[Idea] Water-walking, and sea travel (4 new traits)

E. Water walking would be a good spell. Units with the natural ability to water walk could be classified as swimming. I'm thinking sharks and stuff. Nice if the swamps get the added element of bogs (shallow lakes).

There are a couple of classes of ships, specifically you have river ships (those with a shallow draft, allowing them to navigate the shallows of the water) and deep water vessels that allow navigation of the deeper water.

There could be special beach tiles that intersect water and land alike called natural harbors. Control these harbors automatically give you the ability to build ships, but you may upgrade the harbor to build better ships. I think this address one issue that frogboy had building harbors. Have to connect resource via outpost.

Not all coasts or even beaches are suited for ship making, a earth 2 water 2 spell could be make a natural harbor. Or some such spell.

I will have to contemplate more on how to address the transportation of units. It could very well be that a special equipment / called "magical row-boat" or something that allows them to have no movement loss on rivers / but also allow travel on shallow water in a sparkly row-boat, a magical effect to produce the row-boat when entering and leaving water.

--- A hopeful wish is a city on the water --- Built on small island, but the city grows out onto the water with floating platforms or something. The city hub automatically is a natural harbor and grows to higher level harbors.

I'm sure there is more here, and for troop transport, there could be an automatic way of doing such things as making a transport fleet, and creating two docking positions for when troops enter a docking position, they arrive at the other docking position a few turns later. Food for thought.

I really hope there will be a system where armies has to enter ships.

You could also have a system where armies are defenceless on sea, because transporters are weak and the real force at sea are the warships. Those who are strongest on land arent necessarily the strongest at sea. You can have the worlds strongest army, but when its loaded on transport vessels it's vulnerable to nations with stronger warships and huger naval force.

The Civ5 system works well enough as a solution for a one unit per tile game. For this kind of game it has to work differently, with transports.

Fixed sea routes are not fun either. This is a 4X game, we will explore the seas freely! I know it can be demanding for the AI, but so be it. Find a sollution (you americans always do).

We also need to find a sollution to the question; Where shall the ships be built? There arent often we build coastal cities the way the game is now. We can have special spots at coast with grain and materials, or we could just have a coastal ressource called Natural Harbour. If a citys influence covers this ressource, or an outpost belonging to that city does it, you can build a harbour village there, in which you may build ships. Later it can be upgraded to a Port Town and Port City allowing better ships to be built. Ships and port upgrades will be built by the city this port tile is attached too. 

Other good ideas people?

Edited the following post into the OP:

I have spent many hours pondering this conundrum, and feel that the most elegant solution for FE is the introduction of four new traits, as well as the specifics outlined in the OP.  The first two are Water-Walking and Transport, both available in three levels.  The different levels of Water-Walking determine what types of water tiles the unit may travel on; and those of Transport indicate how many other units may be in the army for that unit's movement traits to over-ride the other troops' (respective to army sizes).  The third trait is Aquatic, a weakness restricting mobility to water; and the fourth could be Land-locked, limiting access to the seas.  These traits may be inherited by a variety of unit types, and in many different ways.

Beach tiles acting as gateways through the cliff wall that separates sea from land, and which may be researched, controlled, and constructed upon (and perhaps created), are additional ideas.  Rivers could also be made accessible to certain classes of Water-Walkers and Transporters, enabling interaction with river-side tiles while "in transport".

Water-roads is another great idea by Heavenfall, which need not be mutually exclusive.

The beautiful cloth map and lore behind the game are practically screaming for enhanced terraform features, simply by making them more prominent; even through subtle changes such as increasing the availability of the raise and lower land spells (by reducing their cost and/or giving them to all Sovs for example).  This would also have the effect of turning the water into a playground for earth channelers (and potentially water, or even all other channelers as well).  The skies are already dominated by air entities.  We can wait for an expansion to discuss tunneling for fire.

Again, all that we really need is stuff to actually do on the water.

Not to sound too negative, but I find the idea of water walking rather boring. I think people wants the naval aspect of the game to be something else then just being equal to the land stuff. Only difference being walking on the sea instead of on land, to say it a bit simplyfied. 

I'd rather see a naval feature where we have ships of different types, and with champions filling the role as admirals. With sea walking the best land power also is the best seapower, almost automatically. Naval stuff should bring another aspect to the game. Being the best naval power should really mean something for an island nation, or any nation that wants the benefits of the ocean. A potentially new faction for the Naval expansion pack could be specialized in maritime bonuses as well.

It seems you only read a few words into the thread.  Water-walking is just a proposed trait that when combined with Transport and Aquatic creates a boat (or sea serpent, etc.) type unit.

Yep, but I'm very skeptical to a system where sea traveling is hugely magic based or/and mainly based on hero level ups.

I have been pondering how to mod in water areas and transport to the game as well. It is of coure easy to create a water-walking spell as of the last patch, but other then that a more comprehensive system remains out of reach. We could add water monsters and possbily goodie huts but we wouldn't have sea tactical maps. We will have to see what we can create with the mod tools. Due to this painting I'm hoping the campaign at least features boats, which we will be able to mod into the main game. If it doesn't we could possibly steal the art from WoM. Of course even if we mod in boats the AI will be unable to use them.

Again it appears as if you didn't read the thread.  Perhaps I did an extremely poor job of explaining the idea, but nowhere do I hint that these traits are limited to spells and/or champions.  A boat is simply a unit with the water-walking, transport, and aquatic traits (represented by whatever 3dimensional model you like).

Not if the boats are just units with specific traits (and a little love from the frog).

Unfortunately transports actually take a lot of code and time in order to get the AI to use them at all. This is why transports weren't used by the AI in WoM. Frogboy has commented on this several times. Think about it. You need to build the transports before hand, move them to the units you want to transport, Load the units up, move to the drop point, unload, and then return the transport to where it is needed next. It is hard to program the AI to do that. Frogboy said awhile ago he was considering a CivV like system without dedicated transports where all units portage, if FE   were to get sea travel. 

The problems for modding in sea travel for the AI in your system would be:

They would have to intelligently build beaches, either through a spell or improvement. 

They would have to plan ahead and build Harbours and Transports, or correctly level units.

They would need to know what to do with transport units. 

Even if you were to just grant a champion the ability to ferry units across water, which might not be possible, their still aren't beaches and the AI wouldn't use him as a transport, at best he would sail around alone or maybe with whatever units happen to be with him.

Please read the entire thread, I have outlined an extremely elegant system for beaches (which could be like shards in that once researched and constructed upon would produce a water-walking unit similar to the elementals created by shrines for binders; and/or also like gates through the cliff wall that must be controlled in order permit passage).  Basic functionality would indeed require the creation of the beach tile, which would then need to be scattered around the map accordingly.  Enhanced functionality would require additional buildings and research paths.  However beaches in and of themselves are a separate mechanic from water-walking, only dependent upon it actually existing.

The AI is already programmed with pathing systems, including parameters related to a unit's movement capabilities.  Water-walking is no different than flying in this regard.  Foresight, look-ahead-depth, and strategic planning are also obviously not foreign concepts to the AI.

Just like beaches and water-walking, transport is a self-contained mechanic as well.  This would of course require the creation of the transport trait, which over-rides other units' movements capabilities (more troops being permitted by higher levels of the trait, with respect to the 3 army sizes).  From my understanding, this is the most difficult thing to teach AI.  However if it can be programmed to research the larger army sizes prior to training larger armies, I see little difficulty in teaching it to ensure that water-walking units with the appropriate transport traits are available before attempting to access the water.  Incorporating this into the pathing systems that determine the shortest route between two locations (and the importance of a location), would seem to be merely a matter of additional checks (and variable values of importance).  The aquatic trait can be used to ensures that water-walking units that should be restricted to the seas are in fact limited as such innately, and the land-locked trait inversely so.  Again, forgive me for over-simplifying.  Hope you see this Frog.

Oh ok, what you are saying is that beaches are actual world resources you can build improvements on like claypits, let's call them natural harbours for clarity's sake. These resources would spawn only on cliffs, and maybe would transform the cliffs around them into beaches. in addition they would spawn a ship once built. These ships would have the ability to add water walking to any unit in it's stack. That is indeed rather elegant and a interesting concept, it certainly would be AI friendly. Still there are some problems.The AI wouldn't know what to do with the transports themselves, although it would build them. If the harbour is on land then how does it spawn a water only unit? How do units that can't go on water join a stack with units that can't go on land?

I do however think that this is a very creative solution. I will take a look at the xml later to see what modders can do. Still I hope the FE campaign contains ships so I can pilfer the xml, because that would solve a lot of the problems. 

There are already an indication where one can intersect beach and water for rivers end. Each rivers end that is on a beach could be the tile resource natural harbor. They already have xml code in place for a river to end at a beach with a specific tile. So, it would be easy to build this natural harbor resource like I suggested and then deal with it as a resource.

For the transportation of units across the sea is a rather AI nightmare, and the only suggestion to fix this nightmare is to set up transport lanes, basically marking two acceptable landings from one place to the other adding ships to the transport lane that automatically ferry land units across the sea. Note: this is not my best idea about the transportation AI fix, but it is a small bandage for a huge wound.

What is tatical ship combat going to look like? My suggestion is to keep the land fighting, but put a background of sever different types of ships together. I don't know if you can have strict naval battles without boarding ships. It can't be run a turn based combat naval shooting, then boarding combat is a resolved combat (while in tatical). I would much prefer if all combat was the boarding action tatical combat, just need to design some special tatical combat maps.

You have no idea how happy it makes me to be so clearly interpreted, and have just given meaning to the many hours spent on this idea (from the feasibility standpoint of a software engineer mind you).  I call them beaches for the sake that they can then be upgraded to docks > piers > harbors or whatever, but you definitely get the idea.  Ships could be replaced with sea serpents (of varying sizes) for Empire factions, again whatever.  These "transports" are just units with a specific trait, as well as all the other characteristics of a unit, and would be treated by the AI just the same.  It is the pathing and planning systems which would need to be updated with consideration to the new traits.  Aquatic units and land-locked units are by definition mutually exclusive, and may not be in the same army.  To the concern of "harbors" being on land yet spawning water-walking units, beach tiles could be classified as both water and land.   =]

The sea at its core is just empty land, with the cliffs and simply a passability toggle restricting movement upon it.  The proposed new Water-walker trait would merely grant access to these water tiles, similar to flight permitting movement over mountains; which although I haven't experimented with yet, I imagine the AI is handling itself ok.

For simplicities sake naval combat just needs a unique collection of tactical map backgrounds, and would be initiated in exactly the same manner as battles on land.

We can change the passability of cliffs through some modding right now. I think I saw somewhere about passability in one of the terrain files. When we have access to make stamps, then we can implement the natural harbor on the usual settings, but for now we can make every waterfall cliff a natural harbor for our purposes. Change the tile make up. Not sure if one can randomize this to have both the waterfall look and the natural harbor make-up. Have to wait for tile editor for changes.

I was merely only concerning the battling to be a boarding action battle as opposed to a ship to ship battle.

Hah cool idea.

Aside from the additions to the AI, this entire proposition is actually quite simple.

After looking at the xml it would be entirely possible to create terrain that both land and water units can traverse. Still there is the problem that there don't seem to be tags for improvements or world resources to change the terrain around them. I guess we could mod in some stamps with beaches and then add just add harbors and only have them spawn on beaches. Then you could have them spawn ships. However unfortunately currently I don't think it is possible to design ships that grant water movement, and again the AI wouldn't use the transports. Close but no cigar.

Since this idea still requires a lot of developer support something to consider is instead of having harbors spawning ships it would be much easier on the AI if harbors allowed units to move from land traveling to water traveling directly. So when you stand on a harbor you can just choose to move onto water, or back onto land. That way the AI can just plot paths normally and doesn't have to worry about moving and loading transport ships.

The thread is definitely intended for developer attention.

That being said, the beaches where the rivers meet the ocean acting as gates through the cliff wall that separates water from land, and that must be researched, controlled, and developed in order to be passed through is a brilliant mod; creating nice strategic bottlenecks on the adventure map for access to and from the seas, as well as an incentive to control them with cities.

Now we just need to add stuff to do on the water.

Xia wants pink sea ponies.

Thought about this for a bit, and a fifth trait could be created called something like War-Machine, which similar to the Transport trait is available in 3 levels, each subsequently increasing the amount of troops permitted in the unit's army for ALL of it's stats and abilities to supersede the others (with respect to the 3 army sizes).  On a tactical map this unit would replace the entire army in every way.  When combined with the Water-walking trait, a battleship is born; combine Transport or War-machine with flying and we've got air-ships.  This would allow battles between Transports and War-machines as well: in the case of a regular ship vs. a battleship a deck-side army would fight a cannon-wielding boat, the tactical map designed to only permit ranged actions.  Again, these Transports and War-machines are just units in every way with an additional trait or two.

Came across the perfect screenshot while reading this thread that demonstrates the notions of water being just a type of land that is currently inaccessible and lacking in points of interest, and of beaches being wonderful choke points for access to and from the seas (once developed as mentioned above):

The dead sea?