On my first playthrough of the OpenDev, I cannot think of another time when I saw that any enemies had a navy at all. I know they must have because they colonized an island, but I didn't see them and I definitely didn't interact with them. I was attempting to play a naval focused merchant game (which I did to the limit of my small knowledge of the game) and never felt that my navy was decisive or even important at all. I did not use my ships for anything besides exploration the entire game. I am a somewhat experienced 4X player who was playing on the second to lowest difficulty, so maybe my issue was simply that I outpaced my opponents to the point that they didn't form any force to speak of. I am curious to hear of anyone else's experience with this.

Same here. For my last playthrough, I tried to go for a naval playstyle. Went all the way south from the starting position, kicked the Green AI out (just kept destroying his outposts), went for a lot of research (Babylonians) and ships and harbors and traderoutes (Carthaginians) after that. You can only use the ships to explore (did found some anomalies at sea for the first time), never got to a proper naval battle. The AI uses the seas to ship some embarked troops. So did I and I colonized some islands (just because I could). With my elephant cavalery (even though you need the horses as a resource for mounted units, you don't need elephants for these).  And then hit turn 150. Not really sure how to improve on this so I think this was just it.

Ditto, I didn't encounter any meaningful Naval gameplay. Not a single battle, only used ships to explore.

I did like the 'lost at sea' mechanic and settlers for colonising a new world a lot. Great improvements on other 4X games.

Same here, I wrote the same thing in the French forum.

I only saw once another boat from AI, but in general I was disappointed by the naval part of the game. Borders prevent boats from exploring sometimes and, well, in a real world, boats were quite free to sail. Sea borders are really recent in human history.

Plundering was useless as well as AI doesn't bother to build neither boats nor harbours.

ogotai wrote:

Same here, I wrote the same thing in the French forum.

I only saw once another boat from AI, but in general I was disappointed by the naval part of the game. Borders prevent boats from exploring sometimes and, well, in a real world, boats were quite free to sail. Sea borders are really recent in human history.

Plundering was useless as well as AI doesn't bother to build neither boats nor harbours.

It would be cool if sea borders became a technology or civic.

The only time they build a "small" navy is on Humankind difficulty. They somehow didn't try to explore and colonize the new world, only close islands.

We need to see epic scale naval skirmishes with privateers and all.