kill you due to blood loss and you must play a game with pain suit on that will simulate pain? lol

some ppl will find logistic very hard to implement while being fun. Like me.

But I loved the civ I, II method of unit support, it does add a little bit to logistics. Capturing a city and losing a unit thats in another city just because it was homed by that city was annoying tho. But I liked how I can siege city tiles and starve the units off as the pop in city fell. Also city support system still doesnt solve how a unit can survive in a middle of desert surrounded completely by enemy units. So scratch the whole logistic idea.. its too complicated.

[Zero]

I like naval bombarding idea. Bombard unit should be able to kill tho. Even land units. I understand that firaxis wanted to emphasize only bombs dont win wars, but at least have them 50% less chance to do dmage when unit is red.

[KaiserIsak]

It could be made optional if you want your ship to return home or not.

With this, the portuguese would have to build fortresses along the coast of africa, just like they did, if they want to go to india.

Another good idea from europa universalis is that exploring takes more time then simply travelling. This would make it a little bit harder to explore, which is good (i guess we all know about the hole world by 200ad).

So Portugal would have to send out Barthelome Diaz first to explore around the tip of africa, then they would send out vasco da gama, who would get much quicker around the tip of africa (because it is already explored by diaz) and could then use his spare turns to exploe up to the friendly port of Mombassa.

[ruby_maser]

galleys

I'm not so sure that the arguement about galleys is correct anyway. Perhaps navigation near the shore was a solution to long trips because it allowed the ship's crew (and we are probably not talking about a bunch of tea-sipping sissies for that time period... think of the Vikings) to venture inland, find fresh water, hunt game, set up camp, restock supplies, etc. On top of the fact that the Vikings were locally feared, they managed to find the New World long before Columbus did and they weren't navigating the open ocean in any well-financed state-backed armadas. I accept that for modern ships, there could be some sort of limit to their ability to remain on the ocean but this is more due to refueling needs, but all civs in the game are immune to these things anyway and as long as that continues, why deal with super-realism. I especially only build as many ships as I need at a given time. Even if you made them cheaper you would have to build twice as many just to deal with the micromanagement issues of getting them home safely.