Will there be boats in Fallen Enchantress?

Not only boats, but naval vessels, sea monsters, flying mounts and flying monsters. Otherwise, we'll just end up with another spreadsheet game for a small number of hardcore guys. FE really needs to have a wow factor as there are couple of fantasy strategy games coming out next year that will have those things.

I don't think we're getting boats. 

Hopefully we'll get them later.

Ya I don't think we will get boats on release. The devs have briefly talked about them though. They will probably be added in a content patch after the post release craziness dies down. We will probably get stuff like water monsters and resources as well but at this point I doubt even the devs know.

well there is a boat in E:WOM so i think there will be some boats in FE however  they probably wont be ment for naval battles, mostly for transporting troops and fishing 

@Gaston_DAoust    what new fantasy strategy games do you mean?

ElanaAhova Warlock:Master of the Arcane is being produced by Paradox Interactive. It is a turn based fantasy strategy game that seems to be a cross between EWom and Master of Magic and is set in the established Majesty universe. The other is an indie game that I lost track of. Someone else posted information on this forum about these two games a while back. I'll try to track down the indie game for you.

Sorry, double post!

Got it! Battle for Wesnoth (Manifesto Games). This one has been out for a while apparently.

There is also Masters of a Broken World coming out as well.

I will be disappointed if we don't get get even a rudimentary way to travel across oceans in FE. That's kinda a big blank spot in the world. See that ocean or sea, no you can't cross it or do anything with it. People in Elemental melt when they touch water so no fishing or navigation or continents. It would be weird if they waited for the third expansion to add it. Not really what I would hope to see in a few years.... boats.

I'd love to see boats and naval action but I'd rather see them perfect the land side of things first.

Boats seem difficult in TBS.  The AI never seems to know what to do with them.  I would love boats, naval battles, sea related magic and fun exploration shit, also lets you have continents and islands, instead of just one landmass.  Doubt the AI can figure out using terraforming magic any easier than boats.  

I'm sure that it's difficult, but it's possible in principle. Tholal's More Naval AI for FfH does a pretty good job with it without adding (too) much to the base AI.

They did mention they were planning to switch to a Civ style portage sytem instead of dedicated transports, which would make programming the AI a little easier. Also if you actually think about it it's not that naval AI's are harder to program(why would they be?) it's just that most games cope out of adding in a fully functional AI for navies on top of one for land troops. Civ5  didn't do either...

It also depends on what kind of system you use. If you use a system like that of HoMM where there are no dedicated combat ships just transports then it's pretty easy. The HoMM system kinda fits FE because they are both centered around hereos, exploring, and quests. You can also always add dedicated navy combat ships later as adding them wouldn't actually require removing transports or anything.

A CivV style portage system and a HoMM style transport sytem would require very little AI work I would think, but you would still get a lot of content and depth. Although I would love dedicated and designable ships... the amount of work to implement them and their AI would be staggering. Maybe in the third expansion.

Well, I mean its hard for the AI to load up ships with troops and then move them to a different continent.  

I hated how troops could just become boats when they touched a beach. I hated it because it just broke the sense of immersion. And I loved it for how great of a solution it was to annoying gameplay elements like loading transports and such.

I think the system in shogun2 is one of the best, and I would suggest that with some modifications.

My ideal naval set-up is that there are pre-determined troop transport routes across the sea. These can be upgraded to move units faster and so on. But most importantly, these routes all have a "victory point" (or several). Whoever controls that victory point can transport units safely across the water. So you have an easy way to move units without any special requirements, but you still have naval warfare as an important piece of the puzzle. Capturing the route would either kill all units being transported, or send them back to where they came. Whoever is sending units across the route maintains full control of the unit, ie it can still cast spells, and the unit can be ordered to turn around and go back home.

The pros:
-units require no management to transport across water
-focus points for naval warfare from the victory locations (naval warfare can take place anywhere, but it becomes focused at the victory locations as they are the most important)
-focus points for ground warfare, from where the routes land

The cons:
-pre-determined routes are never going to be perfect
-perhaps easy to exploit the AI, capturing and re-capturing the route as you see fit

I actually like this a lot, too. Just to clarify, victory points are held with actual naval units?

Yes, the sea victory locations are held by naval units capable of warfare. But there are also de facto chokepoints at the landings, which are not defended by the naval units. Sending an army over a route you control, towards a landing the enemy controls, would trigger a tactical battle at the landing.

I am going to ask this again because everyone seems to know something I don't about boats, why can't boats be constructed in one season by an entire army of soldiers? Makeshift boats are very simple to construct for short range transport. And we have magic. What are you immersing yourself in HF?

A living world where mounted knights and mammoths and tanks can't build makeshift flotillas out of nothing to travel across a raging sea.

Edit: If you want to cross a river, that's fine. You can probably build a very small bridge if necessary, or just wade through it. But you cannot transport armed men across the open sea without real boats. You have no tar. You have no supplies. You have no seamen.

Yeah but the Civ portage system I mentioned is where armies can just become transports when they touch water instead of requiring a independent transport. You don't need to load transports, units can transition between land and water automatically. I believe Derek mentioned this system as a possible route in another thread.

Ya the whole magic appearing boats thing is problematic, but they are are ways around that. One way to make that system more realistic is to require the player have a city with a harbor before they can portage. You could also tie it to having the harbor on the specific body of water you are trying to cross but that may be hard to implement.

I like your system Heavenfall and it seems very tactical but it doesn't seem organic enough for random maps. Unless I am misunderstanding something it would also prevent you from exploring the water like you can the land. You wouldn't be able to visit oceanic notable locations or perhaps fight water monsters, if such things get added. I also really would like to see maritime trading, with cool little merchant ships traveling between cities over maritime trade-routes. That's just my secret little wish though.

All the naval units would be able to explore, and you could even set up your own naval trade routes. What it avoids is having to load up any transports with land-based units. Other than that, the seas are still open. I just want a system where I can select a land unit and click once to move two or three islands away instead of having to click 40 times and move various transports and so on and so forth.

True, the routes would be difficult to place organically (as I said, they'd never be perfect). Another issue is that there are terraforming spells in E:wom that change the lands. Would the routes change too?

I liked the Civ 5 transport model.  With some modification it could work in Elemental, but only if the AI can handle it.

You would think it would be easy on the AI anyway. They can just calculate one direct path just like over land, except when they get to the shore they pop in and out of boat mode. It's pretty much the same thing as land travel from the AI point of view I would guess.

Maybe there should be a combination of lore and game mechanics to solve this. Allow any army to boatify, losing one season of movement. 

From this point there is a wide range of gameplay mechanics and lore that can be used (not that any devs are reading this silly conversation):

1. There is a merchant marine guild that provides transport of goods and troops for all of the realm. They can be called at any time by a small magical coin given to the leader of every army. Instead of a coin it could be through use of carrier pigeons or however else we are giving orders in this game. For a price you can move any army to any location with total security. 

2. There is a merchant marine guild that provides transport of goods and troops, but it has limited ships available to the highest bidder. There would be a ship per every x tiles of water. You can use the diplomacy tree to gain contact with these mariners. Once contact is made you may request transport at a given price. The default value would be set, but if say a nearby faction outbids you on the use of that boat, it will work for them on the next cycle of turns. There would be rules for acquiring ships, but once troops are on a ship, you would have complete control. Likewise, goods being transported by sea would continue until the end of that season. This would add a fun and competitive mechanic to seafaring not previously seen in any game. The point would be to either spend money and time ruling the seas, lending a new strategy to players that have little opportunity on their current continent. The issue of streamlining troop transport would be something to work through, but I think the idea has merit if they are looking for a full fledged seafaring system, without causing all the annoying problems found in Civ games. 

3. Use the standard boat systems seen in Civ4.

4. Boats are created via magical reshaping of massive trees and a technological rediscovery of viking style, quickly manufactured boats made from trees and commonly found supplies gathered by your men in on their travels. These two methods can be researched. The first boating techs would lend to short travel (3 water tiles away from a coast). They can be made at any coast. Further research would allow greater waters to be traversed, possibly incurring some time penalties or requiring a harbor or drydock rather than being able to build it at any coastline. 

5. "Shutup and play the game. The devs are busy with more important matters and seafaring is going to be minimal. If immersion is an issue, get drunk before playing."    -Derek 

Please no.  Civ 5's boat model was terrible.  It completely removed all strategic planning necessary to move between continents.  Invading another continent should be a serious undertaking requiring planning and preparation.  It absolutely should NOT be "oh hey, I have this idle army.  Let's ship them overseas and conquer someone because that's so easy." 

The boat model in Civ 5 is one of the worst design decisions in the game.