A Ship that Refuels?

[:) Smiley]

You upped the ship's movement points? Dude, don't you know how fearsome a battleship that can attack 7 times is already?

[Case]

Do you have a better idea to suggest?

If you get the ratio of battleship to land unit attack strenghts correct, then high movement rates don't translate into multiple attacks (have a look at the stats in Exile's Imperialism).

Furthermore, if you're a bit creative, then you can have land and naval units operating in what are effectively different worlds, using quite different stats that neatly counteract each another (This is done brilliantly in John Ellis's 'Bonaparte 2'). The sub flag is highly useful in this regards.

[N35t0r]

Originally posted by OzzyKP I was just hoping there'd be some way to mix the plane attributes with the ship ones so we could have a bomber type craft that traveled only in the water. I don't want to affect the rest of the game.

Though I guess we could just make them planes and tell players not to move them over land. Rely on the honor system.. but thats pretty lame..

If what you're looking for is a 'torpedo bomber', ie a plane that can only attack sea units, IIRC if you give an air unit the sub flag, it will only be able to attack sea units. I use this in my personal modpack for a torpedo bomber, cheaper than regular bombers but slightly stronger, yet unable to attack land targets. The AI is dumb with them, though.

[OzzyKP]

Hmm, it still moves over land though, right?

That wouldn't work, because normal ships can still bombard coasts, so I wouldn't want to loose that in the game.

[Thoddy]

Originally posted by N35t0r



If what you're looking for is a 'torpedo bomber', ie a plane that can only attack sea units, IIRC if you give an air unit the sub flag, it will only be able to attack sea units. I use this in my personal modpack for a torpedo bomber, cheaper than regular bombers but slightly stronger, yet unable to attack land targets. The AI is dumb with them, though.

use the rocket flag, the AI will use this weapon in a significant better way against ships, because of "Warping" .

[Elok]

Originally posted by Thoddy
use the rocket flag, the AI will use this weapon in a significant better way against ships, because of "Warping" .

Yeah, but then doesn't your unit only get to attack once?

Then again, how about a bunch of submarines with zero attack power, coupled with cheap "shell" units? Your ships won't have to refuel, but they will have to reload regularly or they lose pretty much all of their usefulness...that's something, isn't it?

[kobayashi]

Originally posted by Elok

Then again, how about a bunch of submarines with zero attack power, coupled with cheap "shell" units? Your ships won't have to refuel, but they will have to reload regularly or they lose pretty much all of their usefulness...that's something, isn't it?

That sounds familiar. Now where have I seen that before?

[Elok]

I'm not saying it's new, just that it might produce the desired results or something like them.

[OzzyKP]

Eh.. that doesn't do much for me.

And I'm not asking for a scenario, but for a multiplayer Diplogame. So there is no AI, rather seven humans.

Its not looking like its possible though...

[Sore Loser]

While not being fancy and certainly not practical, there is the option of making it a self-imposed rule. Manually keeping track of each unit's progress would be cumbersome, maybe the shell units above could be replaced with supply/fuel units; one must be disbanded every turn or the ship sinks. Different fuel/supply units could then be developed.

[Sore Loser]

Elaborating on the above, each ship can carry a lot more units, but must disband one "Supply" unit each turn. This way, exploration will be more difficult and will likely require outposts for resupplying. Additionally, the more units you have onboard, the shorter the distance you can sail before resupplying. Supplies could cost zero production points, making outposts more useful.

This system could be used for units as well. The main problem is that one supply unit (taking at least one whole turn of production to complete) is *very* expensive for mainintaining just a single unit for one turn. And one unit every second or third turn is just messy. On the other hand, this creates more emphasis on different city types, making outposts more valuable.

[Sore Loser]

I've done some testing with the supply unit concept, and it works really well. I've set the size of rows in the shield box to 4 to lower the cost of supplies. At the same time, ships can move farther to make sure they're still useful. Triremes can move 6 squares, meaning that they can explore three squares in any direction without needing supplies. If a ship starts a turn outside of a friendly port (own city, or if you docked at an ally's city last turn), you must disband a unit of supplies. If you cannot, you must disband the ship and all units it carries. I've increased the cargo hold of triremes to 8. Units take 2 spots, supplies take one.

It doesn't work well for units at all, it would just be cumbersome. But I don't think it's too much of a hassle for ships.