I agree that mobility has to increase. And the text "Boarding Vessel" was also super misleading. I thought it meant it could ferry units FAST across the oceans. So after finding some islands I want to get to that required sailing across deep water tiles, I loaded up my quadrireme with a scout and... then they could only move 2 tiles per turn because of the scouts movement ability. The scout got ON the boat, he's not paddling along side. He absolutely should move at the speed of the boat. It also then made it impossible for me to reach the island with them because at 2 movement per turn I'd be lost at sea. This was super frustrating. It also makes trying to achieve expansionist star goals really hard if you can see all the land but not be able to claim it. 

It certainly would increase the effectiveness and utility of navies if ships in Humankind gained the ability to haul units, could be represented by a separate army window, who's army size is limited by the number of ships in the stack. The complaints about movement are largely tied to the slow transport vessels I imagine, which should stay in the game but as an alternative to dedicated ships ferrying units. Loading chariots on to a trireme would be sick.

Unlike my other feedback posts, this one will be rather short by virtue of the AI not engaging in naval endeavours or building any ships at all ;)

I went Phoenicians, Carthage and Venice in my main run so I did my fair share of naval stuff. I liked all the improvements that were in this Victor build; I built an empire on naval trade routes and it felt great; ship movement and range was fine. Ships look really cool! Naval combat only happened when my ships engaged with embarked independent units so that wasn't really a challenge. I can only speculate on actual naval combat: the attacker will be strongly advantaged starting from the cannon ages since there is no terrain strategizing at sea: the attacker can focus fire one enemy ship without penalty since all ships can reach eachother. Since the attacker is decided by who can click the other army the fastest, this isn't great fun.

So this will need to be addressed I think, but please beware with systems like the EL one; random storms and fog feel very unfair and punitive when you can't directly control your unit movement and position. While that concept was really cool, I disliked how it turned out.

Another thing: it would be so cool if early naval scouting was rewarded with coastal outpost; currently ships can't do it. But I don't know if it would be unbalanced.

Reduced transportation cost of naval trade was very nice touch. It did not make sense at all that a naval trade route had even higher cost than that of land trade route (especially when they had similar travel distance.)

Changlini wrote:

What would make naval ships better?

1. Being able to initiate attacks to siege coastal cities
2. Being able to initiate battle against land units on an adjacent land tile.

I also think that there should be a bigger kind of stimulus or incentive to having a navy. So what could be a benefit of having ships besides being able to take part in battles and sieges?

In the Victor Open Dev I tried to explore the seas and I noticed that there are many regions that consist mostly or only of water tiles so as far as I see it, there is no possibility to claim these regions with an outpost. So the presence of ships could mark a temporary claim to that sea region which could e.g. count towards the number of controlled regions, increase your influence on  on neighbouring outposts and so on. 

In the moment naval trade routes do not show pins on the map but if this is going to be inplemented, a strong navy could be essential to protect your trade.

Although I've built a lot of ships in Victor, I can never actually find something for them to do. The AI doesn't really build ships or settle on the coast, and exploring doesn't seem to have a point until my transports are advanced enough to ferry land units over deep sea tiles and make outposts.

As others have said, I think the biggest way to improve this isn't changing the ships, but giving incentive to build on the coast. Allowing quarters to build off of harbours again and giving them some chunky adjacency bonuses would mean that coasts were worth raiding and protecting. Combat ships should probably also be able to ransack coastal quarters and perform some form of naval blockade/siege - conquering cities wouldn't make much sense with the combat system, but if there was a stability/yield drain for enemy ships blockading your coast I'd definitely ignore naval less.

7. I mean maybe they can? I don't know I'm not an elephantologist but ... yes. You probably took my meaning.

8roomsofelixir wrote:

- Some other ways to encourage players to build more quarters in the water or on the coast. For instance, give City Center an extra yield when on the coast (since it cannot exploit coastal waters), or to give a larger adjacency to Market and even Makers Quarters that are build next to a Harbor.

- Better Harbor infrastructures for increasing the costal yields, to encourage the player to invest the sea. For instance, give Harbor a bit larger money yield from the water tiles, to encourage player build cities on the coast specialized in money making.

- Early naval Units can ignore closed borders on water, until the borders are closed by a later Era tech - in order to buff the effectiveness of early costal exploration.

- Certain naval units can ransack land-based Quarters directly on the coast.

- Certain naval units can increase the movement of embarked land units when formed in an army.

- Beginning from Early Modern, long range naval units can receive "Bombardment" trait, so they can bombard quarters from ocean as a form of long range support fire.

- During a war, naval units can "blockade" an enemy Harbor. It can be achieved via "parking a naval unit next to enemy Harbor can deny the Harbor from receiving yields or give the city a stability hit" or similar.

- Make early naval units a bit faster. Naval movement was faster than land movement before railway, and navies were acted as a rapid response force since very early in the human history; while currently, the only way to buff early naval movement is to pick Norse in Medieval and built Great Lighthouse, both are fairly limited/railroaded choices. I would suggest increase early and Medieval naval units' movements from 4 to 5, Transport Ships from 2 to 4, Caravel from 3 to 5, and Langskip from 3 to 4 (since it now benefits from Norse LT).

Absolutely!! At least naval units' movement should be faster than movement of land units, except for cavalry/mounted units. In reality sailing ship is faster than moving by foot anyway.

Regarding early modern era or later eras, I think it would be nice to have naval units with bombardment traits or long range like that of a mortar unit. This can buff naval gameplay significantly, since defending coastal territories or cities would require naval units to counter enemies' long range barrages. 

Plus, it is also possible to give naval units a special ability, which, when joined into army with land-unit-transporting vessels, allow them to ignore the movement point of transporting vessels. In this way, players would find naval units much more valuable: protecting scouting land units and make the journey a bit faster.

I have not seen an AI constructed warsip yet (played two games till the end and explored the settled regions completely)

It is unclear to me how long a ship can survive out on deep sea: a clear indication would be helpful especially when this value changes

Non-gunpoweder ships cannot attack land targets - suggest to allow them to attack as well and increase their range to 2 so that they are not sitting and looking useless in tactical battles :) They can still have shorter range then base archers and aroun same damage but need to be able to do something

Naval trade routes have not been created on my games - this is absolutely needed to make inldand seas interesting. Establishing and then protecting (raiding other) trade routes should be a mayor focus point of naval combat

Guys, is it a bug or feature that after discovering Great Blue Hole every single coastal tile starts proviing +4 science? Seems really weird

AndreyP wrote:

Guys, is it a bug or feature that after discovering Great Blue Hole every single coastal tile starts proviing +4 science? Seems really weird

That is the Legacy Trait of the Joseon Culture (+4 science on coastal tiles & lake tiles). It is quite good for picking up tons of science especially so with multiple harbors in each territory (via EQs). 

RNGZero wrote:

AndreyP wrote:

Guys, is it a bug or feature that after discovering Great Blue Hole every single coastal tile starts proviing +4 science? Seems really weird

That is the Legacy Trait of the Joseon Culture (+4 science on coastal tiles & lake tiles). It is quite good for picking up tons of science especially so with multiple harbors in each territory (via EQs). 

If someone were to substitute "overpowered" for "quite good", I wouldn't argue with them.  I like the science-from-coast idea - much better than +X% - but the amount of science seems a bit much relative to other sources.

Unfortunately I never really got to experience much with naval gameplay.  At first I didn't realize I even needed a harbor (which is admittedly pretty silly of me), and I was confused when I could not figure out how to build caravels.

Now that I understand about troop transports, the idea sounds great!  Embarked units are often overlooked in other games, so that they can provide their own defense and offense reduces the overhead needed to get into the ocean game.  I never got to experiment much with trade routes, so I don't know how they work.  Whether it's because the game ended too soon for AI to exploit the ocean, or my lack of push into generating money, I never saw a reason to go strongly into navy.  Historically, it seems like countries really started investing in navies as a combination of trade (managing trade routes) and defense (of trade routes and new colonies).  I did not see a good way to raid trade routes or "coastal" cities/harbors in game, so I saw no benefit to building strictly naval units.  Maybe if these trade routes were emphasized more, especially between cities with luxury resources, there could be more reason for building up raiders/defensive navies in-game.

I did travel to the new world (and was the first to do so).  The concept of the settler unit really intrigues me, as I feel like in other similar games it always seems to be the oldest cities that were my best.  That you can give a boost to building new cities is definitely a good idea.  I'm personally hoping that as we progress into later eras, it gets significantly harder to control some of these "colonies" without heavy investment.  Something like that could even allow you to temporarily imbalance the game (via money/trade) only to later "punish" for distant colonies to bring balance back.  Seems like it could be a fun (and potentially infuriating) concept to me!

- I was disappointed to see the AI build no ships at all  until early modern era. I had two wars in my runthrough and I had no fight on sea at all. There wasn't even a goal for me to attack.

- I used the boats for exploration and unveiled most of the map. But I couldn't get the exploration fame bonuses and I don't understand why.

- I didn't understand why sometimes autoexplore worked just fine and sometimes it automatically switched off autoexplore.

- I like the feature that you can move to deep waters but the limit grows with better ships and better tech researched.

conclusion: I think naval gameplay needs some improvement yet. AI needs to build more ships at least in a sea-rich map, Maybe allow going through ennemy coastal territoriy even if you don't have open borders but causing greavances by doing so.

I did not get a chance to thoroughly explore naval gameplay, as I was much more focussed on other things and before I knew it the game was ending in 25 turns. I did however, spend a long time in my first playthrough trying to work out just how to embark units. The tooltip was telling me I did not have a required technology, but it would be helpful to see what technology that was. When you scroll to the technology in the tech tree, its not glaringly evident that the transport ship is the tech that unlocks embarkment; I was under the impression this was a unit, but all the playthroughs I'd watched the units just automatically embarked. I suggest either changing the transport ship to just text rather than an image so it doesn't look like another unit AND definitely making it so that the movement blocked tooltip IDENTIFIES the missing tech. Thankyou so much for the opportunity to test this game I am very keen.

A more complete feedback from my end after two playthroughs (one on hard, one on very hard). An avid CIV player, I cannot not benchmark Humankind against it.

Overall

1. it's alright
2. it's serviceable
3. I don't feel like Russell Crowe in Master and Commander (which, for me personally, is a pity)

Feedback

1. if naval combat should be a priority in the grand scheme of OpenDev feedback epics and user stories, consider sprucing it up by making it distinct from land combat:
   - positioning and manoeuvring should play a larger role during combat. Ships aren't able to turn 90 degrees on the dot, much less 180. This would provide another point of differentiation for cultures, as more manoeuvrable ships could use less movement points in order to get into position, for example.
   - following the above, broadsides, front and rear cannons, etc, would come into play.
   - ship boarding should be a thing as well.
2. four movement points for a cog feels unnecessarily restrictive. Should be at least 5.
3. stowed units should not get lost at sea.