SEA FORTRESSES & OCEAN CONTROL

Overall Rationale

Sea Fortresses

Sub-rationale

Feature Overview

An ocean region can contain between 0 and 3 fortresses depending on its size and topological importance: how connected it is to islands, continents and other oceans. Simply put the more “strategically interesting” an ocean is the more fortresses it will tend to have. It is possible to take control of fortresses through diplomacy or combat. Fortresses have a garrison but do not have fortification. In this fortresses more closely resemble converted villages then cities. They do not, however, automatically spawn units.

Fortress Composition

A fortress is composed of a central “citadel” tile and up to 4 “facility” tiles which grant different kinds of bonuses to the fortress’s owner:

A fortress’s owner can garrison units in the citadel: units in garrison cost less upkeep and regenerate faster. Fortresses can be traded between empires at peace, in an alliance or negotiating a truce. Garrisoned units are ejected when the fortress changes hands.

Capturing a fortress provides exploration (but not vision) of the citadel tiles of all the region’s other fortresses.

Roaming fleets

At the beginning of the game fortresses are controlled by a neutral faction of enigmatic and rather hostile creatures called "Fomorians" . Masters of sea-craft, it is from them that the other factions gain access to their warships.

Neutral-controlled fortresses periodically spawn hostile warships which gradually fills out their garrison. When there is no room left they will leave and begin to patrol their regions in an increasing aggressive manner. They will take back fortresses that have been taken by a Major Faction in their own and in neighbouring regions.

Interactions with fortresses

Empires can gain control of neutral-controlled fortresses either by destroying their garrison or by completing a quest for them (assuming they have researched Language Square). Quests will not always provide control of the fortress however: they will sometimes provide seafaring technologies or resources instead. It is possible to parley with each fortress of a given region independently. 

Fortresses in neutral regions can be attacked if they are Fomorian-controlled or if the empire is at least in cold war with the owner. The garrison does not receive any fortification bonus, but it can reinforce and be reinforced as normal. 

It is not possible to Bribe, Convert, Pillage or Besiege a fortress.

Facilities

Sub-rationale

Feature Overview

The bonuses provided by sea fortresses are “made flesh” in the form of “facility” tiles adjacent to the central citadel. These can provide either strategic or luxury resources or a significant and world-unique bonus which increases as more facilities are captured. These “unique” facilities may not appear in every game and even less in all fortresses. They are definitely less common than the (non-unique) strategic- and luxury-resource facilities.

Facilities can start opened or closed. Closed facilities will be revealed as empires advance through the eras, prompting them to reevaluate their priorities. This dynamic should further emphasise the fickle and flowing nature of the sea and create a tense guessing-game between empires for those high-level facilities which still remain in their “closed” state late-game.

We are currently planning on including the following types of facility:

Strategic Resource Facility (non-unique)

Luxury Resource Facility (non-unique)

Dust Accumulator

Center of Influence

Vision Facility

Food Facility

 Industry Facility

Science Facility

 Cargo Nexus

 Ship Efficiency Facility

Ship Optimization Facility

Luxury Boost Facility

Strategic Boost Facility

Sky Shaker Facility

Vile tide Facility

Ocean Control

Sub-rationale

Feature Overview

Once an empire controls all the fortresses in an ocean region they gain control of the region itself. Controlling a region provides bragging right but also significant benefits:

• Team-colour: the region takes the colour of the empire which controls it, much like a land region.

• Naming Rights : It becomes possible to rename the ocean.

• Trade Routes: The science and dust yield of ocean trade routes is doubled if they cross only self or friendly-controlled oceanic regions.

• Facility Resource Production: The strategic and luxury resource production of deposits in a controlled oceanic region is doubled.

• Fortress Vision Bonus: The vision range of all fortresses is increased by 3.

• Regeneration: As on land, units in an ally-controlled ocean region regenerate at a higher rate.

• Re

Slashman wrote:

I'm a little confused by fortress battles. Does this mean that ships will not be a part of fortress battles since land units garrisoned there will fight in the battle also?

Lorco wrote:

will fortresses gice garrisoned bouses just like cities or will they have a different role in combat, like acting as big turrets or immovable ranged units that attack once a turn?

Battles involving fortresses are always sea battles, so any land units in the fortress will participate in transport ship form.

Gwydden wrote:

Cities placed on these tiny island would be pretty much impossible to attack though, as one a few districts have been built there would be nowhere to land troops

That already happens, though. It might be an extremely rare occurrence, but I remember a single player game where I couldn't conquer an AI player's last city because it was placed at the end of a two-tile peninsula, with a minor faction village in the tile nearest to the mainland.

This is a known issue, yes. So if I understand correctly the idea is that a sea-based siege type action could help with this issue in certain cases (ie. not for lakes). A true siege by warships wouldn't make a lot of sense as ships can't surround the land parts of a city.

The-Cat-o-Nine-Tales wrote:

BlackBird1696 wrote:

Will ship designs be faction specific or pull from a universal pool? I ask this because you said that we get our warship tech from the Fomorians.

From the overview post:

The choice came down to either 1 naval unit per faction or several, shared by everyone and we opted for the later: for naval warfare to have an interesting set of counters everyone needs to have access to a varied roster of ships. The ships will share the same models (otherwise we would need 11 factions times 4 new models… simply a tremendous undertaking).

We debated for a while whether we'd have warships per faction or shared warships. As we have 11 factions now -not including the Mezari and Morgawr- we'd need 11 new models, textures and sound, FX and animation sets to give each faction their own ship. We wouldn't be able to make these ships too different either or to do that much in the way of roles and counters, as each empire would only have access to 1 ship. This ship would therefore need to be fairly multi-purpose. Really to have some degree of variety in the ships you could field we'd need a not one but several ships per faction, so maybe 20-30 new models, etc.

At the end of the day we decided it would be better to make 4 very different warships for all the factions to share and to use the few dozen models worth of budget on adding more features like weather.