We sail across the vast ocean to find another civilization on another shore, and the first thing we need is to ask for safe passage for our vessel.  Cultural borders always extend to the offshore shallows, so the most dangerous thing to our explorers is often being denied access to shallow water when we need it the most.

Proposal: Split the "Open Borders" treaty into "Allow Sea Travel" and "Allow Land Travel".  The AIs can still say no, of course, but maybe they should be more amenable to having ships travel mostly-harmlessly along their coastline without sending people ashore.

Alternately, allow us to float ships in "closed" shallow waters but pick up an "Offshore Tresspassing" grievance that doesn't cost health.

Yes.

Wald