The problem with them is rather obvious - Either you're on a sea map and they're OP or you're on a mixed/land map and they're not very useful. They cannot help if your cities are attacked or ransacked because most of them cannot attack land units. In fact most base sea units cannot attack land. Which makes them so separated from the rest of the game that I wonder if they're ever really useful to build, I honestly only used them on the most archipelago map type I could set up and even there they weren't all key to my success.

Many cultures kind of have no emblematic unit right now, because the one they have is just trash or locked far away, and some have units that feel so important to the game to have that it's a bit weird playing with base units. Overall I am not sure the unique units are distributed fairly among the cultures, however that would be fine if those cultures get some benefit elsewhere.

It's just, I don't know if having a unique unit that can be SO obsolete on some maps is good for the game. Yeah you could just not pick that culture (unless it's a 10 player run), but I don't think just not using a culture is good for the game overall. I mean a lot of other cultures have benefits based on terrain and that's fine, but I feel like sea units are just in this really weird place. And here's the thing if you buff these cultures in other places, then on sea maps they become absolutely ridiculous. I feel like the fact that ALL cultures get exactly ONE emblematic is doing them a disservice.

The Phoenicians for example I still have trouble making viable. They don't even get the normal harbor type adjacency so when I did the achipelago map with ALL the harbor cultures + Dutch VOC warehouse, I literally skipped them because they don't even fit into that build. I tried to make them work, they just don't. They ruin your early game SO hard, because 1 industry is worth 1.7 gold, but you get only a 8 to 6 ratio with their passive which is 1.33 so it's not even enough to make gold equal to industry let alone better. You still have to allocate all your workers to industry else you fall behind hard and the cost to build their harbor doesn't help either. Add to all of this that they have no unique unit that can help in a war and I wonder why anyone would ever pick them.

Now if they had a 2nd unit, like say the Sacred Band then they could at least put up a fight when a bunch of warmongering neighbors knock on their door, and you wouldn't have to buff them so hard that they become oppressive on sea maps.

Carthage for example works, because Carthage gets a ton of production AND elephants. While hard to build, they're really effective. Rome suffered from the lack of a unique unit for a while too with theirs being locked SO far in the tech tree, but now they get a bit of a discount on it I guess and if you have a strong science game early on you can make Praetorian guard work pretty hard, they're a strong unit that can help if you get in a war.

Germany for example has some really cool benefits and playing solely for their industry bonuses is perfectly viable in my opinion at least, they do miss out on a lot by having the U-boat as their unique unit. Yeah, u-boats are very iconic, but like, it's the Germans, they have a lot of other things that could be really cool.

PS - I can't really comment on unique aircraft since I literally never get to play with them in a fair fight at the moment. The game is basically over by the time I have them and like 50 turns before the AI does.

Well, you really only ever pick one of those cultures if you're on an island or have a ton of coast line so any argument about picking them when you've not got one of those conditions is moot - of course they're not great, they weren't designed for that and can't take advantage of it.  That said, since there is no rock paper scissors in naval combat bigger numbers win.  So if you ARE doing naval battles any ship with bigger numbers is gonna bust up the conventional navies.

Oddible wrote:

Well, you really only ever pick one of those cultures if you're on an island or have a ton of coast line so any argument about picking them when you've not got one of those conditions is moot - of course they're not great, they weren't designed for that and can't take advantage of it.  That said, since there is no rock paper scissors in naval combat bigger numbers win.  So if you ARE doing naval battles any ship with bigger numbers is gonna bust up the conventional navies.

If you read the post you know why this isn't a counter-argument. Them being bad without the sea isn't the issue necessarily. I mean even if you are on like a continent with just 1 other player, that other player would be at an advantage, so the scope of this culture is EXTREMELY limited and my question is - Is that healthy for the game?

Yeah not picking them is an option, but that just means you get 9 cultures to choose from instead of 10 and in the opposite scenario where you are on a sea map, whoever picks the one culture who has bigger numbers wins. It's either very good or very bad, and there's no in-between and that's kind of the problem. Ideally every culture should be at least somewhat viable in any scenario, especially since you can play 10 player matches where the last person to pick will be stuck with whatever is left.

I think this is an issue humankind will have to work to deal with in the long-term, because sea units only give you an advantage against other sea units, and the only use sea units have is to allow you to move land units. That said, I don't think the developers should just give up and not try to make naval EU. A lot of civs have EU that are only situationally useful and are still good civs.

Sea units do let you conquer cities that have built to the coast in the second half of the game. Water can be made more important by working more with the trade system (was disappointed they removed the +10 extra stability from luxes….having trade routes cut and having a big drop in stability seemed to be a good thing.)

Krikkitone wrote:

Sea units do let you conquer cities that have built to the coast in the second half of the game. Water can be made more important by working more with the trade system (was disappointed they removed the +10 extra stability from luxes….having trade routes cut and having a big drop in stability seemed to be a good thing.)

Most cities however only have a harbor on the coast at most, and no buildings. And even if they do, actually conquering the city with ships that can't hit land units is not exactly quick. Unless auto-resolve can bypass this issue which I don't know if it does or not, but it obviously shouldn't.