There are a lot of good ideas here about implementing a good naval combat system , which imitates land battles. But I´m not sure if the AI could ever learn to make good use of this system.



Perhaps a good approach would be to use the battle system from ES1 for naval battles? The battle could be seperated into 5 steps, deployment/manover, long range weapons (cannons), middle range (bows and flyers), boarding and battle result. Depending on the terrain of the ocean tile, the background could change, battle cards could maybe be used again, though I believe they should cost recourses.



I think the AI would have a much easier time dealing with this kind of system. Also, since my guess is that naval battles are going to be a rare occurence compared to land battles, this might help make them stand out and make them enjoyable for the player. I realise that this would be a ton of work to be implemented, but any other deep meaningful system would also be very time consuming to be created and if the expansion would be big enough, I believe that it could be justified.

Steph'nie wrote:
Usually, the community is more active when we release new content. We'll have some cool news to share regarding the upcoming expansion called Shifters, so the community will surely have something new to discuss then!

Been waiting for this ... enough with the silence already ! ^^

Maximus86 wrote:
PS: I am new here but why do these forums feel so empty? The game is awesome and I normally always see over 5000 people playing it at any time on Steam. Yet, on these forums, we hardly have 5-6 comments a day. Nobody sharing their AAR/stories or sharing their "legends".

Usually, the community is more active when we release new content. We'll have some cool news to share regarding the upcoming expansion called Shifters, so the community will surely have something new to discuss then!

Though I voted for the first option, viewing the comments on this thread made me realize that going with the first option would mean a major rework and probably the existing mechanics might get effected due to it. I love the game in the current state and probably tweaking of existing mechanics to fit in naval warfare (unless thought through and very well done) might not be so desirable after all.



PS: I am new here but why do these forums feel so empty? The game is awesome and I normally always see over 5000 people playing it at any time on Steam. Yet, on these forums, we hardly have 5-6 comments a day. Nobody sharing their AAR/stories or sharing their "legends".

A lot of good stuff has already been written about possible naval tactics. Here are some ideas for expanding naval competition in other dimensions:



Lighthouse Sites: A few coastal or just-offshore island tiles could be designated as lighthouse sites, revealed at the same time as watchtower sites. Upon researching Sailing (or any other gatekeeper tech), the player can build a city improvement in that region which grants a lighthouse. Benefits might include regen for ships / embarked troops, enhanced sight over the ocean, and a bonus to coastal trade.



Great Harbor: The Harbor of Auriga could be a special Great District buildable only on a tile adjacent to sea or ocean, granting some unique benefit like Influence on ocean trade routes.



Winter Changes: Winters could freeze progressively more of Auriga's oceans, starting from the polar regions and by late game freezing everything. This would presumably block sea trade routes and prevent embarked movement once a city region was iced out of the open ocean. However, players might be able to cross the frozen ocean with a movement or hazard penalty, opening up risky alternative attack paths.



Minor Faction Pirates: Minor faction villages situated on coastlines might build pirate raiders instead of a land army (perhaps only in summer).



Ocean Trade: Research, improvements or faction traits might contribute to the range, number, or income of ocean trade routes, similar to how roads /land trade routes get stronger over time.



River Trade: An early tech could turn rivers into roads for trading purposes (but not army movement), connecting cities as long as the river flows through friendly territory and flows adjacent to a city district.



Admirals: Heroes could be tasked with leading ship fleets (if such a feature was implemented), with corresponding abilities and specialization paths.

The ship classes should reflect the style of play of the faction they represent.

There also needs to be balanced infrastructure to keep the player from having to sacrifice to have a navy where others don't.

For example, the cultists should be able to build docks to produce units without going on the coast.

The playstyle of the ships should aslo reflect the strengths and weaknesses of the faction themselves.



Roving clans should get trade ships

Cultists should have one mega ship or maybe A ship that can convert other ships to the cause

Wild walkers should have powerful ranged ships or have cheap ships that are weak in combat reflecting their separation from land and the forest

vaulters could have ships that are more powerful when they have their holy resource but have to resupply or they will have debuffs

Necrophages could infest other ships and could do poison damage or could spawn foragers on the enemy boats

Ardent Mages ships could do more damage after taking more damage or could do more damage to damaged boats.

Broken lords should get ghost ships or ships that heal after defeating another ship by consuming the crew (This could be optional for a bonus and Broken Lord RP)

The forgotten could be Pirates who can capture and sell boats for better prices or they could get bonuses in the winter for concealment.

Drakken could get a water dragon with a bonus toward the amount of allied units near it.



But its amps game so its going to be good so no need to worry.

I believe naval warfare sounds fun.

But I think there needs to be something to protect in the water or something valuable to make coastal cities worth the risk.

Maybe increased trade or more resources.

I would like to see naval units that have large amounts of interaction with the world around them.



Just an idea there could be a faction whose land and sea units were interchangeable and could fight on land or sea.

I thin this could allow for new opportunities in playstyle and maps with large oceans.

endlessnothing wrote:
my view of naval warfare is simple, a way of summing it up is a re-skinned version of land battles.

1.rather than 1 ship showing, i suggest multiple ship with different design to add more colour or to make it look like a fleet, they move one after another. like in this image in civ 5 but better.

2.combat is still the same as on land (hence the term of re skinned) melee and ranged units will function the same as on land including their stats.

3.flyers and other classes (ie ateshi zealot, ancient etc) that an fly will act similar to a carrier. when in combat they are the same as they are on land, when not in combat they will have a ship carrying them.

4.units that cant fly will be on ships, with the exceptions of ocean creatures faction/minor faction etc. they will split into 2 types: ranged and melee.

5. ranged ships splits into magic dealing types and the non magic dealing types, can be distinguish by their designs.

6. melee units splits into battle ship(other names are available), sea version of infantry. and cruisers, sea version of cavalry. again distinguished by their own designs.

7. battle animation are the same as on land for airborne, range and other units (ie telsem warlock). for those that do actual melee in the animation will be replaced with ramming/boarding animations.

8. unit design will be dependant upon their faction/minor faction, the actual unit and their class.

9. as for amphibious battles (land armies vs sea armies) will have a map dependant in the location/geography. ie if its a small island invasion the entire small islands are encompassed in the battle, however amphibious assault large land mass will typically have the battle map to have 2/3 being land. any units getting into land or sea will have a movement penalty and to miss an attack. this happens to any units, so advisable to keep ranged unit at sea/land in the battle for support of transitioning troops.

10. terrain tiles will affect combat, so shallow water tiles (ie coast coral lake etc) will reduces movement of all units, while deep areas are normal. weather will be random and affect movement, winter reduces movement with the exception of winter units, rough seas in any season reduce movement of units.

11. sea units/creatures and new sea terrains will be introduced.

12. sea based faction with new mechanics (as explained on other threads)

13. unit customization will have 2 tabs: one for land and the other for naval warfare, with the exception of airborne units ie a marine will have a tab for its land customization tab and another tab for naval customization.

14. heroes will act the same as on land, the same applies as normal units, heroes will fight on their own ships (with the exception of airborne heroes).

15. all units that have a boat form will have two separate health bars, one, their regular health bar, the other belonging to their ship

16. ship health regenerates VERY slowly and cannot be healed in battle, if the ship sinks, the unit instantly goes with it. (flying units only lose ship health when fleeing, but because carrier ships aren't designed for combat, they are destroyed after fleeing once) [theonlyplacetoreallyrepairshiphealthisinacity]

17. ship health is the same for all units, and is low, but ship defence will be high so it will be harder for it to take damage. [bothhealthanddefensecanbeupgradedwithtech]

18. by necessity, world size will need to be increased in order to make an environment suitable for naval combat to really be a thing. (as it stands, oceans are a quick and simple thing to cross). all world sizes will be increased by at least 25%, ocean filling the entirety of that in addition to whatever is normally is given to ocean. (basically, I'm just saying we need larger oceans while not reducing landmass, so we need bigger worlds.)

19. water civ has the benefit of not needing to worry about ship health on any of their natural units.

20 certain terrain damages ship health if the unit stays on it for a turn.



Rational: Gives water combat a bit of a different feel, as it probably should.

Endless Legend is an excellent and very intuitive game, thanks to the UI the game mechanics are well exposed and explained.



I think naval warfare should be implemented with the same philosophy in mind: clear and simple, not complicated, with a small or medium amount of depth.



(Congratulations to Amplitude Studio for they work so far! )

It's true that naval combat could be a resource sink without payoff. As I see it, there are really two options:

1. Introduce a single combat ship for each faction that automatically wins again embarked troops. I could have minor weapon and armor customization and play out according to the same rules as normal combat, with the exception of being restricted to water tiles (incidentally, this would also allow potential ranged boats to reinforce battles near the coast.) All this is really mostly to fix the invincible armies on water tiles.

2. Make a full expansion with focus on the oceans. This would include not only several ships per faction, but much more varied water tiles, aquatic minor factions, and potentially even an aquatic major faction. Probably include a research that allows founding of some sort of city-equivalent in ocean regions, or another way to lay claim to them (with the aquatic faction instead needing a technology to found cities on land).

I voted no naval warfare. The base game still needs a lot more refinement and potential for branching. Further, I've seldom seen naval combat done well in 4x/TBS games, and it could simply be a resource sink that yields very little benefit.

This thread has been open so long, not sure how long this entire G2G process will take but i hope there will be some sort of solution to the broken naval system as of now you cant play islands. It´s broken. So the minimal solution should be to allow attacks from water to land, you need to be able to attack a city from a boat or else they are forever invincible. Same goes for ships vs ships. I read a couple of good ideas, i myself would prefer some sort of different kind of shiptypes system and units are just inside transports and can be sunk by bigger ships rather easy. Maybe a mix of Civ and Age of Mythology style.

I had an idea similar to what has been talked about here that would basically just transfer the "land battle" onto sea, thus not needing a new, complicated system for ships. What you do is have what would usually be "the land" be comprised of the opposing boats LITERAL decks, and then your units are placed on your respective ships and they fight on the decks and can cross over boats as you would see in pirates moves simply by walking over the needed tiles.



The height advantages are given by the ships themselves as different parts of the ships are different heights. If more than one ship is involved from each faction then perhaps the battlefield could be adjusted to show units spawning or three or four ships instead of two. This may be an oversimplification of combat but I just really like the idea of having that "pirate-like" combat where the units are still fighting on "land" but it just happens that the land is the decks of the ships.



There could still be cool techs that maybe make it easier to destroy the actual SHIP the enemy is standing on and maybe giving defense bonuses to units in your ships and maybe having "militia" type units to shoot cannons or something from the vanguard positions on each ship.

@Rustam rofl lol lol lol

abmpicoli wrote:
I don't see any problem regarding units "walking on water" during a combat. Just place them over a surf board .

lol

I would customize them the way we do army units now.



Battleship would work like ranged combat units. Destroyer would work like infantry units. Transport ship would work like settler. A transport ship would be an embarked unit. They can do some damage, but mostly they are very vulnerable. Both of the ship types would cost resources the way regular units with upgraded weapons do now.



I'm not sure on the effects, but I can imagine someone would pitch in their ideas. I would create a couple of different types of ocean terrain like; fast/slow current, rough/calm seas, shallow water/river sediment, etc to carry the battlefield, as well as the corral beds that exist now.



Assume, that any unit that is embarked is too seasick to participate in battle. The battle occurs between the deckhands.



I could do a serious mockup, but I have a lot on my plate, so unless I see serious interest from the dev's, I won't bother. I don't want to get my hopes worked up to just have them dashed again.

All of these suggestions so far have been for the transports to have some defense, being less strong than dedicated naval units, but strong enough to fight off a few of them. So in order to make naval fleets dedicated to chasing down transports feasible, and also creating the reason for you to protect your transports which would begin the naval battles, how strong or weak do transports and the dedicated naval ships need to be? If transports are too strong, there isn't much point in dedicated ships as you can protect your ships and port cities just fine without them. However, if they are too weak, then it would only take a few ships to completely destroy a fleet of transports, meaning that the game would become many different ships scouring the map for enemies in tiny fleets rather than two large fleets fighting between each other.

In Warlock: Master of the Arcane, though there are dedicated naval units, your terrestrial units can cross into the water, disembarking in a transport ship. This ship has it's own stats that are the same regardless of the units it contains, which could make it faster or slower, have more range/damage or less, and tougher or more fragile. For example, when a teleportation or water-walking/flying spell isn't convenient, a player might have one of their Lords (Hero unit equivalent) attempt to cross a body of water by normal means in a transport ship. What was previously an Elven Bowmaster with the damage and range of heavy artillery, protected by a myriad of magical spells, is now contained in a transport ship, weak and fragile by comparison, and ready to be swiftly obliterated by an opportunistic enemy, dooming the valuable Lord inside to drown in the ocean.



I'm fond of the notion of the disembarking unit travelling in a transport ship, the stats of which are irrelevant to the stats of the units within. However, tech upgrades, slightly different transport ships for different unit types, etc, are definitely changes that can be added to this concept to make it work well in Endless Legend.

This wouldn't allow for more large-scale naval battles though, plus the terrain would all be the same which would be boring. Also, if you wish to do that, then how large should each ship be? While you could make ships any size out at sea, that system wouldn't work with amphibious battles as you have to have room for both the ships and the defending army on the shore.

MANoob wrote:

Naval battles are ship boarding fights on special "ship" maps. Due to highly constrained space archers and heavy infantry have an advantage.

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Reminds me of King's Bounty and HOMM... which is actually a good system. Maybe they could apply the "ship" terrain overlay ON TOP of the ocean terrain itself?

This would actually work well even for amphibious battles... and it's simple. Just using a "Ship" terrain overlay that is superimposed on the background terrain